I am all for making an informed and well researched decision. And think most people who use alternatives are generally well informed on their treatments as well as their disease--from a poster on another thread.
The problem is twofold:
1. Most of what people who take the 'alternative' route use for research is without scientific merit.
2. They generally lack both the knowledge and ability to understand the papers that present the results of basic science research. This is not a put-down; it’s just a statement of fact. And it's true for any subject that presupposes a certain depth of knowledge on a particular topic, whether the engineering of coal-fired electric generation plants, the handgrinding of solid carbide surgical burrs, or restaurant management. The sheer amount of information (and mis-information) that's out there on any subject is staggering. It takes a great deal of time and effort just to get a sense of what's current in one little area of one little area.
Suppose someone is diagnosed with colon cancer and says he doesn't trust his doctor because the doctor will just recommend surgery and is in league with the surgeons to give them more work. The thought of surgery is really scary and confirms both the presence of a deadly disease and his inability to do anything about it. Consequently, in order to regain some feeling of control, he decides to take the 'alternative' route to treatment and to do his own research. Besides, coffee enemas and macrobiotics, both things he can do at home, sound a lot more “natural” than colon resection and chemotherapy.
Since he doesn't trust medical science because of its alleged self-interest, everything medical science says is suspect. Then where will he go for information? To those who sell alternative medications and procedures? What about their self-interest? Does he type in 'colon cancer' AND 'cures' into some web search engine? If he does, he'll come back with literally thousands of web pages (7,400,000 from Google.com using the above criteria) that would take thousands (or millions) of hours to read. But even then he would only have scraped the surface and all the while the cancer is progressing.
The lone researcher still must devise some way of separating the pages with accurate information from those that are simply untrue or from those that are actively misleading. How will he do it? Simply being willing to do research will do nothing to halt the progression of his cancer. The tumor doesn't give a rat's ass (tumor immunology joke since a lot of cancers are implanted on a rodent's hind quarters) about how hard the person it's going to kill is willing to work to become truly knowledgeable about it. It has its own timetable.
If he wanted to go to scientific journals in the field of medical research in general, cancer in particular, and colon cancer specifically, he would be faced with the same problem. If he went to
PubMed, a resource of millions of peer-reviewed journals in the fields of medical science, and entered ‘colon cancer’ AND 'review' into the PubMed Query in order to find papers that give an overview of the subject of colon cancer and the research being done in it, he would get a return of 2475 articles. And these are not the primary papers. If he looked up 'colon cancer', he would get a return of 20727 papers on the subject. If he entered 'cancer' AND 'review' he would be presented with a return of 270,705 papers. If just 'cancer,' then 2,347,612 papers. Which should he choose?
To be able to understand what the papers are saying, he would have to acquire sufficient background in anatomy and physiology (both animal and human), biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, epidemiology, genetics, pharmacology, statistics, surgery, and so on. Where should he start? To be able to read the papers intelligently he would need to know how those results applied to males versus females, to old versus young, with this or that complicating condition and whether the results were obtained in a way that others could independently reproduce.
After that, he would still need adequate knowledge and experience to judge the validity of the conclusions drawn by the researchers. And finally, he would need some method to determine whether he is picking one thing and rejecting another because it is true or because it does or doesn't appeal to what he has already decided he wants to be true.
He cannot do this by surfing the web no matter his degree of sincerity.
Meanwhile, he has been diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of cancer that needs treatment NOW. What should he do? The best thing, since he lacks both time and expertise, is to go to those who have gone through all of the training described above. These people are medical doctors. Some specialize in the diagnosis of the disease; some, in the medical treatment of it; some, in the surgical or radiological treatment of it. They work together to pool their knowledge on the subject as it applies to one particular person in order to find the most effective way of treating the disease in that individual. The single individual becomes the beneficiary of many hundreds of thousands of hours of study and experience that he could not possibly acquire on his own.
Yeah, sometimes the doctors are wrong. They aren't God, though some may appear to believe they are on a first name basis with him. They don't know everything. But in general medical doctors will be far more likely to know what to do in a given medical situation than a clerk at the GNC with a GED and a certificate in herbal bowelology he got mail order from The Center for Wholistic Healing.
Well, no doubt medical technology and information and the biological sciences are beyond alot of people.
Kinda in the same way auto mechanics is.
And we KNOW FOR A FACT that auto mechanics are always benevolent, trustworthy individuals who would never in a million years tell you something needs replaced when it was still good, right?
;=)
Doctors are people in a profession. There are good ones and bad ones. No matter what, they are men, not gods.
So t’s not like the medical industry itself has some kind of high falutin ethical standards that make them unquestionable.
And remember. A person might pay $100 for an alternator, but that same person would pay 100 thousand dollars for a liver!!!