Learning opportunities
I found myself in two frighteningly similar, yet significantly different situations while on winter break. One occurred at the home of a family member I was visiting. I found several books and pamphlets on homeopathy and other associated woo, and naturally became concerned about how deeply the woo had spread. The other happened at a party I was at with friends. I heard one person (a new friend who I don’t know all that well) tell another (a friend of mine for many years) that he had been having some mental and physical problems recently but that thankfully he’d found a “good homeopath.” I was sitting next to the conversation and could have easily jumped in, but I wasn’t being talked to directly.
My proper course of action in the first situation was obvious. Knowing this family member well, I couldn’t believe that they would honestly buy into homeopathy if they knew exactly what it meant. I sat them down and flipped through the books, explaining about dilution and succussion, using ipecac as a cure for nausea, and so on. It took less than two minutes to convince them to get rid of the books, though we talked a little longer about the details because of their curiosity. It turned out that the books were bought used and on sale very cheap, and seemed worth picking up because they looked like medical encyclopedias. We decided to throw the books away rather than donate them or bring them to a used book store, so that no one else would be fooled by them. Later, they asked me to look through a pile of books about medicine and to pull out the ones based on pseudoscience. It would have been nice to have taught them how to identify woo, rather than just how to run potential woo by me for evaluation, but overall I consider it a success.
I had quite the moral dilemma in the second situation, though. I didn’t know the person that well, wasn’t clearly a part of the conversation, and wasn’t sure whether it was actually a teachable moment. I heard him explain that he got worse before he got better — a classic hallmark of issues like a cold or a headache that appear, worsen, and heal on their own over time, and good evidence that homeopathic treatment is unrelated to the healing process. I squirmed in my seat and tried to make eye contact with a known-skeptic friend on the other side of the room. The real dilemma happened when he explained how the mind and body are so interconnected, and how so many ailments are psychosomatic. He used this as evidence for the necessity of “holistic” medicine, but I thought, good point! Maybe if you have a fake medical problem, it’s not so bad to treat it with fake medicine. This may even work for some real but not-too-serious problems — the placebo effect actually does help some people get better faster than they would have without it.
I decided not to say anything. I just complained about it later to that skeptic friend across the room, who never noticed my desperate stares. I think it was the right call because it would have made a scene and made people unhappy and upset (in a way I was safe from while visiting family). People don’t tend to learn from what you tell them, if telling them makes them very upset. Still, I know there is plenty of harm possible from this kind of stuff, and I feel bad about not even trying to intervene.
So, did I do the right thing? When do you step in to teach people about science and pseudoscience, and when should you just let it go?
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It’s easy for anyone reading your account to say, “Well, I would have intervened,” but you are right that unsolicited interventions of this kind do upset people and tend to make them more entrenched in their positions.
In similar situations I have sometimes found feigning wide-eyed innocence and genuine interest helps as a way of being accepted into the conversation. I ask questions as if I’m interested in trying it out for myself but then start to gently point out the problems “as I see them” e.g “so how come the water keeps a trace of the ‘mother tincture’ but not of everything else that’s been in it?”
The purpose isn’t to change the mind of the confirmed devotee but to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of anyone s/he’s trying to convert.
Anyway, you did a great job with your relative. Well done.
Thanks.
Your suggestion is a really good one. In retrospect it probably would have worked. He seemed really eager (as I imagine many people in his situation are) to explain to people just how miraculous and special alternative medicine is. Next time!
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