This is sort of the dividing line for me for alternative medicine stuff I can listen to and that I can't. If somebody says, "this seems to work, but I don't know why", or "this seems to work, I have an idea why, but it's just a hypothesis", I can keep an open mind. It may still be quackery of course, but maybe not. It's the business of "this works by unlocking the energy", etc. that drives me beserk. Or "I can't explain how it works in Western terms - it's part of the Eastern paradigm". Give me a break. We're all humans, and our bodies work roughly (I know, very roughly) the same way.
I guess I'm a bit more open to this stuff than some other people on the list, though. About a year after I was born in 1963, my 13-year-old sister died of leukemia. Although (from what I've been told after), it was obvious she was going to die, her quality of life was miserable, with growing tumors over her body, in particular over her eye keeping her from reading. My parents had tried everything the doctors said, and then tried krebiozen, usually referred to now (for example, on quackwatch) as a major example of quackery. Well, it was the only thing that reduced the tumors. Not a cure, but it did seem to help her quality of life. As my mother describes it, before the doctors would examine the tumors to see if they had shrunk by a millimeter or something, while after they tried the krebiozen the shrinkage was obvious and she could at least read.
Krebiozen is also often referred to these days (as any web search will find) as an example of the placebo effect, where patients only responded to krebiozen because it was touted as a cure. Maybe, it could be, but my sister did respond to krebiozen but not to whatever else they were giving to her, which I assume they also tried to say would help her. Even if is just a placebo effect, it is still an astonishing demonstration of just how much standard medicine does not understand about how we work.
If I recall right, my parents (very much on the left) once told they had first heard about Krebiozen in Arnoni's Minority of One magazine. (hmm, now I'm curious - I see that the library here has all the old copies of this. I may go look at a few.) My mother (my father is no longer alive) is still on the left and I think still quite upset about what happened to Krebiozen and really hates the American Cancer Society.