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:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)