Aug
22
“Over the years, I’ve often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It’s not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can’t be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have to believe in the therapy, dedicate yourself completely to it, in order for it to work. Of course, as I’ve also mentioned before, it is that insistence on belief and total commitment shared by religion and alternative medicine that provides quacks with an “out” when their treatments don’t yield the promised results, their frequent excuse being to blame the patient. He didn’t believe hard enough. In a reverse of The Secret, which states that you can bring good things to yourself by simply wanting it, in alt-med world, it’s all too often implied (or even more than implied) that you bring calamities on yourself through bad diet, bad lifestyle, and bad thoughts. After all, what is the German New Medicine, other than the claim that cancerous tumors are not the disease, but rather a manifestation of buried emotional traumas that cause the “protective” mechanism of a tumor to result?”
Alternative medicine as religion – Respectful Insolence
Stephanie Booth is a freelance internet geek who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. Digital Crumble is where she dumps all sorts of interesting stuff she finds online.
