There is a teacher in my department who is very, very big on all things chiropractic and alternatively naturally medical. I respect his (unrelated) work, but that’s something on which we’ll hardly ever see eye to eye.
Next week, though, we’re scheduled to have a discussion and I know he’ll talk about Applied Kinesiology. I know he’ll make a whole bunch of unsupported claims, and I’m thinking of polite ways I can voice my lack of enthusiasm for these practices.
There are quite a few skeptic-minded people hanging out here, and I’m sure you all run into all sorts of claims you just can’t take at face value. How do you respond without being preachy yourself? What do you do when you can’t just say: “whatever…”?
One thing’s for sure, skeptics are no fun at parties. Does it really have to be that way?
(Note that I’m not really looking only for answers specific to my situation, or AK.)
Is this a peer or a professor who gives you a grade? If he’s your professor, is this a classroom discussion or something where it’s just the two of you and nobody else participates or listens? I think that you will have to factor those variables into any challenge you might make against his claims, unfortunately. I don’t believe students should meekly accept whatever their teachers tell them just because they are teachers, but you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot either since you are in all liklihood NOT going to change his mind.
This isn’t a classroom context, it’s a preliminary discussion/debate for an eventual research project. At this early stage discussions are usually very abstract and philosophical. We’re a team of about twenty participants, four professors and about fifteen students.
This being graduate school, I think most students are fairly well equiped to challenge teachers.
This isn’t an academic issue at all though, I already know more or less how I’ll present my views. I’m more interested in how other people deal with situations where you can’t help showing your skepticism.
That site you provided does a pretty good job of dispelling this particular form of quackery. Not only is AK quackery, but the underlying “science” for it (such as Chi) is also bunk. It’s a tower built by stacking bullshit ontop of more bullshit.
People reply to my skepticism with remarks like “your too closed minded” or “you only believe what you can see.” I sometimes want to reply with “your too gullible” or “you’ll believe in anything” but those lack the tact that is needed. It’s strange that proponents of nonsense seldom feel the need for such tact.
My simplest response is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A few anecdotes don’t qualify as evidence.
Science has eradicated Smallpox and beaten Polio. It saves lives in e.r.s every hour of the day. It has improved the quality of life for countless millions of people. Diabetics and AIDS patients who would have died long ago now live due to treatments that give them greatly expanded life expectancies. It goes on and on.
Obviously, there is still much suffering but there is no better tool to deal with our natural fraility than science.
Alternative medicine on the other hand has accomplished no more than prying money out of the hands of the suffering, the desperate and the foolish. New fads need to be constantly “invented” to replace yesterday’s miracle cures that have become unfashionable.
Good luck, though. You may find yourself beating your head against the wall here. You don’t need to convince anyone else that you are right, however. Just make your feelings known and let the chips fall where they may. At least that way people will know where you stand. Silence could be taken as a tacit endorsement of the quackery.
In social situations, I just say something vaguely disapproving (“Oh, really? I heard that __________ is a load of hooey. You might want to check out Quackwatch.com and see whether it’s actually dangerous, or just a waste of money.”
In an academic setting, though, I’d say the gloves are off. Come in with plenty of factual ammo and don’t let this guy get away with anything. You will probably not make a dent in his belief, but other people in the audience who are hearing about this stuff for possibly the first time deserve to hear the straight dope.
Under the heading of Situations No One Wants To Be In, my husband’s grandfather has cancer, and one of his aunts is urging him to forgo chemotherapy in favor of holistic healing. Expensive holistic healing. She’s appealing to his children to contribute money for the quack treatments. I haven’t had the chance to sound my MIL out on the issue, but I think she knows it’s a bunch of crap–but she’s also the sort of person who instantly caves to any sort of pressure from her family, so I imagine that pretty soon she’ll be spending money that she can ill afford to help her father toward the grave.
And in my experience they have a lot of “evidence” and “cites” to back up their beliefs, and it’s hard to address their individual points when you don’t have access to a library or the internet.
That being said, I should probably say that I decided to try and hijack the debate to topics where we’re on the same psychic frequency, so to speak.
Well, the OP seems to equate chiropractice with quackery. I’m not so sure about that. Osteopathy was long derided as quackery and has recently been vindicated, and ISTR that chiropractice (which is similar) has also.
Those elements of Osteopathy that agree with conventional medicine have been “vindicated”. Osteopathy has shed a great deal of quackery that has since been taken up by chiropracters.
As for chiropracty–it’s quackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquack
and nothing but quackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquack
I roll up my pantlegs and put a clothspin on my nose. This invariably promts the other party to inquire what I’m doing. Thats when I say, “I smell BULLSHIT!”
Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.
Well, Chiropractic may be quackery - but it helps my back. And conventional medicine couldn’t. I don’t really care if the premise or philosophic underpinings of the profession are bizzare as long as I can touch my toes and sleep through the night.
Apuncuture is often seen as alternative or quackery, but IMHO it’s not possible for millions of Chinese people to be brain washed or hypnotized. No way you could perform invasive surgery on someone using acupuncture as the sole anesthetic if it didn’t do SOMETHING. Western scientists don’t understand it - but that’s not the same thing as saying it doesn’t work.
My favorite quote along these lines came from a newly minted MD. A person I know was brought into an ER in severe distress with asthma. The first MD who saw him used an old fashioned treatment - sedation. The idea being that if one calmed down they 'd have an easier time breathing. This therapy has been largely discarded as more specific drugs have been developed. It worked for the person I know and when he was checked in on by the younger MD he told the young doc that he was feeling better already. The MD replied, “No, you don’t feel better. You just think you feel better.”
A former co-worker constantly urged us to take various vitamins & herbal concoctions for ailments we didn’t have. I finally told her “I don’t do anything to my body unless I’m sure of its safety & efficacy.” Think that sent her to the dictionary, which wouldn’t work in your academic setting, jovan. I hope.
Maybe you could come up with a new quackery – complete with invented experts, think tanks, universities, anecdotal evidence from satisfied patients, etc. and pressure this guy to try it. Be so strident & insistent that he can’t get a word in. Recruit others to attest to the success of your discovery. You must not be the only one who’s being annoyed by this guy. Fight fire with fire.
One of the other profs on the team is a hardcore atheist and he often talks about how the best way to express his beliefs would be to start a religion… And since I know he’s fairly skeptic about AK and its ilk, I think we might be onto something here…
Though I choose to be amused rather than annoyed.
When I say that skeptics are no fun at parties, I meant that when someone answers something like: “This sounds like bull!”, you’re usually not headed for pleasant and ultimately fruitful conversation. The real difficulty in those situations is being able to confront the believer’s beliefs in a non-confrontational way.
Interesting link, Dogbase. Chiropractors I’ve encountered seem to focus entirely on muscular-skeleto problems. Clearly they recognise the limitations of their treatments.
