Do you feel that Western Medicine is the only valid healing modality?
Where the medicine comes from is not the point. What makes medicine valid is testing done by independent research. You cannot just take the personal anecdotes of one or even a dozen people and consider the matter to be closed. Time and time gain, anecdotal evidence has proven to be extremely unreliable. Bottom line, we cannot trust human perception to accurately relay the healing effects of any medicine. Heck, we give people sugar pills and they get better from sheer will. What you call Western Medicine I call Scientific Medicine. So, in short, yes, I believe Scientific Medicine is the only valid healing modality. Why do I believe this? Because there is supporting evidence that is peer-reviewed. It is the only medicine that can be verified independently that it works.
Do you think that it is possible for some so called alternative healing practices to actually have some merit?
I not only believe it's possible, I believe it's inevitable. But, you cannot convince me that any one specific treatment works from testimonials alone, only from independent peer-reviewed study. I won't say a certain treatment doesn't work without any real testing done on it, but that doesn't mean that it works, either.
Which ones?
What about the naturally-occurring substances that have already been proven by modern medicine to be legitimate? Aspirin and Penicillin are among the oldest, most well-documented "natural" medicines available. In fact, you'll be surprised to know that most medicine is made from naturally-occurring ingredients.
My beef with the natural medicine crowd is that they fall into a trap of faulty logic and bogus claims. They can't explain how their "cures" work, just that they do, and when they make the attempt to explain how, it's always based on faulty assumptions and assertions about the human body that are just...plain...wrong. Take for example, Kevin Trudeau's assertion that if a body is "acid" it will develop cancer but if the body is "alkaline" it can't. First off, that's demonstratably wrong. Second, just what part of the body is he talking about? The blood? The tissues? The lymph nodes? Trudeau and many other so-called "natural healers" have an extremely oversimplistic view of the body. Their theories, every single one I've seen are, again, just...plain...wrong.