Yeah, it bugged me too. I’d liked the few of those videos I’d seen, including the one on consent. I didn’t see whatever the original comment was that she made about homeopathy, but apparently some people were giving her a hard time about it via email or something, because in the Q&A video I linked to she made some cryptic but somewhat upset-sounding remarks about people pestering her about it. She held up a homeopathic remedy of some kind and made a statement citing various authorities, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), implying that those bodies supported or endorsed or in some sense vouched for the efficacy (I guess? she wasn’t very specific) of homeopathy. Which is perhaps true in a hyper-technical sense? I know the FDA set up some office of “complementary and alternative medicine” or something like that a while ago. But homeopathy, obviously, is bonkers.

There’s a depressing amount of pseudoscientific belief around. I’d never really heard much about homeopathy and didn’t know what it was, when a speaker was booked to come talk to the weekly parenting class that was associated with my son’s preschool ten years or so ago. By the time the person was done giving his presentation about how great homeopathy was I was rolling my eyes. Since then I’ve become more aware of the issue.

I can only conclude that getting a doctorate in human sexuality, which appears to be what the host of Sexplanations has, does not involve enough contact with actual science to weed out people who are credulous about homeopathy. In a larger sense, it raises concerns in my mind that YouTube series developed by Hank Green are not necessarily a reliable source of scientific and medical information.

It’s interesting how YouTube’s lowering of the bar in terms of cost and gatekeeper effects enables all this cool communication and community building, but also puts the young and naive at risk of being misled either intentionally or accidentally by people who, absent YouTube, would have a smaller reach.

Hank and Dr. Doe are smart and nerdishly enthusiastic in a way that comes across well on video, but they would benefit from more scruples about fact-checking and not presenting themselves as authorities in areas where they lack expertise. It’s a stylistic convention they seem to share with other successful YouTubers, to project confidence and talk fast and make lots of authoritative-sounding pronouncements. It’s obviously effective.

I don’t think Hank and Dr. Doe are intentionally misleading their viewers. But it’s a slippery slope, and others obviously have been willing to use the same tools in ways that are a lot more damaging, as recents events demonstrate. And even if it’s the result of ignorance rather than malice, it does real harm for a purported expert to promote the use of useless treatments for actual medical conditions.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1gtg3e3.