“California” writes to Carolyn Hax (it’s the second piece at that link):
Dear Carolyn: One of my friends has had fibromyalgia for the past year. It makes me sad, and so I like to find alternative treatments and cures and tell her about them.
Dear “California”, I live there too, and I am glad to say we have a lot of sharper knives in our state’s kitchen. The reason they are called “alternative treatements and cures” is that they aren’t treatements or cures. They are just stuff that non-doctors and non-scientists make up out of wishful thinking, and maybe someone once used one and spontaneously got better, so they say that they work!
Real treatments and cures come with years of the most careful testing, both to make sure they actually do help, and that they don’t hurt more than they help, and to determine what the right dosage is – because if it changes something in your body, too much is probably bad for you, and often deadly.
Some of that testing has been done on historic home remedies, herbal, and Ayurvedic medicine, and doctors really have recommended the ones that work: for example digitalis, otherwise known as the Foxglove plant, was a historic remedy found to actually work for heart disease at the exact right dose. Too much and it’s a lethal poison.
I have personally experienced what happens when you replace that science with hand-waving: years ago my Mom listened to a dear friend who suggested an alfalfa cure. She turned out to be allergic to alfalfa, which turned her black and blue all over her body, sending her to the hospital, and put her in such terrible pain that she asked to be put out of her misery. It was so terrible that she never told the friend, who would have felt incredibly guilty. This is what you risk with “alternative treatments and cures”.
Your friend who needs IVF to conceive a child would not appreciate your suggestion to put out bait for storks in the hope that one brings a baby. In the same way, your friend with a serious disease, who is managing it appropriately, does not appreciate your repeated suggestion that she partake of quacks and frauds.