From Abracadabra to Zombies

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reader comments: radionics

13 June 2008
Radionics does work. It's taught in colleges in England and other European countries.

reply: I'll take your word for it, but I'd like to know what you mean by 'works' and why you consider being taught in England and other European countries relevant to whether something 'works'.

Only in this country where rotten drug pushing pharmas run the country do we have such backwards suppressed "technology". Nurses and Doctors use radionics in England.

reply: You realize that there are many more colleges in America, England, and Europe where pharmacology is taught than there are places where radionics is taught. Does this mean that pharmacology 'works'? And there are certainly more doctors and nurses that prescribe or administer pharmaceuticals than there are those who use radionics. Don't radionics promoters push their devices, too? You think it's backwards to require that claims about medical devices be true and the machines actually do what they claim? Where is the proof that the energies radionics allegedly detects even exist?

Big Pharma doesn't run the country alone, anyway. There are other powerful lobbies that share in buying the influence of those who govern us. I don't have time to list them all, but we can all name a few of the giants. The petroleum industry, especially those pesky Saudis. Halliburton. Agriculture. Tobacco. Munitions manufacturers.

America is the richest third-world nation, where the medicine is arcane and special interests are trying to ban vitamins.

reply: Who's trying to ban vitamins? The tobacco industry? Halliburton? McDonalds? Where do you get your information? And even if there is some vast anti-vitamin conspiracy, who cares? What possibility of success would such a cabal have? Our fearless leaders not only take vitamins but many of them think bee pollen will cure their allergies. If anything, Congress is likely to insist on a free and unregulated market for the herbal and supplement industry. You have to be careful here. If you want people to take you seriously, you shouldn't admit that you think there are "special interests" trying to ban vitamins.

Furthermore, there are lots of adjectives one might use to describe American medicine but 'arcane' shouldn't be one of them. There are hundreds of medical books and journals you could read, if you had the interest in finding out what doctors know. Medical knowledge is not known only to the initiated few or some secret cabal.

Finally, I suppose you mean it as an insult to refer the America as a third-world nation and consider America "backwards" because radionics is not taught in our universities. Many of our universities, however, are jumping on the "traditional wisdom" bandwagon and are offering instruction in such things as acupuncture and healing touch. Soon, we might see other pseudosciences like radionics being taught alongside biochemistry, genetics, and immunology. The country seems to be moving in that direction.

Pretty soon you'll write an article on how lemons are poisonous and Vitamin C is a "fluke" and needs to be heavily regulated for 300 bucks a bottle. People will be dying from scurvy again, as this treasonous government wants the people to go back to the dark ages where no one can read and we are all poverty stricken and ignorant. Why do you wish for such? American's don't go to the dentist anymore unless they are rich. Our teeth are rotting while we get poisoned by garbage "trendy" drug bullshit, and the water and everything else is poisoned. It's all okay, though, right?

no name given

reply: Before I retired from teaching, I used to make up paragraphs like your concluding one as practice exercises for my students. Their task was to find the fallacies. You evade the issue, poison the well, and produce a straw man instead of trying to demonstrate that the actual argument I give in the radionics article is flawed by inaccuracy, irrelevancy, omission, or some other logical error. And you make up stuff about American dental hygiene and our water supplies. Everything isn't poisoned. Dental care is better than ever, but could still be improved, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The water is safe to drink in all our major metropolitan areas. We don't have cholera epidemics like some countries do because our water supply is safe. The water filtering and purification systems in use throughout this country are quite advanced. Despite the hype over bottled water, it is not safer or tastier than most tap water. It's true we have been ruled for eight years by an administration that has done little to improve the environment or enforce environmental laws. This administration has also done nothing to encourage the reduction of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases. But none of this is relevant to defending radionics.

You should produce some evidence that Big Pharma is suppressing radionics, rather than assume it. But first you need to explain what you mean by saying radionics "works." Usually, when I hear from people defending unproven medical treatments that  "work," they mean they are satisfied with it. They feel better or their ailment went away after the treatment. This post hoc reasoning satisfies many people who would rather believe in miracles than science. When I try to get them to see that randomized, double-blind, controlled studies are needed to rule out errors in causal reasoning like the post hoc fallacy or confirmation bias, most of them resort to an ad hominem: they call me prejudiced and closed-minded, or accuse me of being a front man for the AMA, Big Pharma, the government, or "them."

radionics