The “Complimentary and Alternative Medicine” or CAM movement is big business. It seems the “in-thing” to shun western medicine as being primarily driven by “big pharma”. Big pharma is a conspiracy which holds that there are cures for things like Cancer or Neuro-degenerative diseases like Parkinsons which are being withheld by the evil pharmaceutical companies in order to turn a profit.

So what’s Alternative Medicine? Alternative Medicine is medicine which does not fall under the FDA regulations for drug testing. The legal definition of a drug is “articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease”.  The FDA mandates that anything claiming to be a drug pass rigourous double-blind clinical trials and be proven to be effective, better than placebo whilst also causing no harm. As you can imagine it takes a LONG time and costs a LOT of money to go through this testing.

Enter CAM. CAM side-steps this troublesome process by simply putting statements on the bottle that say things like “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease”. Genius.

Now you’ve got all the ingredients of a good bit of foolery:

• a) The demand: People are sick, desperate and they need cures. Health-care is expensive.
• b) The opportunity: Just put some fine-print on the bottle and you’re good to go.
• c) The conspiracy: Propagate a rumour about the Evil Big Pharma.

A+B+C = The True Believer.  No one ever stops to ask if the stuff actually works and clinical trials seem like a silly nuisance.

You might be surprised to learn what kinds of things fall into the bucket of CAM, here’s a short list: accupuncture, anything chinese, anything holistic, Naturopathy,  Urine therapy, Magnetotherapy, Faith Healing, Fasting, Quigong, Calorie Restriction and on and on…

(ok, ok, I wasn’t surprised by “Urine Therapy”)

The Wiki4CAM states it with incredible irony/ignorance “Wiki4CAM has been started to provide the Complementary and Alternative Medicine community its own space, where it can build its knowledge base without any undue skeptical diversions. ”

Of course, no one needs skeptical diversions? Why bother ourselves “unduly” with the burden of efficacy? Unfortunately this does have a serious side and has often proven deadly.

• In 2007 a PA boy dies from Chelation Therapy whilst being treated for Autism LINK]
• 40 year old Jacqueline Henson and mother of 5 died after consuming too much water [LINK]
• Just 9 days ago 11 year old Madeline Neumann died from diabetes. Her parents refused to get her medical attention and instead tried to “pray” her diabetes away [LINK]. Disgusting.

As one doctor said, “do you know what they call Alternatative Medicine that works? …”Medicine!”

I suppose the lure of these treatments is that they are “Natural” and how could anything natural be bad for you? Well quite easily for example Deadly Nightshade is natural or Arsenic is naturally occuring, both will kill you quite naturally.

This is all part and parcel of the move towards Organic food because non-organic food has chemicals and chemicals are bad. This is pure nonsense but let’s dig in. The basic premise in this case is flawed: Chemicals are not bad. Might I remind you that you’re breathing chemicals right now! Yes, Oxygen is a chemical, Nitrogen is a chemical, both essential to life which is based in our case on…Carbon! Oh no, another chemical!

Somehow there’s a feeling that food grown without chemicals (pesticide or fertiliser) is better than food grown with chemicals. Not true. In fact a study was just published which states

“Organically grown food is no more nutritious than conventionally grown food when it comes to the amount of certain important nutrients”. [LINK]

Organic food is smaller due to less fertiliser being used, there are more losses from pests, takes more land to cultivate (the yield per square foot is less), tastes the same and costs MORE.  Penn and Teller claimed recently that if all the world grew organic food, there’d only be enough to feed 4 billion people. 3 billion would have to go hungry. Nice.

Finally there’s Genetic Modification. Folks don’t like genetic modification because it sounds creepy. Genetic Modification is a process whereby the genetic material of foods is modified to enhance it in specific ways. Examples are strawberries that can survive frost, potatoes that absorb less fat when fried or apples that can fight blight.

The jury’s still out on this one but if you think about it humans have been genetically modifying food through selective breeding and agriculture for thousands of years.  For example, some evidence suggests the modern day “domesticated” carrot started out life a thousand years ago in Afghanistan as a small purple-yellow root.  Most flowers are products of genetic modification, same thing with domestic cats and dogs.

Is GM food safe? I don’t know but let’s base decisions off the evidence.

P.S. The image this time is of Donald Duck, a long time proponent of Quackery.

James Randi has long offered the princely sum of $1,000,000 to anyone who can submit to clinical testing in a controlled environment (of their choosing) and demonstrate supernatural powers [LINK]. This has been called the “Million Dollar Challenge”. It’d be easy money if you had supernatural powers as these psychics claim. Sylvia Brown agreed to take the test over 10 years ago on the Larry King show but never followed through.

The truth is these folks cannot talk to the dead and do not possess psychic powers. What they are doing is knowingly fooling the public using a technique called “Cold Reading”.

Cold Reading involves a person (the Reader) making suggestions or statements, which at face value sound specific, but in reality are general statements which apply to almost anyone. The person being interviewed then takes these statements and applies them to their own lives, often without even realizing and the result is an experience in which the interviewee feels as though the Reader has either spoken to a dead relative of theirs or completely read their mind.

It’s called “cold” reading since the reader needs no prior knowledge of the subject. If they had prior knowledge that’d be “hot” reading.

Here’s an example:

• Reader: I see a male figure (guaranteed hit)
• Client: Yes
• Reader: An older male, with a strong temperament but a gentle demeanor, could be a uncle, father or grandfather (we all have at least one make figure who’s dead). The demeanor part sounds specific but it’s actually not. )
• Client: Yes, my Uncle passed away. He was very soft spoken.
• Reader: Yes a gentle man. He kept his strong side hidden.
• Reader: He’s upset. Something about “too soon”. He didn’t get to finish. (again, sounds specific, but if it’s an uncle then depending on the Client’s age this would be a high-probability hit).
• Reader: Was he sick for a while? (leading question)
• Client: No (What? a miss? Our psychic’s stumbling…)
• Reader: No, that’s right, because he’s saying it was quite sudden. (See what he did there? Turned a miss into a hit).
• Client: That’s true, he was taken suddenly.
• Reader: I see a huge pressure in his chest area. (this is a really useful statement which can mean anything from massive heart attack to lung cancer to getting hit with a stick in the chest to breaking a rib etc.)
• Client: No I don’t understand
• Reader: He says there’s something in the chest area, you have to help me here, something about a burning or smoke maybe?
• Client: I don’t understand, my uncle drowned. (the reader’s completely missed)
• Reader: Yes, that’s right, he says he felt pressure in his lungs from the water. (he’s turned it around)
• Client: (client is now sobbing) Wow! That’s amazing
• Reader: He says he’s ok now, things were very sudden but he wants me to acknowledge that he’s fine now.
• Client: Oh thank goodness.

That’s just a sample made up out of whole cloth but you can see how the Reader just made artful guesses whilst the Client did the work. The Reader made numerous guesses, all high probability hits and when things went well he built upon them.

The mind plays a role here. Most folks who’d seek a psychic’s help are already true believers. They WANT the thing to work. In fact this desire is so strong that a client will subconsciously fail to remember all the incorrect guesses that a cold reader makes and only recall the hits that actually were close. Our friend, Confirmation Bias again.

Anyone can be a psychic if you know the types of things to say: Lots of folks use “Barnum Statements” – Named after P.T. Barnum, they sound specific but apply to everyone:

• “I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.”
• “You have a box of old unsorted photographs in your house.”
• “You had an accident when you were a child involving water.”
• “You’re having problems with a friend or relative.”
• “Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen.”

Horoscopes work the same way. In “Cosmos” Carl Sagan famously read the horoscopes from different newspapers for the same sign for the same time period, all with different answers. When shown any horoscope, even ones which are not intended for that individual, the individual will find some nugget in there that makes sense.

As an aside: Astrology isn’t doesn’t seem to follow any rhyme nor reason anyway; Years ago the astrological signs were determined by the rotation of the heavens over the earth. At the time there were 12 astrological signs. Due to incremental changes in the earth’s rotation the number of constellations now is actually 13 but no one recognizes the 13th sign, Ophiuchus.

By now you get the idea. Psychics and Astrologists are all con artists. Over time a number of techniques have developed, here are a few more types : “The Jacques Statement”, “The Fuzzy Fact”, “The Greener Grass technique”, “The Diverted Question”, “Sugar Lumps”, “the Russian Doll”, “Forking”, “The Jargon Blast” and the “Good Chance Guess”. John Edwards seems particularly fond of using “Push Statements” – stories that are made up out of whole cloth and usually don’t make sense to the client. The client goes away and ultimately tweaks the story until it fits something in their lives. The point being that he is such a good psychic that he even knows stuff that at first doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately the Media plays a big roll in perpetuating this nonsense. It doesn’t always go the Reader’s way though. Here are a few videos of Sylvia and John making completely wrong guesses and here’s what gets me; these folks are flat-out lying to people in extremely unfortunate situations. There could be nothing worse than giving false hope where there is none or telling someone their loved one is dead when in fact they are alive and well. Only the lowest scum of the earth would do such a thing.

Watch as Sylvia tells Shawn Hornbeck’s parents that he is dead. She provides incorrect information which diverted the police search. She gave false information on the description of his abductor. Despicable. Shawn thankfully showed up 4 years later alive.

Don’t be fooled; look for plausibility supported by evidence. http://www.stopsylvia.com

I’ve been pondering the universe these past two+ years and trying to research various different aspects of humanity (from my armchair). In this series of blogs I’ll try to share or regurgitate what I’ve learned.

Let’s start by discussing Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias is the process by which you take a look at something that has already happened and then infer a meaning or a reason for that having happened. Typically comes in the form of “well that was bound to happen because…xyz”. The distinguishing feature of Confirmation Bias is that folks don’t try to test their hypothesis properly and the reasoning is often in support of a position we already held, thus confirming pre-existing biases.

Flim-flam artists take advantage of this to trick us.

In the following video from Derren Browne, a wallet loaded with cash is placed on a busy city street – a bright yellow circle is drawn around the wallet. A hidden camera records the action. No one touches the wallet. Embedding has been disabled but here’s the link [LINK].

If you scan through the comments left by folks viewing the video you’ll see some very creative reasoning going on with all kinds of explanation as to why this works.

“Thats because people in public thinks differently than in private. They are just stuck on some kind of autopilot – (preprogrammed robots)- set of behaviours, what they think they should do in public. That set includes honesty and yellow chalk reminds them that they are observed by other people. It works in every civilized society.”

“I guess one chalk circle makes all the difference”

“why is noone picking it up… cause its ciculed in yellow they think its a trap????”

“There are a LOT of people walking through these streets, so if someone were to pick this wallet up, then a lot of people would notice. Not to mention that there’s a yellow circle surrounding it. It’s been drawn there and it looks intentional. So this would register to someone’s mind that, “Hey, if I pick this up and someone were to see me, they might think I wasn’t there before and am stealing it now.” There’s a lot that goes through someone’s mind.”

“The circle’s a bright color as well so it draws attention. The act of stealing something like a wallet full of money is a shameful and suspicious one. To bring that much attention with a bright color and an abnormal situation of a circle surrounding a dropped wallet would cause people to stop their impulse from stealing it. So they look, but they don’t steal because they would be afraid of being noticed. It’s quite a pity that we can’t have a circle drawn around our belongings when we lose them!”

“The yellow circle makes it so that on the offchance anyone notices the wallet, they’ll think someone will somehow know if they pick it up, which of course is true. It makes me think a lot about primal or instinctual ideas of territory and belonging.”

Admittedly my initial reaction was to jump immediately to the yellow circle, why was it there, how did it protect the wallet and all the while I assumed it was actually the key to the whole thing. I never questioned whether or not this was actually a genuine phenomenon at all!

After watching the video I held the bias that this Yellow Circle thing could protect a wallet and that it worked every time and that all I had to do was to figure out why.

I was operating under a false premise; that yellow circles protected wallets.

Truth is there’s nothing in this video to suggest that. All Derren’s done is play a trick on the viewer by leveraging confirmation bias. It’s highly likely that this experiment was tried repeatedly on numerous street corners until it worked. He might’ve lost numerous wallets before he got the clips of one continuous shot where the wallet wasn’t touched. He might’ve had a big sign held off-camera warning folks not to touch the wallet on the ground. Who knows?

By observing the result of something that’s already happened, and then trying to reverse engineer the reason behind it, we fall foul to Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias closes off other options and just leads us to re-enforce our personal biases on a given phenomenon.

Another way to look at it is that you’re Cherry Picking the evidence which supports your way of thinking whilst ignoring the evidence which does not support your bias.

So is confirmation bias bad? Not really, in fact it’s natural. The brain has evolved a great capacity to theorize, hypothesize and imagine. No matter what you do you are stuck with a mind that will try to infer meaning in the world around you. It’s unavoidable. As long as you apply the scientific method, look for evidence supporting your theory, then look for ways to falsify the theory and apply The Scientific Method you will not fall fowl to confirmation bias.

Why do I care about this? Actually normally I wouldn’t care. Just that Karen has cancer.

When a loved one is ill, you’ll do anything to improve the situation. When Karen was diagnosed (over a year ago), I quickly set about researching her form of cancer, trying to uncover a potential cure or complimentary therapy.

I quickly became overwhelmed with information. Let me give you the rundown of *crap* I uncovered as potential cancer cures:

• Reishi Mushrooms
• Reiki (laying on of hands)
• Flax seed + Cottage Cheese
• Fish Oils
• Essiac Tea
• Green Tea
• Pomegranate
• Turmeric
• Feng Shui
• Homeopathy
• Fresh Cell Therapy
• Naturopathy
• Immuno-augmentative therapy
• Shark Cartilage

Now let me tell you what I’ve discovered…IT’S…ALL…B*LLSH1T!!!

That’s right. Bullshit. There is no clinical peer-reviewed evidence of the efficacy of any of this *crap*.

There are two types of people preying on the cancer community: BS artists and Con artists. The first are ignorant morons, the latter are insidious opportunists.

I have every reason in the world to want this stuff to work. So does just about every cancer patient or caregiver. That makes us easy targets.

Not only do they prey on the victim’s finances, more importantly they offer false hope to a group of people who are already at their most vulnerable. To which hope is needed most.

If these therapies had even a PERCENTAGE of the efficacy they claim, it would make sense then that every cancer treatment regime would factor them in. The response to this typically is that the pharma industry actively dis-credits these alternative medicines in an effort to push their drugs. Sorry, that’s just plain false.  As Mark Twain said (paraphrasing) "A lie will journey around the world before the truth has put on its shoes".

Lastly and most deplorable, each of these therapies has its own chemistry. By introducing additional moving parts into the mix you run the risk of lessening the effect of clinically proven therapies.

I liked the following quote which was actually focused on prayer as a therapy (not the focus of this posting).
This pithy quote came from a cancer patient:

"Jesus is great but don’t try Jesus without Chemo".

This post is about the tangible dangers of unquestioning belief + group dynamics. Two recent articles highlight what I’m talking about:

• a)’Penis Thefts’ Cause Panic In The Congo [LINK]
  • "Congolese police have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of stealing men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by reports of the witchcraft."

• b) Thieves cut off holy man’s ‘magic’ leg [LINK]
  • "Police are hunting two men who attacked a holy man and chopped off his right leg. The men apparently believed the leg had magical powers. The holy man, Yanadi Kondaiah, 80, claimed that those who touched his leg would be cured of illness or have wishes granted."

The first story speaks for itself. Somehow there’s a market for severed penises. Great.

The second I heard about on the Skeptic’s Guide the Universe [LINK] and is even more bizarre. First if the leg was indeed magic, why didn’t the holy man just wish the attackers away? Or why didn’t he just cop to it in the midst of the attack and say "listen, I was just kidding, my leg’s not really magic". And how stupid were the attackers? Was the plan to just take the leg, then open up shop elsewhere with a severed rotting appendage? Once they got back to their hideout, how long before they realized "hey, this leg is stinking, can we wish away the smell?".

These are extreme examples but it just goes to show the lengths believers will go to. And guess what…YOU’re a believer too. There are things which you hold as truths. They might not be magic legs but there are things. Just because they’re more mainstream beliefs, doesn’t make them accurate. Remember up until a few hundred years ago folks thought the Earth was flat [1].

So you must ALWAYS question and in my instance, I’ve even forgotten WHAT to question. Beliefs become so ingrained that they subtly become fact.  Case in point; The example I JUST gave of a Flat Earth….is actually a Myth [LINK].

Being a skeptic is hard. We are a breed of believers. Our brains are hard-wired to prohibit skepticism.

The world is over-populated with information. Our brains have to make sense of it ALL and over time have adapted to take "shortcuts" that prevent information overload. This makes it hard to exhibit good judgment.

Everything’s an approximation. We don’t truly see the world, rather our eyes collect information which is aggregated by the brain, then ENRICHED and converted into conscious thought. Same thing with hearing, touch, taste, all the physical senses.  The brain fills in the blank based on past experience or available information. You come away with an approximation of the actual event.

That’s how illusions work (e.g. Persistence of Vision). That’s how tricksters deceive us (e.g. misdirection).

This makes me wonder if the non-physical is an approximation too? Are we really feeling THAT sad, or do we just fill in the blank so that our overall mental state trends in a given direction? There’s probably some truth to this; how often have you caught yourself being upset about something only to realize that it’s not that big a deal? That’s your brain, filling in the emotional blanks.

More often than not, we don’t get to choose how each blank is filled in. To do so would quickly overwhelm our brain. The amazing thing is that our brain is multi-threaded. We can operate our limbs and move through the environment at the same time as focusing on the bird in the tree or the car on the road. We don’t have to really focus to consciously realize that the bird’s in the tree. Our brain fills in the blank. At the SAME time we can be consciously pondering what to eat for lunch.

And so this leads to the point of this post. Skepticism. When we’re faced with a new experience and tasked with figuring it out, more often than not the unconscious mind forms its own conclusions without us even realizing. The non-skeptic will tend to use logic and reasoning to justify the unconscious minds’ conclusion. In truth it should be the reverse. The conscious mind should follow a path of reasoning to arrive at a conclusion. That’s skepticism.

I heard a good general guideline on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: focus on the process, rather than the conclusion. Ensure the thought process you’re following is correct and whatever conclusions you arrive at are simply a side-effect rather than the objective.

"When intuition and logic agree, you are always right." – Blaise Pascal