Projects were started, long campaigns by Good Thinking Soc et al to get NHS to stop funding homeopathy. Those campaigns are bearing fruit literally today - Bristol finally announced it will no longer fund homeopathy. But, there’s a ‘meanwhile’.
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The wellness movement exploits distress, selling quack cures for problems which might exist in the future, or exist now but aren’t curable. But it does it under the guise of kindness, so attacking those who fall for it just looks cruel.
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So where are we now? We have a growing and increasingly dangerous conspiracy theory and wellness culture (these things are closely related, ‘govt and big pharma’ are the enemy of wellness solutions, it’s not coincidence that Alex Jones sells health supplements).
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We no longer have a critical thinking community or leaders as capable of getting headlines as Jones or Paltrow or Peterson are. And we can’t use the old tactics of mocking silly beliefs, because belief is now identity.
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What do I mean by ‘belief is identity’? Let’s look at chronic lyme disease. It doesn’t exist. It’s made up. Pure quackery. There is no such thing as chronic lyme disease. And yet I can show you thousands of sufferers. They have an identity: Lyme Warriors.
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The disease they have google-diagnosed themselves with (or found a quack) has become an identity. And so the self-worth and community of Lyme Warriors relies on not only a fake disease being real, but on the patient continuing to have it. Lose the diagnosis, lose the identity.
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This reinforces the individual diagnosis, it often becomes the dominant force in the person’s life, because there is now An Enemy (doctors who say it’s not a real disease, Big Pharma who refuse to research a cure, sometimes conspiracy theories about keeping them ill, etc).
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So you can’t just go ‘here’s an explanation of Diagnosis By Exclusion, here’s some studies showing chronic lyme isn’t real, here’s some material on critical thinking’ because none of that fills the identity gap. It takes everything away.
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Those Lyme Warriors (almost all women) still have the symptoms, are still dismissed and ignored by doctors, still have poor quality of life. So yes they will stick to their community and identity, because the alternative can be worse.
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But along with this new generation of quackery-as-identity communities, there is also a new generation of producers and journalists who weren’t around when Randi took Jose Alvarez around Australia to fool the media. They didn’t see Storm.
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They take all claims as equal. To reiterate, no modern culture of ‘testable claim’. It’s down to two individuals from ‘opposing sides’ to debate it out. And if one ‘side’ has the stronger identity politics behind it, that’s the one the producers and editors end up in thrall to.
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So a bunch of us old skeptic activists are going “huh? This again? Didn’t we debunk this ten years ago? Why is the
@Guardian suddenly falling for quackery again?”. And this time we don’t have any infrastructure to protest it. I’ve just got this thread. Doubt it’ll work.Show this thread -
And now some FURTHER READING, woo! Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. A little dated but still the best primer on critical thinking. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0345409469/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_AIEABb3C31A14 …
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James Randi’s Flim Flam is cheap as chips on Kindle, also a bit dated but essential background on testable claims https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flim-Flam-Psychics-Unicorns-Other-Delusions-ebook/dp/B004X6U5DY …
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There are other books of this ilk but many of the authors turned out to be the aforementioned sex pests, so let’s not go there.
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On women and why alternative medicine fills the gap actual medicine created, it’s me, your humble tweeter:https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/health-inequality-promotes-alternatives-goop-1-5542200 …
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On chronic lyme, follow
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And final word also goes to my own work because I just sweated over this hot thread, the aforementioned Storm, which never gets old.https://youtu.be/HhGuXCuDb1U
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WAIT come back I’m not actually done. Need to acknowledge that skeptics also fell afoul of ‘beliefs as identity’, lots of ‘I’m a Skeptic therefore always right’ nonsense which is best illustrated by the horrorshow that was the Atheism+ movement.
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Again, not a coincidence that ‘new atheism’ was populated by aggressive, often anti-feminist men. Identity politics has a critical thinking problem and critical thinking has an identity politics problem. All movements do. Not all are about intellectual superiority though.
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Okay now I’m done. Let’s see what my mentions are li…oh dear god
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Revisiting this thread to add this account of exactly what I describe: illness/symptoms as identityhttps://twitter.com/lymescience/status/1039894459834687488?s=21 …
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End of conversation
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