Prejudice, science, etc.

[zenmaster]

That's less interesting. What's more interesting is that we are willing to fabricate or to ignore information merely to reinforce our existing prejudices.

Being a Johnny-come-lately to this thread, I'm not privy to where or when this thread was broken off. But I'm gonna throw my two pennies in the mix anyway.

zenmaster- What you say here is definitely true. However I would point out that it is just as true for many scientists, especially those of the "rational materialist skeptic" type who hide behind the aegis of "SCIENCE" when "debunking" anything that does not fit with their worldview.

Well, this is certainly true and the skeptical inside-the-box, reductionistic mentality viewpoint is frequently used by many as evidence of the lack of effectiveness of science itself (especially by those which have recently left that meme) However, the thing to understand is that the scientific method does not so constrain in the least according to worldview or rational development for that matter.

Under the purview of my profession, which is natural medicine, there is certainly all manner of woo-woo, psuedoscience, and downright ridiculous claims being made by various practitioners of natural medicine.

I am very familiar with the profession of natural medicine.

Yet for every one of these woo-types there appears to be one of these skeptic-types who pound the drum of "show me the evidence" even when they know good darn well that there are many things for which there will never be a double-blind placebo-controlled study.

Diet is one of those things that can never be rigorously controlled in a study. Many nutritional claims being made come from observing that pathway X requires cofactor Y in order to function. Thus, it stands to reason that food or supplement Z, which contains cofactor Y, can help to support malfunctions of pathway X. Can we prove it in the most rigorous sense? No. But does that mean we should refrain from making any sort of claim, whatsoever? I don't think so.

That's true, but there should be some type of accountability for the sake of the trusting patient/client. Without formal regulations, the burden is on the healthcare practitioner to provide appropriate advice and treatment, and also to dedicate themselves to continued learning about how to heal.

Another area which gets a lot of heat is acupuncture. Since the whole premise of acupuncture is the existence of many interconnected points along energy meridian pathways, it is impossible to truly control an experiment comparing acupuncture points A, B and C to D, E, and F. They are all connected. Therefore even using the "wrong" acupuncture points is going to have some kind of effect.

If the definition of "pseudoscience" means that anything which "cannot be reliably tested" is pseudoscientific, then yes, acupuncture is a pseudoscience. But does that mean it is completely bereft of value as a healing modality? No, it doesn't.

When it comes right down to it, pseudoscience is about making scientific claims without adequately describing or expressing the underlying principles. Some idea may seem to have the potential to solve some problem, but scientifically that means literally nothing without a proper treatment. While it is a difficult thing for one to write a proper science paper, it's an extremely easy thing for one to make a fantastic claim or to cry conspiracy.

And this is where I think many people get frustrated which science. There is this pervasive attitude in many scientific circles where anything "pseudoscientific" is met with derision, as if it isn't even worth our consideration, and that anybody who is interested in "pseudoscience" must therefore be an idiot, a quack, or both.

"pseudoscience" to me (and I would say most working scientists) is not about something which has not yet been addressed by science or given a scientific treatment, it's about the manner in which claims are made. In order to give their alternative ideas credibility or authority people will often hijack some established concept of science (which their intuition vaguely suggests is somehow associated with their work) and ride with it. With art you can glue pieces together like that, with science you simply can't.

What is worse, when it comes to Western medicine, there is a large amount of Wizard of Oz "man behind the curtain" effect where things are presented to the public as "hard facts backed by SCIENCE" when they are not.

For example, in my pharmacology classes, I was surprised to learn that a solid 1/3 of pharmaceutical drugs approved for treatment of certain diseases in fact have unknown mechanisms of action.

I would say that when you get down to some level, almost all have unknown mechanisms of action (protein behavior, receptor sites, etc really just know some kind of stimulus and response - we can't create these biological tissues and functions from scratch after all). Science is about creating the best models available and improving upon them, not about hiding what is unknown. If you actually bother to look at those things which seem to be "ignored" by science, it's inevitably something not amenable to research due to lack of understanding. This is regardless of what one's intuition may suggest as something which "holds great promise to all of humanity" and the number of followers of that individual.

Beyond that, MDs and DOs regularly prescribe medications for purposes which they are not approved for, and which they were never proven to work.

Which would all be fine, except for the fact that there is a blatant double-standard that is adopted by Western medicine where it is projected to the public that all these medications are "backed by hard science" when they aren't. Yet simultaneously, many doctors snub their noses at alternative treatments ostensibly for their lack of scientific support.

Many doctors are pragmatic when it comes to how to treat certain conditions and do not snub their noses at alternative treatments. There are biases in both professions, especially when one or the other course of treatment is not generally known to be effective or, the reverse, when it has been shown to be effective.

The truth is that a very large chunk of Western medicine has no more scientific support than many of the "pseudoscientific" approaches which many doctors are so quick to attack.

The body is one of those areas which has been given a lot of attention to scientific study, but being a 2D system with time/space components, is extremely difficult to model. I agree that the shortcomings of western medicine are directly related to the lack of scientific understanding of the body.

So I guess my point is that you are right. But let us all be clear that many scientists are just as guilty as prejudice and confirmation bias as everybody else. Only, being scientists, it is worse when they do it because they should ostensibly know better. Which means that, either something is going horribly wrong in the educational process of these scientists, or that they are being deliberately disingenuous.

Great thing is that, for now anyway, you can simply go to another doctor.