QuoteProject
If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.
Richard Dawkins
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Alternative medicine lacks rigorous testing and scientific validation, unlike conventional medicine.

This quote by Richard Dawkins emphasizes the importance of scientific testing in determining the efficacy of remedies. It suggests that once an alternative treatment has been proven effective through controlled studies, it should no longer be labeled as alternative but rather classified as standard medicine, highlighting the necessity of empirical evidence in healthcare.

Themes

ScienceMedicineAlternativeTestingEvidence

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used to emphasize the importance of scientific validation in a health seminar.

More from Richard Dawkins

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
Richard DawkinsRead
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.
Richard DawkinsRead
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.
Richard DawkinsRead
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.
Richard DawkinsRead
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.
Richard DawkinsRead
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.
Richard DawkinsRead

Similar quotes

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.
Craig VenterRead
With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
Miguel NicolelisRead
Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts.
David HilbertRead
We often say that our science is objective and accurate, but we don't often say that our science is incomplete - that although the established parts of natural science are very well tested and the evidence makes a compelling case for things being as they've been described, there nevertheless are open questions that we cannot answer.
Jim PeeblesRead
Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.
Paul DiracRead
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
Robert M. PirsigRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.