placebo effect

I love to see stuff like this on the web

http://holfordwatch.info/

Holford watch.com is a site devoted to debunking A psuedo Scientist in the UK, a Man named Holford who claims to be a nutritionist. It looks like he promotes nutritional treatment of disease, but with little to no evidence to back up his methods.
There is legitimate nutritional medicine, legitimate nutritional supplements that can help a person. Fake science, psuedoscience hurts people by
1. Taking the money of people who are sick and often desperate for a cure.
2. Alternative medicine can replace legitimate medicine, interfering with a legitimate cure.
3. Alternative medicine by its very nature suggests that regular medicine is somehow not legitimate. It promotes other remedies and cures that can be potentially harmful, as they are unregulated and untested.
4. This culture is related to the anti-vaccination and anti-science movement, which are harmful to the public health at large.
5. Elements of the anti-science community reject the teaching of evolution and natural selection in public schools. This is one of the major reasons for the poor quality of science education in public schools.


OK, nothing new here. But some of this stuff 'works' and now we are to the placebo effect. It is powerful, it is real, and now perhaps to curtail some of this craziness we ought to have doctors prescribe sugar pills.

check out this article on the new role of placebo in medicine.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124367058

Perhaps the current role of non-legitimate alternative medicine is fulfilling the role of the placebo and the placebo needs to have a real place in modern medicine. Certainly a regular doctor prescribing fake medicine is better than a greedy quack. Of course there is a lot of placebo effect in regular medicine, and real medicine in legitimate alternative treatments, I just get excited about stuff that takes advantage of the sick and desperate, and costs a lot of money, especially stuff like chelation therapy which has been studied by the FDA and found to be ineffective.
Cheap fake medicine is fine.