…couldn’t resist!

I take your point, and I agree that at least when conventionally-trained people start down the “Alt Therapy” road they are largely sincere.

But… the longer they continue down in that direction, and the more successful they are, the more they lose their sense of the divide between reality and Alternate Reality. The phrase “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” springs to mind.

Perhaps it is less of a strictly Faustian bargain, and more of a Darth Vader scenario (starts with desire to do something, grows frustrated with restrictions and rules and gradually gets more and more capricious and bonkers, until eventually….).

Contributing to this, I would say, is the fact that mainstream people who DO embrace Alternative (Reality) “Medicine” end up hanging out professionally with more and more other Alternative Reality folk (like, for instance, the mixed bag of loons and apologists at the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health). Under these circumstances, the temptation to increasingly lose touch with evidence-based reality, and embrace Alternative Reality in all its wackier forms, is clear. I think you can see this trajectory in some of the conventional folk who have “gone to the Darkside”.

But I’m just as happy with Darth Vader as an analogy!

Or perhaps I should call it “retrospectively Faustian”. I do wonder whether people like Dr Briffa ever think about this, when and if they reflect on the kind of mental contortions and doublethink they have to engage in to explain why things like “Alternative Applied Kinesiology” are not bollocks (which they self-evidently are).

Anyway, perhaps that is more the sense in which I view it as “Faustian” – a sort of more retrospective “crikey – was it worth it?”

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Admin edit as per following comment

Holford did have a decent chance to learn about how to read & interpret evidence (or at least now he would, & I’ve been taught by at least one of the same people), it’s not something medical training gives you a monopoly on. If he had done English Lit I’d have had more sympathy for his confused-ness.

Thanks!

For what it’s worth, though, here’s my tuppence worth on Psychology departments. A divide is often noticeable (at least at the academic staff level) between two groups; the people who are “experimental” psychologists (tests, “instruments”, data, scientific rigour etc etc)… And a second (hopefully smaller) group who largely dispense with science, and are into grand (sometimes social) theorising about “the psychological basis of ABC” or “the social history of XYZ”. This lot don’t do data that much but are into hand-waving.

Now I freely admit that is a sweeping generalisation, based on seminars over the years and the odd examiners’ meeting. So feel free to shoot me down.

And good luck with the degree result.

Oi! Holford did start off doing a sensible degree too, you know – I am fervently praying that tomorrow will have shown me to get slightly better marks than him at it.