Unfortunately it seems like the solution to this feeling of failure is to generate a never-ending ambiguity machine where you can experience the positive feedback of a patient telling you that supplement #945 seems like it improves their bloating somewhat and they can walk away feeling like they did something good. These doctors realized that there’s nothing in the research to help their patients, and so they move over to the thousands of things that someone-once-said-might-help and spin theories based on poor understanding of the biology as to why it might work.
Yup. A lot of people seriously underestimate the main benefit of alternative medicine from the clinicians' perspective: it's like a slot machine that almost always makes you win a little. It's fake, but it's a constant stream of positive feedback. Exact same reason why psychobehavioral pseudoscience is so popular: they get the thrill of helping, requiring zero effort, and they can always fall back to the position that the treatment can't fail, only the patients can fail it. They can even keep trying again and again. Return business is the easiest business.
The toxic combination of psychosomatic ideology and corrupt evidence-based medicine is making this creep more and more into real medicine. Going to work every day and making little difference is terrible for morale. Going to work instead and feeling a little good about maybe helping every patient just a little seems to provide the same feeling of reward as actually making a real difference. This is probably why psychosomatic beliefs are especially strong in neurology. It's a discipline that deals with such horrible diseases with high disability burdens, and having this stream of patients being "healed" with fake treatments is too exciting to pass.
We're really seeing a world grow more into the idea of faking it until you make it, in a systemic way. The biopsychosocial model is perfect for this. It's completely fake but it always feels like it's working. So the clinicians get the same feel-good out of it, while remaining in real medicine, which makes them feel doubleplusgood because it isn't just helping everyone a little bit, it's science! Well, it's not, but that's the whole thing about biopsychosocial medicine: no actual science, but the feeling that it's fully scientifically valid.
Over time it's guaranteed that alternative medicine creeps closer to real medicine, just as real medicine is adopting alternative ideas. Frankly I'm surprised they haven't clued in on it, you could easily get the exact same kind of boasts out of homeopathy than out of CBT. As long as your homeopathic treatment includes a hefty dose of gushing about how effective it is, backed by systematic reviews and clinical trials. Although most likely it will simply be that "mind-body" garbage becomes the main approach in alternative practices, it's essentially custom-built for this purpose.
