How do you respond to Pseudoscience?

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FBurnaby

FBurnaby

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I have an in-law who jumps on and relishes any alternative medicine/pseudoscience they see on facebook or hear from friends (anti-vaxx, thinking chiropractors are higher trained than medical doctors, buying expensive oils and herbs, big phrama is evil, medical school doesn't teach hormones or nutrition, almonds can treat cancer, etc.) How do you confront these people without coming off as a jerk? It seems the easier I dismiss these things the more it adds to the fallacy that these alternatives are underdog secrets being suppressed by western medicine. Much of her views comes from severe ignorance in science, so it's difficult to even explain why these things are wrong. Any help?
 
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Just let them know western medicine actually is evidence based, while alt. medicine is kookoo-based. People bitch and complain about western medicine taking advantage of people and profiting off of their sickness. What about alt. medicine? Profiting off sickness using methods that are not even recognized by science and backed up by quality research. One thing is for sure... You don't have to "respect" alt. medicine if you don't want to... Western medicine is actual medicine... Let the ignorant know that it is superior to all.
 
FBurnaby said:
I have an in-law who jumps on and relishes any alternative medicine/pseudoscience they see on facebook or hear from friends (anti-vaxx, thinking chiropractors are higher trained than medical doctors, buying expensive oils and herbs, big phrama is evil, medical school doesn't teach hormones or nutrition, etc.) How do you confront these people without coming off as a jerk? It seems the easier I dismiss these things the more it adds to the fallacy that these alternatives are underdog secrets being suppressed by western medicine. Much of her views comes from severe ignorance in science, so it's difficult to even explain why these things are wrong. Any help?
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Both my mother and MIL are on this band wagon and it's infuriating.

I usually tell them they're wrong and that Facebook doesn't count as a source. I ask them what website specifically they found their sources from or where on the FDA website did they find the page that admits that obscene levels of mercury are being used in vaccines.

I asked my mother what a vaccine does (MOA) and WHOAH, she couldn't answer. I asked her what the stages were in getting an pharmaceutical drug on the market and WHOAH, she couldn't answer.

If they get upset and think you're a jerk because you don't agree with them then that's on them.
 
I've linked it on here before, but have them watch this video below - it's much easier for me to pawn the burden of teaching off to a video, because it won't listen to their dissent (I'm terrible at getting sidetracked and answering every little detail that people bring up while trying to argue about pseudoscience, and I fail to see the big picture of misunderstanding). Plus, the lazy learners that actually believe the BS they read on facebook etc. about alternative medicine will probably only be able to learn from a video.

As @sb247 said, just give up on them if they're stupid - it's not worth your breath if they're unwilling to learn or take any other viewpoint into consideration. I recently argued with my boyfriend's father about the confederate flag, which eventually devolved into a talk about how black people are where they are because they're raised by animals, and that living on welfare is a super lush life because they buy lobsters with food stamps. There is no fixing some people, which is a damn shame, but a sad reality.

 
It's just the Dunning-Kruger effect at work; they're too dull to know how dull they are.
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I just block anyone's posts from my news feed if they post that ****.
 
It's a complex issue, because quackery is quackery until it's not.

Take the claims in your OP. Chiropractors ARE better trained than physicians for the treatment of certain illnesses. Big pharma often DOES prioritize financial rewards to effectiveness and consumer safety. The average physician knows jack **** about nutrition; they'll blindly recite the USDA guidelines -if they even know them- with a vague knowledge of the reasoning behind, without realizing that it's wrong more often than not (and heavily influenced by the agricultural industry). And medical professionals often administrate treatment with little to no proven effectiveness.

It's not an excuse to let people get away with anti-vaccine idiocies and stuff, mind you, but you should think twice before spitting out "truths".
 
To be fair big pharma is evil and physicians don't learn nutrition.

So. It might be partly our fault that then everything else that might be actual quackery then gets believed. Especially if your response is to be a condescending douche about any of it.

The best way to respond is calmly without talking down to anyone. Support your position with as much evidence based data as possible and don't insult anyone's intelligence. Then you have to hope for the best.
 
Thank you all for the feedback. @AlteredScale I feel your pain because it is my mother in law. Normally I am comfortable taking an aggressive approach against non-evidence theories/therapies, or simply giving up on the hopelessly irrational. This was a minor laughable matter initially, but now that we are new parents, it's getting much worse and she is bordering on interfering with our parenting, not to mention the money wasted on alternative health kicks that should be money saved (shes relatively wealthy but her long term finances are not in order, but thats a different battle). I tried talking to her about what constitutes evidence, but she sees personal anecdotes and her "research" (googling alt websites) as strong evidence. I haven't tried sitting her down and really discussing this, which may be needed. Just interested in everyone else's experiences with this issue.
 
These people might be dealing with misinformation, emotional responses, "fad-chasing", or delusions.

The first group should be your primary focus for educating, if needed.

The second group may come around with time when whatever issue they have cools off.

The third group can't be reasoned with because they lack the background understanding to grasp the explanations and are simply just going to follow whatever their popular idol says. You will cite them info from UptoDate and they will cite you right back with Jenny McCarthy's blog post.

The last group: there was a 2007 thread in the psychiatry forum about the feasibility/utility of talking psych patients [suffering from delusions] out of their beliefs. Sounded like for most of those that were successful at it, it was only transient at best, and they could be sent right back to being enthralled by their delusion by the slightest trigger (TV commercial, random comment they read on youtube, whatever). In other words, for the person with an honest delusion that "big pharma is out to get them and give everyone autism/cancer with the flu vaccine", no matter what you do (or how educated they are, PhD in Astrophysics, whatever), you won't be able to break them out of their delusion permanently with a conversation -- no matter how you reason it...hence the delusion status as 'fixed, and persist in the face of evidence to the contrary'. Fascinating.

The task is just to figure out what category they fall under and if there is utility to be had by the change.
 
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When I said big pharma is evil I more meant she thinks anything that comes from the CDC, FDA, WHO, etc. should be distrusted automatically, along with other conspiracies, not so much legitimate criticism of pharma.
 
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I typically respond with violence. Gotta speak to them in a language they'll understand
 
My aunt is a physician. She practices allopathic medicine, but will go to pseudoscience practitioners herself frequently.
 
The great thing about a clueless person is that allowing them to speak is sufficient refutation in and of itself. Engage with them. Invite them to explain their ideas. Ask questions. Continue to listen until they have made it completely clear that their ideas have no basis. Ultimately, you don't need to explain anything. You just need to expose the fact that they can't back up their own position.

"So you say your Chiropractor can cure cancer/prevent the onset of diabetes/bring the dead back to life by twisting the patient's head in just the right way? I'm really interested in this idea. Can you explain how this works? Oh, he's fixing subluxations you say. What exactly is a subluxation and how does a subluxation cause the aliment under discussion? How do you know that you have a subluxation and how do you know when it's fixed?"
 
I'm thankful that the worst I get on my feed is the occasional CCHR cleverly-disguised anti-psychiatry video.

...and a bunch of runner friends who are bizarrely obsessed with KT tape.
 
I think many people underestimate the impact of nutrition on the well-being of individuals. There are quite few studies on how our environment especially what we eat influence how our genes are expressed which is a relatively new concept in curing chronic illnesses (Functional Medicine). It isn't pseudoscience per say, but we are more familiar with the world of microbiology and ID so we think that the effectiveness may come from just vaccines and pharmaceutical drugs. The reality is that most drugs do not cure the source of the disease, it only alleviates the symptoms which is not effective.
 
To OP: It really depends on how much time you want to invest in talking to a particular person. If they are close personal relatives, it may be worth taking the trouble, and gently explaining your position. Otherwise, it's not really worth it, unless you relish the entertainment factor.

I find it helpful to compare the current anti vaccine/Big Pharma/anti GMO/chiro/naturopath fervor to previous examples of moral panic that have risen and fallen in the public consciousness over the past decades, like playing Dungeons and Dragons leading to Satanic baby sacrifice, or the seemingly pervasive rate of alien abduction in the 1990s. If you look back on these, the distribution of belief is pretty similar: There was a core group of true believers that found signs everywhere, and pieced together disparate "evidence" to make themselves irrationally fearful and angry, there were stories featured in media that appealed to emotion (from silly tabloids to Reader's Digest), and a large segment of middle America that credulously entertained the ideas.

Neither of these two things are really in the public consciousness today.

So what happened? Did the Dark Lord become satisfied with the blood of infants, and not need to manipulate nerdy teenage minions to do his bidding? Did the aliens fill their quotas? Did the flying saucers become too heavy with all the kidnapped bodies?

Or did the credulous portion of our society lose interest?

All of these things involve some amorphous evil entity, vague reports of unfortunate events, and enough public interest to keep generating and perpetuating them. After a while, it just sort of becomes obvious that a lot of people played RPGs, and the thought of kidnapping babies just never came up. One could drive down empty back roads in Nebraska, go camping, and have no fear of being probed by aliens. Similarly, most of us have been vaccinated, eat some sort of GMOs in some sense, and are COMPLETELY healthy, and do not need a "vaccine/toxin detox diet" or spinal adjustment to restore our vitality.

The key to not alienating people that you actually like is to point out that all kinds of perfectly intelligent and otherwise rational people fall subject to misconception and irrational thinking at some point in time. Linus Pauling, for all his genius, was fixated on Vitamin C, which has never really proven to be as widely beneficial as he thought. I have met very intelligent high performing people in medicine, who for a brief moment, were taken in by the chemtrail hoax. It happens to all of us at some point in time.

For people I don't like, I prefer to one up their pseudoscience: After all, why should I be concerned about Big Pharma and GMOs when the Annunaki have been dominating humanity since the dawn of time? Don't believe me? You should educate yourself. There are (frankly quite awesome) Youtube videos detailing the archeological and anthropological evidence of this. It's all there.
 
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To be fair, the anti-vaccination thing isn't so much "pseudoscience" as a movement spawned out of the failure of actual medical science to both be ethical and police itself. That Lancet fiasco was an absolute travesty for which the medical community, honestly, holds more responsibility than the lay-people who joined the gravy train.

For most types of "pseudoscience," I usually won't confront it unless it's harmful to people or they are proposing it as an alternative to traditional medicine. My view on this is the same as my view on the role of religion in people's health: "If it's working for you, great." If someone is proposing homeopathy as an alternative to traditional medicine or they are consuming toxic potions or something, that's a different story.
 
Devil's advocate:

1. Western medicine in practice is not always evidence-based.
2. Absence of evidence-based medicine =/= pseudoscience.
3. Many of the pseudoscience claims have their origins in published scientific literature. This is what the Dunning-Kruger crowds latch onto.
4. Big Pharma is evil.

I usually research their arguments before I respond. Unless I can find substantial disproof or harm, I phrase my responses with words like "implausible", "possible", "unproven", or "bat ****-quackery".
 
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genelia said:
My aunt is a physician. She practices allopathic medicine, but will go to pseudoscience practitioners herself frequently.
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Seeing the phrase "practices allopathic medicine" is like nails on a chalkboard. You mean she practices medicine?
 
jw3600 said:
Seeing the phrase "practices allopathic medicine" is like nails on a chalkboard. You mean she practices medicine?
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This is not accurate. Allopathic medicine is not the only type of medicine with an evidence base out there. It may not be consensus-level evidence, but there is a good amount of evidence that acupuncture, for instance, works for certain pain syndromes and has less risks than narcotics. This evidence includes studies that utilize randomization and sham acupuncture controls. Certain herbal supplements do actually work. St. John's Wort for depression is one example (despite it being an anesthesiologist's nightmare). These are procedures or medications that are used to modify body processes and improve health. That clearly seems like medicine to me.

That said, do you really think it's accurate to label acupuncturists and herbalists "allopathic medical practitioners"? They obviously don't come from the same philosophical background or operate on the same framework as allopathy . . .
 
Jabbed said:
Devil's advocate:

1. Western medicine in practice is not always evidence-based.
2. Absence of evidence-based medicine =/= pseudoscience.
Click to expand...

These are actually decent criticisms of western medicine, in my opinion. From a historical perspective, it is only very recently that western medicine has started utilizing randomization and blinding as routine research procedures. For centuries, RCTs were not at all standard practice in medical research and blinding was merely a weapon that was periodically dusted off and used to bludgeon the claims of mystics and "quacks" out of respectable existence. Western medicine has started to turn over a new leaf with the dawn of truly "evidence-based medicine," which may actually be why certain non-traditional theories and methods have gained some measures of acceptance ("treating the patient, not the illness"; certain principles of palliative care; access to green space/parks as public health initiatives, etc.). Still, western medicine carries a substantial amount of historical baggage that is not in the least "evidence-based."
 
@sloop I was hoping to see others' experiences talking with close friends/family about things that are obviously wrong, say homeopathy, not so much a "western" medicine vs "hey st. johns wart works for depression"
 
FBurnaby said:
@sloop I was hoping to see others' experiences talking with close friends/family about things that are obviously wrong, say homeopathy, not so much a "western" medicine vs "hey st. johns wart works for depression"
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Fair, but this is why that comment was not directed at you but rather the person who insinuated that "medicine" is synonymous with "allopathic medicine." It's not. Not all non-western, non-allopathic medicine is quackery, which was my point.

How much you choose to fight the battle about things like homeopathy with friends or family really depends on who your friends are, how much you value them, and how they would respond to a fight. If you really don't like your friends that much and are willing to not be friends with them anymore because of their beliefs, then by all means go full-bore. Otherwise, if they're not making sacrifices to their health (seeing homeopathy as something to use instead of traditional medicine), I'd just leave it alone. It's not like I try to exorcise my friends of all their irrational beliefs. I'm cordially friends with plenty of religious people despite thinking their belief is completely irrational.
 
Personally, I usually won't correct the person unless I am 100% that what they are saying is BS, but I usually just state my opinion on the matter with something along the lines of "I'm not sure that's correct based on the evidence I've read..." My aunt is an elementary school nurse and has often suggested doing non traditional things to help with random health issues -- like eating a particular type of food and it will heal x, y, or z, or using this drug will make you lose a lot of weight. But on those spare occasions where she gives me health advice, I just smile and nod... smile and nod.
 
FBurnaby said:
@sloop I was hoping to see others' experiences talking with close friends/family about things that are obviously wrong, say homeopathy, not so much a "western" medicine vs "hey st. johns wart works for depression"
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That's the thing, if you go in with the mindset that "this is obviously wrong because I didn't learn about it in med school", then you're likely not going to convince/handle any of your family members. Research their claims, summarize the evidence for/against, and then give your educated opinion. As much as I love telling my uncle that he's an idiot for thinking that marijuana cures epilepsy and that it's healthy for you because it "comes from the earth", I know that I'm not doing much to educate or convince him otherwise. When I'm talking to my aunt about the money that she spends on various vitamins, supplements, herbal remedies, etc, I'm much more serious and will take the time to properly research things and give her my best advice, which has the chance of shaping her views on the subject.

Don't be dismissive.
 
Here's the truth about people who embrace the pseudoscience: it's not about their beliefs, it's about their entire world view. You can't address the errant beliefs without first addressing their world view. Changing someone's world view is nearly impossible, so you would be best advised to go after their beliefs in a way that aligns with their world view.

For example, many who are into the whole herbal/oil thing have a world view that everything natural is good and anything synthetic/unnatural is bad. Herbal/oil companies exploit this in their advertising which sets up the dichotomy of the home-grown oil/herb producers versus the billion-dollar bad pharma industry. Showing them evidence that their herbs don't work is too incongruent with their worldview to be accepted. Instead, don't fight that battle. Show them the BMJ study which found that the overwhelming majority of herbal products don't even contain the herb they claim to. Show them financial evidence that the natural supplement industry is itself a multi-billion dollar industry and now there's clear evidence they are cutting corners and selling you grass clippings laced with caffeine and laxatives. I find this line much more apt to land because it doesn't challenge their world view, merely the trustworthiness of yet another billion dollar industry trying to deceive them.
 
FBurnaby said:
@sloop I was hoping to see others' experiences talking with close friends/family about things that are obviously wrong, say homeopathy, not so much a "western" medicine vs "hey st. johns wart works for depression"
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it's not st. johns wart
 
I've had a few recent intracranial hemorrhages in chiropractors acting as their own "doctors" for years and probably treating their HTN with solid mumbo jumbo. I respond to them with endotracheal tubes and nicardipine.
 
Banco said:
Just smile and nod. There is no changing opinions that are so deeply entrenched.
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Yup.

My aunt in Mexico likes to capture live bees and use them on my grandpa or other people for "pain management" or to "reduce swelling."

She is on another whole level of s____. I'm waiting for that one call that she almost killed someone by helping them get anaphylaxis.
 
FBurnaby said:
I have an in-law who jumps on and relishes any alternative medicine/pseudoscience they see on facebook or hear from friends (anti-vaxx, thinking chiropractors are higher trained than medical doctors, buying expensive oils and herbs, big phrama is evil, medical school doesn't teach hormones or nutrition, almonds can treat cancer, etc.) How do you confront these people without coming off as a jerk? It seems the easier I dismiss these things the more it adds to the fallacy that these alternatives are underdog secrets being suppressed by western medicine. Much of her views comes from severe ignorance in science, so it's difficult to even explain why these things are wrong. Any help?
Click to expand...

You can't reason somebody out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into 🙂


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