“One of the arguments mobilized by alternative medicine practitioners against orthodox medicine is that the latter is constantly changing while alternative medicine has remained unaltered for hundreds, even thousands of years,” wrote Raymond Tallis in Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents. “The lack of development in 5,000 years can be a good thing only if 5,000 years ago alternative practitioners already knew of entirely satisfactory treatments. If they did, they have been remarkably quiet about them.”
