Because firstly, most of their results are frankly not clinically interesting. In most cases (and for many kinds of woo-woo in all cases investigated), the improvement felt by the individual comes down to confirmation bias, regression to the mean and various and sundry other well-known mental short-circuits.
This isn't actually true. It's probably impossible to investigate woo woo without confirmation bias on either side, and I can certainly think of at least one disconformation study with a methodology which would have been rightly ripped to shreds or ignored if it hadn't produced a negative result.
In the placebo studies I mentioned, the results were statistically significant. In fact they were more significant than the results of mainstream drug studies - not that that's a high standard, necessarily. But even so.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
But that just highlights the double standard - this study was quoted by 'serious' researchers as if it was definitive and utterly professional, when in fact it was a very small data set collected under less than strictly controlled conditions as a high school student science fair project.
