[troutman]

The CAM Practitioner As Enabler (Or Death by Pseudoscience)
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/...doscience.html

Often I am asked, “what’s the harm” of believing in and using fanciful or magical medical treatments. If it makes people feel better, who cares if it’s not real? Well, there are many kinds of harm, but perhaps the most insidious is simply instilling and reinforcing in people a belief in nonsense and a simultaneous distrust of science and reason.

In medicine, putting one’s faith in demonstrable baloney can lead to a delay in getting proper care. One might argue that the individual has the right to choose his or her own care and interventions, but this (while true) minimizes and even dismisses the role of the alternative practitioner in this decision-making process.

In my opinion the mere existence of alternative “professions” and practitioners enables fear and irrationality in health care decision-making. They subvert the purpose of informed consent. They provide an illusion, a false choice, that distracts and lures patients away from rational health care by tempting them with magical wish-fulfillment right when they are most vulnerable.

CAM proponents frequently dispense comforting or appealing misinformation, luring people away from the often hard choices and scary options provided by honest science-based medicine, and then scream “consumer choice” whenever any standards or quality control threatens to restrict their ability to extract money from the public.

Regulation of unscientific philosophy-based health professions, however, has never resulted in actual quality control or protecting the public from nonsense. It actually makes the problem worse, by legitimizing pseudoscience and providing plausibility to the enablers. Licensing pseudoscience makes the government complicit in fraud and medical harm.