Criticism for “Crystal Crash Course: A Beginner’s Guide to Healing Crystals” by Heather Askinosei

📌Category: Geology, Science
📌Words: 870
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 22 June 2021

For as long as humanity can remember, crystals have been seen as valuable. Whether it be for donning royalty, or by religious connection, we have always seemed to connect crystals to a higher form of power. To this day people still use crystals as if they have power; Calling these minerals healing crystals. They take normal crystals and claim these objects are infused with healing powers. However, claiming this is true is pseudoscientific because there is a bunch of other science proving crystals do not heal. Heather Askinosei made this story tutorial to explain how healing crystals work and suggest how to find the right crystal. What made Heather’s explanation of healing crystals pseudoscientific to me was them explaining away and ignoring falsifying data, using vague language, and making claims that are inconsistent with well-established scientific truths.

Heather Askinosei’s intro course to healing crystals is pseudoscientific because it explains away and ignores falsifying data. Bassam notes that: “It [pseudoscience] explains away or ignores falsifying data (474),” which is exactly what Heather does. She goes on and on throughout the writing about how cool healing crystals are, but all of that ignores true data and anything that could possibly oppose it. An example of one of these lines would be: “Many people wonder if crystals have healing powers, and while there are many anecdotes describing the curative effects of healing stones, crystal energy works differently on everyone depending on how receptive you are (Heather, 2020).” She goes over the anxiety of crystals not working, but only ever advocates for healing crystals instead of seeing the other argument. That last part about receptiveness sounds a lot like an excuse as well. She claims that they work and refuses to acknowledge data that falsifies this claim throughout the entire tutorial. In real science, it is extremely important to get straight to the point of the data. Explaining away and ignoring falsifying data does not help the idea of healing crystals grow into an actual science. When she says “letting your intuition guide you to the energies you need” she is giving herself an excuse to call healing crystals a working practice. By Heather’s explanation of healing crystals, her consistency in explaining away and ignoring falsifying data makes her description of healing crystals a pseudoscience.

Heather’s description also pertains to pseudoscience because she uses vague language to make her point. Bassam notes that: “It [pseudoscience] uses vague language (474).” Heather does exactly this and does not show much about how these crystals actually help. She says that “In this magical world of vibrations, crystal energy helps you on your spiritual journey because it works to hold your intention and send it out into the universe. (Heather, 2020).” In actual science, everything needs to be explained out in detail. More definition is needed so that other scientists could progress and build off from that theory to produce similar results. Heather dodges around detail by saying people have different chakras and vibrations, which does not actually explain how the healing power of crystals work. Nor does she explain what she means about vibrations as she proceeds to talk more about it. Due to Heather’s vague explanation of how healing crystals work, healing crystals are a pseudoscience.

One final example of how Heather’s description of healing crystals is pseudoscience is how she makes claims that are inconsistent with well-known scientific truths. Bassam notes that: “It [pseudoscience] makes claims that are inconsistent with well-established scientific truths.” Heather made many claims about why healing crystals heal when they do. Two examples of this would be: “As Albert Einstein is reported to have said, everything in life is vibration. The vibrations that these energy crystals hold can realign and re-calibrate your energy with theirs, helping you to raise your vibration and reach a higher state of being (Heather 2020)” and “Due to their structure and composition, crystals emit vibrations at a constant frequency, meaning that their vibrations do not change (Heather 2020).” Making claims inconsistent with truths is extremely easy and bold. In practice, these claims are only okay to make if they can prove anything. However, claiming against it with no evidence is an easy to see type of fallacy. These claims also take the original scientific statement out of context to connect their own false fantasy against the scientific truth. Albert Einstein did say that all things have vibrations, but this was when he was studying molecules and their natural tendency to keep moving. Heather uses the vibrations’ part to justify saying healing crystals use vibrations to work. By Heather making a false claim against a well-known scientific truth, her description of healing crystals is a pseudoscience.

Heather Askinosei’s description of healing crystals is an example of pseudoscience because she explains away and ignores falsifying data, uses vague language, and makes claims that are inconsistent with well-established scientific truths. Her explanation of how healing crystals work disqualifies her words from being science. By this point, I could just pick a rock up from the side of the street and call it a “rock of medicine,” which still doesn’t make it science. Even if healing crystals can’t be entirely disproven they cannot compensate for actual medicine or therapy, which is what makes healing crystals a pseudoscience. If they would do some more research and keep an open thought process, a lot of unfortunate minds would stay away from these types of practices. It’s a crying shame that there are people out there who believe pseudoscience and natural methods of medicine are better than getting some help. We can only hope that they one day realize that relying on pseudoscientific information doesn’t really help them feel better at all.

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