Sunday, January 27, 2013

Quacks and Conspiracies: The undermining of science and your health

In case you use one of these; homeopathy, naturopathy, alternative medicine, you will want to at least try to read this.
http://c2cjournal.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/C2CJournal_Winter2013-FINAL.pdf
In this issue of C2C Journal, we take the side of science and the scientific method over ad hominem attacks, foggy reasoning, magical thinking, and outright chicanery. Science and a proper understanding of it matters for many reasons but in the context of personal health, it matters even more.

Homeopathy is a faith-informed practice and, as such, largely impervious to rational argumentation.

In modern scientific research, the gold standard is
the hypothetico-deductive method, which operates
through the following stages:
1. Inductively gather information through
observation.
2. Formulate an explanatory theory.
3. From that theory, deduce a hypothesis (prediction).
4. Compare (test) that hypothesis against
systematic empirical evidence.
5. If the prediction is accurate, consider the theory
tentatively supported (i.e., not yet falsified)
but continue to derive other predictions for
empirical testing.
6. If the prediction is falsified, revise or abandon
the theory, and start the cycle over again.
7. Let other researchers replicate the experiment
to ensure that results are not a statistical outlier
or perhaps due to some quirk of the researcher.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting article but Tom Flanagan and the others didn't convince me of anything.

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