Cost of testing should work to the benefit of alternative approaches, shouldn't it? It's not very expensive to give a massage or lead meditation. The problem

Cost of testing should work to the benefit of alternative approaches, shouldn't it? It's not very expensive to give a massage or lead meditation. The problem is, whether due to variability of practices or some other factors, in the best case, practitioners cannot reliably say if their treatment offers any benefit. Without statistics there is simply no way to identify a useful treatment; people are horrible at correctly identifying correlations on their own when the data are in any way nuanced. So, it seems morally and intellectually hazardous to suggest alternative medicine when there is no credible way to show that helps anyone other than the purveyors of crystals, water-molecule-aligning bottles, wellness seminars, etc. But ah, we do know that placebos have some benefit. So have a placebo instead!