When fighting against a tug-of-war (between scientific and “alternative” medicine, say) in a high-dimensional space, the best strategy is to pull sideways.
Fortunately, homeopathy is mostly harmless—a wonderful improvement over the usually actively-harmful “medicine” of its day, which is why it gained enough of a following to kind of get grandfathered in to our current system. So you probably have some time. If you’re not a minor, you have the absolute right to refuse your mother’s “treatments”. It sounds like it’s for your own good in her mind, so she won’t disown you over this. If you are a minor, it’s probably not going to kill you, but you can still fight it and maybe consider early emancipation.
But the level of insanity required to believe in this stuff is also sufficient to persuade people to drink bleach and die, or donate all of their money to Nigerian “princes”—a very dangerous place to be in the Internet age. Homeopathy is only a symptom. The real disease is faulty epistemology. It’s endemic, but some people have a worse case than others.
Irrational people develop defenses against direct arguments, but you can often work around these using the Socratic method.
Street Epistemology is a modern method of Socratic dialogue focused on improving the interlocutor’s epistemology, guiding them to eventually doubt and release their attachment to false beliefs. For someone in your position, it’s worth learning to do. You may want to practice with others before trying it on your mother though.
When fighting against a tug-of-war (between scientific and “alternative” medicine, say) in a high-dimensional space, the best strategy is to pull sideways.
Fortunately, homeopathy is mostly harmless—a wonderful improvement over the usually actively-harmful “medicine” of its day, which is why it gained enough of a following to kind of get grandfathered in to our current system. So you probably have some time. If you’re not a minor, you have the absolute right to refuse your mother’s “treatments”. It sounds like it’s for your own good in her mind, so she won’t disown you over this. If you are a minor, it’s probably not going to kill you, but you can still fight it and maybe consider early emancipation.
But the level of insanity required to believe in this stuff is also sufficient to persuade people to drink bleach and die, or donate all of their money to Nigerian “princes”—a very dangerous place to be in the Internet age. Homeopathy is only a symptom. The real disease is faulty epistemology. It’s endemic, but some people have a worse case than others.
Irrational people develop defenses against direct arguments, but you can often work around these using the Socratic method.
Street Epistemology is a modern method of Socratic dialogue focused on improving the interlocutor’s epistemology, guiding them to eventually doubt and release their attachment to false beliefs. For someone in your position, it’s worth learning to do. You may want to practice with others before trying it on your mother though.