Amos, that's the point - the human body has amazing powers of self-recovery. That's why the placebo effect is so remarkable, and why there's a need to correct for it in the first place. And again, that's why M Ted's doctor was so right - if it works for you then keep doing it.

Sadly it wouldn't make money for the drugs companies if we found out how it worked, so there isn't the research into it that there really should be. There certainly is research going on, though.

LH, the doctor in your example only *claims* to cure AIDS. Anyone found the actual stats from his hospital?

As far as alternative treatments go, the key thing is finding which ones work and which don't, and for which diseases/symptoms they do/don't work. Acupuncture is a good recent example - it's fairly widely used now (at least in the UK), even though it's not understood yet. And we *still* don't know how aspirin works. But it hasn't stopped studies to find what they do/don't work for. No doctor will ever be thrown out by their professional association for using evidence-based medicine.

The problem is practitioners who *don't* use evidence-based medicine. (Homeopathy is the prime example here, since the overwhelming concensus of studies is that it has no effect beyond placebo.) If you prescribe a treatment that hasn't been shown to work, then you *should* be drummed out of your profession! Unless of course you've made it completely clear that you're doing research, and the patients are 100% in agreement with you using them as guinea pigs for this research - and even then you'll have ethical problems if the results of the treatment failing are near-certainty of death (cancer or AIDS, for instance).

As for "nobody got sick because they *lacked* drugs", that's pure bullshit. There's a reason everyone had huge families before modern medicine - having a family of 10 was the only way you could guarantee 2 of them surviving. Antibiotics and vaccines are the clearest possible counter-argument to your claim. Go talk to an African about river sickness, malaria, diptheria or TB, and see how well they're doing without them.

Graham.