[derleth]

> I'd like to say we've become empirical enough about what practices we place belief in that we could just treat all cases of quackery as malicious fraud - but the very prevalence of such issues tends to support the opposite conclusion.

There are enough cognitive biases I can't support this conclusion. Confirmation bias alone accounts for a lot of this crap, I'm sure.

Fundamentally, though, there's a big difference between crap we know doesn't and can't work, like homeopathy, and therapies that are in the pipeline and might be accepted or rejected on their merits.

Homeopathy has had its turn and it failed. That goes for everything else I called quackery. Don't confuse that with something we haven't tried yet.

[grueful]

Failed according to you, me, and the prevailing majority of the medical community isn't equivalent to failed in the minds of the overwhelming majority of the public. The segment which believes or doesn't strongly disbelieve things like homeopathy is manifestly non-negligible.

Anti-vax nuts wouldn't be the public health threat that they are if there were two of them in a pool of hundreds of millions. The segment acting on these beliefs is manifestly large enough to enable outbreaks of diseases we otherwise could suppress almost totally.

[stfu]

For the sake of the argument let me try to defend Homeopathy for a moment. Sure, people can bash it all day long and it might have very little "measurable" effects. But as long as people believe in it, I expect that it leads to the same results as placebo effects.

Placebo effects have been proven in many cases extremely strong and a main obstacle for the pharmaceutic industry to prove the statistical significance of their products. And as long as people get better, even if it is just by the believe in the effect, it is in my view a legitimate approach.

[derleth]

> And as long as people get better, even if it is just by the believe in the effect, it is in my view a legitimate approach.

So fraud isn't really fraud if people are going to get better anyway?

[stfu]

If the believe in an illusion makes the symptoms improve I think it is completely legitimate. Maybe the same would have been achieved by a psychologist sitting down with them for a few sessions. But if the same result can be achieved by a placebo pill, I am all for it. Ultimately I see the goal of medicine to improve the conditions of the patient and if simple psychological triggers like placebo-similar medicine can achieve this, I am all for it.

[derleth]

> The segment which believes or doesn't strongly disbelieve things like homeopathy is manifestly non-negligible.

It doesn't matter. Science doesn't work by popular acclaim.