I was sorry to read that. It seems that “skeptic” is another word to have its meaning arbitrarily made useless by misapplication. We’ve already lost the meaning of “conservative,” at least when applied to resources, “conservatives” in the U.S. government decided that the way to conserve natural resources was to use them up as fast and as wastefully as possible, then began fighting to keep any safeguards for the most important natural resources: unpolluted air and water to a minimum, so as not to get in the way of short-term profits.

As a geologist I’m sorry to say that the mining and energy companies; major employers and supporters of the geosciences for many decades, were not on the side of what I consider to be real resource conservatism. And the actions of the energy companies in keeping the information their own scientists had found for global warming to themselves and actively sowing disinformation about global warming were simply despicable.

I thought that massage was one of the very few “alternative” medicine treatments that was shown to be effective and is now part of real medicine?

Never heard of rolfing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing

some medical doctors and dentists are too busy seeing a great number of patients per day to talk to or relate in some human way to individual patients. If that is not comfortable for you, if you live in most cities and search a bit you can probably find one that makes going to them easier. I don’t think that is exactly the main kind of thing to which Greg was referring, though. In his example, the treatment was more effective or was more likely to be sought out because stress was reduced — or something like that.

We know that the quality of an individual’s life can be improved, their stress levels, reduced, and thus, probably, the outcome of their treatments improved or made less complicated, if the environment in which they get the treatments are more comfortable.

Something similar to that has been posited as the reason people who swear by homeopaths (I will assume that there is no disagreement that they are quacks), massage therapists, and the like, do so in spite of the fact that there is no evidence of true medical relief: the “practitioners” of those things tend to spend far more time speaking with their marks (uh, patients) than do real doctors, and that attention is greatly appreciated.