Why would some say that Alternative Medicine is not “evidence” based?

The Homeopathy, Naturopathy and Chiropractic practices are within the scope of Alternative Medicine. Logically, there’s a school for such health practices like in Canada and it’s very legal. There’s even an “Alternative Medicine Research Institute Canada”. So why the blame for “non-evidence”???

When I started visiting YA, I noticed “not evidence based” was brought up a lot to attack alternative medicine, and given the context of the term and how it was used, I assumed the term was mostly designed to be an emotional attack phrase lacking substance. So as you would guess, next I went to look it up. I found that even within the circles who use the term, it’s not accurately (and consistently) defined, and the “validity” of the mentality isn’t agreed upon either.

To over simplify the term though, you could term it “stuff which does not have repeatedable double blind studies supporting it is not evidence based medicine (and hence bad).”
I feel there are a couple big holes in this train of logic. The practical/capitalist side of it, and the philosophical half.

First and foremost, double blind studies are expensive to do, as “honest as the people who carried them out,” and subject to being dismissed if their results are not liked, or more are put out which show things differently. A practical consequence of this has been that with various toxic chemicals marketed to consumers, the companies developing them published misleading “objective double blind studies” to get their drugs approved (FDA doesn’t test, they just use results given by the producers most of the time), and that when other groups publish studies (due to their being enough of a problem that they can amass the funding) shown proving they are bad (which is the only way this can be awknowldged since anything besides acceptable scientific studies are dismissed), the body with more funds just pumps out a few more to descredit the original party.
So practicaly, the need for expensive double blind studies to prove matters of health results in their being a massive bias or favoritism to parties with large ammounts of funds. Alternative medicine does not have this, so as a result, they do not have as many studies.

Secondly, you could say this is a product of the industrial revolution and the western adoption of modern science. Simply put, there was a belief that by studying and analyzing systems and applying the new scientific knowledge, it would become possible to reinivent old processes, and apply a scientific systematization to them to make them more efficient and objectively perfect (aka assembly line production instead of craftsmen producing an item). In my opinion this reductionist (break things, including their creation into their parts, and then pick the best one available) approach initally created great gains, but overtime had many problems manifest as well (this parallel often comes up in environmental science when the green revolution is explained, initially it spiked food production, but now there are lots of problems, and it’s considered to be worse than it’s predecessor).
In “scientific medicine” a need exists for something like double blind trials to prove something “objectively works” so that curing a disease can be broken down into a series of things done to a patient based of existing data to cure them.
Alternative medicine ascribes to a different model, which is much more variable and requires a lot of consideration to be taken about the patient in each case, and hence double blind studies become less central to the concept.
Additionally, going with this idea, a lot of health practices that alternative people do (especially energy manipulation) cannot really be done in a double blind manner, they require the person doing them to focus on the person.

Since a lot of what is done in alternative medicine either does not make sense to western medicine or goes against financial interests, it will be slandered, and the term evidence based is just the most commonly chosen one. When studies come along, they are normally dismissed and ignored.
In short I’d say the term evidence based is just a term which implies the negation is worthless, but doesn’t have much actually going for it. When homeopathy was created, conventional medicine was based around swallowing mercury and letting blood out, but when homeopathy provided an alternative that actually worked and cured the disease which only treatments like blood letting had previously existed for, it spread like wildfire, and before long had colleges teaching it based in the US. By the definition of evidence based we are currently using, this result is not evidence based. By the same token, you could say chinese medicine which has existed in china and improved over 1000′s of years (since over there, doctors were only payed if they cured their patients, and hence had to actually do the job and gradually improve, whereas over here you pay regardless of it it works) is not “evidence based”.

Lastly, I’d like to leave you with an example that I believe sums a lot of this up. A (very scientifically sound) study was done which showed that if a group of people in one country prayed for a group of people in another country recovering from operations, there was a stastically significant increase in their recovery rate. This study has been mostly ignored, occasionally attacked (although not that much since there was nothing in the procedure it followed that could be pointed out as a flaw, along with it being reproduced), and any treatment involving intention or prayer is still regarded as quackery and evidence based medicine (or possibly placebo…although that counter argument doesn’t really adress the people recovering did not even know they were being prayed for).

Sorry for the long answer, but I hope that answers your question well! I’ve been meaning to put this into writing for a while, so thank for giving me somewhere to do it

Evidence Based Chiropractic – Indiana, PA

	Evidence-based Chiropractic Practice By Haneline, Michael T. $114.15

	Evidence-Based Chiropractic Practice NEW $111.31

Netter’s Orthopaedic Clinical Examination: An Evidence-Based Approach, 2e (Netter Clinical Science) $48.50 Netter’s Orthopaedic Clinical Examination: An Evidence-Based Approach, by Joshua Cleland and Shane Koppenhaver, helps you apply best practices to get the most clinically significant information from each physical examination. Classic Netter artwork and anatomy/biomechanics tables provide a handy anatomy and pathophysiology overview, while an evidence-based approach helps you focus on the examinati…

Outcome-Based Massage: From Evidence to Practice $29.99 Written for physical therapists, massage therapists and occupational therapists, this text introduces an evidence-based clinical reasoning process for incorporating massage into therapeutic practice. The authors instruct readers in how to identify impairments, select and apply appropriate massage techniques, and integrate massage with other treatments. The book integrates a wide variety of techniq…

Therapeutic Electrophysical Agents: Evidence Behind Practice $48.14 Much more than an update to the Evidence-Based Guide to Therapeutic Physical Agents, this Second Edition, now titled Therapeutic Electrophysical Agents: Evidence Behind Practice, enables you to translate your learning into practice. The Second Edition expands and strengthens the concept of evidence-based practice for the study and application of therapeutic electrophysical agents (EPAs) in the fie…