Another expert heard from
Wisdom from an expert on holistic medicine.
Dawkins seems to be stuck in the last century.
Stuck in the last century – that’s a good one. Experts on holistic medicine are so hip and cutting edge and up to date while stodgy boring unfashionable people like scientists are stuck (like flies in amber, like gnats in ice cream, like a large person in a small doorway) in the last century, way the hell back seven years ago before the internet or CAT scans or the internal combustion engine.
He’s a very entertaining guy, but he suffers from existential insecurity: everything has to be proven before he’ll believe it.
That’s stupid, in more than one way. I’ll enumerate them. 1) ‘Existential insecurity’ is a silly tendentious self-flattering label to apply to rational skepticism of miraculous claims. It is not ‘existential insecurity’ to think and say that claims of medicinal effects that defy the laws of physics are not automatically credible. 2) It’s an elementary mistake to confuse evidence with proof, which shows what kind of ‘expert’ Stephen Russell is. Everything does not have to be proven before Dawkins will believe it; for claims about the natural world he wants evidence before he will consider the claims plausible.
His basic, rather alarmist, premise was that western medicine is in danger of being overshadowed by alternative medicine. Apart from being simply not true, it’s a very old-fashioned way of looking at the field.
There it is again – the peculiar obsession with fashion, and the clumsy lurch into irrelevance. It doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘old-fashioned’ or not; the issue is merit, not fashion.
It’s ridiculously nihilistic to think that if you can’t prove something right now, it isn’t valid. It’s so self-limiting: Dawkins must be very unhappy in himself. We’ve progressed beyond that.
We fashionable up to date types, that is – the ones who keep making the same stupid mistake about proof over and over again, while calling ourselves ‘experts’ in a ‘field’ that thinks water remembers a vanished molecule and can therefore have curative power. Russell must be very happy in himself; but what’s that got to do with anything? He’s still a chump.
As soon as I read this I knew you would feature it.
I was thinking that ‘I won’t believe without proof, I won’t consider without evidence’ would make a good family motto.
My latin is rusty, can anyone come up with a snappy translation?
But, really, that was the weakest attack on Dawkins I’ve seen this year. And competition is stiff.
Sine argumento credere nolo, sine indicio accipere nolo.
My artisans are engraving it even now.
Considering that “western” medicine is practiced all over the world nowadays, isn’t it about time that it’s earned the appellation “orthodox,” or how about just “rational”? After all, if I get sick in Seoul, Tokyo or Hong Kong, they’re not gonna do some freaky dance around me, are they?
Fields don’t think. People think. And the field of alternative medicine is heterogenous indeed. You’ve got everything from people who are basically nurse practitioners-cum-herbalists to people who want to hook you up to a box of blinkenlights and announce that you are allergic to everything and should eat only hay and pickled plums.
(Which is not to say that this guy isn’t a prize putz. “Very unhappy in himself” indeed, pah.)
Barefoot Doctor or Barefaced Cheek?
“…[S]ome of Stephen Russell’s ideas of how the body works: the ears are the flowers of the kidney, so tinnitus is a result of depleted kidney energy;…” See: http://www.healthwatch uk.org/newsletterarchive/nlett45.html
Woo!
And again, Woo!
Maybe he’s just jealous because Dawkins got on telly exposing some of his mates’ more ludicrous nonsense…
Lots more of this stuff given a severe doing at:
http://www.badscience.net
Cam, but the field in question – the one Russell is an ‘expert’ in – isn’t alternative medicine, it’s homeopathy. It is a tenet of that field that water remembers molecules, isn’t it? That’s the explanation of how homeopathic medicine can work even when it’s been so diluted that not even one molecule remains – isn’t it?
Oh, my mistake then. I skimmed the article a while ago and apparently didn’t remember it correctly. (Probably because “Must be very unhappy in himself” causes a red, obscuring haze to form in my vision. Man, does that kind of thing ever push my buttons.) Yes, you’re quite right – to the best of my knowledge, you can’t be a homeopath and not believe that. And as far as I know, homeopathy is not like, say, chiropractic, which does apparently seem to have some modest benefit in certain highly-restricted cases even though the underlying theory and history are goofy.
Now, there are at least a few substances that appear to have some really bizarre and unexpected dose-response curves down at the tiny end of the scale. There’s a woman at the UW working on toxicity of fragrances who’s finding some odd things along those lines, as I recall. I hope that homeopathic bogosity isn’t making things difficult for her. And not just because irritating homeopaths may buttonhole her at parties and gurgle enthusiastically at her; I can imagine it making scientific investigations like that one seem untouchable, taboo.
Another crackpot cites quantum mechanics as legitimating any old nonsense. I really want to scream.
Every single sentence of that Grauniad piece represents one form of bad argument or another; it might be quite interesting to deconstruct it completely (as it’s quite short) and post it on the site somewhere for educative purposes.
Russell is actually into all sorts of alternative stuff. You don’t have to dig very deeply to find that his motive for trying to rubbish Dawkins is the age-old one of his pocket.
(Yes, I have checked up a bit to make sure that this is the same Barefoot Doctor. This, whilst not conclusive, seems to me good evidence – the style is recognisable from other crap from the Graudnia.)
See also, Amazon.co.uk: Stephen Russell: BooksBarefoot Doctor’s Handbook for Modern Lovers: A Spiritual Guide to Truly Rude and Amazing Love and Sex by Stephen Russell (Paperback – 27 Jan 2000}
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Stephen%20Russell&p.
Another bareface exposure stunt, if you ask me.
Amazon.co.uk: Stephen Russell – @ google, should suffice.
“Yin and Yang… are said (by Taoists) to meet in your lower abdomen in the so-called sea of chi (energy), just below your navel. Press firmly into the bubbling spring points with your thumbs for a moment now, then gently with your favourite fingertip on the crown of your head, rubbing in a small circular motion, and feel – or visualise yourself feeling – the primordial energies of yin and yang streaming towards each other within and collecting in your belly. All you have to do now is remain aware of this flow for the rest of your life and there’ll be no matter your mind will be unable to overcome.”
!
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1086050,00.html
Oooh, I hadn’t realised this was THE “barefoot doctor” (or should that be “barefaced charlatan”? [or T.B.C.])
I saw him on telly once pulling a pathetic con on some random members of the public…he was supposedly demonstrating his amazing ‘instant’ diagnostic skills, and as part of his act, he squeezed the pressure point between this poor guy’s thumb & forefinger, and asked if the guy felt pain.
Would ya believe it, the guy did, (if he hadn’t felt any pain, the most likely explanation would be that he had significant nerve damage or was, in fact, dead. Try it for yourself – squeeze on the belly of the muscle just in from the webbing. It should ALWAYS hurt. If it doesn’t, you might have a genuine problem!), and T.B.C. claimed this as fantastic proof that his ‘diagnosis’ of some kind of stomach/disgestive problem was brilliant and entirely valid.
Well gee. I gave myself a second-degree burn on a fingertip yesterday (taking a bowl out of the microwave – I had no idea it was that hot). It hurt. That must mean I have some kind of cardio-vascular problem.
Ya know, blistering is a sure sign of Satanic possession. Get thee to an exorcist.
An even sillier attack on RD here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article2361294.ece
Apparently;
# Dawkins doesn’t get that nobody really believes in that kind of god, the believe in ‘subtle and profound: archetypal images that dramatise the invisible realities…(which)…act as symbols for the formless elements of physics; but also for the creative imagination.’
# Dawkins hasn’t studied Theology.
# He has no concept of the “reality” of a thought.
# yadda yadda, something about angels.
You bet: subtle archetypes: that’s what all believers believe in; no believers believe in that person-type god who answers prayers and punishes people with hurricanes; that’s why we never hear about that god but only about the subtle archetype god.