[WikiEN-l] Re: Pseudoscience category - GSPOV

Wed Jun 29 15:07:57 UTC 2005

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.

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>