Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
One can graduate from a mainstream, accredited medical school, receive a medical degree, & even be board-certified -- & yet still be a quack.
I fully agree.
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 have not had occasion to use them, but If I look at the prices of homeopathic medicines I find them rather modest. Compare that with the prices of heavily patented medicines sold by major pharmaceutical companies. The improved efficacy of some of these is often only incremental over that of the drug whose patent has expired. Some of these producers are quite happy to withhold medicines from those who can't pay. It isn't the homeopaths who are failing to send AIDS drugs to Africa, or are using their patent powers to restrict domestic African production of these drugs.
If indeed homeopathic medicine doesn't work as you allege, there is at least no recent claims of it doing direct harm. (Direct harm involves far more than any allegation of negligence for failing to send the victims to a "real" doctor.) The recent problems over Vioxx/Celebrex did not come from the homeopathic community
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.
I suspect that chiropractic is more popular, but that could vary from one place to the next. Your use of "beyond reasonable doubt" is too categorical. The popularity of homeopathy alone is not be enough to establish that the medicines work, but it is a clear expression of reasonable doubt.
Healing involves more than medicines that produce the desired chemical results. It can involve more than the syllogistic thinking that has become so commonplace in the Western World ever since Aristotle.
Attitude and hope are also factors in healing. I do not believe in God, but can still recognize the value of prayer to healing. Shamans had a vital role in their own societies, even if their medicine bags contained nothing but innocuous trinkets.
When you show a man the wonders of modern medicine you are showing him that hope exists. When you demonstrate that those wonders are beyond his means, you have turned modern medicine into the offerings of a latter-day Pandora. Maybe he was better off with his vials of sterile water.
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.
Such a move would be objectionable POV pushing.
Ec