Steve,
Possibly you are not old enough to have been burned by mainstream medicine - I have - but fortunately not irreversibly!
Mainstream medicine is hopelessly skewed by big pharma's need for profits. It is also probably skewed by its adherence to materialistic explanations - even while it struggles with fact that people's minds seem capable of messing up all sorts of medical experiments (the placebo effect).
Even if you only accept the first part of that statement (the malign effect of big pharma), you can see that the science establishment is not a temple to rationality, it is driven by many forces.
David
However, that has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. Medicine could be as messed up as you claim and it still wouldn't mean that CAM therapies are any better than doing nothing.
Linda