Ray Saintonge (saintonge@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.