The Vetting of Alternative Medicine

In a New York Times article entitled, "Applying Science to Alternative Medicine," the federal government is described as, "working hard to raise the standards of evidence, seeking to distinguish between what is effective, useless and harmful or even dangerous," regarding the veracity of a wide range of herbs and therapies that fall under the umbrella of alternative medicine. You know how every time you purchase your much-needed bottle of echinacea during flu season or some bee pollen during spring, you are apt to find a warning on the product, saying, "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration...." Well, finally, clinical trials are being conducted to assess how effective yoga is in treating insomnia or whether ginkgo biloba can indeed reign in Alzheimer's. To be clear, it isn't as if these trials weren't conducted before, they were. The earlier trials, though, were severely criticized as having no credence, because they were "small, averaging 30 or fewer subjects per arm of the randomized trial." Apparently, the smaller the trial, the more likely it is to have "false positives." Of course, alternative medicine has its detractors who believe that your favorite tincture or wellness exercise is bologna, but I often wonder how these same individuals minimize all the medicine that existed around the world before "Western medicine" came to the fore, so to speak. Obviously, I think this is a great step toward both medically and socially legitimizing many of the herbs and remedies many people use to treat and heal themselves, and it's about time they finally caught up.