Alt med still making me sick | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine is an excellent post. But I feel it is missing on a few points….

Well, your fallacy here Phil is to assume that Chiropractic is an alternative medicine (it is not), it’s pretty much a proven practice. It’s just a shame that the occasional quack has seen fit to ruin Chirpractic for the skeptical by making ridiculous, outrageous claims. That does not, however, discount the positive effects of Chiropractic.

Damon, you seem to have missed the entire point of the case.

It was the British Chiropractic Association that was making the quack claims that were the target of Singh’s criticism, with at least the tacit approval of its members. This is not “the occasional quack”, it is one of the organisations representing the entire chiropractic profession. Additionally, you will find that many chiropractors make or have made claims about chiropractic that are similarly unsupportable.

You, as a supporter of chiropractic, should be at the forefront of those demanding that the profession be put on a firm foundation of properly-acquired evidence. Are you?

Date: 6.30pm Wednesday, 15 July
Tickets: $20 Full, $15 Conc
Venue: Seymour Theatre Center, University of Sydney.

Thanks to the doubters – see you there!

The rise of alt med IS unproven. But, like voters voting for an unproven opposition party, it’s more about the rejection of the people in power than wholesale acceptance of the option.

OK, fair enough. But make it a level playing field. New treatments introduced in the last 30 years or so have been required by law (in Europe and North America, Australia and Japan at least) to undergo trials for safety and efficacy. So, why not have the same standard for alt meds?

Trad medicine isn’t working and railing against Alt med won’t change that.

But modern medicine does work more often than not. Otherwise they would not license it. Alt med, OTOH, almost all doesn’t work. For example, homeopathy has been demonstrated in more than one controlled trial to be no better than placebo. Some herbal remedies do work (y’see, because people tested these things properly, we now know), chiropractic can help with some back problems, but things like crystal healing and so on are just so much mumbo-jumbo.

Where exactly is government (the only people with a reason AND the money to do the research) in the production of cross-comparison studies looking at the overall efficacy of alt vs. trad med, in specific areas and across populations.

Why should governments spend their taxpayers’ money carrying out trials that the alt med industry should be paying for?

There are many billions of dollars to be saved if even a few alt med proceedures are effective.

And, in the present environment, billions of dollars in undiluted profit for the alt med practitioners.

When I said:

The principal of persimony …

of course I meant “the principle of parsimony”.

This is a logical fallacy I’ve heard too many people trot out. By its very definition, the existence or nonexistence of a God or gods is something inherently beyond our ability to prove – it is something for which there is and can be no physical evidence to prove or to disprove. Disbelief is in itself belief – in that it is making a judgment without evidence. Atheism is a “belief”, because it is making a claim to know the nature of God/gods/whatever without any evidence. Logically speaking there can be no definite conclusion for or against the existence of a God or gods, so atheism is in its own way just as illogical as any other spiritual belief. So yes, atheism is a “belief”.

You are wrong.

The principal of persimony demands that we do not assume the existence of something without evidence. Belief in any deity (or anything else for which there is, by definition, no evidence) is therefore irrational. The only rational and logical position to adopt is atheism.

This isn’t a logical fallacy, it is the conclusion of a logical examination of the options.

Belief that there is no god is a different thing from belief in a god or gods. It is a belief based on experience, evidence and logic.

For instance, the universe appears to us to be and to behave exactly as we would expect it to if it had formed in some process like the big bang and had then developed according to physical laws that exist today. There is no evidence of divine tinkering anywhere. This is not proof that there is no god (after all, how can anyone ever disprove the existence of something that is defined to be incorporeal, omnipresent and omniscient?), but it is evidence that there has been no divine tinkering in the development of the universe.