Spoken like a True Believer in the "Skeptic" Movement, there BillD.

A charlatan is a charlatan, whether as a snake oil salesman or a brain surgeon who loses or maims all his patients.

I worked with one of those brain surgeons--virtually every patient he operated on died, but he keeps practicing in a major university teaching hospital, because he is being allowed to do experimental surgeries on patients with tumors in parts of the brain that medical science hasn't been able to successfully treat.

Sound medical science? No. Hit or miss? Yes. He is using living, breathing human beings as if they were cadavers. Deeply disturbing. Now, I'm completely on the side of using human subjects for research if done properly. I'm all for cutting edge medical research. I am fascinated by the science and the art of practicing medicine. But I am as skeptical of so-called "scientific" medicine as I am of the "old wives tales". If it is proven to work, I'm all for it, and I don't care who "discovered" it.

All our medical knowledge came from people, often women, who did the thankless work of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data on plants, metals, and other naturally occuring substances developed by humans as medicinal curative agents, or from experimenting with and observing the ways physical manipulation of the energy pathways in the human body (ie yoga, tai chi, massage, acupuncture, diet, etc) works to relieve pain and speed healing.

If the term "energy pathways" disturbs you skeptics, you can readily substitute the word "systems" as in the endocrine system, the nervous system, the pulmonary system, etc.

There is a pretty well documented history of extremely useful traditional knowledge (which in some instances is very ancient knowledge indeed) that has been passed down to us. That is as true of science as it is religion. Today's complimentary healing "quacks" (as the skeptics ignorantly insist they are) were yesterday's health care professionals, just like today's astronomers were yesterday's astrologers, or today's metallurgists are yesterday's alchemists.

So just where are those "factually inaccurate" statements, BillD?