[13years]

That assumes there is some systematic process in which established medicine adopts alternative methods once they have been validated.

However, this is a simplistic view that is quite far from reality. First, the practices are totally different in principled approaches. Medicine generally is focused on treatment and management of illness and conditions. Alternative medicine is generally focused on prevention or reversal of conditions.

Medicine doesn't have much incentive to adopt alternative practices even when they do work. You can't patent them. Lot's of research often goes into taking a natural substance and turning it into a drug just so it can be patented to make it profitable. However, often in the effort to create a drug version, the drug version must be a modified structure which doesn't exist in nature in order for it to be patentable, but this is what leads to the problem of side effects or complete failures of medications.

Just look at recent revelations of medicine such as anti-depressants which perform no better than placebo. Effectiveness of statins are being called into question and then there is monumental disaster Vioxx that killed something like 55k after successfully completing the FDA approval process.

Simply saying medicine works and alternative doesn't is quite an unfair view. Reality is there is both good and bad on both sides.