The myth of Alternative Medicine

The more undeveloped the country, the more the reliance on "traditional" and alternative medicines is a general rule in the world.
Alternative medicine needs to die. Let the researchers in Universities and Pfizers of the world find out why some herb, potion, etc. works. But you had I need to keep away from alternative therapies like Homeopathy, Accupuncture, Ayurveda, Chiropracter, Therapy with Magnets, etc. Remember that "modern" medicine (I hate the call anything modern. what is modern today will be old in the future, in  a few centuries. we love our present times as being something special, because we are alive in it-but in the history of human development, we are just a time speck) was born out of these, and I think it is better if a medical doctor who has already went to school in  modern med school medicine discover why some herbs or home made remedies work. You and I need to stay away from this stuff. For every one thing that works in these therapies, there are nine which are utterly useless, and waste of time and money, and sometimes, even harmful.
Take chiropractic services. This is massage therapy with a funky name. They even license this stuff-in most cases it is useless. The good results of this can be attained by intelligent massage therapy, and you dont need to spend a lot of money on a chiropracter to find relief for your backache. Even though modern medicine may not work, but that doesn't mean you will try anything and everything. The only place where it seems justified to try all these alternative therapies is in the case of terminally ill patients-it is okay to give some old or new unproven therapy a shot to see if works. Desperate times call for desperate acts; there's nothing wrong with that.

Everyday you will get an email in your box about the great properties of figs or lemons, and you can ignore these emails. What medical sciences and biochemistry do is find out what are the substances in figs which are causing some good results, then those substances or chemicals are grown artifically or naturally to give you the concentrated form of the good stuff in figs. It is the whole basis of biochemistry.

An example of quinine, the first and most reknown antibiotic. In the late 19th century quinine was extracted from trees in Ecuador, and shipped worldwide. After a few decades intelligent researchers figured out that it is not necessary to have quinine from this tree-you could impregnate apple with quinine and they will keep generating more quinine apples. A few decades after that, quinine was synthesized artfiically and costs were brought down even further. The source of the molecule or chemical substance which works in a symptom doesn't matter; we change the source to reduce costs. This the basis of biochemistry and chemistry. That's why vitamin C from lemons or vitamin C from Figs has the same effects (minor differences might exist). Same with proteins from vegetable or animal sources, these are very similar molecules, and will likely have the same dietary effects, no matter what the meat mafia influenced doctor says (this notion that meat protein is better than vegetable protein still exists in South America; thankfully in US and Canada it is gone. I don't know about where it stands in other countries).

When some ayurvedic herbal cure seems to work, a medical researcher at Pfizer can do more scientific experimentation to find out what exactly is the chemical substance in the herb which is causing the good effects. Then if that effect is proven to be really from the substance, we can figure out cheaper ways of producing  this chemical or drug, naturally in other plants, or artificially from other chemicals in a laboratory.
This is how allopathy was born; over time it took ideas from traditional chinese medicine, ayurveda etc. to incorporate more and more drugs into it. It didn't just drop in this world from some another planet. Even to this day medical reseachers are always looking out for information on why some herbal cure works in the indigenous population of bolivia or peru, or in other tribes in Africa. There is knowledge and real cause-effect there; and professionals are working to understand those effects; but you and I do not need to directly experiment this on ourselves.

Sanjay