> desperate people who've tried mainstream therapies without success

It would be wonderful if we could help desperate people without lying about the expected outcome of alternative treatment.

I don't think anybody will complain if you say something like "maybe you will find this medidation technique makes it easier to deal with your pain".

The problem is when people say "This technique will cure your pain. You only need to give me 5000€. Also, don't bother continuing with chemo, it just interferes with your natural healing powers."

I don't think it has to be this way, or that is necessarily the norm. For example, in most countries you can sit as many 10-day Vipassana meditation courses as you like with zero obligation to pay. I did though, because I'd been suffering with debilitating whole body eczema since I was born, where the most effective treatment was corticosteroids. I've been free of this burden for years now. No-one told me it would cure my ills, and I would never have been prescribed this by my GP or dermatologist. Likewise, I would say to anyone YMMV and meditation isn't a panacea.

There are definitely fraudsters out there, but there's doctors who prescribe an ineffectual or even harmful medication for kick-backs, such as 'seminars' which are basically paid-for vacations. So keep in mind that conventional medicine isn't the paragon of ethics either

I agree with you and I want to make it clear that I don't think meditation itself is fraud. I'm pretty sure meditation is an effective way to deal with stress.

It also sounds plausible that reducing stress would help with skin problems -- I think it's pretty much consensus that neurodermatitis can be triggered by stress.

Another example are IR heat lamps: they were often used to help with joint pain. I don't know how effective they are, but at least they feel good. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with buying a heat lamp and using it.

But someone I know was sold one of these lamps as a cure for her cancer, for about 100x the normal price of such lamps. There is no way a fancy lamp is going to help when the surgery failed. People will pay anything for a glimmer of hope, and peddlers of "alternative" treatments prey on this desperation. That's the problem with alternative medicine.

> I think it's pretty much consensus that neurodermatitis can be triggered by stress.

No offense intended, but you're a little out of your depth here. Keep in mind I had this for decades and thought of everything you could think of, and more. And yes, stress makes it worse, but quitting work and pretty much eliminating any stress from my life, didn't fix it.

> But someone I know was sold one of these lamps as a cure for her cancer, for about 100x the normal price of such lamps.

That's a bummer of a story. As I said, I wouldn't say this is the norm for alternative therapies.

> That's the problem with alternative medicine.

It is certainly a problem that exists within 'alternative medicine'. There are fewer check and balances, and government oversight, as per the traditional medical establishment, and there's nonsense like homeopathy, but unscrupulous things happen in conventional medicine too. Like say, trying to fix psychological issues with chemical interventions that aren't all that efficacious, or addictive pain meds that lead to overdoses.

Conventional medicine of course has plenty of merit, and is often backed up by rigorous clinical studies, but I'd also argue there's plenty of helpful encounters with 'alternative medicine'. I think also helps to have some epistemic humility, and that in order to be truly 'scientific', alternative therapies should be taken seriously, and studied properly, before they are dismissed... and yes, fraud is a problem that should be taken seriously too.

> No offense intended, but you're a little out of your depth here.

I wasn't trying to make any claims about how skin diseases work, I apologise if it came across this way. I just wanted to say that it sounds plausible to me that meditation could help with excemas, since to my knowledge some skin diseases correlate with stress.

I'm not saying that your exzemas were caused by stress. I also didn't say that removing stress would cure neurodermatitis -- these kinds of statements based on anecdotes are exactly what I'm trying to argue against.

(One interesting anecdote about neurodermatitis is that with all the people I knew it mostly went away at some point in their lives, and they don't know why)

> I wouldn't say this is the norm for alternative therapies.

I have a lot of relatives who are very fond of "alternative medicine", and almost all of it is total bullshit.

There's people determining the correct ingredients of a medicine using a pendulum, others determining food allergies by measuring electrical resistance of the skin, people who cure headaches with electric shocks, or those that cure epilepsy by taking specific "salts", and there's always some general purpose alcohol drops that help cure everything.

> alternative therapies should be taken seriously, and studied properly, before they are dismissed

So many people come up with devices that channel earth rays and complain that the establishment doesn't take them serious. If you try to make money with some made up treatment, it's on you to prove that it works. You can't just go peddle your cure for everything and then expect some scientist to come along and do the work for you.

If it's something sensible, then people do study it. Out of curiosity I typed the keywords "meditation" and "exzema" into Google scholar, and 5000 articles matched the query. I don't have any background in clinical research, so I have no idea how I'd go about to evaluate the quality of these articles, but it definitely does look to me like research is being done on alternative treatments.

> I wasn't trying to make any claims about how skin diseases work, I apologise if it came across this way. I just wanted to say that it sounds plausible to me that meditation could help with excemas, since to my knowledge some skin diseases correlate with stress.

> (One interesting anecdote about neurodermatitis is that with all the people I knew it mostly went away at some point in their lives, and they don't know why)

You were informing me about the mechanisms of a disease I lived with for 36 desperate years, as if I was naive, and never read any literature, consulted any experts, and didn't know the basics, like say, that stress is a factor in eczema severity. Try to imagine how that might feel.

But I'm surprised you know of more than one person with neurodermatitis, I can only think of one other. What I had was atopic dermatitis, it was from birth, and never abated.

I read that for most people atopic dermatitis usually disappears around their late 20s, and that milestone came and went for me. Things only got worse. My whole body was covered - unlike for typical neurodermatitis. My dermatologist put me on a course of oral corticosteroids, which didn't really help, and also told me to take lightly bleached baths. The body-wide secondary infection meant my bed was damp from my broken skin leaking out everywhere. My whole body was screaming at me to scratch. I basically never had proper sleep.

I changed everything I could change. I quit my job (so no more exposure to air conditioning drying out my skin everyday, no more stressful deadlines), moved back home to a sunnier climate (low-dose UV is a treatment for eczema, so I'd sun myself every day), had healthy good food that avoided any of the allergens on my RAST tests, and the situation improved... but I still had it across my whole body, I still had no sleep.

The meditation practice of Vipassana solved the problem for me in 10 days... for free. Maybe I could have spent months going to CBT sessions and got the same results from a medically sanctioned clinical methodology... but why, when the better thing is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper? It just so happened the technique is basically not reacting to sensations, which seems perfectly designed psychological intervention for breaking the itch-scratch-itch cycle.

> I have a lot of relatives who are very fond of "alternative medicine", and almost all of it is total bullshit.

The examples you go on to describe are total BS and I agree these should never claim to be a stand in for already-proven medicine, like say taking a RAST test to determine allergies vs measuring skin conductivity. This sort of Gwyneth Paltrow stuff for me seems to be on the fringes and mostly benign, but the sorts of alternative medicines I'm thinking of are more psychological interventions, or maybe last-resort placebos, or even plant medicine outside what has been properly studied. I think there's some scope to bring these into the fold of conventional medicine should they prove their worth.

> You can't just go peddle your cure for everything and then expect some scientist to come along and do the work for you.

Agreed.

> but it definitely does look to me like research is being done on alternative treatments.

You're probably right. Though it took some time before meditation was taken seriously by science, and it's been around for millennia. I'm certain that if my GP said -- in some alternate dimension -- 'I prescribe you a Vipassana meditation retreat', and I took that 'medicine' in my teenage years, I would have been vastly better off. It's bizarre, to be at my peak cognition and physical fitness in my late 30s, because I'm no longer distracted by my whole body screaming at me with the largest organ on my body shredded from head to toe. But how was my doctor to know?

>but even then, it's worth noting that some placebos work better than others, and likely placebos work differently for each individual. So for something like pain, which can be controlled somewhat by psychological intervention, a better placebo could have merit.

Do you think it's ethical for manufacturers to advertise sugar pills as real drugs being able to treat illness, even though their effects are purely placebo?

I'll quote myself

> Not saying that unproven interventions should be thrust upon naive patients,