Steve,
The only medicine and therapy I'm interested in is evidence-based medicine and therapy. It's not a conventional vs alternative or complimentary medicine distinction.
For what it's worth, I don't put doctors on a pedestal. Antibiotics are overprescribed, as well as prescribed for infections that aren't affected by them. (Every time I had a cold as a kid, my family doctor would prescribe an antibiotic, presumably because it made my mother feel better that he was doing something, when doing nothing at all would have been the better course. I sometimes think that if doctors had some training in evolutionary biology it would have been obvious that organisms which have generation times measured in minutes would evolve resistance to antibiotics in almost no time at all, so the wise course of action would be using antibiotics judiciously and sparingly.)
I also think that the health profession as a whole puts too much emphasis on treatment and not enough on prevention. It's a huge problem because we inflict a lot of preventable disease, suffering and premature death on ourselves.
For what it's worth, I see some alternate therapies as part of a much bigger problem -- that people are far too willing to believe in things for which there's little or poor evidence and an overwillingness to reject things that are supported by mountains of evidence.
It's interesting that just about everyone has a baloney detector, some point at which a claim seems too preposterous. Mine is set to ultrasensitive, so I reject some things that may be true, but I'm also far less likely to accept things that are very likely to be false.
Is it really such a bad thing to be a rational skeptic?
Joe