Criticism
A study on medical intuitives concluded that "patients relying solely on psychic diagnosis as the basis for therapy are at risk of serious medical problems going undetected" (p. 39). Some people have heeded the medical intuitive's advice and experience serious, if not fatal results.
The James Randi Educational Foundation has offered a $1,000,000 USD prize to anyone who can prove under controlled conditions that he or she can diagnose or cure an illness using intuition or prove the existence of auras. To date, only one medical intuitive has taken the challenge using an experimental protocol that she helped to design. She failed to diagnose any documented illness beyond the level of chance.
Intuitives have countered that, as a direct perception of truth independent of any reasoning process (i.e., epistemology of individual experience), medical intuition is not a science and cannot be tested scientifically. Further, some medical intuitives and other alternative medicine practitioners consider the reductionist nature of empirical scientific research to be hostile toward (while systematically suppressing) holistic and innovative challenges to conventional medicine, and incapable of detecting universal truths.
Read more about this topic: Medical Intuitive
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)