Quite right. Much of medicine is in the mind; we had a thread up above about people dying of a broken heart. Anything that works is perfectly good to use.

The only thing I object to is the pseudoscientific abracadabrian mumpsimus that some of the new- age wonder healers come up with. And when they convince people on scientifically unsupportable grounds to eschew a mainstream treatment that works in favour of an alternative one that doesn't.

We had a prime example in the UK, when (partly as a result of blundering by an authoritarian- minded government) a significant number of people stopped having their children vaccinated. This puts their own children, and still worse others, at risk.