Does the evidence show that complementary and alternative medicine work?
Let’s put it a different way. Would you consider exercise, diet, lowering of cholesterol and stress management to be conventional therapies for heart disease or alternative therapies for heart disease? When I went through internal medicine training in the early 1980s, the notion that one could stabilize or reverse cardiovascular disease through diet, exercise and stress management was deemed as fairly preposterous. There’s an example of where over twenty years the evidence showed that lifestyle mattered. That what you ate mattered. That folate mattered. That stress management mattered. This has morphed from a very alternative vantage point first made popular by Dean Ornish in the late 1970s to now part of conventional academic cardiology. So we have to put these things into a historical perspective. Some things that are deemed alternative, complementary, unproven today, when passed through the prism of science, will come out the other side as evidence-based, helpful therapies that will
