Science Makes Everything Better
Over lunch this week I was talking with a cow-orker about alt-med therapy like acupuncture or reiki. He was already on board with me as far as whether it works (it does) and how it works ( via the placebo effect), but he felt that science was doing a disservice by discovering this because revealing a formerly respected technique as placebo prevents
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My point in a previous post is that this is, at best, shaky ethical ground. My point in this post is that I think this is a flawed premise. Certainly some people experience a demonstrable beneficial effect from believing something which is demonstrably false, but I question whether it's necessary that the thing they believe is false. If something works because you have confidence in it for misplaced reasons, and then you don't just uncover correct reasons but reproducible, peer-reviewed evidence proving that the new explanation is correct, you ought to have even more confidence in it, right?
Take trepanation. People may have received beneficial effects from believing that it provided exit holes for evil spirits, and people still derive benefit from it today for cerebral hematomas. Anyone who was convinced that trepanation was a legitimate folk treatment is going to be doubly convinced after learning that it's stood up to scientific scrutiny and been further improved with modern surgical tools, anesthesia, and hygiene.
I guess that there might be some weird corner cases. Take, for example, someone who believes in the "big pharma" conspiracy. I suppose that if mainstream pharmaceutical companies start selling standardized, medically proven versions of the same treatments that they've previously been using it's possible that they'll have some sort of "if Big Pharma says it's good then it must be bad" confidence-undermining effect, and for the sake of the patient's ongoing treatment you might want to hide the fact that mainstream scientists have fully endorsed it.
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