Just how science-minded are we?

As the gaily coloured bus lurched down a Kenyan dirt road from town to the villages, a self-professed 'doctor' in a grey suit clung on to the seats while standing in the aisle. He yelled in Swahinglish about the magical properties of the green ointment in his other hand. The ointment cured AIDS, he said. Baldness. Impotence, in men and women. It also cured eczema, foot rot, and tuberculosis. Hands rose up from among the seats to claim their sample of this cure-all, and the 'doctor' administered his wares with a flurry of cash and promises.

I was at the tipping point of rage as he approached my seat. I couldn't hold back my fury and yelled over the hubbub that he had blood on his hands for selling fake treatments to poor people. Losing my temper at the display of hocus pocus in Kenya was becoming a bit of a theme.

Witchcraft, misguided religious advice and clashes between tradition and science were common experiences during my time in Uganda and Kenya. Undertaking health education at a local church my lesson to the assembled was subsequently undermined by the pastor. He stood up after me and announced that all condoms were made in cold countries, and when they were brought to Kenya they simply broke in the heat.

I had it explained to me that everything from homosexuality to yoga were attributed to the devil. Alcohol turned women to lesbians. Malaria was caused by infidelity. Even the motorbike accident that left a dear colleague in a wheelchair was caused by a curse the neighbour placed on him. Maybe worst of all, it was rumoured that the foundations of all the major buildings in Kampala contained the body of a new born; a sacrifice to the spirits to ensure the building didn't fall down.

The mystic, the religious and the scientific lived in daily competition and conciliation in the minds and hearts of those around me. Tradition and spirituality were by no means discarded mechanisms for explaining the universe. If they clashed with more scientific explanations, explanatory compromises arose, whereby the two could exist in some sort of harmony.

One woman I knew, a Ugandan health volunteer named Mary, had done amazing things working alongside our organization to educate people about HIV. Living an HIV positive life she had done a great deal to dispel misunderstandings about how the disease worked, and promoted the use of anti-retroviral medication which protected not only the person with HIV, but also their children and partner. With the right treatment, the risk of transmitting HIV to a child during birth could be reduced by 80%. She worked hard to embed this knowledge in the village.

That was, until Mary went for routine testing and received a false negative reading on her HIV test. Her church celebrated the miracle of her cure. They celebrated her in the chapel as one touched by God's blessing. She stopped taking the anti-retrovirals. Within months she started getting sick as her immune system crumpled. Those in her local church told her this was because her faith was weakening. To pray harder would bring her back to health. Mary continued on praying and believing she was cured. She died in hospital of cerebral malaria and meningitis. Mary, with all the information and medication available to her, still fell victim to the battle between science, religion and culture, which she had been unable to navigate.

Every culture finds a way for explaining the universe around them. And I felt regret for those in Uganda who have suffered waves of interference from outside countries. I knew that where I stood in the village preaching the existence of microbes someone had stood only decades before preaching the existence of God. Both were equally invisible to the naked eye, but God at least made some sort of moral sense, by rewarding the good and punishing those with evil in their hearts.

I craved often during this time to return home to the scientific-minded world of home. There, in the Australia of my mind, people required evidence before they believed something. People would look to research before concluding on the appropriate medication or treatment for an illness. We delicately lay culture aside in favour of clear-cut rationality, right?

Right?

It's true, health literacy has increased considerably in our society in the past few decades. People expect explanations, options, and evidence from their doctor. The gap between practitioners and the public has shrunk, and amazing publications such as the British Medical Journal, PubMed, the Cochrane collaboration and JAMA have made it easier to access scientific knowledge than ever before. Science communication is on the up and up; 'I Fucking Love Science' has over nine and a half million followers on Facebook. Tim Minchin and others artists have worked key scientific concepts into their works. We see science everywhere.

Many of us declare an allegiance to science as the primary tool to inform our understanding of the universe. Though science is not an outcome, or a finding – it's a process. One involving the selection of a hypothesis and identifying the evidence that exists both for and against it. It involves identifying and removing bias from experimentation. It's about being able to reproduce the same results under the same conditions. It's based exclusively on what can be observed. It's a process of understanding why a systematic review which collates the results of hundreds of clinical trials testing the same hypothesis is better evidence than what your auntie swears by as a cure for her bunions. It involves understanding the distinction between correlation and causation. It requires understanding the difference between anecdote and data. It involves knowing how tremendously powerful placebo and nocebo are. At the heart of science is an understanding that we, as feeling, social creatures, are not instinctively scientific.

Of course none of us have the capacity to personally undertake experiments to scientifically test all the objects and processes that touch our lives. We trust that the food we buy from the supermarket won't kill us, and the bridge that we drive over was built according to the laws of physics. Part of being in society is undertaking a contract of trust with those around you. It's a process of faith that that the truck driver carrying 5 tonnes at 120 kilometres an hour in the opposite direction believes in the white dividing line in the centre of the road as much as we do.

But the luxury of living in 2014 is that we can find that information if we want it. But do we want it?

Whether we're aware of it or not, we are all navigating between social, cultural and scientific influences every day. For example, many people have been drawn recently to the alternative therapy of acupuncture.

In 2006-07 Australians made a total of 589,796 Medicare rebate claims for acupuncture performed by medical practitioners. Based on a Chinese belief in the flow of Chi (or Qi) along pathways in the body called Meridian lines. Chi is energy in the body; illness occurs when blockages in the flow of energy occur. Acupuncture involves the process of 'unblocking' these energy flows with the use of superficial needling of the epidermal layer. The fact that no biological evidence of the existence of Chi or meridian lines exist has not limited its popularity.

The evidence behind acupuncture has confounded many people for some time, because, when assessed in trials against sugar pills or no intervention, it has routinely produced greater reported amounts of pain relief. Not until 2007 did several new methods of clinical trial start really testing the premise of acupuncture's success rates.

The German acupuncture trials are considered to be one of the largest clinical trials in the field of acupuncture. They involved a series of nationwide experiments in 2001 and published in 2006, on behalf of several German statutory health insurance companies. They consisted of one observational study and four randomized controlled trials - investigating acupuncture treatment for low back pain, knee osteoarthritis, migraine prophylaxis, and tension-type headache.

What differed in these trials from those previous was the use of a new technology; sham acupuncture needles. The needles, when applied to the skin telescoped inside themselves, not actually piercing the surface. Over 90% of patients could not distinguish the difference between the real acupuncture needle and the sham needle. Patients involved in the trial were randomised to receive the sham or the real needles accordingly. The results showed that rates of pain relief from sham and real needles were almost identical.

The second key method of testing the efficacy of acupuncture has been trials where needles are applied to points not identified in traditional Chinese medicine as pressure points. Over 30 trials have found the results of non-pressure point needling to produce identical results as needling the traditional pressure points.

The cumulative outcomes of these studies strongly suggest that acupuncture is a powerful placebo - but not a lasting one. Of the thousands of studies listed on the Cochrane collaboration website, many show that over the course of three months the pain-relieving effect of acupuncture decreases to perform no better than other placebos.

If acupuncture produces pain relief, does it matter whether or not it is due to a placebo effect? While placebo may deliver immediate pain relief, it does little to address the underlying cause of the illness or injury. Also, if doctors recommend placebo treatments in lieu of evidence-based treatments, they've undermined the key principle of medicine; the Hippocratic Oath, in which physicians and health care providers swear to undertake medicine honestly. Without this, medicine and magic become indistinguishable.

The data throwing doubt on the efficacy of acupuncture as a treatment has not halted its popularity. We're not as science-minded as we like to think we are. What our friend recommends, what our mother tells us is good for us, and how something makes us feel all feed into how we construct our reality. I've come to realise there really is no distinction between the way decisions are made and opinions formed in Kenya and Australia.

That we're not scientific creatures by nature is okay. By gaining a grasp of how we shuffle, prioritise and make sense of the myriad of information that comes to us on a daily basis, we can test our conclusions and ask ourselves how we reached them. We can seek the information to best improve our health, our practices and our understanding. Science is beautiful.