Despite these protective mechanisms the market pullulates with wonderful life-enriching, disease-curing, products whose powers are said to derive fromsome ancient magical or mystic principle; or else whose healing powers are supported by a befuddling mishmash of scientific ‘‘facts’’ judiciously taken out of context from appropriately chosen publications. Having had no unprejudiced, repeatable and independent verification of their properties, all such products (and their advocates) should be considered suspect. In the best cases these items are harmless, but sometimes they are dangerous,2 and often they are fraudulent.
The intellectual and practical applications of the scientific method make it important for the public to have a basic understanding of the manner in which scientific theories are obtained, tested and accepted. With this type of knowledge the public can protect itself from non-scientific quackery, and impress upon the government the need to create and enforce policy against it. In many cases the lives of people depend on the reliability and thoroughness of this scrutiny.
It is not my intention to imply that all human intellectual pursuits should be centered on a scientific approach. But when gathering quantitative information about Nature, systematizing the data, and deriving from it a deeper understand- ing of the world around us, the scientific approach described below is the best method available.