Echo chamber culture of the quack movement.

This has been said here many times by those advocating the application of real science to our health problems.  The response from the peanut gallery has always been the same, personal attacks ("pharma troll" is a site favorite) accusations of being an "agent" for big medicine and other similar attacks.  What they never do is address the lack actual science involved in the various quack treaments like homeopathy, silver colloidals, alkaline diets, and the various cancer cures like fresh cell therapy, oleander, Gerson, Gonzales, and the like.  As this blogger (not me) writes, the alties are too busy doing their self affirmation dance to be able to think critically about the issues.

Compare this to the honest and open exchange of ideas in forums like talkrational, IIBD, RichardDawkins and JamesRandi, where the strength of ideas is measured not by thumb votes or dis/agree votes but by the content and strength of the evidence.

Excerpt from the sciencebasedmedicine blog

Among those who don’t understand science, few have a harder time with the rough-and-tumble debate over evidence and science that routinely goes on among scientists than those advocating pseudoscience. Indeed, in marked contrast to scientists, they tend to cultivate cultures of the echo chamber. Examples abound and include discussion forums devoted to “alternative” medicine like CureZone, where never is heard a discouraging word — because anyone expressing too much skepticism about the prevailing view on such forums invariably finds himself first shunned by other members of the discussion forums and then, if he persists, booted from the forum by the moderators. In marked contrast, on skeptical forums, most of the time almost anything goes. True, the occasional supporter of woo who finds his way onto a skeptical forum will face a lot of criticism, some of it brutal. However, rarely will such a person be banned, unless he commits offenses unrelated to his questioning of scientific dogma, such as insulting or abusive behavior towards other forum participants or trolling. Such people may annoy the heck out of us skeptics sometimes, but on the other hand, they do actually from time to time challenge us to defend our science and prevent us from becoming too complacent. Indeed, that’s what I like about skeptics and being a scientist. Nothing or no one is sacred.

In marked contrast, supporters of pseudoscience are very much characterized by their aversion to scientific debate. The reason is obvious. They don’t have the goods. (If they did, what they’re advocating wouldn’t be pseudoscience.) They can’t win on science, reason, and evidence. The result is that they often end up forming communities that exist more to support their pseudoscience than to discover what does and does not actually work. Indeed, Prometheus describes this phenomenon well as he’s seen it in “autism biomed” discussion forums.

The same sort of group dynamics occurs in forums like CureZone and many others. Those who try to apply science and skepticism to the prevailing dogma of the group usually end up banned or give up in disgust. Indeed, at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism, comments are ruthlessly censored, and anyone who disagrees too strongly with the prevailing “wisdom” that vaccines cause autism will soon find himself or herself permanently banned. One consequence of this can be that the adherents of such views become progressively less able to defend their views in an evidence- and science-based argument, because they simply aren’t used to having them challenged based on evidence and science. Indeed some no longer even know how to react to criticism other than by lashing out.