Science and Alternative Medicine

A number of posts have dealt with complementary and alternative medical treatments for autism. Scott Pomeroy writes at RealClearScience:

Why waste time and money testing medical treatments that defy the laws of physics and chemistry?

That's the pointed question posed by Drs. David Gorski and Steven Novella in a new op-ed published in the journal Trends in Molecular Medicine. To most, the answer is obvious: we shouldn't. But in the past decade, alternative medicines without any basis in science, like acupuncture, homeopathy, and chiropractic, have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government, which, in turn, has been used to fund hundreds of randomized clinical trials.

Alternative medicine supporters insist that these trials are necessary to find out what does and does not work. That seems reasonable. But unlike proper scientists, they don't cast off that which evidence shows to be worthless. When a study's result is negative -- and almost all of them are -- they ignore it. And on the rare occasion when a study's result is positive -- however miniscule the effect may be -- they cling to it like there's no tomorrow. In the eyes of the alternative medicine proponent, more research will always be needed.