I first saw the word “woo” here. Took an example or two to get it. I assumed it was an Anglo, non-US word. Isn’t it?
My understanding is it is derived from a stereotypical, scary, Hollywood-ish ghost sound, perhaps wind thru the trees on a dark Halloween night, to wit: “woo-woo-woo,” :eek: often made by children and paranormal hopefuls. It has come to mean most anything that is in the paranormal or highly doubtful realm of non-reality.
I am fairly sure it is American in origin, but it may have been coined relatively recently in the “skeptic/atheist” community -like the people at http://freethoughtblogs.com/ and The Skeptics Society - and not have spread very far from there yet. The Dope is sort of on the fringes of that community, so a lot of people here have heard it.
I first heard it used this way on the skeptics guide to the universe, an excellent podcast.
And that’s what so weird, historically. Rocketry and rocket artillery was an established part of Western military science, going back to the Congreve rocket. The fact that rockets fired by enemies can rain ballistic death down on their targets would have been a “no Duh!” revelation to Allied soldiers hunkering down under a Nebelwerfer barrage. Katyushas and Calliopes were all over the battlefield. Rocketry was no kind of woo, at least not on the battlefield. Maybe the idea of rocketry in space, or suborbital long-range “strategic” artillery (a la ballistic V-weapons), may have been considered woo. But the difference between medium-range rocket artillery and long-range rocket artillery is just engineering.
There’s some confusion going on. Rockets were well established in all militaries; in addition to the ones gnoitall mentions, there were Allied rocket-firing amphibious landing support ships and air-to-ground rockets on many Allied fighter-bombers.
The thing that some scientists refused to believe was specifically liquid-fueled rockets, especially large ones. A major figure in advancing that view was Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific advisor. He argued famously that the Oslo Report could not be accurate because large rockets could not be liquid-fueled.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Lindemann [Cherwell] also repeatedly made arguments against V-2 rocket evidence, such as inaccurately claiming “to put a four-thousand horsepower turbine in a twenty-inch space is lunacy: it couldn’t be done, Mr. Lubbock” and that at the end of the war, the committee would find that the rocket was “a mare’s nest”.[20] Cherwell took the view that long-range military rockets were feasible only if they were propelled by solid fuels and would accordingly need to be of enormous size. He repeatedly rejected arguments that relatively compact liquid fuels could be used to propel such weapons.[21]
[/QUOTE]
Ok, the distinction was liquid-fueled rocket engines. Interesting. That makes the specific reference to Goddard more relevant, since that was his particular scientific speciality.
Still, it seems kind of odd now, thinking that liquid-fueled rocket engines would be considered woo. Was it woo for “physics” reasons (insufficient energy density, for instance, given having to carry both liquid fuel and some kind of oxydizer), or woo for “engineering” reasons (e.g., the pumps and tankage would be “too complicated”). Because if the latter, that’s just stupid. Engineers have a special name for that kind of problem: “fun”.
“It’s just engineering” means something is not impossible, just complicated and difficult. The perfect engineering challenge.
I’ll post some of the acupuncture studies, reviews, Cochrane reviews, and discussion links if people want to see them. (Without any popular demand, well, I’ve got too much to do! 
It is definitely more effective than no treatment, and that’s the point of a correctly conducted study. I have no patience for New-Agey silliness (I still prefer that term to “woo”.) But any articles and studies that make it to pubmed.gov represent the gold standard. No anecdotes, no vague stories, and actually, everything that was published in any publication that could remotely be described as related to alternative medicine can be omitted too. Even the argument that “sham” acupuncture actually does not represent a placebo can be left out, although there’s a lot of evidence that it doesn’t.
It’s important to clarify WHY certain treatments aren’t valid, and dubious medical treatments represent a huge part of the problem being discussed here. If nothing is there in terms of evidence beyond anecdotes, then a treatment may be interesting, it may help some, it may be worth developing, it may even really be helpful. But it is not a treatment with any validity. On the other hand, it just doesn’t make sense to lump every “alternative” medical treatment together when some are a lot better supported than others.
You’ve probably heard this before, :rolleyes: but you know what they call alternative treatments that really work, don’t you?
Medicine.
Snerk!
I do think it will get there. I think that there’s a lot more research to do when it comes to acupuncture. But there’s enough evidence to show that there are positive effects in many areas, particularly in specific applications. There are also some fascinating recent experiments involving rats. Just on the cerebral ischemia front:
In a biography of someone (geologist/explorer Clarence King, perhaps?) who lived in the mid-19th century, I recall mention of a letter his father wrote to him when he was at boarding school, warning him to “not eat any bread.” I always thought that was an odd – bread is such a common staple. I figured it was some mid-1800s fad among some social circle…not sure what the supposed ill effects were.
Then, just a few years ago, we get the South Beach Diet, with the central tenet of avoiding bread. Not exactly pure science, but it does unarguably help you shed pounds (especially if you’re a middle-aged man with a flabby midsection…not so useful for most boarding-school-age boys, that’s true.)
Kellog and his cornflakes had something to to with avoiding bread, IIRC.
Also avoiding sex was important to health, according to him.
Taking too many baths was considered dangerous and would make you go crazy, but now it’s valid to bathe often for health reasons?
Randas Batista’s procedures went from woo to science to woo again.
He came up with the idea that if the heart was failing, due to Chigas disease or certain forms of cardiomyopathy, you didn’t need to replace the entire heart. You could just cut out a section of it, sew it back up, and the patient would be good as new!
He presented this idea at conferences and was basically laughed out of the room. Then he went and did it. When the patients didn’t die, it was considered revolutionary. It started to gain some widespread appeal and was used in the US and Japan for awhile.
Problem was, the survival rate over a 5 year period wasn’t that great. The procedure, while still practiced somewhat today, has generally fallen out of favor.
I don’t feel that is an example of woo. It is an example of a treatment that simply didn’t prove as effective as proposed or once thought. It wasn’t something that had any paranormal element to it. It may even have had some medical relevance to the then-current knowledge.
(AFAIK and IANAD)
Now if Batista claimed that the ghost of a heart surgeon performed the operation, it was directed remotely by reptile aliens on Zeta-Reticuli, or the surgery could be done without breaking the skin, that would be woo.
No. It’s real, you see: We can observe its effects in the real world in very repeatable circumstances. That means it isn’t woo. It might be weird, counter-intuitive, and contrary to all our intuition, but the fact we can observe it in reality means it is not woo.
This is contradictory, since PubMed does index articles from alt med journals, so there goes the “gold standard”.
Alt med advocates can in many cases point to “scientific studies” that they claim supports their woo (homeopathy is a notorious example). The problem is that small pilot studies and other limited, poorly conducted research may show a positive effect which is then publicized. When the limitations are pointed out and requests are made for more substantive research, then the excuses pile up - there’s no money because the treatment “can’t be patented”, Big Pharma is blocking it, Science Cannot Adequately Measure My Woo, etc.
There’s a guy whose name escapes me at the moment who sounded “woo” when I first heard of him, back in the '90s. He was I think dead by that point but had followers who had established an “institute” in his name. He preached strongly against eating hydrogenated oils, sugar, and processed flour. He said that natural, full-fat milk, butter, eggs, and red meat was good for you. At the time it was completely against the CW. In the last five to ten years, I’ve noticed an emerging scientific consensus building toward pretty much the same conclusion.
Weston Price?