Open minded. What does that mean? Hmmm. If it means open to the possibility that there is some truth underlying the claims of traditional folk medical therapies, good for you. If it means believing in the efficacy and safety of those treatments because 1) somebody claimed they work, 2) people have believed in them for a long time, 3) you tried one and felt better, and so on, then you’re really not being open-minded but simply easily convinced, without adequate care for the simple but ubiquitous mistakes in thinking that lead us to believe things that aren’t actually true. I find it disturbing that believing in something based only on the anecdotal experiences of oneself and the similar testimonials of others, without any effor to account for the fact, demonstrated many many times, that such anecdotes actually do a poor job predicting the safety and efficacy of medical treatments, is labeled as being open-minded. And, by extension, questioning the validity of such conclusions, and asking for evidence for them, is labeled as closed-minded. A dangerous bit of wordplay, which denigrates truly “clear thinking” and venerates fuzzy thinking.
