Eli5: how are treatments like acupuncture, kinetic tape and homeopathy still a thing, if scientific studies disproving their effectiveness are publicly available to everyone and doctors?
In: Biology
In addition to the parts where people aren’t actually that scientifically minded there is one other thing:
You go to those people and you get listened to by someone sympathetic who takes your concerns seriously (well, or seems to anyway), gives you time, and makes you feel like they care. What they say seems to make sense, and they say it works and sound confident about that.
Compare to real medicine which is done by people with dozens of other patients who are all in need so you talk to them for a short time, they say confusing stuff, they make you feel like a task on a list.
Worse, while it’s damn effective real medicine isn’t actually 100% effective. And the practitioners don’t pretend it is. If you do ask them about how effective a given treatment is they’ll tell you it’s X% effective Y% of the time given Z conditions which doesn’t sound nearly as comforting as “I’ve never seen it fail yet!” or the like that you’ll hear from quacks.
Still worse, real medicine often doesn’t leave you feeling a whole lot better right away even when it does work, and there simply aren’t effective treatments for many conditions.
Go to a real doctor with arthritis and they’ll tell you that there really isn’t a whole lot they can actually do. Maybe, depending on the type, they can give you crazy painful injections of stuff into your joints that might, sort of, once the pain wears off, make things a bit better for a while but then you need it again. Go to your local quack with arthritis and they’ve got a zillion things to sell you that they’ve never seen fail but if the first one does well here’s this other one. and this other one. and this other one…..
Go to a real doctor with certain kinds of cancer and the answer is “sorry, we can try X or Y but it’s not likely to do much but make you feel awful for the next six months or so before you die.” Take that same cancer to a quack and they will yet again have all sorts of stuff that totally works and sounds mystic and stuff.
Another thing is, quacks really love treating people with a bit of money who aren’t actually sick but just don’t feel great. And they’ll listen patiently, seem concerned, offer emotional support, and sell a wide range of products that don’t do anything, but since there’s nothing really wrong with you that’s not a problem!
TL;DR: quackery often has offer better customer experience and customer service than real medicine, promises relatively cheap and easy treatments they say work all the time.
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