In the USA all official medical treatments that have been approved by the medical bureaucracy, the US/FDA, including: lab tests, vaccines, and medical procedures that a marketers claims can prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure a disease are called drugs.
All treatments that are not approved are officially “not” drugs. The US/FDA does not use the word medicines nor alternative medicines.
“Works” is not defined. Drug manufacturers who want approval for a product define “works” independently in each clinical studie designed to prove their product “works better than nothing” – better than a placebo. They submit selected results to the FDA and if they receive approval they can market it as a drug (medicine).
Cure is not defined for most diseases. Drug manufacturers rarely define works as cures because most drugs do not cure. Most diseases are cured by health, like the common cold, influenza, and measles, but “There is no cure for the common cold.” Most cures get lost. There are few medicines that cure – but there are lots of medicines that “work”.
According to the FDA, the official judge of the medical bureaucracy, alternative medicines do not exist. There are drugs (approved medicines) and not-drugs (not yet approved). That’s all. The FDA website has a single page about complementary and alternative medicines, a draft guidance written in 2006. It’s still a draft. Officially, they don’t exist, so… they can’t possibly “work”.
Alternative medicine is a marketing term. Conventional medicine manufacturers and marketers use it to dismiss medical treatments that are not approved by the bureaucracy.
Alternative medicine manufacturers and marketers use it to proudly announce that their treatments are not those approved by the medical bureaucracy.
What if it “works”? There are two clearly defined and opposing sides, so there are two different answers, each supported by “facts” on their respective side.
For those in the medical bureaucracies, alternative medicines are not approved (by definition), therefore they do not work. They have never been proven to work. All claims of working, even curing, are just anecdotes. The US/FDA does not accept anecdotal claims. Truth is not important, statistics rule approval processes because the FDA has no method to judge any individual claim of “it worked”.
Those marketing alternative medicines are, at the same time, both proud and frustrated that their products cannot be approved. Even when they, or their patients, see an alternative medicine work, they know that the approval path is totally blocked by a huge bureaucracy.
What do we call a medicine (conventional or alternative) that cures? It’s called a cure, but cure is not in the medical dictionaries, not in the medical reference texts, not defined by the US/FDA, and not defined in any alternative medical reference either.
What do I call any medicine, conventional or alternative, that claims to “work”?
A “not-cure”. If it was a cure, https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1792968108/we could call it a cure.
To your health, Tracy
Author: The Elements of Cure
This post was initially written as a response to a question on QUORA. You can see more of my answers here.
