People tend to limit their reading to sources that agree with their beliefs. We find ourselves mostly preaching to the choir; our message usually doesn’t reach those who most need to hear it. I recently received an inquiry from a science-based medical doctor asking how to approach others in building a bridge to clarify so much misinformation.
My first thought was that you can build a bridge but the real challenge is persuading people to cross that bridge. Like leading a horse to water…
How to approach others? That’s a tough question. The best approach varies with the individual and with where he is in his journey. Confrontation seldom works: it just makes people angry. It is counterproductive: it only serves to make them invent more rationalizations to defend their beliefs. Although sometimes anger can be a good thing. I got an e-mail from an acupuncturist who was incensed by an article I wrote saying that acupuncture was not based on good evidence. He set out to prove me wrong by looking up the evidence behind what he had been taught by his teachers about acupuncture’s efficacy for specific conditions, and when he couldn’t find any, he realized that his teachers and his textbooks had misled him with lies. He gave up acupuncture and went back to school to learn a science-based health profession.
If someone has never had his belief challenged and thinks it a universally accepted truth, it might do some good to show him otherwise. When I was in the dentist’s office earlier this week he asked me what I thought about detoxification. I told him I thought it was a pseudoscientific concept with no scientific validity, that proponents couldn’t even tell you what those “toxins” were, much less measure how much had been removed, and that there was no evidence that detox objectively benefitted patients. He had me repeat this to his assistant who was currently doing a detox. She looked at me very strangely and I may have created an enemy for life. But just possibly I may have started a small crack in her certainty that might someday widen to let accurate information seep in.
Some people respond to accurate information. I belong to the Healthfraud discussion list on Quackwatch and we have had several people thank us for providing accurate information, debunking false information, showing the fallacies in arguments for claims, and helping them learn about the scientific process. They tell us they have discarded their previous false beliefs because of what they read there.
When I spoke at a local college I mentioned that diet supplements are not regulated like FDA approved drugs and have been found contaminated with everything from insect parts to prescription drugs, and that dosages sometimes vary wildly from what the label says. One older student got very upset and said she was going right home to clean out her cabinet and throw all those products away.
I have gotten e-mails from people who decided not to waste their money at the Amen Clinics or on treatments with the DRX-9000 spinal decompression machine after reading my articles.
Unfortunately, many people do not respond to accurate information. Some people choose to form strong beliefs on hearsay or personal perceptions or ideological grounds without any input from science. Scientific information is irrelevant to them so they are not likely to change their minds no matter how much evidence from scientific studies you throw at them. It is useful to ask people what evidence it would take to change their minds. True believers frequently say nothing would change their minds: they know they are right and they are sure that testing would only serve to demonstrate the truth of their beliefs. It’s a waste of time to talk to these people.
I met a believer in dowsing and I gave him a book explaining the ideomotor effect, showing that dowsers had never been able to pass controlled tests, and debunking dowsing in detail. We held a public debate afterwards, and what he said was as if he had never read the book. He managed to just ignore everything in it: his “pro” side of the argument boiled down to two points: he’d personally seen it work and lots of people believed in it. That was enough for him.
Then there are people who are capable of responding to new information but don’t want to hear it. Don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind’s made up. It’s more comforting to have a belief and stick to it than to deal with uncertainty.
Something I haven’t tried yet but want to: ask them if they know of something that doesn’t work but that some other people believe in. Once you find something they reject, you might be able to argue that logical consistency requires that their pet remedy be rejected on the same grounds. For instance, if they reject bloodletting to balance the humors but accept reflexology, you might point out that during the many centuries bloodletting was used, there were far more testimonials from patients and doctors than there are for reflexology today. So if they accept reflexology on the basis of testimonials, they should logically accept bloodletting on the same basis. If they reject bloodletting because science showed it didn’t work, they should look more closely at what science says about reflexology.
Humor can be effective in making a point, like the comedian who said “Of course science doesn’t know everything; it KNOWS it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop.” And like Mark Crislip’s “Alternative Flight.”
The best strategy would be to guide people to discover the truth for themselves and claim it as their own, but I’m afraid I don’t have the patience or the psychological acumen to carry that out. It’s too bad Socrates isn’t around to help.
I am not foolish enough to think I could ever influence true believers; but even for them, it might be possible to plant a tiny seed of doubt that might be reinforced by future experiences and might eventually grow into a plant. Dripping water can wear away the hardest stone over time. But realistically, I can only hope to reach the fence-sitters: those who have not yet irrevocably made up their mind.
I hope readers will share their own success stories and bridge-building ideas in the comments section.
- Yes, But. The Annotated Atlantic. - November 7th, 2009 [November 7th, 2009]
- Health Insurance Benefit Costs by Region - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- For an Operator, Please Press... - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pollyanna With a Pen: Maine Governor Signs 18 New Health Care Bills into Law - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- AMA Sounds the Alarm, Medicare Making Yet Another Attempt to Cut Reimbursement - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mass Governor Asks Blue Cross to Keep Higher Employer Contribution - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lifespan and Care New England Plan Monopoly (Again) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dirigo Health: Con Artists, Liars, and Thieves? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Orleans: Health Challenges - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- August a Flurry of Activity - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Maine's Dirigo Health Savings One-Third of Original Estimate - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- “Methodolatry”: My new favorite term for one of the shortcomings of evidence-based medicine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Suzanne Somers’ Knockout: Dangerous misinformation about cancer (part 1) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A science-based blog about GMO - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A Not-So-Split Decision - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Military Medicine in Iraq - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The effective wordsmithing of Amy Wallace - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- A Science Lesson from a Homeopath and Behavioral Optometrist - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Join CFI in opposing funding mandates for quackery in health care reform - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mainstreaming Science-Based Medicine: A Novel Approach - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Those who live in glass houses… - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- J.B. Handley of the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue: Misogynistic attacks on journalists who champion science - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- When homeopaths attack medicine and physics - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The cancer screening kerfuffle erupts again: “Rethinking” screening for breast and prostate cancer - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- All Medicines Are Poison! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- When Loud Wins: Will Your Tax Dollars Pay For Prayer? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- It’s All in Your Head - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Skeptical O.B. joins the Science-Based Medicine crew - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Tragic Death Toll of Homebirth - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s the right C-section rate? Higher than you think. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Recombinant Human Antithrombin – Milking Nanny Goats for Big Bucks - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Does C-section increase the rate of neonatal death? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Man in Coma 23 Years – Is He Really Conscious? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Why Universal Hepatitis B Vaccination Isn’t Quite Universal - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ontario naturopathic prescribing proposal is bad medicine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Naturopaths and the anti-vaccine movement: Hijacking the law in service of pseudoscience - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Institute for Science in Medicine enters the health care reform fray - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Neti pots – Ancient Ayurvedic Treatment Validated by Scientific Evidence - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Early Intervention for Autism - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- A temporary reprieve from legislative madness - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- A critique of the leading study of American homebirth - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Lose those holiday pounds - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Endocrine disruptors—the one true cause? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Acupuncture for Chronic Prostatitis/Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Evidence in Medicine: Experimental Studies - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Midwives and the assault on scientific evidence - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Mammogram Post-Mortem - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- An Influenza Recap: The End of the Second Wave - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The End of Chiropractic - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Cell phones and cancer again, or: Oh, no! My cell phone’s going to give me cancer! (revisited) - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Another wrinkle to the USPSTF mammogram guidelines kerfuffle: What about African-American women? - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Acupuncture, the P-Value Fallacy, and Honesty - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- The One True Cause of All Disease - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Communicating with the Locked-In - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Are the benefits of breastfeeding oversold? - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Measles - December 20th, 2009 [December 20th, 2009]
- Radiation from medical imaging and cancer risk - December 21st, 2009 [December 21st, 2009]
- Multiple Sclerosis and Irrational Exuberance - December 21st, 2009 [December 21st, 2009]
- Medical Fun with Christmas Carols - December 22nd, 2009 [December 22nd, 2009]
- Lithium for ALS – Angioplasty for MS - December 23rd, 2009 [December 23rd, 2009]
- “Toxins”: the new evil humours - December 24th, 2009 [December 24th, 2009]
- 2009’s Top 5 Threats To Science In Medicine - December 24th, 2009 [December 24th, 2009]
- Buteyko Breathing Technique – Nothing to Hyperventilate About - December 26th, 2009 [December 26th, 2009]
- The Graston Technique – Inducing Microtrauma with Instruments - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- The “pharma shill” gambit - December 29th, 2009 [December 29th, 2009]
- Ginkgo biloba – No Effect - December 30th, 2009 [December 30th, 2009]
- Oppose “Big Floss”; practice alternative dentistry - January 1st, 2010 [January 1st, 2010]
- Causation and Hill’s Criteria - January 3rd, 2010 [January 3rd, 2010]
- The life cycle of translational research - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- The anti-vaccine movement strikes back against Dr. Paul Offit - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- Osteoporosis Drugs: Good Medicine or Big Pharma Scam? - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- Acupuncture for Hot Flashes - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- The case for neonatal circumcision - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- A victory for science-based medicine - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- James Ray and testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) - January 10th, 2010 [January 10th, 2010]
- The Water Cure: Another Example of Self Deception and the “Lone Genius” - January 12th, 2010 [January 12th, 2010]
- Be careful what you wish for, Dr. Dossey, you just might get it - January 13th, 2010 [January 13th, 2010]
- You. You. Who are you calling a You You? - January 15th, 2010 [January 15th, 2010]
- The War on Salt - January 16th, 2010 [January 16th, 2010]
- Is breech vaginal delivery safe? - January 16th, 2010 [January 16th, 2010]