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I thought I'd share with you an excerpt from one of Micheal T. Murray's books I'm reading. This excerpt is from a segment entitled, "Why is there a bias among medical doctors against alternative medicine?"      

The simple answer to this important question is that many doctors are simply not educated in the value of nutrition and other natural therapies; in fact, most were told during their education to tell their patients that alternative medicines are worthless. Many doctors are not aware of, or choose to ignore the data on, beneficial natural therapies such as diet, exercise, and dietary supplements, even if the data are overwhelmingly positive. Rather than admit that they don't know, most doctors have a knee-jerk reaction: it can't be true. If they are not up on something, they will be down on it, to protect their own ego. They often suffer from what I call the "tomato effect." This is a reference to the belief, widely held in eighteenth-century North America, that tomatoes were poisonous, even though they were a dietary staple in Europe. It wasn't until 1820, when Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a tomato on the courthouse steps in Salem, Indiana, that the barrier against the "poisonous" tomato was broken in the minds of many Americans.

The attitude of many Physicians toward alternative therapies is quite similar to the tomato effect. For example, diet is a fundamental aspect of health. But when patients ask about diet therapy or a nutritional supplement for a particular condition, even if the nutritional approach has considerable support in the scientific literature and this literature proves its safety and effectiveness, most doctors will caution their patients against taking the natural route or will tell them that it will not help, though it won't hurt either. The truth is that in many cases, the doctor just doesn't know anything about it.