"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.

It's very hard to prove something doesn't ever work under any conditions. On the other hand most popular "alternative medicine" stuff *has* been put to scientific tests and *failed*. When tested in properly controlled double blind scientific studies (such as any new medicine is subjected to) homeopathy has failed. More than once.

Homeopaths alternatively point to poorly conducted studies that seemed to show some efficacy and, more usually, anecdotal evidence. Sometimes they like to imply that their craft has never been tested scientifically and that scientific validation is just around the corner. Needless to say, that is not the case.

This is, I think, what many people think of when they hear about "alternative medicine" - something new that hasn't been properly tested but just might work. That's the impression the quacks like to give (often in good faith, no doubt) but it's wrong. Most of this has been tested and failed long ago. That's why it's accurate to call it quackery and somewhat misleading to call it alternative medicine.

"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?

Certainly. The homeopaths don't even really deny the fact. Their idea is that the pure water they sell has some magical properties. They don't usually deny that chemically it's pure water.

James Randi (http://www.randi.org) offers his million dollar price to anyone who has a method for distinguishing between homeopathic water and normal water.

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.

I may be a parrot but I'm a fairly well informed one :)

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.

The overwhelming majority of what quacks (and other well-meaning people) like to call alternative medicine is quackery. Sometimes the term is defined so broadly as to include massage. This is a further attempt to confuse the issue since massage has very little in common with, for example, homeopathy.

To sum up the case against homeopathy:

1. Theory developed in the infancy of modern medicine. 2. No plausible mechanism by which it could work. 3. Proper scientific studies fail to show any efficacy. 4. No-one has come up with a method to distinguish between normal water and homeopathic water. 5. It's sold for profit to many people around the world, some of them sick and desperate.

What more could you possibly want in order to classify something as quackery?

The degree of doubt that there might be about homeopathy does indeed belong in the article on the topic.

Our article on [[Holocaust denial]] is in the [[Category:Pseudohistory]]. That term sounds pretty derisive to me. Does the "degree of doubt that there might be" on the occurrence of the Holocaust deserve a prominent place and a sympathetic representation in any articles related to it?

(I'm sorry for breaking Godwin's law. I honestly tried to come up with another well known example of pseudohistory. I tried the Apollo hoax theory but for some reason the relevant article isn't in the pseudohistory category. Nothing in that category is as well known as [[Holocaust denial]].

To be absolutely clear I'm not suggesting that any member of this list is a Holocaust denier or that the Holocaust is somehow comparable to homeopathy or other types of quackery.)

My opinion is that [[Homeopathy]] belongs both in [[Category:Pseudoscience]] and in [[Category:Quackery]]. If there is a consensus that it doesn't I will of course defer to it.

I'm willing to discuss other members of the alternative medicine category on their individual merits for classification as quackery.

Regards, Haukur