Stealing Elias’s gimmick

Over at Flower & Thistle, brother-blogger Elias has an occasional “What ____ Said” feature wherein he passes on wisdom from others with little further embellishment.

I’m stealing his bit.

Emily at The Biology Files has written a wonderful, detailed take-down of yet another piece of anti-science idiocy at the Huffington Post.  HuffPo is so rife with this kind of dangerous and idiotic nonsense, it’s always a public service when someone takes the time to debunk it.  Whenever I read about problems with the AOL/HuffPo merger, it gladdens my soul to know that maybe egregious witch-doctory won’t get a wider audience after all.

Emily begins:

Huffington Post is notorious for publishing anti-science garbage. But I don’t think anything they’ve vomited into the Webosphere is as egregiously misleading and anti-scientific as this pieceby one Robert A. Kornfeld in which he purports to let us all know exactly why your physician’s belief in the efficacy of modern medicine is a myth and in which he exposes an ignorance about genetics so profound that I may lose hope in humanity.

Before I take each of his “myths” one at a time, let me give some background on the good doctor himself. Dr. Kornfeld, you see, is a podiatrist. He is a foot doctor who, by the way, has a “holistic” (oh, that word. That woo-ey, woo-ey word) practice in which he promises to treat everything from eczema to neuropathy.

The “myths” themselves, as you will see, are not myths at all but instead are argued against the backdrop of the mythology of the World of Woo. This mythology is a dangerous one because it assumes power of the individual over physiological processes and implies that only the strong who can exert that power truly have a right to health.

She then goes alleged myth by alleged myth, and takes apart each one.  For anyone fascinated by the pervasive stupidity of anti-science quacks, it worth reading in its entirety.

(Hat tip: you know who you are.)