I commend you, Steve, for devoting so much of your time to stem such seemingly unstoppable cascades of cognitive dung, propelled by sheer dishonesty and, arguably, greed.

The current use of the term Allopath to describe scientific medicine goes beyond a straw man to being outright slander.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Millikan

But Millikan was intellectually honest, and reported his data as he measured it, not as he wished it to be.

The source of a hypothesis is irrelevant to how well that hypothesis fits the data and how well it corresponds to reality. The original idea for the structure of the benzene ring came in a dream about a snake catching its tail. Of course if benzene were not actually a ring, a dream about a snake catching its tail would have been a useless distraction, not a source of revelation.

2 ) As you have brought up in the podcast, the holistic vs. non holistic argument is non existent. Except in very obvious cases, like when I broke my hand, just about every doctor I have been to has always asked basic questions about my diet or stress levels.

3) I think the ether is the perfect topic to bring up to any pseudo-scientist because it was a concept that was basically unanimously agreed upon by science and in a very short amount of time was completely abandoned when evidence against it mounted. It proves without a doubt that science is willing to accept contradictory notions when there is proof.

I don’t think there is a more powerful ‘science-stopper’ than claiming that most utmost of subjective absolutes.

Out of the choices you offered- homeopathic principles are not only “not powerful enough” they are non-existent. The “meritocracy of science” means that ideas are tested against reality and only those that work survive. Homeopathic ideas have no relationship to reality, they are scientifically dead.

Homeopathy survives through marketing and using cultural and political avenues to circumvent science – to change the rules. Doing an end-run around science in order to sell nonsense to the public does not serve society, it only serves the profits of those who sell homeopathy.