But the anti-new age backlash can be a bit like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (in most cases not, but sometimes

We’ve seen it before, for example, with lucid dreaming, where scientists in the 1960s vehemently denied that such a phenomenon occurred, mostly due to its association with hippies and spiritual thinkers.

But a scientific hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis–Just as Richard Feynman gave parapsychology the benefit of the doubt and went to experience for himself if Uri Geller could bend spoons with his mind (this was notoriously not replicated in front of Feynman). A scientific hypotheses should be treated on merits of science regardless of its fanatical association.

Another example is this whole vaccine movement. The motives and agendas behind the movement seem fairly characteristic of pseudoscience, but the hypothesis that a variable X (in this case, vaccination) could have a statistical association with outcome Y (in this case, autism) is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that can be tested on scientific merit. I don’t really follow the ordeal, nor care about it, so I don’t know if peer-reviewed studies have been published on the matter. I’m assuming they have, and I’d guess the results were negative.

In the case of alternative medicine, I’m assuming a lot of it is pseudoscience. I’m sure a lot of it is quackery. I’m sure a lot of it talks about “quantum mechanics” and “energy fields” and “waves”. But let’s not force a dichotomy.

There’s plenty of pseudoscience in “real” medicine as well. Dig into the medical literature. The most notorious is the Ancel Keys study, which gave rise to the “fat is bad” meme. He removed outliers that really weren’t outliers just so he could publish a weak correlation between fat intake and heart disease. The ensuing lipid hypothesis continues to be dogmatically accepted by most doctors, despite the fact that it’s never been proven. I could go on, but I don’t want to write a book here.

I think you get my point.

That’s where the ‘But It’s Natural’ brigade press the emotion buttons, because they don’t have facts and they can’t afford to admit it.

Alternative medicine proponents call things “natural” for marketing purposes and to set up the above mentioned false dichotomy. Potential patients are lead to believe that because it has that green label on it, whatever is inside must be better for you than any of those scary sounding chemicals made in pharmacology labs.