Hokum-Balderdash Assay

Have a break. Have a religion

2011-06-19T12:01:00.000+08:00

Made the after reading this completely insane thinking and behavior. So whenever you don't like what reality throws at you take some time out for a psychotic break.

original image

My very first orb!

2011-06-09T12:40:00.001+08:00

Close-up from the same image:

OMG! My car's possezzed! An automobilic ectoplasmic globule has come out of the woodwork (or metalwork). This must be punishment for hacking into the electrical system. I must appease the god Toyotus. Perhaps feeding it ultra high octane gas, giving it a much needed oil change, and pampering it with a whole body wash might do it.

Hmmm my very first orb manifested in the car as well: http://www.skepdic.com/orbs.html

It was and has been raining lightly all morning and I was at the entrance to the garage so there's a good chance this is a tiny droplet floating by.

In the series of pics I took there were no other orbs so this speck is almost certainly not on the lens itself. Which makes sense since the orb is very bright--implying it was illuminated by the camera's flash

For the curious that's my test circuit for a variable intermittent wiper control I'm working on. There's a breadboarded microcontroller circuit in the transparent plastic box and two relays mounted on a DIN rail at the back of the box. Wires go up to the car's wiper circuit underneath the steering column. I've been studying the wiper's circuitry for several days now but I snipped the wiper's wires just today to bypass the car's electronics and hook up my circuit to it. Love the coincidence.

Finally, as alwayz the Bible has something to say: Beholdest thou the mote that is in thy camera's eye (Matt.7:3)

Pulseebo®

2011-05-06T10:43:00.000+08:00

My company is all set to manufacture Pulseebo®, a cardiovascular drug indicated for hypertension, atherosclerosis, hyperlipidemia, among others. It'll be the most inexpensive CV drug around at just $0.10 per tablet. It's Rx so you need to get your doctor to write out a prescription.

Pulseebo® has no known side effects due to the fact that we have completely removed all active ingredients. Remember that active ingredients are responsible for all side effects in drugs. By taking them out of the formulation we have--for the first time in the industry--made a drug that will not produce any side effects. Moreover, this means that overdosing on Pulseebo® is almost impossible. Popping a whole bottle will, at worst, give you an upset stomach. (We're already working on our next drug Pulseebo Minus® which will have all nonactive ingredients removed as well to finally make overdosing an impossibility).

The evidence for the efficacy of Pulseebo® is just overwhelming. Over the past 5 years we've done extensive non-randomized, uncontrolled, unblinded, multicenter studies which which we've published in our in-house journal clearly showing that Pulseebo® is safe and effective. (These studies and other technical literature are available upon request.) More importantly, Pulseebo's efficacy is attested to by those who've used it. Just ask our staff for their personal stories. They've been unbiased and thoroughly objective in their assessment and have absolutely no conflicts of interest.

For more on Pulseebo®, ask your doctor on your next visit.

Pulseebo® -Your heart deserves more

When logic goes to the dogs

2011-01-27T01:35:00.001+08:00

The dog's argument has an implicit inference which has to be made explicit:

All cats have four legs.
All creatures that have four legs are cats.
I have four legs.
Therefore I am a cat.

That argument can also be stated, equivalently, as follows:

If the animal is a cat then it has four legs
I'm an animal with four legs.
Therefore, I'm a cat.

Well our canine shouldn't be heartbroken at all for discovering she's actually a feline. Instead she should be depressed she's committed the fallacy of illicit conversion.

The fallacy occurs when given "all p are q" we infer that the converse "all q are p" is also true. Likewise when given "if p then q" and we conclude that "if q then p," then we've committed an illicit conversion. The "if - then" case may be more familiar when stated as follows:

If p then q
q
Therefore p.

That's the well known fallacy of affirming the consequent and is an example of an illicit conversion. (p is known as the antecedent and q the consequent.) An argument in this form is invalid.

The thing to remember is that "all s are r" or "if p then q" do not necessarily imply "all r are s" or "if q then p." The converse is is not necessarily implied but it might be true. For instance, in causal arguments, if p causes q, and if p is both necessary and sufficient to cause q, then the converse is also true:

If a sheet of paper is heated to its combustion temperature and oxygen is present then it will burn.
If paper is burning then it's been raised to its combustion temperature and oxygen is present

Both statements are true. This is called a biconditional--the conditional (i.e., the if - then statement) is true both ways. If p then q and if q then p. To formalize the relationship between temperature/oxygen and paper we would say:

Paper will burn if and only if its temperature is raised to its combustion point and oxygen is present.

The phrase "if and only if" indicates this is a biconditonal statement.

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Print References:

Bennett, Deborah J.. Logic made easy: how to know when language deceives you. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. p. 108-110, 116-117, 130.

Vaughn, Lewis. The power of critical thinking: effective reasoning about ordinary and extraordinary claims. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 287-289.

The prejudice of faith

2011-01-25T23:25:00.000+08:00

Faith discriminates. In the sense that a person will choose to believe in certain ideas that are extraordinary and unsupported by evidence and reason, but won't have faith in a host of other similar unenvinced extraordinary ideas. So what then are the criteria for having faith in X but not Y? Why X instead of Y, and why neither? What kinds of claims must we have faith in? What are the characteristics of those claims for which we must forgo reason/evidence, but must believe in fully nonetheless rather than just ignore or be agnostic about?

I think if believers honestly and sincerely answered these questions they'd find that their bases would include, among others, preference, emotion, culture-centric biases/prejudices. If we scratch the surface I think we'll discover instances of special pleading--of singling out particular claims which they hold immune to rationality and rule of evidence and logic, affording them a special pass and privilege they don't grant to almost all other ideas/beliefs and areas of inquiry.

More on HPT, and conditionals and their converse

2011-01-21T00:56:00.001+08:00

After writing the primer on conditional probabilities and their converse vis-a-vis screening tests, I continued to scour the Web to gather more information on the base rates of conception/pregnancy. But, much to my chagrin, as with searching for scientific studies on the reliability of home pregnancy tests (HPT) [note 1] I have come up nearly empty-handed. Thus far I've managed to find only one resource (which unfortunately doesn't provide any citation or rationale for the 50% figure provided; it sounds quite plausible, notwithstanding).

The probability of being pregnant increases as various indicators come into play. For instance given coitus within the last mentrual cycle and given the current scheduled menses has been overdue for several days, the probability that one is pregnant increases to around 50%. For our hypothetical HPT in the hands of the "average" user (for whom sensitivity = specificity = 75%) given P(pregnant) = 0.50, the reliability of the HPT is: P(pregnant | test positive) = 75% and P(not pregnant | test negative) = 75%. In this case, the true positive and true negative ratings are equal to the test's sensitivity and specificity only because the base rate = 50% and sensitivity = specificity.

A 75% true positive rating wouldn't warrant declaring HPTs as being spot on. If the prior probability (base rate) of 50% for pregnancy is held constant, the sensitivity and particularly specificity have to be >90% to attain a true positive rating close to 100%. (Use the spreadsheet and experiment with different combinations of base rate, sensitivity, and specificity. Instructions for copying the table to your spreadsheet are in Testing Screening Tests.)

It's claimed that HPTs are accurate, that "if the test result is positive, you're almost certainly pregnant" although "negative results are less reliable." However, as Bastian et al. discovered, even if the laboratory-determined sensitivity and specificity of the HPT kit is high, once the kit is in the hands of consumers, the actual sensitivity drops because most users fail to follow the instructions to the letter. User error detracts from the reliability of the test.

HPTs rely on the detection of the level of human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) in urine, HCG being a chemical whose amount increases over time after conception but is present in insufficient quantities during the first week or so after conception for the HPT to present a positive finding. Thus most HPT kits are to be used after the upcoming menstrual period is missed. If a user tests herself within a week of unprotected intercourse, chances are there still won't be enough HCG for the HPT to detect, assuming conception had taken place. Such misuse lowers the specificity of the test.

Moreover, as we've seen, what we're interested in discovering are the probabilities of the converse, i.e., not the sensitivity and specificity but their inverse--P(pregnant | test positive) and P(not pregnant | test negative). To obtain those figures we need to take the base rate of pregnancy into consideration. And so even with a sensitivity and specificity >90%, a true positive close to 100% is only possible if the prior probability of pregnancy is high enough (>50%). To fail to factor in P(pregnancy) is to commit the base rate fallacy.

According to studies even doctors can misunderstand the nature of sensitivity and specificity and fail to see the need to compute for the probability of the converse.

[C]onditional statements are often confused with their converses. When they evaluate medical research, physicians routinely deal with statistics of the sensitivity and specificity of laboratory test results. In a 1978 study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, it became apparent that physicians often misunderstand the results of these tests" [note 2].

In a study by David Eddy, after being given the values for base rate, sensitivity, and the complement of specificity (i.e., 1 - specificity), 95% of doctors surveyed overestimated P(malignancy | test positive) by one order of magnitude. "David Eddy reported that it's no wonder physicians confused these conditional probabilities; the authors of the medical research often made the error themselves in reporting their results" [note 3].

To end, let's look at conditional probabilities using "if / then" notation [note 4]. If a patient has cancer, then the probability of testing positive is 85%. That's sensitivity. If a patient does not have cancer, then the probability of testing negative is 90%. That's specificity. Now we want to know the converse: if an individual tests positive, then the probability of him/her having cancer is ___. And if a person tests negative, then the probability of him/her not having cancer is ___. They're both blank because we need the prevalence rate (base rate) of the particular type of cancer to determine those values. And the lower the prevalence of the disease 1. the higher the false positive rating of the screening test and 2.the lower its false negative rating will be.

In general, given the statement "if A then B," it doesn't imply the converse is necessarily true, that "if B then A." Thus, given "if I drink and drive then I will figure in a mishap," it would be erroneous to conclude that "if I'm in an accident then I was driving drunk." I could be in mishap even if I haven't had a drink and even if I'm the passenger.

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Notes:

1. To find all studies with "home pregnancy test" in their titles, I typed in "home pregnancy test[Title]" (without the quotes) in the search engine box on the PubMed site . Only 13 studies (mostly irrelevant) came up.

2. Bennett, Deborah J.. Logic Made Easy: How to Know When Language Deceives You. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. p.109. The NEJM article being referred to is "Interpretation by Physicians of Clinical Laboratory Results" by Ward Casscells, Arno Schoenberger, and Thomas B. Graboys.

3. Bennett, p.110.

4. Bennett, p.109.

Testing screening tests

2011-01-20T00:53:00.005+08:00

How reliable are home pregnancy test (HPT) kits? Given 100 who've just conceived, 75 of them will test positive. And given 100 who aren't pregnant, 75 will correctly test negative [see note 1]. Assume the chances of conception when coitus is performed at some randomly chosen day of the month is 5% [see note 2]. If the HPT result comes out positive should the woman panic and faint if it's an unwanted pregnancy? Or if she's been trying to be with child for years, should she immediately broadcast the news on Facebook, Twitter, and email every friend and kin she has?

Before finding out the answer, let's introduce some important terms. The base rate is the prevalence rate or frequency of a disease, condition or phenomenon in the population. Sensitivity is the rate/frequency/probability a medical screening test will result in a positive finding given that the person being tested has the condition or disease which the test is for. In probability notation sensitivity can be denoted as P(test is positive | person has the condition). That's read as "the probability that the test comes out positive given the person has the condition." The vertical bar is read as "given." Specificity is the rate/frequency/probability a medical screening test will result in a negative finding given that the person being tested does not have the condition or disease which the test is for. In other words, specificity is P(test is negative | person doesn't have the condition).

So for HPT the base rate = 0.05, sensitivity = 75/100 = 0.75, and specificity = 75/100 = 0.75.

What we're interested in finding out is how reliable the test is, ie., how accurate it is when the test comes out positive and when it comes out negative. In essence we want to know P(being pregnant | test is positive) and P(not being pregnant | test is negative). These are two values and they needn't be the same. If the values are close to 1 (e.g. > 0.90) then we can say that HPT is reliable.

Notice that when we're talking of reliability of the test when it results in a positive finding we are looking at P(being pregnant | test is positive). This is not the same as the sensitivity of HPT which is P(test is positive | person is pregnant). The test's sensitivity measures how accurate it is when the subjects who are being tested are already known to have the condition (eg. are definitely known to be pregnant before the test is even administered). Quite obviously women who buy HPT kits do so to find out whether or not they're pregnant. Likewise the reliability of the test when the results come back negative is the P(not pregnant | test is negative). Contrast this with specificity of HPT which is P(test is negative | not pregnant). So the reliability indicators we're interested in are the converse of sensitivity and specificity.

To help us derive all the numbers, we shall enlist the help of a spreadsheet. Take a look at this 2x2 contingency table (it would be best if you open a new tab or window on your browser for the spreadsheet so you can easily switch between this text and the tables). Although I can simply give you the equations for P(being pregnant | test is positive) and P(not pregnant | test is negative), using a table is far more illuminating and easier to understand. But if you would rather have the formulas, I've included them in the spreadsheet--look for the rows "true positive" and "true negative."

Although there are clearly more than two rows and two columns in the table it's described as 2x2 because the two variables have two states/levels each. In the case of HPT the variables are pregnancy and HPT test result. Their states are: pregnant, not pregnant, test result positive, test result negative.

The equations to compute for the values of the cells are provided. The values for cells which don't have explicit equations for them can easily be derived after the other cells have been filled. Keep in mind that except for the last table which uses user-provided sample size, the cells of the contingency tables all contain probabilities. Therefore, they will only have values from 0 to 1, inclusive.

Now scroll down to the row labeled "EXAMPLE." I've already plugged in the base rate, sensitivity and specificity for HPT kits (see yellow-colored cells). Focus your attention on the purple cells. As you can see when HPT says a woman is pregnant, there's only a 13.64% chance that it's true. Thus the false positive rate = 86.36%. Out of a hundred times the test comes out positive, 86 of them will be false alarms. Not very comforting at all.

But look at HPT's true negative rate--P(not pregnant | test negative). It's 98.28%. When the test tells a woman she hasn't conceived, then it will be wrong only 2 out of 100 times. Now that's reliable.

Before moving on, I suggest creating a new google spreadsheet so you can play around with the inputs and see how the probabilities change. Go to https://docs.google.com/ (and sign in if you need to). Click on the "Create new" button on the upper left hand corner of the window. A drop menu will appear. Click on "Spreadsheet." Go to the contingency table and click on "View" on the menu bar on top. Click "Show all formulas" on the drop menu. Press CTRL-A to select the entire table and then CTRL-C to copy it. Go back to your new blank spreadsheet and press CTRL-V to paste. You will have to manually join the various cells for those whose text is too long to fit one cell (and so it wraps down). Do this by selecting the cells on the row which you want to join and then click on the merge icon (it's the square one with left and right facing arrows). To "unmerge" select the merged cells and click the icon.

Now you can change the values of the yellow colored cells--base rate, sensitivity, specificity, sample size--and watch how the values in the tables below them change. Try inputting a value of 1 for specificity and watch how false positives are completely eliminated no matter what the sensitivity is.

One of the reasons that HPT (or for that matter, other tests) are prone to false positives (i.e., test result is positive but it's wrong--it should actually be negative) is because the base rate is rather low. And as we decrease the base rate--keeping sensitivity and specificity constant--the higher the false positive rate goes up. Try tweaking the base rate on your spreadsheet and see what happens.

If low base rate decreases true positive rates, then higher base rates should increase it, right? Remember we assumed that the base rate, thus P(getting pregnant ) is 0.05? Well, our assumption is that the woman doesn't know her ovulation cycle--she doesn't know the time of the month she's fertile. Now suppose she does. Suppose she knows exactly the six-day ovulation period when she can conceive [see note 2]. If she then has coitus during this period, the chances of her conceiving jumps to approximately 20% (it's actually between 10% to 33% depending on the day). Given that the base rate has increased, the reliability of HPT should increase as well. If we change the base rate to 0.20, the false positive rate drops to 57.14%. If the test comes out positive, it's nearly a coin toss whether one is really pregnant. On the hand, look at how the false negative rate has been affected. It's increased from 1.72% to 7.69%. Moral is: You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Let's move on and use another real life example. Fecal occult blood test (FOBT) is a kit which can be used at home to screen for, among other conditions, possible colorectal cancer (CRC). As with HPT, FOBT kits from different manufacturers vary in their sensitivity and specificity. Let's take an "average" FOBT which has a sensitivity = 65% and specificity = 95%. How often (or rarely) does CRC occur in the population? Given the prevalence in 2007 we can estimate it to be 0.37% [see note 3].

Plugging those values in our spreadsheet we get the following:

True positive rate = 4.61%
False positive rate = 95.39%

True negative rate = 99.86%
False negative rate = 0.14%

When FOBT comes out negative we can almost be proof positive that we are CRC-free. But when it comes out positive, further testing is necessary to confirm/refute the initial screening. The low base rate means this test is prone to false positives.

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Notes:

1. Home pregnancy test sensitivity and specifity values: "The results we have suggest that for every four women who use such a test and are pregnant, one will get a negative test result. It also suggests that for every four women who are not pregnant, one will have a positive test result." In other words, P(test negative | pregnant) and P(test positive | not pregnant) are both 1/4. P(test positive | pregnant), i.e., sensitivity, and P(test negative | not pregnant), i.e., specificity of the test, are the complements of these values: 1 - 1/4 = 0.75.

It is important to note that different brands of HPT kits have varying sensitivities and specificities.

2. Pregnancy base rate: During the 6-day ovulation period the probability of becoming pregnant is between 10 to 33%. Computing for a simplistic average we get approx 20% for P(pregnancy | coitus during the 6-day ovulation period). According to the study there is no conception if coitus is outside this 6-day period. Therefore the P(pregnancy | coitus outside the 6-day ovulation period) = 0. Since the ovulation period is 6 days and there are 30 days/month, the probability that any randomly picked day is within the 6-day ovulation period = 6/30 = 1/5 = 0.2. We need to find the probability of getting pregnant regardless of when coitus is performed, that is we need to determine P(pregnancy).

Let:
p = pregnancy
p' = no pregnancy
v = coitus during 6-day ovulation period
v' = coitus outside the 6-day ovulation period

P(v) = 0.2
P(v') = 1 - P(v) = 0.8
P(p|v) = 0.25
P(p|v') = 0

P(p & v) = P(v) * P(p|v) = 0.2 * 0.25 = 0.05
P(p & v') = P(v') * P(p|v') = 0.8 * 0 = 0
P(p) = P(p & v) + P(p & v') = 0.05 + 0 = 0.05

I actually used a tree diagram (with ovulation period as the first two branches) and a 2x2 table as in the spreadsheet to aid in determining the probabilities. The above equations are a distillation of that graphical and tabular process.

3. Prevalence of colorectal cancer: "On January 1, 2007, in the United States there were approximately 1,112,493 men and women alive who had a history of cancer of the colon and rectum -- 540,636 men and 571,857 women. This includes any person alive on January 1, 2007 who had been diagnosed with cancer of the colon and rectum at any point prior to January 1, 2007 and includes persons with active disease and those who are cured of their disease." In 2007 the population of the US was 302.2 million. Therefore we can compute an estimate of the base rate for CRC: 1.112million / 302.2million = 0.0037.

A very sick doctor

2011-01-11T17:35:00.008+08:00

According to Eduardo Cabantog he's an MD who's served in various state-run hospitals in the Philippines. Some years ago he founded Alliance in Motion (AIM) Global, Inc.--a multi level marketing (MLM) company. He's never looked back since. And if his presentation (see endnote 1) is any gauge, he's actually turned his back on the ethics of being a doctor.

AIM is into food/dietary supplements. But I'm not even going into the efficacy question regarding the items the company is peddling. This blog entry is about a (different) scam Cabantog has been perpetrating during his presentation(s).

Watch the following video begining at around 2:40 (you can see how the older gentlemen eventually fared in Part 8 of the presentation below).

The two men are easily thrown off balance by Cabantog when he performs his drag-the-person-down test. But after taking Alive! supplement (manufactured by Nature's Way) the two subjects become incredibly immovable. Try as he did Cabantog could not get them to budge. Amazing, isn't it? Well, it would be if Cabantog wasn't resorting to outright flim flam. Here's Richard Saunders of Australian Skeptics showing us how to do this party trick (see endnote 2). The reveal begins @5:10.

The direction in which the forces are applied is key. Push/pull a person away from where he's standing and it's easy to throw him off balance. The opposite is also true. Moreover, the lack of any form of blinding ensures that the tester can apply as much or as little force as he wants depending on whether the subject has taken the supplement or not. Similarly, the subject, knowing that's he's taken the supplement and having already been primed by Cabantog's prior presentation on the benefits of the wonder supplement, can apply more or less resistance. The subject--just like a patient--reflexively wants to please the authority figure and to play along specially given the large audience present (yes, there is peer pressure at work). Given how Cabantog has full control of the vectors--the magnitude and direction of the forces he's going to apply--and given how the subjects can more or less be counted on to perform as expected of a good albeit unwitting shill, there is almost no way this trick can go wrong.

Let's move on. Watch the following, paying close attention to the portion of the video from 2:16 - 3:03 and 4:34 - 5:20. Watch both a few times and see if you notice something peculiar.

Did you see it? Those two segments are merely mirror images of one another. And we know the first is the original because @2:23 to 2:25 we see the label of the lancet (the penlike device for pricking the finger)--the first few letters being "Lan"--flipped horizontally @4:41 to 4:43.

Moreover, if you listen carefully to the audio (best if you don't look at the vid) you'll hear the same one in both the first and second segments (although the first few seconds from the first don't make it to the second; in its place is a short part of the audio downstream, thus resulting in that portion being repeated twice in the second segment). You'll even hear the very same car horn @2:47 and @5:05.

In the first segment, the supposed blood sample taken is one before the subject took Alive! In the second, a blood sample after the supplement was taken. But as we've seen AIM Global merely provided a flipped version of the very same blood sampling. If AIM actually took blood samples from a subject in the audience before and after taking Alive! and if the glass slide showing freely moving RBC is from the same subject, then because they don't have the video clip for the second sampling there is reason to believe AIM is hiding something. Perhaps they don't want to show that they added a substance to the second blood sample (which they didn't to the first) because "Rouleaux and clumping occur when blood is placed under a microscope without first being suspended in proper solutions to control acidity and agglutination." Is AIM going to give us the lame excuse that they forgot to turn on the camera during the second blood sampling or that that video segment got corrupted?

Finally I found the following images in a Facebook album that apparently is open for all Facebook members to see and comment on. They're ads for AIM's latest product C24/7, which apparently is an improved Alive! since instead of just 16,000 "phytonutrients" C24/7 contains 22,000. Given the weight of one capsule and this number of chemicals you can do the math to find out how many micrograms of each there is per cap (assuming AIM isn't pulling our legs--again--with that 22k figure).

Whether these ads were made by AIM Global or by individuals (re)selling the supplement, I don't know. Since these ads make explicit therapeutic claims, they are in clear violation of the laws of the land (among others, RA 7394 Art.112 and the Department of Health regulations)

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Notes:

1. Alliance in Motion (AIM) Global presentation featuring Eduardo Cabantog, MD
Part 1/10 Part 2/10 Part 3/10 Part 4/10 Part 5/10 Part 6/10 Part 7/10 Part 8/10 Part 9/10 Part 10/10

2. This trick was also employed by, among others, Power Balance (Australia), which recently had to admit (thanks to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) that its wild claims for its rubber bracelet are bogus:

If you don't have a Nobel, I'll have none of your ideas

2011-01-01T13:42:00.000+08:00

A recent example of an ad hominem argument.

After being provided Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Perimeter of Ignorance" paper (see footnote) which puts Newton, Einstein, et al's religious sentiments into perspective, instead of critiquing the paper a believer went off questioning NDT's "smartness": "Did he ever win a Nobel Prize? Please elaborate why [we] would think that he is smarter or wiser than Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton." And even after being told that "an idea stands and falls on its merit, not from whom it came from," this believer forges on, none the wiser, and hauls out NDT's curriculum vitae and resume from wikipedia, placing emphasis on NDT's being "a frequent Guest on the Game Show called Jeopardy," finally concluding "I am sorry but his greatest 'Achievements' are certainly nothing compared to the 'Achievements' of Albert Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton. Are you kidding Sir???"

As to whether this person even bothered to read NDT's essay is unclear. He certainly does not even broach the ideas contained therein.

What is an ad hominem? It consists of "attacking the person instead of attacking his argument" [link]. "This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions" [link].

An ad hominem argument has the following basic form:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B makes an attack on person A.
3. Therefore A's claim is false.
[link]

Person A corresponds to NDT and person B to the believer.

One crucial question is whether B would've said what he did if NDT's essay had been, say, entitled "The Perimeter of Enlightenment" and had hailed Newton et al. as being warranted in invoking an intelligent designer for those mysteries which at the time eluded scientific explanation. Well apparently not, since when confronted with this very question, B simply refused to answer.

When you think about it, science would never advance and would become dogmatic and a cult worshiping the pronouncements of a few if the ad hominem rule were to prevail. Young scientists and thinkers would never get off the ground since they have yet to make their mark in history by adding to the pool of knowledge or even overthrowing wrong ideas by their esteemed predecessors. So when their ideas are at odds with the status quo they would be compared with the giants who've come before them and since their CV and resume are practically blank they would be pooh-poohed and never given an audience. Their ideas would be trampled upon and deemed heretical simply because they have no Nobels or awards to show off, no celebrity status, no biographies, no books written about them, none of the "blings" to show they're smarter and oh so important.

And rather obviously, scientists win Nobel prizes after their ideas have proved to be groundbreaking and shown to be true, and not because they scored 300 on their IQ test or because their CV is a hundred pages thick or that they didn't frequent game shows. Had we applied the above believer's criteria for judging ideas we would've said of Einstein when he came up with his relativity theory (thus supplanting Newtonian mechanics) at the beginning of the 20th century: "Einstein was a patent office clerk! Are you kidding me?! Has he won a Nobel Prize? Please elaborate why we should think he's smarter or wiser than Sir Isaac Newton?"

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Far more entertaining than the paper is Tyson's Beyond Belief 2006 talk with the same title: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Sins to be wary of

2010-12-15T23:24:00.000+08:00

Back in 1996, in the chapter The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Carl Sagan used this example to illustrate the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: "Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila [said]: 'I know of ... a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.'" [emphasis mine, not Sagan's] (Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. p. 215)

Sin's use of "because" implies he was blaming the pill and citing it as the cause. That's fallacious. There's a host of possible causes in that woman's life that can account for the effect observed, and yet the cardinal picked this particular one (perhaps out of prejudice).

I'd also point out that Cardinal Sin committed the sin of selection bias. He cites one example that (erroneously) supports the implied claim that contraceptive pills are bad for women. However, just like psychics who never advertize those predictions that bombed, Sin fails to tell us about how many 26-year old women have taken the pill but don't' look 60 or 50 or 40 or 30. Also for the sake of completeness Sin would also need to tell us how many 26 yr olds who don't take the pill and look 60 or 50 or 40 or 30, and how many who don't take the pill and don't look any older than they really are.

Why would we need all those values? To fill in the 2x2 contingency table required for the computation of the correlational coefficient between the two variables (taking the pill and looking older than one really is). In order to find out if there is a correlation (positive or negative) or not, we need the values for all four cells of the table.

These two--post hockery and selection/confirmation bias--I might add are such common pitfalls in health claims (the Cardinal's assertion included). They're all over the Web. Quacks and manufacturers/dealers/multilevel marketers of health products use them to their advantage, and sadly most consumers see nothing wrong with them and in fact fall for and even naively employ such flawed reasoning.

All too often we read and hear testimonials proclaiming that John and Jane de la Cruz took Vitamin Z or LiverAIDS or 4Geek antioxidant or hairball tea or whatnot, and then felt better or lost weight or their cancer went away or their gray matter went away or whatever. That I took A and thereafter noticed B doesn't necessarily mean A caused B. To argue otherwise is textbook post hockery. And yet even doctors fall prey to this error. For instance there's one who enthusiastically presribed a CAM procedure to my mom because he's seen/heard positive anecdotes regarding that specific "alternative" treatment.

But as shown by the Cardinal's sin positive testimonials and stories aren't evidence at all, because:
1. they provide datum for only one of the cells in the contingency table. Where are the other three?
2. they don't tell us how much of the "I feel better" is due to the placebo effect
3. they don't tell us of the other treatments, lifestyle changes, and other possible causative factors that the person is simultaneously undertaking, confounding factors that screw up any pat and easy causal conclusion.
4. they don't give us a precise baseline--they don't provide the "before" picture--with which to compare the "after" nor a verification that the illness/condtion purported to exist is true and accurate.

If I declare that prayers work giving as proof the fact that the sun indeed rose after I wore ten rosaries each around my neck, arms and legs and prayed to god Xenu for the sun to rise, I would be guilty of the post. hoc fallacy as well as the sin of selection bias. If you want to show how freaking stupid and moronic I really am you simply have to ask for the data for the other three cells. After computing for the coefficient, not only will we discover a lack of causal link, we'd prove there isn't even a correlation at all.

We know the caveat "correlation does not necessarily imply causation." We also need to keep in mind that an apparent (but yet untested) correlation may not even be true--it might be illusory.

If I drink and drive I'll meet an accident. I had a mishap therefore I'd been DUI.

2010-12-14T22:34:00.000+08:00

According to a news article which just got posted on Richard Dawkins' website, a study shows that "people with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God." Apparently the creme de la creme among scientists are not only geniuses but have chucked the belief in talking snakes and cops in the sky: "A survey of Royal Society fellows found that only 3.3 per cent believed in God - at a time when 68.5 per cent of the general UK population described themselves as believers."

Well, let's assume that's true--that highly intelligent blokes are more likely to be nonbelievers. As is known to all here I don't subscribe to any postulated supernatural entity whether you call them gods, goddesses, deities, angels, higher powers and principalities, your heavenly juju or holy mojo or Elvis for that matter. On the other hand, I have no idea what my IQ is. Since I'm a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool, in-your-face atheist, does it follow then that I am more likely to have above average IQ? Can I conclude that I'm most likely an Einstein? Let's find out.

First, for the sake of clarity let's give the news article's claim some concreteness. So let's say that it's been determined that those with IQ >100 have an 80% chance of being atheistic. Now let's try and encode that in the nomenclature of probability theory since we are dealing with likelihoods.

Let:

AA = above average intelligence
NB = non-belief
P() = probability of

The above proposition then can be expressed as:

If a person has AA then P(NB) = 80% [let's call this P1]

We now move on to the question we're trying to answer. Does it follow that if I'm a nonbeliever there is an 80% of oh so humble moi having above average intelligence? In other words, is the following statement true:

If a person is an atheist then P(AA) = 80% [P2]

Well, you probably guessed it's not.

P1 can be written succinctly as P(NB|AA), which is read as the "probability of nonbelief given the person has above average intelligence." The vertical bar means "given."

P2 on other hand can be written as P(AA|NB), the probability of having AA given NB.

P1 and P2 are known as conditional probabilities and the values for these two are not necessarily the same. More often than not they're different. If we want to find the value for P(AA|NB) we'd need to have the figures for P(AA) and P(AA and NB), the latter being the probability that a person has above average intelligence and is an atheist--the intersection between the set of people with AA and the set of atheists. Mathematically, P(AA|NB) = P(AA & NB) / P(NB).

So the answer to our inquiry is: No, we cannot conclude at all that I can now be a member of Mensa or any clique and club of snobbish, condescending eggheads and geniuses.?

I couldn't think of a good title for this piece and so have that clumsy one up there. It alludes to the conversion error whereby given "if A then B" is true we presume it follows that "if B therefore A."

Echoing Prof. Coyne

2010-10-11T08:52:00.000+08:00

Jerry Coyne has just come out with a science-and-religion-are-incompatible article.He doesn't provide anything novel but what he says has to be repeated over and over as there are quarters out there that want us to buy into yet another fantasy--that science and religion can be partners in bed.

[S]cience is no more compatible with religion than with other superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don't talk about reconciling science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it's the most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially powerful.

Indeed. Let's not treat religion with kids gloves. As with astrology it's had millennia to prove itself. And all we've found out is either that religious ideas are flat out wrong or that they're mere speculations which even their proponents can't prove to be true.

Last night I commented on a friend's blog entry on this very subject of science and religion. Got carried away and ended up writing more than I intended. Am reposting it here:

I am of the opinion that science and religion are premised upon conflicting and irreconcilable epistemologies. Science is rooted in churning out hypotheses that can be tested and falsified. Hypotheses and explanations which cannot be empirically determined to be true/false are not scientific.

Theistic ideas are of the latter kind. Take the hypothesis that there is a being and this entity is in fact three persons. From the git go you have problems. First there needs to be a definition of this entity. Then we'd need to find out wthether this hypothesized entity is real. We'd then need to define what these "persons" are. If we manage to provide characterization of these persons, then we'd then move on to determining the existence of these multiple persons. This is a bit similar to finding out whether the hypothesis "Intelligent lifeforms with six stomachs, five eyes, four legs, three heads, and two penises exist in the universe" is in fact true.

It should be noted that probabilities, though not sine qua non, are of practical importance here. The idea that the planet Earth has no core and is in fact hollow has a very low probability of being true. So is the claim that there is biological life on the Sun. There are very scientific reasons for saying these are highly improbable. In a similar vein, the hypothesis that intelligent anthropomorphic entities exist within the Earth's atmosphere, as the ancients believed, is so highly improbable that they can be rejected as false. Needless to say, science and technology have relegated this worldview under the rubric of mythology.

Revelation, faith, tradition--these do not make anything true. Revelation is merely a claim. We would still need evidence that the "revealed truth" was in fact revealed by some nonhuman intelligence and that it is true. Faith--belief without evidence--is simply that. Rather patently, no amount of believing will make something true if it isn't. That would be wishful thinking. And however old an idea may be will not make it any truer than it really is. Hence, an argument from tradition has no merit in the determination of the truth of a claim or idea.

The lack of progress in finding which religion and which religious/supernatural hypotheses is/are true over the last several thousand years merely shows how religion does not possess valid epistemological methods. In fact the number of religions and religious hypotheses have increased over time. Contrast that with hypotheses about the empirical world. We have advanced so much in our understanding of the universe that we are now discovering exosolar planets trillions of kilometers from our planet and have been able to weigh the universe and discovered that our universe is mostly likely a flat one--that galaxies will continue to accelerate away from each other until they exceed the speed of light.

Religion underscores the importance of believing. Science emphasizes evidence to provide a solid foundation for believing. Religion, unlike science, ahbors truth, in the sense that while it may be a fount of ideas, it does not provide any proven means for determining the truth/facticity of those ideas. In short, science has the methods to mercilessly rid itself of bad ideas. Religion on the other hand has been forced to become a storehouse of untested and untestable ideas, as it continuous to seek refuge in God the Gaps hypotheses.

Will this offend you?

2010-09-13T21:01:00.001+08:00

I downloaded a copy of the bible. I then deleted it from my hard disk. Will fatheists be offended? Will I be accused of irreverence and desecration and insensitivity? What if I kept downloading and deleting? What's the difference between annihilating a digital copy and a printed one? What if I had burned it into a CD and took a pair of shears and cut it up? What if I had cut that CD into the shape of a cross and then tossed it into a bonfire or flushed it down the toilet?

The psychology of offense and which forms offend and which don't should be an interesting field of study.

Bearded juveniles

2010-09-13T13:23:00.000+08:00

I really don't get all the brouhaha over the planned (but eventually aborted) burning of Korans. Much ado about ink and paper. And over a handful of mass produced copies out of millions at that. If the ancient scrolls/manuscripts/codices or the last copies on earth were the ones under threat, I'd be among those rallying to save them. But of course this is simply not the case. Just goes to show you how Mo's fanboys are slaves to their psychology. How puerile can you get? Grow up you babies.

If religionuts everywhere bought all the remaining copies by Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and Darwin and burned them and even their effigies, I predict the only complaint from atheists would be that these pissants have unnecessarily contributed to climate change. Sure, go rip out the pages of The God Delusion and damn and curse atheists and burn title upon title, but please go roast your shawarma with them.

Teaching children to fish and to ...

2010-08-24T10:48:00.000+08:00

If I had kids I'd indoctrinate them to ask the following: How do we it's true, that is, what are our reasons for believing? How good are these reasons?

If we simply give children the answers to questions they grow up thinking they've already got unassailable knowledge and end up thinking that knowledge is that which comes out of the mouths of their personally preferred authorities. Encourage children to keep questioning and to ask the right questions and they become astute independent critical thinkers who have the ability to know and to assess an idea as to its position on the "reality spectrum" ranging from reason-based knowing to unsubstantiated belief.

What?! You got no religion?

2010-05-19T21:36:00.000+08:00

Census taker came by this noon and I had to spend some ten minutes providing her the number of people in our household, birthdate, educational attainment, ethnicity, and religion. When she got to that latter item, I said I had no religion. With a quizzical look, she inquired, "What do you mean no religion?" Without hesitation I told her, "I'm an atheist." And she turned to her clipboard and started writing on the form. My eyesight is so bad I wasn't able to catch what she scribbled.

I gather that this particular individual (late 20s early 30s) has not come across a person who's answered "no religion" to her question. It's strange really that she wasn't prepared for such a reply. I'd like to think that the census office give their people enough training to expect the various possible answers before sending them off to collect data.

Today's experience shows me that there are some (as to the percentage I would say it's not insignificant) who still need consciousness raising. There are those who are still in that stage of innocence, assuming that everyone has a religion, in the same way that everyone has a birthdate and biological parents (even those who were conceived via IVF). Just as I had a rude awakening years ago that not every human on this planet celebrates Christmas and therefore not everyone would welcome or even understand being greeted "Merry Christmas", there are those who need to wake up to the reality that there are not a few who've never had a religion or been part of organized religion, or who were part of some tradition but have moved on and unfettered themselves from such belief systems.

Well, if anything, at least I may have nudged (I should hope jolted) this person out of her naivete.

I'm offended that you're offended

2010-05-05T11:38:00.001+08:00

Richard Dawkins was recently in Australia and stole the limelight in a Q&A episode on religion [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6].

I have to hand it to Senator Stephen Fielding. He has guts coming out and admitting he's a young earth creationist. Perhaps Australian politicians are not unlike those in my country--they'll do anything to draw attention (and thus engendering name recall for future elections) even it means becoming the laughing stock of the audience (or the country). People like Fielding are truly deluded in the psychiatric sense. In the face of overwhelming evidence they still hold on to cockamamie beliefs. In fact for the utterly deluded no amount or quality of evidence will persuade them otherwise. They are absolutely closed to the idea that they are or may be wrong. As long as they have a minimum number of members (and who knows how many that is) who subscribe to the same delusion, as long as such a community of like-minded inmates exists, they will carry on.

Interestingly Dawkins is the only nonbeliever in the panel of six. I don't know if the audience was able to digest the fact--one that Dawkins eventually pointed out--that those in the panel had differing religious beliefs which were incompatible with one another to a lesser or greater degree. For instance none of the five of course would have anything to do with Fielding's inane "10,000-year old universe, God waved his wand and rabbits and humans magically came into being" worldview. I felt that Minster of Agriculture Tony Bourke and political opposition deputy leader Julie Bishop wanted to distance themselves as clearly as possible from the crackpot senator when they explicitly and repeatedly said that religion and specifically Intelligent Design should not be taught in science classes. And then there was Judaism represented by Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio, a religion which does not and, as far as its tradition goes, will never accept Jesus as God incarnate. Ninio's Judaism, by the way, seems to lean more toward Jewish mysticism--she talked about a God concept that continually evolves. Hardly fundamentalist. So even within this group of five you had a plurality of supernatural beliefs which couldn't all be simultaneously right (unless we're willing to throw out the principle of noncontradiction). Some ideas will be wrong and some may be right, or all of them might be false. That's inescapable.

What I found so completely lame is that during the latter half of the program Bishop and then Bourke charged Dawkins with being disrespectful and ridiculing religion. Once Dawkins delved into specifics and pointed out biblical facts, these two whipped out the "you are being disrespectful" and "you offend me"card. Well, believers offend and disrespect me for being offended by rational critique. How dare they mock Dawkins' and nonbelievers' intelligence!

Dawkins is proved right. If this had been a discussion on political or economic systems, or science or engineering, this issue of respect of one's views wouldn't come up. Criticism and debate would be taken for granted as the norm. Somehow believers have this insane belief that belief in invisible superheroes and superfoes, in airy fairy, namby pamby notions should be respected. And "insane" is not inappropriate a description. For what could be sane about granting respect to and withholding criticism from such extraordinary ideas that have no evidential support whatsoever? What is a mockery is the believers' supposed treasuring of truth but all the while closing off the avenues toward reaching it.

Another condition for which acupuncture is useless

2010-05-04T21:48:00.000+08:00

A systematic review of ten RCTs for labor pain showed that needling was no better than no intervention, analgesics, or sham acupuncture. Edzard Ernst, one of the co-authors said:

Labour is a good subject to study the analgesic effects of acupuncture. Our analyses show that the effects of acupuncture perceived by women are largely due to placebo. Acupuncture has many qualities that maximise placebo effects: it involves touch and is invasive and, psychologically, is attached to the mysticism of the East. Our findings are in keeping with much of the recent research on acupuncture which demonstrates that the more one controls for such confounders, the smaller the effect of acupuncture gets.

How many more RCTs and reviews will it take before quacks throw in the towel? Unfortunately, they never will however compelling and overwhelming the evidence against their claims are. As James Randi would say, they're unsinkable rubber ducks.

Stent or surgery?

2010-04-22T18:18:00.000+08:00

Two-month old news but I just heard about it. The Carotid Revascularization Endarterectomy vs. Stenting Trial (CREST) was a 9-year, multicenter, mega trial with over 2,500 patients randomized to either stenting or endarterectomy. Adjudicators of the outcomes were blinded. Results shows that placing a stent to dilate a blocked carotid artery and surgical removal of the blockage--the traditional treatment--both have nearly the same efficacy and overall safety.

The overall safety and efficacy of the two procedures was largely the same with equal benefits for both men and for women, and for patients who had previously had a stroke and for those who had not. However, when the investigators looked at the numbers of heart attacks and strokes, they found differences. The investigators found that there were more heart attacks in the surgical group, 2.3 percent compared to 1.1 percent in the stenting group; and more strokes in the stenting group, 4.1 percent versus 2.3 percent for the surgical group in the weeks following the procedure.

The study also found that the age of the patient made a difference. At approximately age 69 and younger, stenting results were slightly better, with a larger benefit for stenting, the younger the age of the patient. Conversely, for patients older than 70, surgical results were slightly superior to stenting, with larger benefits for surgery, the older the age of the patient.

You'd think that's the final word on the matter. However, in March this year the results of the International Carotid Stenting Study (ICSS) came out. ICSS is a multicenter mega trial with over 1,700 participants randomized to either stenting or endarterectomy. As in CREST adjudicators of outcomes were blinded. Unlike CREST the objective of the European study did not include comparison of efficacy, only safety. Researchers found that surgery is safer overall. Incidence of stroke, death, procedural myocardial infarction, and risk of any stroke and all-cause death were all lower in the endarterectomy group. The three heart attacks that occurred during stenting were all fatal, while all four that occurred during endarterectomy were nonfatal. On the other hand,

There was one event of cranial nerve palsy in the stenting group compared with 45 in the endarterectomy group. There were also fewer haematomas of any severity in the stenting group than in the endarterectomy group.

Possible reasons for the difference in findings: the ICSS employed only symptomatic patients (ie., those who've had minor strokes or transient ischemic atttacks) while CREST included both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients; unlike ICSS, CREST limited itself to physicians who had a "high degree of proficiency and safety."

95% of chiropractic sites make unsubstantiated claims

2010-04-21T23:33:00.000+08:00

On the heels of Simon Singh's victory, we have the following assessment of chiropractors' claims on the Internet by Ernst and Gilbey.

RESULTS: We found evidence that 190 (95%) chiropractor websites made unsubstantiated claims regarding at least one of the conditions. When colic and infant colic data were collapsed into one heading, there was evidence that 76 (38%) chiropractor websites made unsubstantiated claims about all the conditions not supported by sound evidence. Fifty-six (28%) websites and 4 of the 9 (44%) associations made claims about lower back pain, whereas 179 (90%) websites and all 9 associations made unsubstantiated claims about headache/migraine. Unsubstantiated claims were made about asthma, ear infection/earache/otitis media, neck pain, CONCLUSIONS: The majority of chiropractors and their associations in the English-speaking world seem to make therapeutic claims that are not supported by sound evidence, whilst only 28% of chiropractor websites promote lower back pain, which is supported by some evidence. We suggest the ubiquity of the unsubstantiated claims constitutes an ethical and public health issue.

Ethical and public health issue. What good can we expect from quackery?

Ruse gives Church a two thumbs down

2010-04-19T13:34:00.000+08:00

Philosopher Michael Ruse isn't exactly a fan of the Four Horsemen even as he is very much against creationism and its current evolutionary descendant Intelligent Design. Apparently, however, the continuing revelations of sexual abuses and cover-ups in the Catholic Church has pushed Ruse into Dawkins' camp, at least in the matter of wishing for the the Fall of the Catholic Church.

Richard Dawkins, wrote a highly emotive piece for the Washington Post, in which he derided the present pope and expressed glee and satisfaction that such a person was now leading the Catholic Church. In Dawkins's judgment, not only was this no less than the Church deserved, but such leadership could only hasten the Church's demise. I thought at the time that Dawkins was over the top and wrong. I now think that he was right and that it was I who was wrong. Let me say at once that, unlike Dawkins, I don't necessarily want to see this as the end of religion or even of the Catholic Church in some form. I stress that although I cannot share the beliefs of Christians, I respect them and applaud the good that is done in the name of their founder. But I do now think that as presently constituted, the Catholic Church is corrupt and should be eradicated.

Great to hear that even a critic of "New Atheism" (I have problems with that term) sees how depraved the Church is.

The spinal manipulators have backed down

2010-04-16T00:15:00.000+08:00

The British Chiropractic Association (BCA) has dropped its libel case against Simon Singh. They thought they could intimidate and silence Simon and criticism of chiropractic by suing. Well they took on the wrong guy. Taking the matter to court backfired. Not only has the BCA managed to train the spotlight on them, they've unwittingly initiated moves to reform English libel laws.

Congratulations, Simon!

It's World Dilution Delusion Awareness Week 2010

2010-04-14T17:06:00.002+08:00

Replace "Dilution Delusion" with "Homeopathy."

Yes, folks, homeopaths are actually celebrating awareness of their 200-year delusion this week. And as others have already done, I'm all for enlightening the yet unaware about what homeopathy really is. Instead of introducing it let me direct you to these fabulous resources:

Segment from Richard Dawkins' 2007 TV series Enemies of Reason
Talk by James Randi
Homeopathy: The Ultimate Fake, by Dr. Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch
Prof. Robert Carroll's comprehensive article

Edzard Ernst, former homeopath who practiced for many years and is the first Professor of Complementary Medicine in the UK, along with science writer Simon Singh have this to say about homeopathy's effectiveness:

We suggest that you ignore the occasional media hype and instead rely on our conclusion, because it is based on examining all the reliable evidence - and the evidence suggests that homeopathy acts as nothing more than a placebo. For this reason, we strongly advise you to avoid homeopathic remedies if you are looking for a medicine that is more than just make-believe. [Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst, Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial, Bantam, 2008, p.140-141]

I just went to the Cochrane Library and found a handful of systematic reviews of homeopathy: attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder or hyperkinetic disorder, chronic asthma, dementia, induction of labour, adverse effects of cancer treatments. The authors conclude that the evidence is either absent, insufficient or unconvincing.

On January 30 2010 hundreds of brave souls in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US went out on the streets and overdosed on a variety of homeopathic pills. Unfortunately for quackery, none of them died, and no one came down with even a tummy ache. Well, that's the point of the whole 10:23 campaign--to show the world that homeopathic preparations--particularly the allegedly most potent ones--contains no active ingredients.

In February 2010 the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee released Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, a report in which it unequivocally stated that there is no evidence for homeopathy and recommended that the government cease supporting its use.

In October 2009 I wrote about homeopathy in the Philippines. Just an excerpt from that blog entry:

In the Nux vomica oral drops some of the substances are watered down to D1000. How dilute is a D1000? If you had one drop of active ingredient and were to dilute it in one go you'd have to mix that single drop with 10¹⁰⁰⁰ (remember, that's "1" followed by a thousand zeros) drops of water or alcohol. How much is 10¹⁰⁰⁰ drops? That's equivalent to 6.5 × 10⁹⁹² cubic meters [see Note 1]. And just how large is that? Well, it's more than the size of our universe. In fact a lot bigger. If a bucket were the size of the universe you'd need 7.7 trillion buckets to end up with 6.5 × 10⁹⁹² m³ [see Note 2]. After mixing (if you can even imagine achieving that) you can scoop a volume as large as the Earth or the Sun or the Milky Way and the chances of finding a single molecule of the active ingredient would still be exceedingly infinitesimal.

Matt Parker writing in TimesOnline has another illustration of how utterly diluted homeopathic remedies are:

To put homeopathy in a medicinal context, if you wanted to consume a normal 500mg paracetamol dose you would need ten million billion homeopathic pills. Where each pill is the same mass as the Milky Way galaxy. There is actually not enough matter in the entire known Universe to make the homeopathic equivalent of a single paracetamol pill.

The funny thing about these dilutions is that if you remove the labels of two vials containing different high potency homeopathic preparations there is no way homeopaths can distinguish one from the other.

While homeopaths are living in dreamland, the homeopathic industry is an investor's dream.

Somewhere near Lyon, France, sometime this year, officials from the French pharmaceutical firm Boiron will slaughter a solitary duck and extract its heart and liver--not to appease the gods but to fight the flu. The organs will be used to make an over-the-counter flu medicine, called Oscillococcinum, that will be sold around the world. In a monetary sense, this single French duck may be the most valuable animal on the planet, as an extract of its heart and liver form the sole "active ingredient" in a flu remedy that is expected to generate sales of $20 million or more. [US News]

Imagine that. Companies can package pure water and lactose (in pill form), stick a variety of labels on the bottles, market water and sugar pills as having therapeutic efficacy for a host of conditions, make a killing, and get away with it legally!

If that got your goat as it did mine then the following should give you a much needed shot of endorphins. Here are comedians Mitchell & Webb parodying homeopathy and other quackery.

So be aware of homeopathy. And make sure to tell others to be wary of it. It's bizarre. It's bunk. It's bogus. It's balderdash.

Crime and punishment

2010-04-14T10:13:00.000+08:00

Well, it's about time someone from the inside spoke up and call for The Rat's resignation.

It's not just a matter of command responsibility; Ratzinger ordered the cover up of sexual abuses! This sleazeball has no business leading an organization which touts itself as a moral authority. I'm with Dawkins and Hitchens. Book this depraved geezer and try him.

Something's very wrong when they can't tell the difference

2010-04-13T15:35:00.000+08:00

Take a cup of consecrated host and another cup of unconsecrated ones. Pour their contents into a jar, put the lid on and mix well. Now ask the Pope, cardinals, and bishops to sort the wafers. Quite patently, they won't be able to. Both chanted over and untransubstantiated crackers look, feel, taste, weigh, and test exactly the same.

Take ten new empty vials from the same production batch and in a class 1 cleanroom fill nine of them with triple distilled water. Using the same batch of distilled water, using new and ultra clean beakers/flasks and pipettes/droppers, and in the same clean 1 room, proceed to make a 30X homeopathic remedy. Doesn't matter what type so long as you end up with a 30X dilution (that is, the amount of active ingredient is 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). In a double-blind test have homeopaths determine which vial is the homeopathic dilution. They can use whatever instrument, equipment, machine, and laboratory they want. Have this test performed many times. You can bet that as more trials are done, homeopaths' performance will converge toward 1X--they will get it right 10% of the time, which is the probability of being right by chance alone.

Being a fan of James Randi I naturally tend to look at weird and pseudoscientific claims from the perspective of testing them in a controlled fashion. Prof. Chris MacDonald on the other hand looks at homeopathy from the point of view of business and consumer protection. Although he doesn't believe it to be so, for the sake of argument he assumes that homeopathy actually works. He then asks,

How do we detect phoney homeopathic preparations? In order to protect consumers, we need to be able to detect fake remedies — fake versions (sold by counterfeiters) that are really just inert look-alike copies of genuine remedies. In an age of international trade and Internet-based pharmacies, phoney pills are a big problem. So, is there any way to test a homeopathic preparation to verify that it is genuine? If I buy homeopathic tablets, is there any test that can be done to see if they’re real or counterfeit? If authorities suspect a criminal organization of selling fake homeopathic tablets, how can they tell the difference between the criminal organization’s tablets and those manufactured by an honest homeopathic pharmacy?

I'd very much like to hear the dilutionists' answer to this as well.

Repeat after me: Sham = placebo

2010-04-13T11:19:00.001+08:00

Yesterday I mentioned Linde et al.'s 2009 Cochrane review and how the authors noted that having needles anywhere on the skin is as effective as sticking them in the "official" acupuncture points. Here's a recent news item on their eureka discovery:

The researchers conducted two sets of tests on patients with chronic migraine pain. In one test, acupuncture needles were applied in strict adherence with established practice. But in the other test, the needles were inserted either in the wrong positions or else the needles did not penetrate the skin at all.

And as the authors concluded: "Collectively, the studies suggest that migraine patients benefit from acupuncture, although the correct placement of needles seems to be less relevant than is usually thought by acupuncturists."

Lead author Klaus Linde explains these results:

Much of the clinical benefit of acupuncture might be due to non- specific needling effects and powerful placebo effects, meaning selection of specific needle points may be less important than many practitioners have traditionally argued.

Well that's a clarification/qualification I'm more comfortable with. Noting that the observed reduction in headaches are due to "non-specific needling effects" and "powerful placebo effects" calms me down.

Let's be clear that the placebo group is there for comparison. If and when the experimental group does not perform any better than the control group then the conclusion ought to be: the modality under test isn't effective. If acupuncturists tell us that the needles should break the skin and that certain points need to be manipulated instead of others in the the treatment of condition X, and if the sham procedure does not meet these criteria, and if there is no statistically significant difference in the results between the two procedures then the conclusion is simple: acupuncture doesn't work.

Sure, we can do a comparative test of placebos and find out which are comparable to placebo X and which elicit placebo effects better than others. But let's keep in mind that they're placebos.

The picture that's coming out of acupuncture studies is that needling anywhere and even jabbing without penetrating the skin (unbeknownst to the particpants of course) all elicit similar or the same effects. One wonders then whether touching, pinching, fondling, scratching, spanking, "hickey-ing," licking, tapping, ... would likewise trigger the same. The only problem is blinding the participants as to which procedure they're receiving. I would guess, however, that being kissed, licked, and fondled by persons the participant finds "interesting" would have much greater, uhh, clinical benefit than being poked with needles.

A journalist for science

2010-04-13T01:11:00.000+08:00

Michael Specter of the New Yorker talks about how science is essential, how the antiscience sentiment is misplaced.

Best line: We run away from Big Pharma and leap into the arms of Big Placebo.

Chinese studies now to be taken with a ton of salt

2010-04-13T00:29:00.000+08:00

It's worse than I thought. The problem of publication bias in China is nothing compared to this.

Ghostwriting, plagiarizing or faking results is so rampant in Chinese academia that some experts worry it could hinder China's efforts to become a leader in science.

...

"Academic fraud, misconduct and ethical violations are very common in China," said professor Rao Yi, dean of the life sciences school at Peking University in the capital. "It is a big problem."

...

Fang Shimin, an independent investigator of fraud, said he and his volunteers expose about a hundred cases every year, publicizing them on a Web site titled "New Threads." "The most common ones are plagiarism and exaggerating academic achievement," Fang said.

WHO not to be trusted with review of CAM

2010-04-12T18:30:00.001+08:00

In Pricks I posted a list of diseases that according to Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist Shenrong Liu are some of the conditions which the World Health Organization (WHO) says are treatable by acupuncture. Here's the complete list from the WHO website. WHO lists the diseases/symptoms/conditions under four categories: 1.those for which acupuncture has been proved to be effective. 2. those for which the therapeutic effect of acupuncture has been shown but for which further proof is needed. 3. those for which there are only individual controlled trials reporting some therapeutic effects. 4. those for which acupuncture may be tried provided the practitioner has special modern medical knowledge and adequate monitoring equipment.

1. Diseases, symptoms or conditions for which acupuncture has been proved-through controlled trials-to be an effective treatment:

    Adverse reactions to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy
    Allergic rhinitis (including hay fever)
    Biliary colic
    Depression (including depressive neurosis and depression following stroke)
    Dysentery, acute bacillary
    Dysmenorrhoea, primary
    Epigastralgia, acute (in peptic ulcer, acute and chronic gastritis, and gastrospasm)
    Facial pain (including craniomandibular disorders)
    Headache
    Hypertension, essential
    Hypotension, primary
    Induction of labour
    Knee pain
    Leukopenia
    Low back pain
    Malposition of fetus, correction of
    Morning sickness
    Nausea and vomiting
    Neck pain
    Pain in dentistry (including dental pain and temporomandibular dysfunction)
    Periarthritis of shoulder
    Postoperative pain
    Renal colic
    Rheumatoid arthritis
    Sciatica
    Sprain
    Stroke
    Tennis elbow

2. Diseases, symptoms or conditions for which the therapeutic effect of acupuncture has been shown but for which further proof is needed:

    Abdominal pain (in acute gastroenteritis or due to gastrointestinal spasm)
    Acne vulgaris
    Alcohol dependence and detoxification
    Bell’s palsy
    Bronchial asthma
    Cancer pain
    Cardiac neurosis
    Cholecystitis, chronic, with acute exacerbation
    Cholelithiasis
    Competition stress syndrome
    Craniocerebral injury, closed
    Diabetes mellitus, non-insulin-dependent
    Earache
    Epidemic haemorrhagic fever
    Epistaxis, simple (without generalized or local disease)
    Eye pain due to subconjunctival injection
    Female infertility
    Facial spasm
    Female urethral syndrome
    Fibromyalgia and fasciitis
    Gastrokinetic disturbance
    Gouty arthritis
    Hepatitis B virus carrier status
    Herpes zoster (human (alpha) herpesvirus 3)
    Hyperlipaemia
    Hypo-ovarianism
    Insomnia
    Labour pain
    Lactation, deficiency
    Male sexual dysfunction, non-organic
    Ménière disease
    Neuralgia, post-herpetic
    Neurodermatitis
    Obesity
    Opium, cocaine and heroin dependence
    Osteoarthritis
    Pain due to endoscopic examination
    Pain in thromboangiitis obliterans
    Polycystic ovary syndrome (Stein-Leventhal syndrome)
    Postextubation in children
    Postoperative convalescence
    Premenstrual syndrome
    Prostatitis, chronic
    Pruritus
    Radicular and pseudoradicular pain syndrome
    Raynaud syndrome, primary
    Recurrent lower urinary-tract infection
    Reflex sympathetic dystrophy
    Retention of urine, traumatic
    Schizophrenia
    Sialism, drug-induced
    Sjögren syndrome
    Sore throat (including tonsillitis)
    Spine pain, acute
    Stiff neck
    Temporomandibular joint dysfunction
    Tietze syndrome
    Tobacco dependence
    Tourette syndrome
    Ulcerative colitis, chronic
    Urolithiasis
    Vascular dementia
    Whooping cough (pertussis)

3. Diseases, symptoms or conditions for which there are only individual controlled trials reporting some therapeutic effects, but for which acupuncture is worth trying because treatment by conventional and other therapies is difficult:

    Chloasma
    Choroidopathy, central serous
    Colour blindness
    Deafness
    Hypophrenia
    Irritable colon syndrome
    Neuropathic bladder in spinal cord injury
    Pulmonary heart disease, chronic
    Small airway obstruction

4. Diseases, symptoms or conditions for which acupuncture may be tried provided the practitioner has special modern medical knowledge and adequate monitoring equipment:

    Breathlessness in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
    Coma
    Convulsions in infants
    Coronary heart disease (angina pectoris)
    Diarrhoea in infants and young children
    Encephalitis, viral, in children, late stage
    Paralysis, progressive bulbar and pseudobulbar

Just counting those in categories 1 & 2 there are a total of 91 conditions that WHO claims to be treatable by acupuncture. That by merely sticking needles in various points on the skin can treat such a wide range of diseases and conditions is already suspect. So we shouldn't be surprised that the WHO review is rather flawed. According to Singh & Ernst the WHO committed two major errors in their review. First, WHO set the bar too low for clinical trials it admitted as evidence. "[T]he WHO had taken into consideration almost every trial ever conducted, because it had set a relatively low quality threshold." And so low quality trials (which are more prone to producing positive findings) skewed the review. Secondly, WHO included a large number of studies from China. This wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that "careful statistical analyses of all the Chinese results ... demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that Chinese researchers are guilty of so-called publication bias." We saw the evidence for this bias in our survey of the studies by Vickers et al., Pan et al., and Tang et al. Given the low admission threshhold and the fact that published Chinese studies are more biased against negative results, the WHO review cannot but come to a very positive conclusion of acupuncture. Garbage in, garbage out. As if that's not enough to weaken the review, the report was "drafted and revised by Dr Zhu-Fan Xie, who was Honorary Director of the Institute of Integrated Medicines in Beijing, which fully endorses the use of acupuncture for a range of disorders." This conflict of interest is more reason to be suspicious of the WHO's glowing findings. [Singh & Ernst p.71-73]

Let's now compare the WHO report with the studies by the Cochrane Collaboration. Why Cochrane? Well, because it's committed to "adhering to the principles of evidence-based medicine" [Singh & Ernst p.74].

The Cochrane Collaboration is practically obsessed with producing high quality, unbiased reviews, given that quality and the avoidance of bias are as important in conducting reviews of trials as they are in conducting the trials themselves. In fact, the organization will not add a review to its database that does not comply with its voluminous set of regulations and safeguards, the most important of which from our perspective is that the quality of the trials must be factored into a succinct, bottom-line conclusion. [W]hile organized medicine might be susceptible to accusations of bias toward CAM, the Cochrane Collaboration is not. The entire reason for the organization's existence is to provide the public and the medical profession with unbiased assessments of what works and what does not work, and it takes this mission very seriously. [Bausell p.202]

The comparative analysis is pretty straightforward. I first searched for all Cochrane reviews with "acupuncture" in the title. I then culled those reviews which had matching diseases/conditions in the WHO report. The results are summarized in the table below. Note that I did not include any findings for electroacupuncture or other forms other than manual needling. And I was tendential toward results for real versus sham acupuncture rather than other types of controls. To my mind the only way to know whether acupuncture is in fact not merely a placebo is to compare it with the results of blinded sham needling.

Disease/Condition	WHO category	Cochrane Collaboration review
Depression	1	"We found insufficient evidence to recommend the use of acupuncture for people with depression. The results are limited by the high risk of bias in the majority of trials meeting inclusion criteria." [source]
Headache	1	"[T]he available evidence suggests that acupuncture could be a valuable option for patients suffering from frequent tension-type headache." [source] Note: this review is for tension-type headache.
Induction of labor	1	"There is insufficient evidence describing the efficacy of acupuncture to induce labour." [source]
Low back pain	1	"The data do not allow firm conclusions about the effectiveness of acupuncture for acute low-back pain. For chronic low-back pain, acupuncture is more effective for pain relief and functional improvement than no treatment or sham treatment immediately after treatment and in the short-term only." [source]
Nausea and vomiting	1	Acupuncture did not reduce the proportion of acute vomiting from chemotherapy. [source] Note: this review is for chemotherapy-induced nausea or vomiting "Compared with sham treatment P6 acupoint stimulation significantly reduced: nausea ...; vomiting ..., and the need for rescue antiemetics." [source] Note: this review is for post-operative nausea and vomiting.
Neck pain	1	"There is moderate evidence that acupuncture relieves pain better than some sham treatments, measured at the end of the treatment ."[source]
Rheumatoid arthritis	1	"From the little evidence that there is, acupuncture does not appear to improve the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis." [source]
Stroke	1	"There is no clear evidence of benefit from acupuncture in acute stroke." [source] "There is no clear evidence of the effects of acupuncture on stroke rehabilitation." [source] "There is not enough evidence to make any conclusion about the therapeutic effect of acupuncture for dysphagia after acute stroke." [source]
Tennis elbow (lateral elbow pain)	1	"There is insufficient evidence to either support or refute the use of acupuncture (either needle or laser) in the treatment of lateral elbow pain." [source]

Bell's palsy	2	"The quality of the included trials was inadequate to allow any conclusion about the efficacy of acupuncture [source]
Bronchial asthma	2	"There is not enough evidence to make recommendations about the value of acupuncture in asthma treatment." [source] Note: this review is for chronic asthma.
Cocaine dependence	2	"There is currently no evidence that auricular acupuncture is effective for the treatment of cocaine dependence." [source]
Female infertility	2	"The data from this meta-analysis suggests that acupuncture does increase the live birth rate with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment when performed around the time of embryo transfer. However, this could be attributed to placebo effect and the small number of trials included in the review." [source]
Insomnia	2	"The small number of randomised controlled trials, together with the poor methodological quality and significant clinical heterogeneity, means that the current evidence is not sufficiently extensive or rigorous to support the use of any form of acupuncture for the treatment of insomnia." [source]
Osteoarthritis	2	"Sham-controlled trials show statistically significant benefits; however, these benefits are small, do not meet our pre-defined thresholds for clinical relevance, and are probably due at least partially to placebo effects from incomplete blinding." [source]
Schizophrenia	2	"We found insufficient evidence to recommend the use of acupuncture for people with schizophrenia." [source]
Tobacco dependence	2	"Acupuncture and related therapies do not appear to help smokers who are trying to quit." [source]
Vascular dementia	2	"There is no evidence from randomized controlled trials to determine whether acupuncture provides any effect when treating people with vascular dementia." [source]

Irritable bowel/colon syndrome	3	"There is no evidence to support the use of acupuncture for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome." [source]

In the above table the only conditions for which Cochrane reviews found evidence of efficacy are tension-type headache, neck pain, short term relief of chronic low back pain, and nausea and vomiting (but not those that are chemotherapy-induced). Of the nine conditions in the table above which according to the WHO are most certainly treatable by acupuncture (category 1), only four are supported by Cochrane reviews and even then the evidence is far from overwhelming.

While the Cochrane review for acupuncture for IVF does say there is evidence in its favor, the authors are cautious given the small number of trials. More importantly that 2007 review has to be tempered by the large RCT by So et al. (2009) employing 370 participants, which found that "placebo acupuncture was associated with a significantly higher overall pregnancy rate when compared with real acupuncture." In other words, real acupuncture is no better than sham. Moreover, a meta-analysis of 14 clinical trials having a total of 2670 subjects published in 2010 by Cheong et al. found "no evidence of benefit in the use of acupuncture during assisted conception." Thus, none of the category 2 conditions listed in the table have any good evidence in their favor.

Although only a minority of the diseases/conditions in the WHO report have corresponding Cochrane reviews the trend is apparent--Cochrane reviews paint a much sober picture of acupuncture's effectiveness. Except for some four conditions, there is currently a dearth of good evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture. This is further drummed in when we consider the fact that the findings of other Cochrane reviews of acupuncture which have no matching conditions in the WHO report are all negative:

Uterine fibroids: "There is no reliable proof of effectiveness of acupuncture for uterine fibroids due to lack of randomized controlled trials up to now."
Migraine prophylaxis: "There is no evidence for an effect of 'true' acupuncture over sham interventions, though this is difficult to interpret, as exact point location could be of limited importance."
Epilepsy: "The current evidence does not support acupuncture as a treatment for epilepsy."
Glaucoma: "At this time, it is impossible to draw reliable conclusions from the available data to support the use of acupuncture for the treatment of glaucoma."
Shoulder pain: "There is not enough evidence to say whether acupuncture works to treat shoulder pain or whether it is harmful."
Restless legs syndrome: "There is insufficient evidence to determine whether acupuncture is an efficacious and safe treatment for RLS."

One would think that this blunder by the WHO is an isolated case. Unfortunately, it seems that CAM has a special place in its heart. In 2005 the British medical journal Lancet reported that

a draft report on homoeopathy by the World Health Organization says the majority of peer-reviewed scientific papers published over the past 40 years have demonstrated that homeopathy is superior to placebo in placebo-controlled trials. Furthermore, it says that homoeopathy is equivalent to conventional medicines in the treatment of illnesses, both in humans and animals.

Looks as if the WHO yet again made no effort to separate chaff from grain and instead admitted any Tom, Dick and Harry study into their review of homeopathy.

We're talking about the World Health Organization here. This is suppose to be an organization which has the health of the human population in mind. Needless to say, it ought to promote and suggest treatments that work, treatments that are backed up by good science and good evidence. Patently, there is no good scientific rationale undergirding acupuncture and homeopathy. And the best evidence at hand refutes them.

There may be hope, however. In 2009 as a response to an open letter by the Voice of Young Science network WHO officials came out stating that WHO does not recommend homeopathy for the treatment of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and diarrhea in infants. While laudable, I'd rather hear them announcing that the WHO does not recommend homeopathy for any and all conditions.

An interesting aside:

In the above Cochrane review of acupuncture for migraine prophylaxis, Linde et al. posit a strange hypothesis. Given that there was no statistically significant difference between real and sham acupuncture the authors muse that the "exact point location could be of limited importance," that "correct placement of needles seems to be less relevant than is usually thought by acupuncturists." What they seem to be saying is that sham acupuncture is as therapeutic and efficacious as real acupuncture. In the above study by So et al. the authors also make a similar a comment after finding that sham performed significantly better than real needling: "Placebo acupuncture may not be inert." Dr. Steven Novella has this to say:

It is just a form of special pleading to argue after a negative trial that placebos work also. In this study the authors are left trying to justify the conclusion that placing the needles in the “correct” locations had a disadvantage over placing them in random locations, which would also mean that expertise in acupuncture is a disadvantage.

One wonders how Linde, So, and their team members would react if after a new drug fails to perform any better than the placebo control the authors of the trial hypothesize that the placebo they employed may not be inert.

----

References:

R. Barker Bausell. Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Oxford Press, 2007.
Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst. Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial. Bantam, 2008.

Pricks

2010-04-11T17:06:00.001+08:00

What do you call a treatment modality that is effective against a gamut of human diseases including Bell's palsy, arthritis, post stroke paralysis, sciatic pain, neuralgia, migraine headaches, insomnia, dizziness, neck and shoulder and back pain, anxiety disorders, depression, mood swings, asthma, colds, flu, allergies, bronchitis, sinusitis, hypertension, angina pectoris, arteriosclerosis, anemia, acute/chronic diarrhea, constipation, indigestion, gastritis, ulcers, irregular/painful menstruation, PMS, hormonal imbalance, infertility in men and women, menopausal symptoms, UTI, prostatitis, bladder/kidney dysfunction, sexual dysfunction, fatigue, tinnitus, diabetes, immune deficiency, debilitating disorders, bed-wetting, seizures, tobacco and alcohol addiction?*

It's called a panacea. Some, including myself, would describe it as snake oil.

Now think of a tested and proved treatment, whose biological/biochemical mechanism is supported by, among others, in vitro studies, which is able to address all of the above conditions. If there is one, I'm all ears.

Let's look at some of the most common proven treatments. Because of their "wonder drug" nature antibiotics immediately spring to mind. But even they are only effective against bacterial infections not viral, and each antibiotic has its limits as to which species it can lick. Worse, antibiotics are limited by the fact that evolution favors those freaking bugs eventually outsmarting our weapon of mass decimation. The sheer number of bacteria and their extremely fast reproductive cycles means selection forces can act within years instead of millennia and longer. So as life-saving and indispensable as antibiotics are, they still cannot address anything beyond bacterial infection.

Of course there's a slew of other drugs such as statins, NSAIDs/analgesics/antipyretics, SSRIs, H2 blockers and proton pump inhibitors, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, anticoagulant/antiplatelet drugs, insulins, ... Yet none of them claim to be able to treat the above encyclopedia of diseases. (Even SSRIs whose efficacy is controversial aren't claimed to be effective against infections, asthma, diarrhea, etc.; in fact they may have adverse side effects)

What about surgery? Well, obviously there is a whole range of surgical procedures depending on the disease/condition one is addressing. Heart surgery obviously is not going to cure a fractured tibia nor will any doctor in his right mind even suggest it. Kidney transplant does nothing if one has healthy kidneys and a brain tumor. Angioplasty certainly isn't called for if one has appendicitis or diabetes or anxiety disorders or infertility or anything in the above litany except for (certain) blockages in arteries.

Now mull over whether drugs and surgery are sensible and how plausible they are. Penicillin for instance was discovered by accident in one experiment--where a mold gate-crashed and screwed up a bacterial party. Further in vitro experiments confirmed the action of penicillin. And you can do such petri dish experiments for the current trove of antibiotics and show how they can in fact mess up the colony. Of course just having a chemical kill a dishful of bacteria tells us nothing about how it will do in the human body. Isopropyl alcohol will kill a multitude of microbial species too. But there are good reasons doctors don't prescribe isopropanol for internal use. And so you perform animal studies and clinical trials to ascertain both efficacy and, more importantly, safety at the effective dosages.

All drugs including antibiotics are chemicals. So are food, water, and air. So are hemlock, ricin, botox, and poison ivy. The body is a chemical factory. So it stands to reason that ingesting a chemical or getting it intravenously can and may have an effect on the body.

The action of a host of surgical procedures is common sense. If you place a stent in a blocked carotid artery which restores the diameter of that pipe then obviously you address the constriction and improve blood flow. You can even measure the before and after flow rate using ultrasound. Transplants are just as common sense. They're a direct analogue of parts replacement in machines. Excision of tumors also makes sense, particularly when that tumor is putting pressure on surrounding tissues. Removal of that feckless appendix specially when it's become a bloated home for a million pathogens is just as sensible.

So at least with these common treatment modalities, none of them claim to address a broad sweep of unrelated disorders. And all of them have a physical/biological/biochemical even common sensical basis for how they work and how they are suppose to treat disease.

But there is (at least) one modality that boasts of actually being able treat that long roster of conditions above. And that's acupuncture. A short introduction to the theory behind acupuncture:

In TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), the body is seen as a delicate balance of two opposing and inseparable forces: yin and yang. The concept of two opposing yet complementary forces described in traditional Chinese medicine. Yin represents cold, slow, or passive aspects of the person, while yang represents hot, excited, or active aspects. A major theory is that health is achieved through balancing yin and yang and disease is caused by an imbalance leading to a blockage in the flow of qi. Yin represents the cold, slow, or passive principle, while yang represents the hot, excited, or active principle. According to TCM, health is achieved by maintaining the body in a "balanced state"; disease is due to an internal imbalance of yin and yang. This imbalance leads to blockage in the flow of qi. In traditional Chinese medicine, the vital energy or life force proposed to regulate a person's spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health and to be influenced by the opposing forces of yin and yang. (vital energy) along pathways known as meridians. Qi can be unblocked, according to TCM, by using acupuncture at certain points on the body that connect with these meridians. Sources vary on the number of meridians, with numbers ranging from 14 to 20. One commonly cited source describes meridians as 14 main channels "connecting the body in a weblike interconnecting matrix" of at least 2,000 acupuncture points.

For illustrations of these meridians go here, here and here among others.

Could "meridians" be just a fancy name for the network of blood/lymph vessels or the nervous system or muscle groups or some other system within the body? Apparently not. Meridians are a completely different phenomenon from anything we currently know of human anatomy. Thus, if we dissect a cadaver and look for meridians, we can mince the whole corpse, but neither we nor acupuncturists will be able to find these channels. You can take a microscope or any other instrument and examine every square micron of the body internally and externally and you won't see these meridians nor will you discover what they're made of. They're not made of nerves, vessels, muscles, or any tissue. We can't see them via dissection or fMRI, X-ray, ultrasound, CAT scan, PET scan, etc.

Dissecting human cadavers was taboo in ancient China [Shapiro p.50, Ernst & Singh p.52]. Needless to say back then they didn't have anything remotely close to any of our imaging technology. So how did the Chinese "know" of the existence of meridians thousands of years ago? They didn't. They merely came up with the idea of a network of energy or vital force conduits and happily took it for granted and passed on the "therapeutic" tradition and its supposed mechanism of operation down the generations.

And what about the vaunted energy form called qi? What kind of energy is this: chemical, mechanical, thermal, electromagnetic, nuclear? Or is it some new form which the ancients knew about but which scientists have been unable to discover? How do you measure this energy? What instruments can be used to detect it? Energy has to come from somewhere. What produces qi? And since energy dissipates where does qi go? We know human biochemistry pretty well. Our energy comes from chemical reactions made possible through the food, water and oxygen we take in. What metabolic processes are involved? It seems these questions can't be answered. Qi is some "energy" that can't be detected, or perhaps can be detected but only subjectively--not unlike the "human energy field" which touch therapists claim to be able to detect. But then 9-yr old Emily Rosa's study--published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association--effectively debunked the claim of practitioners--mostly nurses--that they can sense this energy field. So is qi yet another imagined phenomenon which would be equally debunked if subjected to a blinded test of detection? Will another 9-year old to put an end to thousands of years of nonsense?

There are meridians which can't be seen, qi which can't be objectively detected or quantified. And then there are postulated mechanisms of cure which make little sense: Disease is said to be caused by blocked or unbalanced qi, and acupuncture is the method by which the flow of qi is unblocked or rebalanced. What does unblocking and rebalancing qi mean biologically, physiologically, etc.? What are the physical, physiological, biochemical processes involved? What happens at the cellular level? Can this unblocking, rebalancing of the undetectable qi be detected and measured?

The onus of proof is of course upon those who make the claim for the existence of new postulated phenomena. But no evidence has been provided. On the other hand, we've been looking inside the human body for centuries. And since the last century we've been scanning it too.We've also measured signals coming from it. But meridians and qi are nowhere to be found. Which naturally leads to the question: How then do today's acupuncture proponents know that meridians and qi are not just human constructs, that they in fact have empirical reality? What's the difference, for instance, between unseen channels that conduct some force or energy (poorly and vaguely defined as they are) and unblocking and rebalancing that energy and the claim that all human disorders are caused by undetectable gremlins in the brain and that realigning gremlin aura in a particular way cures the person of their disease? Neither meridians nor gremlins can be found, neither qi nor auras are detectable much less measurable, neither unblocking/rebalancing qi nor realigning auras have been shown to actually occur. These phenomena have no existence beyond the crania of their proponents. Acupuncture (as is our gremlin theory of disease) is pseudoscientific from the git go.

Even some acupuncturists have already given up providing tangibility to these concepts. A brochure by the China Acupuncture Health Center in Westford, Massachusetts, for instance, admits, "you can't look at [qi] under a microscope, you can't detect it with any scientific instrument. You cannot isolate it in any form or substrate" [Shapiro, p.48]. Just like invisible gremlins and their aura. Felix Mann, founder and president from 1959 to 1980 of the (British) Medical Acupuncture Society, is most explicit and forceful about the nature of these ancient concepts:

Acupuncture points, in the traditional sense, do not exist.... Meridians, in the traditional sense, likewise do not exist. [Mann p.3-4]

Some [researchers] have tried to find acupuncture points or meridians by measurement of the electrical skin resistance. Those with a microscope have tried to find specialised structures in the skin or subjacent tissue. Those who have the use of infra-red photography, Kirlian photography or ultrasound have all diligently searched for the elusive acupuncture point. Some have been "successful" and have described their findings in journals.

If only these researchers had realised that the traditional acupuncture point does not exist! [Mann, p.5]

The meridians of acupuncture are no more real than the meridians of geography. If someone were to get a spade and tried to dig up the Greenwich meridian, he might end up in a lunatic asylum. Perhaps the same fate should await those doctors who believe in meridians. [Mann p.31]

Given how 1. there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of meridians and qi, 2. there is hardly any scientific rationale for how needling the skin can produce the plethora of claimed therapeutic effects, and 3. acupuncture is claimed to be a panacea, with the ability of treat infectious diseases, psychiatric, reproductive, gastroenterological, musculo-skeletal, respiratory, ... disorders, the prior probability that it is an efficacious therapy is extremely low. Even prior to testing and conducting trials there is no good reason to believe that acupuncture should work, anymore than chiropractic manipulation of the spine or pinching various points on the butt will cure the said litany of diseases.

In fact acupuncture can be likened to that other pseudoscience--chiropractic. It postulates a phenomenon of subluxation or misalignment of the spine. As with blocked qi, subluxations are said to be the cause of diseases. And while needling can unblock and rebalance qi, spinal manipulation can correct subluxations and cure the patient of his ailment. Just a needling is a panacea, realignment of the backbone is touted to be a cure-all.

So can pin pricks treat the host of disorders mentioned above? We should be most skeptical that they can.

----

* This list of diseases comes from a pamphlet by Shenrong Liu, an acupuncturist who has a master's degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine from the Academy of Chinese Culture & Health Sciences in Oakland, California. She is (or was) a Chinese Medicine Physician in China and has been in practice for 20 years. She's currently practising TCM in the Philippines. In her pamphlet she writes, "According to the United Nation's World Health Organization, over seventy diseases can be treated effectively with acupuncture, including the following:" The above list of diseases then follows.

----

References:

Edzard Ernst & Simon Singh. Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial. Bantam, 2008.
Felix Mann. Reinventing Acupuncture: A New Concept of Ancient Medicine, 2ed., Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000.
Rose Shapiro. Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All. Harvill Secker, 2008.

The lighter side of science

2010-04-10T21:14:00.001+08:00

Watch science comedian Brian Malow here and here. Just an example from his repertoire of bar jokes:

Some helium gas drifts into a bar. The bartender says, "We don't serve noble gases in this bar." The helium doesn't react.

What a gas! Malow's jokes I mean.

And to add to his wonderful collection here's my own contribution:

A DNA molecule walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We don't serve double helices in this bar." The DNA immediately turns around and splits.

Why studies from China should be taken with a sack of salt

2010-04-08T00:00:00.005+08:00

Nothing new in what follows. Actually the studies I cite below are all over five years old. Just that of late I've been in a discussion with a doctor (an MD) who's also an acupuncturist and the topic of publication bias came up. We both agree that Chinese studies are suspect. But then he makes the simplistic claim that studies in the West are also guilty of the same bias. True enough that those in English-speaking countries are also afflicted with publication bias. But just as corruption is more prevalent in some countries than in others so too is publication bias. There is a difference in degree. And this isn't just a prejudice. There is evidence showing that this is a bigger problem among Chinese studies.

For instance, a 1998 systematic review by Andrew Vickers et al. ("Do Certain Countries Produce Only Positive Results? A Systematic Review of Controlled Trials") showed that 100% of acupuncture studies from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam were positive while of those from English-speaking countries 60% from the UK, 53% from the USA, and 30% from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were positive [Bausell p.170]. Furthermore,

when Vickers and his colleagues repeated the analyses with a much larger sample of trials involving treatments other than acupuncture (most of which involved conventional medical treatments), they basically came up with the same results: 98 percent of conventional Chinese trials produced positive results, as did 97 percent of Russian trials [Bausell p.169]

In their 1999 "Review of randomised controlled trials of traditional Chinese medicine" Jin Ling Tang et al. noted that besides reporting inadequacies, small trial sizes, limited use of blinding, inappropriate controls (use of a control treatment which in itself has not been shown to be efficacious), etc., there was a preponderance of positive findings among the RCTs which may be attributable to publication bias:

Most trials claimed that the tested treatments were effective, indicating that publication bias may be common; a funnel plot of the 49 trials of acupuncture in the treatment of stroke confirmed selective publication of positive trials in the area, suggesting that acupuncture may not be more effective than the control treatments.

Zhenglun Pan et al. in "Local Literature Bias in Genetic Epidemiology: An Empirical Evaluation of the Chinese Literature" have this to say:

Chinese studies typically suggest much stronger genetic effects than non-Chinese studies, and this may be even more prominent for the few studies that reach PubMed. Although Chinese studies are smaller than non-Chinese studies and thus even more underpowered, surprisingly half of them reach formal statistical significance for the evaluated gene-disease association. This exaggeration is seen across very diverse topics.

The larger genetic effects in Chinese studies are unlikely to reflect genuine heterogeneity in the effects of genetic risk factors across various "racial" descent populations. Heterogeneity due to ancestry should not have led always to larger effect sizes in all probed gene-disease associations. Therefore, the most likely explanation is publication bias against "negative" results or other selection biases in the chase for statistically significant findings. This explanation is further supported by our analysis of the expected number of statistically significant findings. Even if the average genetic effects in the Chinese studies were indeed as large as those observed, one would expect far fewer Chinese studies to have reached formal statistical significance on their own, given their small sample sizes. The alternative explanation that Chinese investigators may be targeting high-risk populations with particularly strong genetic effects is unlikely given these data.

In his November 22, 2005 PLoS article "Selection Bias in Meta-Analyses of Gene-Disease Associations" JL Tang comments on the above study by Pan et al:

In their study published in this issue of PLoS Medicine, Pan and colleagues compared genetic studies conducted in mainland China with those from other places. The researchers identified 12 gene-disease associations and compared a total of 161 Chinese studies and 309 non-Chinese studies. The Chinese studies were on average smaller in sample size than non-Chinese studies and appeared in the literature a few years after the first non-Chinese studies. Chinese studies in general reported a stronger gene-disease association and more frequently a statistically significant result. These two characteristics were more likely to occur in Chinese studies identified through PubMed than in those accessible only locally.

These findings suggest a variation or heterogeneity in the strength of the gene-disease association (often expressed in an odds ratio) observed between Chinese and non-Chinese studies. These studies are primarily case-control studies. Many factors may contribute to the variation in the estimate of odds ratio across such studies, such as the genetic make-up of the population studied, the type of patients included, the selection of controls, the quality of the study design, and the quality of the laboratory work. These factors could lead to either over- or under-estimation of the true odds ratio. However, it is difficult to conceive that any single factor, or combination of these factors, could consistently cause the exaggerated odds ratio in Chinese studies in all the topics (gene-disease associations) examined by Pan and colleagues. Selective publication is therefore a very likely and worrying explanation for their findings.

Selective publication can cause publication bias, which in turn could lead to false gene-disease associations in meta-analyses. It would be a disaster if a genetic screening program (in which healthy people are tested for a gene and offered a treatment if they test positive) were based on such a false association. Even if such a false gene-disease association were only subjected to further related investigations, this would be a waste of valuable resources for medical research.

Selective publication of positive studies in China and a few other Asian countries has been observed in clinical trials of acupuncture. However, selective publication by no means exists in only the Chinese literature. It is probably a common phenomenon in the entire field of biomedical research. Given the fact that positive studies are more likely to be published than negative ones, and given the pressure on researchers worldwide to publish in indexed journals (especially in international journals with high impact factors), selective publication is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. As compared with English-speaking countries, selective publication is perhaps more likely to occur in non-English-speaking countries where there are a small number of indexed journals to publish local studies.

That last line bears repeating: "As compared with English-speaking countries, selective publication is perhaps more likely to occur in non-English-speaking countries where there are a small number of indexed journals to publish local studies."

----

Reference:

R. Barker Bausell. Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

A dozen apples a day will likely not banish cancer risk away

2010-04-07T14:43:00.000+08:00

Just in: An analysis by Paolo Boffetta et al., (Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Overall Cancer Risk in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition) concludes that there is "a very small inverse association between intake of total fruitsand vegetables and cancer risk." The study used data from over 142,000 men and 335,000 women who had a high intake of fruits and vegetables.

Apparently, this mega prospective analysis supports the findings of previous studies:

In an accompanying editorial, Walter C. Willett, M.D., Dr.P.H., of the Harvard School of Public Health, notes that "this study strongly confirms" the findings of other prospective studies that high intake of fruits and vegetables has little or no effect in reducing the incidence of cancer, although it has been shown to affect the risk of cardiovascular disease.

That last point has to be emphasized. Just because eating more fruits and vegies has negligible impact on cancer risk doesn't necessarily imply it's worthless or doesn't have significant consequences for other conditions.

Courts of science vs courts of law

2010-04-03T00:02:00.000+08:00

Just learned from Andy Lewis of Quackometer that General Electric had sued Danish radiologist Henrik Thomsen for supposed inuendo concerning GE's MRI contrast drug Omniscan. Apparently GE did not like what Thomsen had to say about their product even if he was merely expressing safety concerns given that there was reasonable evidence to be wary of Omniscan. GE had a taste of its own medicine when Thomsen countersued. The giant probably didn't expect that. Well, last February GE had a change of heart and change of mind and dropped its libel suit. What the heck was it thinking in the first place when it tried to silence Thomsen?!

As you may know, journalist and author Simon Singh had also been sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over his use of "bogus" in the April 19 2008 edition of the Guardian.

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

The judge who heard the case sided with the BCA. Singh appealed and after a costly battle a celebration is in order. Yesterday, the judges presiding over the appeal dealt a coup de grace to BCA's breathtaking inanity.

Among other things in their decision is this:

We would respectfully adopt what Judge Easterbrook, now Chief Judge of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, said in a libel action over a scientific controversy, Underwager v Salter22 Fed. 3d 730 (1994):
"[Plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying 'character assassination!', silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiffs' interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation. … More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models – not larger awards of damages – mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us."

So we've had both quacks and Big Pharma try to stifle critique by enlisting the courts. But as Easterbrook says scientific matters are not settled through litigation. Science has its own courts for arriving at the truth.

A god who can do anything is nothing

2010-03-27T13:31:00.000+08:00

From Massimo Pigliucci, biologist and philosopher:

[Can God make a mountain so heavy he can't move it?] If you answer “yes,” it looks like god can do something that he cannot undo, which means that he is not, after all, omnipotent. If you respond “no” then you are immediately acknowledging a limit to what god can do, so again it turns out that he is not omnipotent. Try getting out of it, you’ll either laugh all the way to your logic class (if you are an atheist) or get a really bad headache (if you are a theist). (The funniest variation of the paradox is due to that immortal philosopher, Homer Simpson: “Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?”)

It would seem, then, that an omnipotent god is a logical impossibility. Since logical impossibilities are stronger than physical and contingent impossibilities, it follows that there cannot be such a thing as an omnipotent god. Oops. So the next time someone says something as inane as “anything is possible,” ask them about the paradox of omnipotence: you will kill two birds with one stone, showing both that not anything is possible and that the most common type of god worshiped nowadays is a contradiction in terms. Then go out for a drink to congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Of Batmen and Supermen

2010-03-23T14:46:00.000+08:00

In Batman whenever the help of the caped crusader is needed the commissioner or chief of police would switch on a huge searchlight which illuminated the clouds with the bat symbol. In minutes the hooded man in black would be at the scene giving likewise hooded men a taste of his knuckles. Superman, without contest a far superior bloke, on the other hand has no walkie talkie or cell phone or anything with which he could be reached. As luck would have it, he's there at just the right moment to foil bank robbers or save the citizens of his city and the world.

There is a need for superheros of course. Just look at the number of criminals who're able to get away with their dastardly deeds. Think of the number of lives that needn't be lost or wouldn't be traumatized if we had Batmen and Supermen. Imagine the wars we won't need to fight because a flying human, impervious to bullets and bombs, and with the strength of a thousand bulldozers could nip a greedy general's ambitions. Imagine how oppressive regimes would be a thing of the past given the deterrent factor that superheros would bring to the world. It's a kind of deterrence that no ICBM can offer.

Humans are prone to fantasizing. We all daydream. We all run imaginary scenarios in our heads. We visualize. We all have hopes. While these are abilities which distinguish as from other species and have allowed wondrous works and discoveries to be made, it is not without its drawbacks. Often we are unable to distinguish reality from fiction. We go overboard and begin wholeheartedly believing in the reality of ideas that we have drenched our minds with or ideas that have been handed down to us via family and culture. We can fail to apprehend that human constructs such as superheros are just that--imagined beings born out of our fervent hopes for Justice and Freedom and Liberty and Peace, hopes for a utopian society.

Yet more than such lofty yearnings, there are more immediate needs that Batman and Superman serve. They swoop down and catch the child who accidentally plunges down Niagara Falls. They rescue the passengers of a plane that's been sabotaged by terrorists. They divert missiles headed for the heart of the city. Saving lives is the primary job of a superhero. We need them to keep us from harm. The survival instinct is so strong in us that during those times when the end is imminent, when we are powerless to change our fate, we call upon and implore them to yank us out of the jaws of death.

One such crisis:

[H]eavy rains and zero cloud visibility forced the landing of the chopper carrying Legarda and five others in Sariaya, Quezon yesterday.

...

Legarda's chopper was forced to land at a vacant lot at the Avalon Subdivision, Barangay Sto. Cristo, Sariaya, at around 12:30 p.m. after hovering around Sariaya for several minutes because of dark clouds and heavy rains.

Legarda started praying the rosary, given by healing priest Fr. Fernando Suarez, when they spotted the open field.

"We were battered by the heavy rains and strong winds. It's fortunate we found the spot," she said. "Thank God that he spared us from danger and I thank the people here in Barangay Sto. Cristo who went to our rescue. Inaamin ko na nagkaroon ako ng kaba. (I admit I got nervous)."

In desperate situations, fearing death, sensing doom, the likes of Loren Legarda reach out to their superheros. No cell phone required. No searchlight need be turned on. A whisper uttered or mere thought addressed to the savior is all that's needed: "Help me." The supernature of her hero guarantees the missive will be received instantly.

Humans are fallible, most fallible. Humans are weak--feeble minded and psychologically fragile. The desire for superheros is an order of magnitude far stronger than the imperative to face reality at all costs.

For the Legardas of the world supersaviors are not mythological. They are very real--not because they've seen their heroes, not because they are as tangible as the ground into which the chopper will smash, but because these superbeings without question exist in their minds. Existence in the head is all the Legardas, Ratzingers, Suarezes need in order to feel and know that their superhero is out there somewhere ready at their beck and call to come to their rescue.

And if Superman fails to appear? There are a thousand and one reasons for his absence, but certainly not because he is a figment.

And so God the superhero is real. He's alive and lives in the billions and billions of neurons that orbit a star in a galaxy called the Milky Way.

A multi-reincarnated bad-energy busting hypnotherapist

2010-03-22T10:44:00.001+08:00

Alice McCall is a psychologist who I think you may agree needs to have her head examined before she merrily goes off examining others'.

McCall said she discovered her own past lives in 2000 and used her knowledge when diagnosed with breast cancer. Through regression therapy, McCall says she learned of her past lives, dealt with unresolved issues and was healed of her cancer.

Since then she has gone on to help others discover their own past lives and facilitate healing of physical and mental maladies.

“I don’t go looking for them, they just come up during hypnotherapy,” she said.

As for her own lives, McCall knows of more than 15, possibly more than 20. She says she once was a high priestess and leader of a mystic school in Egypt during the time of the pyramids.

Hey, if she was a priestess, then I was King Tut. Just to make it very clear, Dr. Hawass, I own that pyramid in the desert, ok?

McCall is one heck a woowoo. Apart from her two dozen or so former lives, she talks of "negative energy" which she claims makes us "malfunction." She practises "holistic" healing--which usually translates to "a mish mash of treatment options, however wacky, ridiculous, untested, or disproved they may really be."

In her website she talks more about this bad energy.

The basic premise behind Alice McCall's energy healing is that when you hold on to a strong negative thought or emotion, it can be buried in your body. The memory of it is held in your cell as a negative, dark dense energy.

Whoa! Dark, dense energy trapped in our cells. She must talking about mitochondria, right? And "negative" ATP in those power plants, right? (A type of energy which the hundreds of thousands of biologists and biochemists have somehow missed in the last hundred years of study). Or could she be alluding to dark energy in the cosmos? Or ultra high gravity black holes perhaps?

So how do you counter cytologically-entrenched evil energy? Why you turn to sky daddy of course. Thus, McCall uses "God-based" energy healing to "remove blocks of dense, negative energy at the cellular level."

I didn't even bother checking out everything on Alice's site. It's a Wonderland and the rabbit hole I can tell is pretty deep.

Another quack, another crank. Isn't there an agency in Florida that can restrain this nutcase from treating the sick?

One of the best ads I've seen

2010-03-19T10:25:00.001+08:00

Off topic. But just have to share this.

This medicine doesn't work unless...

2010-03-18T09:28:00.003+08:00

I just received a free sample of a new super antibiotic in liquid form called Panbiocin. According to the person handing it out it is effective against every known pathogen--bacterial and viral. This is astounding to say the least since conventional antibiotics are effective only against certain bacteria and antibiotics are useless against viral infections. So I took home the sample bottle and read the label more carefully. Well, I got the surprise of my life. Right there below the brand name it states:

ATTENTION: THIS ANTIBIOTIC DOES NOT REALLY TREAT INFECTIONS. IT IS YOUR FAITH IN ITS CURATIVE POWERS THAT WILL INACTIVATE MICROBES. WITHOUT FIRMLY BELIEVING IN ITS EFFICACY, PANBIOCIN IS USELESS.

You are encouraged to make a trip to the heart of the Amazon rainforest where the active ingredients for this incredible medication is made from. Being in the midst of Mother Nature and the very flora that go into this antibiotic promotes faster healing. Chanting "I am getting cured, I am getting cured!" when taking Panbiocin has also been shown to increase its effectiveness.

What's even more amazing is that Panbiocin is said to be effective in any concentration, such that it can be endlessly diluted and still possess the same potency. Thus, the manufacturer suggests:

Should you wish to share Panbiocin with friends and family simply add a drop to a gallon of clean, boiled water and mix thoroughly. Bottle the resulting dilution and distribute freely. Tell the recipients that they too can do the same and produce more of the product. Remember, it is not the antibiotic that cures, it is your unwavering belief in its healing powers.

At the back of the bottle users are encouraged to send in their success stories:

If you or someone you know is satisfied with this product please send your story to the email or postal address below. We broadcast positive testimonials to those who suffer from all kinds of infections to give them hope and show them that Panbiocin can cure all manner of bacterial and viral diseases.

A most incredible product indeed. And unlike homeopathic remedies, concentration/dilution does not affect its potency. The one thing that the label fails to mention, however, are the side effects. It's a heuristic in medicine that the more powerful the drug, the more powerful its side effects are as well.

On another front I need to mention that I had heart surgery last month. Before going under the knife the surgeon explained to me the nature of the operation in complete detail including how effective it is, what he and his team will be doing, what my chances were, and possible post-op complications. He then asked me to sign a waiver. Among other things, the 500-word document included the following clause:

I, the undersigned, fully understand that the coronary surgical procedure I am about to undergo is COMPLETELY USELESS, that it has been shown to have NO therapeutic benefit over and above sham heart surgery, and that only my belief in its efficacy confers it any chance of effectiveness. I hereby expressly agree that any failure or lack of complete success of the procedure to cure my condition shall be attributed to dearth or paucity of faith (belief) on my part, and that neither doctors nor staff nor this hospital shall be accountable for such failure.

Yeah, I signed it of course given how I had and still have complete, absolute trust in my surgeon and in his procedure of choice. Hey, look, I'm alive today, right? Time to mail in my success story.

I don't think anyone is gullible to the point that they would believe either of the treatment claims above. Well, I should hope not. Both are fictitious, of course. The point of churning out such ludicrous therapeutic claims is that the one coming right up isn't made up at all. Journalist Bernardo V. Lopez wholeheartedly believes it. Hermie Santos believes it. The nuns of the Religious of the Virgin Mary (RVM) believe it too. And those who flock to the Mother Ignacia Healing Ministry compound in Novaliches in search of miracle healings blissfully join the bandwagon.

Couple of weeks back I found out that the Mother Ignacia Healing Ministry is giving away free healing oil via snail mail. Peachy! How could I resist. Today I received the oil endowed with supernatural curative powers. The cloth inside the ziplock bag is 1.5 x 1.25 inches in size and is soaked in some odorless oil. (My camera has been on the blink so the image quality is poor.)

From what I've read, the Ministry claims the oil mysteriously appeared on the floor of their chapel late last year. They couldn't explain how it got there. In one video (6:45min into it), a nun speculated that the ceiling might have a leak but then cursory ocular inspection ruled this out. Happening in the chapel, the nuns couldn't help looking for significance in the drops and puddles of oil. It happened in a place of worship and a healing center so the sisters mused that the oil could be for healing. Sure enough when Sister Raquel Reodica, the resident miracle healer, applied it on the sick some claim to be healed.

What I'd dearly want to do is to be able to get hold of her bottle of healing oil (without anyone knowing of course) and replace it with canola, hydraulic, or some other oil. Bet we'll get the same "healing" results statistically.

Early this year the Ministry began making the healing oil available for free upon request. Which of course made me wonder how they can possibly have enough of the oil from the floor to accommodate the, I imagine, hundreds if not thousands of requests.

When I requested for the oil my plan was to send it to a laboratory for analysis to find out what it's made of. Could it be some compound unknown to 21st century chemistry? Some exotic chemical which destabilizes and decomposes at room temperature but miraculously doesn't in this case? Or would it be discovered to be extra virgin olive oil for salads?

A computer printed letter accompanied the oil-drench cloth. Here are images of that document.

Here's the full transcript.

HEALING OIL GUIDELINES

Dear recipient of healing oil,

PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THIS "HEALING" OIL DOES NOT REALLY HEAL. IT IS JESUS HEALING PEOPLE THROUGH THIS BLEST OIL, A MATERIAL OR PHYSICAL MEDIUM SIMILAR TO THE SACRAMENTS, I.E. WATER FOR BAPTISM OR SALT FOR CONFIRMATION. WITHOUT PRAYER OR FAITH, THE OIL IS USELESS. IT CANNOT HEAL.

YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO MAKE A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HEALING CENTER, IF YOU CAN, WHERE THE OIL MYSTERIOUSLY APPEARED. YOU CAN ACHIEVE HEALING BETTER THIS WAY. YOUR PILGRIMAGE IS A FORM OF POWERFUL PRAYER AND SACRIFICE. YOU ARE ALSO ASKED TO SHARE THE OIL WITH OTHERS, ESPECIALLY THE TERMINALLY SICK AS YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THE HEALING MINISTRY. FOR DIRECTIONS AND SCHEDULES, GO TO - www.sisterraquel.com

First step is to read the background and history about the oil so you understand the healing process. go to the link http://www.sisterraquel.com/2010/02/announcement3-%E2%80%93-blogsite-library-links/

Put emphasis in praying and strengthening your faith rather than just thinking the oil will heal you. As soon as you receive the oil, before you apply it on yourself or the sick, all present must pray together to Jesus the healer while touching the oil container. Put yourselves in the presence of Jesus and thank Him for bringing the oil to you. Then ask Him for healing. Ask for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Mother Ignacia del Espiritu Santo, foundress [sic] of the congregation of the Religious of the Virgin Mary or RVM, of which Sister Raquel Reodica is a member. Sister Raquel invokes Mother Ignacia in her healing prayer. DO NOT APPLY THE OIL WITHOUT PRAYING. Only after praying should you apply the cloth with oil on the part of the body which is sick, breast, forehead, abdomen, etc., preferably while saying "Jesus, Jesus" and "Mary, Mary" continuously. For non-Catholics who do not pray to Mary, pray to Jesus directly. Again, without prayer, the oil is useless. It cannot heal. Only Jesus heals.

There are only 14 drops of oil on the cloth you received, to avoid leaks in the mail. So that you do not run out of oil and you can share with others, Sister Raquel suggests you wash and dry a small empty perfume bottle, put the healing oil cloth you received by mail in it, and mix it with ordinary baby oil until it is full. Optional but recommended, have your local priest bless it. If you distribute the oil to friends, do the same thing, put oil on a small woolen cloth in a small zip lock bag or small bottle and let the recipient add baby oil into it and have it blessed. Make a photocopy of this document and give to all you give the oil to.

The oil you receive comes from the tabernacle lamp of the adoration chapel, which is constantly replenished as many pilgrims are allowed to take some. This lamp, which has an eternal flame, mysteriously overflowed and created a large pool of oil on the floor on November 6, 2009, a First Friday. On that day, nine lines of oil appeared in an orderly equidistant line on the floor from the back of the chapel to the altar. The oil was wiped over by a towel and applied to the sick, many of whom were healed, some instantly. To view or download photos of the healing oil, go to the link http://www.sisterraquel.com/2009/12/poster37-40-mysterious-oil-and-cloud-at-healing-center/

The oil you received was blessed by Fr. Teo[filo], healing center chaplain, and by Sister Raquel. It was offered at the healing fountain of the same adoration chapel where many have been healed. It was offered to the Blessed Sacrament, Holy Child, Sacred Heart, Blessed Virgin, Mother Ignacia, St. Therese of the Flower, Padre Pio, and St. Michael the Archangel at the healing center before it ready [sic] to be given away.

If you or someone is healed by the oil, please report this to the email address below, so that it is included in the ministry archives. These testimonials are broadcasted to desperate terminally-sick [sic] people to give them hope and to make them understand that nothing is impossible for Jesus the Healer. eastwind@motherignaciahealingministry.com

The healing oil you receive is given free. The ministry spends for postage cost. There is no need to give a donation. However, if you still wish to make a donation, no matter how small, and participate in the healing ministry, please send by postal mail any amount 1) outside the Philippines, international money order in dollars pay to HERMIE SANTOS, 8 Dockery Drive, West Orange, NJ 07052, U.S.A.; 2) in the Philippines, deposit cheque or cash at the nearest Bank of the Philippines Islands branch to BPI Savings Account No. 0086-3992-84 in the name of BERNARDO V. LOPEZ. In both cases, email Mr. Santos at hermie.santos@verizon.net or Mr. Lopez at the eastwind email address above that you have sent or deposited your donation. You will get a reply once the donation is received.

Please visit our website www.sisterraquel.com/ and subscribe as member if you are interested in 1) asking for prayers for the sick sent to our prayer warrior group with worldwide members; 2) receiving regular notices of the ministry's healing guides and inspirational materials, such as youtubes, powerpoints, prayer-poems, testimonials.

Given the above text I now believe having the oil analyzed is unnecessary. The "healing oil" I received is most probably lamp oil, either spilled or fresh from the dealer, and "blessed by Fr. Teo[filo], healing center chaplain, and by Sister Raquel." The Ministry admits the oil did not actually have miraculous origins--it didn't even condense out of thin air. Instead the oil comes from the tabernacle lamp. You gotta give them a thumbs up for honesty. The oil reservoir they say "mysteriously overflowed and created a large pool of oil on the floor." "Mysteriously"? Wonder if they bothered checking for a cracked or leaky container. I'd also like to have a word with the guy who tops up the lamp's fuel tank. And since visitors are allowed to take oil home, a video of what happened the day before the pools of oil appeared may be revealing. Here is a screenshot of what may be the oil lamp (9:37min into the video) in question.

Apparently, oil has been seen on the floor on at least two occasions--September 25 and November 6, 2009*. Though I haven't found an admission, the Sept. 25 oil spill probably has something to do with the tabernacle lamp oil as well.

As with the makers of Panbiocin, the Ministry is adamant that "THIS 'HEALING' OIL DOES NOT REALLY HEAL." Rather it's a 2000-year old corpse that actually makes you well: "IT IS JESUS HEALING PEOPLE THROUGH THIS BLEST OIL." So how do we get the zombie to cure us through the nonhealing oil? Beseeching and believing: "WITHOUT PRAYER OR FAITH, THE OIL IS USELESS. IT CANNOT HEAL." So the oil by itself does not possess curative powers. But if one prays and has faith that can move the whole Himalayan mountain range, do we still need the oil? Can't we just pray and believe till we're blue? Can't Jesus heal directly without the use of chemicals? You can bet that miracle healer Benny Hinn et al. would belt out a Yeah, baby, yeah! Then again, if Jesus can heal directly, who needs Hinn & Co.?

And as in the case of Panbiocin, the oil can be also diluted--in this case with baby oil--and still retain its full potency, not least because as they warn the oil does not really heal. Chances are--and the Ministry might cautiously agree--you can use sunflower oil, peanut oil, motor oil, ... instead of mineral oil and it shouldn't make a difference. The Ministry may even approve of a Vitamin E enriched healing oil. Or what about a rose scented oil to please Doctor Jesus? We can even use that famed panacea--virgin coconut oil (VCO)--and in teaming up with the supernatural endow it with even more magical powers. I'm sure Doc Jesus will bless the Philippines for using indigenous products.

As for claims of healing, need it be said that all the Ministry can show are testimonials? One story is not proof. A thousand anecdotes ain't evidence. Certainly not when the cherry picker shamelessly tells us to send in only happy stories:

If you or someone is healed by the oil, please report this to the email address below, so that it is included in the ministry archives. These testimonials are broadcasted to desperate terminally-sick [sic] people to give them hope and to make them understand that nothing is impossible for Jesus the Healer.

Well, if I count only my hits and ignore my failures, then I'm an A student in all subjects from kindergarten to university, a genuine psychic, a top marksman, numero uno in the diagnosis of illnesses and electronic faults, ....

Finally, having watched Bernardo Lopez's videos and having corresponded with him, I can only say that he is utterly deluded and has not a single critical bone in his frame. For instance, in his latest videos (12A and 12B) he totally believes in the power of prayer. His reason? Post hockery. He recalls and makes known only those instances when a desired outcome came after the nuns prayed and ignores those instances when prayer was not followed by a desirable outcome (we know this because the nuns pray everyday). Yes, Lopez is the Ministry's resident cherry picker. And then of course there are the testimonials he features. On the flimsiest and hyper unreliable kind of evidence he is persuaded that indeed the people in his videos have been cured of their ailments and that the oil or Sister Reodica or prayer or a zombie or what have you is what cured them. Non causa pro causa. Amen.

Lopez is older than I am. He's probably in his 50s or 60s. And yet there is something rather intellectually sophomoric about him. I don't know if he knows this but he shared a tidbit that might shed light on his mental/intellectual constitution:

i have a very strong faith
which is from the heart
you are arguing from the mind
intellectual plain
i am not there

And that segues onto the matter of his writing style in our correspondences which both irked and puzzled me at first. In each of the seven emails I received each line is less than 10 words. I initially thought the short lines was a quirk of his email software, that it was adding a carriage return (yeah I'm from the typewriter days) automatically. Only later did it dawn on me that he was deliberately writing in verse form. Duh! Artistic? I say crank. The obsessively, fanatically religious all are.

----

* In this video, Bernardo Lopez says oil appeared on November 26, 2009 which according to him is a First Friday, which can't be since Nov. 26 was a Thursday. Furthermore the photos he shows are those of the Nov. 6 oil appearance. In all probability he just made a booboo and actually meant to say Nov. 6. In an earlier video Lopez claims oil also appeared on the floor on October 16, 2009. Strangely he does not mention this in his Inquirer article.

Falsehood in advertising pays

2010-03-12T22:00:00.017+08:00

I was at the drugstore today and while waiting for the pharmacist to bring out the medicines I saw on one of shelves behind the counter a dark green box labeled "Coldease." Well, that caught my attention because I remember a Coldease in the US that's being sold as a homeopathic cure for, well, colds. Unfortunately, it isn't homeopathic, meaning that the amount of active ingredients in the preparation is nowhere close to infinitesimal. In fact there's enough of the zinc compound to cause adverse effects, loss of smell being one of the more notorious ones.

When the pharmacist returned I asked if I could take a look at the green box. Closer examination revealed this Coldease probably isn't homeopathic at all. The pharmacist told me it's actually an herbal remedy--meaning there is an appreciable amount of the active ingredient in it and the ingredient is of course plant-based. And sure enough it is. The description said it contains, among other things, Echinacea, a plant touted, for Zeus knows how many centuries, as a treatment for colds.

I googled Coldease the moment I got home and turns out my memory was--as is usually the case--on the blink. The American "homeopathic" remedy is "Cold-Eeze," and it was through James Randi that I first heard of it. Coldease on the other hand is a brand by the Philippine pharmaceutical company United Laboratories (Unilab). I couldn't find this product on their website. Instead I found the following Coldease TV ad uploaded by Unilab on their Youtube channel. According to the info they provide the ad was produced in late 2009. In the video Unilab boasts Coldease can "help stop a cold before it starts." But can Echinacea--presumably the major active ingredient in Coldease--in fact stop a cold before it occurs?

Studies, systematic reviews and meta-analyes of trials have come to conflicting conclusions. The National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) tells us:

Study results are mixed on whether echinacea effectively treats colds or flu. For example, two NCCAM-funded studies did not find a benefit from echinacea, either as Echinacea purpurea fresh-pressed juice for treating colds in children, or as an unrefined mixture of Echinacea angustifolia root and Echinacea purpurea root and herb in adults. However, other studies have shown that echinacea may be beneficial in treating upper respiratory infections.

Most studies to date indicate that echinacea does not appear to prevent colds or other infections.

On the other hand, a 2007 meta-analysis by Shah et al. published in the British medical journal Lancet found that "Echinacea decreased the odds of developing the common cold by 58% and the duration of a cold by 1.4 days." However, in June 2008, Craig Coleman, one of the authors of the meta-analysis, in reply to a letter, wrote in the Lancet:

I agree with Andreas von Maxen and Peter Schoenhoefer that the studies on echinacea included in our meta-analysis are heterogeneous in their methodological quality. We attempted to cast a broad net to see whether or not a difference in the incidence or duration of cold was evident when the whole of the literature on echinacea was summarised, but as described in our paper's conclusions, we too suggest caution in over-emphasising the results before they can be confirmed with more rigorous, larger randomised controlled trials.

Meanwhile, a 2007 Cochrane Collaboration systematic review by Barrett el al. concluded,

Echinacea preparations tested in clinical trials differ greatly. There is some evidence that preparations based on the aerial parts of E. purpurea might be effective for the early treatment of colds in adults but the results are not fully consistent. Beneficial effects of other Echinacea preparations, and Echinacea used for preventative purposes might exist but have not been shown in independently replicated, rigorous RCTs.

That such large studies and reviews come out with contradictory and cautionary results may imply that the effect size of echinacea is very small or nonexistent--that is, its therapeutic efficacy over placebo may be zero to minimal. Whatever the reason for the differences in conclusions, however, it is inadvisable to tout echinacea as effective against colds or in preventing it when the jury is still out on the matter and no definitive evidence is at hand to support a claim to efficacy.

Unilab and others who promote and market echinacea as a cold remedy are, to say the least, jumping the gun. Why not wait until there is firm, conclusive evidence that it is effective? Because when it comes to profit the end justifies the means.

The asylum known as the Vatican

2010-03-11T22:15:00.000+08:00

85-year old Father Gabriele Amorth has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for the last 25 years. He's come across some 70,000 demonic possessions. Amorth says the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Church lately is evidence that the Devil is within the Vatican itself.

Amorth also claims that a number of the possessed he's encountered "spat out nails or pieces of glass." "Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals," he says.
Well this is most interesting. If humans--whose mouths and guts are devoid of the said materials--actually can be shown to produce nails, cullet, bolts?, bullets?, lava?, flowers and what have you, then this would be a truly incredible phenomenon meriting study and investigation from a host of disciplines. Hell, this would mean that Hell might actually be real!

To kickstart the investigation I've got a suggestion. The next time Amorth rushes to exorcise a human Gatling gun, I urge him to bring along two conjurers/magicians. No need for scientists. They'll just be a hindrance. A couple of seasoned illusionists will do just fine. Let them stick around, poke around, and check out the (purportedly) possessed and the (supposed) projectiles shooting out of them. I bet you a thousand dollars they'll come back home yawning. While Amorth will continue to insist that demons and possession are as real as the brew of delusions his brain is marinated in.

When MDs fail us

2010-03-09T03:14:00.001+08:00

You'd think that doctors have had years of training and continually attend conferences and seminars such that they know which treatments/medications out there in the market work and which don't. Unfortunately, reality doesn't bear that out. Case in point: My 72-year old mom had experienced excruciating pain in the knee for about a month. When the pain failed to diminish after three days, she went to see an orthopedist who quickly diagnosed her as having osteoarthritis of the knee and made out just one prescription: 1500mg of powdered glucosamine sulfate to be mixed with a glass of water and taken once a day. My mom dutifully followed the doctor's instructions and began taking the medication in the hopes that her torment will end.

Unfortunately her doctor had prescribed something that simply wouldn't work. You see, glucosamine sulfate has already been clinically tested, and the best studies to date show it does nothing for osteoarthritis. Back in 2007 when his Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary Medicine was published, R. Barker Bausell said that the definitive study on glucosamine was one published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006. That study tested glucosamine, chondroitin, glucosamine with chondroitin, and celecoxib (an already tested and proven pain medication). The results? Except for celecoxib, all the others performed no better than placebo. In other words, glucosamine et al. were all ineffective.

Since 2006 several other studies have been done.

One 2007 study showed that glucosamine sulfate was better than placebo for knee osteoarthritis. Another 2007 study showed that glucosamine HCl and chondroitin, with or without exercise, were no better than placebo for knee osteoarthritis. Sources like the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database believe the evidence favors glucosamine sulfate but not glucosamine hydrochloride. A new study was published 19 February 2008 in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine. It is arguably the best study to date, and may shed some light on the controversy. Carried out in the Netherlands in a primary care setting, it studied 222 patients with hip osteoarthritis over a 2 year period. Half the patients took glucosamine sulfate 1500 mg a day; half took a placebo. They concluded that glucosamine sulfate was no better than placebo in reducing symptoms and progression of hip osteoarthritis.

Thus, to date, the best studies show glucosamine to be mere placebo for osteoarthritis of this and that part of the body.

When there are conflicting studies such as in the glucosamine controversy, the better studies (better means bigger trial size, better designed, more stringent controls, stricter blinding, multicenter vs single center, etc.) are of course given more weight. But supposing all the studies are of equal quality and that they're all good studies. Then the mere fact that some show that X works and some conclude that X is no better than placebo, almost certainly means that the latter conclusion is correct. Why? Because, if X actually works and works significantly better than placebo then any good study will almost surely find a statistically significant difference between X and a placebo. That some good studies find it effective and some equally good ones conclude it isn't implies that the difference between X and the control is probably small. Thus, even if all the studies for glucosamine thus far are equally good studies--they're not--then it is more likely that further studies--better ones--will show X to be no better than a lactose pill.

And here's something to think about. Glucosamine is already present in our bodies, the amount of which is far far more than the recommnded dose:

[Dr.] Wallace Sampson, one of the other authors of this blog, has pointed out that the amount of glucosamine in the typical supplement dose is on the order of 1/1000th or 1/10,000th of the available glucosamine in the body, most of which is produced by the body itself. He says, “Glucosamine is not an essential nutrient like a vitamin or an essential amino acid, for which small amounts make a large difference. How much difference could that small additional amount make? If glucosamine or chondroitin worked, this would be a medical first and worthy of a Nobel. It probably cannot work.”

Hence, my mom's orthopedist had prescribed expensive crap. If the good doctor knows this then he was intentionally prescribing a placebo--hoping the placebo effect would kick in, leading to a reduction in the unbearable pain that mom was experiencing, and/or perhaps hoping that the pain would naturally subside and that she would attribute this to glucosamine. On the other hand, if this doctor actually thought that glucosamine is effective, then he's one hell of an ignorant "expert."

The sad thing is that another doctor--a general physician--whom she consulted thereafter most confidently backed up the glucosamine prescription, and went a step further and suggested glucosamine with MSM, saying in effect it's even better. A simple check on Quackwatch reveals that MSM stands for methylsufonylmethane, and that there are few studies involving MSM, and practically no clinical trials showing MSM as efficacious against any human disease. And so this doctor's recommendation is perhaps even worse, given that efficacy and safety studies on humans at the suggested dosage levels have not been carried out.

About two weeks pass and mom's burning pain does not subside. There are days when it feels less painful and days when it's hell. But overall there has been no improvement. So off she goes to see another doctor. After examining the patient and looking at the xray he ordered, this orthopedist tells her she doesn't have osteoarthritis at all. In fact her knee joint is in excellent condition. Instead she has a nerve problem.* And he prescribes an anti-neuropathic drug as well as two anti-inflammatory medications. But before mom leaves the clinic, the good doctor advises her to also look for an acupuncturist. He says that while he can't explain how it works, acupuncture can do wonders. For instance, he's heard of performing an appendectomy using only acupuncture as the anesthetic! And acupuncture has been around for thousands of years so there must be something to it.

To say that this is disappointing to hear is an understatement. The best studies on acupuncture--those that employ the most credible sham acupuncture procedure and have the best single/double blinding--show that "needling" at the, so to speak, magical points on the body is no better than poking needles anywhere else nor is it better than pretend pricks. And of course the traditional explanation for how acupuncture works is utter nonsense (where oh where could those dang meridians be and what exactly is the nature of and what instrument can measure the qi energy that's supposedly coursing through our bodies?). Needless to say, the doctor's argumentum ad antiquitatem is an elementary error in logic. And the story of doctors using acupuncture as the sole anesthetic invites the question, How true is it? As with anecdotes of cures the story is suspect. The devil is in the details you know. Even acupuncturists in China don't have magic needles.

My mother has been to five doctors in the last two months for this pain of hers. The above three have actually prescribed CAM treatments whose efficacy has been, for all practical purposes, scientifically refuted. It seems quite clear that at least two of the above doctors don't know this.

In a recent interview, Dr. Harriet Hall, aka SkepDoc, confirms that many doctors are now prescribing/suggesting alternative remedies to their patients (pertinent quote at 27:40 min of the podcast). The truth is, just because they have "MD" trailing behind their names doesn't mean that what comes out of their mouths is biblical and true and right. Doctors are fallible. They may not be cognizant of which treatment modalities are science and evidence-based. They can enthusiastically give their patients belief-based treatments (as Dr. Hall rightly calls it). They can misdiagnose and/or mis-treat.

It's bad enough when quacks peddle snake oil and nostrums. There are enough gullible, nonskeptical, uncritical people who fall for them daily and are even prepared to defend them (self-proclaimed panacea guru Eli Edwin Casimero just keeps coming to mind). But it's much worse when licensed doctors become knowing or unwitting hucksters themselves. Since doctors are legitimate experts on disease and their treatment we seldom or rarely question their pronouncements and the scribbles they hand over to us. We take their word for it that we are going to get better if we follow their instruction and pop this and that pill three times a day.. Thus, when our physicians start prescribing nostrum, there is a good chance that we'll end up believing these "alternative" treatments to be in fact effective remedies. The onus is, of course, on them. It is their ethical responsibility to know and make sure the treatments they offer their patients have been tested safe and effective. On the other hand, it is our lives we are placing in the hands of another human being. We owe it ourselves to make sure that this person isn't putting us in danger or giving us worthless treatments. So, caveat emptor. Be a smart patient. Be critically-minded. Be scientific. Read up and check the body of evidence.

---

* This highlights yet another problem that I pointed out yesterday--that misdiagnosis is not a rarity at all. My mother went through 4 doctors before the cause of her pain was finally correctly identified. Two of those doctors had completely opposing diagnoses.

No, Marie, there is no Santo Papa's ghost

2010-03-08T01:51:00.004+08:00

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre had been diagnosed with Parkinson's.

In 2007 Simon-Pierre could barely move her left side, could not write legibly, drive or move around easily and was in constant pain. Her disease worsened after [Pope John Paul 2's] death, and her order prayed for his intervention to ease her suffering. Then after writing his name on a paper one night, she woke up the next day apparently cured and returned to work as a maternity nurse with no traces of the disease.

Mirable dictu! Well, it was wonderful to relate and was of course held as a miracle ... until the nun's disease returned.

[O]ne of the doctors charged with scrutinising the nun's case believed she might have been suffering from a similar nervous disease, not Parkinson's, which could go into sudden remission. A report on the paper's website went further, saying that the 49-year-old nun had become sick again with the same illness.

Don't you just love these post hoc ergo propter hoc stories? Mr. G rubbed a crystal on his belly for a week. On the seventh day the abdominal pain was completely gone. Hallelujah! Crystals work wonders! This should be yet another cautionary tale for anyone who's into so-called complementary and alternative medicine (SCAM) including religion-based cures. Simon-Pierre's "miracle" reminds me of a Lourdes "confirmed" miraculous healing some half a century involving a woman who had Budd-Chiari disease. Turns out doctors back then didn't understand enough of the disease to know that it could go into natural remission. The woman eventually died of the same disease. And the part about the possibility of a misdiagnosis is a big deal. Doctors and diagnostics are not perfect. Misdiagnosis is a not an infrequent event! Everyone will be led astray if we think that the person has X which is incurable when in fact he's down with Y which can go into spontaneous remission. Anything he was doing at the time of the remission will be touted as a miracle cure.

Casimero's romance with Hulda Clark

2010-03-07T21:42:00.005+08:00

I got around to checking some of Edwin Casimero's other health sites (including Fertility Help Network and Eczema Cure) and one cannot miss how he worships Hulda Clark and her zapper. In Dengue Cure, for example, he tells us that if his own children were to come down with dengue hemorrhagic fever, among the things he'd do is to use Clark's zapper which "destroys viruses via their positive electric pulsations." In Diabetes Cure Asia he plasters Clark's zany diabetes treatment which of course employs the zapper. Apparently, diabetes is caused by wood alcohol (methanol) in one's pancreas, the presence of which "attracts" the cattle fluke Eurytrema pancreaticum. As to how that parasite gets to humans and makes its home in the pancreas Casimero does not tells us.

I wouldn't be surprised if Casimero swears by Clark and her crackpot devices. Which of course makes you wonder how a computer techie like him (he's a web developer) can be duped by a patently zany quack and her bogus gizmos. Perhaps because he's not an electrical/electronics engineer? No. I think it's because he's had unfortunate experiences with doctors--the "western" ones--which made him decide to go over to the dark side (ostensibly checking his brain at the border). He is so sold on CAM and quackery that he practically doesn't ask such basic questions as, Is the principle upon which the zapper is said to work sensible and plausible? Can it really be that all cancers and most diseases have just one cause and of all the possible causes, it would be one species of parasite? Casimero has completely lost his faith in conventional medicine and now puts his trust in anything nonscientific, nonevidence-based, unconventional, and traditional. He's become not just skeptical of mainstream medicine, he's absolutely cynical. And because he and his family do need medical care from time to time, his cynicism has led him to completely embrace and promote CAM uncritically without a hint of skepticism whatsoever. Over time he's become so confident about his knowledge of disease and healing that two years ago he began offering face-to-face cancer cure consultations for PhP500.00. We can infer from this that "hubris" has not made it into this hobby healer's vocabulary. He also declares that "I am not responsible for your health unless you are my wife or my child." For someone who publicly dispenses his cure for all diseases and charges for consultations I wonder how he defines "responsible"?

Let's take a quick look at Hulda Clark and her claims. Clark earned her degree in naturopathy from Clayton College, a "correspondence school" in Alabama. Unfortunately,

naturopathy degree issued by Clayton College is not considered a valid credential by any state licensing naturopathic doctors. It is also not considered a sufficient credential to sit for the national naturopathic licensing examination (NPLX).

On the other hand, Joseph Pizzorno is the "top naturopath" in the USA. He is the founder and "president emeritus of Bastyr University, the first fully accredited, multidisciplinary university of natural medicine in the United States" and "senior editor of the Textbook of Natural Medicine, the most authoritative textbook on natural medicine currently available." So, in terms of professional prestige if not authoritativeness in the world of naturopathy, Pizzorno outdoes Clark.

In her books Clark claims that a single parasite, the fluke Fasciolopsis buski, is the cause of all cancers and a host of other diseases including AIDS, Alzheimer's, Crohn's, Kaposi's sarcoma, and endometriosis. It's strange enough that Clark would name one cause for a large number of different diseases. It's even more puzzling when it comes to light that F. buski is found only in East Asia. Pizzorno informs us:

There is no research documenting the association of F. buski with cancer or any disease other than fasciolopsiasis. Considering the well-documented level of infestation in these other [East Asian] countries, if the Clark theory was true we'd see an equally high level of cancer, which we don't.

As for the zapper Pizzorno says,

No research is presented demonstrating that the Zapper has any physiological effects, let alone ability to kill parasites or cure cancer. The claim that mild electrical shocks to the skin can eliminate intestinal parasites is, frankly, preposterous.

Even celebrity CAM meister Andrew Weil has in effect described her a crank: "No studies have backed up [Clark's] bizarre claims, and it’s unclear whether the cancer patients she’s supposedly cured ever had cancer to begin with." And the Swiss Study Group for Complementary and Alternative Methods in Cancer (SCAC) reports:

There is no scientific basis for Hulda Clark's hypotheses and recommendations, including her suggested treatments.

The parasite Fasciolopsis buskii does in fact exist, but only in Asian countries, so that an infection in our country is ruled out. Consequently, this parasite does not enter into consideration as a cause of the numerous cases of cancer in the Western countries; at most, it might be one of several causes of liver cancer (and only for this type of cancer) in the Asian countries.

As a whole, Clark's thesis cannot be comprehended, nor is it proven.

Which of course makes me wonder how Casimero could possibly have fallen for these utterly crackpot ideas. Casimero is a graduate of one of the top universities in the Philippines (University of the Philippines) which at the very least shows he has enough brains to have been accepted and make it through. So how does a person like that get taken in by a nutcase and fugitive like Clark?

Having been into both religion and various woo myself, Michael Shermer's explanation may hold a clue. Since there are not a few very intelligent people like Frank Tipler who believe in very goofy stuff, Shermer poses the question, Why do smart people believe in weird things? And his answer is,

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons. [Shermer, p.283]

So I'm wondering whether UP-bred Edwin Casimero has been able to skillfully delude himself with rationales and explanations which he finds sensible and adequate but in reality hold no water. Then again, perhaps he has simply assumed that anything outside conventional medicine must be right. Maybe he's just still too starstruck that it has not occurred to him to question the plausibility of the claims of his gurus. Or maybe, and this is an uber remote possibility, he's just too scientifically illiterate.

On the other hand, what is most certainly the case--as I have discovered through his email to me--is that he does not have a grasp of what constitutes good evidence. For him anecdotes are enough. If he's tried it or on his family members and they seem to have gotten better, then the CAM remedy must be effective--a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc mistake as I told him in my email.

Will reason get through to Casimero? Will he see the light, so to speak? Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that people who've heavily invested their head and heart and made a commitment publicly and have had the belief system for a long time are not about to suddenly have a change of heart and mind. That's the exception. Instead they will redouble their efforts and resort to rationales and self-justifications to bring back consonance. Their press release will read: Mistakes were not made and certainly not by me!

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Michael Shermer, Why People Believe in Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, Owl Books, 2002. An online excerpt is available.

Casimero's Cure Manual for All Diseases

2010-03-05T23:46:00.004+08:00

Edwin Casimero maintains the website The Cure Manual whose tagline reads, "Banish Fear from ALL Diseases. All Diseases Curable." Just from that last claim you may already be rolling your eyes. His site provides cures for a variety of illnesses.

Is Casimero a doctor? A scientist perhaps? Apparently, he has no qualification whatsoever in medicine, biology, biochemistry, or anything related to human physiology, metabolism, and disease. Instead he describes himself as a "hobby healer," which simply means healing is a hobby of his.

Nothing wrong with sharing information and educating people about health matters. But only if the said advice and treatments are backed up by good objective evidence showing to some degree of confidence that they actually work and are safe.

Unfortunately that is hardly the case with this site. Casimero has guzzled the whole pitcher of Kool Aid. He's not just knee-deep in quackery. He pretty much eats, breathes, and lives it. He doesn't believe in "western doctors" anymore. He stopped vaccinating his children because he "found out that the whole vaccination theory and paradigm was completely false." He and his wife give chiropractic for heart ailments a thumbs up. He's been through colonics. He worships such sultans of nostrum as Hulda Clark, Andreas Moritz, and Bruce Fife. He avers that "'wholistic' healers are correct" while "pharmaceutical and surgical dominant medical superstition is absolutely false." In other words conventional medicine is bunk; it's the quacks with their snake oil who are the real doctors with real cures. (About Cure Manual, About Me)

Casimero makes the following statement:

They admit themselves that they have zero cures for all the diseases of civilization. They admit they only have treatments. They admit they have only symptom alleviation / masking / coverup drugs, radiation and surgical procedures.

Firstly, who's "they"? A list of names of those who made and make the claim would be helpful. Dr. Harriet Hall has an illuminating article explaining who's treating symptoms and who's actually ferreting out the real cause and treating it.

The wonderful thing about such sweeping claims as Casimero's is that we need only provide one disconfirming instance and the claim gets debunked. In logic the classic example is: All swans are white. If we find a swan of a different color, we instantly refute the claim. So does conventional medicine have zero cures for all diseases? When was the last time you had a bacterial infection that didn't go away or couldn't have gone away on its own? Were you prescribed antibiotics? Did the antibiotic just target the symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, etc. or did it rid you of the infection? Ever since the discovery of penicillin, millions of people have been routinely cured of a host of bacterial infections. They've proven so good in fact that we have forced artificial selection on pathogenic bacteria, thus leading to the problem of antibiotic-resistant strains flourishing. So there, Casimero's claim falsified.

But bacterial infection is hardly the only condition "western medicine" is able to address. There are a host of conditions that it can treat and cure. Herniated vertebral discs which cause nerves to be pinched leading to pain in the limbs are routinely surgically remedied. If doctors merely drowned the patient with NSAIDs and other pain relievers, that would be treating only the symptom. But if the pain is caused by a herniated disc then treating the spinal problem would be going right to the cause. Casimero's claim is dealt another blow.

And what about parasitic infestation such as ameobiasis and tapeworms? What do drugs such as metronidazole, paromomycin, and niclosamide do? They rid us of the parasites. Now is that treating the symptoms or the cause? Yet another machete strike. Do we have go on hacking and mincing this mythical horse?

Ok, just one last chop. Over five years ago my brother-in-law just suddenly collapsed in a mall. Tests revealed he had colon cancer. He underwent surgery. Part of his colon was removed. Annual check ups thus far show he's cancer-free.

Casimero continues:

A doctor who says your disease has no cure has no business serving you! A doctor who says your disease has no cure does not deserve to be paid.

Perhaps Casimero can enlighten us as to what the cause of death of various deceased alternative medicine practitioners have been. What can he say of those who succumbed to diseases? For instance, what, may we ask, did Hulda Clark die of? Clark whose books include The Cure For All Cancers and The Cure For All Diseases endured a series of ailments that even she could not address, thus leading her to (occasionally) turn to, gasp!, conventional medicine--pain relievers and hip replacement. "She suffered more than she should have because she wanted to solve her problems herself." Implied is that she couldn't and wasn't able to. The guru who had all the cures couldn't cure herself. In the end she apparently died from a form of cancer. Oh, the irony.

Here's Casimero's cure for all incurable diseases. I guess Hulda Clark failed to read Casimero. If only she had been on the "right diet," had not "polluted" herself, "cleansed" and detoxified her organs, "nurtured" herself, had taken nothing but raw foods and drank not water but coconut juice, used no toiletries of any sort, she never would have had any disease whatsoever and any disease she contracted would've left her in a zippy. So fear not malaria or dengue or hemophilia or sickle cell anemia or glaucoma or ... so long as you follow Casimero's recommendations. Remember, as with Clark he has written the definitive Cure Manual for All Diseases.

One of the things I've experienced with some religious sites and blogs is that they moderate comments. They probably want to screen out spam, ad hominems, crank messages, and the like. But I found to my chagrin that besides these obvious annoyances, some of these sites never allowed my comments to be posted. No, my remarks did not contain flames or insults or gratuitous derision. They were on-topic rational critiques. Which of course leads me to believe that these sites and blogs are afraid of analyses, facts and the truth. Perhaps because allowing dissenting views and informed criticism would open the door to questioning and disillusionment. They want their readers shrouded from reality, doubt, logic even. Thus, any views or facts for that matter that rock the boat will not be permitted to appear on their site.

Well I've had the same experience with Casimero. He too has blocked what I posted on his beam ray machine article. I've learned my lesson from sites that trash my comments so I now keep a copy on my computer, at least until the comment is posted. Here's what I wrote on Casimero's page:

1. The mechanism by which the beam ray is said to work has not been determined to be true. There is no good scientific evidence that various "frequencies" can detect/treat illnesses such as internal infections/infestation.

2. There are no impartial, randomized, double-blinded, controlled clinical trials that show beam ray machines can treat diseases. Thus, no good evidence exists that these devices actually work.

3. A good number of sellers of "beam ray" devices have been convicted of fraud and other felonies. Some beam ray devices have been linked to various deaths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rife#Modern_revival.2C_marketing.2C_and_health_fraud.

4. Hulda Clark's claim that all diseases are caused by parasites has no basis in reality. Her "zapper" machines are bogus. Clark has run afoul with both the US and Mexican government for issues related to her practice of medicine. She is not licensed to treat people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulda_Clark)

Instead of publishing the above, he emailed me. Seriously, I appreciate that he did. It shows he does in some way care about the matters I raised. In his missive (which I won't copy and paste, having no permission to do so), he acknowledges my "healthy skepticism" and provides a series of positive personal anecdotes which he uses to justify his belief in the beam ray machine he's been exposed to and Hulda Clark's zapper which he purports helped save his brother's life. In answer to my statement that no RCT has been conducted to evince the efficacy of beam ray machines, he told me to finance a study myself, adding that I'll need half a billion to a billion dollars for it. I'll presume he isn't ignorant and was merely in a hyperbolic mood since even the NCCAM gets only a billion to fund a whole range of CAM studies.

I replied informing Casimero of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and how factors such as the placebo effect, natural history of diseases, regression to mean can mess up causal inferences vis-a-vis treatments. I also asked him whether he allows rational critiques on his site and if not, why? That question must've been a show stopper since I have yet to hear from him. I'm afraid that as with the religious sites I allude to above, Casimero will not allow anyone to rock his boat, lest the truth be let out of the bag and infect the minds of his readers, and perhaps family members as well. Could it be that his cure-all regimen might prove ineffective against critical thinking? And maybe, just maybe, he harbors the fear that he could be terribly wrong about CAM.

Finally, just for entertainment, here's how Casimero's site rates on the Quackometer (click for the larger image):

A full 10 Canards! Congratulations! Woo hoo!

Medjugorje prophecy looking more and more bogus

2010-03-04T22:38:00.003+08:00

A few days ago I said that I searched the Medjugorje messages from 1984-2010 for any reference to the Philippines being the global spiritual center and came up empty-handed. Since then I've received a response from the webmaster of medjugorje.ws to my inquiry on this. According to Marek over the last ten years he's read all the messages from 1981 onwards but has not come across any mention of the Philippines. Although this doesn't close the book on the claim, Marek's input heightens my confidence that the "prophecy" is just an urban legend. It could be an outright hoax, a pious fabrication, or some actual fact which after having being passed from one person to another has been embellished, edited, mangled, mistransmitted and thus mutated into what it is.

Let's just backtrack a bit and look at the claim. Bernardo Lopez, a journalist in an article in Business World over five years ago wrote:

It is reported that Our Lady of Medjugorje gave a message saying that the Philippines will one day be a global spiritual center. It is hard to imagine how a poor Third World nation, 70% of whose populace live below the poverty line, would be a spiritual mecca for an ailing world full of wars and chaos.... Is the healing ministry of Sister Raquel and the RVM sisters the first step towards fulfilling the Medjugorje message? Nobody knows.

Allison Lopez of the Philippine Daily Inquirer in December 2007 tells us, "In Medjugorje, Mary’s message was that the Philippines would one day become a global spiritual center. Was the message about Montemaria?" Bingo P. Dejaresco, in the now apparently defunct Bohol Chronicle website wrote, "A message from Our Lady of Medjugorge spoke of the Philippines to become the 'global spiritual center.' Will this become a reality soon?" And someone with the handle georgemortel13 states in his video, "After her appearances in Lourdes and Fatima, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared last in Medjugorje - leaving one prophecy for the Philippines: that the nation will become the global spiritual healing center of the world."

Bernie Lopez is affiliated with the Mother Ignacia Ministry and runs a YouTube channel under the handle eastwind7. The channel features his videos of miraculous healings by Sister Raquel Reodica and Father Fernando Suarez. Given his religious zeal, I emailed him, telling him of my failure to find the Medjugorje message that contains the prophecy and asked for his source for the report. He replied within the day and admitted that his sources were second and third hand reports and were unreliable, that if I couldn't find the message then perhaps there is no such prophecy. I was kind of surprised by his candidness and honesty. Kudos to him for not resorting to self-justification maneuvers.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But of course if the prophecy doesn't exist then quite naturally there won't be any evidence for it. The day I contacted Marek I also emailed the exact same missive to medjugorje.org, asking for information on the 1981 to 1983 messages and stating that I am looking for the message that contains the Philippines-as-spiritual-center prophecy. I have yet to hear from the site.

I'm not holding my breath on this claim. My money is on the hypothesis that it's false.

Superman's wife

2010-03-01T12:55:00.001+08:00

Former actress Elizabeth Oropesa has been practicing something called Tetada Kalimasada for the last seven years. According to her she has "X-ray eyes" which gives her the ability to see people's internal organs. Terrific! Forget MRI, CAT, PET, endoscopy, colonoscopy, angiograms, etc. Have St. Luke's Medical Center hire this human x-ray vision machine asap!

Well, not to boast, but I have a thirteenth sense which gives me the hands-down, spot-on ability to peer into people's brain even via cyberspace, without even having the person present, thus letting me know unequivocally that Oropesa is suffering from delusional disorder.

Visit the link above and read the entire article. More cranks therein talking about "energy centers" in the body. Pure gobbledygook. Test them if they even understand the string of words coming out of their mouths: Ask them to locate anatomically these energy centers and show their physiological mechanism. Ask them how they measure the so called energy and whether they use the physics unit Joules or some Never Never Land unit such as Tinkerbells. Chances are they'll duck and dodge and point to or pass the buck to even more poppycock like invisible, intangible, undetectable spiritual planes and energies.

The Suarez delusion: The continuing story

2010-03-01T00:00:00.002+08:00

You may remember Fr. Fernando Suarez the healing priest who hit the front pages a couple of years ago. Back then plans were underway to build a large shrine including a statue of the Virgin Mary taller than the Statue of Liberty on a mountain in Montemaria, Batangas. It was said that Montemaria is a special place and would become a healing center, perhaps the global ~~healing~~ spiritual center purportedly prophesied in one of the Medjugorje messages*.

But even before any makeshift chapel had been put up, people began flocking to the site to gather stones. You see, a Fr. Nap Baltazar had earlier gone to the site, sensing that it was somehow sacred, and saw the grassy area littered with stones. He gathered about a dozen of these pebbles and brought them back home with him, believing they can be used for healing, given the import of the Montemaria. Some folks began using them and experienced healing of sorts. After the news of this spread, you had all these faith-heads going up to Montemaria gathering miraculous healing stones which I presume they shared with friends and family. Since then there have been various accounts, including video testimonials, of conditions such as diabetes and cancer being treated and cured with these stones simply by rubbing them on the body.

However, on February 16, 2010 Suarez's group officially announced that plans for the said Montemaria shrine have fallen through; negotiations for the 5-hectare land have completely bogged down. Instead, the shrine will now be built somewhere in Tagaytay**. Given the specialness of Montemaria and the fact that its stones have been "proved" miraculous, it behooves us to ask whether Montemaria and its stones had ever been supernaturally special. If Montemaria was never "fated" to be the site for the shrine and healing center, what do the faithful now say about the stones? Do they admit the stones were in fact ineffective and did not have supernatural healing powers? Do they say the stones were effective and therapeutic while the illusion about Montemaria lasted but are no longer anymore? Will some cling to the belief that the stones were and will forever be miraculously therapeutic? Or would they say, as not a few have stated even before, that it is not the stones that heal but people's faith in their deity? As to this latter claim, it is interesting to note that early on some have already been saying that people don't even need to attend Suarez's healing Masses, that they can get healed simply by either praying, or watching an online video of Suarez's healing sessions, or even via cell phone text messages.

Now that Montemaria is no longer the blessed site, will newly picked stones from that mountain possess any magical powers? Perhaps people will now find the stones or some tree or the water in the new location of the shrine as possessing special magical powers. This is not unlikely since there have been some who've fantasized about Montemaria as the next Lourdes and Fatima. So be not surprised if in the coming years people begin raving about the healing waters of Tagaytay Shrine, and the sick from all over the country and the world come flocking. When that happens the government of Tagaytay will be the first to shoot me down for exposing religious quackery.

As for the advertised miraculous cures, they have not been investigated by medical experts. Presuming these testimonials are true and ingenuous, it is most doubtless that these infirmed who had rubbed the stones on their bodies experienced massive doses of the placebo effect. Think about it. These people had serious diseases which they wanted to go away, were religious/superstitious, and truly believed the stones possessed some magical powers which would cure them of their ailment. These are exactly the conditions that elicit the placebo effect. Moreover, when did these folks provide their testimonials? Well, certainly not on those days they were in pain or bedridden. Rather they gave their stories of miraculous healing at the time when they were (relatively) painless and in good spirits. Their pronouncement or videos are a snapshot in time, a frame in a movie that's months and years long. And so we should ask, Can we please see more of the movie, say, a frame from each week till the present, beginning well before the stone rubbing? Patently, if we're only given one picture and one where the patient is smiling, we're being afforded only limited and biased information. If I let you view only the video of my mom walking pain-free after acupuncture, you'd most likely be misled into believing that the acupuncture worked for her. But if I let you watch the epic length recording showing how her pain kept cycling--abating for two days and coming back to torment her for the next couple of days only to wane once again and wax and wane and... regardless of acupuncture and drugs--you'd come to a very different conclusion, right? More importantly we are not told what treatment these people had been receiving in conjunction with the stones. If I take antibiotics for a kidney infection and rub a healing stone on my lower back three times a day for ten days, I will most certainly get well. But which of the two treatments actually licked the infection? The magical stone, right? Well, that's what the superstitious will tell you since they cherry pick which events in the timeline they share with us and which one they choose as the cause of their recovery. So the question that always needs to be asked when we're treated to anecdotes and testimonials is: What haven't we been told? What crucial information have been left out? What's the whole picture? What are the biases in the information and how do we address them?

Given our current body of robust understanding of reality, what is the probability that some stone--or boulder for that matter--or tree, or pond, or what have you, possesses some magical, supernatural power that can cure such life-threatening diseases as cancer? Exceedingly infinitesimal of course. Prior plausibility for magical healing is, for all practical purposes, zero. So why would people believe in something extremely implausible? For one thing, these religionists already have implausible, irrational beliefs--deities. Deities are supernatural. They are not constrained by any laws of nature. All things are possible with gods. They're Magicians. Neither material reality, physical laws, logic, nor ethics constrain them. They transcend any and all of these. Thus, those who believe in deities with such attributes cannot but have a worldview wherein nothing is impossible and where plausibility and probabilities have no impact if not no meaning.

----

* I searched the Medjugorje messages from 1984 to 2010. There is no mention of a healing center or the Philippines. Messages from 1981 to 1983 don't seem to be available online.

** One feature of the religious mindset is how they come up with ad hoc rationalizations to deal with disconfirming events. Suarez, his group, his followers, Baltazar and his followers all "knew" that Montemaria was special. They publicized these sentiments. The stones were magical because of Montemaria's sacredness/holiness. Now that Montemaria is history, the rationalizations are pouring in. Suarez's group, Blessed Mary Mother of the Poor, Inc., has this unverifiable/nonfalsifiable excuse:

There is much pain in this decision [to let go of Montemaria], Montemaria having been our beacon and common aspiration for the last three years. However, the preferential will of God seems clear, and we must allow the Holy Spirit to lead.

Yeah, right. The know-it-all, omniscient, omnipotent, perfect god of theirs changed its mind. Do "oxymoron" and "contradiction" exist in their vocabulary? Their deity misled Suarez, Baltazar, et al. He tricked them into believing Montemaria was going to be the holy land. Either that, or these religion-intoxicated people will have to admit their sensors were totally on the blink in picking up Montemaria as their god's choice. Or, these individuals can just accept the truth--that they were completely deluded and it's time to grow up and face reality and the hard cold fact that there is no daddy and cop in the sky.

Phitenizing your qi

2010-02-28T13:18:00.004+08:00

A friend had to procure some fun run application forms over at R.O.X. in Bonifacio High Street, Global City. I tagged along and on our way out she stopped over at the display stand of Phiten products. First time to hear of Phiten and wasn't in the least bit interested in what they're offering. But a few seconds later a salesperson approached us and began explaining what Phiten was all about. Turns out they're necklaces which have titanium in them. What's so special about these thousand-buck necklaces is that the titanium alters the bio-electricity of our bodies and by wearing these necklaces the titanium is able to do something to this bioelectrical field of sorts and make us healthier.

Bio-electricity? Whoa! That must be a new scientific discovery, one that won or will win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The moment the sales rep uttered "bio-electricity" I began chuckling. As he went through his spiel, I kept blurting, "Really?!" Fortunately for the guy my friend restrained me from grilling him.

A search turns up the following official explanation for what Phiten necklaces are:

Anyone can benefit from wearing our products to help aid in counteracting the stress and fatigue of everyday life.... Phiten products work with your body’s energy system, helping to regulate and balance the flow of energy throughout your body. Proper energy balance helps to alleviate discomfort, speed recovery, and counteract fatigue. Athletes find that they tire less easily and recover faster from intense physical activity. Further benefits of Phiten’s exclusive technology are more relaxed muscles leading to less stress and a greater range of motion that can be of great benefit to an athlete or anyone in any walk of life.

Regulate and balance the flow of energy in our bodies? If I didn't know better I'd say this line was lifted straight from Oriental medicine quackery, particularly acupuncture where qi is said to be an energy flowing through our bodies and must be in balance and must not be block, else disease sets in.

Phiten New Zealand has more details:

Phiten has developed the Phild processing technique, invented by a Japanese chiropractor and now a time honoured secret. The Phild processing technique aligns the bio-electricity within titanium, so that when in close proximity to the body, it assists in regulating bio-electric currents.

A chiropractor! Oh my. Chiropractic is a discredited profession that believes in what it calls subluxations--"misalignment[s] of the spine that allegedly interferes with nerve signals from the brain." Chiropractors claim that various diseases can be cured by realigning the spine. There is, of course, no evidence for this.

"The Phild processing technique aligns the bio-electricity within titanium...." Are they saying that the bioelectricity from our bodies is taken up by titanium and aligned within the metal or that titanium has some innate bio-electricity that the Phild process aligns? Whatever the case may be, it just gets curioser and curioser as we go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

More from Phiten New Zealand:

The natural state of the body’s bioelectrical currents can be disrupted by everyday factors such as electrical equipment, cellular phones, stress, fatigue and injury. These interruptions cause bio-electricity within cells to become unstable and bio-electrical messages throughout the body to become confused. Phiten’s titanium combats the negative effects of instability by normalising the bio-electricity within each cell.

So low frequency 60-Hz electricity as well as high frequency microwaves from our cell phones can disrupt the bioelectrical currents of our bodies, which can cause bioelectrical messages to become garbled. Not to worry though. By simply wearing a Phiten the bioelectricity in each and every one of the phitzillion cells in our body gets normalized. Oh thank you, Phiten! You are our savior!

Folks, if we ask Phiten to produce evidence and measurements for this purported new found phenomenon they call bio-electricity, they won't be able to. (Or, in desperation when confronted, they might say it's another name for the electricity produced by our neurological system.) And they won't be able to produce any objective evidence whatsoever that their products can "align" or "balance" or "normalise" or phitenebulize or ... the bio-electricity in our cells. All this terminology and language is gobbledygook. The phenomenon and the mechanisms are all made up. Phiten is doing nothing but pulling the wool over our eyes.

Jeff Wagg, in his take-down of Phiten, tells us what all this is:

Star Trek fans will recognize this for exactly what it is: technobabble. Throw out some sciency sounding words, and people with a weak science education will be impressed.

Indeed. The ignorants among us will just nod our heads and the gullibles will fall for the Pied Piper and buy Phiten. And that's the point: To gyp people into turning over their money. Phiten is selling sh*t and apparently a few intellectually-challenged, unskeptical, uncritical athletes--see photos of Justin Morneau, Kara Goucher, Joba Chamberlain, Jennie Finch, Josh Beckett splashed on Phiten's site--have happily lapped it up. Yum! We love crap! Have some too.

And ROX? It could be another intellectually-challenged, unskeptical, uncritical client. Or it may actually be in the know as to how bogus Phiten necklaces are but can't help joining the Phiten bandwagon and come away with some of the duffel bags.

Doctors needs to be cured of this disease

2009-11-15T20:18:00.003+08:00

Here are doctors who've implicitly took an oath to be superstitious and peddle the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Needless to say the site is unabashedly blatantly biased. It publishes only those cases where there was prayer somewhere in the patient history after which the patient got better. So what may we ask about those who had the same condition and did have prayer (whatever kind and to whichever deity) but did not get well or even got worse? And what about those who had the same condition who didn't pray but whose condition improved? Moreover, what about the various medical treatments and procedures which the patients were undergoing at the time invisible genies somewhere in the universe or outside the universe were being dialed up? Would the patients have recovered without them? If prayer is a or the panacea and is effective against such a wide spectrum of diseases and medical conditions, why don't these God-intoxicated doctors just turn their cases over to Doc Jesus and have him snap his fingers and make them well? Just replace all doctors in their hospital or clinic with faith healers. If prayer is indeed efficacious then decommision the pharmaceutical industry and have MDs change careers. You don't even need diagnostics of any kind. Scrap all the equipment for X-ray, CAT scans, MRIs, PET scans, blood exams, etc. Just tell people to pray or head on over to the nearest healing priest/pastor/shaman the minute they feel something wrong. It's that simple if prayer really works. It doesn't work that way? Why? How do you know? What makes you think this (peri)omnipotent, (peri)omniscient deity of yours needs your help?

In Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Amazing Meeting 6 talk he declared that doctors are far from being smart. I thought that was a rather unfair blanket statement. Well, I apologize to Tyson. I'm beginning to think he may very well be right after all. Of course, there are doctors who can actually think critically (the skeptics community has a number of them--Steven Novella, Stephen Barret, Harriet Hall, David Gorski) but there really are lots of MDs who don't have their heads screwed on right at all and buy into cockamamie alternative medicine crap out there, including one of the most ridiculous--homeopathy.

Homeopathy is a disease of the mind

2009-10-22T10:40:00.003+08:00

Earlier this week I said I found it alarming that a Heel affiliate was promoting what is probably a quack treatment for dengue. I did some googling and apparently there indeed are homeopathic remedies intended to address dengue. For instance Dr. Ana Teresa Doria Dreux, former president of the Instituto Hahnemanniano do Brasil (presumably named in honor of homeopathy's inventor Samuel Hahnemann) and currently its VP, prescribes nostrums for the prevention and treatment of dengue. Her concoction consists of 5CH and 12CH dilutions (equivalent to 10X and 24X). That's 1 part per ten billion and 1 part per trillion trillion of active ingredients respectively. The latter is simply too dilute to have any possible effect (therapeutic or adverse). She tells us that these remedies are her own creations. However, we are not told what clinical trials have been performed to test their efficacy. All she says is:

So far, with those patients who have used this formula as prevention, there have not been any cases of infection, at least not reported to me.

I distribute this formula every year to all the personnel at IHB during the periods of epidemics and since I began doing so, not one of the approximately 22 employees has contracted the disease, not even those who live in areas where it is endemic.

This of course is insufficient evidence for efficacy. When I read the above the image that pops in my head is that of Dreux tightly crossing her fingers behind her back praying her luck holds.

Despite belief in the efficacy of her anti-dengue nostrum, she cautions:

Of course homeopathy does not DO AWAY WITH or INTERFERE with the obligatory medical care in these cases, nor should we neglect to eradicate the vector (the Aedes aegypti mosquito) by eliminating its breeding sites.

Well, if "obligatory medical care" and eradication of the disease vector weren't and aren't done away with, couldn't these be the cause of the lack of incidence? Setting aside ethical issues for the moment, if Dreux actually performed a double-blind trial and subjected half of a community to her brew and half to pure sugar pills--withholding any other form of treatment including "obligatory medical care"--perhaps she could have a better idea of whether her "medicine" actually works or not. As it is, Dr. Dreux is infected with dilution delusion. And not even an hourly dose of 100,000X (ultra powerful stuff indeed!) whatnot will cure her.

Dreux and her water institute aside, what is truly disturbing is what the doctor reveals in passing--that Brazil's health department has a homeopathy division. When government legitimizes quackery and itself peddles snakeoil then it has betrayed the people. One can only hope that there are Brazilians who are making noise and who are trying to inject sanity into its department of health.

Close encounters with homeo and acupunc

2009-10-19T12:45:00.006+08:00

Accompanied a friend to a trade exhibit last Saturday and encountered two companies promoting and selling woo.

1. Homeopathy and Homotoxicology by Biological Homeopathic Medical Corp (BHMC) / Ibarra Bio Med Int'l Trading Corp.

Let me begin with what may be a tragedy that's in the offing. After I started inquiring about their products alarms went off in my head when the representative at the booth boasted about their company having made a presentation before health officials for a preparation that addresses dengue. What these "medicines" actually are remains to be seen. I gather from the rep that they're alternative meds, perhaps homeopathic. In the recent past there have been homeopaths who prescribed homeopathic remedies for malaria. Such nostrums are completely ineffective against that disease. I'm betting that the treatment BHMC is purveying is just as bogus. These people are toying with lives. Dengue is a very serious condition. Homeopathy should be banned from peddling anything to treat/prevent such life threatening conditions. Hopefully the health department will not get duped. Lives--specially those of young children--are at stake.

Onto the reading materials I was provided. One of BHMC's flier lists the principles "proven and developed by Dr. Hans Heinrich Reckeweg":

1. Like cures like
2. The more the remedy is diluted, the greater its potency
3. An illness is specific to the individual

The first two principles were in fact laid down by the inventor of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann. And no they haven't been proven. The second principle doesn't even need testing. Given what we know about how chemicals work, it's implausible from the git go. It's the very opposite of what we know is true even intuitively--the more of a substance you administer the more pronounced its effect. The less of it you give/receive the less its effects--and that goes for what we commonly call poisons as well. Even cyanide poses no threat if you ingest but a microgram.

BHMC is affiliated with Heel, a company that has distributors in the US, Germany, Canada, Australia, among others. Dr. Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch tells us that Reckeweg founded BHI (later renamed Heel) back in the early 20th century. In the last few decades the company managed to earn the ire of the FDA which regarded it as the "most flagrant law violators among homeopathic marketers." Barrett issues this warning:

Heel-BHI has been marketing products with outrageous and illegal claims for more than 25 years. The vast majority are irrationally formulated and have not been scientifically tested. Using them instead of proven therapy is a waste of money and could lead to delay in getting appropriate treatment.

The BHMC pamphlet lists its services:

Electroacupuncture by Dr. Voll
Super MORA Therapy
Bio Oxidative Therapy
Ozone Therapy
Chelation Therapy
Neural Therapy
Bio-Puncture
Colonic Hydrotherapy
Traditional Chinese Acupuncture
Anti-Ageing Therapy
Natural, Nutritional and Biological Preventive Medicine

All of the above are unproved therapies. And the safety of some of them is questionable..

The other flier I was handed introduces their Detox Kit. It describes the contents of the kit as follows:

The Heel Detox Kit^® combines three homeopathic complex remedies for a comprehensive effect.

Lymphomyosot^® Oral Drops
activates the lymphatic system in order to detoxify the connective tissue and the mesenchyme

Nux vomica-Homaccord^® Oral Drops
stimulates the gastro-intestinal excretion pathway as well as the hepatic system (liver)

Berberis-Homaccord^® Oral Drops
activates the renal and the biliary systems (kidney, gall bladder)

I googled and found the composition of the Heel Detox Kit. The webpage lists all the active ingredients and even the amount of each per 100 milliliter bottle. With this data I created a spreadsheet which shows the actual amount each of the active ingredients taking into account their respective dilutions.

For the Nux vomica-Homaccord drops they list 22 substances:

Nux vomica D3
Nux vomica D10
Nux vomica D15
Nux vomica D30
Nux vomica D200
Nux vomica D1000

Bryonia alba D3
Bryonia alba D6
Bryonia alba D10
Bryonia alba D15
Bryonia alba D30
Bryonia alba D200
Bryonia alba D1000

Colocynthis D3
Colocynthis D10
Colocynthis D30
Colocynthis D200

Lycopodium clavatum D3
Lycopodium clavatum D10
Lycopodium clavatum D30
Lycopodium clavatum D200
Lycopodium clavatum D1000

You can't help but notice that in fact there are only 4 ingredients. They've merely used various dilutions of these four. If you look at the last column (% of total active ingredients) of the spreadsheet you'll see that the contributions of dilutions other than D3 are completely negligible.

You're probably wondering what this "Dx" rating is all about. In homeopathic terminology D stands for decimal. It's a scale to denote the degree of dilution. A D1 means there's one part of active to 10 parts inert ingredient. For a D2 it's one in a hundred. So it's a logarithmic scale similar to the Richter scale for earthquake intensity. Being logarithmic a D4 is ten times more dilute than a D3 preparation [10^(4-3)], a D6 is a thousand times more dilute than a D3 [10^(6-3)], and a D30 is a thousand trillion trillion times more dilute than a D3 [10^(30-3)].

In the Nux vomica oral drops some of the substances are watered down to D1000. How dilute is a D1000? If you had one drop of active ingredient and were to dilute it in one go you'd have to mix that single drop with 10¹⁰⁰⁰ (remember, that's "1" followed by a thousand zeros) drops of water or alcohol. How much is 10¹⁰⁰⁰ drops? That's equivalent to 6.5 × 10⁹⁹² cubic meters [see Note 1]. And just how large is that? Well, it's more than the size of our universe. In fact a lot bigger. If a bucket were the size of the universe you'd need 7.7 trillion buckets to end up with 6.5 × 10⁹⁹² m³ [see Note 2]. After mixing (if you can even imagine achieving that) you can scoop a volume as large as the Earth or the Sun or the Milky Way and the chances of finding a single molecule of the active ingredient would still be exceedingly infinitesimal.

Since it is impossible to make extremely dilute preparations in a single step, homeopaths perform a series of successive dilutions. For example to obtain a D1000 they may mix a drop of the active ingredient in 10⁵ drops of water--equivalent to 6.5 liters. This is now a D5 dilution. A drop from this is then added to another 6.5 liters of water to create a D10. And so on until it's been performed 200 times. Here's another way of looking at that. Let's say the entire Earth all the way to its inner core is made of water. You add a drop of the active ingredient and mix thoroughly. Take a drop of that and add it to another Earth-sized planet made of pure water. Remember to mix it real well. To end up with a D1000 you'd need to do this 45 times [see Note 3].

As we've seen homeopaths claim that the more diluted a preparation the more potent it is. Thus a D1000 is far more powerful than a D10 even if there's negligible chance of finding even a single molecule of the substance that's suppose to treat the condition. This is dilution delusion.

According to Heel the Detox regimen consists of "30 drops of each preparation in 0.7-1.5 liters of spring water to be drank during the course of the day." In the spreadsheet I've computed how much of the active ingredients one actually gets daily.

Nux vomica-Homaccord: 0.00030 drop (equivalent to 0.00020 ml)
Lymphomyosot (or Lyphosot): 0.0087 drop (equivalent to 0.00057ml)
Berberis-Homaccord: 0.084 mg.

These are very minuscule amounts indeed. Which means to say they probably have neither therapeutic nor adverse effects.

Just to get a perspective on how small those amounts are, let's compute for how many days it would take to ingest a drop or milligram of the active ingredients. To compute, just get the inverse of the above values. We obtain:

Nux vomica-Homaccord: 3,333 days / drop
Lymphomyosot (or Lyphosot): 115 days / drop
Berberis-Homaccord: 12 days / mg

Finally, is there anything to the notion of detoxification? None. It's bunk. It's crap. It's woo.

2. Shaolin Electronic Acupuncture Apparatus

The apparatus consists of an oval plastic device with a major diameter of around two and half inches, with "wings" on either side made of some pliable material under which are attached a black, sticky material they call the plaster or patch. Click the above link for photos. Here are a couple of infomercial videos I found on Youtube: the original is in Chinese but here's one in English.

The apparatus is manufactured by Zhengzhou HuiHao Technology Co.,Ltd in Zhengzhou, China. The device is powered by a coin battery and is said to incorporate a microprocessor. They probably mean microcontroller but then the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in reference to embedded systems.

The flier I got explains how it works:

A Microprocessor [sic] generates a low frequency magnetic field while [sic]controls a modulated pulse that provokes slight vibrations to simulate therapy by acupuncture. This function stimulates the channels and collateral in our body thru a patch helping to promote blood circulation to relieve pains; eliminates [sic] dampness to invigorate the kidneys; expel toxins to lose fat, etc. It also achieves [sic] and has very good healing effects on inflammations and aches of the neck, shoulders, waist, legs and joints.

The following are the diseases and conditions the device can purportedly "prevent and cure": Arthritis, diabetes, rheumatism, backache, sciatica, impotence, joint pain, Bell's palsy, kidney problems, stiff neck, vertigo, insomnia, constipation, gastroptosis, nausea, gastroenteritis, tennis elbow, hangover, hypertension, stroke, headache, gonarthritis, bone diseases, cervical spondylosis, scapulohumeral periarthritis, hip pain, inflammation of the lumbar discs, hemiplegia, carpal tunnel syndrome. It can also help rid (excess) fat, expel toxins, relieve pain, provide energy, free the "channels and collaterals", and promote blood circulation. I'm surprised they left out the big C--cancer.

According to the video the sticky patch contains a secret Shaolin concoction made from 13 herbs. These seep into the skin five times deeper than without the electronic apparatus. As to how deep the herbs penetrate without the device they don't say.

The exhibit representative urged me to try the apparatus for just ten minutes. Although reluctant at first I did give in and allowed myself to be a guinea pig just to see what the gizmo would do. Boy, was I in for a surprise. The lady strapped the device onto my forearm and pressed a button. Within seconds it started delivering electric shocks. Not very pleasant at all! My hand twitched violently with every shock as the device caused my arm muscles to contract. The pulse frequency was approximately one per second. But every half minute the frequency would change.

Given its shocking output I believe this gadget employs an inductor--a coil of (enameled) wire (probably with an iron core)--to produce a very short but high voltage output. Whenever current passes through a conductor a magnetic field is produced. When wire is formed into a coil the magnetic field around the entire length of that wire becomes concentrated--the inductance increases. When current stops flowing the magnetic field around the coil collapses. But that collapsing field now induces a voltage in the coil--a voltage that is many times that which was present when current was flowing. But while voltage is high there is very little current that flows--and it's the amount of current that can kill, not necessarily the voltage. Thus while static buildup in our body can easily reach a thousand volts, we don't feel more than a sting when we discharge the accumulated charge.

If the acupuncture gadget does employ an inductor then it works on the same principle as the ignition coil in a gasoline engine. But in this case you and I are the spark plug. Try the following (if you dare). With the engine off, pull the cable off one of the spark plugs. Hold the end of that cable--called the boot. Best if you hold a metal rod and stick it inside the boot so you can make contact with the metal shroud inside. Have that hand also touch the body of the car (ground). As a safety precaution put your other hand behind your back and avoid having any other part of your body in contact with the vehicle. Now let someone crank the engine. Unless your body is made of plastic, rubber, glass or some excellent insulator, you'll get a pulsing jolt. I've had my share of surprises when I was still tinkering with engines decades ago. So in case you want to experience electronic acupuncture, your automobile will gladly assist you.

A car's ignition coil delivers around 20,000 volts to the spark plug causing an arc to jump across the electrodes. It's this arc which ignites the gas-air mixture in the cylinder. Now think about that. What do you think will happen if you bring this acupuncture gizmo to the gas station and turn it on as you're filling up? Well most likely nothing (unless perhaps you put it right next to where you pump gas into car's gas tank). But put it inside a jar with a rich gasoline-air mix, set the gap between the electrodes to less than 5 millimeters, program the apparatus to maximum output, and maybe, just maybe, you'll have an early New Year's Eve celebration.

Instead of acupuncture the manufacturer should've called it The Portable Electro Shocker. Does it work? It certainly does! For those who have a masochistic streak in them, that is.

Notes:

1. One drop = 0.065 ml = 6.5 × 10^-8 m³
Cubic meter equivalent of 10¹⁰⁰⁰ drops:
10¹⁰⁰⁰ drops × 6.5 × 10^-8 m³/drop = 6.5 × 10⁹⁹² m³

2. Volume of the universe = 3 × 10⁸⁰ m³
number of universe-fuls of water (or alcohol) required to dilute one drop of active ingredient to D1000:
[6.5 × 10⁹⁹² m³] / [3 × 10⁸⁰ m³] = 7.7 × 10¹²

3. Volume of the Earth = 1.08 × 10¹⁵ m³
Let 10^x = volume of the Earth in drops
6.5 × 10^-8 m³/drop × 10^x drops = 1.08 × 10¹⁵ m³
10^x = [1.08 × 10¹⁵] / [6.5 × 10^-8]
10^x = 16.6 × 10²¹
x log10 = log (16.6 × 10²¹)
x = 22.2

number of Earth-sized successive dilutions to achieve D1000:
1000 / 22.2 = 45 Earths

Justice with Michael Sandel

2009-09-27T22:47:00.007+08:00

Just learned of that lecture series on ethics. The first two episodes are already up for viewing. Succeeding ones will be uploaded once a week. While watching the preview/teaser, "Star Trek!" was the first thing that popped in my head. Ethical questions and dilemmas are what draws me to that sci fi series.

Prof. Sandel begins his first lecture with the (classic) trolley (or train) problem. It exposes how we humans basically are utilitarian when faced with no option but to choose between the lesser of two evils. (By the way, Sandel sounds like Command Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation)

In the movie The Wrath of Khan the dying Spock tells Kirk--having sacrificed himself to save the crew: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one." That's utilitarian logic. And we all extol such such self sacrifice.

Seven years ago, after watching a Star Trek Voyager episode (you can watch it on Youtube) I wrote the following analysis of the ethical questions which it raised and tackled.

I. The Storyline

In the episode "Nothing Human" the crew of the starship Voyager comes to the rescue of an intelligent yet heretofore unknown alien species, one resembling a very large scorpion or lobster. Because its ship is badly damaged Captain Kathryn Janeway decides to beam the lone survivor to sick bay, knowing fully well that by bringing this 'stranger' on board her ship she is putting Voyager at risk.

Preliminary diagnosis indicates that the creature is ill or injured. Though at first docile this creature moments later pounces upon the ship's engineer B'Elanna Torres and attaches itself to her, pierces her neck, and starts injecting substances into her body and sending tendrils into her major organs. By so doing the creatures survives by parasitically siphoning her energy and nutrients (reminiscent of Dracula).

Unable to decipher its language consisting of shrills the crew has no way of understanding the motives of this creature. They don't know whether it has attached itself to Torres because it merely wants to survive or whether it has more long term malevolent intents.

Knowing nothing about this creature and its anatomy, Voyager's chief medical officer "The Doctor" (a hologram) decides he needs the assistance of a Cardassian medical expert on exobiology. The engineers toil to create a holographic representation of Dr. Crell Moset, a feat they manage to pull off. After the Doctor explains their predicament Moset proceeds to examine Torres and the alien creature. But because the equipment on board Voyager is inadequate he asks that his laboratory be recreated in order that he may have access to the specialized instruments he requires to further examine this creature.

While Doc and Moset try to learn about the creature and ultimately devise a method to remove it from Torres without killing her, one crew member, Ensign Tabor, by chance comes face to face with Moset. The Bajroan is aghast and is unable to contain his rage. He accuses Moset of having murdered his family by exposing them to all sorts of radiation and chemicals as part of his medical experiments. The Doctor cannot believe his ears. Surely there has been a mistake. The great Dr. Moset singlehandedly came up with a cure for a rare disease and saved thousands from the fatal epidemic. It must be a simple case of mistaken identity.

But alas, searching through the ship's database, the crew piece enough information that corroborates Tabor's allegations: the 'good' doctor indeed had performed horrible experiments on Bajorans directly causing the death of dozens if not hundreds of their people.

Captain Janeway calls for a meeting. Voyager is caught in a dilemma. How can they let Moset continue helping them when the very knowledge he's utilizing was gained from his murderous experiments? Given the fact that his expertise derives from many counts of heinous crimes, is it at all conscionable to use whatever Moset has to offer to save the life of Torres, notwithstanding that this Moset is merely a holographic representation? No, they say, not even if it's only a hologram since the representation relies on the actual Moset files found in Voyager's database. The debate among the officers heats up. Several want the Moset program terminated immediately. Even the Vulcan Tuvok agrees that it is logical for Torres to refuse help from Moset. However, a few believe that saving Torres is more important and that the chances of doing so drops to nill if Moset's expertise becomes unavailable. The captain must make a decision. And she is forthright and does not dally, giving us the impression she had already made up her mind even before she called for the meeting. For now she says Torres is more important to her than ethical issues and instructs the Doctor to continue working with Moset.

In Moset's recreated lab he and the Doctor successfully induce the creature to retract its tendrils and free Torres from its death grip, by applying a neurostatic shock to its nervous system. They move on to sickbay and try the method, for real this time. But while Moset wants to apply a large dose of electrical shock ensuring rapid retraction of the tendrils, Doc intervenes and takes over, and applies a less than lethal dose to the creature.

Meanwhile, the comrades of this alien creature have arrived and are pounding Voyager. Its energy shields are useless against the aliens' weapons. Voyager still does not understand the shrills even as the crew tries desperately to telll the aliens that they mean no harm. It is clear, however, the aliens want their comrade back.

Over in sickbay the Doctor manages to induce the creature to finally let go of Torres. With the separation complete engineers are finally able to lock onto the creature and beam it to its ship. With mission accomplished the alien ships depart without damaging Voyager. They even seem to say "thank you" on their way off.

In the aftermath Captain Janeway tells the Doctor that as the medical expert on board he must decide the fate of Dr. Moset. It will up to him whether to retain Moset or pull the plug on this most controversial hologram. The Doctor arrives at Moset's laboratory. The latter is stowing away his instruments while humming a tune he and the Doctor had sung during their most fruitful collaboration earlier.

The Doctor tells Moset that he has come to inform him of his decision. The Cardassian understands that the Doctor is still bothered by his shady past and so tries to persuade him that what is important are the results. That he was able to cure thousands during the war. Moreover, that the two of them were able to save both Torres and the parasitic alien creature should be considered a victory. The means by which they managed to do that is irrelevant. The eloquent Moset puts up a convincing argument. He even reminds the Doctor that humans had for decades used animals to test virtually everything that humans dare not try on themselves. But the Doctor has already made up his mind. No argument by Moset can possibly make him reconsider. He hails Voyager's voice-activated computer and commands it to delete the Crell Moset program and all files related to it. The laboratory and Dr. Moset, murderer and savior, disappear from the holodeck forever.

II. The Issues

A. Moset's Move

Was it right for Dr. Moset to conduct his medical experiments on Bajroans, to use them as guinea pigs and in the process maim, mutilate, and eventually kill them? No. I doubt any one of us would agree. Those who dare say yes should be ready to stand beside Moset and infect, irradiate, and eventually kill any number of people.

The end does not justify the means, certainly not in this case. But this is exactly the point around which Moset's argument revolves. The Cardassian doctor believes that the thousands who were saved did justify the (cruel) means he employed. Moset is a utilitarian, i.e., he believes that if a hundred thousand lives can be saved by sacrificing a hundred or a thousand then it is a good bargain and one must go for it unhesitatingly. Moset would further argue that with the knowledge gained from experimenting on Bajorans (or humans for that matter) medical science would be so served and advanced that the potential benefits may be even more than what is now apparent.

The utilitarian angle is an attractive argument and many throughout our history have so reasoned and rationalized their actions this way.Surely if I deny myself the several dozen books I would like to purchase right now and instead place that money in an investment that gives a return of a whopping 20% per month I'd be able to enjoy even more books next month. In this rather trivial case the small amount of pain that I suffer today from being deprived of much desired reading material indeed is more than offset by the greater amount of enjoyment I will experience in the near future. Delaying gratification, of course, if one of the signs of a mature person (very young children as we all know fail this test miserably). In this sense utilitarianism may be a good thing.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was the founder of utilitarianism and made it famous (or infamous) with his formula that we must strive for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Doubtless our Cardassian doctor would gleefully assent. And to the sure delight of Bentham, Crell Moset is a utilitarian to the very end and in every circumstance. He is a doctor, but with a twist. He wants to save and cure people, yet he is ready to sacrifice a 'few' if that would ultimately enhance the life of more people. For Moset the injunction "Do no harm" is not absolute if in the end more will benefit.

On the other end of the scale is Ivan Karamazov of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan argues that if the salvation of the entire world were to be founded on the abominable suffering of but one little girl then it is not worth it at all. In fact it is unthinkable, so much so that Ivan would rather return his ticket to God. The price is simply too much to pay. Indeed who amongst us would agree to such a Faustian bargain—one tiny insignificant soul for the salvation of the entire world? Tempting sometimes, until you're handed the stick and asked to torture the child yourself.

B. Voyager's Move

The dilemma on board the Voyager is whether to allow Moset to continue counseling them, thereby directly benefiting from the murderous experiments he conducted, expert opinion which would probably save Torres; or whether to delete the Moset holographic program, thereby denouncing in no uncertain terms the crimes against humanity (or Bajorans) committed by Moset, a move which will almost surely lead to Torres' death.

Let us now tackle the argument by some of the crew members that it is absolutely wrong to reap any benefit from the work and expertise of Moset because they were gained through the most unethical means imaginable. Was it wrong for Captain Janeway to use Moset in saving Torres? Does her decision make her an accomplice to Moset's crimes?

My personal response is this: While it is incontrovertible that Moset's experiments were criminal in nature, that the harm he willfully inflicted upon the Bajorans cannot and should never be countenanced, the fact remains, today, that what happened had happened and that we now have in our possession the medical knowledge, the know-how which can and does allow Star Trek doctors everywhere to help cure and save lives, indispensable knowledge without which many will not be saved. I am of the opinion that we must not throw away that knowledge simply because it was derived unethically. If that knowledge is summarily discarded then the suffering of those who served as Moset's guinea pigs would have been in vain. Not only had they been tortured, but the only good that ever came out of their suffering and untimely death would be put to death as well.

We cannot change the past. History is like a moving hand that writes which, having writ, moves on (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam). That Moset committed crimes against humanity is undeniable. That he was able to use the knowledge gained from those crimes to save not a few cannot be denied as well. That the same knowledge will benefit others in future (as in the case of Torres) must also be acknowledged. Call it some form of pragmatism but it is not conscionable to me to deny a starving family a loaf of bread just because that particular loaf had been stolen. If that stolen loaf is the only sustenance available that will keep that family from dying tonight in their sleep, I see an imperative for all to immediately offer them that loaf however it may have been acquired. There are priorities. And life is one of them, as Captain Janeway correctly recognized.

On the other hand, if the knowledge we had derived from the suffering of those Bajorans was how to kill more people more efficiently and effectively, then, yes, we most certainly must immediately efface, erase, expunge, and raze all the knowledge Moset had acquired.

III. An Experiment of Our Own

Let us imagine that we have been transported to the time when Crell Moset was just about to conduct these experiments. Further, let us suppose that conducting these experiments is the only way the for the doctor to find a cure for the hundreds of thousands who are dying. Moreover, let us also suppose that we have enough authority and power to stop Moset from continuing with his experiments. Let us also assume that we can see the future well enough to know of the alien creature that will attack Torres which would thus require the services of Moset, and that if we stop him from performing his experiments now the future Torres will surely die. The question for us who can grant Moset the thumbs up or down is: Should we allow Moset to proceed unimpeded? Given our perfect foreknowledge can we deny the hundreds of thousands, and Torres as well, the medical knowledge that will cure and save them? How would you answer or change your answer if one of those who will eventually be saved will be your 4-year old child? How will you answer or change your answer if all of those who will be saved are the people who invaded your country and massacred your people, leaving you widowed?

If we permit Moset to conduct his experiments then we become utilitarians ourselves just like Bentham and Moset. Morevoer, we would become accomplices to murder and all the crimes Moset will commit in the name of medical science.

Although the experiments will surely yield the answers we need to cure a whole generation there is no rationale that can permit us to decide the fate of a few in order to save the many. The end does not justify the means, however much more good there will be (as if we can, with ease, quantify goodness, happiness and utility) in the end than what we started with.

Therefore, while knowledge that already exists should not be discarded despite the means by which it was gained, consenting to create new knowledge through such means is not an option.

Rated X

2009-09-14T14:44:00.003+08:00

Among the most important people in my life are my nephews--my sister's children. Over the past couple of years I've become some sort of a de facto tutor to her 5- and 4-year old sons. I'm a handyman and so I bring my toolbox(es) almost every time I visit my sis--not least because there's always something she needs fixed. Soon after I arrive the kids would come flocking to the toolbox and start the mayhem--littering the floor with pliers, screwdrivers, electrical tape, ... and trying to snatch my digital multimeter. Of course I have to be there to supervise and keep in check their insatiable curiosity lest they hurt themselves. I know I'm asking for disaster and their mother frowns upon the activity. Though real tools are not at all kid-friendly I'm happy to say that they've learned the names of all the basic tools and can even manage to fasten and unfasten real screws (on second thought that may not be all a good idea--I shudder at the thought of one of them grabbing a screwdriver behind their parents' back and jabbing themselves accidentally while taking their toys apart). But what I'm most proud of is the fact that I've been one of their English teachers so to speak, correcting their mistakes, expanding their vocabulary, reading them stories. We live in a trilingual community and I've set it as my goal to make English their first language. An uphill battle most certainly, but I wouldn't let anyone else have this dirty job.

Well, having said how much I am part of these children's lives and how I find it so fulfilling, my almost irrational reaction to what just happened last night to the eldest will be in context. I found out from my sister this morning that her husband was watching a TV program last night. Apparently, John was watching too. At one point he turned to his mom and asked why the man was bleeding. His mom replied that the blood isn't real and the man was just a statue--although a life-sized one. A couple of seconds later John burst into tears. His mom rushed over and hugged him, trying to console the frightened child. She told him not to be afraid, that it wasn't really blood, just red paint and that it's dripping because the artist hadn't finished his work yet. The scene so traumatized John that an hour after he was still in a state of unease, still asking about the blood. In fact it was so bad that even after bedtime he kept waking up. He was able to sleep soundly only past midnight.

So what exactly did my nephew see that rattled him the whole night? John saw a naked man impaled on a cross, complete with blood oozing out of his hands (and perhaps feet). The TV program was a mini documentary on the life and sainthood of that Catholic priest Padre Pio, a purported stigmatist.

We adults who've grown jaded and inured to seeing crosses can't imagine how frightening and nightmarish it must be for a young child to see it for the very first time particularly when they've already sustained previous injuries and understand pain. In John's case he's already experienced various cuts and even a fractured arm and knows blood and pain very very well.

So here's a human being, practically naked, hanging from pieces of timber--nailed! to it--and bleeding to death. How awfully disturbing that must be! I imagine in that child's mind, in some way, he was able to apprehend how he could or would share the same fate, that he would be subjected to the same pain and suffer the same tortuous death.

My sister knows very well that I'm an atheist. I told her that what happened to John has made me angrier than ever. Not at the parents of course. At religion. As others have already pointed out using other hypothetical examples, what if some religion had for its central symbol a depiction of how their holy teacher or god-man was racked, eviscerated and quartered, because that's how he gave his life to save humanity. How would Christians react to that? Would their pastors and priests see no psychological harm in exposing youngsters--particularly those whose parents belong to that disemboweled man's religion--to such pictures and "artistic" works? The cross with a lifelike depiction of a bloodied dying man is a gruesome image. To subject children to such violence is downright insane! It's so graphic that's it's porn. It should have an X rating. And yet weekly, we have children dragged to churches and treated to a giant cross behind the altar complete with naked, tortured Jesus on it. I think this qualifies as child abuse.

My sister now knows more than ever that she has to be careful what her kids watch on television. She's been pretty successful in keeping the tots from seeing violent programs (needless to say, toy guns and swords are absolutely banned in her home). I believe now she's also aware that she has to be on guard against religious insanities as well.

It's been half a day since the news but I'm still seething. My sister warned me not to ask John about the nightmarish scene he saw. He's suffered enough. We certainly don't want to resurrect the ~~fearful feelings~~ dread. I'm still so angry that John went through what he did.

The miracle we need is the extinction of ignorance

2009-08-26T11:54:00.004+08:00

When religionists jump up in joy upon hearing a supposed medical miracle what I hear their consciousness/unconscious telling me is:

I'm really so hungry for signs. So without even having the foggiest idea of the thousands of medical events occurring daily worldwide, I find this one--in my medical and scientific ignorance--to be extraordinary and see it as a miracle--a supernaturally caused event. Forget the fact that this medical event is (merely) a statistical outlier (occurring at the tail end of the bell curve--the positive end of course, not the negative). And perish the thought that I'm calling this a miracle not because there is evidence for the supernatural but because I am--in my breathtaking ignorance again of course--at a loss for the real explanation. No one else seems to know or wants to provide a natural explanation, therefore, in unabashed hubris I declare that I do know and that it was caused by G, and mind you not just any G, but my G. It is a miracle because I want to believe it is and I say it is. Now f**k off and leave me to my delusions.

Folks, beware of this mind virus. Prevent infection and save your mind. Inoculate yourself at the nearest critical thinking clinic.

Talking to the wind

2009-08-13T13:27:00.003+08:00

Sit down, close your eyes, relax, and be mindful of your breathing. Now repeat after me: "Kalenbo utam, mitao grekkang tho. Kalenbo utam, mitao grekkang tho! Kalenbo utam, mitao grekkang tho!!" Peace unto thee. Your stage 4 cancer is cured.

Can anyone explain and prove to me how mere concentration and utterance of words (in whatever language, terrestrial or otherwise, fictive or otherwise) can possibly affect malignant cells?

If chants and thoughts are indeed effective in curing ailments and disease why then is a faith healing "clinic" in New Zealand offering patients free prayer therapy but advises its patients "to not stop regular medical treatment"? If mumbo jumbo actually can zap cancer et al., what need is there for medication? And if the patient does get well, shouldn't the drugs receive the applause?

I'm sorry but I cannot have any respect for the cockamamie belief in supernatural friends (and in a supernatural family where the father is the son and vice versa) and belief that talking to them will get them to come thru as benefactors--in other words, genies. On the contrary, I only have unbridled derision for such beliefs. In the context of 21st century life, they're pure malarkey.

The anecdotes of cure these faith healers provide are no different from those of other forms of quackery. I could very well market pure water (without saying it's just water of course) aggressively and enthusiastically as a cancer cure, and after I've duped a few dozen into buying, I'd be able to glean more than a couple of positive testimonials which I can then use to further promote my absolutely bogus product.

Christian finally meets his master

2009-07-29T19:50:00.003+08:00

God: Why, look who's here! What took you so long?

You: Uhh, what do you mean, God?

God: Duh! 30 years ago I prepared a welcome feast for your arrival. Grand party with choirs of angels and all. I rang you up. Sent a platoon of my elite pathogens so you could be here in a jiffy but still have time to say hasta la vista to your family. So did you wear your best suit for the homecoming? Nooooo! You went and took all those antibiotics for an entire month and annihilated my army! Needless to say, I was heartbroken. And then 15 years ago I buzzed you again. I thought that giving you a heart attack would make my invitation loud and clear. But no! Instead of kissing your wife goodbye, you had her drive you to the ER. And those minions of Satan--wolves in white clothing--got your heart up and running again. To add insult to injury you even thanked those doctors on your way out of the hospital.

Well, who the fuck do you think you are! Who do you think makes the rules around here! Well, I've had it playing Mr.Nice Guy.with you. Since you've been such a bitch, I decided to stop sending you invites altogether and just yank you up here. Yes, yes, yes, that bloke who pumped half a dozen 357s into your thick skull was Angel 007. He's been on missions 24/7 ever since that demonic Fleming guy concocted penicillin or you would've been here years ago. Well now that you've finally arrived, what do you think happens to those who make it a point to fuck up my plan? Hmmmm?

Empty-headed

2009-07-08T08:11:00.005+08:00

Philosopher Simon Blackburn reviews Karen Armstrong's latest opus: The Case for God: What Religion Really Means. Armstrong is a former nun and is the author of over a dozen titles.

Apparently, Armstrong is saying that religion as it is now is faux religion. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. with all their doctrines, dogmas, cathedrals, mosques, synagogues, are bogus religions. They're rogue, adulterated, corrupted forms of the real thing. True religion is one that does not say anything about God. In fact if you can talk about God, if you start spouting off God's properties, deeds, will, etc, then what you're talking about isn't God.

Well, that's exactly the same theme in Taoism (I guess the real Taoism, not the kind being practised by the superstitious Chinese masses--mind you, some of whom are probably my kinsfolk). The Tao Te Ching says, "The Way is eternally nameless." "The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way; The names that can be named are not the eternal name." (Tao Te Ching, Victor Mair, Bantam, 1990, p. 59,99) If you can say something about it, describe it, circumscribe it, it isn't the real McCoy. Thus you just have to approach the subject of God/Tao with silence. You cannot intellectualize it. You cannot relate to it via belief, much less dogmas and doctrines. Once you do, you've lost God, you've tried to produce, so to speak, a 3-dimensional representation of what is an infinite-dimension phenomenon, and made an idol.

This is the religious tradition of apophasis, where silence toward the subject is the principal tenet. Which makes you wonder what apophatic masters teach. I imagine Lesson 1 goes: "God is that which you cannot speak of, think of, believe in." And Lesson 2: "There is nothing else to say or think about."

I think the problem with apophasis is that its adherents are a drop in the ocean. That kind of religion is completely foreign, perhaps even inconceivable to the run of the mill believer. Most people can't possibly subscribe to such a religion. What people are looking for are derivatives from religion such as attenuation of anxieties, comfort, pat certainties, unchanging rules, black and white answers.

Religions obviously have evolved and continue to change and develop, with all the denominations and sects as living proof of the number of variants and strains, whilst other forms have died off. Moreover, claiming that the apophatic religion is the true kind of religion is just that-- another claim. The Koran claims that its Islam is the true religion. It would be silly and unthinkable indeed if any religion declared, "Oh I'm sorry, but we're not a or the true religion. So why do we keep at it? We're plain nutcases, you see." So the charge (either by Armstrong or by Blackburn) that the Four Horsemen are tilting at windmills, roughing up a strawman is hardly true. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens are engaging the extant species of religion. It seems to me that Armstrong's trying to save an endangered form, a high form of religion, if you will, but one which will never become a dominant species ever or even come close to such stature. Or she's just defending a tradition she prefers.

----------------------

Breaking News: Just read John Crace's "synopsis" of The Case for God. And I thought I was being a tad harsh on Armstrong!

What epistemology?

2009-06-27T09:50:00.003+08:00

Learned of the following via the Center for Inquiry. It's an article by physicist Lawrence Krauss in yesteday's Wall Street Journal.

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

So while scientific rationality does not require atheism, it is by no means irrational to use it as the basis for arguing against the existence of God, and thus to conclude that claimed miracles like the virgin birth are incompatible with our scientific understanding of nature.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.

Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs -- as well as in the rest of the physical world -- reason is the better guide.

I really don't understand why anyone bothers defending religion. It claims to have a valid epistemology. Well, ok, show us. What supernaturalistic claim does any religion have that's been verified to be true? We've been waiting for several millennia now. Face it. Religion has tons of supernatural claims. None have been found or is known to be true It has tons of empirical claims too (and it even claims to have a real epistemology) and a good number have already been disconfirmed (eg. the earth is not--as some sacred texts claim--flat, the age of the earth is way more than ten millennia, there is just no evidence for any worldwide deluge, evolution is the origin of species not some mythic anthropomorphic militaristic macho prick as claimed by a tribe in the Bronze Age, ....)

Provide us a means by which we can find out whether religious epistemology actually works. For instance offer a procedure by which revelation can be shown to be a valid way of knowing. And show that revelation (whereby a "truth" or idea is placed in someone's head by a supposed supernatural entity) actually is a revelation from a supernatural entity and not just natural firing of neurons. Show that whatever "truth" is supposedly uttered by this prophet is not true simply due to coincidence or was arrived at by other ways of knowing.

In contrast, science has demonstrated again and again and again over hundreds of years that its epistemology does work and does provide us reliable knowledge. If you've ever used a computer and know of the things called airplane and antibiotic and seen those stunning Hubble deep space photographs then you would be a freaking idiot to claim that science doesn't work.

Epistemic progess is of course a barometer of the validity of the epistemology that any discipline flaunts. So which domain has had epistemic progress? Yes that's a no-brainer. Which religion has had any epistemic progress vis-a-vis supposed supernatural "truths"? If this were a contest (and I think it is!) religion should've been booed out of the stadium eons ago.

Now tell me which of the two is arrogant: Science which lets reality be the ultimate arbiter as to which explanations, hypotheses, theories are true, or religion which rides roughshod over reality whenever any of its doctrines/dogmas are contradicted by reality?

Yes, I am so uber frustrated over the fact that even educated adults keep getting duped into clinging to superstitions in sheep's clothing.

What makes a man a man ... according to the KJV

2009-06-15T00:44:00.002+08:00

Via Michael Nielsen

Religion does turn some into pricks.

How not to find cause of and cure for cancer

2009-06-11T00:18:00.006+08:00

A friend brought to my attention (via a forwarded email that has been circulating for some time it seems) a certain Professor Jane Plant who claims in a book of hers that she's discovered a causal factor of breast cancer and that she was cured of her own affliction by eliminating milk products in her diet. The book may be old hat to some of you but I just got wind of it.

Just to be sure that this wasn't another urban legend, I turned to Amazon.com. Well, Jane Plant and her book Your Life in Your Hand (the US edition is entitled The No-Dairy Breast Cancer Prevention Program: How One Scientist's Discovery Helped Her Defeat Her Cancer) checks out. So much the worse for Plant as you'll see. Go read the widely available excerpt from her book (that particular website goes to show how governments are not necessarily keepers of the light, enlightenment that is).

Allow me to put cart before the horse and provide you my conclusion: Geologist and professor Jane Plant is incompetent. I say that because she's supposedly a scientist and yet she commits errors in thinking and analysis that would earn science undergrads a failing grade. How she could, in the same breath, remind us she's a scientist and write as a woowoo is jaw dropping.

Now for my arguments.

Plant tells us that it dawned upon her that in China practically no one drinks cow's milk and that dairy products including cheese are not part of the diet. She also says that statistics show that only 1 in 10,000 women in China die from breast cancer, while the figures for Western countries is around 1 in 10. (Let's at the moment just take for granted that she has her numbers right, although those would need to be checked too of course--I'm suspicious of the 1 in 10 stat). So Plant puts two and two together and comes up with the hypothesis that dairy product consumption might be a or the culprit.

Can we jump to the conclusion that milk is dangerous to women's health? Most certainly not. There's a truism in statistics and science: Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Correlation is the phenomenon wherein two or more variables/events are associated with one another. For example, the temperature of the ground is correlated with the time of day--the closer it is to noontime the warmer the ground is. And of course this is because the sun heats the earth up. However, just because two variables are correlated does not mean one causes the other. The clock we used in recording the time of day obviously does not cause the ground to heat up. Yet another example. Over two decades ago researchers in Taiwan found that there is a strong correlation between the number of electrical appliances (including toasters) that a household owns and the frequency of use of birth control methods. Does this mean then that buying more appliances causes people to resort to contraceptives more often? Or does it mean that higher frequency of employing contraceptives makes Taiwanese buy more appliances? One of these would have to be our conclusion if correlation were equivalent to causation. The truth of the matter, however, is that the above variables are both correlated with yet other variables, namely, income and educational attainment. And it is these two latter factors that cause the increase in both number of appliances owned and contraceptive use. Income and education are both correlated with the former two variables. They also are causal factors.

In summary, if X is correlated with Y then either X causes Y, or Y causes X, or neither X nor Y is a cause of the other. On the other hand, if Q is the known cause of P, then Q and P will by necessity be correlated with one another. So while correlation does not necessarily imply causation, causation necessarily implies correlation.

In discussing Plant's hypothesis, another friend reminded me of how the Chinese consume a lot of soybean in its various forms--tofu, soybean milk, soy sauce, salted soy beans, etc. That in itself would correlate significantly with breast cancer mortality since Westerners consume less soybeans than Orientals. Just as with dairy products we could also say something like, It might be that the high consumption of soybean products guards against the occurrence of breast cancer. And these surely are not the only variables that correlate with breast cancer incidence and mortality. You could scour the world for various factors and find correlations, both positive and negative.

Plant goes on to tell us that based on this correlation and hypothesis of hers, she stopped taking any product that contained milk. She narrates what happened soon thereafter:

About two weeks after my second chemotherapy session and one week after giving up dairy produce, the lump in my neck started to itch. Then it began to soften and to reduce in size. The line on the graph, which had shown no change, was now pointing downwards as the tumour got smaller and smaller.

She goes on to conclude that based on her experience she was right in identifying milk as the cause.

It was difficult for me, as it may be for you, to accept that a substance as ‘natural’ as milk might have such ominous health implications. But I an i living proof that it works....

Well, unfortunately for Plant, her reasoning is flawed. She commits the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (after this, therefore, because of this). This is a causal attribution error whereby just because event B comes after A, we conclude that A caused B. Thus, just because the sun rose after the rooster crows obviously does not imply that the chicken made the sun rise. But this is precisely what Plant is saying. She tells us that she stopped taking any dairy product after which she noticed that her lump started waning until it totally disappeared. She then attributes this to her diet change. This is a textbook case of causal attribution error.

But note how she herself tells us that she was simultaneously undergoing chemotherapy, a treatment modality that is known to work against cancer. Why does she not attribute the remission to chemo? So what actually caused her lump to up and disappear? Well, we don't know for sure. It may have been the chemo, the diet change, both of these, spontaneous remission, or something else. To jump to the conclusion that it was diet change is to commit the post hoc fallacy.

Furthermore, Plant has the gall to jump to a conclusion based on her own personal experience. One anecdote is not evidence. And even if a thousand other women shared a similar story, it would still not be evidence. Thus, the aphorism goes: The plural of "anecdote" is not data, it's "anecdotes." And even if this had been a clinical trial, it is impossible for it to be a randomized controlled study for the simple reason we'd need to have at the very least two participants in the study--with one serving as the control. A clinical study with a sample size of two is in itself laughable--the margins of error would be so huge as to make its results practically useless. Hence, a sample size of one is just absurd.

Linda Bily, a reviewer on Amazon.com of Plant's book, likewise apprehends the lack of critical thinking that Plant manifests and has this to say:

The premise that since Oriental women don't consume a lot of dairy products and have less incidence of breast cancer is plausible, but unproven. I shudder to think of the thousands of women who will change their diets based on this book. I am most concerned that the high intake of estrogens and phytoestrogens, especially in the soy products recommended, could be detrimental to some women. There is still controversy in the medical community about the use of soy. If you read this book as an interesting scientific, but unproven, premise, you will be fine. If you take this book to heart, without consulting your medical specialist, you could be opening a can of worms. Dr. Plant is a respected scientist in her field. As a breast cancer survivor and advocate, I question some of her findings. The studies she cites to validate her ideas are older, some of obscure practice and are not widely confirmed. I also take issue with her description of her own breast cancer diagnosis. It returned 5 times according to the author and yet she states that it was an early stage at diagnosis. The tumor on her neck disappeared during chemo and she credits only her non-dairy diet for this shrinkage. She says that it spread to her lymphatic system, but her lymph nodes were clear. The book is interesting reading, but while I do not doubt her personal beliefs or her expertise as an earth-based scientist, I do hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. I am afraid that too many women, looking for a quick fix, will adapt her lifestyle without question. There still is no known cause or cure for breast cancer. Feel free to search alternative options and methods, but please, discuss any changes in your treatment, diet or life with your medical team and make an informed decision.

So, is Jane Plant's hypothesis that dairy products are a casual factor in breast cancer wrong? Certainly not. Let me repeat that in case you think that's a typo. It may be that regular consumption of dairy products are (partly) responsible for breast cancer. My critique above does not imply that Plant's hypothesis is totally off the mark. What is utterly awry are the methods/reasoning by which she reaches her conclusion, which means it is nowhere close to being conclusive. Keep in mind that an argument may have false premises but true conclusions. When the argument contains various fallacies then the conclusion cannot be known to be true. However, if the argument is sound (i.e, the premises are known to be true and the argument contains no fallacies) then the conclusion must by necessity be true. Because Plant does not follow scientific protocol (ie., objective, unbiased methods of testing hypotheses) we cannot have any confidence in her conclusion.

As a scientist, what Plant could have done is applied for a grant and performed randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trials (RCT) employing at least several dozens of participants. Barring this (for ethical or whatever reason), she could've performed an epidemiological study (just as was done with tobacco use and lung cancer decades ago), although such studies hardly provide the degree of certitude of RCTs. (But since she has no degree nor expertise in medicine I doubt she would've been awarded research money in the first place; thus she should've left testing of this hypothesis to the experts).

It is said that when a layperson makes a mistake in matters of, say, rocket science then that mistake is out of ignorance. But when a rocket scientist commits an error involving rocket science, that's stupidity. Prof. Jane Plant claims to be a scientist. But she made elementary mistakes about hypothesis testing and induction. Now that's utter stupidity.

As we've seen above Plant says of her cancer treatment: "I am living proof that it works." No, Prof. Plant. You're living proof that you failed to learn the essentials of Scientific Method 101. For shame!

Speak univocally, not equivocally

2009-06-07T06:40:00.002+08:00

What's wrong with the following argument?

Mad men should be put in mental asylums. Annie's dad is mad--he just berated her for one full hour for taking money from his wallet without asking permission. Therefore, Annie's dad should be carted away in a straitjacket and locked up in a mental institution. (example is adapted from Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, 3ed., by Merrilee H. Salmon, Harcourt Brace, 1995, p.47)

If that made you chuckle, then you hit the nail on the head intuitively. In the first sentence (statement) "mad" is used in the sense of "insane" / "mentally disturbed" / "demented". However, in the second statement "mad" is used in the sense of "angry." Because Annie's dad was angry and not insane, the conclusion (the last statement) simply does not follow. If you say that the conclusion does follow from the preceding statements then you're mad! (no, not angry, but nuts and off your rockers).

The use of the same term but with different meanings within the argument is known as the fallacy of equivocation. Professors of logic Copi and Cohen tell us that equivocation is an:

informal fallacy in which two or more meanings of the same word or phrase have been confused. If used with one of its meanings in one of the propositions of the argument but with a different meaning in another proposition of the argument, a word is said to have been used equivocally (p.688)

Equivocal arguments are always fallacious. (p.192)

[Irving M. Copi & Carl Cohen, Introduction to Logic, 10th ed., Prentice-Hall, 1998]

As we've seen from the (facetious) example above the premises (1st and 2nd statements) have nothing to do with one another given that the same word "mad" was used to mean quite different things. The Philosophy Pages tells us that: "The inferential relationship between the propositions included in a single argument will be sure to hold only if we are careful to employ exactly the same meaning in each of them," in other words, if the terms are used univocally--with only one meaning--and not equivocally--several meanings.

As with other logical errors, equivocation is sometimes used in humor. Lewis Carroll, for instance, employs it in Through the Looking Glass:

"Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding his hand out to the messenger for some hay.
"Nobody," said the messenger.
"Quite right," said the King; "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you."

(quoted in Copi & Cohen, p.192)

Moving on to more serious examples.

It's the duty of the press to publish news that's in the public interest. There is great public interest in UFOs. Therefore the press fails in its duty if it does not publish articles on UFOs. (Theodore Schick, Jr. & Lewis Vaughn, How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, 2ed., Mayfield, 1999, p.286)

Did you catch how "public interest" shifted in meaning? From meaning "welfare of the public" in the first statement it changed to "what the public wants to read about" in the second.

Here's one that's requires some prior scientific understanding. It's also an example that has an ethical side to it:

[A] sugar advertisement ... argued for increased consumption of sugar on the grounds that "Sugar is an essential component of the body ... a key material in all sorts of metabolic processes." (Howard Kahane & Paul Tidman, Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction, Wadsworth, 1995, p.311)

It is true that sugar is an essential component of the body. But this "sugar" is glucose. On the other hand, the "sugar" which the advertisement is promoting is sucrose--table sugar. While both glucose and sucrose are examples of sugars (i.e., saccharides), using "sugar" to mean glucose in one part of the advert and "sucrose" in another part (even if just implicitly) is a blatant commission of equivocation. Given that this is an ad, it is almost certain that the ad makers were fully aware of what they were doing and intentionally took advantage of the equivocal meaning of "sugar" in an attempt to mislead and dupe the consumer (perhaps to counter the prevailing notion that table sugar in one's diet should be reduced to a minimum).

Now that wily, deceitful ad appropriately segues to an example of equivocation by a member of the sect/cult Jehovah's Witnesses (JW) who had the temerity of locking horns with an atheist using illogic and absurd claims. Like the above ad, his argument misleads readers by resorting to the equivocal use of a pivotal term.

This JW made the following argument:

The gods in the religion of the atheists are the atheists themselves. The atheists deny the existence of all gods. But the atheists believe that they are gods. So they idiotically deny their existence.

If you're a bit nonplussed as to how and why he can make the claim that atheists are gods, he offers the following idiosyncratic definition of "god":

A god can be the true God, can be any powerful being, any person with power in high position or anyone can be a god over a group of people under him, anyone makes himself a god if he denies the true God, a god can be also a thing like money, sex, idol, etc.

Going back to his argument about atheists, let's number the sentences/statements therein:

1. The gods in the religion of the atheists are the atheists themselves.
2. The atheists deny the existence of all gods.
3. But the atheists believe that they are gods.
4. So they idiotically deny their existence.

In #1 since atheists are human beings, natural (not supernatural) phenomena, we know that he uses "gods" in the sense he has defined it.

In #2 however, "gods" can only pertain to supernatural entities since that is what atheists don't believe in, that is what "gods" mean when atheists declare "I/We do not believe in gods". It cannot be in the sense that this JW has defined it since needless to say atheists believe in the existence of powerful persons in high positions, in the existence of other humans beings, in the existence of sex, money, and idols (presumably he means that sex, money and other objects in the world can be idolized, i.e., inordinately valued by some people to the point of obsession, reverence, etc.). This JW cannot of course claim that "gods" in #2 refer to a subset of the "gods" as he has defined it since he tells us that "atheists deny the existence of all gods" (emphasis added). Insisting that "gods" here is the same as in #1 would mean that premise #2 is false, pretty obviously so, thus pulling the rug from his argument.

In #3,ostensibly, he uses "gods" in the sense as he does in #1.

Given that this JW uses "gods" in two different senses, his argument commits the fallacy of equivocation.

#4 is the conclusion. But as we've seen and learned above this conclusion cannot legitimately follow from the premises because the word "gods" has been used equivocally.

In order to further see more clearly how the above argument in fact commits the fallacy of equivocation here is an example that uses "God" (capitalized) equivocally:

Some religious arguments can also include equivocations, for example:

It is not possible for the universe to exist without a cause, therefore there must have been a First Cause, which we can reasonably call "God." I already believe in the God of the Bible, and now you have no excuse for not doing so as well.
...

[W]e can see that God is being used in two entirely different ways. In the first sense, God is simply being used as a convenient term to describe a First Cause of the universe, with no particular attributes beyond that which is necessary to cause a universe. But in the second sense, the term God is used for something much more specific and with many more attributes: a traditional Christian conception of God.

(Fallacies of Ambiguity: Equivocation)

In logic, a deductive argument is said to be valid if it contains no fallacies. In a valid argument the conclusion logically and necessarily follows from the premises. An argument is said to be sound if the argument is valid and all the premises are known to be or have been shown to be true. Given a sound argument the conclusion therein must necessarily be true.

It is important to stress that the premises of an argument do not have actually to be true in order for the argument to be valid. An argument is valid if the premises and conclusion are related to each other in the right way so that if the premises were true, then the conclusion would have to be true as well. We can recognize in the above case that even if one of the premises is actually false, that if they had been true the conclusion would have been true as well. Consider, then an argument such as the following:

All toasters are items made of gold.
All items made of gold are time-travel devices.
Therefore, all toasters are time-travel devices.

Obviously, the premises in this argument are not true. It may be hard to imagine these premises being true, but it is not hard to see that if they were true, their truth would logically guarantee the conclusion's truth. It is easy to see that the previous example is not an example of a completely good argument. A valid argument may still have a false conclusion. When we construct our arguments, we must aim to construct one that is not only valid, but sound. A sound argument is one that is not only valid, but begins with premises that are actually true.

(Validity and Soundness)

Given this primer on validity and soundness, is the argument by the JW a valid argument? No, since it contains at least one logical fallacy.

Is it a sound argument? No, since it is invalid. And we don't even need to ask if the premises are true (a necessary condition for an argument to be valid), because an invalid argument can never be sound (validity is also a necessary condition for an argument to be sound).

The lesson: Make sure you use terms consistently. You can preclude equivocation by defining your terms precisely and in detail at the very beginning and double checking that every instance of the term is consistent with how it has been defined. Remember: the existence of equivocation renders an argument invalid. And sometimes, if flagrant, it may make it rather silly too.

Deja vu, Oprah

2009-05-19T11:11:00.005+08:00

Three years ago Oprah lent her weight to a book entitled A Million Little Pieces, written by James Frey. It's an autobiography about his drug addiction and eventual recovery. At least that's what Frey purported it to be. It was soon discovered, however, that Frey had falsified a good number of "facts" and embellished others. His memoir turned out to be largely fictional.

Oprah had made a mistake, a big one--for her endorsement had boosted sales of this title to millions of copies. But Oprah did something very few do--she admitted on a succeeding episode how she had made a terrible mistake. Oprah bit the bullet, swallowed her pride, and apologized to her audience and viewers and even invited Frey and censured him right on her show. She even told a Washington Post columnist who had criticized her as deluded that he was right--that she was wrong and that his criticism was appropriate.

Recently, Oprah committed a far more egregious mistake, one that puts lives on the line. She's endorsed anti-vaccine propagandist Jenny McCarthy. Oprah has practically given Jenny a carte blanche by providing her her own show on the Oprah network.

Three years ago Oprah owned up and showed America her integrity. Hopefully this time around she will do the same.

Shirley Wu has written an open letter to Oprah encouraging her to do the right thing.

...To me, it is clear that a significant number of people look up to you, and trust your advice and judgment. That is why it is such a huge mistake for you to endorse Jenny McCarthy with her own show on your network.

Surely you must realize that McCarthy is neither a medical professional nor a scientist. And yet she acts as a spokesperson for the anti-vaccination movement, a movement that directly impacts people’s health. Claims that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism have been refuted time after time, but their allure persists in part because of high-profile champions for ignorance like McCarthy. In fact, ten of the thirteen authors of the paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccination movement retracted the explosive conclusions they made due to insufficient evidence. Furthermore, it is now clear that the study’s main author, Andrew Wakefield, falsified data to support these shaky conclusions.

Go on over to Shirley's blog and read her missive in its entirety. If you think it's worth it spread the word. And let Oprah know about it if you can. Remind her about Frey.

Vatican twaddle

2009-03-06T01:21:00.000+08:00

The latest from the Vatican:

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Catholic Church doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities like evolution, saying there was a "wide spectrum of room" for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.

"We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things," he said on the sidelines of the conference.

But while the Vatican did not exclude any area of science, it did reject as "absurd" the atheist notion of biologist and author Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God, he said.

What?! When did Dawkins say evolution proves there is no God/gods? Firstly, science is not in the business of offering proofs. Can't they (and journalists) get that into their skulls? Secondly, the worst or best (depending on your perspective) that evolution can say is that the various extant species came to be via natural processes--that the "some deity zapped plants, animals, and humans directly into existence" hypothesis has been dealt a coup de grace.

The Catholic Church might be finally learning. It's shoving its deity into those regions where science cannot follow it (the Church, that is). Sure, you can be Deistic and say "God is the creator of the universe." For now--and perhaps a long time to come--it's nonfalsifiable and nontestable. But those Vat boys better cross their fingers and pray that scientists don't take that away from them as well. There are already alternative naturalistic hypotheses, you know.

The Aviator

2009-02-22T18:22:00.002+08:00

Imagine there's this top pilot, the best in the world. S/he can fly any plane blindfolded from the smallest to the biggest, commercial or military. Let's call him the Aviator. Not let's say a new electronic system has been invented that allows any plane to be flown by remote control from the ground. Given how this fly by wire(less) device can save a troubled plane from crashing this type of avionics becomes the new standard in civil aviation. The leading aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus quickly retrofit all their existing short, medium and long-haul planes with this device. What's more, there need only be one remote control box (RCB) to manage all aircrafts. One merely has to punch in the aircraft's number into the RCB and, voila!, one immediately has total control of that particular plane with all the feedback from the sensors and gauges displayed right there on the colored LCD screen.

Imagine the Aviator is the sole individual authorized and certified to operate the RCB which he has with him all the time, 24/7. (It has various hi tech security measures that makes it practically impossible for some one with malicious intent to gain access to the RCB's functions). In case of an emergency the Aviator is informed and he can proceed to try and bring the plane of the crisis.

Now let's say Flight 576 bound for Tokyo, carrying some 300 passengers, has radioed in and reports that they've been losing altitude over the past hour. Nothing the pilots have done has been able to bring them back up to a safe altitude. Media has already picked up the exchange between 576 and the tower. The latest word is that the aircraft is now flying less than 500 meters above the Pacific Ocean.

At present the Aviator is in a pub in Dublin. By sheer luck the telly is broadcasting the news about Flight 576. The Aviator watches and knows of course that the situation is about to end horrifically. But instead of immediately pulling out the RCB he sits back and continues sipping his drink.

Someone in the pub recognizes him. "Mr. Aviator! It's you, right? Hey that plane's going down. Aren't you going to do anything?" He waves the guy away. "Neither the tower, the FAA nor the IATA, or any of those in charge has asked for my help. If they don't buzz me, well, that's just too bad for the crew and passengers." The man is incredulous. "What?! You're just going to let all those people die?!"

----

Do you think you the Aviator had an ethical obligation to use the RCB to try and prevent the plane from crashing? Do you think he should be ethically and criminally liable for ignoring the crisis, for not doing anything to help?

One of the latest air mishaps--real one this time--occurred in Buffalo, New York last week. Continental Flight 3407 dropped out of the sky and crashed into a house, killing one on the ground and all 49 on board.

Who do you think had the RCB that could've prevented this tragedy?

God.

We can be quite confident there were people on board who rung Him/Her/It up. They had beseeched their deity to save them from certain death. But even assuming not one supplication was beamed, this being is said to be all-seeing, all-knowing. This entity in a sense was watching the entire drama unfold on his heavenly 600-inch plasma tv. And what did it do? God just let all those people die horrifically.

If you're a theist who believes God had the power to prevent the accident, knew what was happening and what would eventually happen unless he stepped in, actually cares about human beings, is a good and loving being, then if you have the gall to tell me that your deity is not morally, criminally culpable then you are absolutely sick in the head. Conjuring up such explanations as "higher good" or "mystery" to absolve this being of responsibility is nothing but a quadriplegic excuse.

Theodicies are just psychological painkillers to stem the massive attack of cognitive dissonance.

It ain't woo; it's proven scientific fact

2009-02-21T10:30:00.002+08:00

A group of women--at least two of whom are purportedly scientists--have started what they dub The Faith of Britain. And they have marked March 6 as the Faith of Britain Day.

For exactly two minutes on March 6th at 11.00am our consortium of psychics and healers will act as a channel for the positive thoughts of the entire country.

All those positive thoughts will be just that--thoughts. It will be what these psychics, healers and participants are going to do, how they will act that'll have an impact on their lives and on those around them.

I wouldn't even have bothered blogging about this if it weren't for the following claim of theirs:

It is a proven scientific fact that thinking about something often causes it to happen. Some call this quantum physics. Others simply call it "faith."

Gee, I never knew this is already a "proven scientific fact." For decades I've been endlessly thinking/imagining/fantasizing/visualizing of being in bed with Zeus knows how many big screen actresses but, by Jove, not one of them--any of them--has come within a trillion miles, much less landed beside me naked. Ah! I probably am not thinking hard enough. I better start having sex on my mind 24/7.

I fired off this email to Faith of Britain:

Hello. According to your homepage, "It is a proven scientific fact that thinking about something often causes it to happen." Does that mean that if I think of my mom's diabetes and cardiovascular diseases going away, then it will happen? If day and night I think of being a billionaire when will I become richer than Bill Gates? How long does a person have to think of something before it comes true?

Can you please point me to the scientific evidence showing that thinking about something causes it to occur? In particular please provide the controlled experiments that were conducted and which have been replicated. In which peer-reviewed journals were these published?

Thank you.

You'd think that having two scientists on board would've prevented them from making such an untenable statement as "it's a proven scientific fact." Which makes me wonder what exactly Lisa Elmore and Isabelle Bonnaire mean when they describe themselves as "Scientists." Conspicuously, they fail to mention whether they're biologists, chemists, physicists or whatnot.

If I ever receive a reply to the email I'll post it.

Truth in advertizing

2009-01-08T14:35:00.002+08:00

In an ad campaign by atheists in London late last year they had buses bearing the slogan "There probably is no God. So stop worrying and enjoy life." I already had reservations about its impact, and now my concern with the wording of that ad has been voiced:

Where did that "probably" come from? It doesn't suggest the sales staff is overly confident about its product. If my pilot told me "This flight to Paris probably won't crash," I'd think about taking the train.

Indeed, I share the observation that "probably" does detract from the possible maximum impact the ad could've had. The lack of resoluteness, the apparent wishy-washiness of the proclamation all but kills the message. Contrast "There probably are no ghosts" with "There are no ghosts." By including "probably" the statement comes across to believers as "Gee, there's a chance that ghosts exist after all."

Unfortunately, we atheists, skeptics, "reality-based communities" will have to live with this problem. That there probably are no sky daddies is the truth. The reality is--our current state of knowledge is--not that "there is no god" but that those who claim its existence have not provided sufficient persuasive evidence. Were we to drop "probably" we'd have to lay on the table evidence which we simply don't have. Evincing such a universal negative is, needless to say, a tall order. It would've been great to emblazon vehicles with "THERE IS NO GOD!" But that would be a lie. We just don't know with 100% certainty. We don't have enough reasons and evidence to make that leap. And indeed proclaiming "there is no god" would be a leap of faith--belief that is disproportionate to the reasons/evidence at hand.

Were we so audacious as to imply that we are certain of the nonexistence of supernatural beings, religionists would be right in slapping us with one of our own principles of clear thinking: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Of course the fact that there is a dearth of evidence--for any X--ought to restrain everyone from believing in X, for doing so would be irrational--why believe in X if good reasons for doing so are absent?)

Many ads mislead. I would even say it's the norm. Even preachers, pastors, priests withhold the whole picture and fail to mention to their congregation the epistemic fine print. So we're not going to make the same mistakes as the faith-heads. We are not going to commit the very errors we're exposing and critiquing. We're here to inform and shed light, not distort the picture.

It stands: There probably are no gods.

A deity-enthralled psychologist writes atheists

2009-01-07T20:16:00.002+08:00

Months ago I came across news that psychologist David Myers was coming out with his latest book A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God Is Good and Faith Isn't Evil. After reading excerpts back then I had expressed reservations about it. Now having gone through A Friendly Letter I can say that I am hardly impressed and indeed don't consider his missive as addressing the major concern of religious skeptics.

Basically, Myer's opus is a defense of religion as a human phenomenon. He defends religion and religiosity by making an appeal to consequences. Not in the sense that he concludes his religion is the true religion and that his deity is real, rather in the sense that religion should be considered a positive force because it has in large measure produced good and made a great many people altruistic. For instance he shows through various studies and surveys that the religious have lower divorce rates, smoke less, and commit less crimes. The religious are into charities and hospital care and other pro-social activities. Towards the end of the book Myers does make it explicit that whatever comes out from religion does not validate his theistic beliefs, its consequences do not imply the existence or nonexistence of his deity.

I have no problem with the fruits of religions. It's empirically clear that various traditions (not just Christianity) have led to good (as well as evil as Myers freely admits). My primary concern is not whether belief in, say, Santa Claus produces better behaved children, but rather whether Santa is real or not, whether belief in Santa is warranted (by evidence and reasons at hand) or delusional. Other atheists may put more weight on religion's fruits but my main concern is with what's real and what's illusory. I'm concerned with the very core belief of theism, i.e., the reality of deities and the supernatural realm. Is there or is there not at least one god? Does the supernatural exist or not? Is belief in these things justified or not? Is there sufficient justification, reasons and evidence to warrant belief? Myers does not address these central, fundamental questions, which to my mind should be since he's addressing skeptics and atheists. He's more interested in showing how being religious, having a religion, having supernatural beliefs can be beneficial psychologically, emotionally, and socially. Reading Myers, I get the feeling he's telling me: Look at all the social, psychological, emotional benefits of harboring a delusion. Ain't it great! Well, feel free to climb on board. Plug into our beliefs; the Matrix is heavenly!

Very early on Myers wants to make it clear that he's one of us--a skeptic and one who espouses critical thinking.

[F]or the most part, my skeptical friends, I share your skepticism. As an appreciative longtime subscriber to The Skeptical Inquirer and to Michael Shermer’s interesting Skeptic’s Society mailings, I cheer on challenges to rampant irrationalism. Thus my Psychology (8th edition) begins with a chapter on “thinking critically with psychological science" and thereafter offers scientific analyses of alternative medicine, astrology, ESP, near-death experiences, repression, hypnosis, and lots more. I have critically examined the supposed powers of unchecked intuition (in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils). And I enjoy casting a critical eye on intriguing claims by asking “What do you mean?” and “How do you know?” (p.6)

Myers may share our skepticism vis-a-vis astrologers, sCAM, psychics, crop circles, and other extraordinary claims, but he certainly shields extraordinary claims he believes in--sectarian in this case--from the light of skeptical inquiry. Need we point out that rather than being critical he's being hypocritical? I'd really like to bounce back one of the questions he enjoys asking: How do you know that your theistic beliefs are true? How do you know that a god exists and that it is your brand that's the real McCoy? How do you know?

Myers reveals to us that "God loves us" (p.125). I'm just wondering how he knows that. And if he doesn't what makes him believe in that quaint, namby-pamby claim? Has God shown this love of his? If so what is Myers' evidence? I'm all ears. Or is it that Myers posits a nontestable claim--e.g., that God will express his love after we are with him in heaven? Or could it be that he just likes the idea and the attendant feelings that come from truly believing there is a transcendent parental figure who loves us all?

Myers is a staunch evolutionist. He will have nothing of creationism, including its latest mutation Intelligent Design. He even includes as an appendix the International Society for Science and Religion's statement on ID. Furthermore, Myers doesn't believe that prayer works. (That's an interesting revelation). He says that a lot of believers equate prayer with magic and God with some genie or heavenly Santa Claus. Myers is also well aware of the ultimate futility of God of the Gaps arguments. But mindful of how science will, given enough time, eventually shine light into every nook and cranny, he hides his god in a gap that science cannot hope to illuminate--the untestable and the unfalsifiable. Hence, Myers can keep his belief in a preternatural realm and in a nondetectable, nonphysical being.

Given that Myers is a psychologist and that he's addressing skeptics and atheists, what I didn't expect was a homily. He sprinkles his missive with such irrelevant and inappropriate sermons as::

So let us observe and experiment, believing that whatever God found worth creating, we should find worth studying. Moreover, let us do so freely, knowing that our ultimate allegiance is not to any human authority or human doctrine but to God alone. (p.18)

Myers should know better than to preach to skeptics and atheists. What could Myers have been thinking when he penned these lines? It's a mortal sin to preach to nonbelievers! They won't listen to such trash and will probably tune out. I almost did and nearly gave up reading.

Yet another thing that drives me (and I guess not a few atheists as well) up the wall is being subjected to interminable bible-quoting by faith-heads. It's like being nagged. And yet Myers does so as if he's preaching to the choir. Again, what could he have been thinking? Does he really think atheists are ignorant of his sacred text or that they'll be swayed by verses and passages?

The worst part, however, is that Myers reveals himself to be a cherry picker. He quotes from the bible, but he selects only those that affirm his beliefs, only those passages that are, shall we say, good and wholesome. Biblical teachings that are patently immoral or stories that are factually untrue and clash with science he's mum about. That a psychologist would fall into the trap of confirmation and selection bias is truly pathetic. In fact I say it's unforgivable. If one defends cherry picking as valid for one's sacred text then one has to accept that it's valid for any text. It also means calling it "sacred" is ridiculous since it's the reader who gets to pick and choose which parts s/he will hold sacred.

Myers admits that the "nasty practices" in Leviticus are not of the same ethical standing as those in Isaiah or the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament (p.15). This of course just shows that the bible is not inerrant, that it can't be the word of some perfect being. Moreover it shows that believers like Myers actively judge the bible, choosing to emphasize some parts, ignore others, and even dearly wish they could sweep the worst parts under the rug. But if cherry picking and the use of ethical discernment are valid in reading the bible then it is Myers who's creating his own god and his own religion. No longer is the bible sacred such that it as a whole dictates how Myers should think, live and eat but that Myers controls what he's going to accept as biblical in his life. He sifts through the text and highlights and heaps praises on those passages that he likes while conveniently turning a blind eye to those that he disapproves of and finds irrelevant.. Well, looks like Myers is just like most non-fundamentalist Christians--they fashion Christianity in their image.

While Myers may opt for delusion if that delusion bears sweet, succulent fruits, I on the other hand favor "reality at all costs" (a phrase by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck which he used in describing what mental health means to him). Christians are fond of saying "the truth will set you free." Which is pretty ironic and odd given how their entire belief system is predicated on beliefs for which there is no good evidence. The truth? The truth is that they merely wish and hope they have not believed in vain. Here's Myers position on truth:

If religion is, on balance, adaptive rather than toxic—if it bends us toward happiness, health, and helpfulness—that is worth knowing. But it still leaves truth up for grabs. And truth is what matters. If religious claims were shown to be untrue, though comforting and adaptive, what honest person would choose to believe? And if religious claims were shown to be true, though discomfiting, what honest person would choose to disbelieve? (p.128)

Let's emphasize that. Truth is what matters.

Thanks for trying to inform us and even tying to change our minds, Dr. Myers. But frankly I'd much rather reread Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis' Religion and the Individual: A Social-Psychological Perspective. It's amongst the couple of psychology of religion works I loved reading cover to cover. The authors provided science, lots of it. You on the other hand brought in psychological studies alright but just as well talked from the pulpit and hosed your intended audience with theology and sectarian beliefs. The latter was a huge turn off. It mostly certainly detracted from the intention that your message be a "friendly" one.

Del Monte pineapple enema

2009-01-07T02:16:00.001+08:00

Some months ago I came across a Del Monte pineapple juice ad that touted the product as an aid in ridding the body of toxins. Upon hearing the radio commercial I slapped my head and blurted, "Good grief! Even Del Monte has ventured into woowoo." In later versions of the ad campaign the company even hired a celebrity to get the detoxification message across. (I get a kick whenever a some star endorses woowoo--it just reinforces the stereotype that they're airheads).

I'm blogging about this just now because that Del Monte marketing inanity was the first thing that popped into my head when a friend shared this detox myth article.

There's more detox news from Dr. David Colquhoun and Ben Goldacre.

Happy not birthday to you, happy not birthday to you, ...

2008-12-13T01:32:00.002+08:00

Hey, what do you know? Jesus' pretend birthday is coming up again. This dude is really special. The chosen one. The Son of a Gun. You see he's the only bloke who gets to celebrate his birthday on the day he wasn't born! Now that must take a miracle to pull off.

Rewinding a bit, nine months before his real birthday (whenever that was and if ever that was), Jeebus was conceived. Big problem though. No human father. No semen. No fertilization. No chromosomes except mama's. But somehow a zygote appeared which then became an embryo which eventually grew into a fetus. Ergo, Jeebus ought to be the Ever Virgin's clone. Hence, he was a she, and she was a Dolly? On the other hand since the fable says it was Sky Daddy who got Mary pregnant then ... Whoa! We've got a god screwing around with a mortal! Then again, why act surprised? The Babylonian king Sargon (c. 2300 B.C.E.) was born of an ordinary woman and a mountain god. Zoroaster, the Persian prophet who lived in the 6th century B.C.E. was God-begotten and virgin born. Cuchulain, an Irish hero, was the son of the god Lugh and the human female Deichtne. Okuninushi of Japan was one of the numerous sons of the storm god Susanowo and by the mortal woman Kishinada. The Aztec hero Quetzlcoatl was born of the virgin Chimalman, to whom the god Onteotl had appeared in a dream. The Greek god Zeus impregnated such women as Danaë resulting in the birth of Perseus; while the union of the god Apollo and Aria created Miletus. So it happens all the time, ok? Obviously the other gods have had their fill of female flesh. It was the Semitic deity's turn. It was but fair, you know--equal opportunity, no to discrimination, and all that jazz.

We can keep pedaling back all the way to the Garden where slithering reptiles had neocortices (biologists and evolutionists take note!) and so had the faculty of human speech and where an omniscient creator had not an inkling, mind you, of what was to happen next in the script he himself wrote, but then you get the point. This Bronze Age, Dark Age whackology is ten orders of magnitude more ridiculous than the worst trash Hollywood churns out. Which makes you really worry that not a few buy it as nonfiction.

How to turn anyone into a killer

2008-12-01T16:54:00.004+08:00

Last Friday shoppers who'd been waiting outside a Wal-Mart for hours burst into the store, tragically trampling to death one of its employees.

Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.

...

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

The Milgram experiment among others has shown us definitively that ordinary citizens can become torturers and killers if you just nudge them inch by inch, initially asking them to do something trivially bad then gradually making them do worse things. That's how young idealistic recruits into government become bad.

In this case had the wave of shoppers been waiting only a couple of minutes I think they would in fact have become good Samaritans rather than homicidal. In fact they wouldn't have stormed the store in the first place. They would've been civil. It's the pressure of having been in line for hours, almost a full day if we are to believe the quote above, and in the cold(?) that turned these people into savages, as Cribbs describes them. Samaritan or otherwise, when under pressure, under stress, we all move closer to the edge. That said, stress and pressure may be contributing causal factors but they are not excuses. These people are guilty of having killed a person.

Since Cribbs was an observer she might've been closer to the back of the line. You'd expect people who've waited less and were less motivated to come and shop early to be among the more sober ones. Those who came earliest were the most motivated, the most "fanatical", therefore, the most dangerous, the most "savage."

In the aftermath I wouldn't be surprised if some of those shoppers directly responsible will even denigrate the deceased. They might call him stupid for putting himself in harm's way. These shoppers like all of us consider themselves decent, law abiding citizens. The psychological dissonance of having been party to a homicide demands an immediate resolution. In order to regain consonance, to maintain their self-image of being a good person, it is most likely they will pass the buck and blame--to the victim, to Wal-Mart, to the police, to circumstances. Admission of personal culpability/responsibility would be too painful a blow to their self concept. Needless to say, admission may get them incarcerated.

Is Weinberg right?

2008-11-09T20:48:00.001+08:00

I have much respect for physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg. He's an atheist and has little qualms in calling a spade a spade when it comes to the irrationality of supernaturalism. But the following oft-quoted statement by him has had me disturbed for some time now.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

If I read correctly Weinberg is saying that the only way for a good person to do evil things is if s/he becomes an adherent of or a believer in some religion. To put it in another way, Weinberg is saying that without religion good people would not do evil things. I haven't been able to put my finger on it but his assertion just didn't seem right. I am leery of blanket statements such as "_____ is the root of (all) evil." Dawkins said it plainly when he objected to his producers' entitling his atheism documentary Root of All Evil? In interviews Dawkins has averred that "no one thing is the root of all anything." (Unfortunately the producers just wouldn't change the title. The only concession to Dawkins' concern was the addition of the question mark.) Be that as it may, Dawkins uses the above Weinberg quote in his The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2007, p. 249) in a way that implicitly gives the nod to Weinberg. (You've got two very intelligent and eminent scientists here--one making the claim and the other agreeing. I should probably doubt my doubting, shut up and just listen to these giants. But illicit appeal to authority isn't in the critical thinker's toolbox.)

After reading Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, I've finally found reason for my unease. In this important and very enthralling work for the general public (which I most highly recommend to everyone more than any book I can think of right now) the authors show us how ordinarily good people can eventually commit rather atrocious acts. What it takes is baby steps--continually rationalizing and justifying the almost trivial immoral/unethical deeds that we do. One does not commit a really bad thing overnight (unless, perhaps, in a fit of rage). That takes time. One gradually moves down the "pyramid of choice," moving further and further away from a route we would've taken had we made a different choice when we started our journey. Tavris and Aronson articulate this process:

When the person at the top of the pyramid is uncertain, when there are benefits and costs of [sic] both choices, then he or she will feel a particular urgency to justify the choice made. But by the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, ambivalence will have morphed into certainty, and he or she will be miles from anyone who took a different route.

This process blurs the distinction that people like to draw between "us good guys" and "those bad guys." Often, standing at the top of the pyramid, we are faced not with a black-and-white, go/no-go decision, but with a gray choice whose consequences are shrouded. The first steps along the path are morally ambiguous, and the right decision is not always clear. We make an early, apparently inconsequential decision, and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice. This starts a process of entrapment--action, justification, further action--that increases our intensity and commitment, and may end up taking us far from our original intentions or principles. [p. 33-34]

In the very famous experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram some four decades ago, subjects were asked to deliver an electric shock to a person whenever this individual made a mistake, under the pretext that they were participating in a study on the role of punishment in learning. The subjects were also instructed to increase the voltage level as the person made more mistakes. The subjects weren't able to see this person but could hear him/her, and thus could hear the groans and pleas and cries as the shocks were applied. This unseen "victim" was in fact a confederate of the research team, and in reality no shocks were ever delivered. In front of the subject was an electrical panel with switches. The labels indicated that the voltage ranged from 10 to 450 volts. As the experiment proceeded the confederate deliberately committed errors and feigned various reactions proportional to the voltage levels. The results of this experiment are most interesting and disturbing.

When people are asked in advance how far they imagine they would go, almost no one says they would go to 450. But when they are actually in the situation, two-thirds of them go all the way to the maximum level they believe is dangerous. They do this by justifying each step as they went along: This small shock doesn't hurt; 20 isn't much worse than 10; if I've given 20, why not 30? As they justified each step, they committed themselves further. By the time people were administering what they believed were strong shocks, most found it difficult to justify a sudden decision to quit. Participants who resisted early in the study, questioning the very validity of the procedure, were less likely to become entrapped by it and more likely to walk out. The Milgram experiment shows us how ordinary people can end up doing immoral and harmful things through a chain reaction of behavior and subsequent self-justification. [p.37]

Thus, if Weinberg is saying that religion is necessary (but insufficient)* for good people to do evil things, then I'm afraid he's wrong. It is in our psychology to justify our actions even if we are mistaken. Self-justification is hard-wired in our brains. Though we may be good we can end up doing bad things, sometimes really bad things, because we have successfully and continually convinced ourselves we have done no wrong while all the while traveling down the road to perdition. Given the findings of social psychology it is plausible if not probable that religion is not a necessary condition for good people to do evil things (even if religion--or certain characteristics thereof--can be--and has been--a causal factor in tipping good people into committing evil).

And rather obviously, we need only find one good person--a nonbeliever--who's committed one evil thing to falsify Weinberg's claim.

That would be the end of my critique were it not for the glaring lack of what "good" and "evil" actually mean operationally. What criteria are we to use in determining whether a person is good or evil, in evaluating which deeds/actions/behavior are good and which are evil? How good is "good," how bad is "evil"? There is a need for clear definitions of these terms, these classes of people and action/behavior. And depending on how these are defined, Weinberg's aphorism may yet withstand falsification. I for one certainly would be most ecstatic if Weinberg's dictum holds.

------

* in philosophy a necessary condition is one without which some event E cannot occur (but which by itself alone may or may not cause the occurrence.of E). A sufficient condition is one which is necessary and which will cause E to occur. Of course, there may be a number of necessary conditions for E to occur. Taken collectively these will be the sufficient condition that leads to E. For example, a power source is a necessary condition for a lamp to give off light, but it is not a sufficient condition. Another necessary condition is the wire to conduct the electricity to the lamp. Power source and conductor together constitute a sufficient condition for the lamp to light. Given the presence of all necessary conditions the lamp must light. If it doesn't then the sufficient condition was in fact not a sufficient one, i.e., one or more necessary conditions were absent (perhaps there is a switch and we forgot to flip it!). Given that Weinberg says that with or without religion good people will do good things but that it takes religion for good people to do evil things, he is asserting that religion is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. This means that good people who are religious have gained the potential to do evil things, which they would not have had they not been religious.

The wave of change

2008-11-05T21:01:00.002+08:00

I am overjoyed that America has chosen its first African-American president. Barack Obama is the man of the hour and for the hour. I'm no fan of Oprah (on the contrary) but she just put in words how I feel today. Upon hearing of Obama's victory, she said that hope has just been born. Most certainly, indeed!

That said, I'm amused to discover that among Obama's foibles is his superstiousness. Apparently he has an election day superstition --playing basketball. I presume that given the co - incidence--of having played and won by a landslide--he will carry on with this ritual in the years and decades to come. And let's not even talk about his fantasies about invisible beings in the sky, a being whom he called to bless America.

And so I still have a dream--that within my lifetime there shall be that commander-in-chief of the most powerful country, male or female, of whatever color, who is uninfected by the mind viruses we call superstitions.

Poor Nikki

2008-10-18T17:14:00.002+08:00

I just received the following spam SMS (formatting and caps as in original):

Hi there Nikki here

There is only ONE TRUE GOD.

Christians Unity. One Name. One God.

Thanks. :)

I promptly replied:

How about first proving your God and not mine is the real one? If you can't then mine is the true god and religion.

The logical fallacy therein is intentional. I opted to use jujitsu--using the opponent's own flawed reasoning against him.

Fueled by the arrogance and thoughtlessness of texting total strangers (whose religious or nonreligious orientation s/he's totally unaware of), I followed it up with the following long missive:

If you can point to your sacred text so can I. If you underscore the 2,000 years under your tradition's belt, I will remind you mine is 3,000 years older. If you say a billion believers cant be wrong, then count the number who believed the Earth is flat and the Sun and other planets go around the Earth. If you implore me to just have faith, then I shall beseech you to have twice the faith in my god, tradition and holy book.

No jujitsu there. Just sound reasoning in literary trappings in the hopes of enlightening such a naive, parochial, unthinking soul.

When adults are no more enlightened than their kids

2008-08-24T12:13:00.002+08:00

In a city in Mindoro, Philippines, some two dozen students mostly female have experienced "seizures" in the past two months. The Inquirer reports that the children "were crying in pain as they suffered from seizures and shortness of breath in a paranormal [emphasis mine] phenomenon that has left a public high school here petrified and perplexed." The reporter has dutifully conveyed the symptoms to us readers. But how does she know the phenomenon is paranormal? How was she able to make the leap from observed facts to causal explanation? What's her definition of paranormal anyway?

So what could have afflicted these kids? School principal Henry Tungol tells us the students have been "possessed by evil spirits." Yep, the head of the school has promptly diagnosed the children as having been the victims of invisible supernatural entities. How did he come to know this? Through the process of natural ignorance of course. If something puzzles you, if something gives you goosebumps, if you have no medical expertise, if in your omniscience you can't explain it any other way, if all you can fall back on is the tradition of superstition you were raised in, then the phenomenon must be supernatural/paranormal. And if what's before you bathes you with a warm fuzzy feeling, then it must be good spirits, otherwise it's those pesky evil ones. Simple.

The Mindoro "epidemic" reminds me of St. Vitus Dance. A search on CSICOP revealed the following on what was known as tarantism, a disease that supposedly occurred during the summer months of July and August:

Symptoms included headache, giddiness, breathlessness, fainting, trembling, twitching, appetite loss, general soreness, and delusions. Sometimes it was claimed that a sore or swelling was caused by a tarantula bite, but such assertions were difficult to verify because the bite resembled those of insects. The dance frenzy symptoms resemble typical modern episodes of epidemic hysteria, in addition to expected reactions from exhaustive physical activity and excessive alcohol consumption.

The seizures did occur in the last two months, although as to the degree of difference in seasons/climes between Europe and Mindoro I don't know. The article doesn't say anything about "dancing" or any wild frenzied behavior so this may be a totally different type of hysteria we're dealing with here.

Among the various candidate explanations, there is one which for now I don't give high points. We're told that exams were just around the bend. It's possible that some of these high school kids conspired to play a prank on their community and feigned "possession," not least to disrupt exam week.

But whatever the nature of this Mindoro event, the most prudent course of action is to check mundane, natural explanations before even entertaining notions of paranormal, demonic, supernatural, or what have you. We know that children can be mischievous, we know that medical and psychological conditions exist. We work with and from what we know, not from that which has no empirical base to support it whatsoever.

Cracker mania

2008-07-13T18:29:00.002+08:00

The brouhaha is now all over the blogosphere. Instead of swallowing the consecrated wafer given to him by the priest, a college student took it out of his mouth and brought it home to show some nonCatholic friend of his. Reports say that Catholics are outraged and some have even sent the kid death threats. Looks like loving one's enemies and turning the other cheek have gone out of fashion.

A student at the University of Central Florida says he's now getting death threats after he stole and later returned a wafer representing the "Body of Christ" from a Catholic Mass in Orlando.

The student senator, Webster Cook, originally claimed he merely wanted to show the Eucharist to a friend who had questions about Catholicism before consuming the host.

Cook, who was raised Catholic, said he decided to bring the wafer home June 29 after a church leader tried to physically pry it from his hand. Cook broke Church rules by failing to consume it immediately during Communion and then removing it from his mouth once seated.

The part about Catholics being furious and the scuffle with the church leader is most revealing. Take a second to digest that: Catholics are angry because the host/wafer/cracker has to be eaten but was not. The piece of bread has to be literally put in one's mouth and has to be literally swallowed. Keep in mind that in Catholicism the host is said to be literally the body of Jesus Christ, a being who's both fully human and fully divine (a god). Now go ahead and add two and two together. How much more literal does it have to get to understand that the Catholic Church not only accepts but in fact demands cannibalism and theophagy (the ingestion of gods)? In Catholicism opting out of eating Jesus is, to put it mildly, frowned upon.

This is the 21st century right? Forgive me for being in a daze, but WTF is this "church rule" about cannibalism being one's duty?!

Thai woo

2008-06-22T01:43:00.001+08:00

Former Thailand prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has sagely advice for his troubled country:

Be patient with the headache-inducing situation until July 2. Mars moving close to Saturn causes the headache. When Mars leaves, the situation will ease.

It seems Thaksin relies on the heavens a lot:

Mr Thaksin has long placed his faith in astrology. When Bangkok's new airport opened he had the first plane land at 9.19am, which he believed was an auspicious moment. For a while as prime minister he cancelled his weekly press conferences, claiming that Mercury was not in a favourable alignment.

And you thought the Reagans were nutty.

A theistic psychologists's letter to skeptics and atheists

2008-06-21T21:19:00.004+08:00

I just learned via psychologist of religion Michael Nielsen that later this year psychologist David Myers' new book, A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God is Good and Faith Isn't Evil, will be coming out.

The subtitle "Why God is Good" already makes me uneasy. It sounds as if Myers has already decided that the entity "God" exists and he will now just be providing arguments to establish its goodness. Pray he hasn't done so or he gets an immediate thumbs down from atheists.

From the looks of the pdf files of the preface and first two chapters it's going be a small format work and, given it runs only 160 pages, quite a slim one at that. Shouldn't take more than a day or two to go through it all. And if the substance of the excerpts provided is a preview of what is to come, there might not be much meat and food for thought. Sorry to say but my appetite isn't at all whetted. In fact I'm disappointed. I was anticipating much more from a psychologist, particularly good science.

Moreover, I'm bugged by what he says about his theism. In Chapter 2 he declares that among his assumptions is "there is a God." Perhaps he does so later in the book, but I don't know which entity he's referring to. He doesn't describe this "God" in any meaningful detail. Given his "biblical understanding" we can surmise he's talking of the Judeo-Christian deity. But is it that of the Catholic, fundamentalist, liberal, ... or his own trimmed down / souped up version?

Right after stating his assumptions Myers tells us that he believes "we should hold our own untested beliefs tentatively, assess others’ ideas with open - minded skepticism, and when appropriate, use observation and experimentation to winnow error from truth." Moreover, he tells us he "enjoy[s] casting a critical eye on intriguing claims by asking 'What do you mean?' and 'How do you know?'" Well and good. Those are what skeptics, including religious skeptics, would want everyone to learn to do. But has Myers cast a critical eye on his own theological beliefs? Hopefully he addresses that matter.

I also have a problem with his use of "faith." This early, he seems to be already using the word in at least two senses: religious/spiritual inclination and belief. If faith is understood to be belief without justification or belief highly disproportionate to the available evidence, then I for one find faith and reason irreconcilable. In such a context faith isn't reasonable.

I get the impression that Myers gives us thumbs up to the human activity we call religion including the belief in deities (although not all kinds of gods). The problem of course--and I think Myers is aware of it--is that even if being religious (in the Western world) is associated with goodness and happiness, it doesn't imply that the proposed supernatural entities believed in actually exist. Given the lack of any good evidence for them, it would be delusional to believe that they in fact are real, i.e., having faith in their existence isn't warranted.

I may be prejudging Myers. Hopefully there is more intellectually rigorous material in the rest of the book.