The question is not so much whether something has been proven scientifically or not but whether it makes money for big medi-business. If a procedure makes money, it is acceptable, proven or not. If it does not make money, it is not acceptable, proven or not. David Suzuki, distinguished Japanese-Canadian science reporter, contends that not more than 30 % of all the procedures carried out by orthodox medicine are backed up by scientific proof. I cannot readily think of any public figure I'd be more inclined to believe than David. Does the medical establishment make any noise about those of its strategies that don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. You bet it does not. It condemns as unscientific only strategies practiced by others. And it is ready to prove as effective only those strategies which it is to its advantage to prove effective.
Take Vitamin C. There is no doubt that it makes an immense positive difference in a person's health. Linus Pauling and others proved it convincingly. You can prove it on yourself quickly and readily because it does not take long for the difference of big doses of Vitamin C to show. The medical establishment tries to scare people out of taking Vitamin C with the horror story of kidney stones caused by Vitamin C. I know thousands of people who have been taking high doses of Vitamin C for years without developing kidney stones. Conversely, in Saudi Arabia kidney stones are an epidemic problem though people don't take Vitamin C there. I can't help suspecting that the medical establishment is opposed to Vitamin C because, if most people took it, there would be much less illness in the world. I don't hear the medical establishment make any noise about the dangers of aspirin therapy? And yet aspirin is infinitely more dangerous than Vitamin C. It has killed thousands of people the world over and it causes very serious complications in tens of thousands more. But don't expect the drug companies that make millions from the sale of the drug to prove that it is dangerous. What they tell you is that you have to weigh the benefits against the risks. Boy, if you weigh the benefits against the risks with Vitamin C, you need a microscope to find the latter.
Let's look at another example, vaccination. Anyone who cares to do a bit of basic reading in medical literature will soon discover that the terrible contagious diseases such measles, mumps, diphtheria, German measles, smallpox, etc. were eradicated, not by vaccinations, but by improvements in living habits. In countries that did not hop on the vaccination bandwagon, those dreadful diseases declined at the same rate as in countries that vaccinated. Diphtheria may serve to illustrate the point. Japan did not vaccinate some 40 or so years ago and the disease declined at the same rate there as elsewhere. If you do a little research in orthodox medical journals you will quickly find out that the smallpox vaccination is responsible for thousands of cases of brain-damaged children all over the world, and you will find out that in sporadic outbreaks of the disease in England, a few decades ago, there were as many vaccinated as unvaccinated among the victims. The benefits of vaccination are very doubtful and the risks are considerable. Remember the swine-flu-vaccination fiasco! It killed about 300 people in the US and left ten times as many with serious complications. Yet the medical establishment is not up in arms about the hazards of vaccination. Why? There is big money in it.
There is very little that cannot be proved or disproved scientifically. Nova Scotia has a newly established Department (cum clinic) of Environmental Illness at Fall River. It is headed by a doctor who was himself a victim of environmental illness. The medical establishment, hostile to it from the beginning, conducted a study to prove that it was, in the words of one of its representatives, "humbug" and "gobbledygook." And they proved it to be so. The outcome of their study would have been different if they had approached it in a let-us-see- what-there-is-to-it attitude.
By and large, drug companies finance studies only where they hope to make money. No pharma-company will spend money to prove something effective unless there is hope of big returns. So, if a procedure has not been proven effective, you may deduce that there has been no interest in establishing proof, not that it isn't effective.
When I dare to state publicly that there would be little illness in the world if people lived right, the advocates of orthodox medicine immediately counter that this is an unproved assumption. What they say is of course true in a way. No drug company has paid, or will pay, money to prove that, if people lived right, they would not need drugs any more! But that does NOT mean either that the assumption is not true or that it has not been proven elsewhere. It has, in fact, been proven in the laboratories of nature, in studies conducted on a scale much vaster than the most spendthrift of drug companies would be willing to pay for. I am thinking of Hunzaland in north-eastern Pakistan. Researchers who went in to investigate could not believe the evidence of their senses. (See "National Geographic" of January 1973.) They found people 100 and more years old still working in the fields that are terraced into the mountain slopes. They found virtually no sick people, young or old. The scourges of our parts of the world -- heart disease, cancer, ulcers, diabetes, arthritis and more -- were virtually unknown. The researchers came to the conclusion that the enviable good health of the Hunzas was attributable to their wholesome lifestyle. So tell me, if you want to, that no DRUG COMPANY has proved that there would be little illness in the world if people lived right, but don't tell me that it has not been proven; or -- what would be worse -- don't try to tell me that it cannot be true...
As for corrective versus preventive medicine, all I can say is that, if the medical establishment were serious about prevention, it would do a lot more than it seems to be doing. If only a fraction of the hundreds of millions now spent on advertizing drugs were spent on a vast and general campaign to educate people how to live so that they won't get sick, the difference would be incalculable. An individual doctor here and there may mean well but that's a drop in the bucket....