It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

From my few conversations on the matter, the thing that's jumped out at me is this:

She's drawn to alternative medicine because it's open source. Like many nerds, she hates closed proprietary systems and loathes bureaucracy.

If alt-med worked, it would be vastly superior to conventional "industrial" medicine. The latter is bureaucratic, run by closed guilds, closed source, and radiates this standoffish "you are an idiot, do not ask questions" mentality.

By contrast alt-med is open. Anyone can learn about it. Anyone can become a practitioner. Anyone can experiment. It's tolerant of differences of opinion to a much greater extent than conventional medicine. It comes off as welcoming, inviting, and engaging.

Of course, I understand some of the reasons medicine is the way it is. Unlike hacking code on a computer, screwing up medicine can really hurt people. (Code on a computer generally can't, unless you're talking about certain kinds of specialized areas.) But it does seem to me that this is part of the appeal of alt-med.

The other appeal, I think, is escape from the bureaucratic hell that is conventional medicine. Alt-med is actually more free-enterprise. There is more patient choice. It's less expensive. My wife and I just had a baby, and dealing with the insurance company has been a living hell.

Edit: one more observation.

We've tried a little bit of alt-med type stuff to varying degrees of success. I think I can also say this, and I think it goes a long way to explaining alt-med's popularity.

The bedside manner you get with "alternative" practitioners is vastly better. I mean huge orders of magnitude better.

We have a pretty good doctor and a pretty good hospital, and even then we occasionally feel like meat. And ours is really above average in terms of doctor-patient relations and comfort. I've heard some real slaughterhouse horror stories, particularly around women giving birth in ordinary hospitals. I have a relative who has such a story. She really felt like a piece of beef, and the doctor was a real jerk.

The physical design of the spaces is better too. Go into an alt-med clinic and it feels warm, welcoming, calming. Go into a hospital or a conventional doctors' office and it looks like a car repair shop. Again -- to draw an analogy to the computer industry -- Apple has proven just how much aesthetics matter. Apple's products are generally not technically superior, but they are often vastly superior aesthetically and in terms of usability.

The things that concern me about herbalism are simple:

1. The compounds in herbs are not tested as rigorously as "modern" drugs, at least by the FDA in the US. Knowledge of side effects and safe dosage is more limited.

2. Herbs are often subject to variation in dosages from pill to pill, because the source plant matter is variable and the actual yields are difficult to determine.

It's not about ignoring thousands of years of experimentation, it's just that our standards are higher, and the old experiments were poorly conducted. We want to know the side effects and the interactions. We want to know the drug's mechanism. We want to know about the possible complications. We want to know the effective dose and the unsafe dose. And we want to be able to isolate things: herbs contain many chemicals: you might want one of the chemicals, but not want the side effects from one of the other chemicals.

It reminds me of the almond extract you can buy at the store. The natural almond extract tastes the same as artificial almond extract, but the natural almond extract contains more cyanide. People pay a premium for things labeled "natural".

The heuristic to use natural things works well for foods, but it's a harmful heuristic when considering drugs. It's also a bad heuristic for heating your home (wood fires), immunizing your children (let them die from whooping cough), family planning (pull out), et cetera.

"to form the basis or foundation of : strengthen, support <facts and statistics subtly undergird his commentary"

However, this quote is an example of shallow thinking that drives me nuts: "Of course, it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages"

Life expectancy FROM BIRTH has risen dramatically, but if you rule out those who died before they reached 5 years old, and rule out violent deaths and/or viral/bacterial plagues, you begin to realize that life expectancy is not much higher today.