Acupuncture

I'd say CAM is now a lot more careful about grand claims to treat cancer etc, but that wasn't always the case - and there are still some practitioners of some treatments that do a lot of damage by making inflated claims about their efficacy, but let's not get into that.

CAM is very good at treating cyclic conditions, like chronic pain (stuff that gets worse for a while, then gets better for a while). Humans are very good at seeing patterns in random data. Just saying, like. Also, and perhaps more importantly, people seem to frequently misunderstand the words "no better than placebo". That doesn't mean "no clinically significant effect" - it just means "probably not doing what you think it is". The placebo effect is very powerful and useful. If it wasn't for ethical considerations about misleading patients, then it would be used a lot more in "Western" medicine (? Science is not a western enterprise btw, and it's only westerners who believe in "Eastern" medicine that use that term. I'd prefer to use EBM, instead).

Finally - and this is getting a bit tl;dr - but someone mentioned that Chinese remedies are 2000 years' old. Well, willowbark has been used to treat pain for much longer than that. By the 1800's doctors had realised that willowbark extract was the really interesting thing, and by 1850 or so somebody had isolated the active ingredient by reaction with acetyl chloride to form an orally-bioavailable solid, acetylsalicylic acid, or Aspirin. 150 years later and this has given rise to the class of NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) that includes ibuprofen. As well as pain management, NSAIDs are useful for lowering fever (Aspirin was used to treat the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918) and, at least while I was still in science (eyebrows might correct me) they were being investigated for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers. They don't have to be injected and they don't make you sleepy.

We could also talk about digitalis, which has a very similar history, or the excitingly-named, excitingly-structured and excitingly-discovered Vancomycin, which is about the most powerful antibiotic we still have, and was isolated from a soil sample taken by a missionary from a jungle path in Borneo.

I just think it's easy and lazy to dismiss scientific advances, or take them for granted, without knowing much about what life is like without them (ask someone with arthritis about painkillers, since we're big on personal anecdotes in this thread). And it's easy to romanticise treatments from other parts of the world that may (or may not) have long and mysterious histories, without realising how open-minded science is. All that is required is that a treatment works. There is no "bias" there before the evidence has been sought.

Well said, word for word - well said.