Beyond the Limits of Applying the Concept of ‘Pseudoscience’ in Medicine

The concept of pseudoscience is often understood through strict epistemic criteria like falsifiability and empirical verification, which do not accurately reflect how medical knowledge functions in real-world contexts. Clinical reasoning in medicine occurs amid uncertainty and requires moral judgment, contextual awareness, and responsiveness to individual patient narratives—elements that cannot be solely validated through experimental methods. While medicine relies on scientific evidence, it also integrates interpretive and experiential insights that extend beyond pure biomedical science. A rigid application of the pseudoscience label can obscure the practical and relational aspects that are essential to both healing practices and scientific inquiry in medicine. The paper begins by assessing the current use of the concept of pseudoscience in medical discourse, suggesting that it is based on outdated views and fails to capture recent advances in demarcation theory. It argues that this narrow interpretation is inadequate and delivers practical consequences that undermine medical objectives. Subsequently, by utilizing Mahner’s tripartite model—pseudoscience, pseudotechnology, and pseudohumanities—the author proposes a more effective framework for evaluating medical claims and practices. Ultimately, the philosophy of medicine requires a dual-critique approach that enables examination of both mainstream (MS) medicine and alternative, non-mainstream (NMS) healing practices, fostering a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the medical field.