From: "Jake Nelson"
<jnelson(a)soncom.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 04:29:42 -0600
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Mr-Natural-Health
There are three issues people have trouble separating: MNH's behavior,
people's dogmatic arguments over "alternative medicine" and
"scientism", and
the content of the articles about "alternative medicine".
Item 1: MNH. I think MNH is rude, insulting, insistent on pushing bias,
making statements (coming back under other names and ISPs, for one) that are
the clear mark of a troll and vandal, and generally making it obvious he
should be banned. Certainly some people's actions have provoked him, but
this is no excuse for his conduct. This is the only item that should have
been at issue on the list... and I think it rather clear.
Because of the repeated attacks that have been made on him it is not at all
clear he should be banned. The virulent attacks and their effects muddy the
situation.
Item 2: "Alternative medicine" and "scientism". I tend to only use
these
words in quotes, as they tend to both be ill-defined terms used to push a
particular side's point of view.
"Alternative medicine": I agree with snoyes's comment that if something is
accepted and proven to have some degree of efficacy, it is by definition no
longer alternative; also, there is the "alternative to what" issue.
There is a relatively clear meaning as to what alternative medicine is and
it includes the many methods such as acupucture, chiropractic (in all its
forms) herbal medicine, color therapy etc. Some of these are accepted and
used by medical doctors, some scoffed at but althernative medicine is an
umbrella term that includes them all. Their status in terms of reasearch
varies, sometimes by country, herbs, for example, are tested much more in
Germany than elsewhere.
"Western
medicine" is an equally loaded and ill-defined term.
What is meant by conventional medicine is simply what you get when you go to
a typical doctor, but more and more frequently that may include alternative
medicine.
As a point of
reference, I live in the US, and have a chronic illness (fibromyalgia) that
the majority of doctors I've seen have denied the very existence of, then
refused to believe I had, and the rare few that actually deal with it have
been unable to successfully treat (though it's better than it used to be). A
large portion of what improvement I have had has come via chiropractic
treatment, which was once called "alternative", and by some still is. (I'm
not talking about "straight chiropractic", the now-uncommon belief that
subluxation is the cause of all ills, here.) I continue to explore a great
many other measures, few of which are accepted as valid by the majority of
American MDs I know of (but this does not make them unscientific).
However,
I can't stand charlatans, which many of today's herbmongers (the vast
majority of "Dietary supplements" sold in drugstores and elsewhere, the
effects of what they're suppoded to be aside, don't even contain what they
claim to. Few are more than placebos. Such is the effect of an unregulated
industry.) and suchlike are. I do consider myself a scientist, but that
doesn't mean what many people seem to think it does... which is my next
point:
"Scientism": I constantly see this term used
as a pejorative by those who
hold beliefs they beleive to be incompatible with science. The thing is,
whenever they describe it, they describe a mindset completely unrelated to
science.
Anyone who has been in an edit war with RK knows what scientism is. For our
purposes it can be decribed operationaly as what he (and apparently a few
others) does.
I think none of this discussion truly belongs here
(and apologize for going
on as I just have, but felt it necessary), and most of it wouldn't happen at
all if people (on both sides) stopped to look at what science actually is...
"sides" are much of the problem.
No. It belongs here, on the list the purpose of which is to discuss such
issues.
Item 3: article content. I think the articles on "alternative medicine" and
such should be expanded and have more information on other views... but
progress is being made, and I expect that like all of Wikipedia's articles,
they will continue to improve over time. Further discussion on this topic
also doesn't belong on the list, but on the relevant talk pages.
-- Jake
Discussion belongs in both places. The notion that an article on one thing
should have a lot of information about another thing fails. An article on
alternative medicine is not an appropriate vehicle for a long discourse on
conventional treatment. A link will do.
Fred