What strides has science made that you think alternative practioners have rejected or ignored?
Well, just look at herbal remedies. It’s essentially a throwback. It’s saying you go to a plant and you mush it up and you stick it in the jar and you sell it and you eat it and it’s going to cure what ails you. And that’s the kind of stuff that people believed in the early 19th century. And you know maybe sometime something worked, but the indications were very uncertain, you didn’t really know what was in that bottle, you had contaminants plus the active ingredient. You didn’t know what the active ingredient was or how strong it was, and so yes, maybe occasionally, such things worked, but probably at a terrible price. Probably often did great harm. For example, the foxglove from which digitalis was later isolated. That was a plant and people used to take it for dropsy, which is a kind of collection of fluid, edema that you can get from heart failure, and maybe taking the foxglove, the whole leaf, worked from time to time. But maybe it also kills you, which an overdose of digitalis ca
