If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
Interpretation
Healing methods with proven effectiveness through scientific trials are no longer considered alternative medicine.
This quote by Richard Dawkins emphasizes the importance of scientific validation in the medical field. It argues that once a healing technique is rigorously tested and shown to be effective through controlled double-blind trials, it transitions from being labeled as 'alternative' to being recognized as legitimate medicine. This underscores the necessity of empirical evidence in healthcare and the evolving nature of medical practices based on scientific findings.
In practice
This quote can be used in a medical conference to highlight the importance of scientific rigor.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.
Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.
Imagine all the food mankind has produced over the past 8,000 years. Now consider that we need to produce that same amount again β but in just the next 40 years if we are to feed our growing and hungry world.
In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.
Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it.
Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.
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