I have a friend who's into homeopathy and such, and I normally keep my mouth shut. But I have done some thinking about why. This friend is very smart, very inte

I have a friend who's into homeopathy and such, and I normally keep my mouth shut. But I have done some thinking about why. This friend is very smart, very intellectual, very curious, and not overly credulous. She's really a bit of a nerd. From my few conversations on the matter, the thing that's jumped out at me is this: She's drawn to alternative medicine because it's open source. Like many nerds, she hates closed proprietary systems and loathes bureaucracy. If alt-med worked, it would be vastly superior to conventional "industrial" medicine. The latter is bureaucratic, run by closed guilds, closed source, and radiates this standoffish "you are an idiot, do not ask questions" mentality. By contrast alt-med is open. Anyone can learn about it. Anyone can become a practitioner. Anyone can experiment. It's tolerant of differences of opinion to a much greater extent than conventional medicine. It comes off as welcoming, inviting, and engaging. Of course, I understand some of the reasons medicine is the way it is. Unlike hacking code on a computer, screwing up medicine can really hurt people. (Code on a computer generally can't, unless you're talking about certain kinds of specialized areas.) But it does seem to me that this is part of the appeal of alt-med. The other appeal, I think, is escape from the bureaucratic hell that is conventional medicine. Alt-med is actually more free-enterprise. There is more patient choice. It's less expensive. My wife and I just had a baby, and dealing with the insurance company has been a living hell. Edit: one more observation. We've tried a little bit of alt-med type stuff to varying degrees of success. I think I can also say this, and I think it goes a long way to explaining alt-med's popularity. The bedside manner you get with "alternative" practitioners is vastly better. I mean huge orders of magnitude better. We have a pretty good doctor and a pretty good hospital, and even then we occasionally feel like meat. And ours is really above average in terms of doctor-patient relations and comfort. I've heard some real slaughterhouse horror stories, particularly around women giving birth in ordinary hospitals. I have a relative who has such a story. She really felt like a piece of beef, and the doctor was a real jerk. The physical design of the spaces is better too. Go into an alt-med clinic and it feels warm, welcoming, calming. Go into a hospital or a conventional doctors' office and it looks like a car repair shop. Again -- to draw an analogy to the computer industry -- Apple has proven just how much aesthetics matter. Apple's products are generally not technically superior, but they are often vastly superior aesthetically and in terms of usability.