“For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. 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. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack”

there are always sufficiently gullible patients
Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
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English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

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“By definition, (I begin),
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“One test of good theory is that it have practical implications.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

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