I haven't weighed in on the alternative meds part of this thread yet.
From what I have seen, there are many types of alternative medicine. Some just seem outright crazy to me. Some are taking some scientific study to an absurd level and working from that.
There is however quite a bit of big business medicine that is based on things that today are considered alternative. Aspirin for example originally came from the bark of a tree. This was mentioned earlier in the thread. Someone isolated what in the bark was reliving the pain, and just started producing pills of that chemical. The bark still works, of course both the bark and the drug have side effects as well. The natural version usually has more, as it has more chemicals in it to cause them, and sometimes less, as it has chemicals that happen to moderate them.
That is just one example, but it is a common method for the creation of modern medical drugs.
There certainly are alternatives that work, but which ones those are would be near impossible to pin down without being raised in the culture that uses it, before big pharma gets a hold of it and actually throws a ton of money at it. No one cares to run trials on alternatives that they can't make money on.
If the way to avoid cancer in the first place is a specific diet which happens to contain some natural medicine no one turned into a drug yet (best bet given cancer rates around the globe), there will likely never be any real proof of the alternative. No one financially benefits from figuring it out. They will however sell the drug once they isolate it. The alternative will be forgotten. No one uses Willow bark these days, not even big pharma making asprin. Big pharma likely would deny where they copied nature if it could threaten their bottom line.
It's all part of the same fallacy that companies have an incentive to produce crappy products, I swear it reminds me of the broken window fallacy.
I saw this and would like to address it. Companies do have an incentive to hit a price point for certain products. That may mean using thinner/weaker material, that while still does the job for at least some/most people, may not be as robust as the competitors more expensive product. There is nothing wrong with that. It meets market demand, but it can be a relatively 'crappy' product.
