It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream

On the whole, it doesn't worry me too much - everyone is entitled to their little domains of craziness and I know I have my own.

But what does worry me is the observation that C/AM believers in my environment are almost always women. It feels like a big gaping hole in everything we achieved with women's rights and education. Within my extremely limited horizon of living in a western industrial society, this is in fact the single most worrying trend. It's like a large part of our women went to a parallel universe "girls school", whereas the men in the mean time learned about science and reasoning.

I'm at a total loss as to where this gender disparity comes from, but there has to be a vector somewhere. If anyone has any ideas, I'm looking forward to hearing them. If there is anything to be done about this, I'd like to volunteer my time for it.

If your friend, or anyone else that way inclined, dislikes modern medicine because of its insular, closed nature then I urge them to support campaigns such as alltrials.net, which advocate open research across medicine. There are a number of people in the industry who truly support an open approach to pharma, and the more people generally shouting about it the better.

I say this because it seems very strange to advocate homeopathy based on its "open source" credentials when the people practising it won't tell you that it patently and demonstrably simply doesn't work outside of the placebo effect. Some alternative medicines do have proven benefits: homeopathy is not one of them.

There is a strong history of alternative medicine medicine practitioners using libel and defamation laws to silence their critics. See, for example, BCA v Singh[1]. Alternative medicine is not open. It is a highly insular community that reacts very badly to criticism, more so than modern medicine.

Let me put it another way: if alternative medicine (and I'm particularly thinking of homeopathy in this case) was so open you would expect people going to receive homeopathic treatment to be told the field was totally discredited by modern science and numerous double blind studies. But they're not. A homeopathic practitioner will not direct you to these studies, or tell you. I don't know how this can be considered open.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCA_v._Singh

It's also unmitigated bullshit. It's tolerant of different views and opinions because none of them are based on evidence.

Alt-med is actually more free-enterprise. There is more patient choice. It's less expensive.

The 'choice' is an illusion. None of it works so sure, choose what you like. It's less expensive because it's nonsense.

The bedside manner you get...

Because it's a con game and that's all they have to offer.

1. Most or all of the mummies studied were from neolithic societies, not paleolithic. The only one that might be considered paleolithic is the Unangan, but even these are from decades after they were conquered by the Russians. So they may very well have had white flour and processed sugar in their diet. I couldn't find information about their diet during this period.

2. The time needed for natural selection to work. I'm not convinced by this one. The examples that were given would have had higher selection pressure on the young during their child-bearing years. I would guess that the selection pressure from diseases of old-age would be much less, and would take many more generations to be felt.

Still some good points to be made about the naturalistic fallacy.