Wikipedia:Alternative medicine

The English Wikipedia has thousands of articles that describe different types and uses of alternative medicine.

Terminology

Alternative medicine

Alternative medicine is used instead of conventional care. For example, if you have a crick in your neck, you can use conventional care (e.g., watchful waiting), or "alternatively", you could use chiropractic care (e.g., spinal manipulation).

Complementary medicine

Complementary medicine is used in addition to conventional care. For example, if you have cancer, you can use both conventional care (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation) and also attempt to improve your health by using non-conventional approaches (laughter therapy, a vegetarian diet).

Conventional medicine

Conventional medicine – in the 21st century – is synonymous with "modern medicine" or "Western medicine". In terms of biomedical information, it now aspires to be evidence-based medicine, with varying degrees of success. However, conventional medicine in previous centuries included whatever treatment was considered "normal" or "good" by that culture, including astrology (c.f. how influenza was named) and herbalism.

Evidence-based medicine

Evidence-based medicine is medicine that uses scientific proof to make decisions. If you have a good, up-to-date, scientifically minded conventional physician, about half of your care will be evidence-based. Good evidence controls for confounding factors, eliminates many normal real-world conditions (like knowing that you're being treated), and focuses on objective outcomes. For subjective symptoms like pain, for which the placebo effect is very strong, a treatment that truly does make most patients feel subjectively better under real-world conditions is often rejected as "not working" according to evidence-based medicine. Scientific limitations include the existence of only poor evidence, no evidence, and inapplicable evidence (e.g., the patient is a pregnant woman with kidney disease, and all the research was done in old men). Evidence-based medicine cannot address the non-scientific aspects of medical practice, such as morals and values. Evidence-based medicine hopes to be able to say which treatment has the most side effects or produces the best chance of a cure, but it can never tell you whether that combination of risks and rewards is acceptable to an individual patient.

Traditional medicine

Traditional medicine is medicine whose origin is pre-modern and pre-scientific. It includes everything from chanting shamans to herbs, and it is tightly associated with specific cultures. For objective, acute medical conditions, like broken bones, traditional medicine is widely accepted as being less effective than modern conventional medicine, even by people who promote it for lifestyle diseases and subjective symptoms.

Self-care

Self-care is medicine that is normally performed by the patient. If you have a headache on a hot day, and you suspect that the headache is caused by dehydration, then drinking a glass of water is a form of conventional self-care.

Experimental medicine

Experimental medicine is conventional medicine that is unproven, but which aspires to be proven using evidence-based standards and is actively being researched.

Unproven medicine

Any medicine for which no good evidence exists either way. "Unproven medicine" can be alternative, complementary, conventional, or traditional. This includes many old, "grandfathered" FDA-approved drugs and all experimental medicine.

Bad medicine

Any medicine that has been scientifically proven not to work, or to work very poorly compared to other options, or to be unreasonably unsafe. "Bad medicine" can be alternative, complementary, conventional, or traditional. For example, withholding food until bowel sounds return after routine surgery is bad conventional medicine, because it provides no benefit, slows recovery, and increases the rate of complications.

Quackery

Quackery is bad medicine pushed by people who know, or who ought to know, that it's bad medicine.

Pseudoscience

Bad medicine that claims to be evidence-based or to be built upon objective scientific principles, but isn't. If the marketing materials mention string theory, quantum mechanics, ozone, or negative ions, then the odds are high that the product is pseudoscientific. By contrast, if the bad medicine claims to be passed down from an indigenous tribe or revealed to the seller in a spiritual dream, then it's bad traditional medicine.

Comparison

Wikipedia editors often focus on efficacy above all else. However, efficacy alone does not determine classification.

Is it alternative medicine?

Treatments for a bad cough that disrupts sleep

	Socially accepted	Not accepted
Effective	Codeine (conventional and evidence-based) Evidence-based medicine	Honey (alternative but evidence-based) Alternative medicine (or self-care)
Ineffective	Dextromethorphan (conventional but proven worthless) Bad medicine	Homeopathy (alternative and proven worthless) Alternative medicine and WP:FRINGE treatment

The fact that "it works" says nothing about the mechanism through which it works. Codeine may "work" by sedating the patient, so that they sleep through the coughing, rather than by stopping it. Similarly, a 10-hour-long upper-body massage might successfully improve a sprained ankle, if only by making the patient stop walking on the injured joint for the length of the massage. A treatment can work indirectly and still be effective.

Is it pseudoscience?

Treatments for a bad cough that disrupts sleep

	Claims to be scientific	Does not claim to be scientific
Effective	Codeine (science-based and evidence says it works) Evidence-based medicine	Honey (claims to be folk advice but evidence says it works) Traditional medicine
Ineffective	Homeopathy (claims to be scientific but the claim is nonsensical) Pseudoscience	Watching funny cat videos (doesn't claim to be scientific and it doesn't work) Self-care (or not a treatment at all)

While it's true that most pseudoscience is incorrect or ineffective, it is possible for the explanation for an effective treatment to be pseudoscience. For example, taking codeine promotes better sleep during a bad cold; this is evidence-based medicine. However, if someone were to incorrectly claim that the reason the codeine is effective is because of enhanced nanoparticle activity caused by a solar flare at the same time that Mars was in retrograde while the drug was manufactured, the explanation itself would be pseudoscientific.

Labeling

It's generally best to provide the most specific label for a treatment. For example, treating babies who are at-risk of premature birth with a dose of corticosteroids should be described as a form of evidence-based medicine, rather than using the vaguer term conventional medicine.

Derogatory or disputed labels should normally use WP:INTEXT attribution to identify specific experts or organizations that use that label.