Venezuelan is Showing the Way on Medical Advancements! By Michael Ferguson

     Look, we will be in the same situation soon. Have you tried to see a doctor, only to find them all booked up, and when you do get in, they dismiss your pains, those pins and needles sensations in your toes, write a prescription for some proton potion and send you out to hustle in then, the next billable patient? Well over in Venezuela, some people think that they have the answer to this problem:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7549571/Venezuelans-turn-shamans-spiritual-healers-treatment-amid-shortage-critical-medicine.html

“A chronic medicine shortage in Venezuela is seeing more people turn to alternative medicine for treatment. It is a move that could put thousands of chronically-ill people in the crisis-wracked South American nation at risk of dying. However, with Venezuela's chronic medicine shortages and hyperinflation there seems to be little choice for those desperately in need of treatment. Humanitarian aid in recent months has led to a small improvement in the availability of medical supplies - but those working in the sector say shortages continue to plague the health-care system. The country's pharmacists' federation say pharmacies and hospitals have on average only about 20 per cent of the medicine stock needed. And as a result Venezuela's opposition parties say some 300,000 chronically ill people are in danger of dying from the shortages of medicines. All across Venezuela, but particularly in poor areas like Petare, patients cannot hope to afford the price of medicines that due to the economic crisis, have become exceedingly rare and expensive. And so they are looking to alternatives for treatment.”

     That makes sense. And the article ignores the fact that the placebo effect could operate, where mere belief that something will work, in a mind-over-matter fashion, could actually be better than nothing. In fact, a lot of mainstream Western medicine is based on this, including numerous surgical procedures:
  https://www.smh.com.au/national/surgery-the-ultimate-placebo-20160208-gmo484.html
  https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/surgery-ultimate-placebo/

“For many complaints and conditions, the benefits from surgery are lower, and the risks higher, than you or your surgeon think. In this book you will see how commonly performed operations can be found to be useless or even harmful when properly evaluated. That these claims come from an experienced, practising orthopaedic surgeon who performs many of these operations himself, makes the unsettling argument particularly compelling. Of course, no surgeon is recommending invasive surgery in bad faith, but Ian Harris argues that the evidence for the success for many common operations, including knee arthroscopies, back fusion or cardiac stenting, become current accepted practice without full examination of the evidence. The placebo effect may be real, but is it worth the recovery time, expense and discomfort?”