Is alternative medicine effective?

Alternative medicine simply acts as a placebo

Question: Is alternative medicine effective?
Position‹2 of 3›: No, alternative medicine is not effective
Argument1 of 3›: Alternative medicine simply acts as a placebo

Any benefits that one experiences from alternative medicine are simply a trick of the mind. Most diseases will come right eventually anyway unless they are chronic or terminal.

The argument

Alternative medicine has become successful on the back of patients using it to treat minor illnesses, and that pattern is itself the clue to what is happening. In these cases there is no reason to believe the treatments have cured the ailment. Rather, they are used in illnesses where the placebo effect can bring about a "cure" — conditions mild enough that expectation, reassurance and the passage of time can plausibly account for the whole of the improvement. The treatments are rarely tested where the placebo effect could not possibly do the work. Even in instances where these treatments appear to work on a patient that is an animal or a small child, the placebo effect still makes sense as an explanation. Often for these groups, the subject wants to please a parent or owner, and therefore begins to believe that the treatments are having a positive effect despite no proof for this. The judgement of improvement in such cases is in any event made by the caregiver, who is the person who chose the therapy and hopes it will work — so the apparent evidence that placebo cannot explain these cases dissolves on inspection. Two further features of illness complete the picture. The natural course of many diseases is cyclical, and people often seek alternative therapy when symptoms are at their worst; when symptoms subsequently improve, this is attributed to the therapy rather than to the cycle that was always going to turn. And an alternative therapy may be tried after conventional medical treatment, so that when symptoms improve, the improvement is credited to the new therapy rather than to the medical treatment that preceded it. In each case the therapy is applied at the moment when improvement is most likely for other reasons, and then collects the credit for it. Once the timing, the mildness of the conditions treated, and the reliance on caregiver report are accounted for, nothing remains that requires the treatment itself to be effective. Alternative medicine simply acts as a placebo.

Premises

[P1]Alternative medicine is typically used for minor or cyclical illnesses where symptoms improve on their own or via the placebo effect. [P2] Apparent improvements are routinely misattributed to the alternative therapy rather than to placebo, natural recovery, or prior conventional treatment. [P3] Even in children and animals, perceived benefits can be explained by the placebo effect mediated through caregivers' expectations. [C] Therefore, alternative medicine is not genuinely effective but merely acts as a placebo.

Counter-arguments

The placebo effects cannot be explained in illnesses where the patients are small children or animals. Yet homeopathic remedies have been used to successfully used to treat both of these groups.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The placebo effect does not fully explain the effectiveness of alternative medicine.

Framing

Diseases have a natural, cyclical course