Holistic Medicine Is Nonsense

“By definition, Alternative Medicine, has either been proved to work or been proved not to work. You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”- Tim Minchin. Holistic medicine is a very elaborate subject with many beliefs. It is ironic then, that it is completely false nonsense. While many would refute my claim their arguments fall in line with the very dogma of holistic medicine, which is nonsense. There are so many reasons that holistic medicine could be considered not to work is astounding, so much so that I am confused to how some people still swear by it. Holistic medicine (also called alternative medicine) normally takes the place of normal medicine. It does not, however, provide the same results

Alternative medicine is any medical treatment that is not part of conventional evidence-based medicine such as one would learn in medical school, nursing school, or even paramedic training (Rational Wiki). This is confusing because you would assume that anything with the name medicine would require training. Holistic medicine practitioners believe that whole person is made up of interdependent parts and if one part is not working properly, all other parts will be affected (Kiefer, David, MD). This also sounds ludicrous if logic is applied to it. This is saying that three parts which are considered to be soul, mind, and body all affect one another, without even explaining what these parts are. How are we expected to believe these parts interact if we don’t even get a clear understanding of what they mean by spirit? And with the definition comes the question “Why?”. Why do people choose holistic medicine? Some would say it could be slick marketing, relaxed regulations, scientific illiteracy, a gullible media, or the failures of mainstream medicine (Steven Novella). No matter what the dogma is, it is a fact that holistic medicine has many followers to its name. So now that we have a clear idea of what Holistic Medicine is at its core, we can now look at some of the defenses for

Often, when trying to maintain business, holistic healers will convince their patients to go without scientific medical care. Since there is no valid evidence to support holistic therapies to actually cure the patients (quite the contrary) it causes the patient to lose much of their desperately needed care. Providing these people with false hope just to let them die is irresponsible, awful, and cold. All there evidence is also anecdotal. They will use small non-isolated cases, which is important not to have for a scientific evaluation. This causes all of their information to seem unreliable. Alternative medicines or therapies range from being scientifically provable to scientifically disproven, and can be benign (and often ridiculous) all the way to downright dangerous (RationalWiki). I find that these reasons cause my severe distrust in the topic of alternative