As a second year medical student, many times in Pharmacology class I learn to have contempt for so-called “alternative medicines.” Lecturers usually make two points: 1) the alternative medicines that have been tested are no more efficacious than placebo, and 2) alternative medicines are not regulated by the FDA, and hence may contain less or more than the therapeutic level, or worse, be contaminated. I agree with both points. This attitude about alternative medicines is not limited to the pharmacology of herbal drugs, but it is also the way conventional Western doctors view therapies like Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Reiki, etc. I agree that many of these treatments are not shown to be more effective than placebo for treating a particular disease. Yet, I myself use a very Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) treatment on myself. What follows is an explanation for how I can incorporate these seemingly contradictory thoughts in my life.
Some of my classmates wonder why many Americans spend so much money on CAM when CAM “doesn’t work.” I have an answer for them, and it starts with my personal story. I grew up in Bangladesh where the holistic Ayurvedic system is embedded in the culture, even though the predominant medical system follows a Western model. When I suffered from acne, my family would tell me to “keep my digestive system clean, drink lots of water, etc.” Being a typical teenager, I scoffed at these suggestions. Once we came to America, my acne got worse, and I finally saw a Dermatologist and took Tetracycline for about 7 months. A couple of years later, my acne flared back, and this time I took Doxycycline for a year. Meanwhile, I learned that studies have shown that diet has no link to acne, so I had found even more reason to disregard Mom’s advice on chocolate and coffee. The antibiotic therapies worked, but I was concerned about the effects of such long-term antibiotic therapy on other bodily functions. In medical school, I used birth-control pills instead of antibiotics for my acne for a while, then stopped using any medication once my skin was reasonably clear.
In medical school, however, I’ve been struggling with a number of issues, from weight gain to depression, to ADD. While receiving Western biomedical treatment for ADD, the side effects of my therapy convinced me that western medication alone would not provide a solution to my problems. That’s when I sought the advice of a doctor who had the knowledge of CAM therapies, even though he’s trained in traditional Western medicine. He does not advise me by himself, but receives advice from his teachers in India who practice holistic healing they call Jeevan Sanjeevani. It was hard for me to accept their suggestions at first. When they suggested that I should have faith in their recommendations, I immediately wondered whether I’m just paying for placebo effect. However, with their suggestions for lifestyle changes and even life outlook changes, I began to experience a new sense of direction in life. Finally, I also realized why my family would recommend “cleaning my digestive system” to cure my acne. It was because eating the wrong kinds of foods, along with other stressors like studying all night, raises the inflammation of the body. For some people, it manifests as acne, for others, it might be arthritis, for some it might be cancer. Cleaning the digestive system, however, is not as simple as it sounds. Because I had not received the medical directions and herbal medications to help me do it before, I was not able to use my family’s advice to cure myself. Now that I’m getting advice from a learned practitioner, I’m realizing how much goes into making such a simple advice work. Granted, I have to be very patient with my results, as this is not a quick fix. This therapy has not only started to help me with some short-term health concerns, but it has renewed my confidence and eased my depression in a way that traditional Western biomedicine could never have done. That is why I’m sticking to this holistic therapy, and that is why many Americans are drawn to CAM. For me, my current therapies are not at all “alternative,” but they are the ideal way of treatment, with some help from Western medicines for short-term problems.
Note that I did not say Western medicine does not work, or that I don’t have faith in it. Western medicines have cured illnesses for me before, and continue to help me. But with Jeevan Sanjeevani, I’ve reduced my dependence on certain medications and hope to not need them in the future. I’m not in the group of people who have such distrust for Western medicine that they refuse to accept results of valid scientific studies. I’m also not critical of using Western medications just because of the fear of side effects, since I realize that a ratio of benefits to risks justifies each individual treatment. But neither am I in the group of Western medicine trained students or doctors who refuse to see other medical systems in their own rights, and therefore cannot make sense of why patients seek alternative treatments.
What is complementary and alternative medicine? NCCAM defines it as a “a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered part of conventional medicine.”[1] Why do we lump all of these very different systems and practices of medicine into one category called CAM? What are these alternatives to? Missing from the picture is that CAM is only alternative to a Western biomedical system of medicine, and one form of CAM might be considered an alternative by a practitioner of a different CAM. This Eurocentric attitude, that the traditional Western biomedical system is the epitome of medicine itself, exists in even international organizations like WHO. WHO defines “traditional medicine” as:
The sum total of knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures that are used to maintain health, as well as to prevent, diagnose, improve or treat physical and mental illnesses. Traditional medicine that has been adopted by other populations (outside its indigenous culture) is often termed alternative or complementary medicine.[2]
The Eurocentric bias becomes clear when WHO explains who uses traditional medicine: “In some Asian and African countries, 80% of the population depend on traditional medicine for primary health care. In many developed countries, 70% to 80% of the population has used some form of alternative or complementary medicine (e.g. acupuncture)”[3]
Why are Africans and Asians said to use “traditional medicine” but not Europeans or Americans? In America, the Western biomedical system is our tradition. Yet, we continue to view traditional Western medicine as the norm for all of the world, while we call other systems of medicine CAM, even when they’re the primary medical system many people follow! We forget to qualify our approach as “traditional,” or “Western/biomedical,” and instead imply that our system defines medicine itself.
It is because as Westerners we refuse to see our own bias in the Western biomedical system that we fail to understand why people use so called CAM therapies even when they’re “quackery” to us doctors. We use research methods of the Western biomedical system to evaluate medicines that don’t even fit the mold of the Western biomedical system, and then we conclude that these therapies “don’t work.” Don’t work how and why? They might not work within the Western frame of medicine, but who says that they don’t work within their own systems? Have we stopped to wonder if Western biomedical therapies are considered effective by the Acupuncture system or the Ayurvedic system? No, we don’t wonder that because we, in our Eurocentric view of the world, refuse to believe that other medical systems are different but equally respectable systems of medicine. I know from my experience with Jeevan Sanjeevani that for them, relief of a single disease by medication does not equal to cure. Cure refers to an entirely healthy state of mind and body. Even when some CAM therapies are shown to be more effective than placebo in a Western biomedical experiment, we remain skeptic about it, as blogger PalMD exemplifies:
When evaluating a therapy for a complex disorder whose natural history is variable, we must very carefully parse out causation from correlation, recognize our own biases, and remember that a positive result of a randomized-controlled trial does not necessarily confirm a hypothesis. If an intervention has no plausible way or working, any positive results are likely a statistical artifact. Science isn't a contest to see who can crank out at least one positive study. It is a way of evaluating hypotheses to see which ones most closely fit reality.[4]
Have we really recognized our own bias when evaluating a CAM therapy? We haven’t even removed the biggest bias of all, which is to see the Western biomedical system as the one and only valid form of science and medicine, instead of admitting that it is one system among many. Perhaps a CAM therapy does not work using ligands and receptors. Perhaps it works in a way that Western doctors are not trained to understand or accept. When we evaluate hypotheses to see which ones most closely fit reality – whose reality are we talking about? Ayurveda is very much a reality among Indians; if a hypotheses fits Ayurveda, who are we to call it quackery just because it doesn’t fit our biomedical model?
Western medicine is a detail oriented, small picture discipline. Our medical education encourages such an approach, and therefore attracts people who like that approach and are good at practicing it. Patients who fit this model come to us with various illnesses, and we give them medications, and/or surgery for each illness. If they have psychological problems, they can go to a therapist for counseling. That therapist does not know about the physiological problems of the patient, and doctors do not know how the therapist is treating the life issues of the patient. This model of specialized healthcare works for many people, both practitioners and patients. This model works not just in America, but elsewhere in the world. Colonization has imposed such a Western biomedical system on many different countries, most of whom have made it their predominant method of healthcare. With globalization, however, the indigenous medical systems of other countries have come to the West, and are appealing to some people just as the Western system appealed to many people of colonized countries. Some of these other medical practitioners know how to incorporate various medical and social illnesses of a patient into a big picture, and therefore attract patients who are looking for a holistic cure. Every CAM practitioner might not be qualified enough or even truthful, but neither are all biomedical doctors perfect. If a surgeon cannot do one surgery right, that does not mean that the surgery does not work, and it does not mean the whole discipline of surgery is quackery. Can we evaluate all surgeries through double blind studies? No, because surgery requires individuality. Many CAM practices are the same way.
To whom do these non-Western medicines hold an appeal? The appeal generally to “big picture” people, people who are not satisfied with treating one single illness at a time with one practitioner, but see their illnesses connected to every other aspect of their life. In other words, traditional Western doctors can treat acne, ADD, arthritis and indigestion separately in a patient, but there is a sense in many people that there is a root cause behind all these illnesses that can be cured. In Western medicine, we look for symptoms of diabetes in a patient, but in certain other medicines, the diabetes itself is a symptom, not a diagnosis.
Understanding and appreciating other medical systems might seem unnecessary to doctors who are satisfied with traditional Western medicine. But we need to understand that this is because of our inherent bias in the traditional Western culture, and the misguided view that our medical culture is the norm. We make fun of alternative therapies and conclude that it’s the patient’s faith in the treatment that makes it work, not the treatment itself. But in fact, Western medicine also requires patient’s faith in the treatment or otherwise, it won’t work. That faith is reflected in patient compliance. Our therapies are successful for patients who follow our directions, experience few side effects, and when they do experience side effects, come to us for additional treatment. They need to have faith to stick to both medications for depression and medications for obesity and hyperlipidemia. Otherwise, failure in one can aggravate the other. Before long, we’re admitting that several factors need to be addressed to manage a patient condition. How is this any different from the way a good acupuncturist may treat? The difference is that in acupuncture, the patient has to follow a holistic therapy that might not solve one problem quickly, but will solve several problems ultimately. It’s the other way around for traditional Western medicine.
I cannot comment on the efficacy of each non-Western medical system, because I’m not being trained in any of them, and I don’t have the understanding to praise or criticize those systems. Our version of medical reality has receptors, hormones and nerves, etc. Someone else’s medical reality includes energies, meridians, or doshas. We may be so ingrained in the traditional Western biomedical model that we’re unable to make sense of anything that doesn’t use the same concepts or language. However, many patients accurately see that there seems to be different ways of understanding a health condition, and they will choose the one that makes them feel the best at any given point in time. Even if we can’t accept their logic, we’ll have to accept that traditional medicine from other cultures will gain a stronghold in our population, just as we have imposed our traditional medicine on theirs.
[1] http://nccam.nih.gov/health/whatiscam/
[2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs134/en/
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2009/09/fibromyalgia_alternative_medic.php
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I definitely think there should be more combining of Western and non-traditional healing. And really, I think we do a lot of unnecessary trashing of placebo effects (not that I think that's all that's going on with non-traditional healing). If you feel better in the end, that's a real result, right? If the method taught you how to make yourself feel better, why is this somehow a lesser result than taking a drug?
Combining the two?
I am skeptical of this.
Not in the sense of the holistic (i.e. non-Western) "heal the whole person" versus the Western "fix the problem, period," and one being good and the other bad. But it can be really, really dangerous to mix (standard) drugs and CAM therapies, especially herbal ones.
Not only are there proven interactions between some that result in either negating the positive effects of both OR making the original condition worse, there is no regulatory body (in the U.S.) that oversees herbals, or (most? unsure) other CAMs. You never know what other mix of herbs and chemicals you might be getting along with the one that you "know" is safe.
I've seen drugs fail people. I've had drugs fail me. I've been devastated by side effects to the point I can't function. And there are some CAMs that really, truly work--I've seen it happen; I've had them work for me (acupressure is *amazing*).
But mixing the two? Be careful.
Glad you are feeling better. The logic leap from "I am feeling better" to "scientifically uncredible medicine works after all" is one you will have to elaborate on a little.
In America, the Western biomedical system is our tradition.
Srsly? Do you know anything about Western medical tradition? Scientific medicine is only about 200 years old, and didn't start in America.
Jeebus. I hope I never have you as a doctor. When I see CAM claptrap in a doctor's office, I run.
She's not saying that Western medicine started in America. She's saying it's what we have traditionally used in America. America as the United States is only about 200 years old so it could be considered a tradition considering Western scientific medicine is a practice taught in American medical schools to each new generation of American doctors that may not be the same as how other cultures teach medicine. It doesn't have to originate here to be considered a tradition.
i did not say scientifically uncredible medicine works after all. i said we're limited in what we think is scientifically credible. there's so much more we have to learn in detail about the human body. so if a therapy doesn't fit what we know currently about receptors and ligands, we can't say that we won't discover it's mechanism in the future. i'm also not vouching for every "alternative" therapy or every other system of medicine. but i do think there are certain long-standing systems of medicine that we shouldn't dismiss pre-maturely. we should recognize the limits of our evaluation.
it is not easy to practice naturopathy, ayurveda or acupuncture and i'm not going to have any "traps" for them in my office, since i don't know how to practice them. i won't discourage patients from seeing a qualified practitioner, however. buying some natural supplements and taking them by yourself is not alternative medicine. getting an opinion from a different kind of medical practitioner is.
I hope I got the right idea about your post... I am too ADD to read it lol. Anyways, I think the only reason doctors look down upon alternative medicines is because they aren't tested. For example, St John's Wort was an herbal medicine used for depression, and it is now used for depression medically (I think). Kind of like chewing coca leaves used to be used, and cocaine is prescribed in some countries as a medication (two horrible examples, I know). That's because those two have been tested. Things like lavender or lion's tail for relaxation haven't been scientifically tested enough to be commercially produced as pharmaceuticals and used by doctors.
So its more like doctors don't like to use other forms of medication because they haven't been tested alot, not any racism I think (I missed that part of your post)
Then read the entire post. All your points would weave in nicely with what the OP is saying. You are short changing yourself when you say "lol I'm going to half participate."
I was doing fine until I came unto the part about homeopathic medicines for ADD, when I remembered that I was hungry. Just kidding, that was really lame. I have a literal inability to read every single word of something. Something this long, I can't read it without starting to skip lines.
The post you are responding to was more of a disclaimer than a choice.
St. John's Wort is one of the ones that has been tested. It has been shown to have some effect on mild to moderate depression. No effect on major (severe) depression.
It also cancels out the benefits of first-line treatments for epilepsy, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, migraines, and heart arrhythmias.
This is what I mean by "be careful."
As someone who lives in Colombia, please let me underline that COCA LEAVES have the same relationship to COCAINE as rye has to whiskey.
Coca leaves are an established traditional treatment for altitude sickness and work nicely. They also supplement the traditional Andean diet which is traditionally weak in some vitamins (A and D, if I'm not mistaken) - Wade Davis' "One River" has an interesting discussion on this topic.
A general comment on traditional non-western medicine, if these different systems are so bad and so unscientific, why is Big Pharma (the big pharmaceutical companies) practicing Bio-Piracy in developing nations in order to claim intellectual property of traditional medicines?
For an interesting critique of Western 'Traditional' medicine please see "For her own good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English which points out that the ascendancy of doctors as professional men had everything to do with the suppression of traditional healers and was anything but scientific.
Well, the two are not mutually exclusively, certainly and holistic forms of medicine do have a component to them that often forms the basic logic of pharmacology.
physicians are not skeptical of "alternative" or homeopathic medicines because we think they are necessarily bonk or "eastern."
in general, we think ALL medicines are bonk unless you can prove that it isn't. yes, we are a skeptical bunch, but we have to be. skepticism is the nature of scientific inquiry. if we simply believed in everything because it worked for a few people, there would be no need for science.
btw - that a medicine is no more effective than placebo is a GREAT reason to not put the patient through the misery of paying for the medicine and possibly enduring its side effects.
most homeopathic and/or alternative or ayurvedic medicines have simply not been proven to have a positive effect - most have not been studied at all. some have shown to have some mild beneficial effects (st johns wort), some dangerous interactions with other meds (also st. johns wort), and on others the evidence that exists is mixed (acupunture). and there are others still that have beneficial effects (turmeric has proven antiseptic properties), but antibiotics work much better. we need more and better studies - you might be surprised to find out that our bastion of allopathic medicine, the NIH, has an entire department devoted to studying potential treatments in alternative medicine.
there have been PLENTY of medicines and innovations in surgery that were born outside the US that we've adopted here. it's not a matter of these treatments being "eastern" or "western." it's a matter of them being scientifically valid and vigorously proven. i care too much about my patients to encourage them to take a medicine that has not been studied and tested.
what angers me is that these companies that push "natural" products can get away with it, charge whatever they want, without any oversight or regulation. the other day a woman showed me an eye drop that she puts into her eyes to slow the growth of cataracts. there is no such drop that is known to slow or reverse cataract as it is a permanent, structural change to the lens of the eye - you have to take the cataract out and put a new lens in (you can potentially slow the progression of a cataract if you wear sunglasses and treat underlying medical illness, such as diabetes). of course, the drop has in small letters that it not approved by the FDA and therefore cannot be guaranteed to treat anything, plus, the drops have a preservative in them that can be irritating. but patients don't know this, because they think something is "natural" and "holistic" and therefore "good for me."
and that company made ten bucks off of her. though i am not a fan of any pharm company that rips people off, at least big pharma has to be somewhat accountable to the FDA.
anyway. you will see more examples of the above as you go through med school and residency, i promise.
thank you for the insight. you know, i'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, but i'm bothered by many doctors' tendency to lump all kinds of CAM together, whether they're just a bonkers drug or actually a wholly separate system of medicine. i'd not advocate that anyone just start using a product that claims to cure a disease. but i cannot just dismiss other practitioners understanding of health just because their explanations do not fit my model.
my point about the whole placebo effect was to say that if we take a particular therapy out of its context and test it, that might not be a valid test to prove its efficacy. for example, i've had to make some lifestyle changes for certain medications to work for me, and without those changes they probably won't have worked better than placebo.
i'm sure i'll learn a lot more through my training. the first two years we get such immensely detailed yet narrow scope of learning.
I echo what 'visibility' said above. I'd also like to add that the whole eastern/traditional/natural/holistic vs. western/'biomedical'/etc. distinction is what they call a false dichotomy. The anti-malarial drug Artemisinin for example, was discovered in ancient China more than a thousand years ago. Modern scientists found it interesting, so they analyzed it and tested it. It was the only one of about 200 herbal medicines they tested which actually worked. (And now they've gone one step further with synthetic versions that are even more effective.) Would you call Artemisinin eastern or western? Traditional or modern? It is neither. As the joke goes: What do you call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? A: Medicine.
I'd also like to add that what you refer to as the Western approach to evaluating medicine - things like clinical trials - are not used because of Western bias. They're used because they're the best approach we've found so far to evaluate medicine. If you have a better approach in mind - one that's even more scientifically sound, statistically robust, that even further eliminates things like personal bias and chance - do share. But you don't. Instead, you're proposing medicine based on faith, personal experience, anecdotes and appeals to antiquity - all orders of magnitude less reliable than the system you're criticizing.
Btw I'm an Indian feminist and I'm on your side on nearly all issues, but not this one, because it's just plain wrong.
to all the commentators so far, thank you for viewing a rather lengthy article that was nothing more than an opinion of mine. i've received comments on this article on my own blog, and i'd like to share my response. hopefully it'll clarify my idea a little more, but i admit, my idea maybe wrong altogether.
One commentator disagreed that the current modality of Western medicine, what some call “allopathy,” is not traditional Western medicine. Well that definitely could be. I wanted to use the term “allopathy” to refer to this particular medical system we have, but that term was coined under the wrong premises, so I had to use something else for lack of a better word. It’s not perfect. But the word tradition can refer to any long standing practice or institution, whether it’s scientific or non-scientific. Tradition also changes. The commenter pointed out how certain treatments like bleeding patients have been thrown out of Western medicine. That’s true. We’re always evaluating what works for us and what doesn’t. Those evaluations take place within other medical systems too. And if they’re not evaluated, or the evaluations are not rigorous, then those systems will not take a stronghold like others. Which brings me to another point – the Western form of medicine has taken a stronghold primarily because we’re able to verify its effects on a disease process. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t make other modalities of medicine all “quackery.” There’s nothing wrong with using Western scientific models to test these other modalities, but the absence of an existing proof in that test does not, for me, rule out that the therapy doesn’t work. It’s because a study might test a therapy in isolation of other factors which would have made the therapy work. For some people, that means the therapy doesn’t work at all and isn’t worth pursuing, but that is certainly not the case for all. Ultimately the efficacy of the treatment also depends on the desired result. I’ll also not rule out the possibility that eventually we’ll realize how certain other treatments work at the physiological/molecular level. If we can’t think of a possibility now, it doesn’t mean that it won’t arise later as we find out more and more details about the human body. Hence, it seems premature to call other practitioners quacks or charlatans as long as they have people who’re benefitting from their treatment. The one caveat is that we can’t let people go ahead and do something that we think might be harmful. In that case, we’d have to advice them that they’re taking a big risk by refusing proven treatments in favor of the unknown. But in all other cases, people can choose to put their money on a treatment that anecdotally works.
Another commentatorr pointed out that scientific methods are not just Western. I agree and I should’ve thought about the terms more before I used them that way. What I meant to say is, again, that scientific methods are not limited to the way we evaluate Western medicines. While it’s true that colonization has imposed a Western way of education on other countries, perhaps there were people in those countries who would’ve started a similar system anyways. Non-Western countries weren’t monolithic, but certain knowledge systems from those countries did get marginalized with colonization. That’s another reason, perhaps small, for why the Western form of medicine is so pervasive today. I think if in history we had an exchange of ideas instead of imposition of one, any one form of medicine would not have been dominant. I also perhaps shouldn’t have added the term racism to the title. Not because I don’t believe there is a racial component to Eurocentrism, but because it is not worth starting disputes that are off the main purpose of the article.
I’ve approved all the comments but one, which was actually a supportive comment from a homeopathic website. Perhaps I should’ve put this disclaimer at the top of my article. But my ideas and writings are not meant to endorse any one form of medicine over the other, and I don’t want to give that impression but approving a institution’s comment. I remain skeptic of many modalities of medicine, and I think their practitioners sometimes step outside the scope of their practice. Of the few modalities I’ve heard of, I’m skeptic of Homeopathy and Chiropractic, while more understanding of Ayurveda and Acupuncture. My previous article was theoretical and just meant to raise questions about the way we think. As an MD I will only prescribe treatments to my patients that I’ve been taught works, and I’ll recommend that they stick to that treatment. But I would not want to limit their improvement in health by telling them other modalities are quackery, just because I don’t understand them, and that they shouldn’t seek other opinions.
Thank you commentators for making me think about my thesis again. I wish I received the same feedback for other articles. To the person who asked me how social constructed the pain is from a brick on your foot – I don’t know. But I do know that perception of pain can change drastically with the right mindset or mind-reconfiguring yoga. To the person who called my article bullshit and assumed I’d call them biased or racist – well, my article might actually be bullshit. Those of us who think outside the box have to accept that new ways of thinking doesn’t mean it’s the right way of thinking. And no, I won’t call you biased or racist without knowing the context of your comment.
Feel free to criticize my idea more!
Changing your diet is science-based medicine, it is a widely accepted part of so-called "Western" medicine, which just means based on scientific theories rather than prescience (developments aren't limited to the west).
Reducing stress is also science-based, "western" medicine.
The reason that Asian and African countries are listed as having prescientific medical modalities is that Unani, the Western prescientific medical modality (humors), was pretty much driven out of mainstream medicine in the west. Our tradition is actually not scientific medicine any more than theirs is, and yes, people do still practice Unani in this country. But the thing is, science-based medicine has taken more ideas from non-Unani at this point than it saved from Unani. It's not Eurocentric at all, Unani is considered one of the more dangerous forms of alternative medicine, even though it's European in nature.
Science-based medicine is the only "valid" form of medicine because it is the only form based in provable, testable reality. This includes things that pseudoscientific practitioners consider "alternative," like diet, exercise, hygiene, drinking enough water, and reducing stress, things "western" doctors have been promoting for years (but patients ignore until someone pretends it's a secret of the ancients). It also includes pharmacognosy, or "herbal" cures, some of which do work, just not as well or as safely as their derived forms (ie, St. John's Wort is effective, but has a LOT of interactions, is less effective than pharmaceutical cures, and can poison patients). And yes, it includes surgery and medicine.
Now, of course, doctors who rely on science can be dumb, and make mistakes; or sometimes the science is wrong and needs to be corrected. I'm not saying science-based medicine is perfect. But it is a system that says, "This is how the body works. We can prove it works this way by x, and you can repeat our experiments with the same results. With that in mind, we will do y to fix your problem, considering how the body works." Compare this to the prescience models: "We believe, with no way to prove it and only faith, that the body works this way. We can't prove it, and you might even be able to disprove it (such as with homeopathy), but we'll believe it anyway. We'll take our beliefs and come up with something that would work if they were right."
When a traditional idea is proven to work, it is accepted into scientific medicine. Like stress causing stomach upset and heartburn. Of course, the promoters of alternative medicine like to pretend that means everything they say will be proven right eventually, and that an eventually justifies promoting it now-- even if it's ALREADY been proven FALSE.