DISQUS

Better Health: Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science Is Planning To Honor Quackery

  • David · 10 months ago
    The fantastic crab legs were matched only by the brilliant company!

    Thank you for raising more awareness of this (dis)honor. Too many people conflate homeopathy with herbal medicine, particularly since some natural products are the starting materials for the infinitely-diluted "remedies." The two could not be more different.

    You make an absolutely spot-on point that academic institutions that lend their imprimatur to fraudulent medical practices not only harm their reputation but also confuse the public by appearing to endorse pseudoscience.

    I'd really like to hear from fellow PCP&S/USiP alums as well as current profs there.
  • albatross · 10 months ago
    Yes! Evaluating even surface-level disputes outside your own expertise is hard. The only thing you have to go on, many times, is expert opinion. To the extent that expert opinion is shaded for political or social or economic reasons, it becomes much less useful. And that comes back to bite us every day. If I know about cases where the "official story" is politically-motivated BS, then it's easy to believe that in cases where the "official story" is true, and thus it becomes much easier for me to buy into nonsense because I just don't have the background knowledge to evaluate the truth.

    Think about the antivaccination movement as an example of this effect. I have to guess that people who've seen the official, respectable sources conceal or shade the truth, or lend credence to nonsense, in other cases (Iraq and WMDs, corn-based ethanol as a path to energy independence) are going to find it more plausible that the official, respectable sources are concealing or shading the truth w.r.t. connections between autism and vaccines. That leads to horrible outcomes like kids dying of stuff for which they and all their classmates should have been vaccinated. My suspicion is that there are a lot of other examples of this effect.

    I don't exactly know what to do about this, other than to suggest that we should all cry foul when we see respectable sources lending support to politically-connected nonsense, lying or shading the truth for social or political or economic goals, etc.