Looking Out To Sea

As Mark Hoofnagle ably points out, the kind of spiritual new-age mock-science that Deepak Chopra issues forth gets really tiresome really quickly:

The mind controls the body, the mind is powerful, blah blah blah, who cares right? Well, today Chopra pulled back the curtain and we see the crank within. It’s a reminder that behind the façade of all the touchy-feely nonsense of the alties is a campaign against science and legitimate medical practice. We start with the standard quack appeal to the individual, which sounds nice, but in practice basically means they have no consistent method to apply their nonsense.

The “unique and beautiful snowflake” argument is so deeply entrenched in altie medicine that even practises that ignore everything but the symptoms (I’m looking at you, homeopathy) claim it for their own. And yet, the only practise that actually has this whole-person approach is the one that everybody rags on for not having it: standard, visit-your-GP, we-have-your-medical-history, we-have-books-about-which-drugs-affect-each-other, evidence-based, medicine.

Strange that I’ve never seen any woo treatments which claim to treat the unique and beautiful snowflake that is your infection. One could argue that the infection is far more important than the person: I may get several colds a year but I don’t really change. It’s the virus that mutates as it moves around the population before coming back to visit me again.

But no-one’s going to be flattered by the notion that, even though they are a unique snowflake, this doesn’t matter. Every single unique snowflake starts to drip when they’re infected by the common cold.

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