On 6/28/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson haukurth@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