The other is effective treatment. You can have effective treatments without good theories. The human body is incredibly complicated, and scientists don't understand the details very well at all. However, if you give some people a chemical and some symptom they have goes away and their life is better (whereas placebo controls don't) then it's an effective medicine and well worthwhile. (Yes, corruption from big pharma in the testing is a problem, but not an insurmountable one).

I have no problem with "it works." I only have a problem with claiming scientific status (which "it works" is not) and with the support by official channels which is directly derived from that claim. I have even said, many times, (though not much on GC,) that as a society we are too harsh with alternative and unorthodox disciplines or theories which don't fit or contradict mainstream views. (Like Dissident, although for me it is not an ideologically directly relevant issue as it is for him.)

Things don't have to have a known organic basis to be subject of valid scientific inquiry. If you look at something like human visual perception and things that come readily to mind like optical illusions, they can be studied very reliably without having any idea what brain processes are involved. All they are measuring is what people say they see.

But the moment you say that seeing a certain optical illusion is healthy and not seeing it is not (or the reverse) you are no longer making science, but value judgments and social control masquerading as science.

It is at this point that psychiatry doesn't pass the test.