I don't know what the difference is between a "functional medical practitioner" and a "medical practitioner".
> This was poo pooed as not being evidence based due to lack of rigorous RCTs,
Well, unless there's evidence, a conjecture is still just a conjecture, right?
After all, the people in the article had a conjecture, so they went to look for evidence.
This is difficult to do within the current US medical system. Practitioners need a deep understanding of the interactions between multiple organ systems and biochemical pathways. And it takes a lot more time than a typical 10 minute office visit.
There are also a lot of quacks pushing pseudoscience woo.
New approaches to medicine often start with case studies before anyone invests in a rigorous RCT. Are there any such case studies where a patient was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, the clinician treated them for candida albicans infection, and symptoms approved? That wouldn't necessarily prove anything but it would indicate a possible approach for further research.
It wouldn’t be that surprising for GP’s to notice a trend in an ad-hoc fashion, right? They have direct contact with the biggest dataset… patients.
Since they are respected professionals with licenses and training I’m sure there’s a way for the research community to hear from them and start systematizing their observations… or at least, I sure hope there is!
There is. Nothing stops a GP from writing a paper and submitting it. All they have to do is keep track (for a particular symptom) of the exact symptoms, the treatment supplied and ask followup "did it work" questions the next time the patient visits.
They already do this, but per-patient.
Sounds like another supplement scam.
You gotta be honest with yourself:
1. Anything that is claimed to work gets tested.
2. Anything showing efficacy in double-blind trials get taken up almost immediately.
3. The only stuff left on the table, then, is the stuff that was tested and was found to perform no better than a placebo. This is where all the alternative medicines lie, on the efficacy spectrum.
Of course the people selling drinking water or acupuncture sessions are going to claim that "the establishment" has never bothered to test their product - why would they tell you that it's been tested and relegated to "alternative" medicine?
The sad fact is that there are a large number (few million, at least) of Phd candidates every year looking to publish a thesis about a drug/process/medicine/practice that is effectively a new cure for something.
They will get insanely rich, and famous, and get invited to give talks and get tenure if even one of the currently popular alternative medicines work better than a placebo.
You need to ask yourself "Is it really possible that every single graduating student of the bio and medical sciences are either bought off by big pharma or too stupid to get this easily reachable fame and fortune?"
Your answer to that question, to yourself, is enough - you don't need to reply to me telling me how $FOO successfully demonized $WORKING_MEDICINE - you need t simply ask yourself why millions of grad students haven't jumped at this opportunity for themselves.
I have experience working with a CRO, and unfortunately, the statement isn't entirely accurate. Not every novel molecule or treatment receives the clinical evaluation it deserves. Clinical studies are incredibly costly, and even if a drug is theoretically just as effective as the standard treatment but with fewer side effects, it might not receive approval. The same holds for treatments with slightly improved efficacy, and so forth.
>3. The only stuff left on the table, then, is the stuff that was tested and was found to perform no better than a placebo. This is where all the alternative medicines lie, on the efficacy spectrum.
The primary challenge lies in the need for funding to conduct these studies. There are natural compounds that can be equally as efficient as their synthetic counterparts, with fewer side effects. Another problem is that natural compounds often cannot be patented.
What does that have to do with scientists? I've said how huge fame and fortunes are sitting on the table for the first person who can find evidence for the popular alternative medicines.
What medical doctors do, or don't do, is irrelevant, because medical doctors aren't in the business of determining what works and what doesn't, they prescribe only what has already been tested to work. Their job isn't to run tests to determine what works, it's to diagnose and treat using known working medication.
If your complaint is that medical doctors don't prescribe alternative medicines, then your beef is not with doctors, but with the science that tested them and found them not to work.
Where it isn’t, it’s often incorporated into medicine—its practitioners pretend to be persecuted as a marketing tactic. (A lot of “food-based medicine”, i.e. targeted nutrition, falls into this category.)
The reality is that non-alternative medicine is that subset of medicine which has been regulatory captured. Whatever medicine couldn't be made profitable was then deemed alternative and relegated to the quacks. It's a shame we've handed health and medicine to big business on a silver platter.
As I said, useless or harmful. If super diluted, useless. If insufficiently so, harmful.
> Whatever medicine couldn't be made profitable was then deemed alternative and relegated to the quacks
This is nonsense. If your doctor is never recommending e.g. a diet change or physical exercise or even PT, and only prescribing medication, get a new doctor. Most medical research is not pharmaceutical.
Everything I know about my condition is from alternative medicine. Mainstream doctors simply throw their hands up.
Most things alternative doctors say about it are crap, but I'm grateful that with some investigation, the truth turns out to be well-explored.