Why The Public Can't Tell What Is Valid And What Is Pseudoscience

Why, you asked? Because some time established facilities that one put trusts on also can't tell the difference and even promote quackery.

I can see if some fly-by-night operator or scam artist to fall for such a thing, but a "hospital"? A Sutter Lakeside Hospital somewhere in California is having its first Health and Wellness Expo, and it is a doosey, folks! Here are the attendees/participants/vendors that got highlighted.

Lucerne resident Margaret Rowson said she came to see Dr. Fred Allen Wolf, theoretical physicist, who was interviewed in the film "What the Bleep Do We Know." Wolf was one of the two keynote speakers.

What? A reputable physicist from UCLA, USC, Berkeley, UC-San Diego, UC-Santa Barbara, etc. were all busy? You had to find someone who appeared in a crackpot movie?

But it gets better...

A couple separately offering homeopathy and acupuncture had a booth as well, and spoke of their plans to make their services available at the Wellness Center in June.

Kinda expected, isn't it?

The problem here is that medical establishment like a hospital symbolizes what we know works in medicine, which presumably is based on solid science and clinical studies. When it endorses things like this which either have not been scientifically shown to be valid, or when it mixes dubious physics with valid ones, the public can't tell which is which and simply considers all of them to be on the SAME level of validity. "Hey, if my hospital endorses it, it must be OK". I'm just surprised they don't have an astrologer on hand to do medical screenings.

So shame on them for turning their backs on the very methodology that they exist on.

Zz.