Let's just leave it at that and not worry about having to prove one right or not.
if we were discussing which ice cream flavour tastes the best then i would agree with you. however in the case of medical science and the pathogenesis of AS i think that it is hugely important to sort fact from fiction. with all the pseudoscience and fake gurus in the alternative medicine world it is also very important to be able to spot a 'crank'.
this article has a good outline of
how to spot a crank.
"the key ingredients of a scientific crank are an inordinate attraction to an idea or hypothesis to the point that he won't abandon it in the face of overwhelming evidence coupled with the arrogance necessary to believe that he is correct and the rest of the scientific community is not. This is probably true no matter what sort of science is being abused. However, when it's medical science that leads to outright quackery, there are other issues that come into play."
"Despite what many who do not like "conventional" physicians say, the vast majority of physicians go into medicine because they want to help people. They honestly want to help their patients, and not being able to help their patients causes them intense feelings of inadequacy and disappointment. In other words, there is a strong incentive, both positive (to get that fantastic feeling we get when we realize that we've really helped a patient) and negative (to avoid that feeling of inadequacy and frustration that we get when we cannot help a patient), to find treatments that the physician perceives to help patients. There's also the ego gratification that comes from patients telling one that he's great and has helped him enormously. The problem with this desire, however noble, is that it makes physicians uniquely susceptible to pseudoscience in the form of quackery. Here's why. "From the ground," a single physician looking at a group of his or her own patients being treated with a therapeutic modality will almost always "see" that the therapy "works." The reason, of course, is the placebo effect. Without a controlled clinical trial, the placebo effect will almost always bestow upon almost any therapeutic modality at least the illusion of therapeutic efficacy, particularly at the single practitioner level. Thus, it is not surprising that homeopathy, reiki, acupuncture, and all manner of modalities that clinical trials show to be no more effective than placebo can easily appear to be effective when a single practitioner does what is in essence an uncontrolled, single-arm observational trial by treating patients with these modalities. Add to these human tendencies a significant financial incentive, and one can see how the slide into quackery can start out as an exercise in idealism, with "start out" being the operative phrase.
...They no longer try to falsify hypotheses or do trials to figure out if their remedies work. Why should they? They know they work! Instead, they cherry pick studies that support their idea and, if they do any clinical studies or science at all, it is almost universally bad science. Over time, they come to believe that they are right "because I see the evidence in my patients," as quacks like to say, forgetting utterly how easy it is to be fooled by a combination of the placebo effect, expectation, confirmation bias, and observation effect when one is a single physician treating all patients. Whether it's preexisting arrogance or a developed arrogance, these physicians will then often dismiss the "sheeple" physicians who practice evidence-based medicine as lacking the vision that they have, all the while making excuses for not doing clinical studies that would confirm or disprove the efficacy of their remedies over and above a placebo.
...I tend to consider physician-cranks to be almost a special case of scientific cranks in general. In no other field of which I'm aware can the combination of an attraction to a hypothesis and arrogance combine with an honest desire to help patients in such an incredibly toxic manner. For most scientists, the forces that seduce them into pseudoscience are largely a combination of intellect and arrogance. For physicians, care for patients and the placebo effect enter into the equation to form a perfect storm that can tempt them into even the most indefensible pseudoscience." and just by coincidence in the comments that follow the article - "A friend of mine, Professor Alan Ebringer, has tried for years to persuade granting agencies that his hypothesis deserves funding, but he only got peanuts. His hypothesis was that MS was cause by a specific bacterial infection, acinetobacter. Now he might be right or wrong, I don't know. But the resistance in the MS field is something to behold."
turns out that the they were right to be skeptical of his ideas and deny funding as they turned out to be completely wrong. and surprise surprise they were based on his favourite hypothesis involving increased levels of antibodies to a genus of bacteria that is normally found in the gut (this time it was acinetobacter) and the process of molecular mimicry. the theory was so wacky that some scientists
thought it was a hoax. despite this he somehow managed to get it
published in an obscure journal and even won the
2004 gold medal from the royal society for the promotion of health for his efforts. he must be quite a character.
