>I often wonder why people do that? Sometimes it's the patients (or parents of patients if minor) but it seems to me that it's almost always friends or relatives that try to hook you up with pipe dreams and fantasies. Why is it so difficult for people to accept our realities?
Lack of education and a (worrying) growing mistrust in science and the scientific method.
Also a factor is that some illnesses are awful and the treatments are inhumane. They're the best current medicine can do, but it's far from what you'd like the solution or paliative to be.
Thus, turning to alternatives is not necessarily mistrust in science, but a desperate search for something tolerable that could work.
Another possible factor that helps here is that many doctors are as inhumane as the treatments they recommend, and in some cases are not up to date in the latest science, so you end up having to educate them.
Although I agree that the decision to look for something else has to come from the person in the trenches, not as a well meaning (really?) suggestion from an outsider. Some people do want to fight that fight in addition to the normal fights Pieter mentions.
Lack of education and a (worrying) growing mistrust in science and the scientific method.