Alternative Medicine 

Why you annoy me:

• Much like New Age Bullshit, you don’t really exist.  Alternative medicine is nothing but mumbo jumbo, meaningless jargon, wishful thinking, poorly conducted pseudo-science, hot air marketing and ineffective herbal remedies.
• Alternative medicine companies are usually fly by night hucksters who prey on truly desperate, sick people.  It is despicable enough to make a living ripping off honest people, but it is inconceivably evil to steal money from the terminally ill.  Anyone who owns or is employed by such a company should seriously consider what they are doing with their lives.
• Faith healers are another disgusting group within this sect.  Faith healing is an utter sham, which I shouldn’t have to tell my readership.
• Along with faith healing come the simple folk who believe in the ‘power of prayer.’  These morons will cite all the studies (not that they have ever actually read one of them) which “prove” that prayer has some effect on the healing process.  It does not.  Those studies are horrible and are obviously conducted by people with no knowledge of statistics.  Those studies do not control for socio-economic status (which has a huge effect on health care quality in the United States) and they take do not take into account the placebo effect.  Namely, if you believe that prayer will help, it gives you a positive mental outlook and thus helps you get better.  Then again, being told your doctor is the best person in his field does the same thing, and doesn’t involve the encouragement of super-natural explanations.
• In fact, the placebo effect explains nearly everything that alternative medicine puts forward, excluding the things they say which are outright lies, since when you are lying you can make up whatever statistics you want.  And they do.
• The sum total of all this is an encouragement of superstitious pseudo-science at best and blatant malicious con-artistry at worst.

 Mitigating factors:

• At least the FDA isn’t falling for these cons anytime soon.
• …then again the FDA is now controlled by religious extremists appointed by Bush who probably believe whole-heartedly in the ‘power of prayer’ and other such nonsense.  We’re doomed.