Here's why *real* medicine is different than woo:

[Jim Lane]

165. Your own sources show what's wrong with woo.

The Boston Globe op-ed ("Trial and too many errors", the source for your linked article) correctly states that "a randomized clinical trial (is) the gold standard in terms of evidence quality...." There are some scientific questions that are difficult to answer, so you can't just throw together a trial and thereby discover a cure for cancer. Nevertheless, randomized clinical trials of things like homeopathy have not been inconclusive, but rather have conclusively demonstrated its worthlessness.

(Two digressions here:
1. Do enough studies and, by random variance, you'll have one that supports a false conclusion. For example, take a bunch of people with chronic headaches and test the efficacy of sleeping with a photo of Ted Cruz under your pillow. To avoid placebo effects (or reverse placebos for liberals), the patient sees only an opaque envelope, which might contain the photo but might instead contain just a blank piece of paper. Most of the time there'll be no difference. Every now and then, however, the Ted Cruz photo will show significantly more healing power than the blank page. The Cruzeopathists will spread word of that study far and wide, ignoring the large number that showed no difference, and ignoring the outlier at the other hand in which the blank paper appeared to work better.
2. Science is not a fixed body of conclusions. It's a method. Sometimes, conclusions that were thought to be well established have to be revised in light of new evidence. For example, there've been a few occasions when Newton's law of gravity yielded an incorrect prediction about a planetary orbit. Some people said that there might be another planet, still unknown, affecting the one we're observing. Others said that the latest observations mean the law is inaccurate. In the case of the orbit of Uranus, the first view was correct. Mathematicians applying Newton's law told astronomers exactly where to look to discover Neptune. In the case of the orbit of Mercury, the second view was correct. Newton's formulation of gravitational attraction had to be revised slightly to take account of relativistic effects. To the extent that acupuncture or some variant of it can survive this kind of process, then it's not woo.)

Now, what about science? The CardioBrief piece you cite states:

A key weakness in the chain is the use of guidelines in evidence-based medicine, since expert opinion instead of “solid clinical trial evidence” plays a large role in the guidelines. The problem is that “many physicians who write these recommendations have financial ties to drug companies.”

In those instances, to paraphrase Chesterton, it doesn't mean that the scientific method has been tried and found wanting; rather, it's been found unprofitable, and not tried.

Are those instances 90% of the total, as you imply? I don't think your sources come close to establishing that. When a medical recommendation is based on expert opinion rather than a randomized clinical trial that's directed specifically at the precise question involved, the expert opinion is often an educated case based on somewhat similar trials, on animal studies, on extrapolation from theories that have held up very well in every area in which they have been rigorously tested, etc. Those recommendations aren't infallible. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that 90% of all scientists are on the take from drug companies or are just making stuff up in order to get published and thus tenured.

In your effort to emphasize the extent to which proper scientific method isn't being used, you write: "There is lots of evidence in the literature about stuff that really helps, but it gets ignored because nobody can make a buck off of it." That's far too sweeping. The first example that occurs to me of something that really helps (helps a lot of medical problems) is exercise. Nobody can make much of a buck off it -- Nikes are way cheaper than bypass surgery and if you can't afford even Nikes you can run barefoot. Nevertheless, would you say that the medical establishment ignores exercise for that reason? No way. We're constantly being harangued about getting more exercise. Furthermore, we're constantly being harangued by experts who don't sell running shoes and who don't otherwise reap financial benefit from their recommendation.