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just to correct a misinterpretation of my statement.. when I read it over it was not clear.
I did not mean to suggest that patients necessarily get sick from alternative therapy (although some do), and then seek conventional treatment. My point was that you were supporting alternative therapy, and I assumed (wrongly as it turns out) that you would want insurance companies to cover such therapies. At the same time you were proposing that it's OK for insurance companies to turn down conventional therapy for patients or refuse them insurance completely if they have some risk factors in their history. So we are in agreement that insurance companies should not cover unproven alternative therapies. On the other hand we completely disagree on what the requirements should be for insurance companies that sell health insurance.
As far as harmful effects of alternative therapy, I have seen deaths because patients were told to give up their normal treatment and take alternative ones. I am a GI doc, and an expert in Ulcerative Colitis. I had one patient who was told by a "naturopath" to stop all her meds and drink aloe juice.
She ended up with an emergency total colectomy (removal of the entire colon) and an ileostomy (bag). That was a direct effect of stopping treatment abruptly. Others have been luckier and just had flare ups and eventually realized that natural treatment for this disease doesn't work at all. Oh by the way, she didn't sue him because he's not a licensed practitioner and there was no insurance, so no money to be had. So don't tell me there is "no harm" done by those that promote these treatments. It is totally unregulated. I have also seen fulminant hepatitis (the most severe and sometimes fatal form) secondary to use of unregulated supplements, and many milder cases which get better when the drugs are stopped.
I have been practicing for 20 years, and I have never seen a cancer patient that was "cured" when they sought alternative treatment. Every one died.
So that's my experience, and I honestly believe that there is virtually no value to any alternative therapy. If an alternative therapy is helpful, and shows benefit in a clinical study over placebo, it is adopted as an accepted treatment fairly rapidly. Most lay people do not understand how strong the placebo effect is, and this accounts for most of the reports of beneficial effects from alternative therapy. In the old days (you couldn't do this now) we used to give hospital patients who we thought were trying to get narcotics a placebo for their complaints of pain and most of the time it worked. We used to write an order on the chart for Obecalp (placebo backwards), 1 capsule as needed for pain, and the pharmacy would give them a pill with some lactose in it. They would report it wasn't quite as strong as Demerol but still worked pretty well!!
So you can save yourself a lot of money on alternative medicines and just have someone give you Lactose pills (of course you have to believe that they will work) and that will have the same effect.
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