To some medical professionals, alternative medicine lacks scientific evidence documenting the effectiveness of alternative treatments. Many patients are turning to alternative medicine not to replace it, but to use it in conjunction with "regular" treatment. At the same time, many patients are not happy with conventional treatments and the "top-down" system.
Questions for debate:

1.)Is alternative medicine effective or just effective through conjecture?

2.)Would you see an alternative medical specialist?(i.e.-acupuncture, etc.) If so, did it work for you?

3.)Aer crtics of alternative medicine just jealous? For a look, check out quack watch.

1.)Is alternative medicine effective or just effective through conjecture?

Well, I would be rather more convinced by alternative therapies if they subjected themselves to the same type of rigorous testing that conventional drugs have to go through to be permitted. Homeopathy, for example, seems to resist any type of testing, and from what I've read, the few times it has been tested under rigorous conditions it has been only as effective as a placebo. Which, given that it is based on diluting to the point where no active ingredients exist any more, is not really surprising.

Other therapies, such as acupuncture, do seem to have some value in some circumstances, but it's hard to know whether their effectiveness is down to any underlying and as-yet unexamined principle, or just the power of the mind of the patient. Let's not forget that hypnosis has occasionally been used instead of anaesthesia in major surgeries.

Indeed, if you speak to some doctors, you can sometimes hear them admit that even Westernised chemical medicine works more often than their chemical therapuetic effects alone can explain - the placebo effect seems to make the difference some of the time.

So I'd say that as long as it does no harm, it should be left alone. Part of making sure it does no harm, however, is to licence and regulate practitioners the same way that regular medical practitioners are licensed and regulated. Which would deal with much of the quackery.

On a wider point, there are, to my mind, two situations where people use alternative medicine. Firstly, they have exhausted regular medicine and use alternative therapies as a last resort. Sometimes, apparently terminal cancers for which no conventional therapy has worked go into spontaneous remission anyway, so again, provided no harm is caused, anything that helps the patient get by is fair enough in my book.

The other option seems to be where patients have for some reason lost their trust in the medical establishment. Sometimes this is straightforward ignorance and paranoia, but I think the main issue is that the medical establishment has never been particularly good as opening itself up to scrutiny, nor at explaining on the wider stage what it does and why. For example, it has (mostly driven by the drug industry) mostly ignored the statistical facts that even the most straightforward drugs - aspirin, say - do not always work for all people. Note - I think "Aspirin" is still a trade name in the US - here in the UK it is a generic name for acetyl salicylate, and this is the sense I use here

2.)Would you see an alternative medical specialist?
Thankfully I've never had any major medical problems, so the issue hasn't arisen. As of today, I'd say no, but I don't know how that might change if I were desperately il and facing death.

3.)Aer crtics of alternative medicine just jealous?
Some might be. Most, however, are just good scientists. This site often has some good debunking of alternative therapies