Bloggen DC’s Improbable Science har postet en fin oversikt over alternative behandlingsformer. Denne inneholder vel stort sett det du trenger å vite.
Og nei, denne er ikke postet under kategorien humor.
- Homeopathy: giving patients medicines that contain no medicine whatsoever.
- Herbal medicine: giving patients an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety.
- Acupuncture: a rather theatrical placebo, with no real therapeutic benefit in most if not all cases.
- Chiropractic: an invention of a 19th century salesmen, based on nonsensical principles, and shown to be no more effective than other manipulative therapies, but less safe.
- Reflexology: plain old foot massage, overlaid with utter nonsense about non-existent connections between your feet and your thyroid gland.
- Nutritional therapy: self-styled ‘nutritionists’ making untrue claims about diet in order to sell you unnecessary supplements.
- Spiritual healing: tea and sympathy, accompanied by arm-waving.
- Reiki: ditto.
- Angelic Reiki: The same but with added “Angels, Ascended Masters and Galactic Healers”. Excellent for advanced fantasists.
- Colonic irrigation: a rectal obsession that fails to rid you of toxins which you didn’t have in the first place.
- Anthroposophical medicine: followers of the mystic barmpot, Rudolf Steiner, for whom nothing whatsoever seems to strain credulity.
- Alternative diagnosis: kinesiology, iridology, vega test etc, various forms of fraud, designed to sell you cures that don’t work for problems you haven’t got.
- Any alternative ‘therapist’ who claims to cure AIDS or malaria: agent of culpable homicide.
- Libel: A very expensive remedy, to be used only when you have no evidence. Appeals to alternative practitioners because truth is irrelevant.