autism_diva
Supporting Member
Joined: Dec 14, 2007
Posts: 224
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 Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 2:12 am Post subject: Article about conspiracy theories in The Telegraph |
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Lies, damn lies and 'counterknowledge'
By Damian Thompson
[page 2]
| Quote: | ...The dividing line between fiction and non-fiction is becoming increasingly hard to draw. These days, public opinion is so malleable that a product does not even have to pretend to be fact in order to affect perceptions of truth: the success of The Da Vinci Code has persuaded 40 per cent of Americans that the Churches are concealing information about Jesus.
Meanwhile, publishers, television channels and newspapers are making huge profits from another branch of counterknowledge: alternative medicine. Unqualified nutritionists make claims for vitamin supplements and "superfoods" that are unsupported by scientific literature; conveniently, these people often have a commercial interest in selling the supplements in question.
Fashionable advocates of alternative medicine, and the executives who profit from them, are as reliant on counterknowledge as any bedsit conspiracy theorist. Their miracle diets and health scares undermine science by distorting the public understanding of cause and effect, and therefore of risk.
The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic. |
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