[_ywdj]

The giveaway on bias is the string "lacks biological plausibility AND". It would be more defensible if the "AND" was instead an "OR".

Plenty of approaches practiced by "alternative" medicine practitioners are biologically plausible, but haven't been tested in randomized controlled trials, because nobody has the incentive or the resources needed to conduct one. (Trials that require many millions of dollars and several years to conduct only happen if a multi-billion dollar return is likely, or if there is a clear and achievable political incentive.)

The most significant category I'm familiar with is emotion/stress-relief-based approaches for treating non-lethal but chronic and debilitating pain/fatigue/inflammatory/autoimmune conditions.

In other discussions here on this site, when I've bothered to fully articulate the basis for the notion that emotional issues and stress can cause these physiological illness, I've found the response to be something like "yeah of course, that's uncontroversial".

And sure, any good mainstream doctor, on recognising their patient is suffering a stress-related illness, will helpfully suggest reducing stress.

But if the patient wants a comprehensive program that can identify and heal all the stress/trauma/held emotion that is keeping them in chronic illness and pain, practitioners that offer this are generally of the kind that is categorised as "alternative" – or, what Wikipedia defines, unconditionally, as "biologically implausible".

Another example is naturopathy, which seeks to improve patients' health mostly through the adoption of an optimal diet and nutrition program. Not much is more biologically plausible than this, but, hey, Wikipedia knows best.

My basis for knowledge on this is over a decade researching and experimenting with approaches to overcome my own chronic illness, finding that those based on emotion and nutrition were the most effective, and finding material from highly-credentialed scientists explaining down to the fundamentals of cell biology, why it is plausible.

As a result, whilst I still turn to Wikipedia routinely as an info source for general topics, I've come to regard it as largely useless for medical topics that veer even slightly from the middle of the road.

[meowface]

Great answer and great example of how small changes in framing and wording can have a huge impact. Neutrality is very hard. If the majority of people writing on a certain topic, or approving the writing, hold a certain view, it's very hard for that view to not leak into the writing in some way.

[Cpoll]

> Another example is naturopathy, which seeks to improve patients' health mostly through the adoption of an optimal diet and nutrition program. Not much is more biologically plausible than this, but, hey, Wikipedia knows best.

That description sounds a bit biased itself. You're describing a dietician, but the Naturopathy umbrella (and practicioners) also covers unproven herbal remedies, homeopathy, acupuncture, belief in 'vital energy,' etc.

[_ywdj]

Yep, I expected that kind of response, and yep it’s somewhat valid but doesn’t counter my central point.

The wording of the Wikipedia article is that anything considered “alternative medicine” is by-definition “biologically implausible”.

But plenty of what is central to what naturopaths do - i.e., nutrition - is plainly biologically plausible. That naturopaths approach nutrition differently to mainstream dieticians doesn’t make the approach by-definition “implausible”. And the “unproven” herbal remedies they may use are not “implausible” (herbs are made up of molecules and thus can quite obviously influence physiology).

“Unproven” and “implausible” are not the same thing; that’s my central point.

If some naturopaths also practice homeopathy, that doesn’t change the biological plausibility of the nutritional aspect, which in my experience, is the vast majority of the practice (at least here in Australia).

For what it’s worth, your assertion that naturopathy is an umbrella term for those other modalities isn’t correct. Sure, some of them are also homeopaths, but not the majority in my experience. And of course acupuncture is from Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is a separate system again.

Speaking of which, in just the past few years we’ve seen Nobel Prize awarded to a Chinese researcher for “discovering” artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin in the herb sweet wormwood, which had long been used as a malaria remedy. She found this by scouring 1600-year-old Chinese medical texts.

So by Wikipedia’s definition, this remedy was “biologically implausible” right up until the moment someone completed Nobel Prize-winning research to suddenly make it plausible.

Fabulous logic. How lucky the researcher hadn’t read Wikipedia beforehand and learned her proposed research was implausible.