User:Howard C. Berkowitz/UHT

At Citizendium, the term unproven healing treatment is used for approaches to preventing and treating disease, which do not meet generally accepted criteria for efficacy. It is fair to say that some once-mainstream treatments are now disproven, do not meet current standards of safety, or are significantly inferior to other treatments; the term in no way is limited to complementary and alternative medicine. Indeed, techniques that were once considered exotic have now been well accepted.

Even "well accepted" is a relative term. Different countries and political systems have different economic and political standards for acceptance. There is no health care system with an unlimited budget, and, whenever there are resource constraints, there will be some form of rationing. In some contexts, an extremely expensive treatment that gives only a slight extension of quality life is effectively unproven under the efficacy criteria of that system.

Some treatments are clearly experimental, and there may be provisional acceptance of such methods, if they have a reasonable scientific basis and evidence of efficacy in laboratory or animal models. In testing, a treatment can easily be deemed unproven, or unsafe. "Experimental", however, cannot plausibly be assumed for methods that, even though they may have been in use for centuries of tradition, still do not present significant statistical evidence that they are at least equivalent to other treatments.