… and I’m afraid that Facebook isn’t the place to go looking either.
I was happily reading Pharyngula while eating lunch (& trying to avoid dropping crumbs into my keyboard), and decided that as a good pharyngulite I should perhaps pharyngulate a poll for once. (I was not at all surprised to find that ‘pharyngulate’ is now a word in at least one on-line dictionary.)Anyway, having done so I lingered to read the comments thread associated with the poll-associated article, and discovered…
… someone asking on Facebook for advice on how to cure their type-2 diabetes. (Or rather, what ‘natural’ treatments they could use instead of their current drug regime.) And being answered by a homeopath – at least, to do them credit, the homeopath doesn’t advise any homeopathic treatments. Howerver, on his website he does claim to have reversed his own type-2 diabetes with homeopathy, diet, and exercise. Since we know that diet and exercise can have this effect, I do wonder how he could be sure that homeopathy had any impact at all…
(There were some v-e-r-y i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g posts on that Facebook page!)
All that aside, what I can’t get my head around is why one would ask for, or take seriously, advice given by someone on a Facebook page. Is it a case of someone who’s already made up their made but is looking for validation for that decision? Is it down to the po-mo view that all points of view, all knowledge, all ‘ways of knowing’ about an issue are equally valid? Or is it something else that can be sheeted home to a distrust of science and a misunderstanding of how science works?
B^4 says:
And being answered by a homeopath – at least, to do them credit, the homeopath doesn’t advise any homeopathic treatments.
What would that even entail- extremely dilute sugar water?
There’s an anti-vertigo “remedy” being advertised on radio in the States, which claims to employ “Advanced Homeopathic Principles”. There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take advantage of him.
Alison Campbell says:
You have a good point there – sugar water (& sugar pills) would not be good options for a diabetic!
herr doktor bimler says:
there are some questions that google can’t answer…
But what are these questions? I googled it to no avail.
Also there seems to be no Wikipedia page devoted to “Subjects not covered by Wikipedia”.
Robyn says:
It’s treating Facebook as faces, ie friends to whom you might say “I’ve got this real problem with…” and the friend reply “Hey, so-and-so had that too and what she did was..” Websites and their contents can seem like intimate friends if you spend a lot of time with them, especially interactive ones like Facebook.