Altie was coined to describe people who are so militantly pro-alternative medicine and so distrustful of conventional medicine that they will never admit when conventional medicine is effective and refuse ever to concede that any alternative medical practitioner might, just might, possibly be a quack.
They are a strident, anti-intellectual, anti-reason, and anti-science subset of alt-med users, who tend to make impossibly grandiose claims for their favorite remedy and usually also express a strong distrust and hatred of conventional medicine and science in general. They are also prone to distrust the government, believe in outlandish conspiracy theories and like to point to the lack of evidence as proof they are right.
YOU JUST MIGHT BE AN ALTIE IF…
If you think vaccines cause autism, you are an altie
If you believe that doctors, scientists, and the pharmaceutical companies conspire to suppress your favorite "alternative medicine" modality, you just might be an altie.
If you like to claim that science is a religion, you might be an altie.
If you accept vague and/or poorly documented anecdotes and testimonials as sufficient evidence that an "alternative" therapy "works," you just might be an altie.
If you make claims for a product or therapy like, "strengthens the immune system," "restores balance," "detoxifies the liver," "cleanses the colon," or "cleanses the blood," you may be an altie.
If you are impressed by such claims when made by others, you just might be an altie.
If you do most of your "scientific" research on websites that exist to sell "alternative health" products, you might be an altie.
If you carefully avoid any criticism of any "alternative medicine" practitioner, product, or theory, regardless of how mind-numbingly obviously unscientific, illogical, internally inconsistent, or fraudulent it may be, you might be an altie.
If you accept or agree with every vilification of medicine and science as The Truth, regardless of the source or of how obviously irrational, without basis, or unjustified the vilification is, you might just be an altie.
If you believe that Hulda Clark is being unjustly "persecuted" by "conventional medicine" and/or "the government" because she is a "threat," you are very likely an altie.
If you believe that Tony Isaac’s toxic soup is the cure for cancer and that “big pharma” is suppressing his findings, you may be an altie.
If you believe anything that has ever come out of Kevin Trudeau’s mouth, you might be an altie.
If you drink strange mineral conconctions to “alkalize” yourself then you might me an altie.
If you absolutely, positively cannot ever admit that a conventional therapy, any conventional medical therapy, can cure a disease, any disease, you may well be an altie.
If you believe that vaccines "don't work" or that they cause chronic diseases, you just might be an altie.
If you believe anything you read at Whale.to, Prisonplanet or Cure Zone, you just might be an altie.
If your If you think misc.health.alternative should be a sunny little support group where true believers in alternative healthcare share testimonials and gleefully trash science and medicine without comment from skeptics (in other words, if you want it to be like Cure Zone), you may be an altie.
If you think colloidal silver ingestion will do anything other than turn you blue, you may be an altie.
If you can regularly post to the support message boards on Cure Zone without being banned, they you're definitely an altie.
If you think it's OK for misc.health.alternative (or any other such newsgroup) to be awash in advertising for snake oil quackery and other spam, you may be an altie.
If you believe that alternative medicine practitioners are far more caring for their patients and far more moral (and therefore, by implication, less corruptible by money) than conventional doctors, you just might be an altie.
If you believe that companies selling alternative medicines have every right to charge high prices for their products (example: GlowLife charging hundreds of dollars for a 150 g tin of Ginseng powder, as I described earlier), but that pharmaceutical companies which spend hundreds of millions of dollars and several years to get each new drug developed, tested, and approved) don't, you are very likely an altie.
If you dismiss every well-designed randomized clinical study that failed to show a benefit for an alternative medicine or therapy over placebo control as either not proving that the therapy is ineffective or as having been manipulated by nefarious forces (conventional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, the government, etc.) to produce a negative result, you may well be an altie.
If you believe that contrails are a part of a plot to by a shadowy international organization, you might be an altie.
If you call your backyard herb garden "the pharmacy", you might be an altie.
If you prefer quotes to scientific evidence, you might be an altie.
If your health vocabulary regularly includes terms like "synergystic", "holistic", "energy", "mind-body", "quantum" or "chi" then you might be an altie.
If you can go on for hours about how many people die from medical errors but get confused when someone mentions the victims of alternative medicine, you might be an altie.
If you say your healer "is too busy people making people healthy" to conduct evidence-based trials but have never met a single person helped by them, you might be an altie.
If you think eating raw food is a cure for everything, you might be an altie.
If you believe people in the past regularly reached over 100 years of age, you might be an altie.
And finally
·If you follow this up with an anti medicine version of “You might be an altie”, then you are positively, irrefutably an ALTIE.