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Originally Posted by Prudence
What's up with the either/or paradigm?
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Like I said, I don't really care if people want to belief in faith based approaches to medicine. I don't join in, but I don't care.
I do care when faith-based is wrapped up in the cloak of scientific support. If you want to do both, so be it (though I'll want to subject claims of real world affect to objective analysis most people don't actually like that).
What I'm responding to in tracilicious's posts are, I think, two things:
1) Using terms without knowing what they mean. And I don't mean that in any way maliciously, she is hardly alone. But they are terms and ways of examining the world that are very important to me and I'll admit I get excessively pedantic in seeing them used correctly.
2) A fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific evidence-based research is done ("Acupuncture evidence is anecdotal and I see a lot of anecdote in Western medicine so the evidence is essentially the same").
While I'll go so far as to bluntly say that homeopathy is nothing but a placebo, I won't go that far with acupuncture. For all I know, properly administered acupuncture could cure all the ills of the world. But if so, it is an effect that is strangely resistant to validation.
For me it personally is either/or. Either I rely on scientific investigation to suss out the truth (though it may be slow and initially incorrect) or I have no mechanism other than some kind of intuition for deciding upon a course of action. As I said, if evidence isn't what you rely on, how do you distinguish "obviously wacky" treatments from "obviously not wacky but still unsupported" treatments?
If evidence isn't important and one wants to rely on intuition then I'm fine with that so long as it isn't then claimed that there is evidence of a generally scientific nature.