


Sure there are quacks. There are quacks who don't treat and quacks who
treat. One's that refuse to diagnose and ones that diagnose improperly. 
There are lucky quacks and unlucky quacks. Smart quacks and dumb ones. 

There are people ahead of their time, with unprobable or unproven theories
and rationals. There are ill-reasoned, absurd, theorists. 

Sometimes it's hard to tell who's who.  

Reading a book of ancient jokes it seems that doctors called other doctors
quacks in Babylon. 

Arguments abound when there aren't any firm answers. Plenty of illnesses
aren't, or can't, be diagnosed or treated. But I think it's better to argue
against the theory, as was originally done with postings on candida a month
or so ago. Stating the facts usually works better than simply asserting an
opinion about someone's competency. And you can't convince everybody. 

Sometimes a correct diagnosis
takes years for people: they don't run into a doctor who recognizes the
disease, they haven't developed something recognizable yet, or they have
something that no one is going to recognize, because it hasn't been
described yet. Sometimes they get a cure, sometimes the illness wears out,
sometimes they stumble on an improper diagnosis with the right treatment,
sometimes they find it's incurable.  

There is no profit in a patient accepting a hopeless attitude about an 
illness. Unless it's a rock solid diagnosis of terminal disease it's is
more like ly that a person will find a cure if they keep looking. 