7 Ways Alternative Medicine Tricks You Into Thinking It Works
1. It Makes Itself Untouchable By Going 'Beyond Science'
An entire industry built around practices that have either been proven to not be able to treat illness or have no evidence supporting they can treat illness is problematic, to say the least. There is no evidence for the mystic "Qi" or Meridian lines of acupuncture, no support for the claims that adjusting your spine can help cure diabetes and there's no evidence that tiny bottles of magic flower booze can do anything – not even get you drunk at a reasonable price.
The alternative medicine industry creates problems, the largest of all being the false dichotomy that there is an alternative to medicine – alternative medicine doesn't really exist, there are medical treatments and practices that have supporting evidence and then there's everything else. If a practice that was once in the sphere of alternative medicine is proven effective at treating illness – it would cease to be an alternative to medicine and become medicine! Fancy that.
Unfortunately, correcting the misconceptions and discussing the problems created by the alternative medicine industry using science isn't going to hold weight with someone who either doesn't value it or doesn't understand it. Amazingly those same people who distrust medicine will have no issues putting untested concoctions in their mouths on the reliance and trust of people who have never seen the inside of the lecture hall, never opened a textbook and think the first link in Google equates to "research".
We live in a society which silences criticism with cries of "But if that's what they believe, who are we to interfere?" Beliefs don't have a place in evidenced-based medicine and they shouldn't be used as guidance when it comes to a person's health. Evidence-based medicine deals in fact, not mysticism and definitely not fluffy sounding supernatural pseudoscience because here's the thing – just because you really want something to be true, doesn't make it so.
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