Irrational medicine and the public’s minds

“by opening the door to irrational medicine alongside evidence-based medicine, we are poisoning the minds of the public” – Baum and Ernst 2009 Source

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions in 1842. Over 180 years later, we’re still fighting, and the “lifeless delusions” are not so different. Anti-vax nonsense, COVID conspiracies, anti-pasteurization, and so on.

Breast cancer researcher Michael Baum is one of the standard bearers of this fight. He and Ernst warned “if we don’t put a brake on the increasing self-confidence of the homeopathic establishment, they will cease to limit their attention to self-limiting or nonspecific maladies” and similar caution is called for today.

Speak up. Call it out. Demand evidence and rigor, even in casual conversation. It’s our job. It’s our role.

After more than 200 years, we are still waiting for homeopathy “heretics” to be proved right, during which time the advances in our understanding of disease, progress in therapeutics and surgery, and prolongation of the length and quality of life by so-called allopaths have been breathtaking. The true skeptic therefore takes pride in closed mindedness when presented with absurd assertions that contravene the laws of thermodynamics or deny progress in all branches of physics, chemistry,
physiology, and medicine. – Baum and Ernst 2009 Source

From Holmes. Source.