Literally every time in the history of the universe when someone has structured a sentence like this, in this context, whoever they're talking about ends up being a giant crackpot. I'm not saying this person is a crackpot, just that the pattern recognition systems are throwing off some alarms.

If you end up dealing with a chronic disease that medical doctors completely fail in dealing with, you naturally get driven to look at “alternatives”. There’s a lot of nonsense out there - but some of it works. As a former skeptic I’m now much less dismissive of these things due to my own circumstances. Particularly when I can see that poor medical treatment over the years actually exacerbated my condition and being less skeptical could have improved my quality of life significantly sooner.

First sentence from wikipedia says:

Casey Means is an American functional medicine/holistic medicine physician, entrepreneur and author.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Means

I'm more influenced by this passage:

Means withdrew from her medical residency at age 30. She has attributed this decision to the lack of training she received about nutrition and the underlying causes of chronic disease. Means dedicated her practice to functional medicine, which focuses on the root causes of disease.

As one comedian said: “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine!”

that's cute but how much alternative medicine eventually finds a way into real medicine?

in other words : someone telling someone to practice yoga to relax and reduce their heart rate 200 years ago was a quack right up until the point that modern doctors decided to include it in their repertoire?

it's a cute joke but it skips over the fact that there seems to be an 'alternative medicine -> real medicine' pipeline, even if a lot of it turns out badly.

The actual quote (from memory, but I just listened to the monologue a minute ago): "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been scientifically proven to work? Medicine!"

In other words, the quote is exactly referring to your "pipeline."

Tim Minchin's "Storm" monologue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk

Medicine as a science didn't exist 200 years ago.

Breath exercises, and physical therapy for relaxation were mainstream in 1960-s.

> it's a cute joke but it skips over the fact that there seems to be an 'alternative medicine -> real medicine' pipeline

Not really. Most of the non-medicine (I refuse to call it "alternative") stays non-medicine: acupuncture, homeopathy, all the "energy meridians" nonsense, ayurveda, alkaline foods, etc.

And even with activities like yoga, it's not more effective than other types of similar physical activity. There is some very weak evidence that yoga _with_ physiotherapy might be more effective than just increased levels of physiotherapy.

Tim Minchin! (about 4 minutes in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk

Well that red flag versus the immediately-preceding passage listing a Doctor of Medicine degree at Stanford Medical School.

I looked into one of the links and apparently she pushes fairly mainstream preventive medicine stuff, diet, exercise, and screening tests. The only questionable thing I saw was the continuous glucose monitoring thing which the jury may still be out on when it comes to non-diabetics.

I haven't tried a continuous glucose monitor myself but those non-diabetics who have generally claim that it gave them interesting insights into how their blood glucose level reacted to different foodstuffs and timing of meals. There is a lot of individual variation there due to genetics, lifestyle, gut microbiome, etc. We'll probably never see a large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial to show that CGM use improves health outcomes for non-diabetics. But for healthy people who already have the basics dialed in, a CGM can probably help them eke out some additional marginal gains.

Now that you mention that pattern, I can’t say I disagree with your comment. However, the information I can find about Means seems to be fairly…non-controversial. Or at least I don’t understand the controversy (which is very likely).