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These are some of my windmills, a.k.a. pet peeves, a.k.a. hills willing to die on.
Medical disinformation
editAlternative medicine is NOT medicine. I am removing with great prejudice homeopathinc, traditional or naturist "remedies" from medical sections and moving them to wherever is appropriate: History, Traditional use, Cultural, and so on. At the very least I add the label "citation needed".
Alternative medicine is dangerous. Period. Whether it is out of sheer venal profiteering off of the medically-uneducated or naive beliefs of same, it is still dangerous. For:
- 1) It prevents people to seek real medical treatment. There are countless people who died because they went with homeopathic or herbal remedies.
- 2) Contrary to popular belief, most of these "remedies" have been investigated properly by medical and scientific community and found either not working or actually being dangerous, i.e. toxic, which brings me to
- 3) Because of lack of regulation in most countries, there is no telling what's in them. Sometimes there is actual poison in them (out of carelessness, greed, or sheer ignorance), sometimes there is nothing in them (virtually all homeopathic treatments fall into this category). One thing is in them for sure is placebo, which means they're not going to cure anything beyond placebo effect.
Because I am of the principle to add to Wikipedia, rather than delete - even if I personally think there are some statements presented as facts which can be very deleterious indeed - I don't delete these statements; just move them where they belong, to historical use/cultural beliefs or whahaveyous, sections describing the childhood stage of medical thinking, and not the present.
Science
editI am, after all is said and done, a scientist to the core both by training and by inclination. Everything I do on Wikipedia (should) reflect that.
In science, any compromise between a correct statement and a wrong statement is a wrong statement. Thanks, user:Stephan Schulz!.
Aldous Huxley famously asserted that "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”. Yes, yes they do. Take history. Facts happened. Reality happened. We know as "facts" what the historical consensus tells us. That is not a fact, that's a widely held opinion. Facts that are ignored they do cease to exist, unfortunately. Not in the beginning. It takes time and multitudes of ignoring minds, but eventually they can fade out of existence.
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. Robert A. Heinlein
"For the fanatic, the Devil is the intellectual, because the intellectual has doubts." Paul Zarifopol