[stubybubs]

Everything in the body is complicated. The history of medicine is rife with unintended consequences. Many body altering surgeries are entirely useless and dangerous. Over 40% of antibiotic prescriptions are off-label and fully 75% of all prescriptions in pediatric populations are off-label, all of those prescriptions being administered by definition at a time of great growth and change in the body.

And yet it's only this that people are talking about. It's bad faith. If you really want to shut this particular thing down for the reasons you've given then you would shut down most of medicine, and virtually all care for pediatric populations.

Edit: yes I am a doctor

[jfengel]

Indeed. We value evidence-based medicine, especially when it comes to rejecting interventions that have been demonstrated not to work. As has been said, the name for "alternative medicine that actually works" is "medicine".

But a surprising amount of "medicine" is less well evidenced than we'd like it to be. That's not the same as demonstrably-false, but nowhere near the rock-solid gold-standard of testing. But we don't stop using it, because suffering patients can't wait while we straighten out the epistemological mess.

The best one to make a decision is a doctor, who has both the education required to understand the state of the art, and the details of the patient in front of them. They can combine that with their experience to make the best decision possible. It won't always be perfect, but it's got more likelihood than people guessing about what they think medicine is about.