How do you distinguish between physical pain and non-physical pain?

I have been able to get some help from alternative medicine (which I was able to verify with quite a bit of certainty through experimentation) after going to doctors let me down, but I also got some seemingly useless recommendations from the same person (which, through experimentation, didn't seem to do a damn thing).

I will say that I think that in general people are more likely to look for answers outside of what is generally considered to be accepted by related scientific communities if they have had some success doing so in the past.  That is to say, if person A tries method X at the advice of person B, and method X proves to be useful, person A is more likely to accept method Y from person B.  Of course, there are also more skeptical people who would apply the same critical scrutiny towards anything they try, but such critical scrutiny is not really required to be successful at using method X if it genuinely works.  So, my experience is that it can be worth trying alternative medicine, but don't assume that there's is or is not any validity to it.  Frankly, though, there are plenty of practices in modern medicine (doctors, drugs) that I find to be misguided at best and outright stupid at worst.

As an aside, how do you know that they're not right about the aliens and auras you mentioned?  Do you know what their beliefs are based on?  Mind you, I'm not claiming that those beliefs are true... I'm just wondering if you have a good reason to dismiss them.