On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 11:47:08AM -0000, Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
Some doctors with education in scientific medicine are quacks. The discipline itself, however, isn't quackery. Homeopathy, on the other hand, is pseudo-medicine. Everyone who practices homeopathy is a quack while she's doing it, in the sense that she is providing medicine that doesn't work.
I think we should avoid calling any person a quack. We can and should refer to acts of quackery, or to particular disproven treatments as quack treatments, but it seems unnecessarily inflammatory to label persons like that. (Likewise, we should say that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were found to have told lies -- not that they "are liars". The former comes across as a flat statement of fact; the latter is a character smear.)
(A little [[E-Prime]] can go a long way.)
I keep coming back to homeopathy because it is probably the pseudo-medicine discipline with the greatest mainstream popularity. It even has some degree of official recognition in some countries. And yet it has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt not to work.
The aspect of it that I really find interesting is how water is only supposed to "remember" the substances the homeopath wishes it to -- even though all the water in the world could be considered to contain a homeopathic dilution of dinosaur pee. :)
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 am arguing that the term is misleading for the articles that category currently holds (I won't repeat my argument here, see my earlier posts). I suggest we replace it with "Pseudo-medicine" and will do so myself if objections are not raised.
If we're taking "quackery" (or "pseudo-medicine") to mean remedies that have been demonstrated to _not_ work, then we still need a place to put remedies that are unproven either way, and ones which are too broad to categorize clearly as working or not-working as a whole.
Take herbal medicine, for instance. It's pretty well established that some herbs do have pharmacologically active ingredients which are effective for the purposes those herbs are traditionally recommended. However, there's also an awful lot of sheer nonsense about herbs. Large portions of the practice can't accurately be classed as "pseudoscience" since practitioners don't imitate science.
Or take massage. There are certainly pseudoscientific and pseudomedical claims made about some forms of massage, such as reflexology -- which holds that massaging specific areas of your feet can cure afflictions of specific parts of the rest of your body. But massage is also recognized as part of physical therapy. As a whole subject, where does massage belong w.r.t. medicine? The category "complementary medicine" seems to me to fit perfectly.