&gt; That&#x27;s different from ... talking about &quot;sacred medicine&quot;<p>You seem to be doubling down on interpreting &#x27;sacred&#x27; in that context as the scholar saying &#x27;something I believe is supernatural&#x27;.<p>Social scientists studying religion should use religious language, and scientists studying experience are fine to use mystical and visionary language, if they are describing something emically: i.e. the subject reports mystic or visionary experience. Terms like that even have an etic use, to refer to the pattern of experiences that are described that way, where they often become specific terms of art.<p>You didn&#x27;t seem to engage with my point that you are misunderstanding the term: it is triggering your &#x27;woo&#x27; detector, which is giving a false positive in this case.<p>&quot;Sacred medicine&quot; is not a problematic term, if you are studying medicine practiced in a sacred context. I have a book on &quot;Shamanic medicine&quot; - that doesn&#x27;t indicate the author is a true believing shaman, just that they are the subject of his study. &quot;Sacred knowledge&quot; is a very good title for this book, because it is an attempt to look at what knowledge of psychoactive drugs is embedded into sacred frameworks cross-culturally, that can be reframed in a modern scientific context.<p>I think  the misunderstanding is very understandable, because religious vested interests do a good job of preventing religious studies being widely known. Partly their concern is to keep sensible folks like you saying this kind of thing: words like &#x27;sacred&#x27;, &#x27;mystic&#x27; and &#x27;visionary&#x27; should not be used unless you are a believer.