Ray Saintonge (saintonge(a)telus.net) [050629 05:01]:
"Falsely presented" is a point that would
need to be proven. Do you
have evidence that homeopathic medicines are not curative, or that they
are just water?
Er, yes. To both. The stuff consistently fails as medicine in double-blind
tests, and it tests as just water.
I do think the sincerity of the practitioners (or difficulty with joined-up
thinking) makes them different to knowing quacks.
(But it still REALLY pisses me off when I see a shelf full of £4 jars of
water in Boots whose labels imply they have any healing effects
whatsoever. Even if the stuff isn't actually harmful other than to the
wallet.)
That may very well be the case, but I would not be
prepared to jump to that conclusion. Making definitive statements about
these practices requires more than parroting the opinions of their
opponents.
The 10,000-foot view of NPOV shouldn't preclude calling this stuff
pseudoscience.
>If you want to make a distinction between
alternative medicine
>and quackery would you object if I moved [[homeopathy]] to the
>quackery category?
I would.
Me too. That's a really hard-to-defend category except for proven frauds.
- d.