What is Alternate Medicine and what relation does it have with religion?
Anything that isn't already acclaimed to be "medicine" by doctors, for the former.
And what in the deepest atoms of my piss does religion have to do with this?
I know Tim Minchin generally has a religion-critical angling to most of his songs and
works, and this one, Storm, is no different. But in this exact scenario I meant to use
the quote literally for what it says and what it means: "Medicine" is only medicine
because doctors, with a degree and several years of extreme health and anatomy
studies, has labelled them medicine. And they do so because it works.
In our modern day and age, with so much information available on a glowing screen,
it's easy, far too easy, to convince oneself of the delusion that "I know better than the
experts." Five minutes of reading an article online apparently makes you much smarter
than a person whose studied a specific field for more than seven years, and then
continue the rest of his career working with what he studied.
It's understandable that in a country such as US, and other countries like it, where
there is very little trust between people, and between the government and people,
it's easy to... Well... Don't trust doctors, or anyone related to one's personal health
except oneself. But most places in the world, people become doctors, and health
related experts because they care for other people's health, yadda yadda.
Bottom line: Trust doctors, and health personnel, they care.