How to research alternative treatments before using them.

If you go to any health store you will find lots of different pills, powders and liquids which promise you to cure your condition in 3 to 20 days. All of them have a text in small letters "This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease". This text says it all. There is no proof that this drug helped anyone. It is just unverified sellet's claim that it did.

Most products in that category are usually produced by mixing quite random harmless ingredients and putting them into pill or powder. After that it is just a matter of good marketing to successfully sell it. Since there are lots of people on the market which are suffering from specific condition they will do anything to find a cure.

I had a time when I suffered from very serious heartburn. I had it day and night almost non stop. Everything was causing it and I thought there is no way back. Conventional medicines helped little. So I turned to alternative treatments. I just went to the nearby store and asked what is the best for my condition. Sales person pointed me to large shelf of alternative drugs with nice shiny labels. I looked at every single one of them and each was promising me an instant cure in several days. I decided that I finally saved and purchased several which I liked the most. But after trying 3 or 4 different "magic" pills for several months I finally understood that it is pure waste of time and money and stopped looking to these shelves in the nearby health stores. Later I calculated that I spend ~200-300$ on these alternative drugs.

That's how this business is done. You purchase it once - it doesn't work and you go away. But your money are already spent. Even if this product has a nice return policy it doesn't mean that you will get your money back. Often you just don't have time or desire to deal with it. And there will be lots of people like me who will go and try these so called "drugs" just to find out that they don't work. One of this article goals is to help you avoid spending to much money on something that's not worth it. I won't go through all formulas available in the health store since there are to many of them.

I want to give you some basic guidance how to research specific condition and alternative approaches to treat it.

- First of all you should be aware about "placebo" effect. If you take some new pill which promises to cure your condition you usually hope that it will help you. And your body reacts to this by making you feel better for some time. But this is not because your condition is gone but because you're excited about the fact that your problem may be over in a couple of days. So if you're taking any alternative drug wait for a month and see if improvement will stay there. If it isthen it really helps otherwise it was just a placebo effect.

- Second you should always do your research before you purchase anything. Just simply typing drug name in the Google could save you lots of time and energy. Also consider typing queries like:

• "drug name" review
• "drug name" side effects
• "drug name" negative
• "drug name" problems

- If you want to see if there is any scientific proof of this drug effect you should go to scientific paper search site like scholar.google.com and search for your drug name. If you see some research papers related to the drug don't hesitate to click on it - you don't have to read the whole paper to understand anything - just take a look at the summary it will give you a lot of useful info.

More information on heartburn: