Thread by @drjanaway

How to deal with pseudoscience in health: right vs wrong.

Wrong: thats charlatan bullshit and you are being manipulated.

Right: I see this is important to you and lets discuss it, and after I will support your choice. Tell me..

Alot of pseudoscience, especially in health, relies on linking superficially plausible ideas together to create a mechanism to address a need. The individual components of the mechanism may be believable, or have some romantic or mystic notion that appeals to us..

For example in homeopathy, "like treats like" has a romantic appeal, and can seem intuitive in a "test or train the system" view, and does work in vaccines (ish,) but actually has no evidence as working for most things. It is the idea that holds appeal, not evidence.

By attaching the concept to something we can all agree on "water is neutral, healthy" and burying it in such prose "alternative, natural" people hide the lie under fluffy and attractive marketing. We all like the idea of natural, but once again not all natural is good..

I.e cancer is natural, as is pneumonia, but we dont go extolling their virtues. We see plausible ideas based on romantic notions strung together to build an attractive lie. This is where the last bit becomes apparent..

The lie fulfils a need. A person is suffering, so the lie is crafted to appeal to them. To manipulate them into buying the product. They may feel better (placebo) and wrongly attribute the effect to the product.

Im okay with this generally if no harm comes to someone. But if a condition is not treated, the product becomes a barrier to treatment and the seller is taking advantage of ungoing unresolved illness.

Explaining this to someone can be tricky, because you are calling out their thinking and ideology. By presenting actual evidence and having a discussion, we help to educate, but ultimately a persons choice is their own. We gain little by insult.

I have seen much of it in my short time, and sometimes all it takes is a discussion of beliefs and rationale to find a common ground. Other times the person is fixed, and you support them in a safe way.

Providing evidence, examples and answering questions is the best we can do on a person-level. But criticism or judgement is neither helpful or necessary. A persons choice is an extension of their being and experience, i.e who they are. Remember challenging an idea can be this.

And, keep in mind, medicine gets it wrong at times. There is no perfect answer, only evidence of plausibility and efficacy. There is no benefit in arrogance around this, in the end we are trying to help ourselves and each other as we best see fit, and these do not always mirror

However, I am willing to go ham on those who do manipulate the vulnerable with shady and unproven products and ideas.

Anyway, I need to go to work. Lives to save..