What is Pseudoscience?
A Nurturing Potential report – Part II 1. PSEUDOSCIENCE AND PSYCHOTHERAPY Shooting yourself in the foot is unfortunate; doing it repeatedly suggests a disorder rather than misfortune. How scientific is psychotherapy? In Issue No. 15 of Nurturing Potential a pseudoscience was described as an established body of knowledge that masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy that it would not otherwise be able to achieve. Psychotherapy has often been accused of being pseudoscientific. The different techniques for curing or alleviating mental or emotional disorders that shelter under the general umbrella of psychotherapy frequently are not tested scientifically. When such tests have been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of a particular therapy and then compared with results obtained from a placebo alternative, too often there has been little evidence of the efficacy of one option or the other. What is beyond doubt is that the last part of the twentieth century, parti
