scientism

One characteristic of cranks, quacks, and pseudoscience boosters is a love-hate relationship with science. They desperately crave the respectability and validation that science confers. In the case of medicine, they want to be seen as evidence- and science-based. On the other hand, they hate science because it just won't given them what they want: Confirmation and validation. The reasons, of course, are obvious; their preferred ideas about disease and modalities to treat it are not rooted in science. Rather, they're usually based in either prescientific concepts of how the human body works…