What is parachemistry? What does a parachemist do?
I'll try to present the best I could find. The titles &quot;para&quot;, &quot;meta&quot; and &quot;ortho&quot; were perhaps given by Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884) way back in the nineteenth century. For one thing, Kolbe had the reputation of being a well recognized teacher and a skilled and productive chemist. He is also well known today (partly) as the author of a critique of the foundation of stereo-chemistry, with was established by the Dutch chemist, Dr. J.H. vant Hoff. He had directed bitter remarks not only towards vant Hoff for his hypotheses (which was perhaps the boldest), but at nearly the entire realm of contemporary organic chemistry.
Background

$\ldots$ Once he gave his amanuensis the empirical formulas for three novel compounds for which their discoverer had just assigned structural formulas. The man reported back in a half hour with several more candidate structures, some of which looked more probable to Kolbe. Kolbe concluded that structure theory is a dangerous toy, especially for inexperienced chemists, and that structures are often assigned &quot;in one's sleep,&quot; with little or no empirical warrant. $\ldots$

Privately, Frankland &quot;entirely dissent[ed]&quot; from this judgment and Volhard also objected privately; he joined Frankland in expressing regret over the personal character of many of Kolbe's remarks. Kolbe's response was pretty straightforward. As he remarked he must criticize and contest the chemical ideas that he considered false and worthless, he would be happy if his views were contested. He later wrote to Varrentrapp that he would rather be considered sharp-tongued than cowardly.
The crusade

In Kolbe's third and fourth retrospects, those for 1873 and 1874, he went after his favorite example of structuralist excess: Kekulé's benzene theory. He absolved Kekulé himself of much of the blame, for he was convinced that Kekulé regarded the theory merely as an intriguing and useful hypothesis. However, most chemists by this time viewed the hexagon as &quot;infallible dogma,&quot; as &quot;the Pope is for Catholics.&quot; They were true fanatics, Kolbe wrote, and viewed him (Kolbe) as a rank beginner, of weak understanding. They were right, he thought, for he could not understand arguments built &quot;in the air&quot; or &quot;on loose shifting sand.&quot;

The end of their sand castles was not distant. Kolbe continued,

The modern chemist, who knows exactly what a chemical compound looks like in its middle and its end, how the six carbon atoms of benzene are symmetrically linked together in a plane, who then further purports . . . to have a clear conception of the spatial arrangement of the atoms, of their ortho, meta, and para positions, who determines the positions of all of the atoms in the compound, has long since abandoned the solid ground of exact science; the scientist has become a metaphysician.

He then named true physicists as &quot;orthophysicists&quot; as opposed to &quot;paraphysicists&quot; who construct hypotheses on the basis of experimental work of others and &quot;metaphysicists&quot; who believed that they can dispense entirely with empirical evidence.
In his own view, he was an &quot;orthochemist&quot; and Kekulé was a &quot;parachemist. But as the  years went by, he increasingly believed that even the term &quot;parachemist&quot; was too kind; his opponents were &quot;metachemists&quot;, to whom &quot;chemical theories are as cheap as blackberries&quot;.

References:

Kolbe Versus the “Transcendental Chemists”: the Emergence of Classical Organic Chemistry, A. J. Rocke
The Quiet Revolution Hermann Kolbe and the Science of Organic Chemistry, Alan J. Rocke
Image and Reality: Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination, A.J. Rocke