In a cancer vaccine setback, the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced yesterday that an immunotherapy it had been testing in a phase III trial had flopped. The company is holding out hope, however, that some patients with a certain genetic signature will still be helped, and the trial is continuing. (1)
So I suppose when the proponents of western medicine critisize homeopathy or acupuncture for “not working for all patients” they are just being… wrong?
Many times we read articles about doctors critisizing “alternative medicine”. However what we do not understand is that the very characterization of a practice as “alternative” automatically places it in this special place in our brain where we have put all the things which are interesting but “wrong”. Why would you say that something, anything, is “alternative” ? Does this mean that something else is mainstream? Does this mean that we imply that the “mainstream” is correct while the “alternative” is (most probably, but who would dare to double-ckeck it anyway?) wrong? And who defines the alternative? Would you ever trust something you read? Would you trust something that others claim as true? Would you trust the 100-year old science of the West? Would you trust better the 3,000-years old traditional “alternative” method of acupuncture?
Or maybe the above hard questions can be summed up in one simple one:
Would you just stop labeling things?
