What if "Integrative Medicine" and "Alternative Therapies" Are Full of .... ?

What if the most valuable thing to come out of the vast torrents of nutrition bloggers and comments on those blogs and alternative medicine conferences, etc, is this chart of dookie? That's what the authors of the Science Based Medicine blog seem to think.

At least this chart presents an actual, observable, measurable observation of the world!

Contrast this chart with the endlessly proposed and promulgated (without testing) navel-gazing "syndromes" that could be any disease or no disease at all.  While I don't necessarily think alternative medical treatments are completely bogus, I have noticed that most alternative therapy information is heavy on the factoids, but very light on actual testable theories or metrics.

But maybe.... instead of criticizing scientifically-untested therapies, we should make an effort to test them!  When it comes to health the line between objective science and subjective experience blurs and I'm never sure which source of information to trust.  Maybe, in the end, after all the scientific and unscientific hypotheses, we just have to follow our gut-instincts!

If you do, this Bristol Stool Chart may be a helpful metric!