Unfortunately Physiotherapists feel threatened because Chiropractic is more effective, thus they are blocking advances purely out of self interest. Having used both in the past, give me a chiropractor any day.
This is a common argument among supporters of alternative medecines. Unfortunately, it is unfair to the vast majority of physicians, who swore to protect and heal their patients (the hippocratic oath), and who underwent strenuous ordeals in order to become doctors. These people are usually not primarily driven by "self interest".
I have several doctors in my family (who, by the way, advised me strongly not to follow in their footsteps if I wanted to live a happy life) and sincerely, they never ever think in terms of "business" & money making. It's simply not their motivation. So I really doubt "self-interest" is at the core of their hostility towards alternative health practices.
And actually, lots of medics are not hostile at all to alternative practices when they witness positive results.
Out of curiosity, I studied traditional Chinese medecine (acupuncture & "tuina" [
therapeutic massage]) for about 5 years in my home country (France), where it is not recognized as a true "medecine". Several of our teachers were also practitioners who got most of their patients through "word of mouth". Most of the time, these patients were recommanded to my teachers by standard physicians, who admitted they could not help them, or who nonetheless saw an interest in sending their patients to an acupunctor as a complement to their standard "western" treatment. The same is true for osteopaths and many other alternative health practitioners.
It is true that some physicians do adopt a very aggressive stance towards alternative medecines. But I think this has more to do with science than self-interest.
Modern medecine is based upon the scientific method. It relies on tested hypotheses as a means to reach knowledge, even though the level of understanding we reach is never complete, and may be replaced by another theory later on.
Unfortunately, most scientific studies are nowadays found lacking when considering the efficiency of alternative medecines. On the other hand, some risks of these medecines are well identified (although rare), such as artery dissection with chiropraxy or osteopathy, or lung perforation with acupuncture, and so on. So I believe most medics who advocate the eradication of these approaches are mainly motivated by a cost versus benefit analysis. They don't see any theoretical soundness in these therapies, but they see how they could harm. And they see as well that quite often, practitioners of these medecines are not professional doctors. So of course, they are scared ... but for their patients ! Especially since charlatans do abound, and unlike doctors, these are often clearly driven by self-interest.
A pinch of "quantum physics", a pinch of "Tesla", a pinch of Mother nature and its wonderful herbs, who never do harm (as we know from nightshade and oleander), and you've got a miracle cure worth a million dollars. Charlatans are a huge nuisance. So, let's understand why some doctors get epidermic when they hear of "alternative medecines" ...
If applied more systematically, the scientific method could bridge the gap between efficient alternative medecines and standard western medecine. There's still a long way to go however, because it is difficult to scientifically assess most alternative medecines. It requires people fluent in both "languages".
For instance, if you want to measure the efficiency of Chinese medecine against "common cold", you have to first translate the notion of "common cold" into Chinese medecine because the Chinese do not classify illnesses as we do. Under what we call common cold, they might distinguish several different illnesses, and treat them accordingly, with different approaches : in Chinese terms, would it be a "cold wind" or a "hot wind". Treating a "cold wind" as a "hot wind" won't work. It may event get you worse. So if you want to assess the efficiency of the Chinese treatment, you have to assess it against the Chinese diagnosis, not the Western one. Nobody does this effort. That's why most current studies about Chinese Traditional Medecine are flawed.
I guess we face this issue with most alternative / traditional medecines. But we never end to learn about the human body & medecine. Old remedies are suddenly found to be beneficial. And actually, scores of pharmacists explore the rainforests of the globe, interviewing shamans and local healers, to identify new molecules for drugs. Forgotten medecines become fashionable again (bacteriophages are making their come-back now that we face higher resistance to antibiotics). So the end chapter of the story of medecine(s) hasn't been written yet.
All good willed practitioners, from all disciplines, should work together for the sake of progress ... But that means accepting a common ground, and this ground is the scientific method.
