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.
What we want is scientists who don't become part of the policy discussion: All they do is produce science. If someone becomes an advocate, then I won't pay as much attention to their science.
The most complex object in the known universe: brain, only uses 20 watts of power. It would require a nuclear power plant to energize a computer the size of a city block to mimic your brain, and your brain does it with just 20 watts. So if someone calls you a dim bulb, that's a compliment.
Windmills installed around the world converting their direct current into alternating current and feeding the electric energy into the world network can harvest the planet Earth's prime daily energy income source-the wind--and adequately supply all the world's energy needs
Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything.
Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.
One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
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