Pseudoscience revisited

Some time ago, I published a post entitled HOW TO BECOME A CHARLATAN. This prompted ‘THE NORWEGIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND LETTERS’ to invite me to give a lecture on the subject, a great honour, I am sure. Consequently, I have thought about this somewhat unusual subject quite a lot.

Obviously, my thoughts come from the perspective of someone who has researched alternative medicine for many years. Pseudoscientists seem to love alternative medicine and proponents of alternative medicine love pseudoscience. As a result, alternative medicine is densely populated by pseudoscientists.

But what is the characteristic of pseudoscience? Reflecting on this question, I found not one but several hallmarks (and for each of them, there are many posts on this blog which provide further explanations):

• A bizarre theory elevated to the status of a dogma
• Denial
• Conspiracy theories
• The abuse of science (not for testing but) for confirming assumptions.
• Jumping to conclusions
• The torture of data (until they ‘confess’)
• The use of fallacies
• The absence of rigorous investigations into the risks of their treatments
• Cherry-picking
• The disregard of the methodological quality of data supporting their treatments.
• Telling and promoting untruths
• Ad hominem attacks

Based on these 12 hallmarks, one could create a simple score which indicates the likelihood of the presence of pseudoscience. In other words, it might be useful to consider pseudoscience in terms of a sliding scale. Some things in alternative medicine can be just a bit pseudoscientific, others quite a lot, while others again are hopelessly so.

The issue of pseudoscience is by no means just academic; it is very real problem and has many important, practical implications. The most important one probably is that, in health care (and other areas as well), pseudoscience can be harmful, even to the point that it costs lives of vulnerable patients who believe that everything masquerading as science can be relied upon.