Does natural medicine actually work? Or is it all just placebo?

Here's how I answered this question on Quora:

“Natural” medicine just means medicine derived from living things rather than synthesized in a lab. Until the 19th century, no one knew how to synthesize organic compounds, so “natural” medicine was the the only kind there was. This knowledge had accumulated over millennia largely by trial and error, so a lot of it was valid, but also a lot of it wasn’t. Even when it was, there usually was no accurate idea of why it worked.

As it so happened, the knowledge of how to synthesize organic compounds developed around the same time as an understanding of how to apply scientific method to medicine with placebo-controlled double-blind trials (which someone has called “the most important medical invention of all time”). And, in a capitalist context, most funding for such systematic research has gone into synthetic treatments because these can typically be patented, whereas natural ones can’t be.

As a result of this coincidence, many people conflate the question of whether a treatment is synthetic and whether it’s scientifically validated. And some commercial interests demagogue this by appealing to people’s suspicion of “experts” to promote things that aren’t scientifically validated, seeking to turn this deficiency into a virtue by labeling them “natural.”

But if you’ll reflect on it, even mainstream doctors often give advice that doesn’t involve anything synthetic. For a cold they’ll tell you to get plenty of rest and fluids. They’ll tell you to increase the fiber and reduce the sugar in your diet. Etc.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations; you simply have to investigate what actual research exists on any given treatment. For this you need to have some familiarity with scientific method and conventions. Consider subscribing to responsible scientific publications oriented toward the general public, such as Science News, not just reading them when you want to investigate a particular claim but regularly, to develop this familiarity.

As a counterexample, one time a co-worker who was desperate to find a treatment for something affecting a friend showed me an article he’d copied about a supposed miracle cure. One “red flag” in the article was the “citations” at the end. It was a long list of journal titles — and that was it. They were all the titles of real medical journals, and were obviously intended to impress a naive reader that this was serious stuff. But if you actually had some familiarity with scientific publications, you would recognize that this was nonsense. Each of these journals might have several issues in any given year, with hundreds of pages in each issue and dozens of articles whose titles would mean nothing to a non-expert. Without even the year of publication being given in any of these “citations” — let alone volume, issue, and page number or article title — it was totally impracticable to verify that they contained anything to substantiate the claims in the article. But that wasn’t their purpose, of course — it was just to make it look “scientific.”