Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
And in the end, maybe what it comes down to is: Categories should not serve as "warning" flags. They are meant to just be taxonomic devices.
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 (incidentally I think [[homeopathy]] makes the "doesn't work" part fairly clear as it is).
The degree of doubt that there might be about homeopathy does indeed belong in the article on the topic. We are, of course, in no position to make a final determination that it either works or doesn't work. Either position would be pseudoscientific. We can establish that a dominant segment of mainstream science believes that it doesn't work. Once that point has been established there is no need to revisit the issue ad nauseam. If the major premise is questionable than so too are any ideas derived from it.
As for the "alternative medicine" category then I suppose "medicine that has not been proven to work" or some such would be more accurate. I for one would actually prefer "quack medicine" since "alternative" has some undeserved positive connotations and implies that quackery is somehow a viable alternative to actual medicine.
"Alternative medicine" is excellent as an NPOV category without introducing a needlessly pejorative term like "quack". "Not proven to work" within the rules of mainstream science is already implicit in the term "alternative". The concepts "not proven to work" and "proven not to work" are very different, and quackery would have more kinship with the latter. I can just as easily see that "quack medicine" has undeserved negative connotations, while "alternative" adequately warns the user to proceed at his own risk. The credibility of the various practices that come under this heading is wildly variable, and some may indeed qualify as quackery, but certainly not all.
Ec