[vdaniuk]

>both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once

On the other hand, non-medicine (alternative medicine) and non-science (pseudoscience) have been spectacularly right more than once. That's the point. Agree with empathy angle and need for emotional arguments, though.

[jacquesm]

Can you give some examples of what you're thinking of here?

[_eyc9]

My guess is that this demographic would tend to categorize traditional Chinese medicine as being pseudoscience – if you agree, here's an example from within that system:

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a Youyou Tu, a Chinese pharmacologist who identified powerful antimalarial compounds in a traditional Chinese medical formula that has been used for centuries to treat Malaria:

> Youyou Tu in China turned to traditional herbal medicine to tackle the challenge of developing novel Malaria therapies. From a large-scale screen of herbal remedies in Malaria-infected animals, an extract from the plant Artemisia annua emerged as an interesting candidate. However, the results were inconsistent, so Tu revisited the ancient literature and discovered clues that guided her in her quest to successfully extract the active component from Artemisia annua. Tu was the first to show that this component, later called Artemisinin, was highly effective against the Malaria parasite, both in infected animals and in humans (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/20...).

There are plenty of other examples if you are curious and inclined to do the research.

As an aside, I would argue that the type of empiricism within this system of medicine is indeed a type of science (cataloguing pharmacological agents for thousands of years and recording their effects in the treatment of myriad medical conditions), but it probably has little to no examples of the modern day notion of randomized clinical trials.

[vdaniuk]

Medicine is usually right and only sometimes wrong, but alternative medicine is usually wrong and only sometimes right. The fact that medicine can be spectacularly or trivially wrong doesn't provide any inputs for change of personal healthcare strategy.

[jacquesm]

I understand what you wrote. I was asking for specific examples.