Abuse of astronomy

I had a phone call recently which made me quite angry - not at the caller, but at the people who abuse science, and take advantage of others' ignorance of science. The caller was a therapist, who told me that several patients had been calling lately, full of anxiety that the world was going to end in 2012 due to one astronomically-based reason or another.

Now, I've already discussed this subject (pt. 2, 3) at some length: there is no scientific reason to think that any particular catastrophe will happen in 2012. Yet people keep trying to attach "scientific explanations" to their predicted end-of-the-world scenarios. That seriously cheeses me off, because it's abusing the "good name" of science - acquired because the scientific method has worked so well to explain and predict the world around us - to scare people for no good reason. Worse, this sort of scare tactic will most affect people already vulnerable, those with anxiety or depression... sometimes with tragic results.

Follow up:

I was able to give some assurances and explanations to the therapist, who, I hope, will pass them along to the concerned patients. However, I remain rather upset about this incident. There have been television shows, on supposedly fact-based channels, spreading this nonsense, sometimes giving little if any time for an actual scientist to contradict the wild stories. There's a movie, apparently, planned on the subject, though at least that doesn't paint itself as a documentary. Add this to the Internet buzz and word of mouth rumors, and the story seems to have spread quite far, in a hundred different variations.

Even though there is no evidence for this idea that the world is doomed to end in 2012, or indeed that any major disaster is scheduled to happen then, the media blitz serves to frighten people. People have enough real concerns - the economy, their health, their families - to worry about; they don't need to be bombarded with pseudo-scientific doomsday predictions.