Aside from following Dr. Oz’s diet and exercise advice, if you follow the advice of many of Oprah’s guests you could very well be putting your life (or your children’s) at risk or, at the very least, get taken for a ride. I am thrilled to see this Newsweek article which pulls no punches about Oprah’s support of alternative “therapies,” Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vaccination folks, ‘The Secret,’ bio-identicals, etc.
Read it! Long read, but worth it!
Another good read: Tips for Spotting Psychological Pseudoscience: A Student-Friendly Guide (Eye on Psi Chi: Winter 2009)
What do we mean by pseudoscience, and how can we tell which claims are pseudoscientific, scientific, or somewhere in between? Although the boundaries between pseudoscience and science aren’t clear-cut (Leahy & Leahy, 1983; Lilienfeld, Lynn, Namy, & Wolff, 2009), we can define pseudosciences as disciplines that pretend to be scientific but aren’t. They display the superficial trappings of science but lack its substance. As a consequence, pseudosciences can easily fool all of us into believing they’re scientific even though they’re not.
Pseudosciences differ from sciences not in their content, but in their approach to evidence, especially negative evidence. For example, what makes the discipline of UFOlogy (the study of UFOs) largely pseudoscientific is not that its claims are false—it’s remotely possible that certain reports of flying saucers from alien worlds will turn out to be true—but that most advocates of UFOs don’t avail themselves of the essential protections of the scientific method when evaluating their claims. In particular, they rarely make use of research safeguards against confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998)—the tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypotheses and ignore, minimize, or misinterpret evidence that doesn’t. Among these crucial safeguards are demands for “blind” observation (the requirement that observers who are examining the data aren’t aware of crucial factors that could bias their ratings), independent replication (the requirement that one’s findings be duplicated by other observers), and peer review (the requirement that one’s findings be subjected to evaluation by largely impartial colleagues). Each of these requirements minimizes, although certainly doesn’t eliminate, the possibility that confirmation bias will fool us into accepting our hypotheses and into believing what we want to believe (Kida, 2006).
