27 Things That Are Actually Pseudoscience, But People Take Them As Fact

Recently, I came across a post on the popular Ask Reddit page from user Ninac4116 asking, “What are some things that are actually pseudoscience that people don’t realize?” and OMG, I’m actually kind of surprised at how many of these I’d never thought about. I thought they were interesting enough to share, so, here are some of the best comments:

1.“Anyone who says you need to “detox” your ________.”

—u/AdRevolutionary1780

2.“Lie detectors.”

—u/General_Sprinkles386

“There’s a good reason polygraphs aren’t admissible in court — it’s junk science. It really just measures how much stress the subject is feeling, and then it assumes that any sudden surges in stress mean the subject is lying (as opposed to the subject being stressed because he knows they’re trying to pin a crime on him).”

—u/BoredAtWork1976

3.“The ‘taste map’ of the tongue.”

—u/NickPDay

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4.“‘The human brain doesn’t stop developing until age 25!'”

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—u/sassy_castrator

5.“Alkaline water. Your stomach acid neutralizes it instantly.”

—u/deathyyy

“I found it to be quite helpful in the third trimester of pregnancy when my life was one constant heartburn.”

—u/wilson-bentley

6.“Sending your child to a ‘program’ in the troubled-teen industry to get ‘help’ with their mental health only for them to leave with more trauma.”

“Those programs are trash. Wilderness therapy was a therapeutic model created to have a low overhead to maximize profits and serve as a pipeline feeder for residential treatment centers and ‘therapeutic boarding schools,’ often owned by the same parent company.”

—u/pinktiger32

7.“‘Alpha’-based dog training.”

—u/LogosKhaos

8.“‘Feed a cold, starve a fever.’ Turns out it takes calories to fight off an illness, and it’s important to make sure you’re eating and drinking enough to keep up.”

—u/TeleHo

9.“Blood type horoscope.”

—u/deleted

“That’s such a Type O thing to say.”

—u/tnawalinski

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10.“What I like to think of as ‘Barnes & Noble’ science. Be very skeptical of getting your science from any book with a charismatic author, especially if they’re smiling in the picture. They’re often presenting views that aren’t representative of the actual scientific consensus, and many are actually quite fringe.”

Sony Pictures Releasing

“Many quacks will turn to the popular press, pop sci news outlets, and low-impact, pay-to-publish journals with lax peer review standards (all of whom care more about profit over scientific rigor) when they can’t get things published in academia.”

—u/Bromelia_and_Bismuth

11.“Personality tests, e.g., Myers-Briggs.”

—u/Snarky_McSnarkleton

“Fun fact: they’re only allowed to ask/determine your Myers-Briggs personality type during job interviews because it isn’t scientific!”

—u/Tailsteak

12.“Chiropractors.”

—u/deleted

“Chiropractics was started by a man who had a ghost tell him to start chiropractics. I shit you not.”

—u/Ninac4116

13.“Pumping and dumping breast milk after drinking alcohol.”

—u/AddisonsContracture

“It blew my mind when I found out, from an actual pediatrician, that breast milk does not process/contain alcohol the same way that blood does, and that therefore (with moderate consumption) the breastmilk really only contains as much alcohol as regular orange juice and is safe for babies…”

—u/fuzzyblacksheepI

14.“My 16-year-old self screams, ‘biorhythms!’ and ‘mood rings!'”

—u/DestinysWeirdCousin

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15.“‘Boosting’ the immune system. It can’t be boosted. You can support it to help fight infection, but you can’t send it into hyperdrive; that would cause autoimmune issues.”

—u/densebloom5

16.“Alpha male shit.”

—u/biffbobfred

17.“Anything outside of physics that uses the word ‘quantum.'”

—u/ReversedFrog

“Even my cloud-enabled quantum AI blockchain vape pen?”

—u/Drone30389

18.“Conversion therapy. You can’t un-gay-ify someone. The methods used are often just ‘intentionally traumatize this teenager so that they associate homosexuality/transgender identity with suffering.'”

NBC / Via giphy.com

—u/_useless_lesbian_

19.“A lot of the hype around vitamins. Many, if not most, are unneeded for the majority of people and don’t get absorbed anyway.”

—u/Ok_Dog_4059

“Except Vitamin D. If you’re on this site, chances are you don’t go outside enough and are deficient in Vitamin D. Most of the general population is.”

—u/rachaek

20.“‘Getting wet in the rain will make you sick.’ One does not ‘catch a cold’ while outside in the rain.”

—u/dcponton

“The idea that cold weather makes you sick. Nope… gotta pick the virus up from somewhere.”

—u/speedyPBJJ

21.“Astrology. Stars don’t control your personality.”

—u/pboytrif

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22.“Cleaning products marketing that they are ‘natural’ and/or ‘organic.’ Arsenic is natural and organic.”

—u/delpheroid

23.“Anything Freudian. I find it alarming that his theories are given the time of day at all. It seems like unfalsifiable bunkum to me.”

—u/FScrotFitzgerald

“Part of why people still pay any attention to his theories is probably the fact that entry-level psych classes often introduce the field by going over its early history, starting with early psychodynamic theorists like Freud. People who just do a semester of psych as an elective and then never touch it again tend not to get a lot of exposure to what the modern-day field is like.”

—u/TheSaltyBrushtail

24.“Bite forensics, ballistic forensics, and blood spatter analysis. All of it is subjective bullshit. It’s not scientific.”

Showtime / Via giphy.com

—u/evh88

“I defended a murder case where the state hired a blood spatter expert. Tried to get him kicked by basically arguing, ‘Judge, are you listening to this bullshit?’ But judges are too scared to step out on a limb on that issue. So I just hired my own expert to spew equally stupid but much more helpful bullshit. Hung the jury. It was one of my proudest moments.”

—u/Shot-Scratch3417

25.“The idea that everyone has a unique fingerprint is an assumption. It’s probably true, but science has never confirmed it.”

—u/gottahavethatbass

26.“Handwriting analysis.”

—u/PoliSW

So, what do you think — pseudoscience or real? Feel free to share your own examples down in the comments. Or, if you want to write in but prefer to stay anonymous, you can write in to this anonymous form! Who knows — your answer could be included in a future BuzzFeed article.

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