There is an ever-increasing menace of pseudoscience around us. It's not much hard to identify. Even if you are not familiar with medical science, you can easily recognize the rhetoric of a pseudoscience proponent. It's incredibly widespread and repetitive. You are most likely to come across it in one way or another. I would like to address this. Through this blog, I would try to decode this rhetoric and the pseudoscience both to the best of my ability.

 

‘Alternative medicine’ and ‘allopathy’

Alternative medicine can be many things such as naturopathy, acupuncture, homeopathy, fake herbal stuff, etc; all of those which do not follow the scientific methodology. All of those that have never been proven as clinically effective. On the flip side though, besides being useless they can turn out to be detrimental and even hazardous in many ways. Such as, for example, if the patient chose to do away with real medicine and opt for these alternative remedies. Or simply due to the harm directly caused by some of these dangerous unregulated therapies.

Allopathy is nothing but a clever renaming of actual medicine to give the impression that allopathy is, just another therapy from a wide range of treatments available in the world. This maneuver works most of the time to confuse unsuspecting people.

In the medical field besides alternative medicine, there are also a ton of pseudoscience, such as the anti-vaxxers movement (people against vaccines) AIDS denialists, and a lot of other misleading information doing rounds on social media. You can google all of them, read about them but many times you may come across people who are actively advocating them and lashing out at actual medicine (which again they conveniently call ‘allopathy’)

A general theme of this blog i.e. decoding and identifying pseudoscience is relevant to almost the entire barrage of junk science. Let's start breaking down seemingly ‘scientific’ rhetoric of pseudoscience step by step starting with the following

The ‘Truth’ factor

The pseudoscience material (it could be an article, or a documentary, or a web page) has the word ‘truth’ in the heading. The information is presented as something new, shocking, unique, groundbreaking, and factually correct. The efforts of a few very smart people who at the same time fell victims of their extraordinary truths being rejected by the mainstream as a part of some sort of a conspiracy. Boohoo! Thus to make their truths more appealing they require over-the-top adjectives such as the ‘real’ truth, truth behind, the ‘hidden’ truth so on and so forth. People who spread these truths, find the whole thing uniquely interesting and perhaps may also derive a feeling of being in a detective squad of some sort which unearths hidden truths….get it? ‘truths’. By the way, just saying something as truth does not make something true in the realm of Science.

Ranting about conventional medicine 

The Propaganda includes the same old attack on medical science saying it has side effects, bad effects, does not attack the root cause of diseases and is unnatural/chemical. Let's dig to explore these rants.

All pharmacological drugs have side effects, they are well studied and documented. The safety of all medical procedures and their complications are constantly being analyzed through and through. Even the risks associated with alternative remedies are studied as to their efficiency when they are being evaluated. The difference is that actual medicine is proven for its efficiency in clinical trials and their benefit to risk ratio is understood. Now, homeopathy virtually has no side effects, but that is because they have no active ingredients in their formulations at all. Their effects, of any kind, do not exceed beyond that of a placebo.

A commonly re-occurring theme in attacking scientific medicine that is, that it does not go for the ‘root cause’. This misconception stems from a gross misunderstanding of medicine (for the sake of simplicity I am just going to refer to one as medicine and the other as alternative medicine)

It's certainly true that so many medications provided for different conditions in medicine are for symptomatic relief only. These apply to many diseases for which we still haven’t found a cure, mostly due to the lack of proper understanding of a particular disease or like in common flu for which going after the root cause would be downright superfluous. Nonetheless, medications providing symptomatic relief are vigorously tested and pass through the same scientific methodology (which I will discuss briefly later on)

Finding the root cause and going after the root causes of diseases is one of the core objectives of medical science, besides understanding how our body and its systems work in health. I mean what else would be doing, taking shots in the dark? In fact, we have been taking shots in the dark for many centuries now but medical science has come a long way.

The cure for polio (vaccine) for example was not going after the root cause? In the west, some conspiracy theorist, by the way, also wants to do away with vaccines altogether, including polio, smallpox. They go as far as saying that the polio vaccine is useless and polio is not even caused by the poliovirus. That's just being ‘extra smart’. Tetanus and rabies almost certainly kill without timely vaccination. There ARE NO alternatives.

Anyways, Whenever they (alternative medicine) claim that they are going after the root cause with whatever they are trying to sell on TV or on the street, be prepared to expect vague and generalized rambling which looks like a script written after smoking weed with afternoon tea by stoner hippies. For example, we will heal you with nature, we will boost the immunity, we will let the body heal itself with spiritual energy, etc lacking an objective scientific basis of elaboration. Good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle are no doubt the best practices we must aim to prevent sickness. But they can only go so far. We are not perfect beings, things can go wrong in countless ways. We seek medical help when we are inflicted/ overwhelmed by an illness that does require medical intervention. It is so plain and apparent. What is the sheer need of creating confusion to prevent people from seeking medical help or delaying or being in gross denial? Both hypochondria and hyperchondria (not an actual word) are unwise; imprudent.

Natural/Unnatural/Chemical –

Let's start confronting this issue with an example

Urea was the first organic compound ever synthesized in a lab. Before this, it was widely accepted that organic compounds cannot be made outside a living tissue.

Urea is excreted in our urine as metabolic waste. If we extract and isolate urea from urine and compare it against urea manufactured in a lab, just this one compound. Comparing the chemical composition, molecular structure, and properties, both will be essentially the same because they are in fact the same chemical compound. I used the word ‘chemical’ because if you break it down, all organic or inorganic compounds that make up everything living and non-living are in fact, all chemicals. The distinction between natural and non-natural is just indicative of whether a certain chemical was obtained from a naturally occurring source or if it was synthesized from naturally occurring materials!

Think about it really, can anything be beyond nature? Can any atom or molecule, really be from outside this universe?

The semantics are widely exploited by advocates of pseudoscience to narrow and channel the perspective into intentional misdirection.

Please note that while I am quoting everything as chemical, I am not implying that since all chemicals are made up of the same atoms that exist in nature and therefore all are equal and fine. If someone wants to be stupid enough to make such an argument then its a shame really that it needs to be laid down for them. Countless chemicals made in factories and labs are harmful to downright toxic and so are the natural poisons.  I am guessing no one would like to eat poisonous plants, be bit by a snake, or make a nice holiday vacation in a uranium mine. By the way, we have polluted our planet beyond belief.

This would be enough to clear the ‘chemical’ misconception but I would go further with another example more relevant to the original topic.

Both Quinine and an early form of aspirin are naturally occurring chemicals. The original source of Quinine was Peruvian Bark and Aspirin, the Willow Bark. Before we started manufacturing them, they were given by early doctors in their original source only, i.e. a certain dosage of dried powdered barks itself. Later on, the active ingredient from the willow was isolated and identified as salicylic acid. Again later it was acetylated to form acetylsalicylic acid with much less toxicity compared to original salicylic acid. A couple of years after, its mechanism of action was studied and in the process, we discovered things about our immune system such as cox enzymes and prostaglandins. Fast forward, ibuprofen (Advil, Brufen) and other NSAIDs were developed, with have much more safety profile (therapeutic index)

Science does not distinguish between these narratives of natural and unnatural, it is a continuous quest to learn ourselves and our nature. It’s never-ending, it's dynamic and changing in the face of new evidence, scientific facts can be proven wrong or right, they follow from falsifiable hypotheses that can be tested by scientific methodology.

Anecdotal Evidence and Scientific Methodology

Almost all alternative therapies and supernatural healing relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. These are either personal testimonies or informal observations. To put this simply, when you saw your grandmother get cured of a certain ailment by ANY type of medication, therapy, or witchcraft magic, it does not validate the efficiency of anything.  

‘Allopathy’ drugs go through the scientific methodology to prove their efficiency and safety values. During its development phase and before it gets approval, drugs go through a series of phases. There are animal studies, clinical trials in which they are tested against a control called placebo (a fake copy of a drug). They all need to prove that their therapeutic effect is superior to the placebo. The way it's done is by randomized double-blind tests, to eliminate bias i.e. neither the doctor nor the patient knows who received which one, medicine or the placebo. These clinical trials are conducted with well laid out systematic plan to collect data of significance and comprehensive information with respect to dosage, age, sex, drug interactions, adverse reactions, safety profile, therapeutic index, the benefit to risk ratio and so on. However, the story does not end here. After the trials get been published they are subjected to repeatability by peers. And then there are meta-analysis; pharmacoepidemiology; long term follow-up.  

Without going into details of pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, it is worthwhile to mention that drugs are studied to know how they work or are tested for the hypothesis of their mechanism of action. It is not enough to know that they just work. Just for a quick comparison, a targeted cancer drug such as Herceptin has been tailored from the understanding of the pathology of the disease while cow urine is just supposed to work, who knows why? Maybe because it is so holy and pure and awesome and it cured someone's neighbor’s daughter-in-law.

I will wrap this up by briefly mentioning some common logical fallacies employed by pseudoscience

The argument from ignorance and open-mindedness

We have come a long from believing that all disorders in our bodies are caused by an imbalance of some mysterious forces or fluids. But there is an immense amount of not yet known knowledge out there, about ourselves, about nature, and the whole universe. The argument from ignorance is basically an appeal to that ignorance, to validate something somehow for which we must take it on the face value of its claim itself. It's like saying believe me because I am telling you it's like that. And if you DON’T, you are close-minded. The very definition of Science is, the curiosity to know, all the advances made in science have been due to our curiosity to know the unknown, to discover, to think of new ideas. However, open-mindedness does not mean throwing all logic and science out of the window and just believing anything or believing things as they are being told.

The argument from authority and Ad Populum

The argument from authority is setting up an expert and asking to believe in his/her authority because that person is an expert. People can be an expert on all kinds of nonsense, there are babas and gurus too and many people believe them because they are ‘experts’. This is a classic example of an argument from authority. Ad Populum is an appeal to believe in something because many people do.

I think so far, you can tell what's keeping the ‘alternative’ medicine turning into ‘medicine’ i.e. this kind of rhetoric instead of scientific evidence. Still, If nothing else works for pseudoscience, they start to attack science itself with, Strawman fallacy- An attempt is made to misrepresent something by every trick in the book and attack that constructed strawman.

I hope I have done enough to explain the common themes surrounding pseudoscience. There is a serious problem of misinformation including blatant lies. A simple fact-checking (Wikipedia, Google) is generally enough if one can see through their charade.

There is just no comparison in the joy of knowing and understanding actual science than wallowing in same old ignorant propaganda of pseudoscience.