Prejudice, science, etc.

[Tenet Nosce]

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.

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.

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.

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" says 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.

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.

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. 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.

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. Western doctors are prescribing based on anecdotal evidence and unproven therapies, just like everybody else.

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.