At MS (and I think other places too), we have a saying called "Not Invented Here" (NIH), which basically means people don't like anything that they didn't build themselves. In some cases it's due to the difficulty of what us geeks call "reuse-in-the-large" but usually it's because people tend to think everyone outside their group/team/country/town/clique/tribe is stupid and that they can do whatever better. I'll admit I've been as guilty of this as anyone else on more that one occasion. But this seems to permiate the entire world and it bugs me. Republicans think Democrats are stupid, and vice versa. This is also true (at some level) of members of any religion, ethnic group, company, fraternity, you name it. "Those people" never know what they're talking about. No one seems to bother to listen to each other.
What got me thinking about this is my experience with a back injury I had a few years ago. I've had lower back issues for years that had kind of been slowly getting worse but with a long enough cycle I didn't really notice. It flared up horribly in about September of 2003, and when the main thrust subsided I was having constant pain down my right hip and leg that slowly got worse and worse. I went to a spine specialist who took some X-rays and a MRI and located a bulge between L5 & S1. Seemed like a really smart guy, knew what he was talking about, and it all made sense. Basically he put me on anti-inflamatories, sent me to PT, and had me come back 6 weeks later for a check up. It had gotten better and he basically said "not much else we can do, this should clear up after 12 months or so". I did PT for several months and waited. It was mostly better but I was still having regular leg pain and back stiffness, and in November 2004 it flared up again.
What they don't tell you is that the word "triathlon" means "OCD" in sports-talk because folks that do them (i.e. yours truely) obsess constantly about whether they are training enough, too much, in the right way, or if what ever injury-du-jour is going to prevent them from training at all. It really is a sickness. Anyway, I'm starting to really worry about this back thing and I see a posting on a triathlete email forum that says "I had a nasty back problem, saw this Chiropractor, and it's helped a lot". So I decided to give it a shot, not without some trepidation because most of the people around me (many medical professionals) don't speak too highly of other medical professionals, let alone some crazy-ass chiropractors. Yes, there are bad chiropractors and chiropractor horror stories but I seem to remember a surgeon amputating the wrong foot off of someone recently, so it's not like mainstream medicine is batting 1,000 either, so please don't even start with me on this one. The point is chiropractic medicine is NIH as far as doctors are concerned, and same goes for acupuncture and alternative-medicine in general, and in most cases they have little actual data about effectivness, or lack thereof. And in many cases, I'm sure, the other way around too. So to make a long story short, after about 8-10 weeks in treatment, and 2 months since, my back is in better shape than it has been in about, oh, 10 years, and it seems to be continuing to improve as time goes on. The Chiropractor explained things in a way that I have never experienced in other types of treatment, really focused on root causes rather than symptoms, and really seemed to be invested in solving the problem. The whole process had a nice feel to it.
The funny side note is that I bumped into the Spine doctor a few months ago and asked me how I was doing. I told him that it had gotten worse again after getting better, I got frustrated and ended up trying a chiropractor, and was having success. He stared at me rather blankly, said something to the effect of "oh, that's nice, see ya later". Not Invented Here.