ArticleAfrican health sciences2019
Pseudoscience in medicine: cautionary recommendations.
Article in African health sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modern teaching for clinical education involving manual therapy: a 6-pillar approach.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2026Review
- Using the theory of planned behavior to assess willingness and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination among a predominantly white U.S. college sample.Health psychology and behavioral medicine · 2023Article
- Pseudoscience and fraudulent products for COVID-19 management.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2022Review
- NCD epidemic and sexual reproductive health issues in the infectious disease world.African health sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionCertain real life applications of scientific and social science ideas that knowingly reject accumulated empirical biomedical evidence have been termed 'pseudoscience,' or empirical rejectionism. An uncritical acceptance of empiricism, or even of evidence-based medicine, however, can also be problematic.
objectivesWith reference to a specific type of medical denialism associated with moral failure, justified by dissident AIDS and anti-vaccine scientific publications, this paper seeks to make the argument that this type of denialism meets certain longstanding definitions for classification as pseudoscience.
methodsThis paper uses a conceptual framework to make certain arguments and to juxtapose arguments for evidence-based approaches to medicine against literature that highlights certain limitations of an unquestioning approach to empiricism.
resultsDiscussions of certain real life examples are used to derive the important insight that, under certain conditions, moral failure can result in the violation both Type I and Type II scientific error types, with catastrophic consequences.
conclusionIt is argued that the validity of all theory should not be assumed before sufficient empirical evidence has accumulated to support its validity across contexts. However, caution is required, to avoid the consequences of an unquestioning approach to empiricism.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.