Reply #36: As you accurately point out, alternative medicine is not regulated...

[RedOnce]

therefore statitistics are not regularly compiled. However this is changing:

BBC - 25 June, 2002
The World Health Organization is to monitor the safety of traditional and alternative medicines. The move follows a number of deaths linked to their misuse. This can be down to use of the wrong medicines, or to using medicines in the wrong way. WHO experts hope to establish a global monitoring system within four years....Similar systems are already in place for conventional Western medicines.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2064808.stm

This is typical of how it has gone, a few deaths make the news and an herb or treatment is then pulled off the market and there is an outcry for regulation. For example (from the same article) "A dozen people in the US died because of problems with the Ephedra plant."

But, it would certainly take a lot of these incidents to manage to add up to the 783,936 deaths per year shown in Death by Medicine. Don't you think?