Actually, they replaced it a few years ago with something that’s totally not a sonnenrad.

Ok, and? That doesn’t contradict my point. Mainstream medicine in America works a lot of the time, but is fundamentally corrupted by the society it exists in. There are a ton of cases where it doesn’t help anyone or actively makes people’s health worse, so even completely ineffective alternative treatments are better by comparison in those instances. Then you have alternative treatments like cannabis, MDMA, or psilocybin which are prohibited from mainstream medicine, but almost certainly work better for some patients than what can be offered by mainstream medicine. Granted, it seems likely that they will someday be considered mainstream medicine, but that is not currently the case.

I should add that if your definition of “mainstream medicine” is simply “everything that works”, then you just have a useless definition. It does not capture the real treatment a patient may receive when they see a doctor in America.

Dumb take. Mainstream medicine is still warped by the conditions of the society in which it is developed and practiced. In America, that means politicized/racist drug policy results in prohibition of actually useful drugs while creating a massive legally prescribed opiod addiction epidemic. That doesn’t mean it’s all bad, but there’s certainly a lot of ways in which “alternative” medicine works better than mainstream medicine.

Yeah, well, they get into the economics departments at these top schools, so…