In my view, at least part of the reason science has been so successful is precisely because it distanced itself from the emotional and spiritual. For those areas of life we have art and philosophy.

The number of red flags when people mention "spiritual" in any given argument is about as bad as someone talking about the Earth being flat or vaccines causing autism.

I know, completely agree. But one thing that struck me the other day, I read a tweet from some random person that got retweeted a bunch. It went something like this, "Don't shame me for looking to natural remedies/my doctor rolls my eyes when I tell him what my chiropractor suggests/my naturopath has never rolled their eyes at something my doctor has said." It made me sad also because so many people jumped in and said basically the same thing, how "western medicine" has failed us".

Modern medicine is wonderful for reducing deaths from childbirth, antibiotics, surgeries, etc. but for someone who has an "incurable" condition which stumps every doctor they've been to, imagine how frustrating it would be to be told every time that nothing can be done or every treatment just makes it worse? If someone else promised something, not based on rigorous scientific trials, it would be tempting to take it, or at least consider it. I can see why someone would consider things when desperate, or sees the side effects of some conventional treatments. And it stands to reason that there exist treatments unproven which work, otherwise medical research would have stopped long ago.

It's not a bad thing to point out the failures of modern medicine or to choose to put your health in the hands of naturopaths. It is, indeed, effectively how the human race got along until modern medicine.

The problem is in forcing your choices on others.

Forcing here is entirely via verbal induction of cognitive dissonance.

Then it's not really forcing. Cognitive dissonance != coercion.

I agree, but my problem is the word, not the idea. The word is loaded, like 'mystical', or other words. I'll still use those words when speaking to the right audience, because I know they won't misinterpret me. That's why I can safely say "That live music show last night was a religious experience", for example.

The point is, we're not rational beings, at least not exclusively. We're emotional beings, and even if, ultimately, emotions are accounted for by physical factors, there needs to be a way to reconcile our rational side (which includes science) with our emotional one. This include realizing that unbiased, fully-rational science is just impossible. Our biases, as part of our phenotype, are there because whatever caused them to emerge either helped enough ancestors survive, or at least did not get them killed before reproducing, so they're always going to be there.

I'm sorry I'm ranting and again, I get what you're saying. I've been through enough experiences of accepting "spiritual" and other words in conversations with people I don't know well, where the other party shortly starts talking about alien abductions and astral traveling, that I know what you mean. But I've also been through enough conversations with people who think science is infallible and will eventually find a solution to everything and an answer to every question.