Hello, i'm a student of Medicine in Brazil, we are having classes about basic concepts of medicine, but there's a problem, in my university pseudoscientific practices like homeopathy, acupuncture, ayurvedic medicine and quantum woo are common and widely accepted. So in this is specific class, my professor is a homeopath, on his first class he recommend us the movie The turning point, made by Fritjof Capra, there's a lot of quantum woo in the book plus the "critic" of traditional science.
Skepticism is rejected as obsolete, one professor in particular is an antivaxxer, there's even a alternative medicine group in the university. So, in this topic i'm going to report every week what happened in my university in regard to pseudoscientific practices to you.
Wish me good luck.

ouch ...ever thought of switching schools?? Move to Cuba ??

Welcome

Oh man, that sounds terrible. Do most people go along with it, or are there a lot like you that see how crazy it is?

I'm really curious about how skepticism is rejected as obsolete. How does that reasoning go?

We like to think of medicine as a very scientific thing, but every now and again a completely unproven treatment gets through and then is presumably taught as a valid treatment to the next generation. I've been having physio for the last month or so after I broke my ankle and one of the treatments is using ultrasound around the wound to reduce swelling or speed up healing. The first time they did it, I thought "this has got to be bollocks" so I googled it as they were doing it, and it turns out there's no evidence for it at all. There is presumably a stage where somebody looked at the science around it and it was a plausible hypothesis. Perhaps a flawed study even showed is effectiveness, but then you've got to figure there are big companies making those machines, and it they can sell a few to every physiotherapist in the world, then that's a lot of money to be made. As a patient, you just want to follow the doctor's instructions, so you just do what they say.

rationalityiscorrect wrote:Hello, i'm a student of Medicine in Brazil, we are having classes about basic concepts of medicine, but there's a problem, in my university pseudoscientific practices like homeopathy, acupuncture, ayurvedic medicine and quantum woo are common and widely accepted. So in this is specific class, my professor is a homeopath, on his first class he recommend us the movie The turning point, made by Fritjof Capra, there's a lot of quantum woo in the book plus the "critic" of traditional science.
Skepticism is rejected as obsolete, one professor in particular is an antivaxxer, there's even a alternative medicine group in the university. So, in this topic i'm going to report every week what happened in my university in regard to pseudoscientific practices to you.
Wish me good luck.

From the sounds of it, the 'alternative medicine' group in that university must be those few who believe in comprehensive medical trials and double blind experimentation.

As far as I am concerned, the homeopath is ignorant as fuck to the point I wouldn't trust him to teach a dog how to sit, and the antivaxxer should be run out of town as a real and present danger, the fucking moron.

When scepticism is obsolete we'll all be gods.

I'm shocked to read pseudo-sciences are still taught in some universities.
If an university that is an authority figure teach pseudo-sciences.
How can we fight against these false and harmful beliefs ?

Not all universities are equal, Im afraid.

Macdoc wrote:ouch ...ever thought of switching schools?? Move to Cuba ??

Welcome

Actually, i have a cuban professor, and he's very scientific.

SafeAsMilk wrote:Oh man, that sounds terrible. Do most people go along with it, or are there a lot like you that see how crazy it is?

I'm really curious about how skepticism is rejected as obsolete. How does that reasoning go?

So, around 97% of the class go along with it, i have only one friend that see how crazy it is. And about the skepticism being rejected as obsolete, i think it's relationated with a kind of "post-modern feeling", like praising alternative styles and that kind of stuff, also the professor tend to misapprehend some concepts, like scientific revolutions and scientific thought.
One exaggerated example:
1 - Quantum mechanics disproves newtonian mechanics (misunderstanding about scales)
2- Quantum mechanics proves that everything is 'connected' (Pure quantum woo)
3- OH MY GOOD THOUGHTS INFLUENCE REALITY11!!!!! (...)
4- YOU HAVE AN OUTDATED CARTESIAN THOUGHT, YOUR BIGOT, BEHOLD THE SUPERIOR POST-MODERN, PARADIGM-BREAKING, HOLISTIC TREATMENTS
5- Proceeds to mock medical technology (that, ironically, uses quantum effects)

Thanks for your response! It's incredible to read, and tough for me to imagine. You'd think that people who are in a position to see that this shit doesn't work wouldn't be so susceptible to that.

Fritjof Capra, the Tao of physics etc, not just woo but yesterday's woo. You'd have to go hunt for threads from the 80s, when that wibble still had any currency, to read of its debunking.

As I told my kids when they were at school, if you have a bad teacher that means you will have to take on more personal responsibility in order to educate yourself on the subject in question. In your situation however, There is no way to compensate and you'd be as well to quit the course altogether.

Sad state of affairs.

I wish you the best of luck.

Fenrir wrote:

viocjit wrote:I'm shocked to read pseudo-sciences are still taught in some universities.
If an university that is an authority figure teach pseudo-sciences.
How can we fight against these false and harmful beliefs ?

You can't. Not through University funding.

Universities these days are businesses. Businesses exist to make money now.

Offer some universities enough money and they will teach any crap you like. Or form a lobby group to hassle politicians. Same thing really.

I don't know of anyone offering universities money to not teach crap.

There are public universities in Brazil...

I wonder how well the courses on the Earth and its environment are getting on?

It's bloody disgusting that pseuodcrap is taught in a place of learning.

If this is a common approach to 'higher learning' in Brazil, then I can only assume that it is promoted by those in power in order to prevent the 'masses' from learning how to think.

Fenrir wrote:

rationalityiscorrect wrote:

Fenrir wrote:

viocjit wrote:I'm shocked to read pseudo-sciences are still taught in some universities.
If an university that is an authority figure teach pseudo-sciences.
How can we fight against these false and harmful beliefs ?

You can't. Not through University funding.

Universities these days are businesses. Businesses exist to make money now.

Offer some universities enough money and they will teach any crap you like. Or form a lobby group to hassle politicians. Same thing really.

I don't know of anyone offering universities money to not teach crap.

There are public universities in Brazil...

I'm talking about public universities.

Public universities do not exist simply as a public good any more (whether they ever did or even mostly did is another topic entirely). These days they are seen by governments as a liablilty and forced to operate as businesses. Their success is largely if not entirely judged on their economic performance. If they can sell a course to enough students they will run it. If lobbyists convince them there is a demand for a course they will run it. Whether the topic has any basis in fact can get lost in the process.

And no, I'm not talking about whether students are charged tuition or not, they are still consumers of a product.

Least that's how I perceive the situation here. Don't know much about Brazil, but I doubt things are much different there.

I'm Brazil things are very different, for example, engineering here is one of the worst courses possible along with law courses, in the sense of getting a decent job, Medicine is an exception, here, opening a course is something that is in the choice of the university, and we are not very smart in that sense. Most of us are going to work in the government, if we manage to pass the public exams, to be fair, private universities in brazil are the worst.
Brazilian education has a lot of problems, only 8% of the population is considered fully literate, and 7% of the population believes the earth is flat, at least, things are getting better here.

rationalityiscorrect wrote:
Brazilian education has a lot of problems, only 8% of the population is considered fully literate, and 7% of the population believes the earth is flat, at least, things are getting better here.

And if things don't get better, at least a fair number of the idiots will hopefully fall off the edge of the Earth.

Today i'm having this class, let's see what happens.

So, apparently, nothing interesting happened, just my biochemistry professor trying to "prove" that homeopathy works by an argument from authority. There's also the fact that the professors are missing their lectures.