Shenanigans on Desiree Jennings!

Desiree Jennings was a young woman with some peculiar symptoms: after getting a seasonal flu shot, she was diagnosed with dystonia. Her speech was slurred, she couldn’t walk without going into painful-looking spams…except that she was fine when she walked backwards or ran. It was very odd, and the blame was being placed on vaccinations.

Now, though, she’s been caught by a camera crew, walking normally, driving, and just generally looking perfectly fine. Her only remaining symptom seems to be that she is afflicted* with an Australian accent. She claims to have been treated by some quack with needles and electrodes and vitamin supplements.

I call shenanigans.

I am going to stop taking vitamins for a while, though, just in case they might make me talk funny, mate.

*I’m going to be pilloried in the comments for that choice of word, aren’t I?

Criticism deferred, but building. And no, my name is not Fermat.

Oh, no. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have written a book and opinion piece in which they try to claim that natural selection is a dying concept, and what do they use to justify that outrageous claim? Evo devo! That’s just nuts, and Mary Midgely compounds the crazy with terrible abuse of developmental biology — she seems to want to turn back the clock to the time of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and throw out Jacob and Monod. I really get pissed off when I see people misusing the specialized ideas of evo devo as a replacement for, rather than an addition to, the framework of modern evolutionary theory.

I will be slashing up their nonsense at greater length, but I’m reading this in a hotel room when I should be finishing up my packing and getting my butt to the airport, and furthermore, the weather looks awful at my destination and I fear my transatlantic flight will be even longer and more uncertain than usual. For now, you’ll have to read Jerry Coyne’s brief stab at them and throw your own arguments down in the comments. I will return to this subject when I’m back in frigid blizzardy Minnesota.

UM’s open shame, the Center for Spirituality & Healing

I’m quite proud, under most circumstances, to be affiliated with the University of Minnesota: it’s an excellent university (and the Morris campus is the best within the system, although some of the other campuses argue about that), we’ve got great students, and we are a secular public institution dedicated to giving an affordable education to anyone. However, there is also one thing about the University of Minnesota which causes me great shame, and which I consider a betrayal of reason and evidence.

I am speaking, of course, of the Center for Spirituality & Healing. Center for Bullshit & Quackery is more like it. It’s the cesspit of the university, where all the pseudoscientific fuzzy-headed crap that fails is excreted, polished, gilded, and held on high as a beacon of New Age light to lead the gullible into a sewer of feel-good futility. If I were president of the university (only possible if genies are real), my first act would be to shut down the whole institution and send the dishonest rascals running the show back to their profitable nostrum-peddling, crystal-gazing, finger-waving tea rooms and sideshow tents.

What prompts my crankiness this time is that the CSH is offering a workshop, Homeopathy Acute Care Workshop.

Homeopathy? At my university? In the health sciences building? The stones of that building should writhe in revulsion and vomit forth the participants.

Stones can’t rebel, but the faculty and staff can. One scientist here wrote a short note in response to the organizer of this shameful nonsense.

Homeopathy is a completely bogus therapy. I am astounded that you are presenting this misinformation here at the university.
This is a disgrace, and an insult to the real work being done at the U of M.

And he got a reply!

Dear Michael,
I have taken a few days to sit with your hostile and critical email, as I wanted to give it a fair evaluation time.
I was quite stunned by the vehemence of your note, and must question exactly how much you know about Homeopathy, and where you learned that.

It is my role as faculty advisor for the IHEAL to support the student’s interests, and help them in finding resources and information. As a CHIP committee, IHEAL is a student group for sharing interdisciplinary interests in integrative healthcare–that includes exploring other systems of medicine and other approaches to healing from those they are exposed to in conventional medical education. We encourage all of our students to be explorers. They should investigate unknown areas with curiosity as well as academic rigor. I am proud and impressed by the initiative this year’s IHEAL group in seeking out and organizing the educational opportunities they desired–including Homeopathy. The faculty they have brought in to present on this topic are both top notch practitioners and teachers–bios attached.

I do not know what the basis is of your rigid judgment, but would like to offer the opportunity for there to be increased understanding and awareness, if you are interested. I will not, in this venue, go into trying to explain or justify the practice of homeopathy, but I have attached two documents summarizing some significant research publications that may be useful to you (the brief list, and the complete one.) I also would refer you to the free, on-line book by Dr. Jacob Mirman, MD (graduate of UMN medical school) http://bookonhealing.com/component/content/article/46/137.html
I would also recommend “Homeopathy: Beyond Flat Earth Medicine” an introduction to homeopathy, a primer for both patients and students.

Many physicians and scientists reject Homeopathy without any knowledge, because they say there is no plausible mechanism that can explain HOW it works, regardless of experiences and studies that have shown its impacts. Remember that we don’t know how the majority of biomedical interventions, including drugs, work. Additionally, at one time we didn’t know about germs and didn’t believe that hand-washing had a mechanism of action that could explain how it impacted stopping the spread of disease–so it was fought against for decades. True, science has not yet created the technology to explore homeopathy in a way that can be understood. That doesn’t mean we stop asking the questions.

This may be a long-winded answer to your comment/accusation, but I hope that you find it enlightening.

Yours in academic rigor,
Karen Lawson
Faculty Advisor, IHEAL

She’s wrong in many things. One is that we reject homeopathy without any knowledge; we certainly do have knowledge of homeopathy and its principles, and that’s the reason it is rejected! There is no mechanism for highly diluted substances to work as they claim, and the principle of treating like with like is simply medieval sympathetic magic. It doesn’t work.

There are no significant studies that show any real effect, either. If there were a consistent pattern of homeopathic remedies doing anything, then we’d be interested; instead, we’ve got lots of studies that show no statistical difference between homeopathic solutions and water. At best, the proponents can cherry-pick all the studies done for ones that are either methodologically weak or that show a chance variation in their favor.

Which always raises a question in my mind: if homeopathy is so difficult to assess using those reductionist techniques of modern science and medicine, how the hell do homeopaths know they work? That’s one of the fundamental principles of science, that you can’t just get by on assertions — you have to be able to explain how you know something, and homeopaths can’t. They just pluck some magical association out of their butt and prescribe it…and then after the fact, they claim that it works for their patients. But if it actually works for their patients, then it would be amenable to clinical trials.

They can’t claim that it works, and simultaneously that it doesn’t work when examined rigorously.

Even when they’re trying to argue that there is evidence for homeopathy, they always seem to begin with a lot of waffling about how science can’t really examine their discipline.

Homeopathy is not a modality or therapy, but an entire system of medicine, with its own paradigm of understanding health and illness. That paradigm directs the process of evaluation and treatment. Therefore, in order to accurately assess the effectiveness of the intervention, researchers need to design studies that are congruent with the way homeopathy is practiced clinically.

This means that the gold-standard, biomedical research model for drug interventions (one disease or symptom, one drug, double-blind, placebo-controlled, prospective trial) is not an ideal research process for homeopathy.

That kind of noise just enrages me. I want to grab that person by the collar and demand, “Well, then, asshole, how do you know your magic pills work?”

I know. They use wishful thinking, instead. In a description of a weak study that showed a small improvement of homeopathic remedies over placebos, they get to write “Homeopaths felt clinically had they been able to prescribe the individually matched remedy to each case, the recovery rate expected would have been as high as 90%”. Well, sure, and if they’d been following my magic procedure of hopping up and down on one foot while taking their pills, I believe the recovery rate would have been 105%, therefore proving the effectiveness of monopedosaltopathy.

The screwball giving the workshop in homeopathy, Jacob Mirman, offers his own case for homeopathy. Again, it opens with superstitious bullshit.

Placebocide!

Oh, no. I’m flying off to the UK tomorrow, and I’ve just learned that all my favoritest, bestest people there are going to kill themselves just 8 hours from now (uh, remember, correlation is not causation…I’m sorta sure it’s not because I’m coming to visit.) What they’re all going to do is go down to their local pharmacy and overdose on those ever-so-potent homeopathic “remedies” they’re selling.

I may be tripping over heaps of corpses on the sidewalks there.

I wonder if there are homeopathic cures for jetlag? Can I pick up 1023 pills to get a molecule or two of something useful?

More laughs from the Shorty Awards

Who would have thought something so trivial would generate so much amusement? I told you all to vote on Twitter for DrRachie, because there was a bunch of quacks in the lead. The kook formerly in the #1 position, the “Health Ranger”, has flamed out hysterically. Now the #2 quack, some guy named Mercola, is showing similar signs of cracking.

Dr. Mercola explained the situation himself in a Facebook post, “An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.”

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be able to report back that Mercola is now rocking back and forth in a corner, shouting “She’s a fatty fat fat fattie!”. At least he’s following the same trend of blatantly lying about the position of real skeptics and physicians.

Sometimes, I think we break the crazy people

I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie ‘medicine’. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.

Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.

He is outraged at being bumped out of the running — not only did he get outvoted, but many of the votes for him were declared invalid, since many people just got a twitter account and posted one item, his nomination. He’s lashing out with accusations of conspiracy and fraud and cheating and is planning to sue the contest. He has totally lost it over this trivial affair.

Look, guy, it’s an internet award. For tweeting. Take the big picture and recognize that as far as significance goes, it’s like finding an especially large and fluffy bit of belly button lint.

Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent.

I do have to point out a wonderful example of irony that is going into my collection. He accuses everyone who voted for DrRachie of fraud, and claims that we’ve been making false accusations of quackery against him.

It wasn’t really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries. Their supporters apparently reflect that same lack of ethical behavior. They will apparently do anything to win, even if it means engaging in widespread false accusations and trying to get natural health people removed from the contest altogether.

That’s the background. Now brace yourself: he later posted an article describing what skeptics, that is, you and me, actually believe. He did this by ‘researching’ skeptical web sites, none of which he links to, and none of which he actually provides accurate quotes from, but instead, he invents a list of his interpretations of what they say.

  • Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and “good for your health.”

  • Skeptics believe that fluoride chemicals derived from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants are really good for human health. They’re so good, in fact, that they should be dumped into the water supply so that everyone is forced to drink those chemicals, regardless of their current level of exposure to fluoride from other sources.

  • Skeptics believe that many six-month-old infants need antidepressant drugs. In fact, they believe that people of all ages can be safely given an unlimited number of drugs all at the same time: Antidepressants, cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping drugs and more — simultaneously!

  • Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

  • Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They are opponents of natural childbirth.)

  • Skeptics do not believe in hypnosis. This is especially hilarious since they are all prime examples of people who are easily hypnotized by mainstream influences.

  • Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness. They do not believe in the mind; only in the physical brain. In fact, skeptics believe that they themselves are mindless automatons who have no free will, no soul and no consciousness whatsoever.

  • Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

  • Skeptics believe that pesticides on the crops are safe, genetically modified foods are safe, and that any chemical food additive approved by the FDA is also safe. There is no advantage to buying organic food, they claim.

  • Skeptics believe that water has no role in human health other than basic hydration. Water is inert, they say, and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).

  • Skeptics believe that all the phytochemicals and nutrients found in ALL plants are inert, having absolutely no benefit whatsoever for human health. (The ignorance of this intellectual position is breathtaking…)

The only thing breathtaking in that list is the dishonesty. I don’t believe any of that, except that I will admit that I do hold the hilarious position that dead food does have the same nutritional properties of living food — if nothing else, everything I eat is very quickly dead after I’ve ground it to bits between my teeth and dropped it into the acid bath of my stomach. I don’t believe that I extract nutritional value from carrot souls, after all. The rest, though, is looney tunes. Water is inert? A fantastic solvent with complex physicochemical properties is inert? Wow. And at the same time, we think pesticides have no effect on us? I should mention that one of the things I study is teratology and the effect of environmental contaminants on developing embryos…I’m not sure how I rationalized that work if I think common chemicals do nothing.

Mike Adams is certifiably nuts, and worse, he is “lying and cheating,” “engaging in widespread false accusations,” and lacks “ethical behavior.”. At least he doesn’t have to worry that I’ll sue him for being a dingbat.

Just stay home, scientologists

Poor Haiti. First the earthquake, and now the cult vultures are descending on them. It’s not just talking bibles: now the scientologists are coming.

Seriously, people. When a region suffers a disaster and the infrastructure is falling down in ruins and people need real help now, when the pipeline is limited and access is difficult, send in the experts (doctors and engineers, for instance) and immediately useful aid (medicine, food, drinking water), and all the peddlers of frivolous non-essentials should just stay out of the way. A box of e-meters is taking up space better spent on a box of antibiotics; a scientology auditor is displacing a doctor.

Hairy horde marches on

I just stagger back from yet another long day of travel, and what do I discover? You’ve filled up the las entry in the endless thread again. Does the horde never sleep?

Anyway, we will launch this one with a mystery. Watch this video of an Oregon bigfoot:

Now the mystery. Why is it that all sightings of bigfoot are such obvious scams? They are typically badly done messes like a poor and shaky camera recording, or a pile of rotting meat in a fur suit. This one suffers from overly slick choreography — isn’t it nice how the camera zooms into focus only briefly, just as Bigfoot turns to look at the cameraman? At least this guy invested in a nice hairy man suit and put some effort into the makeup, but it’s still a guy in a costume.

And wait — the creator’s name is “John E. Walker”? Yeah, right.

As if you need anything to talk about, at least you can start by ripping into this video. I have no idea where you’ll end up from there, of course.

Goofy gadget, falsified by SCIENCE!

RCA (which is not the old and reputable company I remember, but has gone out of business and its name sold to anyone with the right amount of cash) recently announced a device called the Airnergy harvester, which supposedly simply soaks up the RF energy emitted by WiFi devices in the neighborhood and uses it to charge portable batteries. Wow, what an idea…but a moment’s thought makes it clear it can’t work. My local wireless router simply can’t be pumping out that much energy, or it would an awesomely wasteful device, and there can’t be that much power floating free in every few cubic inches of my home. Fortunately, one of the commenters at that site did the math and made it explicit. Don’t you just love math? It’s so powerful and so handy.

Here’s some math. Long story short, by my calculations, 100% efficiency and absorption at 5 feet away from a 100mW home router, (reasonable figures), it would take 34.5 years to charge that blackberry battery.

It’s not a Dyson Sphere, so you only get the power that hits the antenna.
Surface of a sphere = 4pir^2, r = 60″ (5 feet).
Surface area of a 5′ sphere = 45,216 square inches.

The device appears about 2″ x 3″ = 6 square inches.
The device then picks up, best case, 0.000133 of the power out from the router, which is 100mW, so.. 0.0133mW

If you leave it there for 24 hours, 0.0318 mWh are stored.
According to Will’s battery, it has ~4,000 mWh capacity.

So, it would take 12,579 days, or 34.5 years, to charge your blackberry battery once, presuming 100% absorption, no losses.

I call BS. Even adding up all the laptops, cell phones, routers, portable phones, everything, all the noise in the RF spectrum that could hit that device, I don’t see it charging the internal battery even in a week.

Ah, reality.

For a dose of unreality, though, read through the comments there. The earliest are all fast explanations of the lack of plausibility of the device, and then what happens? It alternates between clueless dopes saying, “Awesome! I want one of those!” and exasperated skeptics saying, “Read the comments up top, it can’t work!”

Cancer is a disease

Barbara Ehrenreich had breast cancer, and ugly and frightening as that disease is, she found something else that was almost as horrible: the ‘positive thinking’ approach to health care. People are stigmatized if they fail to regard their illness as anything other than an uplifting, positive life experience, an opportunity to examine their lives and identify what is most important to them…and also, most disturbingly, if they fail to appreciate that the attitude that they bring to the problem will determine whether they live or die. It’s the Oprah-zation of medicine.

In the most extreme characterisation, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance – it is a “gift”, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor writes in her book The Gift Of Cancer: A Call To Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.” And if that is not enough to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells, she insists, “Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”

Well, doesn’t that just make you all want to rush out and take a bath in some carcinogens? We healthy people are missing out on enlightenment!

We’re also missing out on an opportunity to be bilked. That’s what this is really all about: con artists who can’t really do anything to fight the cancer can at least tell you to smile, be cheerful, pray, buy my super-duper vitamin supplements, and pay the cashier my consulting fees on the way out … and if it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault. You’ve got a disease that’s ripping through your guts and causing pain, yet if you feel a moment’s doubt or worry, you’ve invalidated the charlatan’s prescription, and your relapse is all your fault.

This is where the feel-good phonies prosper. Look at how Deepak Chopra treats his ‘patients’.

Besides, it takes effort to maintain the upbeat demeanor expected by others – effort that can no longer be justified as a contribution to long-term survival. Consider the woman who wrote to Deepak Chopra that her breast cancer had spread to the bones and lungs: “Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise, and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.”

Chopra’s response: “As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover. You just have to continue doing them until the cancer is gone for good. I know it is discouraging to make great progress only to have it come back again, but sometimes cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.”

The poor woman has a metastisizing cancer that has spread to her bones and lungs, and Chopra is telling her that diet, prayer, and not thinking ‘toxic’ thoughts will lead to a cure! I don’t know how that quack has avoided arrest.

I much prefer the honesty of Ehrenreich (I also like the connotations of her name). This is the truth:

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift”, was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.