Alternative Medicine PP9

I am all for an alternative to conventional medicine treatments, but would prefer that those alternatives have been tested and clinical trials done to show the pros and cons of that alternative medicines use. I do not, however, believe that publicly funded health programs should pay for these types of treatments when they have not been used in clinical trials to come to a general consensus of what the pros and cons are of their use and what the potential dangers are for using them if you are already taking some other conventional drug or herb. Standards of practice and quality needs to be ascertained to one: keep unscrupulous peddlers with false claims and tainted product from becoming a problem and two: herbs can also harm given certain circumstances and anything that is strong enough to make a chemical change in your body will have some side effects and those side effects need to be known. In addition, without some sort of clinical trials and testing done, there is the potential for harm and ineffectiveness with the use of herbs or alternative medicines since some studies have shown that there are varying amounts of the actual herb in most products. With the cost of current health care today, many people are turning to alternative medicine options and self-medicating so why not change the old way of teaching and training our doctors and physicians to also include the study of mind/body interactions and the body's natural potential healing and start laying a medical foundation for the use of botanical medicine and other alternative medicine therapies? There is a natural synergy of whole herbs and mind/body interactions that could potentially be way more effective than that of man-made chemical treatments. But again, before I agree to publicly funded health care programs footing the bill for these alternative options I need to see the studies that go along with these alternatives.