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: 4, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Thursday March 13 2014, @02:25PM
"Homeopathy" has a very specific meaning, which your examples don't address. No one's arguing that herbal medicine as a whole is necessarily quackery (well, I don't think they are, anyway, and if they are then they're wrong) but specifically that homeopathy is quackery by its very nature.
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(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Thursday March 13 2014, @03:22PM
I'll comment on this one though there were a couple after that said simple. I understand your point. I did confuse homeopathy with the utilization of natural ingredients in medications. After reading about it I found that i also had a skeptical eye towards that specific use of natural elements. That is sad really for I have and do see the benefits of using more natural ingredients in managing some health issues.
So I stand on my thoughts that natural products to help some medical conditions is not a bad thing, blind faith in any specific health system is bad.
The more things change, the more they look the same