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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Dismantling the rhetoric of alternative medicine: Smokescreens, errors, conspiracies, and follies

subject

description

Alternative medicine is popular, and one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that it is relentlessly being promoted with the use of a wide range of fallacies, arguments which appear to be logic and true but which turn out on closer inspection to be illogical and false. In this article, I use my experience in alternative medicine research to discuss some of the most commonly employed fallacies. I conclude that they are used by proponents of alternative medicine to mislead the public such that even the most extravagant absurdities appear plausible. Collectively these fallacies constitute attacks upon rationality and progress in healthcare.