Asking whether anyone has been helped by a treatment (alternative or conventional) will mislead you. This is anecdotal evidence, and depends purely on someone's possibly incorrect perceptions.

I have an uncomfortable bed in my guest bedroom, so my mother in law doesn't come to visit often. On the other hand, my mother in law lives thousands of miles from me and I'm a bit of a dick to her, so I'm probably wrong in thinking the uncomfortable bed trick works.

The correct way of determining whether a remedy works is through the scientific method, which has nothing to do with "the man" or the influence of pharmaceutical companies.

If you think rainbows can treat a specific type of cancer, you start by treating some patients with real rainbows, and some patients with a synthetic refracted light substitute. You don't know which is which, so you can't tip off the patients and allow the placebo effect to kick in.

After the full course of treatment, you examine the patients to see whether any of them benefited from the treatment. If both groups of patients, those treated with real rainbows and those treated with the substitute, had similar responses, rainbows are not an effective treatment for cancer.

If, on the other hand, the people treated with real rainbows show a better rate of recovery than those who weren't treated with rainbows, we can be reasonably confident that rainbows deserve a closer look as potential cancer treatment.

At this point, the pharmaceutical companies will be all over rainbows, seeking to extract the active ingredient that's helping the cancer patients. This is why folk remedies and alternative treatments do not work. If they did, any of thousands of research facilities would be rushing to extract, refine and patent the treatment. Researchers at these facilities, and tens of thousands of academics all over the world, would be getting articles published in the top medical journals.

tl;dr: If it worked, it can be proven to work, beyond argument, and will no longer be "alternative".