Dr. Sergeant's discussion of the "inevitable truths" underlying medicine is eloquent. The term "faux medicine" is a creative addition to the groups of terms (such as "unproven" and "unscientific") that view the common thread of alternative medicine as a bogus, primitive, and delusional conceptual model.

Indeed, science and technology have bestowed much of humanity with enormous material benefits. But for most patients in the waiting room, their health care is not reducible to a scientific event. As Dr. Sergeant has implied, disease may be a physical fact, but existential, personal, and subjective considerations necessarily linger whenever health is threatened (1, 2). Being sick inevitably involves passion and the imagination and has a deep component of narrative and fantasy (3). The suffering of illness includes "the realm of social roles, group identification, the relation with self, body, or family, or the relation with a transpersonal, transcendent source of meaning" (4). Much that is not scientific is at stake.

In my view, whenever the proud banner of triumphant science is used to separate conventional medicine from alternative medicine, alternative medicine inevitably wins. In the face of irreducible uncertainty and genuine mystery, physicians need to foster and use a language that acknowledges, without necessarily agreeing to, alternative responses to the "unbearable" sorrow of life. As noted by Stanley Hauerwas, "We must be careful not to rob others of  ... [their humanity] in our attempt to spare their suffering" (5). This includes medical beliefs and practices that one may disagree with or that threaten the cultural and political power of medicine. Calling the beliefs of people (especially our patients) "ignorance" is inevitably perceived as a kind of "white-man's burden" colonialism. Like telling patients not to feel fear, grief, or despair, dismissing "subjective clutching" does not make it go away.

The value of alternative medicine for conventional medicine should not be primarily as a "foil" with which to proclaim conventional medicine's own righteousness and scientific certainty. Alternative medicine might instead be an opportunity for medicine to reflect on how its scientific apparatus needs to be tempered by magic—even if this magic is usually called "art."