The Quackometer

Labels: energy healing, nutritionist

 

Following on from my last post about whether the people that run quack web sites are deeply deluded or just plain old frauds, I had to share this gem with you. For all aficionados of quackery, this is truly a collectors item to be savoured. Thanks to whoever entered the healingbroom.com web site into the quackometer. It is a treat and scores a perfect 10 canards.

The healing broom looks like a metallic cat o' nine tails with which to whip yourself. Apparently, you should not use it if you bleed easily. However, the claim is that this 21st century self-flagellation device will stimulate qi, your meridians and cause your cells to vibrate. It breaks up toxic accumulations and will stimulate your bone marrow, depending on how hard you flail yourself, no doubt. If you survive this self-imposed scourging, the healing whip also comes with a separate sharp metal stick thing that you poke yourself with. The stick is magnetic, thankfully, and so the magno-acupressure produced will dull the pain from your whipping, I guess.

What can healing broom treatment do for you? Well, it can 'return your cells to their normal position'. So, if you notice huge groups of cells in places they should not be, say, several feet to the left, then whip them back into position with the broom. Oh, and slapping is good exercise too.

Naturally, no evidence is given for any of these claims - bar the usual testimonials. The site looks like they have swallowed the woo dictionary. It appears to cover the whole gamut of quack words - hence the high Canard score.

Fortunately, safety is obviously at the top of the company's concerns. Apparently, you must not use the flail on your body between 11am and 1pm, or on a full stomach, although a reason is not given for this advice. More sensibly, you should not share your implements with someone else. I guess there is large chance of transmission of bodily fluids which could be a source of blood-borne disease. Light coloured clothing should be avoided. I guess blood stains easily.

There is a small bit of me that delights in the fact that people who fall for this scam will administer their own punishment, albeit a sort of punishment that was last seen during the height of British naval power and the Napoleonic wars. As for the sellers? Flogging is too good for them.

Hey, healingbroom.com! Do you believe any of this horse shit?

Labels: energy healing, magnets

 

Or 'How to be debunked by a nine year old schoolgirl'

In the special world of the quack, the crank and the pseudo-scientist the word 'Energy' holds the highest place in the league tables of misappropriated and abused language.

I often get complaints that the quackometer only spots quacks and lets cranks off the hook. That is deliberate on my part - one thing at a time. The crank is easy to tell from the quack: the crank seeks 'free' energy, the quack seeks 'healing' energy. The crank seeks an endless supply of useful energy from spinning rotors and magnets; the quack seeks an infinite source of healing energy from spinning arms and language.

Both cranks and quacks like to talk about 'energy' all the time. Energy has an everyday meaning that we can relate to (our 'energy' to do things) and a rock solid physics definition (the capacity to do work). Maybe that is why energy is such a useful pseudo-scientific concept as we have an intuitive grasp of what it means, but little idea of the scientific details. The crank/quack fills in the gaps for us with their own pseudoscience.

At least the crank has some capacity to understand what energy is - the capacity to do work - even if they have limited understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. The quack however, uses the word energy, just like any other word borrowed from the sciences, with little regard to establishing a definition or consistent meaning. Indeed, vagueness and slipperiness are essential in the quacks cause.

Quack Energy has many different forms, or manifestations, depending on the particular field of woo being considered, Quack Energy has explanatory roles in Reiki, QiGong, Touch Therapy, Biofield Therapy, Acupuncture, Homeopathy and just about any other 'discipline' where science suggests the technique ought to be nonsense. Quack Energy is used to corrupt and subvert logic. It is claimed that because science cannot explain the healing capacity of reiki/acupuncture/qigong then it must be due to a new universal life-force energy. It does not occur to the practitioner that there might not be anything to explain.

The names for Quack Energy are legion: Mana, Energy, Qi, Aura, Chi, Ki and so. In debating with woos, I like to lump them altogether as MEQUACK.

Although, MEQUACK has different origins within the different fake medicines, there are some common properties:

• The Energy is 'Subtle'. Indeed, it is often called 'Subtle Energy'. MEQUACK has to be subtle as no-one has proposed a way of measuring it or even detecting it. So subtle indeed, that it escapes all the very sensitive scientific instruments we have at our disposal.
• MEQUACK is a 'life force', or 'biofield'. Despite is being subtle, it somehow has a very important relationship to our health. Despite no instrument being able to detect it, somehow our bodies can.
• MEQUACK flows around our body in someway and can get blocked, or disrupted, causing illness. Sometimes the energy uses some sort of MEQUACK channel in the body, like a meridian, or is centred in special places in the body, like a Chakra. You've guessed it, none of these flows or centres have ever been found, detected or observed.
• MEQUACK can get disrupted by our modern lifestyles and surroundings. The electrical and magnetic fields in our homes, somehow can also interact with our biofield MEQUACK, even when our sensitive electrical and magnetic scientific instruments cannot.

What is so galling to anyone with a scientific background is that energy, as a concept, is so well understood. Energy comes in many forms: chemical, kinetic, nuclear, thermal, potential and so on. All are convertible from one form to another. Light a firework rocket and chemical energy is quickly converted to sound energy, thermal, electromagnetic (light) and kinetic energy as the fuel burns and the rocket launches upwards. Kinetic energy, under gravity, is then transformed into potential energy and back again as it descends to earth. At the end, all that chemical energy has been converted to thermal energy. No energy was lost or created - always conserved - and all in ways that are thoroughly understood by science with lots of maths to work out what will happen. We are expected to believe that in all the years of experimentation, a form of energy exists, that is vital to our bodies, that has never shown up in our accounting for what happens.

MEQUACK has no conservation laws, no conversion mechanisms, no mathematics, no means of detection, no capacity for harnessing in an engine and doing work - its properties tend to get very vague when examined. Still, somehow, it is vital for life and health. Despite the so-called ancient origins of the knowledge of MEQUACK, no physics or biology textbook denotes a sentence to it, let alone a chapter.

So, why do quacks keep on about it? Talk of MEQUACK is often given in attempt to justify otherwise ridiculous claims. A quick example: The QLink pendant. We have seen this bauble in previous posts. The floggers of this tat invoke 'resonating subtle energies' as an explanation of how it works.

In this ridiculous page, Dr. William Tiller explains how:

Scientists have long puzzled over force field phenomena that do not fit the four known forces: electromagnetic, gravity, weak and strong forces. These force field that do not fall into the classical four are sometimes labeled "subtle energies." They are called "subtle" because they cannot be observed or measured by any known instrumentation.

It's difficult to know where to begin, but the first question would be: "What field phenomena?" Science has done an amazing job of distilling all known phenomena into four forces! Secondly I would ask: "If they cannot be observed by any instrumentation, how do you know they exist?"

This is typical of the garbled quack nonsense speak. Dr Teller goes on to explain that:

Electromagnetic fields are composed of two basic types of energy wave packets:
electrons and photons.

The high school physicists amongst you will be able to spot the simple error in this statement. This is not even wrong, it is just nonsense.

If this example is typical, then we can see that talk of MEQUACK is not meant to explain anything - it is designed to deflect enquiry and bamboozle. It deflects enquiry by quickly getting into technical jargon that most people will not, or cannot, explore further. For those, with a slightly less credulous bent, it deflects enquiry by essentially postulating that all attempts to detect or measure MEQUACK are futile as it is too 'subtle' to be detected by clumsy, reductionist, non-holistic, closed-minded, arrogant scientists and their instruments. Invoking MEQUACK is an act of fraud and deception. My guess is though, that many of the practitioners and exponents of the many forms of MEQUACK have first utterly deceived themselves.

So, to summarise so far:

• MEQUACK is a supposed life force energy;
• it has never been detected;
• it has no theory to explain it;
• MEQUACK has conflicting explanations across quack disciplines;
• is supposedly under attack from modern lifestyles to give rise to illnesses that are not recognised, or have very poor evidence bases, such EMF-stress
• MEQUACK can be manipulated by 'healers' by shamanically waving their arms above you (reiki), sticking pins in you (acupuncture, voodoo), wearing the right colours (chakras), giving you 'energetically charged' pills (homeopathy), or wearing a christmas cracker trinket (the QLink).

With so little going for it, it is amazing that so many people believe so passionately in it. Maybe it is because there are consistent reports of people feeling warmth and tingling when undergoing some sort of MEQUACK non-touch 'healing' ritual, such as QiGong, Reiki or (the modern favourite) Bi-Aura. That is pretty powerful evidence! Being able to detect the warmth and tingling in your nerves! Wow!

So, if you can really feel MEQUACK, then maybe science ought to sit up and take notice. Indeed, such a simple demonstration ought to be easy and it would convince me straight away. Show me you can feel this 'energy' and the world will listen. It ought to be so easy, in fact, that a nine year old could do it.

In fact, a nine year old has done it.

The youngest person ever to publish a scientific, peer-reviewed paper in a prestigious medical journal was Emily Rosa. Emily wanted to test if energy therapists could really sense MEQUACK. Twenty-one therapists agreed to takes part; how could they refuse a sweet little nine year old doing a school project?

In the test, the therapist would put both their hands through a screen. Unseen, Emily would place one of her own hands over one the practitioners hands and the 'therapist' was asked to say which hand it was. All therapists claimed that they could perform this test - the results though showed that their guesses were no better than chance (they got 123 out of 280 trials right). Emily's parents helped her with the stats and the experiment was publised in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The editors described the study as 'solid gold'.

Her conclusoins were;

Twenty-one experienced TT [Theraputic Touch] practitioners were unable to detect the investigator's "energy field." Their failure to substantiate TT's most fundamental claim is unrefuted evidence that the claims of TT are groundless and that further professional use is unjustified.

Naturally, many 'energy therapists' have cried fowl. A full list of rebuttals can be found on the quackwatch site. What is amazing is this study cost about $10 for the screen. Any 'therapist' could do this test themselves as long as they were intellectually honest enough to properly blind themselves and remove obvious sources of bias. I think this shows how little the advocates of strange bio-energy are interested in the truth. Only their comforting delusions are important, and in some case, their fraudulent money-making practices.

So what is going on with the therapists? Why do they really believe they can feel MEQUACK. Well, self-deception can be very powerful. Expectations can make you feel things that aren't really there. Now the little black duck is quite ticklish. Even the thought of being tickled can make me tingle. Maybe the MEQUACKists are feeling something similar: anticipation, expectation and wishful thinking? What is for sure, as Emily (aged 9) has shown, they do not feel a bio-energy.

Labels: energy healing, pseudoscience, qlink, Quack Words

 

"Once Dismissed as Hokum" is how Dr Danny Penman begins with a less-than-half-truth in his quacktasticly exceptional article about Spiritual Healing in the Daily Mail, "Could spiritual healing actually work?"

This article ought to serve as a case study in how to write about nonsense quackery for the madder end of the British Press. I thought it worthwhile to dissect this piece to show how you can write supportively about completely batshit ideas without telling too many porkies.

1. Ensure the Title has a question mark at the end. Give the impression of honest enquiry and an open mind - an appeal to be "Open Minded".

2. As a journalist, flaunt your qualifications, awards and titles. Danny Penman signs the article with his title, 'Dr'. Note that Dr Danny Penman got his PhD in Biochemisty studying fungus on cocoa crops, not a medical subject. This is a blatant appeal to authority as we have previously discussed.

3. Start off with some dodgy anecdotes. Personal experience is always convincing for some reason. Testimonials can make up for a complete lack of evidence if required. In this case, an anecdote about ME is particularly unconvincing. ME is a chronic disease that is cyclical in its nature and is subject to spontaneous remission. How do we know spiritual healing caused the improvement? Of course, we do not. This is commiting the 'Pragmatic Falacy' - it works for me!

4. Talk about how 'scientists' or 'experts' are being swayed by the evidence. No need to mention any names, and if you do, no need to mention that these a fringe characters not in the mainstream of the profession. Even better, count people with 'para-' or 'alternative' prefixes as if they were real academics. Note the inclusion of a 'parapsychologist' in this article as if this genuine discipline without controversy.

5. Give no references to research. No one will check them anyway. Talk about unpublished research as if it was of the same rigour as independently, peer-reviewed published papers.

6. Talk about discredited or retracted work as if it was still important. No one is going to check. The work about cardiac patients is old now and has been discredited and superseded by better studies that showed that prayer had no effect (or, if it did, prayer made things worse for patients.)

7. Do not mention any work that may contradict what you are trying to say. There is no need to be balanced for this type of story, nor is there any reason to weight evidence according to its merit. Remember, you are after a good story. You are not making an enquiry into the truth - the truth does not sell.

8 . Appeal to peoples' prejudices and beg the question. Remember, Mail readers want their prejudices confirmed - never challenged. That is why they read the paper to ensure their views on race, immigrants, lefties and Europe are always on the front page and routinely confirmed. For quackery, those prejudices include a distrust of any authority, academics, atheists, foreigners and the (nannying) government.

9. Make sure you have a good comments section. Your good readers will supply the bits even you are embarrassed to write and they can get away with spectacular nonsense that even you might wince at.

Dr Penman sticks well to all of these rules. I emailed him to ask if he really believes what he has written. I did not get an answer to this, but he kindly sent me papers and articles that backed up his story, but surprisingly, also articles that shot holes in it. Why no mention of them in the article? Seriously, if this story had any merit, it would be the most groundbreaking medical story in a millennium.

I will leave the final word to the brave persons who left comments for this story on the Mail web site. Perhaps these comments slipped passed the usually diligent Mail moderators by being slyly flattering in their opening words...

The most wondrous thing about these miracle cures is the ease with which patients can become practitioners. Imagine a patient whose life is saved by, say, neurosurgery becoming a neurosurgeon herself. Of course, that probably doesn't happen too often, what with all those years of study and self-denial. But in the amazing world of "alternative" medicine, all one needs to become a "master" is willingness, an open mind, and faith. Oh, also mind-boggling credulity, the ability to wave one's hands around a "patient" with an appearance of purpose, and a modest sum of cash.

- Mick Houlahan, Chicago, USA

Yes, what a wonderful article, and beautifully referenced with comments from many doctors who are completely unbiased and who have absolutely no preconceptions about spirituality and complementary medicine. Of course nature will cure us all, as it has done for centuries, particularly when spiritualism and Christianity were at their height (you know, when life expectancy was 35 and 3 in 5 kids died before their 5th birthday).

- Deetee, Blackpool, UK

It's incredible the power of our own mind, apart from that it's poppycock.

- Steve Webster, Amsterdam, Netherlands (exiled)

PS Danny - seriously, if you read this - hope the broken bones are OK and I'm glad you didn't resort to healing them spiritually!

Labels: daily mail, energy healing

 

I thought my post on Reiki Healing for Hedgehogs was going to be a one-off. But a recent trip to the garden centre has opened up a whole new compost heap of prickles. Now, I live in hedgehog country. I have a hedgehog hospital within feather spitting distance of my pond, and I see them around me all the time. I am fond of them. My prickly, vespertine friends come out to see me on Summer evenings while I am enjoying a bottle of wine in the garden until it gets too dark to see.

So, I open a book called 'The Natural Hedgehog' by by Lenni Sykes and Jane Durrant with a forward by Virginia McKenna (Born Free remake? Elsa the Hedgehog?). Lenni and Jane appear to run the Welsh Hedgehog Hospital and so should know a great deal about looking after Mrs Tiggywinkle. Anyway, nice pictures but, shockingly, the book is full of hedgehog quackery - mostly homeopathy this time - on how to treat injured hedgehogs with sugar pills and shaken water, with suitable warnings about taking care not to touch the tablets.

I'm quite shocked by this. Now quackery might just about be justifiable on humans on the account that the placebo effect might give some relief (although I would argue against taking this position). But an animal cannot experience the placebo and will gain no benefit whatsoever from homeopathy, reiki, or ear candling for that matter. The only person who will gain is the carer, thinking they are doing good for the prickly little fellow. Placebo Effects work on humans. It's a cultural thing. Hedgehogs do not cotton on to the significance of the psycho-suggestive shamanistic healing rituals involved in homeopathy. They would just prefer to curl up into a pin cushion. Many go on about homeopathy tests on animals proving the case for homeopathy think they do not need to have randomised blind controls, since animals cannot have a placebo effect. But this dodges the fact that it is their carers and owners are reporting the animals' health improvements - the placebo works on the carers. Blinded trials on animal medicines are still absolutely necessary. For more details on homeopathy, placebos and animals see the excellent British Veterinary Voodoo Society.

Doing a bit of web research uncovers shocking new levels of hedgehog quackery. Most comprehensively dealt with here. (6 canards)

Everything from colour therapy, purple plates (the mind boggles), aromatherapy, crystal healing, bach flower remedies, reiki and massage therapy (Ouch!!!).

Now being an awkward bastard, my initial thinking about colour therapy is to question if hedgehogs even experience colour? Nocturnal mammals, on the whole, tend to have poor colour vision. The cones in the retina for colour vision require adequate light to function and so animals rely on their rod cells for night vision and see in black and white - juts like humans. From a google search, it would appear that most placental, nocturnal, mammals (like hedgehogs, bats and moles) lack cones altogether - they have no colour vision. An insectivorous nocturnal mammal is going to be heavily dependent on other senses such as smell and touch, so colour therapy and purple plates (can hardly type that without laughing) are out, but aromatherapy might just be in. Although I doubt your aromatherapist is going to have the hedgehog re-assuring essence of rotting leaves, earthworms and cat shit in their kit bag.

I find this quackery an appalling derogation of responsibility to these animals. The people who take injured hedgehogs to animal hospices expect the resultant duty of care to be upheld. Thinking that you can relieve pain and suffering by putting your poorly hedgehog on a purple plate is animal cruelty. The woolly thinking that leads to giving hedgehogs aromatherapy, colour therapy and homeopathy is an abuse of the responsibility to care for these creatures. The same people who do this would report kids to the RSPCA for kicking a curled-up hedgehog across the street. Maybe the RSPCA should take interest in this too?

The hedgehogs in our care deserve evidence-based medicine too. Like hedgehogs, I'm going to do some shnuffling around to see how widespread this nonsense is.

Labels: energy healing

 

Quackery is often accompanied with grand associations with complex science, the harder the better. Usually, quantum theory is the science of choice: it has plenty of counter-intuitive results, is riddled with deep mysteries, and most importantly, you (the quack's target) are very unlike to understand it. The recipe is simple. My quack theory is mysterious; quantum theory is mysterious, therefore quantum theory helps back up my own theory.

In addition, the quack explanation can expect to be long and superficially plausible, backed up with many obscure references and valid science. Checking this lot is often tedious and time consuming, and can be very hard if you are not familiar with the underlying science anyway. Giving up straight away is usually a mistake as the first dib into examining the explanation usually reveals a castle in the air.

We saw abuse of quantum theory in my last blog entry, where life after death was being 'proved' by recourse to 'complex' quantum ideas. Anyone who has really studied physics will know that links between the microscopic world of quantum theory and big chunks of matter (like people) are riddled with difficulties, but fortunately for the quack those people are few and far between.

Occasionally, more obscure areas of science are recruited to explain a piece of quackery. I was recently debating the merits of Reiki (healing by the 'energy' in hands) and had a 'proof' thrust upon me. I was told that Toni Bunnell was a lecturer in physiology at Hull University and had written a paper on A Tentative Mechanism for Healing. (10 Canards)It was difficult to know where to start with this tentative mechanism, but one area caught my attention. Here are a few important bits...

Studies have also shown that during healing the healer's alpha brainwaves synchronise with those of the healee, so both will be resonating at the same frequency (sympathetic resonance). In other words, channeling energy through the healer and to the healee involves both being in the a state.

...

Alpha is also the home of the window frequency known as the Schuman Resonance, which is the vibrational frequency of the earth's electromagnetic field (emf). This means that the brain waves of a person in the alpha state will resonate in sympathy with the earth's emf producing constructive interference which amplifies the vibration. This might explain how healers (having tuned into the healee) are able to draw on energy (universal energy source?) from outside themselves i.e. channel energy through them to the healee.

What was this Schuman Resonance? Could there be anything in this? I had never heard of this resonance before. So a quick google returns some startling results - thousands of quackery pages all going on about amazing things like the Earth loosing its magnetic field as predicted by prophesy. However, despite the mumbo-jumbo, the resonace is real and describes the way the Earth's atmosphere between the ground and the ionosphere acts like a huge cavity where standing radio waves can be set up. The frequency of the resonances depend on the height of the ionosphere on any particular day.

So what has the Schumann Resonance got to do with Reiki? Well nothing as far as I can see. Bunnell's mechanism only works if the radio-wave resonances really area 'universal energy source' that has real healing affects on the human body, and any suggested evidence or theoretical reason for this to be true is completely absent. The reader, as far as I can see, is just supposed to be impressed with all the talk of alpha waves and resonances and 'tuning in' and not to appreciate that all this is just random scientific words strung together meaning nothing.

The whole article is full of such stuff and could keep a blog going for weeks. One of my other favourite passages was,

As the body is thought not to consist of dense matter but rather vortices of energy spinning continuously, the boundary between the physical body and the etheric body becomes less distinct.

Spinning energy vortices? They ought to be easy to detect! And how does this 'fact' make my 'etheric' and 'physical' body boundaries less distinct? No idea what that means.

I also have no idea whether Dr Toni Bunnell PhD knows this is nonsense or is sincerely trying to explain something she is interested in. No responses to my email.

I hope Dr Toni uses slightly more conventional techniques than Schumann enhanced reiki on her main passion - the healing and rehabilitation of injured and sick wild hedgehogs. I wish reiki really could be used here - a hands-off approach to healing hedgehogs is surely going to reduce injuries from those nasty prickles.

Time to shnuffle off.

Labels: energy healing, pseudoscience, quantum quackery