On 6/28/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is> wrote:
I got my definition of quack medicine from
Webster's.
OK, I could very well be wrong. May I ask, is it the only meaning of
the word mentioned, or the main one? Someone else who has a good book
to check? Words often have several meanings... the word is often used
as an insult, carrying negative connotations. On that I hope we can
agree.
During the course in oncology, our teachers told us that many of their
patients also sought for some alternative method of various kinds.
They were not at all against it - they said the alternative people
gave the patients something they badly needed, both for better
prognosis and for quality of life - often not a very long period of
time. That thing the alt.med. stuff can give in that situation, is
hope...
Our medical disclaimer notwithstanding I believe
Wikipedia
should do its darndest to provide people with accurate
information on medical subjects. This includes making a
clear distinction between quackery/alternative medicine
and useful medical care.
Then is the question if categorisation should be used for this
purpose, or not - as Fastfission pointed out from the very start of
the discussion. You said yourself
Agreed. If someone reads an article on, say,
homeopathy and only realizes when she sees the
categories at the bottom that the thing doesn't
work then there's something wrong with the article
and I still can not see that you have explained wherein the usefulness
of this particular category lies.It looks to me that you actuallly
want to use it for this very purpose - to warn the readers i.e. you
decide what people should be warned of. Maybe I want to warn people
for religion - can I create [[Category:Unscientific supernatural
beliefs]] and put [[Christianity]] in it? Or should the method be that
we decide whether or not the article is NPOV, and if not label it with
the {{NPOV}}-tag?
/Habj