Alternative Medicine And Common Errors Of Reasoning [jnl article]

Why do so many otherwise intelligent patients and therapists pay considerable sums for products and therapies of alternative medicine, even though most of these either are known to be useless or dangerous or have not been subjected to rigorous scientific testing? The author proposes a number of reasons this occurs: (1) Social and cultural reasons (e.g., many citizens’ inability to make an informed choice about a health care product; anti-scientific attitudes meshed with New Age mysticism; vigorous marketing and extravagant claims; dislike of the delivery of scientific biomedicine; belief in the superiority of ‘‘natural’’ products); (2) psychological reasons (e.g., the will to believe; logical errors of judgment; wishful thinking, and ‘‘demand characteristics’’); (3) the illusion that an ineffective therapy works, when actually other factors