There’s always been charlatans saying, my friend have I got an alternative for you. If you’re lucky they’re The Charlatans bringing you alternative rock. But they usually aren’t. There’s the well meaning ones bringing you something they find wonderful like radioactive cocaine. And there’s the true crooks promising jobs and delivering fascism.

The alternatives position themselves as alternatives to complicated egghead science. Simpler, natural, common sense approaches to daily problems. They appeal to the bucolic sense of communion with nature. What they don’t tell you is they’re the alternative to safe bridges, low birth mortality and safe drinking water. By rejecting the scientific method the alternatives are rejecting the methods that stoped doctors from murdering women at child birth. Alternative “medicines” such as homeopathy are supported by the same magical thinking which led doctors to rummage around in gangrenous corpses with their bare hands and immediately after go deliver babies.