there are some questions that google can’t answer…

… and I’m afraid that Facebook isn’t the place to go looking either.

I was happily reading Pharyngula while eating lunch (& trying to avoid dropping crumbs into my keyboard), and decided that as a good pharyngulite I should perhaps pharyngulate a poll for once. (I was not at all surprised to find that ‘pharyngulate’ is now a word in at least one on-line dictionary.)Anyway, having done so I lingered to read the comments thread associated with the poll-associated article, and discovered…

… someone asking on Facebook for advice on how to cure their type-2 diabetes. (Or rather, what ‘natural’ treatments they could use instead of their current drug regime.) And being answered by a homeopath – at least, to do them credit, the homeopath doesn’t advise any homeopathic treatments. Howerver, on his website he does claim to have reversed his own type-2 diabetes with homeopathy, diet, and exercise. Since we know that diet and exercise can have this effect, I do wonder how he could be sure that homeopathy had any impact at all…

(There were some v-e-r-y i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g posts on that Facebook page!)

All that aside, what I can’t get my head around is why one would ask for, or take seriously, advice given by someone on a Facebook page. Is it a case of someone who’s already made up their made but is looking for validation for that decision? Is it down to the po-mo view that all points of view, all knowledge, all ‘ways of knowing’ about an issue are equally valid? Or is it something else that can be sheeted home to a distrust of science and a misunderstanding of how science works?