4.3: Why should scientific criteria apply to alternative therapies?
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This article is from the Scientific Skepticism FAQ, by Paul Johnson Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk with numerous contributions by others.
4.3: Why should scientific criteria apply to alternative therapies?
So that we can tell if they work or not. If you take a patient
and give them treatment then one of three things will happen: the
patient will get better, will get worse, or will not change. And this
is true whether the treatment is a course of drugs chosen by a doctor,
an alternative therapy, or just counting to ten.
Many alternative therapies depend on "anecdotal evidence" where
particular cases got better after the therapy was applied. Almost any
therapy will have some such cases, even if it actually harms the
patients. And so anecdotal evidence of Mrs. X who was cured of cancer
by this wonderful new treatment is not useful in deciding whether the
treatment is any good.
The only way to tell for sure whether or not an alternative treatment
works is to use a double-blind trial, or as near to it as you can get.
See the previous question.
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