If you challenge the beliefs of your professors in med school, they're going to fail you. If you challenge your mentors during residency training, they are not going to support your continued training. If you challenge the beliefs of your peers in the scientific community, you are not going to get published. This is how today's system of conventional medicine ("scientific medicine") suppresses the emergence of new ideas and new theories that could produce true breakthroughs in our understanding of health, medicine, science and the nature of the universe.
The science that's published in medical and scientific journals today may indeed be solid science, but it in no way represents all of the good scientific research being conducted today. There are independent thinkers, scientists, pioneers and outright scientific rebels who are doing extraordinary research, yet never get published. Even worse, their research gets systematically ridiculed by the old school guardians of the scientific community. One of the most obvious examples of this is the team of Fleischmann and Pons, who are, of course, the fathers of "cold fusion," which is now better known as "low-energy nuclear reactions."
If you think back to 1989 and look at the way this issue was suppressed, you realize that the credibility of cold fusion was destroyed by scientists who had career and ego investments in the theories of hot fusion. These were scientists who had published papers or invested their careers in multi-billion dollar experiments trying to generate free electricity from hot fusion. Thus, the idea that two chemists could create cold fusion with a tabletop experiment was viewed as outrageous. Rather than examining the evidence with an open mind and try to understand and replicate what was going on, they sought to destroy it.
This ego-fueled suppression of cold fusion was quite successful, to the point where, today, if you mention cold fusion to anyone who is steeped in conventional medicine or science, they will laugh at you and say, "Cold fusion is a joke, just like medical quackery." But of course, the big joke is on them, because cold fusion does indeed exist, and it has been proven time and time again.
(You can see pictures of a modern cold fusion experiment running at the physics department of Purdue university at http://www.physics.purdue.edu/neutron/LENR.html)
Of course, it is scientific insanity to suggest that just because something happens three out of ten times, it doesn't exist at all. In my view, three out of ten times is pretty darn good for an emerging science that is experimental in nature and very poorly understood. With refinement and additional experiments, that number could doubtlessly have been increased to six or seven out of ten, and perhaps eventually ten out of ten.
Nevertheless, cold fusion was discredited. Today, more than 15 years later, it remains discredited and virtually unknown in the Western world. Meanwhile, Fleischmann and Pons are busy working for private corporations who will, without a doubt, one day release industrial or consumer versions of low-energy nuclear reactors that will provide free energy to households, businesses and even entire communities at very little cost.
Every time I write about cold fusion, by the way, I get one or two letters from some "esteemed" professor of physics from some university who thinks it's his job to explain to me why cold fusion doesn't exist and can't work. (It's a lot like receiving a letter through some sort of time machine, where all the senders of the letters are fifty years behind...) As always, these people remain utterly ignorant of what's happening in this field. For example, in 1999, the Depart of Energy actually funded a low-energy nuclear reaction lab at the University of Illinois. Read it yourself at http://www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_6_10_1.html.
There are now over 400 scientific papers on cold fusion, most of which are now available at http://www.lenr-canr.org/, the leading cold fusion community website. This site provides excellent reading on the history of cold fusion as well as the many challenges still being faced in this search for genuine scientific understanding.
In the world of so-called "evidence-based medicine," the defenders of conventional medicine, which include the American Medical Association, medical schools and conventionally trained doctors, also want to protect their territory. They want to remain in control over all medical decisions and health-related interactions with patients. Yet, they have very few qualifications for actually doing so. For example, medical schools don't even teach basic nutrition, and doctors graduate from medical schools and residence training with practically no understanding of nutrition whatsoever. They have no real qualifications to talk to patients about disease prevention through healing foods, or to talk about how to live a healthy life through intelligent food choice. These are the basics of health, yet they are almost entirely ignored by modern medicine.
Many of the most promising healing modalities are not just ignored by conventional medicine; they are in fact ridiculed. Homeopathy comes to mind. Homeopathy is discredited simply because the defenders of conventional medicine have no understanding of the mechanism by which homeopathic remedies work. It's similar to saying that there is no such thing as infectious disease because we can't see any germs (which was once the official position of science-based medicine). Of course, once the microscope was invented, germs could be seen, and the acceptance of the scientific validity of infectious disease soon followed.
Some day, there will be instruments that can measure the vibrational nature, or what is called the "memory," of water. When those instruments are available, homeopathy will seem to be common sense, but today it is considered fringe science or quackery by the defenders of conventional medicine because they don't see how it could possibly work. They leave no room in their belief systems for the possibility that something could operate outside their current understanding. As long as there is no microscope for seeing homeopathic energy, the stodgy, egoistic defenders of evidence-based medicine will call it quackery. Of course, this is the same thinking that once called the germ theory quackery.
No one wants to rewrite their theories, re-evaluate their belief systems or admit they were wrong. Scientific understanding thus only progresses at the rate that leaders of conventional science retire or die. Thank goodness they do, because when that happens, they take their old, distorted belief systems with them, thereby making room for the new understanding and belief systems of the next generation of scientists. Science thus marches forward slowly, not on a schedule conducive to breakthroughs or true scientific research, but more along one that is dictated by the retirement of old guard defenders of outdated scientific theory.
The bottom line is: We as consumers should be wary any time someone says they have a "scientific approach" or an "evidence-based approach" to medicinal herbs, nutrition, pharmaceuticals or medicine. Anything that's based on evidence is also subject to the distortions and belief systems of old-guard scientists and doctors who currently control the intellectual topography in which this evidence is framed. Just because something claims to be based on evidence doesn't mean it's true, nor that it stands up to genuine scientific scrutiny. And just because something is called quackery or rejected by the scientific community doesn't mean it isn't true. It could simply mean that a sufficient number of old school scientists haven't died yet to make room for these new observations or theories.
Remember, current scientific "truth" is defined and guarded by a committee of the most powerful people and organizations in the scientific community (it's called "peer review"). Anyone who has ever worked on a committee knows real progress under such systems is slow and painful. Real scientific progress usually comes from determined, outcast scientific rebels who are viciously attacked by old guard defenders of the current scientific community. You might recognize a few of their names: Einstein, Semmelweis, Copernicus, Tesla, and more than a few others.