[GoNative]

Many modern day western medicines are just refined derivatives of traditional medicines so there's certainly some evidence that some herbal medicines can be effective.
A big problem as far as I'm concerned though is that there is a real lack of credible clinical trials to show the efficacy of such treatments. And most of the clinical trials that have been done have shown little more efficacy that what you would expect from a placebo.
A huge clinical trial on accupuncture for instance completed in the US a year or so ago had a couple of groups being treated for back pain. One group had traditional accupuncture and another group had needles stuck in them but not in any of the propper spots associated with the practice of accupuncture. The group not receiving traditional accupuncture reported the best results. Showing that if you believe it's doing you good then in a certain percentage of people it will do you good (placebo effect).
The biggest problem of course if that many of the worlds traditional medicines on the market come out of China and we all know how much you can trust quality control of products coming out of that country. There's been many products over the years claiming to contain certain ingredients and a check in a lab has found they actually have virtually none of the ingrdients they claim to have.
Another big issue is that with exactly the same symptoms you can go to 10 different practioners of traditional medicines and end up getting 10 completely different treatments. There's no real oversight of things like dosage of each ingredient or even what ingredients are used for particular symptoms.

Overall I don't dismiss traditional and alternative treatments out of hand, of course some of them are clearly utterly ridiculous with no proof whatsoever that they work, but I believe there needs to be a lot more regulation and clinical trials to check that they actually can do what they claim.