Jimmy Wales To 'Holistic Healers': Prove Your Claims the Old-Fashioned Way

Barence (1228440) writes with this excerpt from PC Pro: "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has issued a sharp response to petitioners calling for his site to "allow for true scientific discourse" on holistic healing. The petition, currently running on the Change.org site, claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to holistic approaches to healing is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong". It has attracted almost 8,000 supporters at the time of publication. Wales's response to the petition, posted on the same page, is far from conciliatory: 'No, you have to be kidding me,' he writes. 'Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't.'"

Comments

Re:You know what they call alternative medicine...

[Arker]

A placebo is not 'nothing.'

A placebo is a psychological treatment agent, as opposed to a biological or chemical agent. It's no surprise at all that placebos should be effective for psychological problems. What is more surprising, and thus interesting, is the array of physical and biological problems for which placebos are provably effective.