"I guarantee if you find someone you care for unconscious you are going to call 911 not Paul Chek." LOL.
Those are some examples about the benefits of medical science... I think alternative medicine is often lacking in understanding and more often relies on some things that were found to work on a trail-and-error basis... effective, but dangerous. Not that medical science doesn't engage in this (mechanisms for many drugs aren't understood, they just work). Also, I believe the 4th leading cause of death in either Canda or the U.S. is post-surgical infections (don't remember where I heard this figure). But then, how many of those people would of died if they didn't have the surgery? I don't know.
Yea a lot of people that don't go to doctors are really healthy, but I would think that it's coz they're healthy that they don't go to the doc, not the other way around. I never go to the doc unless there's something significantly wrong. How many hypochondriacs and people with weird disease that docs can't help are helped by alternative medicine. I know Mark will say he is one of them, but I'm sure there are plenty of things alternative medicine can't do nothing about. I think a lot of those kind of things (headaches, various pains, feelings of malaise) take time and have some psychological components, but people always want a silver bullet. I don't think medical science is in direct opposition with the concept of living and eating healthy, so I don't see what 'alternative' medicine is supposed to be anyway. Let's have some definitions.