Salvation Is At Hand!

[oneplusme]

A quango is to be established to regulate "alternative therapists". They can even be struck off the (voluntary) national register for incompetence.

I can't help but wonder how one could possibly be an incompetent homeopath. Actually giving people medicines? Still, now we need no longer fear that our ear-candlers will be unable to identify the

Comments

[oneplusme]

Yoga and Pilates seem generally to be advanced as forms of exercise, which is entirely reasonable; massage as a form of relaxation. No problem.

My issue is with those who claim that diseases can be cured by mystical means which strangely disappear whenever tested under proper experimental conditions. If someone comes up with a technique - acupuncture, intercessory prayer, or whatever - then it should be tested the same way as any other drug or clinical technique. If it produces results then great! Let's find out how it works. If it doesn't, rather than continuing to claim that Evil Masculine Western Materialist Science is conspiring against its proponents, we should do as we do for anything else - give it up as a bad job and try something else.

It's not so much the pseudo-spiritual baggage that I object to (although it grates on me, people can do what they like in the privacy of their own homes) as the vast waste of time, effort, money and brainpower that it all represents. Instead of exploring new things which at least have a possibility of benefiting humanity, they're wasting not only their own time but also that of the rest of us.