> You claim that people hear and believe bullshit. That itself is a symptom; mainstream medicine has been unable to provide adecuate healthcare services, so the quacks come in and fill in the gap. Your chosen side is very eager to throw accusations of malfeasance and stupidity, but in many cases it would be more accurate to say that people is doing a (perhaps misguided) attempt to deal with hard realities with limited options.
I fully believe that many of the people promoting and peddling treatments that don't work honestly believe that they do work. Nonetheless, if the treatment is worthless, it's still bullshit.
The problem isn't that modern medicine provides insufficient services. It's that modern medicine is fundamentally unable to cure or even treat many conditions, because we simply lack the knowledge. "Alternative medicine" rushes to fill the gaps because people desperately want something. So they buy into vitamins to cure cancer and homeopathy to treat virtually everything but in the absence of evidence of efficacy, these are just snake oil.
There's also carryover effect where some people assume that if medicine can't cure everything, then they have to doubt it's effectiveness for even the things it can cure. People also like to believe that they have secret knowledge. People enjoy imagining that they know things that even the doctors don't know. Plus conspiracies of knowledge suppression etc.
> True Science should have no business taking sides on what ultimately ends up being comercial disputes; theirs is to look at Nature and figure out how it works.
I'm not sure what you mean. Science is on the side of proof. Any "alternative" medicines that have proven effectiveness aren't alternative any more.
> I am obviously engaged in the Alt-med scene, and I can tell you by personal experience that it does work well enough.
Personal experience just isn't very meaningful. There are two many confounding factors and biases involved. You can find people who swear by the effectiveness of pretty much anything.
What matters is verifiability. The ability and willingness to put medicines through double blind studies is what separates medicine from alternative medicine.
> The problem is that, being a low status subject, the ranks of its practicioners are filled with anti-intellectual types; and yes, this means there're lots of bullshit being peddled out there, and even the stuff that seems to work does probably work according to principles that are unknow to the people that use them. And it is an herculean taks just trying to figure out what's complete bonkers and what's real phenomena waiting to have an actual explanation.
The problem is that its ranks are filled with people who don't practice actual medicine.
Ok, I will make one last comment and let this discussion to rest.
It is curious you mention Snake Oil. There was a post a few days ago on HN, reporting that Science has found actual biochemicals in oil of some snakes that may be useful in modern health care.
Snake oil was a well known remedy in Chinese pharmacopea, but unfortunatelly is was introduced to America by an unscroupulus peddler and bigot, who thought that as long as it was a con anyways, it did not matter what kind of oil he would peddle.
Then, the name of a genuine prescientific remedy ended up being the class exemplar of all fake cures out there. And the discovery of this chemicals took 200 years longer because real doctors would not dare take the status hit to even consider the possibility that it might be something real behind the quack's claims.
> And the discovery of this chemicals took 200 years longer because real doctors would not dare take the status hit to even consider the possibility that it might be something real behind the quack's claims.
And the alternative is what precisely? For doctors to not tell people when the "medicine" they're using is a worthless scam?
I fully believe that many of the people promoting and peddling treatments that don't work honestly believe that they do work. Nonetheless, if the treatment is worthless, it's still bullshit.
The problem isn't that modern medicine provides insufficient services. It's that modern medicine is fundamentally unable to cure or even treat many conditions, because we simply lack the knowledge. "Alternative medicine" rushes to fill the gaps because people desperately want something. So they buy into vitamins to cure cancer and homeopathy to treat virtually everything but in the absence of evidence of efficacy, these are just snake oil.
There's also carryover effect where some people assume that if medicine can't cure everything, then they have to doubt it's effectiveness for even the things it can cure. People also like to believe that they have secret knowledge. People enjoy imagining that they know things that even the doctors don't know. Plus conspiracies of knowledge suppression etc.
> True Science should have no business taking sides on what ultimately ends up being comercial disputes; theirs is to look at Nature and figure out how it works.
I'm not sure what you mean. Science is on the side of proof. Any "alternative" medicines that have proven effectiveness aren't alternative any more.
> I am obviously engaged in the Alt-med scene, and I can tell you by personal experience that it does work well enough.
Personal experience just isn't very meaningful. There are two many confounding factors and biases involved. You can find people who swear by the effectiveness of pretty much anything.
What matters is verifiability. The ability and willingness to put medicines through double blind studies is what separates medicine from alternative medicine.
> The problem is that, being a low status subject, the ranks of its practicioners are filled with anti-intellectual types; and yes, this means there're lots of bullshit being peddled out there, and even the stuff that seems to work does probably work according to principles that are unknow to the people that use them. And it is an herculean taks just trying to figure out what's complete bonkers and what's real phenomena waiting to have an actual explanation.
The problem is that its ranks are filled with people who don't practice actual medicine.