How pseudoscience tries to fool you





What is real science




  2. Observations–this is the subjective part of science. Do we observe trends or anomalies? Does a physician notice that every patient from a town or neighborhood exhibit the same disease? A lot of science arises from observations of the natural world, and yes, some of those observations can be anecdotes or personal observations. For example, one of the most famous stories in the early history of medicine is when Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids rarely were infected by smallpox because they were exposed to cowpox, a less virulent disease.
  3. Hypothesis–using the observations, create a hypothesis that can be tested. In Jenner’s case, he hypothesized that exposure to cowpox immunized individuals to small pox.
  4. Experiment–simply, the scientist then tests the hypothesis with experiments and collects the data. The experiments are not designed to solely validate the hypothesis but may also attempt to refute it. In real science, attempting to nullify one’s own hypothesis is an honorable pursuit.
  5. Analyze–examining the results carefully, usually using acceptable statistical methods.
  7. Publish–in today’s scientific community, scientific data and analysis is subject to the scrutiny of other scientists before it can be published, a process called “peer-review.” This is a critical step that ensures that the results can stand up to criticism of others.

Science is an evidence-based systematic analysis without inherent opinion or emotion. In other words, it is a method to cut through opinions and anecdotal observations, so that one can have some reasonable expectation that a medicine or device will work as planned, or if a theory can be predictive.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine (called CAM), for example, fails to utilize scientific method. Supporters of CAM usually perform experiments to confirm their hypotheses, never attempting to refute it, because the attempt to refute may provide you more solid evidence than attempting to confirm.

This is the fundamental principle of falsifiability, that is, that if a hypothesis is false, it can be shown in experimentation–this allows scientist to have an open mind about the the natural world. When you speak to a believer of CAM, they almost never assume that their treatment cannot work–back to that black and white view of the world.

It’s interesting that CAM and pseudoscience start out with observations of the real world. For example, CAM therapies sometimes show positive results, not because of the therapies themselves, but because humans just get better from many diseases.

So, these CAM therapies rely upon confirmation bias, that is, the tendency to accept information that supports your beliefs, or even Post hoc ergo propter hoc, a logical fallacy which says “since that event followed this one, that event must have been caused by this one.”


The “pseudoscientific method”

To identify pseudoscience, there are six reliable clues that shout out “pseudoscience.” Almost always, you can find all six in any pseudoscientific claim.

  1. Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims. Essentially, pseudoscience makes “scientific claims” that are vague and variable, rather than the precise scientific claims made with statistical analysis, usually a hallmark of the specificity associated with scientific research. Importantly, pseudoscience suffers from the absence of parsimony, sometimes referred to as Occam’s razor, that is, failing to seek an explanation that requires the fewest possible additional assumptions when multiple viable explanations are possible. Finally, it uses obscurantist language, and use of apparently technical jargon in an effort to give claims the superficial trappings of science.
  2. Extreme reliance on confirmation rather than refutation. Pseudoscience relies upon assertions that do not allow the logical possibility that they can be shown to be false by observation or physical experiment, a concept called falsifiability. In other words, real science assumes that there could be an experiment designed that would refute (or nullify) the hypothesis. Pseudoscience also asserts claims of predictability when it has not been shown to be predictive; “scientific” claims that do not confer any predictive power are considered at best “conjectures”, or at worst “pseudoscience”.
  3. Lack of openness to testing by other experts. Pseudoscience researchers evade peer review before publicizing results, occasionally using press conferences to share their ideas. These “researchers” will claim that their ideas contradict the scientific consensus, so they must avoid the peer review process because that process is biased towards the established paradigms and consensus. They will also claim that their results cannot arrive from the scientific method. Thus, they get to avoid the feedback of informed colleagues. They will also appeal to the need for secrecy or proprietary knowledge when an independent review of data or methodology is requested. Of course, many agencies and institutions that fund real science research require authors to share data so it may be evaluated independently.
  4. Absence of progress. Pseudoscience usually fails to progress towards providing or even searching for additional evidence of its claims. Astrology is an example of a pseudoscientific concept that has not changed in 2000 years. Real science is constantly adding data through scientific progress.
  6. Use of misleading language. They try to create scientific-sounding terms to add weight to claims and persuade non-experts to believe statements that may be false or meaningless; for example, a long-standing hoax refers to water by the rarely used formal name “dihydrogen monoxide” and describes it as the main constituent in most poisonous solutions to show how easily the general public can be misled. More often, pseudoscientists use established technical terms in idiosyncratic ways, thereby demonstrating unfamiliarity with mainstream work in the discipline.


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The differences between science and pseudoscience

There are several types of logical fallacies that the pseudoscience crowd employs.  My favorites are appeals to antiquity or tradition, or old ideas are somehow better than new ideas; appeals to authority, or someone who should know better supports the claim even if everyone else does not; bandwagon fallacy, or everyone does it, so it must be useful; and the genetic fallacy, where the source is matters more than the merits of the evidence.  I’ve created my favorites list of logical fallacies on this website.



Almost any medical product, device, drug or procedure must, by law, be tested in a Randomized Controlled Trial, sometimes called a clinical trial. Essentially, it is a scientific experiment, designed to test the hypothesis of whether the safety and efficacy of a particular medical product is better than a placebo. That is, does the medical product produce results better than doing nothing at all? This is the “gold standard” of investigation, and if the study does confirm the hypothesis, you can be assured it has a benefit to your life (although the degree may be subject to argument).



Epidemiology is a scientific process that is critical to preventative medicine–without it, we cannot know if some behavior or public health issue has a causal effect on health. Vaccine deniers also love to play with clinical trials by inventing outrageous and highly immoral clinical trials for vaccines. For example, they would like kids to be place in a placebo group vs a vaccine group to see if there are any adverse effects or if even if the vaccine works.

Remember, anecdotes (“my mother’s friend’s cousin’s daughter was cured by eating this leaf”) are not reasons to accept alternative medicine. Even anecdotes that try to sound like science (“90 out of 100 people think this leaf does work”) aren’t a reason to “believe” in a pseudoscience. And having a high number of anecdotes does not equal “data.”

You might have heard that taking lots of Vitamin C helps prevent colds. It doesn’t–that conclusion is supported by large clinical trials. So unless you are afflicted by scurvy, there’s no reason to take large doses of the vitamin. And that’s the difference between real science and pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience vs evidence (or science) based medicine

In an outstanding analysis of pseudoscience, Steven Novella, MD, a clinical neurologist at Yale University, illustrates how pseudoscience (those who pretend to praise the scientific method, yet do it in a way that is not actually science) and anti-science (those who repudiate science outright, or even undermine science, with subjective analysis and untestable spirituality) is used to reject evidence-based medicine:





Clearly, science depends upon evidence, and in fact, values evidence above all other information. Pseudoscience depends upon faith or belief in what is being pushed. It actually devalues evidence.






Once again, Dr. Novella says it perfectly:


One more thing

Let’s talk about skepticism. Let’s be clear what it is, because the term is abused by so many. Real scientific skepticism is is the noble art of constantly questioning and doubting claims and assertions, and holding that the accumulation of evidence is of fundamental importance. It forms part of the scientific method, which requires relentless testing and reviewing of claimed facts and theories. In other words, skepticism is not just the questioning or doubting of claims, it is gathering all of the evidence and weighing it properly.

A real skeptic, for example, gives more weight to evidence provided in a meta-review articles (which rolls up all of the evidence for and against a particular hypothesis, removing obviously biased or poorly done studies) than to anecdotal commentary from an anonymous website. A real skeptic will value evidence that comes from people who are experts in the particularly field even over those who claim an expertise based on education or research in an unrelated field. An immunologist knows more about immunology than a biochemist, because it takes so long to understand a field of science.

On the other hand, there are those who claim to be skeptics, but are, in fact pseudoskeptics. A pseudoskeptic, in its proper use, is someone who will claim they are a skeptic of a concept, but in reality would not be convinced by any evidence that might be presented. They are close-minded to any evidence, or their standards of evidence are such that it approaches the Nirvana Fallacy, or they want evidence that’s perfect otherwise, it’s worthless. Sometimes, a pseudoskeptic will often call a real skeptic a “pseudoskeptic”, but that’s just a misuse of the term, a misdirection to confuse the argument. Pseudoskeptic is clearly a word that is a synonym of denialism, as there is usually a vast amount of real evidence which is simply willfully ignored by these pseudoskeptics.

For example, there is an individual on Facebook, Vaccine Skeptic Society, who is a proven vaccine denier and a pseudoskeptic. Real skeptics are always prepared to change their positions based on new evidence, relying on the scientific method. Vaccine Denier Society (to use proper terminology) has been shown to ignore all evidence except that which support their position, which isn’t skepticism. It’s just blindly using confirmation bias and ignoring evidence, including the quality of that evidence.

Don’t fall for the trap that you should be “open-minded” or neutral to anti-science or pseudoscience.  Open-mindedness and neutrality are expectations that you will balance real scientific evidence, not treat the rhetoric as if it has equal weight to scientific method.


The other day I engaged in a discussion with a well-meaning pharmacist who claimed that vitamin C could treat colds and prevent other diseases like  “cancer” (I always get annoyed  by people who lump all cancers together, when there are over 200 different cancers, all of which have different histologies, genetics, and causes). Of course, there are a number of well-controlled clinical trials that show that vitamin C has no effect on the common cold and has no effect on cancers so far studied (see thisthisthis and this).

During our discussion, she said “science should be neutral,” with the implication that I wasn’t neutral. I happen to agree, science should be neutral and it should balanced. But science should be based upon the scientific method not rhetoric and not using science-y words, at which the writers of Star Trek were well-versed.

So, when I say that I am (or any evidence-based real scientist), “scientifically neutral”, that means I’m willing to weigh the evidence and publications on real scientific issues. I am not a geologist nor a paleontologist, but I was studying biochemistry when the earliest theories on what caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65.5 million years ago, where all the dinosaurs (well, not all, since technically modern birds are surviving dinosaurs from a cladistic point of view) and some 75% of all extant genera died out or were killed. In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose career was extraordinary, along with his son, Walter Alvarez (a geologist), and Frank Asaro, published an article that describe a sedimentary layer across the world that included a rare element, iridium, usually found in extraterrestrial objects like meteors and comets. The layer fell right at the geological boundary layer that defines the extinction event, so they proposed that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge comet or asteroid.

Today, the bolide impact is accepted as a scientific theory with tons of confirming evidence (although some scientists aren’t fully convinced, they still propose some other natural event). But at the time, it was ridiculed, and scientific meetings were quite energetic in discussions.  The point is that the impact theory displaced the prevailing scientific theory of the extinction event (well, there were several). One theory replaced another not by rhetoric or appeals to antiquity or belief or faith or pseudoskepticism or anything else. In fact, in this story, one scientific hypothesis was replaced by another and eventually developed into a solid theory.

We should be neutral in science, first reviewing the evidence, next objectively valuing the quality of the evidence, and finally using that evidence to support and refute hypotheses. We did that with the impact event for the dinosaur extinction. We’ve done that with the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Science does that all the time.

Using scientific neutrality, vitamin C doesn’t work, not because I have an opinion, but because there is no science supporting its efficacy. There are some articles that support its use in preventing or treating colds, or megadoses for curing cancer, but those articles are in low-impact (meaning obscure) journals or with poorly designed, or non-blinded trials. My friendly neighborhood pharmacist was stating that I should be neutral between real science and well, nothing at all.  That’s not balance, that’s a close-mindedness to science and the scientific method.  That’s using opinion as the balance to scientific knowledge. The only thing that should balance scientific knowledge is more scientific knowledge.

Pseudoscience is easy. It doesn’t take work. It’s the lazy man’s (or woman’s) “science.” But it has no value, and because it lacks high quality evidence in support of it, it should be dismissed, and it should not be a part of the conversation.

And one more thing. Real science is hard. You don’t get to be an expert in biochemistry, astrophysics, immunology, multivariate mathematics, or any other natural science just by surfing the internet for a few hours or days. Real science is sitting in dozens of classes over years absorbing and understanding the decades of research that preceded you. It means learning how to be critical, not for criticism’s sake, but to find a new idea that might blossom in to the next best thing in science. It means spending years of your life studying a small idea. It means being smarter than almost anyone else you know. It means writing better than any of your friends or pals. It means late nights and early mornings. It means standing up to the criticism of your peers and of the leaders in your field. And if you put in the really really really really hard work that it takes to be a scientific expert, then you will be given due weight to your ideas. And maybe you’ll change things.

But if you’re going to be lazy, and tell me that vaccines don’t work because “I know my friend’s children got sick after being vaccinated”, at best I’m going to dismiss your pseudoscience. At worst, I’m going to call you a liar and give you my full onslaught of mockery and insults. You deserve no better.

I respect real skeptics. But using the claim of skepticism to support a pseudoscience–that is simply nonsense, and that’s that.

The Original Skeptical Raptor
Chief Executive Officer at SkepticalRaptor