The Quackometer

In today's Daily Mail, Brendan Montague brings us the sensational story that Migraine suffers need not suffer much longer thanks to a wonder device about to be launched in the US and available for a paltry £1,000 (with a further £15 for each treatment).

Millions of migraine sufferers have been given hope of a cure with the invention of a magnetic pain "zapper"... The handheld device is placed at the back of the head and uses a gentle pulse to disrupt the "electrical storm" which is believed to lead to migraines.

Now the black duck's beak tingles like mad whenever the words 'magnetic' and 'cure' are found in the same sentence. Quackery is sure to follow.

Let's look a little more. How does the device work?

Gary Stroy, the president of California-based Neuralieve, said last night: "The device is about the size of a hairdryer and is held at the back of the head. "It releases electrical energy through a magnet, and this magnetic field then passes into the brain. This then interrupts the nerve signalingling process which would otherwise result in a migraine.

Well, I hope it only interrupts the nerve signals responsible for the migraine and not other ones for say, controlling my bladder, or worse, breathing.

But a reputable paper like the Mail reporting a plain old quack puff marketing story as truth? Surely not. So is this device quackery? What are the tell-tale signs of it being quackery? Well, you decide. Let's show you my thoughts...

First, lets go to Neuralieve web site (3 Canards) and see what they have to say and what we can find out:

1. It's a start up! Good luck to them. If clinical trials had given good results, the big businesses would be rolling in. Quacks are almost always found as sole traders (heroes) or as small companies.
2. They do not ever claim that the device cures migraine. Read that again. They do not claim the device works! Look at the language used:
   - 'The company 'is pursuing a completely novel approach' - it doesn't have a novel approach.
   - 'The company believes that TMS has the potential' - it doesn't have any evidence.
   - 'Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) has the potential to meet this need' - yes, if it works.
   - 'perhaps reduce the frequency of migraine attacks.' - well only perhaps.
   - 'TMS has an established record of safety' - not of efficacy.
3. There is the rather brilliant distancing of the company from quacks: 'Although such magnets are popular in the alternative medicine community, there is no validated clinical evidence to support their effectiveness in any condition.' But it fails to point out that there is also no validated evidence for their own technique.
4. The clinical research menu link is broken. Is this because there isn't any?
5. The front page disclaimer: 'Caution: Investigational Use Only'. Translation: We don't know if this works too.
6. The various statements associated with the product that trials are 'in progress'. Well let's wait until they are written up in peer-reviewed journals.

Looking at the bigger picture, the use of magnets in healthcare falls into two categories: diagnostic (finding out what is wrong with you) and theraputic (trying to cure you.) Magnets in diagnostics have been enormously successful, most noticably with MRI scanners (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). However, there are no widely accepted uses of magnets in theraputic medicine. All such uses are either highly speculative and unproven, quackery or just plain health fraud. That is why 'magnet' plus 'health' in a sentence usually means quackery.

So unfortunatley, it does not look like we will see a miracle cure soon for this terrible condition. A great shame. Let's hope the trials prove me wrong. I'm not holding my breath.

What is shameful is how the Daily Mail can publish this as ground breaking science news with no critical comment and no suggestion that this is controversial. The copy is little more than an advertorial for this new company. No wonder science gets such a bad press with all these 'wonder cures' coming to nothing. The truth is that the Mail has published a story based on little more than marketing blurb for this small company with a non-existent product and no reason to believe it will ever work.

Why does the Daily Mail publish such stuff?

The journalist Brendan Montague has an MA in English Literature.

Labels: daily mail, pseudoscience

 

As you can see, I have signed up this blog to the Bloggers Against Torture campaign as part of the torture awareness month.

I will keep this short. To compare the act of torture to the banalities of quackery will do the victims a dishonour. However, I would venture that both the justification of torture and various quackeries are based on the same misguided logic:

What we wish to be true or feel ought to be true is not necessarily true.

Quackery plays on this common logical falacy by appealing to peoples' belief that there ought to be 'natural', spiritual, non-invasive, non-commercial, non-complicated healing processes that draw on 'ancient wisdom' or 'holistic' knowledge. Torture relies on the acceptance that their are quick wins to be made by inflicting pain on suspects. There is no evidence that either is true.

We may hope that the quick appliance of some carefully targeted 'discomfort', against the captured remnants of Taliban fighters, may yield the inner thoughts of those that wish to commit future atrocities. However, this is unlikely to be true. Torture on one hand is debasement of what it means to be human. On the other hand, is just plain bad evidence gathering.

It is appalling that countries such as the US, a supposed beacon of freedom and high moral values, has recently become associated with such barbaric acts. It would appear that the current American administration continuously commits acts of quack-like thinking.

• The desperate desire to pin the blame of 9/11 on Saddam.
• The insistence of Iraq having WMDs.
• The ease with which an Iraqi invasion would solve Iraqis' problems.
• A prisoner's suicide is an act of 'asymmetric warfare'.

All quack-like thinking. There we many voices saying that the evidence does not support any of this, but the desire to believe such things was and still is incredibly strong.

Close Guantanamo now. End flights of 'rendition'. We need to win a moral victory first before we can rid the world of fascist, authoritarian religious and political beliefs.

 

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