<p>There are now many full-length books that focus on this deep, complex question about human nature/psychology and note newer/ongoing/active research in the area, some of it cited in them.</p>

<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0805070893">Why people believe weird things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time</a> Shermer and Gould</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0195147103">Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud</a> Park</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0691145970">Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science</a> Park</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/04/must-read-books-being-wrong/">5 Must-Read Books on the Psychology of Being Wrong</a></p></li>
</ul>

<p>But some counterpoint from the reverse, flip side. Science is a complex, evolving, and at times subtle field in a way that was not fully recognized largely until the research in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift">Kuhnian shifts</a>. </p>

<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0452289327">When Science Goes Wrong</a> LeVay</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1601631022">Science was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions "They" Declared Impossible</a> Friedman &amp; Marden</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1621450090">They Got It Wrong: Science: All the Facts that Turned out to be Science Fiction</a> Donald</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/special/rewriting-the-textbooks">Rewriting the textbooks: When science gets it wrong</a> New Scientist</p></li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-12T19:16:48.423Z
2014-02-13T07:08:05.693Z
2014-02-13T07:08:05.693Z
vzn
<p>Perhaps people are attracted to these theories in part because of the inability for mainstream science to answer anomalies.  </p>

<p>The occasion of governmental </p>

<ul>
<li>lying, </li>
<li>hiding of technology, and </li>
<li>corruption, </li>
</ul>

<p>helps reinforce the idea that there exists real Science that is not known to the mainstream.  In the absence of trust, people contemplate the possibilities (imagination) by which the breach of trust could harm them.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-12-21T14:08:46.130Z
Or, more relevantly, [pharma will not make and distribute effective drugs that have a low (or negative) profit margin](http://www.raps.org/Regulatory-Focus/News/2014/11/14/20746/Is-a-Drug-Unsafe-or-Just-Unprofitable-How-a-Lack-of-Data-Clouds-Regulatory-Classifications/).  No one has solved this [even with creative schemes](http://www.forbes.com/sites/helencoster/2011/02/07/novartis-institute-tackles-unprofitable-drugs/).  Thus it is rational to presume that simple cures exist which cannot profit via IP.  Is a drug 'alternative' only because it is unpatentable?
New Alexandria
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-08-21T14:23:35.573Z
I agree. People may, for instance, believe there is profit motive for modern medicine to "make good customers" of you by managing symptoms rather than effecting a cure; therefore, those people may choose to believe in alternative medicines.
Randy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-08-21T12:53:22.427Z
2013-08-21T14:26:08.887Z
2013-08-21T14:26:08.887Z
New Alexandria
<p>There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question:</p>

<ol>
<li>David Deutsch (2005) "<a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation" rel="noreferrer">A new way to explain explanation</a>", and</li>
<li>Richard Dawkins (2009) "<a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe" rel="noreferrer">Why the universe seems so strange</a>"</li>
</ol>

<p>At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and <em>sometimes</em> using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless unless they understand the story it tells. The problem with modern science is that to have a good grasp of its explanatory power, you need a lot of (often difficult) background. As you gain this background, you develop what Feynman would call the most fundamental skill in science: always questioning, being able to say "I don't know", and to hold contrasting ideas together. If you don't invest in acquiring this background, most of science seems like witchcraft passed down by ivory-tower academics in funny gowns and hats. </p>

<p>What pseudoscience (or even <a href="http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm" rel="noreferrer">cargo-cult science</a>) provide is explanations that require less background, purport to be more certain, have something for everyone (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect" rel="noreferrer">Forer effect</a>), and reassure you that "there is an answer". If you look at much of pseudoscience (or ancient myths) more closely, you will notice that they tend to personify their subject matter much more than science (my favorite example is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument" rel="noreferrer">homunculus fallacy</a>). They use this personification to provide agency, intent, and meaning to their explanations.</p>

<p>The great advantage of these human stories is that our minds are optimized for them. If you subscribe to Dunbar's <a href="http://archives.evergreen.edu/webpages/curricular/2006-2007/languageofpolitics/files/languageofpolitics/Evol_Anthrop_6.pdf" rel="noreferrer">Social Brain Hypothesis</a>, then one of the main things evolution produced is a mind built to understand social structure, and other people. When an agent does not adhere to its role and violates our theory-of-mind and behaves erratically, without discernible intent and meaning, this is dangerous to us and our society; it causes us great discomfort. When you hijack the social mind to try to explain further and further afield parts of nature, you try to build the same sort of characters. </p>

<p>When you have to say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" this character, it creates discomfort. Pseudoscience thrives on this by giving an arbitrary, simple, shallow and easy to change explanation. Since most lay-people never pursue this explanation far enough to notice its contradictions, and since it shapes their observations (in the <a href="https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/3498/686">Popper-sense</a> and through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias" rel="noreferrer">confirmation bias</a>) they never get a strong enough cognitive-dissonance to overcome to positive feeling of having an understandable 'explanation'.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, all I can do in this answer is provide a intuitively appealing, intent and agency based explanation. Reread my answer and make note of unnecessary personifications I made -- just like much of pseudoscience, science is a story and there is the biggest rub.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-23T08:32:04.940Z
I think the answer is OK, but there is a point in which I strongly disagree. You say that science provides explanation and, sometimes, predictions. If science is not required to provide predictions beyond the observed data, it's no different from myth and religion. Indeed your answer is scientific in this sense: it predicts that, whenever a pseudoscience succeeds it's always through extensive use of personification.
Javier Rodriguez Laguna
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-09-12T21:54:31.417Z
+1. Only missing reference to Daniel Dennett and it would be perfect :)
LitheOhm
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-10-14T16:49:04.947Z
@JavierRodriguezLaguna The point this sentence is that the the most important aspect of science is it's explanatory power. (You can find this argument in the book [The fabric of reality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabric_of_Reality) by David Deutsch). Whether scientific theories need to provide predictions is a different subject, and Artem Kaznatcheev never said that science does not require to provide predictions. (nor did he say that science require to provide predictions)
Benjamin Crouzier
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-10-14T20:30:32.153Z
Prediction is mandatory, a nice story is not. A nice story to help understand is strongly recommended, sure. But science can proceed without. E.g., quantum mechanics as seen by Bohr. Without the ability to make predictions, science is just another narrative.
Javier Rodriguez Laguna
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-10-14T20:36:17.087Z
@JavierRodriguezLaguna I think you have a very naive view of how science proceeds. Physics is very exceptional compared to most of science in being able to generate predictions, and even when it does it is mostly by accident. Almost every theorist that sets out to work in physics has as their goal to explain something, only after they develop their theory do they realize that as a side-effect it made some new predictions. If you want a case-study, consider either Maxwell on light or Dirac's work on anti-particles. We remember predictions because they are romantic, but that is not the practice.
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-10-14T20:40:30.937Z
@JavierRodriguezLaguna prediction is definitely a big plus (why many prefer physics over psychology, say) but it is not mandatory. A good story (although also not necessarily mandatory) is almost always desired, once again consider how many theorists where guided by mathematical elegance (good story in math terms) to arrive at new truths. Notable case-studied would be Einstein and (again) Dirac.
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-10-16T14:03:15.793Z
@ArtemKaznatcheev, your definition of science is extremely weak. It is hard to distinguish from religion or philosophy. I am a physicist myself, you might have guessed that much :), and I do believe that other wannabe sciences should be modelled with our same level of demand, no less. Physics, and any good science, is predictive every day, not just at special romantic situations. I use predictions in my daily work. That's why everybody relies on physics, they put their lives in our hands, e.g.: when you travel by plane. And nobody would risk their lives on the predictions of e.g. economy.
Javier Rodriguez Laguna
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-10-16T20:54:20.613Z
@JavierRodriguezLaguna I am a physicists too (well, that is a lie, I am more a mathematician now) and I don't do engineering hence I rarely use predictions of physics. When I am doing _science_, I am explaining parts of physics that are not well understood, and then the engineers worry about the applications and predictions after. This is true of most of my colleagues as well, except for a few experimentalists. But we are going off-topic, if you want to discuss more then catch me on [G+](https://plus.google.com/u/0/101780559173703781847/posts) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/kaznatcheev).
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-11-02T16:05:40.187Z
I really like this answer, but this discussion about whether predictions are essential to science is sort of puzzling. I *think* the term prediction is just being used in different ways. We can agree, I think, that a valid scientific statement or theory requires a testable hypothesis (at least in principle), which I would call a prediction. If it does not then it can no longer be called a scientific statement. Most experiments are a form of inductive reasoning about such predictions -- if A then B. B is true, so A is more plausible. Or, just as importantly, B is false, so A is less plausible.
yamad
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-11-03T07:40:43.980Z
I'm wandering if this desire for an "explanation" plagues scientists as well, only in the form of "publication bias", where positive explanations are far more likely to get published than "I tried, but still don't know" ones.
Alex Stone
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-20T19:42:41.637Z
in other words, it's because of the laziness
chaohuang
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-26T05:20:01.493Z
I disagree that science is only about explanations. What draws a line between science and pseudoscience is applicability. Both often try to explain.
rus9384
CC BY-SA 4.0
2012-08-16T21:29:08.687Z
2018-07-04T18:44:30.173Z
2018-07-04T18:44:30.173Z
Artem Kaznatcheev
<p>There are <strong>many</strong> theories/disciplines that have been categorized as pseudoscience in the scientific community.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience" rel="noreferrer">list</a> includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like graphology, astrology, psychoanalysis, personality types, etc.</p>
<h3>Questions:</h3>
<ul>
<li><p>What attracts people to such theories? Do any cognitive biases make people believe them easily? Which part of pseudosciences acts as a stimulus that triggers this cognitive bias?</p>
</li>
<li><p>If there's a cognitive bias behind people believing in pseudoscience, knowing that a majority of the population does that – is there any term for such a phenomenon in social psychology?</p>
</li>
<li><p>A majority of the population believes in some kind of pseudoscience. Does this signify an evolutionary aspect of our minds – that people are still evolving into better species that might one day believe in proper science? Pseudoscience seems to be older than science; correct me if I am wrong here.</p>
</li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-16T20:47:08.913Z
note the irony of your last question. You make a teleological statement about evolution -- a common mistake of pseudoscience ;).
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-17T10:36:11.183Z
Oh, there is a term for it!! Thanks for pointing that out. Even a greater irony is that I subscribed to this pseudoscience without even knowing it exists!! LOL
Bharadwaj Srigiriraju
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-04-12T22:14:49.223Z
There's more than one answer, but regarding medical quackery, I wonder if the placebo effect plays a role. Placebos have a demonstratable benefit over doing nothing, and when actual treatment is unavailable or prohibitively expensive, belief in chicken noodle soup is perfectly rational. When you tell someone that the soup does nothing, you are taking away the benefit of the soup. I'm assuming here that people are unconsciously aware of their self-deception, and we're getting into pascal's wager territory here, so feel free to downvote.
James
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-13T04:58:22.373Z
@forbidden-overseer: some do help and work for people and there are gaps in science. There is an element of art to life that has real outcomes and can not always be organized in thought.
Greg McNulty
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-13T06:54:08.280Z
What pseudoscience actually works for is very limited. It rarely works reliably for its claimed functions, and sometimes sets them back considerably.
Nick Stauner
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-03-06T10:39:06.740Z
For the same reasons they subscribe to scientific theories, mostly.
Gala
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-03-06T23:26:44.040Z
In my experience, a combination of personal constructs and confirmation bias.
Sebaileyus Hope
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-05T22:47:33.490Z
Probably because a lot of the scientific theories are incomplete, controversial, unconvincing or otherwise unsatisfying.
dtech
<cognitive-psychology><social-psychology><motivation><bias><rationality>
What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?
Bharadwaj Srigiriraju
# What makes people easily subscribe to pseudoscientific theories?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2012-08-16)

There are **many** theories/disciplines that have been categorized as pseudoscience in the scientific community.

The [list](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience) includes many things that are regularly even quoted in media like graphology, astrology, psychoanalysis, personality types, etc.

### Questions:

* What attracts people to such theories? Do any cognitive biases make people believe them easily? Which part of pseudosciences acts as a stimulus that triggers this cognitive bias?
* If there's a cognitive bias behind people believing in pseudoscience, knowing that a majority of the population does that – is there any term for such a phenomenon in social psychology?
* A majority of the population believes in some kind of pseudoscience. Does this signify an evolutionary aspect of our minds – that people are still evolving into better species that might one day believe in proper science? Pseudoscience seems to be older than science; correct me if I am wrong here.

**Tags:** cognitive-psychology, social-psychology, motivation, bias, rationality

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: note the irony of your last question. You make a teleological statement about evolution -- a common mistake of pseudoscience ;).  
> **username_0**: Oh, there is a term for it!! Thanks for pointing that out. Even a greater irony is that I subscribed to this pseudoscience without even knowing it exists!! LOL  
> **username_3**: @forbidden-overseer: some do help and work for people and there are gaps in science. There is an element of art to life that has real outcomes and can not always be organized in thought.  
> **username_4**: What pseudoscience actually works for is very limited. It rarely works reliably for its claimed functions, and sometimes sets them back considerably.  
> **username_5**: For the same reasons they subscribe to scientific theories, mostly.  
> **username_2**: There's more than one answer, but regarding medical quackery, I wonder if the placebo effect plays a role. Placebos have a demonstratable benefit over doing nothing, and when actual treatment is unavailable or prohibitively expensive, belief in chicken noodle soup is perfectly rational. When you tell someone that the soup does nothing, you are taking away the benefit of the soup. I'm assuming here that people are unconsciously aware of their self-deception, and we're getting into pascal's wager territory here, so feel free to downvote.  
> **username_6**: In my experience, a combination of personal constructs and confirmation bias.  
> **username_7**: Probably because a lot of the scientific theories are incomplete, controversial, unconvincing or otherwise unsatisfying.  

---

## 3 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2012-08-16. Score: 70 | Accepted answer

There are two great TED talks that together help shed some light on your question:

1. David Deutsch (2005) "[A new way to explain explanation](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation)", and
2. Richard Dawkins (2009) "[Why the universe seems so strange](https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe)"

At a fundamental level, science is about explanation (and *sometimes* using that explanation to make predictions). Thus, to most people, science is useless unless they understand the story it tells. The problem with modern science is that to have a good grasp of its explanatory power, you need a lot of (often difficult) background. As you gain this background, you develop what Feynman would call the most fundamental skill in science: always questioning, being able to say "I don't know", and to hold contrasting ideas together. If you don't invest in acquiring this background, most of science seems like witchcraft passed down by ivory-tower academics in funny gowns and hats.

What pseudoscience (or even [cargo-cult science](http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm)) provide is explanations that require less background, purport to be more certain, have something for everyone ([Forer effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect)), and reassure you that "there is an answer". If you look at much of pseudoscience (or ancient myths) more closely, you will notice that they tend to personify their subject matter much more than science (my favorite example is the [homunculus fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument)). They use this personification to provide agency, intent, and meaning to their explanations.

The great advantage of these human stories is that our minds are optimized for them. If you subscribe to Dunbar's [Social Brain Hypothesis](http://archives.evergreen.edu/webpages/curricular/2006-2007/languageofpolitics/files/languageofpolitics/Evol_Anthrop_6.pdf), then one of the main things evolution produced is a mind built to understand social structure, and other people. When an agent does not adhere to its role and violates our theory-of-mind and behaves erratically, without discernible intent and meaning, this is dangerous to us and our society; it causes us great discomfort. When you hijack the social mind to try to explain further and further afield parts of nature, you try to build the same sort of characters.

When you have to say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" this character, it creates discomfort. Pseudoscience thrives on this by giving an arbitrary, simple, shallow and easy to change explanation. Since most lay-people never pursue this explanation far enough to notice its contradictions, and since it shapes their observations (in the [Popper-sense](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/3498/686) and through [confirmation bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)) they never get a strong enough cognitive-dissonance to overcome to positive feeling of having an understandable 'explanation'.

Unfortunately, all I can do in this answer is provide a intuitively appealing, intent and agency based explanation. Reread my answer and make note of unnecessary personifications I made -- just like much of pseudoscience, science is a story and there is the biggest rub.

> **Comments:**
> **username_11**: I think the answer is OK, but there is a point in which I strongly disagree. You say that science provides explanation and, sometimes, predictions. If science is not required to provide predictions beyond the observed data, it's no different from myth and religion. Indeed your answer is scientific in this sense: it predicts that, whenever a pseudoscience succeeds it's always through extensive use of personification.  
> **username_12**: +1. Only missing reference to Daniel Dennett and it would be perfect :)  
> **username_13**: @JavierRodriguezLaguna The point this sentence is that the the most important aspect of science is it's explanatory power. (You can find this argument in the book [The fabric of reality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabric_of_Reality) by David Deutsch). Whether scientific theories need to provide predictions is a different subject, and username_1 never said that science does not require to provide predictions. (nor did he say that science require to provide predictions)  
> **username_11**: Prediction is mandatory, a nice story is not. A nice story to help understand is strongly recommended, sure. But science can proceed without. E.g., quantum mechanics as seen by Bohr. Without the ability to make predictions, science is just another narrative.  
> **username_1**: @JavierRodriguezLaguna I think you have a very naive view of how science proceeds. Physics is very exceptional compared to most of science in being able to generate predictions, and even when it does it is mostly by accident. Almost every theorist that sets out to work in physics has as their goal to explain something, only after they develop their theory do they realize that as a side-effect it made some new predictions. If you want a case-study, consider either Maxwell on light or Dirac's work on anti-particles. We remember predictions because they are romantic, but that is not the practice.  
> **username_1**: @JavierRodriguezLaguna prediction is definitely a big plus (why many prefer physics over psychology, say) but it is not mandatory. A good story (although also not necessarily mandatory) is almost always desired, once again consider how many theorists where guided by mathematical elegance (good story in math terms) to arrive at new truths. Notable case-studied would be Einstein and (again) Dirac.  
> **username_11**: @ArtemKaznatcheev, your definition of science is extremely weak. It is hard to distinguish from religion or philosophy. I am a physicist myself, you might have guessed that much :), and I do believe that other wannabe sciences should be modelled with our same level of demand, no less. Physics, and any good science, is predictive every day, not just at special romantic situations. I use predictions in my daily work. That's why everybody relies on physics, they put their lives in our hands, e.g.: when you travel by plane. And nobody would risk their lives on the predictions of e.g. economy.  
> **username_1**: @JavierRodriguezLaguna I am a physicists too (well, that is a lie, I am more a mathematician now) and I don't do engineering hence I rarely use predictions of physics. When I am doing _science_, I am explaining parts of physics that are not well understood, and then the engineers worry about the applications and predictions after. This is true of most of my colleagues as well, except for a few experimentalists. But we are going off-topic, if you want to discuss more then catch me on [G+](https://plus.google.com/u/0/101780559173703781847/posts) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/kaznatcheev).  
> **username_14**: I really like this answer, but this discussion about whether predictions are essential to science is sort of puzzling. I *think* the term prediction is just being used in different ways. We can agree, I think, that a valid scientific statement or theory requires a testable hypothesis (at least in principle), which I would call a prediction. If it does not then it can no longer be called a scientific statement. Most experiments are a form of inductive reasoning about such predictions -- if A then B. B is true, so A is more plausible. Or, just as importantly, B is false, so A is less plausible.  
> **username_15**: I'm wandering if this desire for an "explanation" plagues scientists as well, only in the form of "publication bias", where positive explanations are far more likely to get published than "I tried, but still don't know" ones.  
> **username_16**: in other words, it's because of the laziness  
> **username_17**: I disagree that science is only about explanations. What draws a line between science and pseudoscience is applicability. Both often try to explain.  

---

### Answer by username_8 on 2014-02-12. Score: 14

There are now many full-length books that focus on this deep, complex question about human nature/psychology and note newer/ongoing/active research in the area, some of it cited in them.

* [Why people believe weird things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0805070893) Shermer and Gould
* [Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0195147103) Park
* [Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0691145970) Park
* [5 Must-Read Books on the Psychology of Being Wrong](http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/04/must-read-books-being-wrong/)

But some counterpoint from the reverse, flip side. Science is a complex, evolving, and at times subtle field in a way that was not fully recognized largely until the research in [Kuhnian shifts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift).

* [When Science Goes Wrong](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0452289327) LeVay
* [Science was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions "They" Declared Impossible](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1601631022) Friedman & Marden
* [They Got It Wrong: Science: All the Facts that Turned out to be Science Fiction](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1621450090) Donald
* [Rewriting the textbooks: When science gets it wrong](http://www.newscientist.com/special/rewriting-the-textbooks) New Scientist


---

### Answer by username_9 on 2013-08-21. Score: 9

Perhaps people are attracted to these theories in part because of the inability for mainstream science to answer anomalies.

The occasion of governmental

* lying,
* hiding of technology, and
* corruption,

helps reinforce the idea that there exists real Science that is not known to the mainstream. In the absence of trust, people contemplate the possibilities (imagination) by which the breach of trust could harm them.

> **Comments:**
> **username_10**: I agree. People may, for instance, believe there is profit motive for modern medicine to "make good customers" of you by managing symptoms rather than effecting a cure; therefore, those people may choose to believe in alternative medicines.  
> **username_9**: Or, more relevantly, [pharma will not make and distribute effective drugs that have a low (or negative) profit margin](http://www.raps.org/Regulatory-Focus/News/2014/11/14/20746/Is-a-Drug-Unsafe-or-Just-Unprofitable-How-a-Lack-of-Data-Clouds-Regulatory-Classifications/).  No one has solved this [even with creative schemes](http://www.forbes.com/sites/helencoster/2011/02/07/novartis-institute-tackles-unprofitable-drugs/).  Thus it is rational to presume that simple cures exist which cannot profit via IP.  Is a drug 'alternative' only because it is unpatentable?  

---

