Crank (person)

"Crank" (or kook, crackpot, or quack) is a pejorative term for a person who writes or speaks in an authoritative fashion about a particular subject, often in science, but is alleged to have false or even ludicrous beliefs. Crank can also be used to describe the opinions of these people (see American Heritage Dictionary 2000 - noun definition 3). Usage of the label is often subjective, with proponents of competing theories labeling their opponents cranks, but the term still connotes someone who is well out of mainstream opinion on a matter, as well as connoting a person of dubious mental stability.

Medicine

• Alternative Medicine or Holistic Health practitioners who seek to completely substitute their treatment modality for mainstream medicine, or who practice a fortiori empirically unfounded modalities (ie: Ear candling).
• Mainstream Physicians who, during the mid-twentieth century, systematically dismissed mounting scientific evidence as to the effects of diet on heart disease.
• Cures for cancer that are not reproducible by third parties
• Homeopathy
• Crystal healing
• Anti-vaccination
• Faith healing (see this same entry under the topic of Paranormal and spiritual)
• Phrenology, especially when used in (pseudo-)psychiatric diagnosis. It nevertheless directed attention to the possibility that each part of the brain performs some particular function. In this sense, Phrenology can be regarded as protoscience.
• Psychic surgery
• Chiropractic, when considered as a total replacement for medical science.
• Medical illnesses neither recognised nor under consideration for inclusion by the World Health Organization into its International Classification of Diseases. Examples include Mucoid plaque.
• Psychiatric illnesses neither recognised nor under consideration for inclusion into the DSM-IV. For example, some cranks still believe that homosexuality is a form of mental illness.

Nutrition

• Diets that forbid or severely limit one or more necessary nutrients. Examples include extreme low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets.
• Those who consider common foods, such as milk or wheat, harmful or even fatal to everyone, including those with no history of food allergies or of anaphylaxis.
• Macrobiotics
• Water fluoridation opponents
• Raw food diets to the extent that cooked food is believed to be inherently harmful.