On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Haukur �orgeirsson wrote:
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.
I may well be mistaken. I'm not a native English speaker and often miss fine distinctions in meaning.
Haukur, I think you are missing an important distinction here between the 2 English words.
On the one hand, "Pseudo-science" embraces more than just fakery that is being passed off as medicine. Other examples of subjects that I think would be fairly categorized as pseudo-science would include Ley lines, the teleological theory of cultural evolution, the theories of Immanuel Velekovsky, & as someone mentioned upthread ghosts. I guess you could say that it is any hypothesis that cannot be proven experimentally, but the least controversial examples are the ones that _have_ been disproven -- yet still have their true believers.
On the other hand, "quackery" is more properly applied to medicine that either does not work, or is harmful. One can graduate from a mainstream, accredited medical school, receive a medical degree, & even be board-certified -- & yet still be a quack. This is the case of a local physician here in Oregon, whose infamy is of more than local interest, since he is wanted in Australia for numerous counts of malpractice.
[snip]
I still think that "Alternative medicine" is misleading, has undeserved positive connotations and does not represent a NPOV.
I'm not entirely sure I know what to say in response to that. We all have erroneous preconceptions, many of which are invisible to ourselves until the moment comes & we see the mistake. Other times, only one individual is correct & the majority is wrong, & we only learn the truth much, much later.
But if it really doesn't hurt anything if we call it "Alternative medicine", & creates a bit of WikiLove to do so, then shouldn't we accept the term & move on to other things? I see that we have 5 candidates for the Wikimedia Foundation who are all well qualified, but we can only elect two: isn't that problem worth at least as many posts as this one?
Geoff