Kat, my point was that blood-letting was Western "traditional" medicine. Medicine progressed beyond there, bcos ppl conducted proper studies to see what worked and what didn't. MDs share experiences of which therapies work and which don't, so that the central organisations can work out what's best practise and what should be scrapped.

My worry with "alternative" therapies is whether there's anything corresponding to that, which can fulfill a similar function. For example, are Kat's acupuncturists changing what they use bcos a group of acupuncturists have researched many alternatives and found which ones work best in double-blind tests, or just bcos they can't get the other stuff? Also note that making you "feel better" or "seeming to work for you" is NOT a measurable criteria - as Liz says, blood-letting may make you feel great, but it's not a good therapy! :-) And if powdered rhino horn is genuinely the best remedy for some conditions (has anyone checked?), then maybe we should be farming rhinos to get enough of it! ;-)

This is contrary to LH's talk of faith. LH says that the choice of therapies is based on all various cultural stuff. Frankly, I'd be more interested in choosing a therapy which worked! I don't have a baseless faith in Western medicine just bcos I've been told so, I have trust in it bcos I know that all the way up, there's ppl looking at which therapies work best. When "alternative" medicine has the same level of rigour in defining best practise, I'll be happy to have the same level of trust in it. Until that improves, I have little to base that trust on, which makes any such trust more of a matter of faith than rationality. I certainly won't rule it out, bcos there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that some of it works - the trouble is that it seems (to me at least) to be largely stuck at the same pre-scientific stage that medicine was before Victorian times. That NCCAM is certainly a big leap in the right direction (when I get time, I'll have a good look through that and see what the score is on all the various therapies - get myself properly educated on that).

Graham.