As any physician can tell you, it’s hard to combat health pseudoscience. I’m referring, of course, to the amalgam of fake claims that travels under the umbrella of “alternative” health. It makes no sense on the face of it. A group of otherwise logical people have fallen headlong for nonsense. It might be anti-vaccine advocacy; it might be supplements; it might be cancer quackery. None of it can be proven and all of it is too good or too easy to be true.

So why are people so gullible?

Perhaps we’ve been approaching this the wrong way. Instead of viewing alternative health as a form of knowledge, albeit pseudoscientific, perhaps we should view it as more akin to religion.

What do I mean?

Merriam Webster defines religion as: “A cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.”

Most religions involve worship of a supreme being or beings endowed with supernatural powers. Such a being can be implored through prayer to intervene in human affairs for the benefit of the person praying.

While religion is a system of belief, theology is a study of God’s intentions and desires. It encompasses the nature of God, and the revelations of God, including a creation myth, a moral framework and a divine reward for adherence to that framework.

It is possible to have a secular religion without a divine being. Despite the absence of “God,” the religion nonetheless includes a creation myth, a moral framework and a reward for adherence to that framework.

Alternative health operates as a secular religion, and its theology mimics that of mainstream religion in important ways.

1. The Creation Myth

Every religion has a creation myth and alternative health is no different. Indeed the alt-health creation myth bears a startling resemblance to the creation myth of Judeo-Christian tradition with the difference that God is replaced by “Nature.”

Nature designed human beings to function perfectly in all respects (a state of grace known as “wellness”) and to live in a Paleo Garden of Eden where everyone ate organic, exercised regularly, used only natural remedies and lived to ripe old age and beyond. So what happened?

2. The Fall

Human beings fell from grace. The serpent in the alternative health Garden was technology, which lured people farther and farther from the state of Nature. As a result, people developed diseases like autism, cancer and obesity.

Simply put, we got sick because we ate from the Tree of (Technological) Knowledge.

3. Demons

Since the fall from grace, we have been plagued by demons. Like the demons of mainstream religions, we cannot see them, and we certainly can’t find them with our scientific technology despite its sophistication. Of course we don’t call them demons. We call them toxins.

Toxins function like demons. They are everywhere; they are insidious; and they lie in wait to prey on the weak.

4. Predestination

Just like the Calvinist belief in predestination allowed the spiritual elect to be identified by their wealth and success, alternative health has its own version of predestination. In alternative health, the spiritual elect can be identified by their good health.

Luck played no role in Calvinist predestination. You weren’t wealthy because you were lucky or even skillful. You were lucky because you had been chosen by God. Luck plays no role in pseudoscience. You aren’t healthy because you are lucky; you’re healthy because you are one of the health elect.

It goes without saying that people who get sick must have done something to deserve it or must have been damaged by demons.

5. The Devil

The Devil is a shape-shifter. One day The Devil is technology; the next it is Big Pharma; or perhaps it’s Big Medicine. The Devil is responsible for illness, and the only way to remain healthy is to thwart The Devil’s machinations. How? By refusing what the Devil is offering:

CHEMICALS!

What are chemicals in quackery theology? In contrast to the scientific definition of chemicals that encompasses every single substance both inside and outside the human body, “chemicals” means something different in alternative health. It is any substance that has a long, scary name.

6. Exorcism

Disease is caused by toxins, the demons of pseudoscience, so it is hardly surprising that preventing and treating disease involves exorcism, forcing demons from your body by cleansing and detoxifying it. Although the body has two separate organs specifically to remove harmful substances, the liver and the kidneys, both are thought to be incapable of removing all the demons. Hence we have juice cleanses, colon cleanses and products that purport to detoxify by being ingested, smeared on or steamed from the body.

7. Faith

Like all religions, alternative health requires faith in the face of the inability to prove that it works or is true. Of course in quackery they call it “intuition.”

For example, it doesn’t matter to anti-vaccine advocates that there is no science to support the claim that vaccines cause autism, because their intuition tells them that it does. They explicitly reject rational explanations, and, like true believers everywhere, the persistence of faith in the face of ever greater evidence is treated as a sign of devotion, not gullibility.

8. Priests

Like any religion, alternative health has its own priests, the purveyors of quackery goods and services. These priests travel under the name of chiropractors, reiki masters, acupuncturists and are typically purveyors of vitamins, herbs and other supplements. Instead of offering rational prescriptions for health, alternative health charlatans offer (for money) superstitions, affirmations, and support in rejecting rationality. They sell substances with no efficacy and provide friendship and companionship as a substitute for knowledge.

Andrew Wakefield, the doctor deprived of his medical license because of research misconduct, is one such priest of pseudoscience, though there are many others. Curiously, celebrities are often leading exponents of quackery.

9. Prayer

Affirmations are the pseudoscience version of prayer. Visualizing the destruction of cancer cells and birth affirmations reflect the magical thinking that thoughts have the power to affect outcomes.

10. Salvation. The goal of quackery, like the goal of many religions, is to be saved and welcomed into paradise. In the case of alternative health, paradise is a return to the imagined state of perfect health “designed” by Nature for blissful life in The Garden of Eden.

Approaching alternative health as a secular religion has important implications for how we address belief in pseudoscience. It is very difficult to use rational arguments to persuade people to give up beliefs that they first adopted without a rational basis. Hence education in the sciences, or specific disciplines of immunology, oncology, etc. is doomed to be ineffective. That’s especially true when persistent faith in the face of evidence to the contrary is venerated as devotion.

Alternative health as secular religion goes a long way toward explaining the vehemence and vitriol of those who believe in it. When real medical professionals question anti-vaccine advocacy, we aren’t merely questioning a specific empirical claim. We’re questioning an entire theology. Is it any wonder then that prominent physicians who tried to combat anti-vaccine beliefs received death threats?

It might be helpful, and more effective, to alert people to the nature of alternative health as a secular religion and that their faith in it is akin to religious belief. Quackery is more than just ignorance of basic scientific principles. It reflects a world view that allows people to control their fears around health and disease and imagine themselves as destined for return to the state of wellness afforded by the original health Garden of Eden.

Turning people away from the religion of quackery is going to require more than science education; it’s going to require spiritual conversion.