This is a very sensible approach - but that is not what this whole discussion is all about. This discussion is not about "alternative" remedies - which may or may not be effective pending empirical proof - but about quackery - or consumer fraud to be more precise.
Consumer fraud is a practice whereby the vendor takes advantage of what is called "information asymmetry" (i.e. knowledge disparity between the vendor and the emptor of a particular product) to misrepresent the characteristic of his product for the purpose of making a profit. Consumer fraud can be range from quite benign - e.g. calling card companies imposing hidden charges that clean the account before the credit is used - in which case the loss is relatively small, and the consumer ends paying only slightly more than using conventional long distance services - to quite deadly.
The "new age" or "alternative medicine" creates ample opportunity for various charlatans because often no objective criteria exist to evaluate their claims. This is not to say that consumer fraud does not exist in "conventional" medicine - but there potential for fraud is more limited by the existence of empirical science.
On the positive side, most forms of "new age/alternative medicine/faith healing/weight loss etc." consumer fraud schemes fall on the mild side - the only thing that looses weight is the buyer's wallet, so to speak. I heard that chiropractors can do some more serious damage, but I am not aware of that being a wide spread problem. A bigger problem is crusading propagandists of the new age/alternative quackery who work to undermine people's confidence in conventional medicine - this may lead to otherwise preventable conditions, including death.
But what really baffles me is that most people on this list would quickly denounce consumer fraud by say, a car manufacturer or a tobacco or fast food vendor - but they defend equally fraudulent practices of the 'alternative' quacks. This falls into a broader pattern, which I mentioned on different occasions - people denouncing the cultural contents produced by artists they do not like as "racist" "homophobic" or "misogynistic" - but if a similar contents is produced by the artists they like (e.g. hip hop or punk) that suddenly becomes a virtuous thing.
That makes me think that much of what passes for politics is in fact high brow justification of one's cultural consumption habits. Wine & cheese - progressive; beer & hot dogs - conservative; subcompact import - good; pickups truck - bad; hip hop - revolutionary; classical - reactionary; or vice versa.
Wojtek