Every so often you read a piece about alternative medicine that asks: how does it work? How does homeopathy work, how does acupuncture work, etc. There was a piece in the Telegraph recently that asked: how does naturopathy work?
There was a complicated answer about ‘healthy electromagnetic frequencies’ and so on; ‘bioresonance’, ‘modalities’, and a marvellous quote about how
‘Every cell in the body puts out a certain electromagnetic frequency, that can be measured – a healthy stomach cell sounds different to a healthy brain cell…’
Presumably those words have some sort of meaning to someone.
But the problem with this piece – and with an awful lot of other pieces on similar topics – is that there’s no point answering the question ‘how does X work?’ until you have first answered the underlying question: ‘does X work?’ I mean, I could spend several hours explaining to you precisely how I managed to fly to Mars on a vacuum cleaner, but if I hadn’t actually done it, you might feel it was something of a waste of your time.
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