An excellent post here enabling you to tell if you’re an “altie”. That is, a believer in alternative theories about health and medicine and such matters.

Now it is true that alternative explanations for things have been correct: just because everyone disagrees does not make at theory untrue, for science is not a democracy. Perhaps the most notable change in my lifetime hs been continental drift. First proposed in the 1950s, the idea that the continents float aroud the world was dismissed as ravings. By the time of my birth, early 1960s, it was still strictly for the fringe. By the time I was doing school exams in geography, it was the accepted mainstream explanation of how the world worked.

But that list:

YOU JUST MIGHT BE AN ALTIE IF…

1. If you believe that doctors, scientists, and the pharmaceutical companies conspire to suppress your favorite “alternative medicine” modality, you just might be an altie.
2. If you like to claim that science is a religion, you might be an altie (or at the very least a creationist).
3. If you accept without questioning vague and/or poorly documented anecdotes and testimonials as sufficient evidence for you that an “alternative” therapy can produce remarkable results “curing” cancer, heart disease, autism, Alzheimers, heart disease, etc., but routinely brutally nitpick and then dismiss well-designed randomized, double-blinded Phase III clinical studies for conventional medicine, you just might be an altie.
4. If you believe that liver “flushes” actually cause gallstones to be “flushed” from your gallbladder and remove “toxins” from your liver, you just might be an altie. (Actually, if you believe that liver “flushes” do anything except give you exceptionally stinky diarrhea, you are almost certainly an altie.)
5. If you believe that dichloroacetate is not cancer chemotherapy because it is a “compound” or because it is not a product of big pharma, there’s only an outside chance that you’re not an altie.

There’s 170 of these little ideas as well.

I take it that believing in a few of these is OK, if a little odd. Believe in more than half of them and you’re a woo woo, believe in them all and you must be Deepak Chopra.