Rebecca Fernandez

Thomas,
I think that was a bit harsh. I don't even know what you're referring to, and a quick Google isn't turning up anything negative about Emily Rosa or her JAMA article (neither of which I had ever heard of prior to your comment, by the way). I'm surmising that some folks didn't believe she actually wrote/conducted her study? Again, this is the first I have heard about her, period, so I'm feeling a bit attacked for something I didn't cite.

I'm also not following what you're referring to... Wallace Sampson?

Again, I think you're making some awfully big leaps here from my linking to an interesting TED talk and mentioning some interesting resources for learning to question, to the accusation that I'm somehow endorsing some giant group of skeptics who are apparently interconnected.

Critical thinking is a process for all of us. I most assuredly have blind spots that I haven't yet looked closely at, because we all have 'acquired wisdom' that we don't really question until the right moment arrives.

The valedictorian's speech, along with a cursory read of her blog and some other related things, is quite clearly the product of having Gatto and others pushed on her by the teacher she mentions. And that's fine--we all try on ideas, often with gusto--but it did surprise me to see so many fans of Gatto reading her work as if she'd done something new and exciting by parroting him. Is it possible she somehow came to the same set of ideas on her own, read his work, and could only thereafter put those ideas into his words and his expressions? I suppose. Seems unlikely to me, though.

In the end, people do make mistakes, even the most skeptical among us. Something causes someone to overlook what's questionable or perfectly obvious to many other people. Critical thinking is an imperfect process, because it involves people, and we come to the table with our own set of experiences and things we "know" are true.

opensource.com is a place where we can explore ideas, and challenge the ideas of others. I'd wager that Red Hat's stock price can weather a heated discussion just fine.

Thank you so much for taking the time to type that all out. It's disappointing to hear you've run up against dogmatic behavior with the folks mentioned.

I'd love to hear a bit more about this:
"The Randi challenge is hogwash. Always has been, always will be. The challenge amounts to nothing other than an effort to trick people into making statements that Randi then uses to create situations in which his "victims" will fail.

One component of the pseudo-science involved is the use of multiple testing trials while claiming alpha and beta values that only apply to single trials.

The general path is at least three tests before Randi would be forced to validate his victim's work. At least one successful trial before you even get to Randi and at least two trials for Randi."

(Feel free to point me to a link if it's been explained somewhere in detail already.)

Also if your articles on Emily Rosa are available online, I would much like to read them, because it sounds very interesting.

I absolutely agree that there is a problem with health care practitioners not following the evidence, which is why I think we need more folks like the Academic OB/Gyn, who really are willing to look into common and uncommon practices and encourage OBs and midwives to reconsider the way they do things. (For example his writings/video on delayed cord clamping is the most balanced, reasonable source I've seen on the subject, which is quite polarized everywhere else.)

However, for me the difficult with most conventional vs. alternative providers is that the former are (usually) willing to rethink what they're doing when evidence points to it being wrong. Or at the very least, will acknowledge that they are doing something that isn't ideal. The latter seems to have a general distrust of science and vague ideas about "chemicals" being harmful (without ever really considering that the divide between synthetic and natural isn't the same as the one between harmful and harmless--meningitis is natural, and the chemicals in the Hib vaccine are not, but most of us would not like to have the former, even if we reject the latter). There's a big belief in conspiracy theories, like the idea that vaccine-preventable diseases were going away before vaccines became available, and Big Pharma is just trying to make money off us.

"I think that opens you up to the observation that the article contains a lot of uncritical thinking that has been recycled by, and between, skeptics for more than two decades."

Agreed, I am certainly open to talking about that. I have certainly seen dismissal of alternative medicine where it's completely inappropriate--when it simply hasn't been tested at all.

But there's also a failure on the side of those who champion these things to realize that conventional medicine *does* use natural cures where they have been shown valuable--it's just that they will do things like try to isolate the valuable part of whatever plant is showing promise and ultimately use that (often a synthetic version) to create a more potent medicine. (Which most of the pro-alternative med folks I know will then promptly refuse to use. :)

I will be upfront and say that, because most of the people in my social circle have much faith in these things, I do tend to appreciate some of the nay-saying perhaps more than I should.

Stories like those described in this blog post are unfortunately not rare, and a general lack of education about the science behind vaccinations, and the substitution of alt-med treatments for proven treatment protocols in serious illnesses, really is a growing public health problem:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2815

I have seen babies die or be injured during labor because their families don't have sufficient critical thinking skills to assess the pseudoscience that pushes them to reject all of modern medicine as harmful and arbitrary. I've seen a child get heart damage after having measles, when her parents were told that she could get autism from MMR, and that measles wasn't dangerous anyway.

When you mentioned a "journal" I pointed to, did you mean Science-Based Medicine? I hope you didn't think that my pointing people there means that I think it's a perfect source. But between the various doctors who review what the others are blogging--I have seen great ones like Harriet Hall really apply a critical eye to her colleagues posts--and the comments, which often push back on questionable points or point to things that contradict what was posted, I do think it's a great resource when you're looking for information on medical treatments.

And for what it's worth, I used the word "legendary" to describe Randi partly because he's memorable as a character to people, not because I can vouch for his skills as a magician or his impartiality as a skeptic. But the resources his foundation provided were pretty good, compared to what else is out there.