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from the better-living-through-solopsism dept.
Papas Fritas writes:
Michael Schulson writes that if you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you can drive hundreds of miles to the Creation Museum in Kentucky but that America's greatest shrine to pseudoscience, the Whole Foods Market, is only a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites. For example the homeopathy section at Whole Foods has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.
"You can buy chocolate with "a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system," and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which "builds better blood." There's cereal with the kind of ingredients that are "made in a kitchen-not in a lab," and tea designed to heal the human heart," writes Schulson. "Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics-live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. "This is bullshit," she said, and went off to buy some vegetables."
According to Schulson the total lack of outrage over Whole Foods' existence, and by the total saturation of outrage over the Creation Museum, makes it clear that strict scientific accuracy in the public sphere isn't quite as important to many of us as we might believe. "The moral is not that we should all boycott Whole Foods. It's that whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:19PM
Also if she had a viral infection there is not a whole lot he can do. However, some people *insist* they have some bottle of pills. So doctors prescribe sugar pills and give it a technical name. If they come back saying the pills are not working 'let me prescribe the stronger version' which is just the same thing but a different color and a different technical name.
Placebo has been shown to help slightly in some specific cases. But not enough to help usually.
The doctor should have been more up front with her though and said 'it is a viral infection there is not a lot I can do it typically takes about 4 weeks to clear if you get xyz symptoms come talk to me'.
The usual 'cure' for tonsillitis is to cut the suckers out. With maybe a spray to help reduce swelling. I use the over the counter Chloraseptic works fair ok for me and takes the sting out of it. Though gargling with salt water produces the same affect.