My adoptive mother is Japanese so I was raised with both eastern and western medicine. They both have great value in my opinion and when you do your research, get referrals from people just as you would for any doctor of western medicine, you have a greater success rate. If I had to go every month and pay tons of money, it might be different but I went 2 times 3 years ago and have been relatively pain free since as long as I also combine the exercises I was taught.
I agree with you that alternative medicine can have value and hey, you don't have the pain, then that's really all that should matter.
The point I want to make (and I apologize if it came across as blunt or harsh) is that, even as an extremely skeptical person, the idea that I need to do all the research in 2016 is sometimes, in my opinion, an unnecessary burden. We have people that have a passion and appropriate posture for medicine and, as physical creatures, the efficacy of it all is not really subjective. There is going to be some variance between how effective one medicine is from one person to the next, but on average that's going to be negligible, if noticeable at all. And that's also not to say that eastern or alternative medicines cannot work, but they absolutely rely heavily on placebo and a foundation of additional physical measures (which you described). I'm all about finding out things for myself, but I think it's important to recognize the pitfall of cognitive bias and guard ourselves from relying on anecdotes from family and friends versus the advice of professionals that stand on the shoulders of centuries of progress.
At the end of the day though, you do you and everybody make that money.
