Folk Tradition vs Clinical Trials

There is a lot of aversion to folk medicine and traditional medicine in the modern medical community. Some of this has to do with a belief that such medicine is superstitious, especially if a lack of understanding of anatomy led to theories which rely more on guesswork and outside observation than the inner structure of the body... or "worse", metaphysical/spirutal explainations of disease. But the major objection that there seems to be for all of it is the lack of clinical trials of such methods... the lack of scientific validation. Personally I think, if we step back for a moment and keep an open mind, we'll find that traditional medicine is subjected to a form of clinical trial all it's own. Traditional medicine, even if it has been codified into a book, is used by people and passed on by word of mouth, by teachers to students, for years... in some cases more years than modern medicine has been in existance. The techniques that do not work are not passed on, and lose popularity, and eventually are lost completely. They may be replaced by new techniques that may or may not work, or the system may become smaller, but the majority of techniques in popular usage after many years should be ones that have been proven, over and over again, to work well. At least, IMHO and if it works the way I think it would....