But this stuff doesn’t really hurt anyone…
That statement, or many like it, are usually quick to be trotted out by people who are trying to stay on the fence about silly irrational beliefs. “Well, maybe it’s true, or maybe it’s not true, but believing in this stuff isn’t hurting anyone, so what’s the big deal?” The problem is, of course, that believing in these things, especially when it comes to health issues, can hurt someone, especially when folks forgo real treatments in favor of bullshit stuff like homeotherapy or ‘applied kinesiology’. And, as demonstrated by this case, sometimes people can even lose their jobs simply for refusing to believe in this idiocy:
Case in point: thanks to some woo, my girlfriend was fired from her job last week.
She’s a preveterinary student who had been working at a local vet clinic for the last year and a half or so. Things went pretty well at first. Then, a few months in, during a routine shift, she walked into an examination room and through the looking glass. One of the doctors, a woman educated for years in veterinary medicine and who must have a strong background in the sciences, was hunched over a poor sick dog pressing a vial of blood to his chest.
This might seem like some sort of morbid ritual to summon Hod-Canus-Sq’ctamoreth, the Ancient Tentacled God-Creature of Insanity and Domestic Dogs, but it was in fact a variant on the bullshit quackery known as “applied kinesiology.” My girlfriend was told to enter the room and take the doctor’s place in pressing the vial of dog’s blood against the ailing canine’s chest. She was then told to hold out her arm while the doctor pushed down on it.
A little further on:
The polite and reasonable way in which my girlfriend attempted to question the usefulness of these treatments did not in any way indict the doctor’s integrity or intelligence as I have here today. She merely voiced politely her skepticism about the methods. Nevertheless, things changed after that day. Her bosses, the vets, began treating her differently. They regarded her askance and turned away their suspicious eyes when she met their gaze. People became colder, more “professional” in person, while rumors started floating around behind her back. Work became a generally hostile environment for her in which each day brought new problems, new worries, new passive aggression. She would get berated for not knowing how to do something, and when she pointed out that she had never been trained to do that something though she had asked multiple times her protests fell on deaf ears (and they never did train her to do many things). Multiple times she spoke of quitting but stayed to gather more experience for her vet school application.
Then she was unceremoniously dumped. Turns out that, under the orders of the holistic woo bitch of a head doctor, her co-workers had been essentially spying on her, her every transgression had been catalogued, until they had a long list on increasingly minor and inane “issues,” including the doozy “asked the doctor a dosage question,” because it is apparently bad to make sure you’re doing your job properly. One honest mistake later and she was out on her ass.
Go and read the full article for the whole sad story, but the lesson here is pretty simple: Believe or else. Despite the complete lack of evidence behind any of these so-called ‘alternative’ treatments, despite the fact that experiment after experiment shows time after time that these things simply do not work (other than a basic placebo effect, and sometimes not even that), despite all rational evidence and thought pointing to these things being nothing more than made-up idiocy: you’re supposed to put your rational mind aside, ignore that little voice in your head that is screaming at you that maybe it’s not a good idea to give someone a sugar pill when there’s real medicine that can help them, and simply go along with this lunacy because ‘hey, it’s not hurting anyone!’
On another quick note, and while I’m on a rant… Ran across this particularly funny site while reading through the Skeptico entry on ‘The Secret’.. This particular brand of idiocy was penned, apparently, by someone deeply upset over the treatment of Oprah’s latest pet project and the flavor of the week when it comes to New (Dark) Age woo-woo, The Secret. Let me save you a few bucks and tell you for free what the writers of that book want you to shell out money for: the so-called secret is nothing but a re-hashing of that old woo-woo canard, the law of attraction, e.g. good thoughts attract good things, bad thoughts attract bad things. Yeah, I think I’ll just quote the Skeptic Dictionary entry on that particular bit of nonsense:
The law of attraction is a New (Dark) Age belief that one’s mental disposition attracts similar external circumstances and events. In other words, your mental intentions and attitudes draw people and things of like intention and attitude to yourself. On one level this is trivially true. We generally hang out with people who think like us and share our values and we avoid people who disagree with us on important matters and don’t share our values. But a moment’s reflection should reveal that this “law” is false; it’s not even truthy.
Sellers don’t attract sellers; they attract buyers, unless they’re running an MLM scheme. Lazy dreamers don’t attract lazy dreamers. They attract con artists with big smiles and lots of promises. Grieving vulnerable people don’t attract vulnerable people; they attract vultures and vampires who take advantage of their grief. If you say that grief and greed are both negative so this example supports the law of attraction, then this law is impossible to test. It’s too slippery to have any meaningful content if obvious contradictions to it are said to support it. When kindness begets not more kindness but resentment, a New (Dark) Age defender of this “law” can always claim that the kindness wasn’t genuine.
Anyway, the sad little site I mentioned before goes on and on making the typical mistakes of confusing science with faith, and therefore accusing skeptics of ‘following scientific dogma’ and all those other inane accusations that woo-peddlers love to trot out in their defense. One particular statement (and one of my all-time pet peeves) involves the unfortunate tendency of New (Dark) Age followers of trying to recruit quantum theory over to their side:
What amused me the most was how dead serious they were about how totally right their thinking process was. Hashed over and over was the pseudo-scientific blather that most skeptic groups dredge up to support their argument. I call them pseudo-scientific because most of them are simply parroting the “real scientists” of the world. In reality like most of us they do not have a clue how “quantum mechanics” REALLY works but sure would like you to believe they do.
Ah, trying to use the language of skepticism to defend your woo-woo beliefs, are we? Excellent. Let’s have at you, then: so the skeptics are resorting to ‘pseudo-science’? Really? And you would have us believe that you are an authority on ‘actual’ science, then? I’m assuming that you must have dozens of peer-reviewed experiments and papers published showing scientific proof for the ‘law of attraction’, then. I’d love to see them. But that’s not even my main complaint with you, it’s the last sentence in that little paragraph.
No, the average lay person may, indeed, have very little clue of how quantum mechanics really works, but, unlike you, a skeptic is willing to actually find out, read the actual scientific papers and find out the truth of the matter. New Age-y folks just take the sound bite version of quantum physics, such as the whole ‘observation affects the result of experimentation’ bit, and try and use it to wrap up the same idiocy they’ve been peddling for thousands of years, just with a shiny veneer of ’scientific validation’. You know, for a group that disdains science so much, they certainly seem real hungry for scientific validation. If an experiment ever managed to show that, say, telepathy was real, they would jump all over it and proclaim it to the heavens as ultimate proof of the existence of telepathy… but when experiment after experiment, over dozens of years, shows over and over again that there is no such thing as telepathy, then clearly science is flawed and false, and of no use to ‘truly open-minded people who are not shackled by the limitations of rationality’. But I digress; the average skeptic may not have a very deep understanding of quantum mechanics, it’s true. But their opinions on quantum mechanics are at least informed by the actual scientists who do work day-in and day-out with this stuff, and I think it’s quite telling that of all the people trotting out quantum mechanics as an ‘explanation’ for all manners of woo-woo beliefs, not a single one of them is one of those scientists. Neither the wannabe-psychic nor the average skeptic may have a deep understanding of quantum physics, but it’s no coincidence that the people who do have a deep understanding of quantum phenomena fall firmly in the camp of science and skepticism.
And let’s not even get into the basic intellectual dishonesty of claiming that neither you or the skeptics really understand quantum mechanics, and then turning right around and trying to use it to justify your own idiotic beliefs…
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