Article after article here shows that alternative medicine is no medicine at all.  Sound medical information is readily available; yet for the average person, ineffectual treatments make up a large percentage of their medical budget.  There are four principle causes.  One, a lack of knowledge of basic health science:  knowledge exposes folly, without it alternative treatments appear sound.  Second,     the production of ideas:  the average person is exposed to several fold more media programming in support of quack treatments than to those with a scientific foundation.  And third, about 1/3^rd of all people have a religious mind, one that produces fanciful ideas.  The same mind that believes that Christ had cast out demons, the world was recently created by Jehovah, and meditation produces an influx of psychic energies, this type of mind is prone to also observe phantom illnesses and their cure by alternative. Fourth, is the fact that doctors are good at spotting those with imaginary medical problems.  The skepticism of a medical practitioner offends those with phantom problems.  Often such people go to the far less critical provider of alternative medicines. 

The harm done is astronomical.  Wasting of time and funds by patients, misinformation occupying place in the brain where science should be, prolonging of illnesses, and in the case of my grandmother-in-law death, for a very curable cancer was first for 2 year treated with herbs.  And there is an army of quack practitioners:  their schools, their offices, and their labors all could, in a more perfect

world, be productively used.