I find the professional skeptic types to be pretty close minded and generally conservative though Forum Lurker. For instance, if you are a chronic or acute pain sufferer, why would you refuse massage therapy treatment, and insist a number of conventional scientific studies "prove" first that massage therapy greatly relieves chronic and acute pain for many people. No one method will work for everyone, and the reason for that (according to the scientific rationalist types) seems to have more to do with a person's belief system than the actual efficacy of the treatment method. If you believe a treatment method is legitimate, it often does work for you. If you don't believe a treatment method is legitimate, it often doesn't work for you.

Therapeutic methods like massage therapy seem to be working much more effectively, with only positive side effects, than pain killer medications for many people nowadays. But because the present health care system is dominated by the pharmaceutical industry, no insurance companies will cover the cost of massage therapy for pain and it's related stress relief and reduction. The reason why it isn't covered and widely prescribed is because of the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, insisting that it never be allowed to be offered by the conventional medical industry, because a whole lot of people will stop taking the pain killer drugs, which have a lot of negative side effects, including addiction.

I have a friend who suffers from chronic pain in her neck and upper back from disabilities from a car accident about 10 years ago. She went off the pain medication about two years afterward--because she was a complete and utter mess physically, emotionally, mentally. Now she uses massage therapy, regular exercises done specifically for her injury, and others to keep generally fit. She quit smoking at the same time too (smoking is a terrible addiction problem, which really runs down your body's systems). She is like a wholly different person than she was while being treated conventionally.

When people wake up and smell the coffee, and see that they have been sold a bill of goods because someone is making a healthy profit from it, many of us automatically become suspicious of so-called science and scientific experts, like doctors who bought into the pharmaceutical industry as the "best treatment" for patients. Another excellent example is the ways that so-called science has been used to justify the environmental degradation of the planet.

Just why are alternative energies considered to be such a joke by conventional standards? When the military industrial establishment is crawling with scientists and engineers who really should know better? The joke is on us--the fossil fuels are going to be mostly gone or in such small supply in less than a generation, the fossil fuel related industries will bankrupt the western democracies. Where is the wisdom in that conventional thinking? The only reason why we all need cars today is because a whole lot of money was made by a tiny elite group of wealthy industrialists who absolutely did not have society's best interests in mind when the entire US economic infrastructure was built to support the combustion engine and the use of fossil fuels.

This isn't about hocus pocus or alien abductions. This is about conventional thinking, and the constraints conventional thinking puts upon our multi-sensory awareness as human beings. Try jogging in rush hour in any major urban area in the world. Do you need "legitimate science" to dictate to you what is and isn't good for you, by telling you after years of "legitimate scientific studies" that your body will be impaired by doing it, and that you will lose much of the benefit of regular exercise to the effects of gulping poisonous air and ingesting it into your body?

Or can you trust your body's multi-sensory awareness enough because jogging in rush hour traffic just makes you feel like shit, despite the instant gratification exercise buzz your brain gets from the adrenaline rush?

Personally, I'm always suspicious of articles like the one linked to, which try and make an argument for conventional, academic scientific rationalism, by debunking paranormal silliness, or religious fanatacism. Scientific rationalism is the folklore that brought us nuclear power plants in our neighborhoods with the caveat that there is "no danger to the public" and the little purple pills driving up the cost of health care so no one but the wealthy can afford to get necessary care. Research and development is now the largest chunk of many "privatized" corporate controlled universities and government agencies charged with doing the scientific work. Problem is, they aren't using our tax dollars to do scientific work for the public interest and good of society. Oh no. They are doing scientific work which benefits the corporate and political elite, and refuse--and I mean absolutely refuse, to do research which benefits the public good. Case in point--the AIDs epidemic.

Scientific rationalism is one of the main engines that drives the justifications used by the corporate and political elites' hold on power, and their control of our economy. In a true democracy based upon free market economics, the economy equally belongs to the workers, management, and the consumer, not just corporate executives and their proxy academic and political elites. The problems we face today as a society are rooted in that balance being destroyed by "privatization" and abandoning a public service model for governing society, for a corporate, profit driven model for governing society. And guess what? The corporate model is an extremely inefficient and overly expensive way to provide government and public services, like health care, housing, transportation, and education.

The ridiculously high cost and inefficient delivery of those services is living proof of just how stupid our society has been to buy into the right wing elite's "privatized corporate model" for governing society. Governing society and ruling the world aren't the same thing, actually. The right wing elite (and I do include the Democratic Party mainstream and their business and academic allies in that elite) has co-opted and taken over the former, and used it as both means and justification for the latter. And scientific rationalism has been a central intellectual tenet of that takeover.