Restarting with a New Name

While I was taking a longer than anticipated break from blogging—doing some extracurricular activities like getting a house built—I had time to reassess my blog. While I still plan to do my part at putting true information about homeopathy on the internet amid a sea of false and ignorant comments, that is only part of my intent. I enjoy a good argument as well as the next guy, but a lot of the arguments with the neo-skeptics are just arguing for it’s own sake. I got more caught up in it that I want to. The larger goal was just to write a blog about health and life from my perspective, which is that of a scientific/technical guy exploring “the other side” and trying to figure out how to integrate the two.

I’ve decided to rename my blog as I’m restarting it. I originally came up with the name “woo-woo science” because despite my journey into it, a lot of what I consider to be the frontier of a new scientific paradigm makes me uncomfortable. In other words, “woo-woo.” Part of me wishes the world was the relatively simple materialistic, logical place that scientism claims it is. But that’s not my experience. However, I decided to drop that pejorative term because it gave some people the wrong idea of what I was writing about.

The new name for my blog is vitalpatterns.net. I wanted to use the word “pattern“ because one way I try to explain my shift in perspective is that I’ve gone from a world of facts to a world of patterns, in the realm of health care and in life in general. Another way to look at it is a shift from a reductionistic to a holistic view of things. The current scientific paradigm requires reductionism. Without that it’s supposedly not ”evidence based.“ I believe, however, that science does not need to be and in fact should not be reductionistic. On the other hand, how do I navigate the territory between ”hard science“ and beliefs, opinions, and intuition? While I’m not discounting beliefs, I prefer to make decisions about things like health care and public policy with a kind of scientific perspective. I’d like it to be a holistic instead of a reductionistic science, but I have to admit that I’m still trying to work out what that looks like.