energy medicine

Quackery at the VA: Our veterans deserve real medicine, not fake medicine

oracknows — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 06:00:48 +0000

Quackery at the VA: Our veterans deserve real medicine, not fake medicine

I get e-mail.

Often, the e-mail I get consists largely of rants from various cranks about how I am a "pharma shill" and whether I feel any regret over the babies I'm supposedly turning autistic by my advocacy for vaccines. Much less often, I get e-mails praising me for my work. Sometimes, I even get e-mails that tell me that my blogging was the reason someone turned away from the dark side of antivaccine quackery or other pseudoscience. Those e-mails make my day.

I also sometimes get e-mails like this:

I'm in the VA healthcare system in Los Angeles. I had previously read your article about how 'alternative medicine' is creeping its way into the VA system.
I was referred to the "healing touch" "nurse" because an actual physical therapy appointment takes three months to get. At first I thought this was some massage technique and would help relieve some muscle tension in my shoulder. Well come to find out it they put me in a room with traditional Asian-themed relaxation music and enough aromatherapy that I felt like I was in a nail salon.

She began to tell me how the "energy of the universe" flows through her hands and because of her touch, many many people have had their lives changed. So I guess sort of like the television church shows but this is taxpayer money.

After about 5-10 minutes of anecdotal stories and claims that there have been "studies" that this works, she proceeds with the "treatment" which basically involves her putting her hands on me and saying she is "feeling" that I have had pain in areas. She goes down a list of stomach, leg, back, neck, headaches, anxiety, etc. saying she can "feel this." More like she can read my VA file which is in the computer. Even then she is 50% correct about my problem areas which I can also replicate with a coin toss.

At the end she asked me how I felt and I told her I felt the same. Then she said that it's a "cumulative effect" and that the "healing energy" needs to build up in my body. "Remember to drink a lot of water for 24-48 hours because the energy is still in your body." Unbelievable! I was polite and smiled, but I wanted to scrutinize this so bad.

Normally you could chalk this up to Los Angeles and how we have this anti-science subculture here, but this is the VA. And tax dollars are paying for it. To add insult to injury, these monies spent on crap like energy healing also make it where I can't get the care I need from REAL doctors and physical therapists due to lack of funding.

Just wanted to give you a first-hand account that this quackery has fully made its way into the VA healthcare system. Thanks for the great website and teaching me a lot about science and medicine that would otherwise be more difficult and less entertaining to read.

Later in the e-mail exchange, he said:

By the way, they are also offering acupuncture at the West LA facility and I was offered this to treat migraine headaches. I told them my concerns (info i got from your site actually) that through studies they found that it's entirely placebo and I was wondering if they had any additional evidence. This doctor, who I actually believe is a real doctor, told me that they had been shown evidence that people felt a lot better. I responded with "Well, it's also been documented that when a doctor asks how your day was and demonstrates they 'care' then patient outcomes improve big a noticeable margin as well. So how is acupuncture different than that?" Her response was something about nerve pathways, etc. At least she didn't tell me something about Chi or I'd go nuts. Again, taxpayer money diverted to quackery instead of things that are proven to help and have science to back it up.

I've written on numerous occasions about how quackery (or, as I like to call it now in the age of Trump, fake medicine) has infiltrated military medicine and less frequently about how the same thing is happening in the VA medical system, but there's nothing like an actual personal anecdote to make it really real to me, which is exactly what this anecdote did. Healing touch is a form of "energy medicine." In contrast to reiki, where the reiki master claims to be able to channel "healing energy" into the patient from the "universal source," practitioners of "healing touch" claim to be able to manipulate the patient's "energy field" to produce healing and/or relieve symptoms. I approach these stories from the viewpoint that our veterans deserve the best medical care available, and that that medical care is science-based medicine. "Complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), "integrative medicine," or whatever the nom du jour is for the quackery masquerading as "wellness" or "holistic medicine" that is currently infiltrating civilian hospitals as renowned as The Cleveland Clinic should have no place in military medicine or the VA either.

In other words, our veterans deserve real medicine, not fake medicine integrated with real medicine.

Spurred by my reader's anecdote, I did a bit of Googling. In addition to finding the usual stuff, such as a VA web page about CAM use for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that says that there's only "limited evidence about the effectiveness of CAM as a treatment for PTSD" but notes that "89% of VA facilities offered CAM and 1% were in the process of developing CAM programs" and that a recent survey of all 170 specialized VA PTSD centers showed that 96% of respondents offer CAM for PTSD.

Then there was this gem of an article published last year in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine by a couple of heavy hitters in the world of integrating quackery into medicine, including Richard C. Niemtzow MD, PhD of the U.S. Air Force Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine Center, Malcolm Grow Medical Clinics and Surgery Center, Joint Base Andrews, MD, as first author and Wayne B. Jonas, MD of the Samueli Institute as well. We've met both of them before, particularly Dr. Niemtzow, who is best known for wanting to bring acupuncture to the battlefield. (No, I'm not making this up.) Jonas, of course, is the President and CEO of the Samueli Institute, one of the foremost proponents of integrating fake medicine into medicine.

Along with the usual drivel about how acupuncture is ancient and effective (it's neither), Niemtzow et all note:

Acupuncture is well known in Eastern cultures for its analgesic benefits. Many medical practices in Western countries have focused not only on this modality but on other integrative approaches to combat pain. As addiction to prescription opioid medication is skyrocketing in the United States, Western physicians are rapidly exploring the benefits of acupuncture for the relief of pain. In particular, BFA, which uses a specific sequence of five ear points for rapid pain relief, is the most popular and “go-to therapy” utilized by military medical acupuncturists around the globe. This is because of its history of providing rapid, safe, and effective pain relief in wounded warriors over many years. As a consequence, and also influenced by the APMTF, a $5.4 million DoD–VA Joint Incentive Fund (JIF) project—“Acupuncture Training Across Clinical Settings (ATACS)”—was funded by the DoD–VA Health Executive Committee in April 2013. The ATACS Program provides BFA [battlefield acupuncture] instruction to DoD and VA healthcare providers (HCPs) and gathers relevant information to ascertain its impact on pain and, in particular, its ability to reduce opioid use.

Successful implementation of an IM [integrative medicine] program by any healthcare system requires a disciplined multistep process. The first step involves selecting a modality that is evidence-based, safe, and has the potential to demonstrate its value in achieving desired outcomes. Selection of appropriate modalities may be ascertained by a combination of a review of available clinical trials, published literature, and/or by empirical clinical experience. Such was the argument for BFA. A second key step, particularly in a large and/or complex healthcare system, is to ensure that HCPs receive a systematic and standardized training program from experienced and well-qualified instructors. This is particularly critical when rolling out an IM modality, for which practitioners may have never been trained.

See what I mean? There is an active effort to train HCPs in the VA in acupuncture and to promote fake medicine under the guise of real evidence-based medicine. As much as advocates claim that acupuncture is evidence-based, it's just not. It's a prescientific medical modality that is rooted in vitalism and nothing more than a theatrical placebo, with the "best" clinical evidence indistinguishable from the normal "noise" in clinical trials that occasionally produces false positive results. Of course, CAM advocates don't like it when it is pointed out that acupuncture is fake medicine. Unfortunately, because acupuncture involves sticking needles into the skin, many physicians think there might be something to it, leaving aside all the mystical mumbo jumbo. Certainly, a decade ago I was in that group. Heck, even someone I admire as much as Paul Offit fell victim to the acupuncture narrative in an otherwise excellent article on quackademic medicine by seeming to argue that it is more than a placebo and citing the "endorphin" explanation, even as he got it right that it doesn't matter where you stick the needles in or even if you stick them in. That's how powerful the narrative can be.

Reading e-mails like my readers angers me. Remember, the reason he was referred to a "healing touch" quack is because the wait for a physical therapy appointment was three months, which is an unacceptable length of time. In other words, the Los Angeles VA doesn't have enough physical therapy resources to meet the needs of its veterans, but it has energy medicine quacks willing to fill in the gaps. I can't help but wonder if this situation comes as a result of the failure of the federal government to invest enough resources into the VA Medical System. More physical therapists and fewer quacks, I say! Unfortunately, since the VA hired Dr. Tracy Gaudet as director of the VHA’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation, fake medicine has become increasingly entrenched (or should I say "integrated") into the VA. Naturopaths are even now lobbying to be employed by the VA. Nothing has come of their efforts that I'm aware of thus far, but if there's one thing I know about naturopaths, it's that they're persistent. They'll keep trying.

With all the problems the VA health care system has, shortage of resources and long waits have always been among them. Unfortunately, in response to the shortage of real medicine, the VA seems to be taking a page from the Mao-era Chinese playbook and trying to "integrate" fake medicine with real medicine to paper over the problem.

Our veterans deserve better.

oracknows Fri, 01/27/2017 - 01:00

Integrative medicine and spoon bending at the University of Alberta and "Bigfoot skepticism"

oracknows — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 06:50:17 +0000

Integrative medicine and spoon bending at the University of Alberta and "Bigfoot skepticism"

After over 11 years at this blogging thing, I periodically start to fear that I’m becoming jaded. In particular, after following the infiltration of quackery in the form of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more commonly known as “integrative medicine,” because it integrates CAM with evidence-based medicine. Of course, in reality, what “integrative medicine” really does is to integrate prescientific, pseudoscientific, and antiscientific quackery with real medicine, and that’s what I mean. I thought I had seen it all in academic medical centers and medical schools: the faith healing that is reiki at National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated comprehensive cancer centers, acupuncture at more universities than I can recall, functional medicine and traditional Chinese medicine at at the Cleveland Clinic; naturopathy and therefore, whether the MDs in the integrative medicine departments know it or not, The One Quackery To Rule Them All, homeopathy, which is an integral part of naturopathy; and even Rudolf Steiner’s ultimate woo, anthroposophic medicine at my damned alma mater!

Yes, I thought I had seen it all, until I came across this Tweet by Tim Caulfield, an outspoken critic of CAM from our neighbors up north:

Spoon bending at @UAlberta. Not satire. Integrative health program. @UAlberta_FoMD @skepticpedi @PharmacistScott pic.twitter.com/BtTgylBrqI

— Timothy Caulfield (@CaulfieldTim) June 1, 2016

And:

Behold this integrative health/quantum physics spoon bending bunk from @UAlberta CC @juliaoftoronto @YoniFreedhoff pic.twitter.com/pgBD6TNTGQ

— Timothy Caulfield (@CaulfieldTim) June 2, 2016

Yes, you read that right. It’s a flier for Pediatric Integrative Medicine Rounds at the University of Alberta’s CARE Program for Integrative Health and Healing advertising a spoon bending workshop. No wonder most people thought it was a joke or some sort of satire. It wasn’t; it even showed up on the CBC News website:

The workshop is to be presented on June 28 by Anastasia Kutt, an Edmonton "energy healing therapist" and "registered reiki master," according to her website.

"This experiential workshop will teach a guided meditation/energy transfer technique which will have most participants bending cutlery using the power of their minds," the workshop description says.

"This will not be a scientific evaluation of the process," the poster notes.

It won’t be a scientific evaluation of the process? Imagine my relief. Particularly hilarious is the part about typically “75% of workshop participants can bend the spoon.” Only 75%?

Naturally, I wandered over to Anastasia Kutt’s website, Luminous Tranquility, where I learned:

Anastasia Kutt (click here for bio) is an energy healing therapist and workshop facilitator in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a Registered Reiki Master Teacher with the Canadian Reiki Association, and offers Reiki workshops at Healing Connections Wellness Center. She is one of 20 certified Trilotherapists in Canada, and also has extensive training in the Yuen Method of Energy Clearing. Please see Workshops for upcoming events and Treatments for information about treatments.

Kutt appears not to be actually treating anyone, but rather making her living doing workshops on reiki and “energy medicine,” including spoon bending workshops, and selling a guided meditation CD. So, obviously, someone at the Pediatric Integrative Medicine program at the University of Alberta must have hired Kutt to do this workshop. Just let that sink in. Whoever runs the Pediatric Integrative Medicine Rounds thought that it was a good idea to invite an “energy healer” to demonstrate how to use the “power of the mind” to bend a spoon! Ultimately, it was reported that the event was canceled, which just goes to show that shining the light of day on these excesses of quackademic medicine is the best disinfectant for

At this point, it would be very easy to go on a fun (and hopefully funny) rant about just how bad things have gotten in quackademic medicine that anyone at an actual medical school would take the claims of spoon bending at face value. Very easy indeed. It would have been a hell of a lot of fun, too, which made it difficult for me to restrain myself. However, as I read over this sad story of credulity, I was reminded of something that happened a mere two weeks ago at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS), when Scientific American journalist John Horgan gave a talk with the intentionally inflammatory title, Dear “Skeptics,” Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More: A science journalist takes a skeptical look at capital-S Skepticism, which he later posted on his Scientific American blog. It provoked a lot of reactions because it was so fractally wrong, including two responses from Steve Novella, Daniel Loxton, Jerry Coyne, and, of course, yours truly.

Basically, Horgan’s criticism of skepticism boiled down to an accusation that we don’t take on the “hard” targets, preferring instead to go after “easy” targets like Bigfoot, homeopathy, astrology, and the like. While there is a grain of truth in that characterization, overall Horgan’s whine came across as the fallacy of relative privation or, as I like to put it, “You should stop caring about what you care about and care about what I care about instead because it’s so much more important than what you care about.” Part of that characterization was to disparage “bigfoot skeptics.” Do you see where I’m going with this?

One of the most basic issues of skepticism, one that many skeptics cut their teeth on, is Uri Geller, the man who bends spoons with the power of his mind. At least, that’s how he characterized himself in the 1970s and onward. I first heard about him when I was a teenager. Being a teenager and of not more than average skepticism, I was just as puzzled as many people were over Geller’s spoon bending. Now, spoon bending is an obvious magic trick, which is why James Randi was so easily able to duplicate it and why he was so easily able, working with Johnny Carson, to expose Geller as a fraud on national TV:

These days, it’s so well known that spoon bending is a magic trick and not evidence of a man’s ability to bend metal with his mind that a quick Google search for “How do you bend spoons?” turns up many links that tell you just how to duplicate Geller’s feat that amazed so many for so many decades, for instance:

There’s even a Wikipedia entry on spoon bending.

This sort of skepticism is exactly the sort of skepticism that Horgan so contemptuously dismissed as “Bigfoot skepticism.” After all, it’s just a con man named Uri Geller bending spoons using a magic trick that most magicians know and fooling the public into thinking that he was using the “power of his mind” to accomplish it. The skill set required to demonstrate that Geller was a fraud was straightforward and not particularly complex. That’s why the story of Uri Geller’s spoon bending con is a basic story that nearly all skeptics encounter fairly early on in their journey to becoming skeptics. It’s the very epitome of what John Horgan considers wrong with organized skepticism.

And yet...

And yet there is a major Canadian academic medical center that had at least one faculty member that doesn’t exercise skepticism about a woman who claims to be able to manipulate “life energy” from the “universal source,” which is what reiki is when you boil it down to its essence, and offers workshops on how to use the power of your mind to bend spoons. Just think about it. If the person putting together Pediatric Integrative Medicine Rounds for the University of Alberta had been inculcated with a bit of the ol’ “Bigfoot skepticism,” maybe he or she wouldn’t have agreed to let Anastasia Kutt to do a workshop there. If that person knew that spoon bending was nothing more than a simple magician’s trick, perhaps he or she wouldn’t have fallen for Kutt’s nonsense. That didn’t happen, unfortunately. Bigfoot skepticism could have prevented this, but in the world of quackademic medicine there isn’t even Bigfoot skepticism. There isn’t much, if any, skepticism at all. More’s the pity.

Then, of course, Horgan also heaped his scorn on skeptics who debunk homeopathy. As I’ve discussed many times in the past, on the surface, there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of homeopathy in academic medical centers. However, if you consider how many CAM or “integrative medicine” programs have naturopaths on faculty and offer naturopathy services, you’ll soon realize that there are a lot of academic medical centers offering homeopathy. The reason is simple. Homeopathy is such an integral part of naturopathy that you can’t have naturopathy without homeopathy.

In fact, a little bit of that “Bigfoot skepticism” could prevent atrocities against science-based medicine like the Pediatric Integrative Medicine (PIM) trial:

The Pediatric Integrative Medicine Trial (“PIM Trial”) started recruitment of hospitalized children at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta in early 2013, and the clinical intervention phase starts in the fall. While the initial focus is on children with cancer, plans to include children in other areas of the hospital are underway. Led by the CARE Program and supported by the University of Alberta, the trial will study the effects of an inpatient PIM service when added to conventional medical care.

The service consists of pediatricians and credentialed therapists in acupuncture, massage therapy, and reiki who will offer consultations and treatments for children experiencing pain, nausea/vomiting, and/or anxiety (“PNVA”). Choice of therapy is guided by each patient and family, and informed by established research on its safety and effectiveness; there are no obligations to start or continue the PIM Trial’s therapies, and there is no cost to the family or to the hospital.

The trial will assess and compare costs, length of hospital stay, safety and effectiveness of therapies (CAM and conventional), and quality of life and satisfaction with care as determined by patients, their caregivers and health care providers.

Of course, acupuncture and reiki are the purest of vitalistic quackery, modalities that have no place in any hospital purporting to provide evidence- and science-based care to patients. “Bigfoot skepticism” is useful in identifying how reiki, at least, is quackery. Acupuncture is a little bit more difficult, given that it involves sticking actual needles into patients, but it’s not that much more difficult to demonstrate that acupuncture is a theatrical placebo. Sadly, the University of Alberta is not alone in embracing quackery. It has lots of company.

Scientific skepticism strives to separate claims that are supported by evidence and science from claims that are not. Claims like the ones made by Uri Geller over the years are clearly ridiculous, but, contrary to what Horgan seems to think, they are not at all unimportant because they are widely believed. In fact, they’re so widely believed that they have served as the basis of a workshop offered by a respected academic medical center. All it would have taken is a single skeptic applying “Bigfoot skepticism” to the claims being made by, for instance, the University of Alberta. Where was that skeptic? Nowhere, or so it would seem. It’s not as though it’s always difficult to test these sorts of implausible claims, either. Indeed, in the case of “therapeutic touch” (also called “healing touch”), a form of “energy medicine” widely taught in nursing school that posits that the person doing the therapeutic touch can sense and manipulate the patient’s “energy field” to healing effect, disproving the woo is so easy that even an 11-year-old can do it. Unfortunately, the environment at some academic medical centers has become so credulous that highly educated physicians and nurses accept this kind of nonsense. Sure, it’s possible that a lot of physicians saw the spoon-bending flyer and scoffed derisively, but the very fact that the workshop was scheduled is a symptom of a serious problem.

In fact, I’d argue that we could use some “Bigfoot skeptics” in medicine. Horgan paints efforts debunking homeopathy with the same brush, as taking on an “easy” target that isn’t worth the effort, but homeopathy is a multibillion dollar industry. We could use some in politics as well, because, for example, there is a whole category of health care pseudo-professionals called naturopaths for whom homeopathy is such an integral part of their practice that it is part of their licensing examination. In my state (Michigan), there is a bill, HB 4531, that would grant licensure and a broad scope of practice to naturopaths. If there were more “Bigfoot skeptics” in our brain dead legislature, maybe the bill wouldn’t have made it out of the House Committee on Health Policy to be considered by the whole House.

Skepticism and critical thinking are a world view that is desperately lacking in most people. Horgan seems to think that it’s not worthwhile to exercise these skills on anything less than world peace and complex questions about whether screening for cancer saves enough lives relative to the cost in money and overtreatment, but there are plenty of examples of much more straightforward questions need to be examined with science and a critical eye. Unfortunately, one of these examples is in medicine myself. If even a few physicians can be accepting enough of a claim that a common magician’s trick is in reality evidence of the power of the mind that they’re willing to schedule a workshop on spoon bending at a major medical center, we have a problem, and it’s a problem that “Bigfoot skeptics” are most suited to tackle.

oracknows Fri, 06/03/2016 - 02:50

Categories

Physical Sciences

Spoon bending... Spoon bending???? F*#%IN' SPOON BENDING??!?!?

Not gonna lie, I checked the calender to see whether it was April 1 when I saw this.

My intern year of residency at the University of Arizona School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics involves a lot of frustration over a newly introduced computer charting system in 2000. It could take 1 to 2 hours to get orders in on a patient that you could have written in a paper chart in about 5 minutes. There was a meeting with the computer people at the hospital along with a doctor who had become an IT specialist for the hospital and he said point blank to us pediatricians that they rolled out this horrible system on the pediatrics ward first because we were " nice people". The flip side to that was that the physicians who were surgeons and in adult medicine would not have stood for this horribly written computer software nonsense. I think to some degree this is the same tolerance by people that are being way too nice (i.e. pediatricians) when it comes to integrative medicine and even worse nonsense like spoon bending and energy healing--not that any of it is stuff that I think should be tolerated in science based medicine. At least I'm hoping that's how it is and this would extend as well to the increasing anti-vaccination you see within Pediatrics. I'm really hoping it's a bunch of people who know these pseudo-scientific quacks are wrong but are simply being nice people in tolerating it rather than actually believing it.

That being said, and as you know, the University of Arizona his home to a pseudo-scientific integrative medicine program that has very much infiltrated the Pediatric Residency program there. Also within the field of Pediatrics about two years ago the president then of the American Academy of Pediatrics made some very ignorant statements in acceptance of Integrative Medicine and Pediatrics showing a complete lack of scientific understanding. Even now the current president of the American Academy of Pediatrics seems more interested in stamping out poverty than he does taking care of patients. I didn't sign up for medicine to be a social worker or to deal with pseudo-scientific crap, and I'm having a real difficult time getting excited about taking care of patients again when I see how pervasive this nonsense has become.

On the plus side, I could listen to James Randi all day. He's like the witty, gay grandpa I've always wished I've had.

Trilotherapist

Yay, I'm learning a new word!
...
What does it means? Something about listening to trilobites? (or to trebles?)

**Wiki search**
"'Trilotherapist' does not exist"

**Google search**
Tranquil Luminosity arrives 4th. Um, some kind of zen Quantum meditation à la Deepak Choprah.
Seems to be mostly a Canadian thing, with maybe a spin-off in India.

But seriously (OK, not too much), if bending spoons was teachable that easily to pediatricians, would you really want a poorly trained Magneto in the same room as your baby?

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

Kutt appears not to be actually treating anyone, but rather making her living doing workshops on reiki and “energy medicine,”

Isn't Reiki teaching a pyramid scheme of sort? You don't go around treating people, you go around teaching them how to do it themselves.

Oh, rats, @4. You beat me to it. Listening to trilobites was my very first guess! I'm quite sure it would be more useful than whatever the heck Trilotherapists actually do.

#4 Helianthus http://www.smilingacademy.com/trilotherapy/ Note who he is sitting with. Deepak Chopra. Says it all

Now, now. I have an energy metabolism - chemical energy, but that's energy nonetheless.
I've also bent many a spoon that I've gripped too tightly.
Obviously, that's because I'm a lizard or something.
Oh wait, nipples, must be a mammal, with all of that warm blood. OK, or something.

OK, all that said, if the subject at hand were in reality in question, I'd simply advocate for summary execution of the advocate. We are speaking of medicine for children and I'm rather uncompromising in that area.
I'm all fun and games until the welfare of a child becomes a matter of concern, then, the part of ancient maps becomes a matter of focus, "Here be monsters".

And I thought U of Alberta was a good university. Yep, up there with U of T and McMaster in the woo stakes though with a spoon-bending Grand Rounds it may be taking the lead. ARRGH! What were those idiots in the Senate and on the Board of Trustees thinking of?

@ 4 Helianthus

Trilotherapist

India? I didn't see anything about India. It does look like there is a minor but possibly dangerous infestation in Alberta (See the House of OM in Calgary) and the http://trilotherapy.com site seems to be written in Hebrew (well it looks like Hebrew to me but what do I know?)

The blurb about trilotherapy (http://trilotherapy.com/trilotherapy/)is as stupid and facile as one wouldexpect it would be. Deepak Chopra would probably find it ridiculous. Its only apparent good point is it does not use the term quantum.

Well, when it comes to dissing Bigfoot "enthusiasts" (ie nutjobs), they make it so easy it's really not worth a skeptics time (though certainly his laughter).

Take, for example, Todd May of Utah, who claims he found a "Bigfoot skull" in the woods near his home (http://www.kare11.com/news/nation-now/man-says-he-found-bigfoot-skull/2…).

It's a ROCK.

Well given a Bigfoot hunter and someone organizing a psychic spoon bending Pediatrics Grand Rounds I know who looks saner. Hint it's not the cutlery enthusiast.

"She holds a Bachelor's of Science degree with a major in Microbiology and Immunology". Sorry; I just can't help thinking that if she is sooo intelligent, stuff like spoon bending, even if used as a metaphor, is completely beneath her. I suppose the idea was to teach people to deceive children with tricks to encourage them to believe they can overcome their illness. But how is that ethical or necessary?

Looks like Anastasia works for the department.

http://www.care.ualberta.ca/en/OurTeam.aspx

"Anastasia Kutt coordinates the Education arm of CARE and is also involved in research activities and organizing events."

Maybe she organized and approved the rounds herself.

India? I didn’t see anything about India. It does look like there is a minor but possibly dangerous infestation in Alberta (See the House of OM in Calgary) and the http://trilotherapy.com site seems to be written in Hebrew (well it looks like Hebrew to me but what do I know?)

Deepak Chopra is involved, and Mr. Chopra is originally from India, so if you are playing the six-degrees-of-separation game...

I agree that the trilotherapy site (at least the front page) is in Hebrew. Not only do the letters look like Hebrew letters, but the text is clearly intended to be read right-to-left, consistent with Hebrew.

And yes, there's definitely something rotten in Edmonton. How does anybody, skeptic or not, get into a position of authority in a medical school without knowing that spoon bending is fake?

@Rob

Holy crap. You're right. This is even worse than I thought. The Pediatric Integrative Medicine program has a reiki quack organizing education events! True, she's just a Research Assistant and probably just does the grunt work inviting and scheduling speakers decided upon by the leadership, but clearly she has influence if she talked them into letting her do a spoon bending workshop.

I agree that the trilotherapy site (at least the front page) is in Hebrew.

It's shilling workshops by trainees of Nissim Amon.

...but clearly she has influence if she talked them into letting her do a spoon bending workshop.

From reading their profiles at Rob's link it looks as if they were already there.

However, I'm encouraged that this department includes those involved in SONAR (Study Of Natural health product Adverse Reactions).

But seriously (OK, not too much), if bending spoons was teachable that easily to pediatricians, would you really want a poorly trained Magneto in the same room as your baby?

Maybe they're just looking for "The One".

What are you talking about? There's a war on somewhere that you should be stopping. Or something.

But the even larger irony? The credulous Horgan recently had to turn to Shermer to get him to explain this. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/skeptic-debunks-spoon-b…

You can't make this up.

I would hold this seminar.

Then, hold everyone, wait for the presenter to sit own, and introduce my special guest speaker, James Randi.

@Rob #12
Thanks for that link. The real problem is Dr Sunita Vohra who started the PIM program several years ago. I remember running across some credulous articles about her/it at the time in the Vancouver Sun.
She is unfortunately an actual MD, and self identified "expert" in woo....err...CAM. This is her department, and all the staff will be taking her lead.

Chris Hickie: "I think to some degree this is the same tolerance by people that are being way too nice (i.e. pediatricians) when it comes to integrative medicine and even worse nonsense like spoon bending and energy healing–not that any of it is stuff that I think should be tolerated in science based medicine. At least I’m hoping that’s how it is and this would extend as well to the increasing anti-vaccination you see within Pediatrics. "

I think it's a tad more complicated from that. First of all, the current young pediatricians are, in most areas, more poorly educated than the generation before, thanks to political nonsense in the schools. Secondly, a lot are from evangelical areas where pediatrics is the one acceptable sort-of-sciency career, but they're all very susceptible to wild theories and dislike vaccines (cause government). Finally, the administration doesn't give a toss and most anti-vaccine pediatricians are free to practice and air their nonsense without censure from any higher-ups. If the boards were to make a few examples, I'm sure there'd be a lot fewer anti-vax pediatricians, and the rest might start using their brains.

But the even larger irony? The credulous Horgan recently had to turn to Shermer to get him to explain this. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/skeptic-debunks-spoon-b…

I guess this means we'll be thoroughly admonished by Horgan if we don't start attacking spoon-benders in a concerted Sceptic effort.

Something certainly needs to get bent at Alberta U.

Mary M@18: Delicate debutantes like Horgan superciliously declare that science needs to work harder to fix and improve science and medicine, then shit giant bricks the moment science starts by stripping out the most copious and lowest hanging of fruit.

Right.

And how the fack do these dimwits think science got where it is today in the first place?

Frankly, if you ain't doing science like this, you ain't doing science at all. The only thing a good scientist needs a spoon for is shivving the competition when it's wrong.

Actually, I can see a use for spoon bending in a pediatric ward of a hospital.
Entertainment.
Like having clowns visit, or window washers who dress up like Spiderman.

That would be a good use.

I misread this as 'Tribbletherapy', and thought it was somehow Trekkie relevant.
Shame they cancelled. I was intending on asking a friend, (a local Edmontonian and fellow skeptic), to attend. He doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Happily, this workshop's been cancelled according to the CBC:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/university-alberta-spoon-bending-1.3612…

PM Justin Trudeau makes me proud to be Canadian, but this spoon-bending made me ashamed. Guess you can't win them all.

There is a great performer who calls himself the Space Cowboy (he's Australian), I guess he's a mentalist - and sword swallower - he does things that others have presented as 'psychic' but he's honest about having no supernatural powers. His is an amazing show, I've seen him a few times over the years. He does a trick involving an up-turned knife blade under one of 3 paper cups, he says he reads the non-verbal cues of the audience member participating to guess which cups are safe to crush. I know he's gotten it wrong at least twice, and ended up with a knife through his hand.

Watching that first video I almost felt bad for Uri. I did not even almost feel bad for the faith healing lying bastard.

Why is everyone so surprised spoons bend? Haven't they ever had to scoop ice cream out of a freezer set on the low side using a regular spoon?

jk rideau

And I thought U of Alberta was a good university.

At least they didn't give Stanley Pons* tenure.At least they didn't give Stanley Pons* tenure.

He was too fast on the draw. He didn't do that extra experiment that one wants to do to verify, said the University of Alberta official, who asked to remain anonymous.

I wonder who Anastasia Kutt is related to/married to/shagging at the U of A.

OR they could come to the Vanishing Rabbit Magic Shop and buy the spoon bending DVD LOL

It’s the very epitome of what John Horgan considers wrong with organized skepticism.

And I'm still wondering why Horgan's opinion should carry any weight for anyone.

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/edmonton/spoon-bending-workshop-wide…

More from Tim Caulfield
"That's my sort of umbrella concern with this," Caulfield said. "Is these kind of programs legitimize the pseudo-science. The problem is, it always sort of slides into the embrace of pseudo-science.

"It's always presented in a legitimate fashion. You don't have that critical component to it, you're working arm in arm with energy healers, reiki experts and homoeopathy practitioners."

#20 The real problem is Dr Sunita Vohra who started the PIM program several years ago"

She seems rather cagey in the limited quotes I've seen. She skirts the issue, looking for more investigation or that doctors need to be reactive and more knowledgeable about what their patients are interested in. The lack of efficacy and the risks of alternative medicine is never mentioned. Nor are the ethics of these grand placebos.

@#8 I took some Hebrew in college. Although that was many years ago, and I no longer have a dictionary. The first two words ( under the guy in the orange bubble, Hebrew goes right to left) I think has something to do with ending/concluding faith/belief. Under the other bubble it says trilotherapy. That is as far as I am going to go right now as I have to get up really early for work tomorrow.

Since this post concerns Canada, I thought I'd raise this here.

There used to be a guy, who I met once in Toronto, who was a very prolific writer and commentator, on autism/vaccine-type issues.

He used to post under the name "Sheldon" - which I think was his name - and then he seemed to vanish. At least in an online presence.

Does this ring any bells, or anything, with anyone. I can think of quite a number of people who've dropped out of the area of interest. So I'm kind of curious, nothing more.

Sarah #37
The first two words are the name of the guy, Nissim Amon. Those Israeli guys are really good at spoon bending.

@ 12 Rob 12 & 14 Orac 14

I think the rot is even worse. If you read some of the blurbs at Rob's link, , we get

Dr. Hsing Jou... completed the University of Alberta’s Certificate Program in Medical Acupuncture in 2002.

The U of A is issuing some kind of certification in acupuncture!

@ 36 harriet huestis

If you track down the Director Dr. Sunita Vohra, it looks like she is researching some interesting areas. https://uofa.ualberta.ca/integrative-health-institute/directors/sunita-… . Note the (i) cluster-controlled cost-effectiveness trial of pediatric integrative medicine (acupuncture, Reiki, massage therapy) for inpatients; - See more at: https://uofa.ualberta.ca/integrative-health-institute/directors/sunita-….

In my experience one does not do a cost-benefit study before one had demonstrated (to some level of surety) that the intervention is having an effect.

She looks pretty far gone in woo.

Brian -- Yes, Sheldon101 was a prolific, and excellent, vaccine defender on the HuffPo years ago (back before they went on non-anonymous FaceBook and I left).

I noticed he vanished, too. I fear he went the way of the late, greatly lamented lilady.

With a 75% success rate for spoon-bending, the The Amazing Randi should be handing out quite a few million dollars after every workshop. I know that'd be my first stop if I suddenly acquired special abilities.

It's Hebrew all right. Nissim Amon. The "about" page tela how he went to the far east after his army sevice. Korea, Japan,Nepal, India. Zen monasteries. The whole nine yards. sigh. Born every minute even here.

@ palindrom

That's what I was thinking maybe. Maybe someone knows.

Pretty snide thing to refer to a legitimate failing of skepticism to refer to calling out what she called out as a "whine" and then buttress it with some lame random grab from the Wikipedia fallacy article. Indeed there should be a moratorium on the word whine because it is little more than a signal that the user is obviously signalling that their opponent hit a nerve.

todd, I lost track of exactly what you were whining about there (sorry), but referring to one's opponents as "whining" is an overused dodge.

Yesterday the Wall St. Journal devoted its weekly religion op-ed to praising a book about Christopher Hitchens, alleging that he supposedly seriously contemplated a switch to religion during his final days (a version of the Deathbed Conversion tale we're familiar with in relation to Pasteur and other luminaries). The op-ed's author referred to atheists who protested/debunked this alleged turnabout by Hitchens as "angry" and "hysterical".

Tiresome.

If I can be permitted a slight diversion this far into the discussion, it was interesting to noted an article this past week on Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, in which he discussed his serious childhood bout with polio (he was unable/not permitted to walk for awhile, but ultimately was left with what was described as minor permanent physical impairment). McConnell was attempting to reassure voters that Donald Trump will be "perfectly fine" (or similar wording) as President. Guess Mitch doesn't know or care that Trump holds inane antivax views and might attempt to weaken vaccination programs, creating more kids susceptible to polio and other dangerous diseases.

Just a few points.
Not only are pediatricians nice, but these are Canadian pediatricians, and should therefore be the ne plus ultra in nice.
The first page that came up on my trilotherapy search was called The Home of OM (points for the rhyme). The picture is of Mr. Amon in an East Asian garment with a Japanese-type sword at his waist. The picture implies that it has something to do with the "Diamond Sword of Zen" Either Mr. Amon is rather petite or the Diamond Sword is immense.

(I hate this keyboard!)
Cont'd:
In either case it looks as if Mr. Amon would need four hands rather than the usual two to wield it. He also doesn't look very Zen warrior-like. If you want to be taken seriously, it isn't a good idea to so beclown yourself (Note: This is a generic use of "you". It is not meant to implicate any individual who may be reading this. (Or maybe it is)).
The page also asks, "Trilotherapy uses many different ways to help you awaken yourself to your own life without guilt, remorse, negativity or stress. Could you imagine what your life would be like without all of these things?"
No, I can't. The only kind of folk I can think of who can imagine it are that strange tribe we call "psychopaths". Maybe the sword has something to do with turning unhappy people into unreflective psychopaths?
The spelling down the page of "troilotherapist" may be revealing too. Maybe the Diamond Sword of Zen is to be used to administer the kind of therapy Troilus administered to Cressida. It all begins to make sense on a deeper level.

http://my.setmore.com/bookingpage/1437a701-be25-4598-8551-a2fe1eee9019

The only thing that makes sense to me on the whole Home of OM site. I guess he's in touch with the real world after all.

Did I get the root letter meaning of the name right?

New to your blog. I picked this one to make my first post on because, well, I have several social ineptitudes that will show themselves as we get to know one another, but...

When people at these gatherings are not able to bend spoons and the organizers tell them they are all just part of the 25% that can't do it and they add themselves up and realize they constitute more than 25% of the attendees, are they allowed to get their money back? ????

I dunno, I'm infamous for bending spoons. Strong hands and a blunted sense of touch will do it every time. I really do have to follow up on that with doctor, find out if it's thoracic outlet syndrome or something in my cervical spine.
My wife and I are keeping quite a few specialists busy of late!

I guess I should have finished every comment to see the event has been cancelled.

My wife and I were at the beginning stages of a serious conversation about a trip there.

The picture implies that it has something to do with the “Diamond Sword of Zen” Either Mr. Amon is rather petite or the Diamond Sword is immense.

Um, I get the reference, but the use of props really is not approprate. I was quite distressed to read that he spent some time with Seung Sahn. If I recall correctly, his monastic training was also in Korea (presumably Chogye). Show me the inka, Nissim.

Narad, I absolutely missed the possibility of phallic symbolism with the sword. That is very unlike my usual sex-crazed self, especially when I'm on the manic side of the swing,
In any case, we;re better off at this blog than at Home of OM.
Nissim Amon may have Zen, but we have Orac!

I absolutely missed the possibility of phallic symbolism with the sword.

That's just as well. Here.

^ I dunno, maybe he's just putting in a blender with Takuan or something. Korea's not Japan or China.

^ "putting it in a blender"

Uri Geller was my kids' gateway to skepticism. Trying to bind up the tatters of his career, Geller had a special on the erroneously named Fox Network (erroneous because it's neither cunning nor hot, unlike Beautiful Rockin' Wife). The Young Rockin' Kids were about 8 and 9, young enough not to be taken in. When Geller was about to go into his spoon bending, I told them to ignore anything he was saying and to watch only his hands. They spotted the trick immediately, much to their amusement and my pride.
John Horgan can go suck it.

Sarah #50
Nissim may mean "miracle" and Amon may mean either "believer" or "skillful worker". The whole name could be translated by "magician" or, more accurately, by "he who is able to bend spoon".

Hi everyone, have been lurking here for a while, enjoying the antivax/ alt cancer pummelings. I have a neglected bachelor degree in Biology and am a martial art (MA) Zen cult survivor.

Which makes it rather painful that my first post will be seen as a defence of woo, with only personal anecdotes to boot! Please be gentle as I'm not out to score points, more moved by my sense of honesty.

I joined this MA organisation as I was getting beaten up a lot, it ticked all the boxes for being a good MA org. About two years in, I started getting taught to smite and move people with energy.

Obviously I was pretty sceptical, with many questions, the main one in my head being “am I just going along with this”? Their premise could be summed up thusly:

The woo only works if both people are “switched on”, the MA org only recruits people who can be switched on. Most people are closed, therefor cannot be affected by the woo (convenient hey).

Why bother then? Well the best MA comes from being switched on, meaning that closed people are dealt physically, the switched on via the woo.

So I went along. Then my personal sensei discovered Reiki, claimed to have gone through five fraud instructors, to finally find a real one. He progressed rapidly, bought a table and started offering sessions. I had a few, but found the "effects" didn't last, was told that my smoking was ruining my health and his efforts.

Now on to the heart of the matter, my girlfriend (gf) at the time had a lot of problems, so I took her for a session and was invited to watch.

Now she was totally asleep, loudly snoring, he was waving his hands around, then he stood about a meter away from her head and slowly "pushed" the air, after a slight delay she quivered starting from her head all the way down.
He repeated this trick at least three times from different angles. Then at one point moved his hands slowly a foot above her body, stopping at the base of the lungs, she groaned a bit and moved her hands over her lungs, still asleep. He said her lungs were full of "crap" and she needed to stop smoking (no mystery there, she smoked like a chimney), as he can't really do anything.

That had quite an effect on me, could I have been hypnotised into seeing that or something?

After a few weeks he quit the reiki sessions, he said it was too much effort, personally I think he made more money from teaching MA. Gf left the org first, then a couple of years later I left, it was starting to overtake my life, being pushed to teach MA myself and I only joined to learn how to protect myself and that was sorted.

Years later I asked the now ex gf about the experience, she can't remember anything really, but swears blind there was no set up.
Years later the org's founder was outed as a fraud and the whole org split into loads of factions.

What might cheer the people on this blog would be the assertion of the now ex sensei that Reiki was pointless for anything else apart from the problems Reiki can solve and therefor had no place in a hospital lol.

As for the studies showing only a placebo effect, when discussed, was talked about mainly in the difficulty of finding a "real" practitioner, the large proportion of switched off people in society and (I kid you not) the power of sceptics smothering the woo.

Palindrome @41: Sheldon101 is still out there defending vaccines, at least up till last April
Hopefully he'll drop by here sometime.

Scientists are to blame for the chaos occurring in integrative medicine. The flat refusal to acknowledge obvious things like the impact of nutrition on an organic body of cells and organs is the obvious misstep. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies that sponsor their "work" are in a narrow path to synthesize drugs. People are flippin' sick of it. So while it's bizarre to hear about spoon bending, it's a travesty that an entire health care system from medical schools to pharmaceuticals to insurance carriers have no interest in breaking out of the "cancer conveyor belt" they profit from. Many of us are not tolerating those choices any longer. And guess what? They live to tell how they "beat" the establishment.

Michele: "The flat refusal to acknowledge obvious things like the impact of nutrition on an organic body of cells and organs is the obvious misstep."

Who figured out about the existence of vitamins and their relationship to problems like scurvy, rickets, pellagra and beriberi? Come on, be honest. Was it naturopaths or scientists and medical doctors?

Was Joseph Goldberger a naturopath or a medical doctor?

Was Christiaan Eijkman a naturopath or a medical doctor?

Was Frederick Hopkins a naturopath or a biochemist?

Was Kurt Huldschinsky a naturopath or a medical doctor?

"So while it’s bizarre to hear about spoon bending, it’s a travesty that an entire health care system from medical schools to pharmaceuticals to insurance carriers have no interest in breaking out of the “cancer conveyor belt” they profit from."

No the travesty are those who make up stuff out of thin air and try to profit by selling nonsense. There is lots of money to be made by selling sugar pills, random hand waving and over priced supplements. Especially if it endangers children.

So get off of your high horse and answer my questions on those names.

Scientists are to blame for the chaos occurring in integrative medicine.

I honestly think greed is to blame. And that happens in both research and woo. I know a fair number of people who have been helped by weird theories that in practice were nothing more that avoiding foods that bothered them.

I could do without the weird and at some point those selling it will have to pony up with the science to support their WA claims. Just as our society will have to support funding of research outside of commerce.

Mrs Grimble @62 -- Excellent news! He's very much on the side of the angels.

And, he has a blog:

http://sheldon101blog.blogspot.com/

@Chris - you know who invented vitamins and tryptophan, but it has nothing to do with what is happening in Dr offices in 2016.

Whoa, Michele, you actually think vitamins were invented! That is hilarious. The air must be very thin on top of that high horse.

So what is really happening in doctor's offices in 2016? Give us details. Was I not supposed to go to the orthopedic doctor office when I broke my wrist? Do tell us what works better for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, Type 1 diabetes, Hib meningitis, and childhood leukemia?

After doing some errands I plan on starting Chapter 4 of Terrors of the Table. It is a history of nutrition, from the science to the fads. This is why I was literally laughing at Michele's sentence: “The flat refusal to acknowledge obvious things like the impact of nutrition on an organic body of cells and organs is the obvious misstep.”

Invented...tryptophan? Invented??

Scientists are to blame for the chaos occurring in integrative medicine. The flat refusal to acknowledge obvious things like the impact of nutrition on an organic body of cells and organs is the obvious misstep.

could you please name 3 scientists who have refused flatly to acknowledge the impact of nutrition on an organic body of cells? Ideally that would be in papers published in a high impact peer reviewed scientific journal (though not The Journal of Irreproducible Results). However, direct quotes reported in reputable news publications would be fine considering the claim.

Thanks.

Setting aside the spoon-bending at UA, I want to address the framing question: On what basis might we critique the merit of different choices skeptics make in the pseudo-science that receives their attention?

Horgan mucked up his complaint by using the lingo of 'hard' and 'soft' targets, which, given his examples, too easily seemed to equate 'hard' with 'serious' and 'soft' (or 'easy') with 'trivial'. But that's not how he actually defined them. What he was trying to call for was more skepticism close to home, more scrutiny for scientific sloppiness within things skeptics tend to accept. He seems to gave gotten derailed by injecting the Bigfoot example that was in the front of his mind due to a personal squabble with his NECSS moderator.

'Soft target' skepticism, per Horgan's actual defintition, really refers to skepticism that is 'easy' to do because the woo is so obviously non-scientfic. This would include not just amusing BS like Bigfoot, but very serious BS, like Brian Clement killing people with curable cancers by getting them to forego chemo for wheatgrass smoothies. Obviously, then, the 'hard/soft' distinction isn't a determining guide to what does and doesn't deserve attention. To be fair to Horgan, he says "soft" targets "deserve criticism," and strikes me as suggesting only that typical skeptic targets receive too much repetitive attention, while skepticism towards problems in 'mainstream science' – which Orac correctly noted RI and SBM do indeed do – could stand more or more vocal attention.

All of which is to say I don't think the question of spoon-bending at UA and Horgan's essay are really relevant to one another. Regardless of what Horgan himself would think of something like the spoon seminar, we could allow that his 'hard/soft' distinction has some merit, but is only one consideration among many about what amount of our finite time and energy for critique any given instance of BS might merit. For one thing, spoon-bending-with-the-mind may be well-established as ridiculously bogus, and not at all widely believed, but when it appears under vague auspices at a medical school, that's hardly outside of Orac's tribe. While I suspect that workshop was intended as something other (and much less worrisome) than what Tim Caulfield assumed, the matter certainly is worthy of attention to try to uncover what exactly is going on.

I'm not up to offering some list of what considerations should guide an assessment of how and where skeptics expend their critical energies. But I do thing that ought to be a subject of debate, and critiuqe should not be simply dismissed. When Orac's tries to reduce Horgan's critique to subjective preference – "you should stop caring about what you care about and care about what I care about" – the corollary implication is that whatever you care about is worth unlimited attention in public forums simply because you care about it, thus casting any question of social responsibility as illegitimate. I don't think Orac actually believes that, since he actually addresses several justifying criteria, if not necessarily by name, in defending his critique of homeopathy by tying it to opposition to the licensure of naturopathy: 'widely believed,' 'moving toward legitimation' , 'degree and scope of potential harm" and 'utility in countering harm.' There are other factors of course, and even within these, we will argue over how they apply. But as a start, those considerations sound good to me, anyway, and a long way from Bigfoot.

sadmar: "On what basis might we critique the merit of different choices skeptics make in the pseudo-science that receives their attention?"

The same basis I would use when someone tells me to stop commenting on blogs: I don't them how to spend their time, so don't tell how I should spend my time.

By the way, about five blocks from where I am sitting is the grave site of someone from our family who decided to not bother with the psychiatrist and the prescription for her bipolar diagnosis, but go to a naturopath who sold her expensive homeopathic sugar pills. This is why I think homeopathy is not a soft target.

By the way, yesterday's included a very lively discussion about Horgan. Oh, and another thing: don't tell me to not listen to podcasts, and I won't tell you to stop listening to music (actually, that is often directed towards dear hubby).

Yep.

Also, I actually do believe that Horgan was, in essence, saying that skeptics should examine things he thinks are important. (He even more or less admitted it in a followup post.) Of course, if that wasn't what he meant, than he's an incompetent writer and speaker because he certainly overlaid his arguments with his own preferences. Let's just put it this way. I can't read Horgan's mind; so I can only address what he actually says or writes.

As for "hard" versus "soft" targets, I'm taking on a very hard target on my not-so-super-secret other blog, which will, of course, eventually be crossposted here, probably a week later. Maybe I'll Tweet it at Horgan.

Another Antivaxx Slayer, I too am a bit disappointed that the event was cancelled. I can see how a conman could persuade people that he was bending spoons by the power of his mind, but how does a conman persuade an audience that they are bending spoons by the power of their minds? Trick spoons maybe?

Horgan was, in essence, saying that skeptics should examine things he thinks are important.

Also that if skeptics don't drop their own preferred targets and swivel in unison to focus on his targets, that is only because they are tribal group-thinking conformists.

Horgan's preferred targets being areas of science (superstring theory, cosmology) that Horgan does not find sufficiently legitimate. True skepticism apparently involves being unqualified and attacking scientists.

Chris,

Similar thoughts to yours although I would have written that you can spend all your time weighing the merit of what skeptics spend their time on but until you pay them to focus on something instead of it being a labor of love, you have no right to to tell them what thing they should be focused on.

However, I was surprised by your question to Michele about what is really happening in doctor’s offices in 2016. It's a fair question and I don't know how she will answer it, but are you not aware of the circumstances that are frustrating patients these days?

I don't find it an excuse to turn to something worse but I do understand their pain.

However, I was surprised by your question to Michele about what is really happening in doctor’s offices in 2016.

Michele made a very broad, vague statement in the context of a discussion about whether scientists (or apparently doctors) would tell you that good nutrition was important. Chris asked for clarification. This strikes me as absolutely proper. Without asking what Michele meant, they could easily be at cross purposes.

To beat the horse further, by Chris's statements she's been to the doctor so has her idea of what happens in a doctor's office. Not a Troll has an idea of what happens in a doctor's office. Michelle has an idea of what happens in doctor's office. Are the the same? If not, why not?

It’s a fair question and I don’t know how she will answer it, but are you not aware of the circumstances that are frustrating patients these days?

What such general circumstances can you extract from Michele's disjointed comments?

^ ^^ Goes to motivation, your Honor.

I think taking the comments as a whole, especially comment #63, expands the conversation to a more general complaint than just the nutritional aspect.

Scientists are to blame for the chaos occurring in integrative medicine.

Scientists and pharmaceutical companies that sponsor their “work” are in a narrow path to synthesize drugs.

Sounds like a jaded patient to me (or to cynical me as if it is an ND justifying their existence).

Well, I for one am thankful that "Scientists and pharmaceutical companies that sponsor their “work” are in a narrow path to synthesize drugs", as otherwise, my aorta would have exploded into my abdomen from hypertension caused by my hyperthyroidism, which is also effectively being treated with those drugs.

Wzrd1,

So am I. But there is a skill to using them (which is why I pay doctors).

It's cool that you found your answer. Thankfully, estrogen replacement therapy treated my hypertension where CPAP, levothyroxine, a diuretic, an ACE inhibitor, a beta blocker, weight loss, exercise, and avoiding salt* did not.

I'm very thankful that estrogen is no longer considered the devil's potion.

*not all meds taken concurrently

I went from having a blood pressure of 200/100 and pulse of 128 to normal BP, while moving from 200 mg metoprolol twice a day to only taking 50 mg of metorpolol twice a day.
Left ventricular hypertrophy, secondary to the hypertension, with some heart pattern alternations that were secondary to remodeling of the atrium, again secondary to hypertension and aortic dilation of 2.2 cm.
So, it's been an eventful year so far!
As this all was discovered in the first week of the year, treatment has been a resounding success so far.

Who knows? My thyroid and I may eventually peacefully coexist. ;)

@Chris did you know that you can walk into a Dr office, complain of fatigue and brain fog and leave (after a 20 minute "visit") with scripts for HRT (no blood work necessary. In the trash it went. My daughter went to the Dr this week complaining of similar symptoms, after no blood work or diagnostic of any kind she left with a script for Concerta. My dad started chemo for pancreatic cancer and was given a sheet by his oncologist and was told he needed "calories" - items full of sugar.

I realize you have no passion or compassion for people. Your goal is to sound super duper intelligent and square off against anyone who tries to help you understand why science is the problem. I don't care if you accept or agree that Drs and scientists and pharmaceuticals have created angry customers. consumers of health care are retaliating against the "system" because they are literally sick of it. Stepping off the conveyor belt that is controlled by scientists and business models and finding real solutions. Ortho is totally different than a systemic disease, which is where the "establishment" makes its money and is not incentivized to find cures and prevention. It profits from "disease management" and dumb dumbs like me (hundreds, thousands, millions of us?) aren't going to blindly follow.

LW - My wife was highly displeased. She loves to have people show her how to do things, especially when they are complete frauds. We were planning on bringing a whole kitchen supply store until they found one that worked. Alas, the tides are against the sarcastic.

Wzrd1 - I should have been more specific, however with the tone of the blog, the article, and advertisement it was referring to, I assumed that a certain level of association would be present by default. My apologies. However, that said, our spoons bend the most in ice cream.

@Michele - I am going to assume that you have no medical knowledge beyond WebMD. I am assuming this because the first three sentences of your post #86 mark you as someone not only devoid of medical knowledge but devoid of all biochemical knowledge in general. I don't have the time to give you the roughly 20 years of biochemical, biological, and medical knowledge floating around only in my head alone, but here is a fast run down.

1. Traditional symptoms are usually diagnosed based on severity of symptoms combined with observations. These initial observations will tell us if testing is needed because sometimes if a patient HAS something worse, it won't show up in blood work yet. This is why when you leave a doctor's office you are told that if he symptoms persist or worsen, return. Throwing away a script is child abuse.

2. As a diabetic that just finished pancreatic cancer let me tell you that if you don't stop giving out medical advice, you will kill members of your family. Sugar is glucose, something our body has to have and is NOT BAD FOR YOU. It is required by our cells to produce the energy his body needs to fight. Having avoid the diet recommended is killing him. Seriously woman, you are destructive to your family.

Sigh @ angry typing

Having him* avoid the diet....

My dad started chemo for pancreatic cancer and was given a sheet by his oncologist and was told he needed “calories” – items full of sugar.

Yup.

@antivaxx - the day before chemo my dad was able to drive to his Dr appt. 2 days after chemo (and sugary foods he was prescribed) he collapsed and was taken by ambulance and died. Thanks for "schooling me" about how ignorant I am. And how I will kill my family.

You. Are. A. Tool.

@antivaxx - throwing away a script is child abuse? It was MY script! And after being prescribed HRT (that I refused to fill) I went back and requested blood work at beginning and mid cycle. Dr was very embarrassed to acknowledge my hormone levels were ALL normal.

And I am the dumb dumb?

Went and double checked your posting. Yup, you are still the idiot.

1). The only person you identify as going to the doctor with those symptoms is your daughter not you, so now you are making this up as you go or are even more incompetent than I previously assumed and trashing the script is still child abuse IMO, just because you were the recipient does not change my opinion.

2). Things occurring with a commonality in time do not indicate a common cause. Tying the death of your father to sugar when it is the basic ideology for pancreatic cancer is utter stupidity. You are very very much the dumb dumb.

Michele,

I am truly sorry for your loss.

With mainstream medicine I know there are risks and mistakes are made, but I think your anger is misplaced towards those here who are concerned with the greater risks to patients from following self-proclaimed messiahs who are authorities in their minds only.

Just because you were burned by mainstream medicine does not mean that you won't be burned by alternative medicine either. Just being anti-establishment doesn't equate to being healers. That is why science is the answer and not the problem. If alternative medicine practitioners cure people of anything, then their treatments should be able to be studied, explained at some level and be repeatable not just anecdotal. I don't think that is too much to ask of them.

@antivaxx - written very clearly: daughter was given a script for Concerta, no mention of trashing it. You may have misunderstood and made assumptions, but the point of throwing a script in the trash followed a statement about HRT and if my daughter is old enough to get that, it's highly unlikely that I took a script from her or that it would be child abuse.

You might want to reach out to the moderator to delete some of your posts to preserve your integrity.

the day before chemo my dad was able to drive to his Dr appt. 2 days after chemo (and sugary foods he was prescribed) he collapsed and was taken by ambulance and died. Thanks for “schooling me” about how ignorant I am

You have twice invoked this falsehood implicitly, and much of the rest of your prose is difficult to even parse. (He was able to drive to his appointment two days after chemo? That's how it reads on the first pass.)

I mean, in comment 82, NaT went to the trouble of trying to mine cogency from your comments. Perhaps if you put some more effort into composing them, people wouldn't be left guessing whether you're actually trying make a coherent point or just ranting.

You might want to reach out to the moderator to delete some of your posts to preserve your integrity.

OK, you don't know where you are. How did you find this post in the first place?

@Michelle; Wow, did you sue Hostess for the Twinkies which obviously killed him? I don't think any amount of schooling will benefit you.

The only person you identify as going to the doctor with those symptoms is your daughter not you, so now you are making this up as you go or are even more incompetent than I previously assumed and trashing the script is still child abuse IMO, just because you were the recipient does not change my opinion.

Um, no, there was one prescription mentioned for HRT and one for methylphenidate. For that matter, there's no telling whether Michele's daughter is even a child in the first place. I mean, HRT for "brain fog"?

@Michele - My integrity is fully intact as I will fully paste here and dissect and parse your original statement.

"@Chris did you know that you can walk into a Dr office, complain of fatigue and brain fog and leave (after a 20 minute “visit”) with scripts for HRT (no blood work necessary. [edit: AAS - No mention of you yet having visited a doctor with symptoms] In the trash it went. My daughter went to the Dr this week complaining of similar symptoms, after no blood work or diagnostic of any kind she left with a script for Concerta. [edit: AAS - As previously stated, still no mention of you as a patient, but now we have mention of your daughter, a doctor visit with these symptoms, and script. Since you have made no previous identification form whom your first sentence was about, the only conclusion is is entire attack on the English language was about your daughter.]

I am done with you. If a moderator wants to redact my posts, then so be it, however, I have Aspergers with OCD, and I refuse to apologize to people like you that treat the people that sacrifice almost everything to learn to save your life, like this. Grow up Michele before you seriously hurt people. Doctors, well most of us, are not in it to hurt you. If we were, then the 72 hour shifts and flights to Africa to treat Ebola on our own dime wouldn't happen.

@Narad

Hence my venomous responses to her.... However, she makes no age determination, I am stating an opinion, not a fact, which has no bearing on the conversation really. However, her mention of the therapy prescribed for the symptoms described, combined with previous comments about the invention of vitamins and such lead me to almost completely disregard her posts from the beginning as false and full works of fiction.

I am stating an opinion, not a fact, which has no bearing on the conversation really.

My point was that I agree with Michele that you misread her comment. As I've also noted, her prose stylings kind of invite this sort of thing.

@Narad

My wife agree with you, however, her first statement is anecdotal with no point of reference. I am home now, so I can use a keyboard and not an iPad in an airport or taxi to type.

You know you can find oil in gold veins.

Anecdotal in that the person can vary from here, the most unacceptable form of argumentative writing. She can add from here, depending on how the conversation goes that this is personal experience OR that this is a story passed on to her. Let's return to her first statement:

[quote]@Chris did you know that you can walk into a Dr office, complain of fatigue and brain fog and leave (after a 20 minute “visit”) with scripts for HRT (no blood work necessary[/quote]

This is the representation of misdirectional prose writing. It's intent is to misdirect. She made no identifying landmarks in the sentence, just an anecdote with no supporting information. The only logical conclusion is that the follow up information about her daughter is therefore the supporting information. I understand this might be construed as being a tightwad, but these clarifications are vital to gaining proper medical knowledge and advice. For example, had she predicated her statement upon the clause of HER being the subject of the statement, then we could have asked what the information she provided was. However, as it is written, the entire post is written in the form of intention to mislead by misdirection.

Sorry for that wordiness, when I TA'd, my pi drilled into my head proper scientific argumentative writing. At least by their standards. So far it has seen me through a piled higher and deeper and a much deeper, but those lessons have stuck hard in my brain. He was french and would take 50% off an entire paper just on grammar and spelling, so my previous grammar errors from Siri are killing my OCD.

I need to stop writing. I can't seem to stop making typos and errors. The point is made, but the errors are egregious.

@SBP no, I didn't you silly "Ding Dong"

Not a Troll: " ...but are you not aware of the circumstances that are frustrating patients these days?"

No, enlighten me. Something I asked Michele to do.

I am quite familiar what happens in lots of doctors' office, several emergency departments and multiple hospitals. My son has several different medical conditions. At least one was included in my question to Michele on what better treatment is available away from medical doctors (also nurses, lab techs, etc etc).

Oddly enough, Michele's symptoms are very familiar to the relative I discussed in Comment #74. The fog and fatigue was similar to when she crashed after a manic episode. I did understand our relative's frustration because she had suffered from chronic migraines. Which makes the naturopath telling her to write down every tinge and ache very annoying, because effective mindfulness would be to find ways to distract from the pain and not focus on it!

Michele, I am still waiting for your better treatments for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, Type 1 diabetes, Hib meningitis, and childhood leukemia... and for fun because these are things that my son has dealt with (both included ambulance trips to an emergency department and hospitalization): seizures and a complex migraine that mimicked a stroke. Fun times.

Instead of personal anecdotes just post the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers.

Michelle: My dad started chemo for pancreatic cancer and was given a sheet by his oncologist and was told he needed “calories” – items full of sugar.

Um, you don't seem to be familiar with how food works, since you seem to be implying that steaks have no calories, as they don't have any sugar. Calories are not the same as sugar.

Needs better wording: ".... familiar to the relative .." should be "... similar to the relative ..."

I personally know that nonspecific symptoms make diagnosis difficult. At first we could not figure out why our son was literally slowing down, and then we attributed his left arm pain because he tripped on a sidewalk. It was not found until after an echocardiogram after the family doctor heard a heart murmur during a scheduled 14 year old tetanus booster vaccine visit.

By the way, does anyone know what's going on with left brain/right brain?

Michele: "I realize you have no passion or compassion for people. Your goal is to sound super duper intelligent and square off against anyone who tries to help you understand why science is the problem. I don’t care if you accept or agree that Drs and scientists and pharmaceuticals have created angry customers"

I am only a stupid engineer. I learned on my son's second day of life when he was taken from my "rooming in maternity" ward by ambulance to the local children's hospital due to seizures on his second day of life. I had to stay because I was literally ripped from stem to stern because of his large head.

Then over the next quarter century things got even more interesting. I used to think I was intelligent, but then I had children. Except, I am willing to learn.

You seem to be one who does not like to learn. You might want to work on that. The first thing I say to the folks who are there to help my autistic son with other issues is "I have no idea what I am doing, please help me." I have found these people give me more information that is actually helpful.

Humble works better than huffy. I don't think I need an attitude adjustment, perhaps you should try a different approach.

Anyway, still waiting for those PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers on better treatments, especially those that made us call 911.

doxing a kid? WTF i s wrong with you

@Michelle. We get it. Your father died and you need to blame someone. Why not pin it on the Mexicans and build a wall around yourself? Angry and ignorant, quite the endearing combination.

I have my suspicions that this mistrust of Doctors is a consequence of private healthcare. IMHO in the US it is mainly poor people looking for a cheaper alternative, whereas in the UK with our NHS, treatment is free and it is the rich seeking to buy a better alternative.

Anyways @Michelle, sorry for your loss, though another way of looking at it. How would he have known he had Pancreatic cancer without using science?

@Jay - the attacks on me started when I commented that science is to blame for chaos in Integrative medicine because the health care establishment refuses to acknowledge obvious things like nutrition. I have not ever said that science has no value. It is highly valuable in research, diagnostics,etc. I think the epic fail is when it comes to patient treatment plans for systemic diseases. Science has many shortcomings that can be supported by alternative medicine and its focus on the organic body as opposed to synthetic ones.

More ammo for the vicious attackers on this site. Don't care about any insults - I'm less concerned about fixing narcissists and more concerned about a system that fails people. We need intelligent people to bridge science and alternative medicine and those people exist, they are just hard to find.

@jrkrideau

"The U of A is issuing some kind of certification in acupuncture!"

Not anymore thankfully. http://www.healthcmi.com/Acupuncture-Continuing-Education-News/747-albe…

@ LW #76

+1. I really wanted to know how the workshop participants were going to bend spoons with their minds. There has to be more to the story than meets the eye, yes? Either Kutt is bending the spoons when the students aren't looking somehow, and convincing them they did it. Or she has some magic mental manipulation trick to get them to bend the spoons physically ala Randi imitating Geller but believe it was their mind that did it not their hands. Or, most likely I'm guessing from re-reading the blurb, she shows them one of the rubbing techniques for spoon bending w/o explaining the basic physics behind it, and since it seems like it shouldn't work, she's able to say that what they're doing with their hands is some kind of "energy transfer technique" in which "quantum physics" and "meditation" are channeling super positive metal waves into their fingers.

But yeah, learning what actually happens in that workshop would be enlightening, since we can only guess.

Depending, it could even have been a legitimate part of the curriculum, depending on how it would be framed by the faculty (not by Kutt), and was just advertised badly. Just something that wasn't really serious or straight, a more light-hearted exercise in "the power of positivity": Yes, you can bend a spoon! (wink wink!) Stay positive, and think outside the box! ...I'm not suggesting this was probably the intent, just that pretty much anything is more possible than what it seemed to promise, (X>0).

Michele, your bleak, simplistic, and uninformed view of medicine is simply not true. It is also mistaken, as well as false, and not factually based. It is just another example of a baseless claim that does not mesh with the facts.
I worked for a time for some of the top hematology/oncology researchers in the world. They were often on the hospital floors for hours and days beyond reason to tend to patients who were not doing well. I was there when two of them announced that for the first time an advanced type of bladder cancer had been completely cleared by chemotherapy - bear in mind that this was a research-based department. I saw case after case taken on to studies which went on to published for the world to see. I saw a man come into the hospital and die of pancreatic cancer two years after chemotherapy, two very good years - the day before he was readmitted he had been playing in an amateur tennis tournament. These were not simple isolated anecdotes. They were the things the doctors were aiming for and took great pleasure and pride in. Every oncologist I spoke to had gone into the field because of the loss of a loved one to cancer. There are much easier and quicker ways to make bigger money in medicine.
I also worked for the immunologist who was one of the earliest describers of, and who first named, AIDS (Sort of - the word "cellular", a C before the I, was dropped by others.) My work day officially ended at 6 PM, but he and I often rounded a second or even third time at 6 and left at 9 or even later. He shed tears over the patients he was unable to help.
So don't give me any crap about oncologists only in it for the money and not in for the cures. I have been there. I have seen it from a side you haven't. I will not see my friends and mentors demeaned by someone so totally ignorant of what goes on.
Some more points. I myself am a cancer survivor, my mother is a breast cancer survivor, and we lost my father to pancreatic cancer, which several oncologists refused to treat as futile in his case. I guess they didn't need the money that month, right? The surgeon who diagnosed my mother's breast cancer didn't operate on her. He sent her on for radiation therapy that didn't make a dime for him.
Do you think that a large proportion of naturopaths are in it for the money? After all, if all it took to be healed was a glass of water and someone waving their hands over me, I could do that in the convenience of my own home for a lot less than one of them would charge me.
I also hope that the men in your family get screened for testicular cancer when appropriate, and if any of them is found to have it, that you won't try to talk them out of chemotherapy and surgery. The cure rate for even a fairly advanced case is astoundingly good, while counting on magic water and someone sticking needles along imaginary lines on their ass is, mildly put, dismal.

#116 Rob

No acupuncture course and certificate at U of A ? Quel domage.

On the other hand there seems to infestations in other parts of the country McMaster University Medical Acupuncture Program

@ Michele

because the health care establishment refuses to acknowledge obvious things like nutrition

*sigh*
Frankly, I don't know where you got your doctors.
My doctors, and my parents' doctors, and my friends' .... - well, you get the pattern. All these doctors will talk about eating correctly. And exercising.
Some of them are French, some are Canadian. From the regulars' comments, I have these feelings a similar pattern was observed by them in the US, in Australia, and about everywhere in-between.

That's why people reacted harshly here. Your experience of doctors is not their experience. You are repeating blindly the old lie that nutrition is not part of mainstream medicine.

Doctors could do better? Assuredly. In the 80's, doctors in particular and the whole society in general was concerned about good fat and bad fat. Omega-3 is good, animal fat not so. Recently, we have come to realize that hidden sugar is not better.

But it's not my doctors which ordered extra-large pizzas. If the patient doesn't comply, he should start by blaming himself. And then maybe aim for more achievable goals.

Now, if by nutrition you want to talk about non-scientific beliefs about food, and your denunciation of sugar as bad for cancer patients seems to be one of them, you are going to get some deserved flak here.
Not because we are narcissists, but because, as some people tried to explain, you are factually wrong.

We need intelligent people to bridge science and alternative medicine

I'm sorry, but there is things which have been proven to work, and things which haven't.

Most of alternative medicine was either stolen from mainstream (nutrition, yoga/meditation and sport/exercise being the most notorious victims), or showed to be exaggerated or outrightly wrong.
In my limited experience, the alt-med view on cancer is rife with outrightly wrong concepts.

@Michelle, I appreciate what you are trying to do and wish both sides refrain from name calling, but I do look on integrative medicine or CAM with great horror. Science is not to blame for the chaos found within it, it's the lack of science or pseudoscience and the scamsters waiting to take advantage, that is.

The world groans under the weight of nutrition advice available, I just don't see the need for Doctors to chime in, especially as the only safe recommendation is to eat a balanced diet.

Then there is the door opened for the quacks, ready to chomp on a good wedge of funds that should stay with Science Based Medicine.

For the miniscule benefit, I just wouldn't take the risks.

Michelle, if I were you, I would consider myself lucky to have received some of the most heartfelt replies I've read here. Now, if you would only learn from them. And, please learn what science is. I think your definition is very skewed.

"enlighten me"

Chris, when you really want to know, let me know, and I will. Please help me out and let me know what you are looking for: Do you want to know what I and those close to me have been subject to, what the literature has described or what doctors who have been patients have experienced?

the attacks on me started when I commented that science is to blame for chaos in Integrative medicine because the health care establishment refuses to acknowledge obvious things like nutrition.

Maybe you shouldn't start with lies like this then?

Your goal is to sound super duper intelligent and square off against anyone who tries to help you understand why science is the problem.

Please, it's takes exactly zero effort to sound super duper intelligent compaired to a clueless tool like you. Though shit.

Michele: "@Jay – the attacks on me started when I commented that science is to blame for chaos in Integrative medicine because the health care establishment refuses to acknowledge obvious things like nutrition"

Mostly because you were wrong, and you are not the first person to make that claim. Here is a big ol' freaking hint on how wrong you are about real medicine and nutrition: my son went to cardiac rehab after his open heart surgery.

Do you know what they do at cardiac rehab? From that link: "Counseling and education to help you understand your condition and how to manage it. You may work with a dietitian to create a healthy eating plan. If you smoke, you may get counseling on how to stop."

My son had his surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and they counseled my son on his diet. Did you know the Mayo Clinic has even published cookbooks? And has a diet program?

Also, because he had a history of seizures and was non-verbal the neurologist had him tested for a certain metabolic disorder. Fortunately he did not have it, because it would have meant he would need a very specific diet. Though not quite the diet for Phenylketonuria (PKU), the condition that disabled Pearl S. Buck's daughter (babies are now tested for that at birth). Plus there are specific and very difficult diets to control epilepsy (met one parent of a child dealing with it). So, yes, I very well know what medicine and nutrition are doing in 2016.

In the future do not pull the "medicine does not acknowledge nutrition" card, because it is wrong, wrong, wrongety wrong.

Re: Sheldon101

I think he suffered from some form of inflammatory bowel problem. My efforts to contact him via his website proved fruitless around a year ago.
His site still hosts the entire GMC transcripts from Wakefield's case, as well as other vaccine related info.
http://sheldon101blog.blogspot.co.uk/

Michele,

1. NM, HM, IM are not real. As are host says: There is only medicine and not medicine.

2. You are mixing correlation and causation concerning your father's death. Two days before his death he went on a high sugar diet (you don't say what this consisted of) and then he died. How did a high sugar diet kill him? Was he diabetic? A friend broke his arm recently and had eaten pizza night before. The pizza caused his broken arm, right?

Re: Sheldon101

Everything of his seems moribund, not updating at all. Hope he's out there somewhere having fun,

Rich Bly: You are mixing correlation and causation concerning your father’s death. Two days before his death he went on a high sugar diet (you don’t say what this consisted of) and then he died. How did a high sugar diet kill him?

As I pointed out, this is made even more confusing by the fact that Michelle mixed up calories, sugars and carbohydrates. It seems unlikely that a doctor would put a cancer patient on a high-sugar diet. A high carbohydrate diet seems more likely, perhaps because it might be easier to digest, but even then, carbohydrates and sugars aren't quite the same thing.

Here is a copy and paste of the American Cancer Society suggestions for diet post pancreatic cancer diagnosis:

There is scientific evidence on many issues regarding nutrition and cancer. But there are also many gaps and inconsistencies in the scientific evidence on the effects of nutrition after cancer diagnosis. The American Cancer Society's Guidelines on Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer Prevention should be regarded as a basis for a healthy diet.

Choose most of the foods you eat from plant sources.
Eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day
Eat other foods from plant sources, such as breads, cereals, grain products, rice, pasta, or beans several times a day
Limit your intake of high fat foods, particularly from animal sources.
Choose foods low in fat
Limit consumption of meats, especially high-fat meats
Be physically active--achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
Be at least moderately active for 30 minutes or more on most days of the week
Stay within your healthy weight range
Limit alcoholic beverages, if you drink at all.
Dealing with Dietary Complications

Some of the changes that occur as a result of pancreatic cancer are unintentional loss of body weight and loss of lean body mass (muscle). Problems with eating, digestion and fatigue can also occur. Any treatment for pancreatic cancer(surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy) can alter nutritional needs and interfere with the ability to eat, digest, or absorb food. This is often due to side effects such as nausea, vomiting, changes in taste or smell, loss of appetite or bowel changes. At the same time, caloric intake needs are increased during any of these treatments.

When problems occur, usual food choices and eating patterns may need to be adjusted. Eating small, frequent meals or snacks may be easier to tolerate than three large daily meals. Food choices should be easy to chew, swallow, digest, and absorb. Choices should also be appealing, even if they are high in calories or fat. If it is not possible to meet nutritional needs through regular diet alone, nutritious snacks or drinks may be advisable. Commercially prepared liquid nutritional products (such as Boost, Ensure, Resource, or NuBasics) can also be helpful to increase the intake of calories and nutrients.

Please note that there are sugars there. This is because of as of yet unknown changes in metabolic pathways and drastically increased energy requirements for fighting a cancer of the organ that helps regulate blood sugar. Sugar is often used to counter he frequent drops in blood glucose levels that can result from hormone changes. The recommendation of some sugar to be used in conjunction with a highly nutritious diet is indicated for in therapy.

Sources: Diabetic, pancreatic cancer survivor. Sometimes, we just simply cannot produce what is needed to effectively use complex carbohydrates, in these cases, the easiest solution is to add sugar, in my case through hard candies I used to treat low glucose anyway, as it is more easily introduced into glycolysis than carbohydrates are.

PGP @128: I'm willing to bet that most people who talk about how "sugar feeds cancer!" don't understand how metabolism works at all, or that eventually most of the food we eat, regardless of it's original form, gets broken down into sugars before being converted into energy.

figure it out
June 6, 2016

doxing a kid? WTF i s wrong with you

In case anyone was, as I, wondering what this bit of seeming gibberish was about, it appears that Robyn Diann Ross (etc.)* has coughed up another hairball.

* Hilariously, the AoA commentariat, which eventually coughed this up, doesn't seem to have figured this out yet. Oh, and at least one has written a protest letter to Walgreens.

^ Dammit, I need to ask the neurologist about that problem with word persistence.

Narad,

No need to feel alone. I've been wondering if I've caught the comma shill virus.

Slayer: Hey, thanks for posting that. The guidelines actually look very similar to what I was expecting. And ya know, a lot more sensible than what Michelle thought they were.

Justatech: I’m willing to bet that most people who talk about how “sugar feeds cancer!” don’t understand how metabolism works at all, or that eventually most of the food we eat, regardless of it’s original form, gets broken down into sugars before being converted into energy.

Most people don't seem to, really. I think it's most widespread in the US, where poor science education and lots of media exposure combine to suck in a lot of people, but other countries have contributed to the woo too.

Refutations posted that as well. I was physically ill for the child and his family. A number of years ago my wife lost her job due to me having been doxxed, though at the time, I don't recall that term being used. Her boss was an antivaxxer and when she found out that I worked directly in the field via a Facebook post that was copied and pasted from my closed Facebook along with a screenshot of my wife's Facebook she called my wife and fired her over the phone with string of curse words and epiteths about wishing I was dead and so forth. The dichotomy of the Internet is infuriating. One of our single greatest achievements and yet, simultaneously our greatest threat. Opinions again.

Anyway, I liked the video. I feel for the kid, but we should be honest with ourselves, there are people on this side that would do the same thing to a kid there, especially if the kid trapped us so easily. Many professionals lose their minds when you call everything they have worked on and for their adult lives into question.

http://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/columnists/paula-simons-quackademic-…
IHI director Sunita Vohra won’t comment on Tyrrell’s resignation. But she says she’s creating “a safe space” for people to have needed conversations about other ways of practising medicine. Vohra says 70 per cent of patients already use some form of alternate medicine, and that doctors should learn about those treatments, so that they can provide respectful “patient-centred” care, without alienating those in their care. She stresses the health institute is about thoughtful scientific research, not advocacy.

Harriet Huestis: Vohra says 70 per cent of patients already use some form of alternate medicine, and that doctors should learn about those treatments, so that they can provide respectful “patient-centred” care, without alienating those in their care. She stresses the health institute is about thoughtful scientific research, not advocacy.

Did she also promise to buy the University of Alberta some primo oceanfront property or a new bridge?

@PGP, perhaps an ever green glade, called the Everglades?
Primo oceanfront property in Montana?

Horgan is wrong on so many levels. He never misses a chance to boost and promote journalist/author Robert Whitaker, a dangerous individual who tirelessly criticizes psychiatric doctors who treat schizophrenics. He insists, among many other dangerous ideas, that these patients would do better without medication. He cites Whitaker in his recent presentation, article and his only interview on his talk with The Prism podcast. He adores this guy and his dangerous ideas. This alone makes it obvious Horgan is as interested in facts as Whitaker himself (not one bit). Here's a thorough take down of some of Whitaker's work. http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/component/content/article/2085-a…

Wzrd1: I know there's primo lakefront property in Montana. It tends to be a bit vertical, but hey, no bugs.(Just remember your oxygen and you should be fine.) There's oceanfront property in Arizona, somewhere.
Frankly, I'd love to own some property in the Everglades. My very own bird sanctuary :) (In related news, the eaglets near my new place have begun to venture out onto branches and are practicing flapping.)

@ Annette:

So true about Whitaker.
He's quite the fave over at prn.fm and Natural News. ( where -btw- CCHR is not frowned upon as it should be)

@ PGP;

Eaglets?

Don't you live in or near the cities?

@Annette:

Yep. Horgan's worship of Whitaker is reason enough to conclude that he is not a skeptic, not even close.

@141 I am appalled to learn about this individual. It's true that my loved one with schizophrenia would not still be ill now if she had not been treated with drugs. She'd be dead. What a disgusting person this Whitaker is.

Ellie: he really is disgusting :( I'm glad your loved one was never influenced by his dangerous assertions. Every fellow journalist who interviews him mentions this: "1998 Boston Globe article series he co-wrote on psychiatric research was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service." He's their sacred cow it seems. :/

DW: Yes, but I also live near the Missisippi, which is apparently primo eagle real estate. The DNR runs a webcam of another nest along the river, and the whole river is getting pretty wild. I've seen turkeys around here, as well as turkey vultures, nighthawks and egrets and herons.

@denice &pgp, Eagles are almost the new seagulls around my small city in northeastern U.S.. I saw eagles and Ospreys tussling over nesting space the other day.

@ PGP and Brook:

Oh I know that birds and wildlife are lofting/scampering about but eaglets are special:
right here just across the 'creek' from [redacted], a major ostentatious coalescence of culture, wealth and ambition, we have falcons on skyscrapers/ bridges/ cliffs and foxes camping in suburbs.
Unfortunately sometimes the only time I see the foxes well is when they are victims of careless drivers.

Please don't reply to this posting, I am just trying to work out how to navigate this site

Test

Mouse magic, or How lab mice learned to stop worrying and trust the healing energy

oracknows — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 06:10:44 +0000

Mouse magic, or How lab mice learned to stop worrying and trust the healing energy

I frequently call homeopathy The One Quackery to Rule Them All, but there are times when I am not so sure that that's the case. You see, there is...another. I'm referring, of course, to what is referred to as "energy medicine." What energy medicine modalities have in common is that they postulate that there is some sort "energy field" around humans that can be manipulated for therapeutic intent or that somehow practitioners can channel "healing energy" from elsewhere. For example, as I've discussed many times before, reiki is based on the concept that reiki masters can channel this fantastical healing energy from something called the Universal Source. That's why I frequently liken reiki to faith healing, because, at its core, that's what it is. Substitute God for the Universal Source, and it's easy to see why. So what's different about therapeutic touch (TT)? Basically, it's the same thing, except that TT practitioners claim that they can wave their hands over patients (touching is actually usually not involved) and manipulate the human "energy field" to therapeutic intent. It's a specialty so ridiculous that even a 11-year-old girl could show that TT practitioners cannot detect "human energy fields," much less manipulate them.

None of this, of course, stops advocates from not only practicing "energy medicine" but designing nonsensically quackademic experiments testing "energy medicine."

I hadn't seen a particularly silly bit of seemingly "basic science" on energy medicine published in quite a while; that is, until now. The other day a study was brought to my attention. It's a study by someone we've met before, Gloria Gronowicz at the University of Connecticut Health Center. Depressingly, she's in the Department of Surgery there, and, equally depressingly, she did a study entitled Therapeutic Touch Has Significant Effects on Mouse Breast Cancer Metastasis and Immune Responses but Not Primary Tumor Size.

Basically, this is a mouse tumor model study. Amusingly, it works with a tumor model very similar to mouse tumor models I've worked with in my laboratory before. Specifically, the tumor model used is the 6-thioguanine-resistant 66cl4 cell line, which was derived from an aggressive 4T1 mouse mammary carcinoma that can metastasize from the primary tumor to popliteal lymph nodes (lymph nodes behind the knee joint). I've used the 4T1 tumor before. Basically, "syngeneic," means it's derived from the same mouse strain and is transplantable. That means that it can grow in mice with intact immune systems as long as they're the same strain from which the tumor was derived. In fact, I know the man, Dr. Fred Miller, who derived the cell line and supplied the cells to Dr. Liisa Kuhn, the corresponding author of this publication.

I always love reading the introductions and methods to papers like this, particularly the explanation of TT and the justification for doing the study. For some reason, authors of pretty much every study of this type can't resist an appeal to popularity, claiming that because so many people use "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), then killing mice to study magic is justified. In this case, the authors claim that, of all CAM, patients report the most benefit from "energy medicine" or "biofield" therapies. Drolly (unintentionally, of course), they note, "Scientific evidence for the possible reasons for this benefit is needed. As a first step we undertook a cancer study in animals to remove psychosocial factors."

Gronowicz et al owe me a new keyboard for that one, as I spit up the iced tea I was drinking when I read that part. I suppose that on a strictly literal basis it's true. Animals don't have psychosocial factors. Well, that's not entirely true. Mice don't like being alone, for instance. They don't like being too crowded either. They're sensitive to how many mice are placed in a single cage. In any case, what the investigators did was to inject tumor cells into the footpads of the mice. To be honest, I'm not sure at all why they chose this route. Usually, with 4T1 cells, we inject them into the flanks of the mouse or into the mammary fat pad. However, these are mere quibbles with respect to methodology when it comes to mouse tumor model experiments. To truly appreciate the hilarity of the methods, you must read how the investigators administered TT to the mice:

TT treatments commenced 24 h after cell injection and were repeated twice a week for the entire period. Two mice at a time were placed into large tissue culture flasks (Sarstedt, Newtown, NC, 18 cm × 11.5 cm × 4 cm) with bedding by a technician through a premade hinged door. Previous studies from our laboratory had shown that tissue culture plastic did not impede human biofield treatments [36]. Flasks were clamped two feet in the air in a ring stand at the end of an L-shaped room. Practitioners alternated treatments so that each practitioner treated mice once a week. Treatment lasted 10 min with hands kept 2–10 inches from all sides of the flask without touching (TT1). Briefly the treatment sequelae were centering, assessment, treatment, and evaluation and followed previously published protocols [29, 36]. The control/mock group consisted of placing two mice in a similar flask and setup for ten minutes twice a week (CA1) at the other end of the same L-shaped room with a non-TT person standing next to the flask. The third group of mice was PBS-injected and received no treatment (PBS1). On the 26th day, mice had developed large tumors in their foot pad and were euthanized.

I love the bit about how prior studies showed that putting the mice in a tissue culture flask "did not impede human biofield treatments." I was half-tempted to look up the paper referenced to see exactly how they had determined this critical bit of information, but then I figured I already had enough amusement for one night sitting right in front of me in the form of this paper. I also didn't want to risk another keyboard or have to go dry while I wrote this. In any case, for full ridiculousness, just try to visualize what is going on here. Healing touch practitioners apparently stood over the large tissue culture flasks holding two mice each. The flasks were suspended two feet in the air by being clamped to a ring stand. They then held their hand over the flask containing the mouse and thought real hard or did whatever it is TT practitioners do to manipulate the human biofield, except they did it on mice. I couldn't help but chuckle. A skilled filmmaker could easily make a comedy out this. How, for instance, does a TT practitioner trained on humans detect the mouse energy field? It is, after all, presumably so much smaller and squeakier than a human energy field.

Even more hilariously, the controls consisted of mice placed in the same flask but just having a non-TT practitioner just stand next to it. This must be because the healing power from a real TT practitioner is so awesome that it can't be the TT practitioner just standing in the same room with the mouse but not exercising his or her skill. Note how the point is made that the control mice were placed at the other end of an L-shaped room. It's as though the TT practitioners think that the residual energy of their awesomeness might affect the control mouse if they were placed in the same part of the room. Or maybe they did the controls and the TT mice at the same time. It's not discussed. They also had a no-tumor arm, in which the mice just got a saline injection not containing any tumor cells, presumably for normal values for blood levels of everything they were measuring. Then, investigators repeated the experiment, except that mice were treated with TT or fake TT for two weeks prior to being injected with tumors. I'm telling ya, ya can't make stuff up like this up. At least, I can't.

Not surprisingly, the TT had no effect on the growth of the primary tumors. Indeed, the tumor volumes were about as close to each other as I've ever seen. Similarly, tumor cell proliferation and apoptosis were unchanged in the primary tumors, as one would expect. One thing I did notice is that the authors let these tumors get rather large, and surely they must have become painful. 220 mm³ is not that big a tumor when it's in the flank or mammary fat pad, but it's quite large for a mouse to have on its footpad, which is only a few millimeters in thickness, at most. In the second experiment, the tumors were allowed to grow to grow to as much as 330 mm³. Where was the University of Connecticut's IACUC during all this? I realize that in this model the tumor has to be on the foot pad because the lymphatic vessels from the foot pad drain to the popliteal lymph nodes being assessed for metastases, but come on.

In any case, the authors' positive results ended up being not particularly impressive. The authors did clonogenic assays, in which the popliteal lymph nodes were dissociated into a cell suspension and plated to see how many colonies of tumor cells grow. There does appear to be a modest decrease in the number of metastases to the popliteal lymph nodes reported, but the variability is high. Indeed, the authors had to do this to get their result to be statistically significant:

For the metastasis assay, most mice had 2–9 cancer cell colonies/lymph node. In the contralateral control limb (C), no tumors developed and no metastatic colonies were found (Figure 2). In contrast, every mouse had metastatic colonies in the mock-treated group (CA). In the TT-treated group (TT), three mice had no metastatic colonies while the remaining mice had some colonies. One mouse had 7-fold more colonies (76 colonies) than the mean. If this extreme outlier is excluded since it is greater than two standard deviations from the mean, TT significantly decreased metastasis compared to the mock-treated group (Figure 2).

Sorry about that outlier, but if you had to remove the outlier to get a statistically significant result, your result was probably not significant, and you still have to explain the outlier. Believe me, I know. I've had this sort of result before. Just because a value is two standard deviations from the mean is not sufficient reason to discard it. I will give the authors some credit, though. They did state that they removed the outlier and that without its removal, their results were not statistically significant. Now if only they didn't keep referring from that point on to the differences in metastases to the popliteal lymph nodes as being statistically significant when in reality their own results show that TT didn't affect the size of the primary tumors or the number of popliteal metastases. That's the real result: No effect on tumor growth or lymph node metastasis.

So all we're left with is a fishing expedition among cytokines.

The authors look at a whole slew of cytokines and find some differences, none particularly striking, specifically decreases in IL-1α, IL-1β, MIG, and MIP-2. Of course, they used a commercial kit to check 32 cytokines, of which 11 were elevated in cancer and four were reported as decreased by TT therapy. All differences reported are modest. Also some differences in T-lymphocyte populations were noted. It's hard not to wonder if this means anything at all, given that TT had no effect on primary tumors or metastases, as we would expect there to be no effect from such magic.

One thing I noticed as I read this study is that it all sounded rather familiar. In fact, so it was. I had written about this study before, only at the time it was just a poster presentation. Here we are, several months later, and the paper is published not in a good journal but in a quack journal, Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. At the time, I noticed that no mention of blinding was made. In the paper, the same thing is almost true. No mention of blinding is made other than that the core facility doing flow cytometry was blinded to experimental groups to which the samples belonged. Imagine my relief. That doesn't change that the people measuring the tumors, counting the clonogenic assays, and measuring the cytokines almost certainly were not blinded to experimental group. Cytokine measurements can be very sensitive to how the sample is collected. If, for instance, the mice being euthanized were subject to different levels of stress right before death, that could produce differences in cytokine profiles. Remember, the blood was collected immediately postmortem by sticking a needle into the mouse's heart.

So what could explain these results? Leave it to the authors to take a stab at it. First, let's recall their justification for choosing TT:

Several reasons for choosing Therapeutic Touch for this study were the method of practice, which is an uncomplicated, well-defined protocol consisting of four steps, easily amenable for reproducibility of practice in a research trial and simple to perform in any setting [29]. The rigorous training program and credentialing process for practitioners, mostly nurses in all of our studies, was also important for consistency. There are no religious ties to the practice, so issues such as the role of prayer or religion are not involved in the interpretation of results. The first step in the practice is to set an intention, which is for the “highest good” of the subject. Finally, TT treatments do not require physical touch, so there is no heat transfer or variable handling of the subject being studied.

So the mice didn't have to practice a specific religion to benefit. Imagine my relief.

Except that we know there was differential handling. The TT group held their hands over the flasks containing the two mice for ten minutes, while the control mice simply had some lab tech stand next to their flask for ten minutes. Similarly, the "control" mice, the mice with no tumors, who were used to produce control cytokine profiles and white blood cells were not regularly removed from their cages and placed in tissue culture flasks at all, unlike both the TT and sham TT groups. I would therefore question whether they were a proper control group for the cytokine measurements, particularly in light of the authors' cluelessness:

A possible explanation of our findings is that the mice recognize and respond positively in a psychosocial manner to the biofield practitioner [46]. In studying psychosocial stress with inflammation and cancer, mouse models have shown that specific psychosocial stress factors produce generalized immune dysfunction, which particularly affects cytokine production resulting in changes in the numbers and function of specific leukocytes [47]. An alternative explanation of our findings is that the opposite of stress, such as exposure to a familiar and nonthreatening individual, may promote normal immune function. Mice attribute human contact with food, water, and positive environmental stimulation. Recently, rodents have been shown to detect and respond to the state of their social partners [48], and perhaps rodents may also respond positively to repeated human interactions. Thus, mammals may be capable of “felt affective experiences” [48]. On the other hand, mice that were placed in a similar apparatus by the same non-TT individual (CA group) did not manifest these changes in immune function suggesting that the TT treatment itself was responsible for the significant effects.

The problem is that the mice in the non-TT group were not handled the same way as the mice in the TT group, as I described above. Nor was the no-tumor control group handled the same way. More importantly, if it is true that differences in handling explain the results, then there is no need to invoke magic mouse energy fields manipulated by TT practitioners as the reason why there were modest changes in the cytokine profiles of the mice treated with TT. Just chalk it up to differences in handling, no magic required. Oh, and, big surprise, pretreating with extra TT didn't change anything.

Papers like this simultaneously amuse and appall me. They amuse me because, well, they are ridiculous. Just the vision of earnest TT practitioners holding their hands between two to ten inches from a large tissue culture flask containing two mice are inherently ridiculous. However, it is appalling that many mice were forced to endure tumors growing on their footpads and then death to test whether TT practitioners can magically manipulate their mousy energy fields to cure their cancers. It's also appalling that money was spent on this that could have been used in real cancer research.

On the other hand, I took a look at the foundation that funded this study, the Trivedi Foundation, which touts itself as giving "Scientific Research Grants to Raise the Consciousness of Living and Nonliving Materials Through the Authenticity of Modern Science":

The Trivedi Effect® is a natural phenomenon that is harnessed from the universe and is capable of transforming living organisms and non-living materials to operate at a higher level and serve a greater purpose for the welfare of humanity. This phenomenon was discovered through the powerful energy transmissions of Mahendra Trivedi. Through the transmission of this energy, the recipient establishes a deep connection to the Creator, or Universal Intelligence, and awakens their Divine potential. He has since been able to transform three other individuals into Trivedi Masters™ who now have the ability to harness this energy.

The Trivedi Effect® has been scientifically proven to transform all living organisms, such as animals, seeds, plants, crops, fungi, bacteria, viruses, cancer cells and humans. Further scientific exploration has revealed that this energy has no limitations because it has the ability to transform the very structure of the atom: the building blocks of life itself. This means that the Trivedi Effect® is able to transform the very thing that this world is built upon. The Trivedi Effect® has the intelligence and profound capability to transform anything and everything. It is the ONE thing that CAN transform ANY thing.

On second thought, maybe paying to test whether waving hands over mice with breast cancer tumors in their foot pads can cure their cancer isn't the worst thing a foundation like this could spend money on. Just peruse the website. This is Deepak Chopra-level woo. Besides, who wants people like this transforming the very structure of the atom and the building blocks of life itself. In any case, regardless of its proclaimed ability to "transform anything and everything," one thing it can't transform is woo into science.

oracknows Thu, 07/16/2015 - 02:10

Tags

complementary and alternative medicine

Skepticism/Critical Thinking

University of Connecticut

complementary and alternative medicine

medicine

Science

I was a bit sickened to imagine the misery of footpad cancer myself. Who designed this study and why did they pick such a cruel location?

I have gotten a lot sicker, with fatigue causing a lot of limitation. Mr Woo has suggested that we just aren't "doing spirituality right." TT, different label.

Dear Mrs Woo - sorry that you aren't doing well and fatigue messing things up. Sending internet hugs and hopes that you improve soon.

The Trivedi Effect® is a natural phenomenon

Glad to see something entirely natural has been registered and trademarked by a private company.
I was told it was impossible to do, that's why Big Pharma don't want to sell vitamins.*

* sarcasm

@ Orac

Animals don’t have psychosocial factors.

Animals don’t have human psychosocial factors.*
As you point out, quite a number of animals seem to react to the presence of other animals of the same kind.

* OTOH, human-like psychosocial factors?

I love the bit about how prior studies showed that putting the mice in a tissue culture flask “did not impede human biofield treatments.”

I would have been more impressed if they have put a mouse inside a strong magnetic field and showed they could reach the poor animal with their biofields.
A fridge magnet slapped on the mouse doesn't count.

IIRC, there was one study 6-8 years ago there even having the control group separated from the treated group was not enough to "impede human biofield treatments.” Mice (or rats?) were cured of cancer all the same in both groups.

These biofields seem very pervasive. Better be careful where you point that finger.

Where was the University of Connecticut’s IACUC during all this?

I had a similar thought. Experiments on live animals are supposed to be approved by an IRB. Was that true of this experiment?

Just because a value is two standard deviations from the mean is not sufficient reason to discard it.

Assuming a normal distribution, about one out of twenty samples will be more than two standard deviations from the mean. That's why p=0.05 is considered a magical number for statistical significance.

A possible explanation of our findings is that the mice recognize and respond positively in a psychosocial manner to the biofield practitioner [46].

Breaking news: Water is wet, bears defecate in the woods, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. At least they admit, via the citation, that this alleged thought isn't entirely original.

IMNSHO, the Force from Star Wars is a better conceived piece of woo than theraputic touch. Despite the handwaving retcon of midichlorians as a physiological source of the Force, the Force is shown in-universe to have actual effects (lightning, Darth Vader's Force chokehold, etc.). And its creators understand that it's fiction. TT is fiction, too, but its advocates don't seem to understand this.

IIRC, there was one study 6-8 years ago there even having the control group separated from the treated group was not enough to “impede human biofield treatments.” Mice (or rats?) were cured of cancer all the same in both groups.

That's probably one of William Bengston's studies, where the energy healing applied was so apparently so potent it cured not only the experimental mice who received it but the control mice that didn't receive any treatment.

bengston's explanation for no statistical difference between the outcomes in the treated and untreated groups by invoking "some mysterious quantum-mystical effect that actually made my control group part of the experimental group, experiencing the benefits of hands-on healing even though the hands weren’t ever on them.”

There was an extended discussion of why this actually represents an utter fail at http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/06/05/reiki-versus-dogs-just-bei…

This utterly incompetent idiot is concerned with the plastic of the mouse containers, but is apparently oblivious to the influence of the "ring stand", presumably the typical arrangement of aluminum or stainless steel rods held together with metallic clamps, on "electromagnetic fields."
The test and control subjects were at different ends of a room, with no mention made of assessing the room for existing "electromagnetic fields." Neither is there any mention of assessing the room for other energy sources potentially noxious to mice but imperceptible to humans, such as high flicker amplitude in the lighting, sounds at ultrasonic (again, to humans) frequencies, or even odor sources. There is no mention of evaluation of other proximate materials that absorb or reflect radiated energy. She clearly has never been anywhere near and EMI/RFI test chamber.
She is bloody well clueless about "energy." Her methods are crap.

She asserts that mice associate humans with bringing food and water. Unless the mice are deprived of food and water at times, I call bullsh!t. If they are given special treats occasionally, then maybe. Otherwise, the food hopper and the water bottle are always full, and the human is just something that comes to bring annoyance - or worse.

She should take up magic hand waving. She is crap at science.

I wonder if the fact that the room was L-shaped was deliberate, or just what was available. There's a Chinese folk belief that evil 'spirits' i.e. harmful energy can only travel in straight lines that;s reflected in a lot of theri architecture-I wonder if the designers have some similar unstated belief that energy healing 'vibrations' can't turn corners as well?

Why didn't the non-TT person moved their hands in exactly the same fashion as the TT practitioner instead of just standing there for the control/mock group? I'm picturing a mouse stuffed into a tube, already stressed out by it...and here is a big human waving their hands around them; the mock/control group instead just got to stay stuffed in the tube without the added stress of hands moving around them.

FYI, this was my medical school. I hope there a some on the faculty there willing to speak up on this nonsense.

@ doug:

Unfortunately, I have learned through woo-meisters that what WE ( i.e. those educated in physics, chemistry, biology, physiology) refer to as 'energy' and what THEY refer to as 'energy' have little in common.

The energy to which they refer is not merely a physical phenomenon BUT is endowed with various psycho-social, emotional, epigenetic, cultural, possibly bioluminescent, spiritual, religious, moral and biodynamic qualities which are indeed tame-able only by those pure of heart and committed to pseudo-science.

For example, one woo-meister claims that everything is an 'energy exchange' then, prosaically describes human interactions such as sexual attraction, learning from a mentor and dealing with a child that would better be understood as psychological events that we've studied for the past century or more. That's the level to which descend in this realm of wishful thinking and practical magic.

When I first came across this nonsense I was reminded of a long essay by Jung ( altho' I'm not a Jungian) that discusses 'psychic' ( that is, 'psychological') energy in terms of archaic concepts of mana, prana, ruach, chi, and libido ( as general' life energy' not especially sexual).

In other words, 'energy' as naively conceived by observers in relation to human activities and beliefs. A person puts 'energy' into achieving a certain outcome, a person feels 'energetic', an argument is 'heated', an active person expends more energy than average. A strong intention, belief or need involves more energy.

And, as if this isn't bad enough, a few gifted healers/ sensitives are able to adjust or 'tune' the out-of-whack energies of others to more resemble their own perfect vibrations. In addition, particularly pure foods, water, supplements and activities can also remedy bad vibes.

How they got the mice in there, I can only imagine because the necks of those tissue culture flasks are kind of narrow, albeit probably wide enough to stuff a mouse in with only minimal trauma. The flasks were suspended two feet in the air by being clamped to a ring stand.

I read this passage over a couple of times - I have been a bit slow in the mornings lately - and still came away with the image of the mice being suspended in the air by their front or hind paws. (Possibly I got stuck on the word "clamped.") "What is this?" I thought, "Some kind of freakish interspecies BDSM?! What purpose could this possible serve?!"

I did eventually figure out what was actually meant.

If this country could just get on board with the metric system*, these confusions would not be so commonplace.

*Okay, that probably would not fix my problems.

Hiya -

in today's blog, you said " In any case, regardless of its proclaimed ability to “transform anything and everything,” one thing it can transform is woo into science."

but probably meant to say:

" In any case, regardless of its proclaimed ability to “transform anything and everything,” one thing it can't transform is woo into science."

or something like that.

You can send my free homeopathic cancer cure kit to me at the address on file. Hi ho!

chris

#4 Eric Lund
All experiments were approved by the Animal Care Committee of the University of Connecticut Health Center.

This does not give me a lot of confidence in the ACC. Possibly Burzynski Ethics committee (whatever it's called in the States) were moonlighting

I see that the paper was published in a reputable profitable journal or at least with a profitable profitable publisher. The write-up for Hindawi Publishing Corporation on Beale's list is most interesting.

I had a look at the large tissue culture container study. Didn't check out the journal but interesttingly enough all the authors were from the University of Connecticut Health Center and included Gronowicz G

I don't think I want to ever go to the University of Connecticut Health Center.

I did think the experimental design was impeccable. One could divide up a 2nd or 3rd year undergraduate research design class into groups and hold a contest to see which group could find the most problems. Is there anything they did not do wrong?

@ JP:

" Some kind of freakish interspecies BDSM?!"

You win the internet!

Is that Frank Zappa and Alex Harvey I can hear turning in their respective graves?

Altogether now:

Let me put my hands on you!

It'll cure your asthma too!

This study is ridiculous, and if there's some foundation out there who knows how to change the structure of the atom, they need to inform the Pentagon. (Today is the anniversary of the Trinity test.)

But, my friend who is the director of a palliative care unit at a hospital also hears reports of TT "working" the best. She asks her outpatients if they're using any CAM, so she knows what they're doing. (She doesn't try to discourage them from it, unless it's something harmful, because all the patients are terminal.) She also asks if the CAM is "helpful", just out of curiosity. And, TT is reported by the patients to "work" the best.

From what I've seen of TT practioners on TV, they stand very close to the patient, and move their hands very close over their body. It's a half-hour or more of concentrated attention from another human being, who is focusing solely on you, whom you know is wishing strongly for you to feel better, and who is moving their hands so closely over you that you can feel their warmth on any bare skin.

That's why it "works" or "helps" better than swallowing a "remedy" or having thin needles stuck into you. It wouldn't work as well if the patient was inside a plastic culture flask suspended on a ringstand.

I served on an ACC (Animal Care Committee) for several years and we would NEVER have approved something like this. Something about "prior plausibility"...

" In any case, regardless of its proclaimed ability to “transform anything and everything,” one thing it can transform is woo into science."

Did you mean "can not" transform?

You nailed it with this article. My keyboard is drying now (learned long ago to only drink water sitting in front of a computer).

For the ethics committee, if they function like here, they don't really judge scientific merit. For that, they rely on whether the study is funded (to them, if it's funded, then someone decided there was scientific merit, though such a funding source would have elicited bright red flags here). Footpad tumors is another red flag that would have been required a thorough explanation of why not anywhere else. That's sloppy work there.

Out of morbid curiosity, I looked up the reference they cite as evidence that TT can work through a tissue culture flask. It was an experiment similar to this one (L-shaped room, non-practitioner control, etc.) except that they had their TT practitioners do that voodoo that they do on cell cultures and basically just assessed everything they could think of: gene expression, DNA replication, etc. Same basic strategy as this paper: go on a fishing expedition and run a bunch of different statistical tests on every possible pairwise comparison, then ignore the fact that most of the results showed no statistically significant difference, cherry-pick the few just-barely significant results, and speculate wildly about what they "suggest."

Also, a minor point re: how they got the mice in the flasks - although their sentence structure is a bit ambiguous it sounds like they're saying that they made a hinged door in the flask itself (for those who don't know, culture flasks are shaped like a flat rectangular prism with a neck, not the classic tapered "flask" shape.) I imagine you could get a mouse into the neck of a flask that big, but can you imagine trying to get it out again afterwards? As someone who does animal research, it saddens me that mice were sacrificed for this worthless piece of dreck.

From what I’ve seen of TT practioners on TV, they stand very close to the patient, and move their hands very close over their body. It’s a half-hour or more of concentrated attention from another human being, who is focusing solely on you, whom you know is wishing strongly for you to feel better, and who is moving their hands so closely over you that you can feel their warmth on any bare skin.

Maybe it's my ethnic background (predominantly Celtic) but that would freak me the hell out. When I'm ailing, I want a comfortable place to lie down, some ginger ale and to be left in peace.

Ask anyone of junior rank who has ever pissed off a senior noncom about directly channeled energy. It's certainly therapeutic, but not in the way Gronowicz et cie mean.

TBruce, well you see, I'm Italian. Need I say more? :)

Actually, it's that the patients aren't just ailing, they are terminally ill, so the focus and attention is more likely to be soothing and welcome.

"The mouse energy field is, after all, so much smaller and squeakier," had me in stitches. Brilliant!

My first reaction to this: What's up at UConn? Can medical science faculty there publish comedy-gold travesties of scientific method in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine and have that count for promotion and tenure? Curious about this "quack journal" I clicked on the link to the study...

Second reaction: Why is Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine on this NIH PubMed index? From reading here, where folks always ask for PubMed cites, I had the impression that implied some legitimacy, a passing through some filter of scientific legitimacy. There's a header for the journal at the top of the citation page: I click on the link for "Editorial Board"...

Third reaction: I am gob-smacked that the editorial board of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine had no less than 319 members. No typo: three hundred and nineteen. The members are affiliated with institutions all over the world, including such major US universities as Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Emory, UCLA, UCSD, UC Irvine, Florida, U of Miami, Texas, Ohio State, Maryland, Minnesota and Florida State (from the U.S. News top 100), and such prestigious medical facilities as Massachusetts General and Cancer Treatment Centers of America... (I joke about the prestige in the last one, of course). Hmmm...

Fourth reaction: I see Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine comes from an outfit by the name of Hindawi Publishing. I wonder if that's a subsidiary of
the Uranus Corporation, and consider the possibility some Philip K. Dickian reality shift has dropped me into a Cheech and Chong sketch, but the Google informs me Hindawi is a highly profitable (50% margin) publisher of pay-to-play science journals, infamous for soliciting submissions by mass spam emails. So UConn has ponied up $2250 (hopefully provided by Trivedi, rather than the general fund) to get Gronowicz et al's paper into EBsCAM. Nice little racket Trivedi has going there with woo-cademia and the 'open source' publishing thing...

Thought five: The EBsCAM header declares it has an 'Impact Factor' of 2.18. I have no idea what that means, so I do some more Google, and eventually discover two supposedly more rigorous science journal ranking systems: Eigenfactor, which EBsCAM in the 82nd percentile; and SCImago, which has EBsCAM in 'the first quartile'. Hmm. There are apparently over 1100 science journals in these rankings, which would mean over 900 of them are less influential — and perhaps worse — than a pay-model rag that publishes a study of how hand-waving effects cancer growth in lab mice that have stuffed into plastic flasks. I start to wonder whether Gronowicz paper could have moved up the pecking order if her team had used a control that didn't beg the whole question of TT 'energy fields' — say shamki involving a lab tech mimicing the gestures of the reiki master to see any measured 'effect' was just due to cancerous mice being calmed by hand-waving. Oh hell, I dunno stats from my arse, but if Orac says they dumped an 'outlier' that sounds squeeky enough to me that I wonder what the peer-reviewers were thinking. Or do I mean drinking?

Seeks sicks 6: EBsCAM "currently has an acceptance rate of 36%". So what do the 64% of papers they reject look like, where do they come from, and what happens to them? Having been passed-over by EBsCAM, do the authors then get them published in The Journal of Complementary and Integrative Medicine, The Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, or The Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, all of which are in the 3rd quartile per SCImago? Wait... There's one journal called Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and another, different one called The Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine? The later, which refers to itself as JEBCAM (and I imagine this as the great karmic unconsciousness referencing the killer-quack-friendly legislation shepherded into law under the former governor of Florida) is published by Sage, and must be lame since it only has 32 members on its editorial board... One of whom is Edzard Ernst!?

Summation: At this point my head is so filled with WTF about 'scholarship in medical science', I don't know what to say – except maybe anybody who lives in this glass house would have a lot of damn gall throwing bricks at Social Text... ;-)

Q: What's the scientific term for the application of Therapeutic Touch to mice?

A: Squeeky reiki.

For the ethics committee, if they function like here, they don’t really judge scientific merit. For that, they rely on whether the study is funded

I can't speak for Canada, but in the US, the IRB is supposed to review any proposed research (even before it is sent to potential funding agencies) that involves human or animal subjects (there are other things, like historical artifacts, that trigger an IRB review, but they aren't relevant to this discussion). So the IRB should have seen the proposal even before it was sent to the foundation in question. That means that either the IRB didn't care, or the proposers did not include the protocol in their proposal. There may be cases where a protocol is designed or revised after proposal submission, but the PI needs to have a very good reason for doing so, and the IRB is still supposed to approve it--meaning that either (again) the IRB didn't care, or they were deliberately bypassed. So there was a major lapse here, either on the IRB's part or on the PI's.

And then there's the issue of this foundation. The UConn Office of Sponsored Research (or whatever they call it) probably doesn't care as long as the checks don't bounce, but something tells me that this may not have been a competitive proposal.

Actually, it’s that the patients aren’t just ailing, they are terminally ill, so the focus and attention is more likely to be soothing and welcome.

Wouldn't giving them a golden retriever accomplish the same thing?

The EBsCAM header declares it has an ‘Impact Factor’ of 2.18....EBsCAM “currently has an acceptance rate of 36%”.

The journal in question may be trying to game their impact factor stats. Obviously higher impact factors are better (at least when comparing journals within a field), but one way to boost your impact factor is by focusing on "sexy" papers and rejecting papers that are obviously unlikely to be cited. (Nature and Science are among the journals alleged to be playing this game.) Not coincidentally, this procedure also boosts your rejection rate, which is another way to make your journal seem better than it is. In addition, some journals (again, Nature and Science are among them) include news focus stories, which boost the numerator (more cites) of the impact factor without boosting the denominator (these stories aren't counted as articles). Given Hindawi's dodgy reputation, it seems at least plausible that they are playing these sorts of games.

In my field, an impact factor of 2.18 would be typical of a decent second-tier journal. But that's not necessarily true in biomedical fields; I suspect impact factors in my field are lower than most other science fields, but in some humanities fields that would be a rather high impact factor.

@shay #25:

Wouldn’t giving them a golden retriever accomplish the same thing?

Shh! I'm holding out for my very own dragon on the NHS.

I should think goldens would be easier on the housekeeping staff.

(sadmar -- squeaky reiki. Oy).

Wouldn’t giving them a golden retriever accomplish the same thing?

When my soon-to-be youngest finally got out of the hospital/re-hab center, it took several weeks before she figured out every dog she saw wasn't a therapy dog put there just to cheer her up.

How did they get an IRB for tihs? The size of the flask they put two mice in was noted as "18 cm × 11.5 cm × 4 cm)." For us Americans that is about: 7' high, a bit over 4" wide, and 1.5' thick.

Since my kids did go through a rodent pet stage which included one mouse I am familiar on how much room they like to have. Even though the mouse was small, it did like to move around. Well, until it died. Then I told them no more rodents and gave the habitats to daughter's first grade teacher.

Was there no oversight on the treatment of the animals at that university?

my soon-to-be youngest

Oh G-d, does this mean what it seems like it means?

Previous studies from our laboratory had shown that tissue culture plastic did not impede human biofield treatments [36]

I wanted to see what other materials they'd tested, to have some confidence in this claim about tissue culture plastic. Also, the nature of the materials which did and did not impede the treatment would tell us something about the nature of this putative energy field. For example, if they failed to detect any effect through a barrier made of ten-inch thick stainless steel, coated with an inch of beryllium and backed by three feet of lead, we could pretty much discount highly-energetic free neutrons, couldn't we? (I'm sure that would come as a comfort to the mice.) At the other end of the mice-containing spectrum, a thin sheet of paper is going to block most alpha particles but not a great deal else.

But it seems the study wasn't actually a study of materials at all. It was simply another claim that TT worked, poorly supported by evidence at that. Gronowicz completely mis-characterises the study and draws a flawed conclusion, which gives us a valuable insight into her woo-soaked way of thinking. Not that we really needed another line into that.

Shay, my cancer center brought in golden retrievers 8 years ago--and look, I'm still alive! Actually, the wife of a partner needed to speak to him, and it was too hot to leave the dogs in the car. I'm sure it was the goldens, not the chemotherapy because dogs are all natural.
I wonder if Blue Heelers are better healers?

Tissue culture flasks are usually made of polystyrene, which is a long way from fur on a triboelectric series chart. I can imagine tiny and unpleasant little lightning bolts following the mousies around inside the flasks.

but that would freak me the hell out.

It wouldn't freak me out, but I'd last about three minutes before I started trying to rip the "therapist's" arms out of their sockets. Give me the golden retriever or some mouseses.

As for ethics, I don't have a great deal of confidence in any reviewing agency. The AVMA, for instance, supports suffocating chickens with fire fighting foam if it is expedient.

It means the adoption hasn't been finalized, and rght now I'm still her foster dad.

Sorry for any confusion...

It means the adoption hasn’t been finalized, and rght now I’m still her foster dad.

Oh, good. Thinking about it a little bit more, I realized that probably an unhappier meaning would not be so casually construed. At least by normal people, anyway, I talk about seriously awful things in a casual manner all the time.

@ doug #6
At my last employer, the student video editing lab I built / maintained / all-but-lived-in was in a relatively new 'Science' building, surrounded by Physics and Astrophysics labs. At one point we got a new, bigger Panasonic monitor for our dubbing/playback cart. I plugged it in, turned it on, before firing up the video source connected to the input — and a kind of psychedelic splotchy color pattern appeared on the otherwise black screen.of the CRT. While wondering if the monitor was defective, I wheeled the cart to a different position in the room — and the pattern changed as the monitor moved through space. I unplugged it, took it down the elevator to the first floor lobby, and tried it there. No color pattern. Back in the lab, I played with all the other electrical things in the room — the computer systems, video gear, both the fluorescent and incandescent-on-dimmers overhead lights. None of them were the source of – or had any effect on – whatever EMR/RFI was being picked up by the circuits in the monitor. I showed the phenomenon to the Computer Science prof whose student lab was in the other half of the room, and he was as puzzled as I was. We observed some more. The elevator machinery for the building was across the hall, and had some big electric motors and and associated control systems, but operation of the elevator had no effect on the pattern either. We wondered if there could be something in adjacent science lab, but we got a look see, and no, no suspects there and besides there was a good sized storage space in between with nothing plugged in. Eventually, we just shrugged and went back to work...

Per Denice @ #9, we might grant Gronowicz et al understand the 'bio-energy field' of living creatures as something other than EMR, but the fact they 'tested' the plastic for potential blockage of this 'energy' means they have to considered it could be affected by the physical properties of the 'research' environment – none of the others of which they bothered to catalog, test, control for, yada yada yada.

So, forget Gronowicz, and mull over a peer review process that fails to meet the intellectual standards of Rufus T. Firefly:

Why, a 2nd year undergraduate could understand what's wrong with this research design! Run out and find me a 2nd year undergraduate; I can't make head or tail of it.

And here's a link to the Uranus Corporation (just 1:18, I think y'all will appreciate it):
https://youtu.be/008BPUdQ1XA
"At Uranus, things come out a little differently."

@Chris #30

I thought the small container suspended in mid air was only for the hand waving part.

I assumed they were in standard research rodent cages when they weren't being pestered.

#32

Doesn't look like other materials were tested, that article is on cells in culture dishes so not sure it even applies to intact critters.

CRT monitors are subject to magnetic fields because the electron beam is magnetically "deflected" (scanned). Residual magnetism in steel parts around the tube can cause strange patterns, which is why CRT monitors generally include a degaussing coil to demagnetize the bits each time the monitor is turned on. In severe cases, manual degaussing with an external coil is required. Of course with the near total demise of CRTs, this is no longer an issue.

It is great sport (for the twisted and depraved) to hold a strong permanent magnet up to the face of a color TV CRT while the uninitiated are watching.

CRT monitors are one of the things that have been identified as noxious to some animals. Conventional television monitors had a horizontal scan rate of about 16 kHz. A combination of magnetostriction in certain materials and coils of wire where strands could move microscopically in response to magnetic fields could make the things audibly quite loud at 16 kHz. Computer CRTs suffered the same problems, but the scan rate was usually higher, so fewer animals could hear it. The power supplies used in almost all modern electronic equipment similarly emit high frequency "audio" noise, though again the more modern types operate at frequencies that are ultrasonic even to meeces. Electronic "ballasts" for fluorescent lights can emit frequencies audible to small critters. Then there's high frequency noise from fan blades.

The elevator machinery for the building was across the hall, and had some big electric motors and and associated control systems, but operation of the elevator had no effect on the pattern either.

Several years ago we noticed a tendency for our office's electronically-controlled security door to lock and unlock by itself, on about a 90 second cycle.

Strict scientific observation* gave rise to a hypothesised sharp sonic connection with the elevator 25 feet away. Further analysis determined that the elevator wasn't going anywhere, and the conclusion was reached that there was some effin' scary sparking action going on with the elevator motors. A suitably qualified elevator technician was called to investigate the problem. We should also have got someone out to investigate why the security door was so crap, but we got bored.

* Preceded by large amounts of joking and bullshitting.

@doug #40:

A combination of magnetostriction in certain materials and coils of wire where strands could move microscopically in response to magnetic fields could make the things audibly quite loud at 16 kHz.

My first introduction to a computer system more complex than a ZX Spectrum was in September 1983, when I got to play with a Pr1me minicomputer. Its boards were housed in an open-sided wardrobe-sized cabinet (for adequate ventilation, naturally), and they ran so slow (by today's standards) that they sang to you.

There were stories that people had written CPU/RAM-intensive software to exploit this effect, with varying degrees of success. The Holy Grail was generally acknowledged to be a rendition of Delia Derbyshire's original 1963 Doctor Who theme tune.

"the role of prayer or religion are not involved in the interpretation of results"

Oh God, please let this mouse's tumors support my hypothesis...

"Was there no oversight on the treatment of the animals at that university?"

C'mon, Chris! Did you miss the part where they provided BEDDING for the two mice in each 7x4x1.5" flask? It's not like these people are monsters or anything. They gave Mickey and Minnie pillows to rest those 330 cubic-mm footpad tumors they gave them. That's less than 7mm per side and mouse feet are... Well, like you said, the mice were just going to move around a little before they died anyway. Or, in the wild, they'd just make a nuisance of themselves chewing through walls and stuff before some cat comes along, boxes their little brains to jelly, and drops them on the living room carpet as a present to its human before heading off to much down some kibble. It's a better life for us and them if they spend their days in a cozy cushioned home before being humanely euthanized, especially since they're helping us cure cancer, transform the very nature of the atom, and whatnot. Just think, if there were enough Trivedi Masters™, they could create pest resistant crops without resorting to glysophate or GMOs, and it would be safe because the Trivedi Effect® is a Natural transformation harnessed from the Intelligence of the Universe!

Hmm...

OK, Chris. Jig's up. I'm onto you. I hope Monsanto's paying you well for your faux animal-rights shill act, and you sleep well knowing your blocking the energy transmissions Mahenda Trivedi is trying to use to serve a greater purpose for the welfare of humanity.
[/sarcasm]

Actually, I suspect Gronowicz measured at least one other effect of TT on mouse biology, and is hiding her findings: the Trivedi Effect® functions very nicely to transform mouse droppings into cash...

@ TBruce:

Although I'm not Celtic I would be freaked out nonetheless.

Ever see video of those churches/ prayer meetings wherein they heal someone complete with laying-on-of-hands ?

Actually I have mixed feelings about touching in general.
It can be good. BUT some people go overboard- kiss everyone in the room hello even if they have just met them.
Have to touch people if they talk to them.

I can see how you would get mice *into* a T-flask; they like small spaces so they'd probably go pretty willingly through the neck. But there is no way in heck you could get them back *out* of a T-flask without some kind of door.

Eric Lund: You keep saying IRB. For animal studies it's an IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee).

Which reminds me of a joke.
What happens when you cross a hamster and an octopus?
A visit from your IACUC and the termination of your grant.

JP saith:

"I talk about seriously awful things in a casual manner all the time"

BUT then, she studied Russian lit I imagine,

Doug @40: It's not just CRTs. One facility I knew had to get all their fancy motion-activated lights removed because the sonic sweep of the motion detector was so upsetting to the mice that the entire facility stopped breeding.

"When my soon-to-be youngest finally got out of the hospital/re-hab center, it took several weeks before she figured out every dog she saw wasn’t a therapy dog put there just to cheer her up."

I firmly believe that every dog on earth is a therapy dog put here just to cheer me up*. Well, maybe not the purse-dogs.

I would laugh, but I'm just depressed for the poor mice. Jamming them in a TC flask and giving them massive tumors in order to bolster your own personal bullshit. Horrid.

Although I should note that they don't seem to have been crammed through that narrow neck: "with bedding by a technician through a premade hinged door." Sounds like they built a little door into the flask. Tiny mercies.

(*They seem to firmly believe I am here just to be licked and to feed them.)

I missed the part about the hinged door when reading the methods. Brain fart from blogging after midnight...

At that point, I don't see why letting them stay in their plastic cages while they get hands waved at them wouldn't be just as scientifically valid. For the very lax interpretation of the word that allows this study, of course.

Conventional television monitors had a horizontal scan rate of about 16 kHz. A combination of magnetostriction in certain materials and coils of wire where strands could move microscopically in response to magnetic fields could make the things audibly quite loud at 16 kHz.

More simply, a loose flyback transformer will do the same thing.

As I can be quite sarcastic, my first thought was'Can the flasks block long distance reiki?' How do we know that someone was not send long distance reiki therapy to the test mice? I would think that there must be occational error when sending long distance reiki healing. What if some one is California is trying to heal someone in Boston, but missed and healed the mice instead. If I am going to believe these results, they will need to prove that the flasks are reiki proof.
http://reikidistancehealing.org/qanda.php#Q5

dz@53
You make a great point. We really need more research into blocking long distance reiki so we can reexamine how it confounds other studies. Maybe it's not chemotherapy but rather interference from long distance reiki. Maybe vaccines do cause autism but studies show otherwise because the authors failed to control for reiki.

More simply, a loose flyback transformer will do the same thing.

Twenty-five years ago, I spent some time working at a place that still used IBM 3270-series terminals. During the first training class there, the demonstration model we were being shown how to use was one that had been pulled off of actual usage because of its tendency to overheat and shut down.

Every time it shut down, four people of the forty or so in the room (including me, but not including any of the instructors) would quite visibly cringe from the loud and extremely high-pitched squeal the machine would put out. It took an annoying amount of effort to convince some of those people that yes, the broken terminal actually was making a lot of noise.

KM #38:
The reikied mice and the lab-guy-just-stands-there 'control' group were put in the flasks for 10 minutes, twice a week. There's no mention of where they were "housed' the other 10,060 minutes of the week, what sorts and degrees of human contact they may have had during that time, whether they were alone or shared space with other mice in the study, what the physical nature of the space surrounding the mouse housing may have been, or whether all these things were identical for each mouse in the study. Not that any such factors could POSSIBLY have anything to do with whatever they measured, compared to 20 minutes of hand-wavnd waving.

Speaking of things Gronowicz et al don't bother to tell us, that includes how many TT practitioners were employed in the sample, what criteria were used to select them, how the authenticity and representativeness of their TT therapy was verified... But the number of practitioners appears to have been "two". We're told nothing about any other ways these two make have been like or different from each other, or from other self-proclaimed TT practioners, or from the "non-TT person standing next to the flask" of the 'control' group – the language is also ambiguous as to whether this was the same individual in person in all sessions, or who-knows-how-many different folks. If there were only one or two 'non-TT persons' used, that's a small sample, and wouldn't rule out a hypothesis that a significant percentage of human beings project energy fields that affect metatasis of foot cancer in BALB/c mice whether they wave their hands or not, but just aren't aware of having that 'gift'. And why didn't Gronowicz control for 'non-TT' by having the TT practitoners just stand next to the flasks w/o doing the hand thing? Or rather, why didn't the peer reviewers find any of this worrisome?

What's on display here is the sort of reductionism of human characteristics, expression and behavior that is endemic in the so-called 'social sciences'. The 'researcher' makes-up some abstract binary category distinction, and treats it like a self-evident natural phenomenon with utterly unified and identical states of 'present/absent'. In this case, you're a TT practitioner if you say you area, all TT practitioners and every one of their their methods, and yea, every individual session of application are interchangeable. And everyone on Earth who does not claim to be a TT practitioner isn't one, and all of them – and anything any of them may do while standing bored, sympathetic, or in gleeful scopophilic sadism next to a pair of mice trapped in a tiny flask – are likewise functionally the same and interchangeable. Even if you're loopy enough to think hand-waving can direct a human energy field to re-orient the energy field of a mouse yielding some bio-physical change, that reductionism ought to stop you dead in your tracks...

The WTF of the premises just assumed here knows no end. If a TT-practioner's energy field interacts with a patient's energy field, how on Earth do you posit that has a bio-physical effect on the patient, but results in no change to the practitioner? Maybe I should apply for a grant to study the physiological change in newly minted reiki masters by euthanizing one subject group before they treat any patients, and another after each gives 40 treatments to the same patient with non-sbm-treatable physiology-based chronic pain, and then comparing thorough autopsy results...

There is an iPhone app, Sound Grenade, that emits a very high pitched squeal after, say, 3 minuets or so. That's just long enough to walk over to a young cow-orker who can still hear sounds that high (too many years of lead slinging and rock & roll narrowed my hearing), and bust a gut trying to not laugh as he slaps his CRT trying to fix the loose flyback transformer.

Ahhh, the days of cubical warfare...

Gak. CRT monitors. I could watch the screen flicker at 75 Hz. Yes, it is headache inducing in addition to making your co-workers think you're crazy.

@shay #25 from Mr Woo: Yes!

@ MI Dawn #2 - Thank you - I think moving, the stress of this type of move and all the complications of it, have hit me kind of hard. Teenagers and their angst on top of it isn't making it much easier. Moving somewhere would be easier than moving into incompleteness. We're barely getting places together to keep the animals contained, and planning to find a camper or something until the house is finished for us, so everything goes to plastic containers with silica gel in the barn and we cross our fingers while my century farmer husband considers it a pioneering adventure. Thank you so much for the warm empathy across the interwebs...

Ahhh, the days of cubical warfare…

Until two years ago, when I had to move, I was keeping alive a 1977 RCA XL-100 ColorTrak. The one with the "space-age" rocker-switch remote (which I had long since lost, which is just as well, given that it had a habit of randomly turning on the set at full blast).

If I still had a scope, I could have put the service manual to better use, but there was a lot of swapping in and out of modules that needed trivial rebuilding because I wasn't that dedicated.

But I digress. Yah, that flyback occasionally needed whacking a gentle suggestion to reseat itself.

Huh; so there is something to whacking a TV. My dad used to "fix" ours that way, and I seem to remember it working, but I wasn't sure if it was a real thing or not.

On occasion, when streaming video is choppy or slow on my laptop, I get an urge to smack it, but I know it will not help.

#23 sadmar

For info on Hindawi Publishing Corporation google Beale’s list and Hindawi Publishing Corporation in the search box. It is a very profitable publishing organization. FYI getting on Beale's list is not a good thing.

It is very likely most members of the editorial board have no idea they are on it. http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2015/02/journals-without-editors-what-is-g…

I have heard of cases where some authors didn't even know that they had written such and such paper.

Why did the Med Center's IRB even allow this waste of mice?

If you are going to test a drug, you first have to show that there IS a drug. I'd make them demonstrate this "TT Field" before they could proceed. Then they could try their TT on cancer cell cultures and show me they could affect cells.

Then, with ROBUST and REPRODUCIBLE results from those, they might get a mouse.

I'm sickened by Orac's photo showing a one eyed mouse cradled in a natural rubber latex glove. ;-(

Is there no decency for mice in medical research?

In continuation to # 65,

If the scientists used natural rubber latex gloves during the experiment how did the "energy medicine" pass through the rubber gloves and into the mouse?

Natural rubber is a material with large ρ and small σ, even a very large electric field in rubber makes almost no current flow through it.

What really steams me about this article is that some anti-animal testing group or person could point to this study as a proof of the wastefulness and negligence of animal testing..... and they'd be right.

The IRB that approved this nonsense should be removed. I work with people that don't want to work with vertebrates any more (frogs and fish, mostly) because the paperwork is too onerous, and these people got mice to torture with their magic?

Argh. I have no words.

Either the MJD above is a Poe, or MJD has gone completely off the deep end.....

@ Lawrence #67,

Even when I agree with Orac you needle me...

Furthermore, when he uses photo's showing natural rubber latex gloves I can't resist the urge to comment.

Congratulations on SB-277 in that your a persistent and persuasive pro-vaxxer.

MJB, how do you know they are latex gloves? They look just like the nitrile gloves in our pantry. Daughter uses them when she cleans the litter box, and if I remember I use them to chop hot peppers.

@ Chris #69,

If you look closely at the photo the mouse's left paw is elevated, an indication of latex sensitivity.

Furthermore, if the scientists ran such an experiment as Orac described they also foolishly used natural rubber latex gloves (See #65).

I'm glad your using nitrile gloves Chris!

I wonder if Blue Heelers are better healers?

Almost certainly, Heelers would round up all those pesky little cancer cells and shunt them off into a corner of the yard.

Golden retrievers just run around with their tongues hanging out, going "Look at me".

@ MJD

If you look closely at the photo the mouse’s left paw is elevated, an indication of latex sensitivity.

You are kidding, right?
You must be, or you seriously need help. I am not joking.

The gloves could be latex, but a quadruped rodent having an elevated front paw is only an indication of curiosity (of the "should I get closer or should I run away" type).
Heck, dogs and cats often take a similar position when investigating something new.

Oh, and the mouse is "one-eyed" because its left eye is on its head's left side, and thus hidden by the way the picture was framed. Rodents' eyes are more far apart than those of hairless monkeys.

Oh, and the mouse is “one-eyed” because its left eye is on its head’s left side, and thus hidden by the way the picture was framed.

Come on. How do you know that this mouse doesn't have part of its head missing? Heh? Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it is there.

Indeed, this might be a 3-eyed mouse.

@ ChrisP

Come on. How do you know that this mouse doesn’t have part of its head missing?

Reminds me of a (real-life) exchange between a lawyer and the medical coroner at some trial. It went something like this:

"So, doctor, what was the status of Mr Smith when you started examining him?"
"I had his corpse in the morgue and his brain in a jar on my desk."
"Were you sure Mr Smith was dead?"
"Well, no,, he could have been walking around and pretending to be a lawyer."

@ Sadmar

If a TT-practioner’s energy field interacts with a patient’s energy field, how on Earth do you posit that has a bio-physical effect on the patient, but results in no change to the practitioner?

Apparently you need intent to trigger the effect. OTOH, apparently you can spread the good juices around you without even noticing.
What happens if the customer is resentful of the energy healer? (by example, he suspects the healer and his wife strongly intertwined their biofields?)

There is also the question of the morphic field's elastic resonance. Once you modify someone's biofield, how long until the morphic field snaps back to its usual shape, out of sheer habit?

FYI getting on Beale’s list is not a good thing.

Hindawi isn't, FWIW.

I could watch the screen flicker at 75 Hz. Yes, it is headache inducing in addition to making your co-workers think you’re crazy.

What's the typical multiplexing frequency of a cheap LED alarm clock?

I remember the discussion here about Bengston's mice - was it really 3 years ago? IIRC we had a couple of TT practitioners here claiming that they used it to increase the survival of cancer patients more effectively than conventional cancer treatment. Their evidence was underwhelming.

Come on. How do you know that this mouse doesn’t have part of its head missing?

That reminds me of "Seeing", Douglas Harding's flavor of zen mysticism, that claims that you will experience enlightenment if you realize that you have no head (i.e.you never see your own head). One of my brothers is into Harding, and I sort of get it.

I could watch the screen flicker at 75 Hz. Yes, it is headache inducing in addition to making your co-workers think you’re crazy.

It was flickering fluorescent lights that used to drive me crazy, and no one else was bothered. Does anyone know why some people can see these things while others can't?

Years ago I got recruited as a (paid) guinea pig for a psychology study into subliminal images. I could see all the subliminal images and describe to the experimenter what they were, thoroughly surprising her and making me useless for the experiment. I still got my £5 as I recall.

They are very clearly synthetic polyisoprene gloves, it's a young rat, not a mouse, and it is holding its foot where it is because it's more comfortable than awkwardly putting it on the closest finger.

@ doug

Oï. I hope the thread is not headed into a repeat of the "what color is this dress" event :-)

Actually, you may be right on all points. I was not sold on nitrile gloves because I'm used to them being more blue, but latex is more yellow-ish. Polyisoprene is indeed likely
And yeah, I'll go with the animal wanting to be comfortable.
It's a young rat, really?
I would have sworn... But I'm no expert in small furry animals.

Helianthus, I'm really just mocking MJD.

I can no more tell that they are polyisoprene by appearance than dippy can tell they are latex. Synthetic polyisoprene gloves are quite expensive and appear to be "popularly" sold as sterile surgical gloves (because they have the desirable properties of latex). There are also lots of ultra-low protein (post-processed) natural latex gloves available.
I have nitrile gloves in blue, green and purple. They also come in pink, white and black, and Kimberly-Clark has their "Sterling" offering which is a rather spiffy silvery tone.

I'm not 100% sure it is a rat, but the proportions of the head, particularly the muzzle, looks more like rat than mouse to me. Just as we need to see the port side to know how many eyes are there, we need to see the stern to help distinguish rat from mouse.

#76 Nard
RE: Hindawi Publishing Corporation "isn't"

It was there at 2015-07-17 08:13 unless I am really messing up my search specs
http://scholarlyoa.com/?s=Hindawi+Publishing+Corporation

Presumably Beale changed his mind?

#76 Narad
That should be 2015-07-17 08:13 EDT

#78 Krebiozen

I can see my nose (well one side at a time). Does this mean I have some strange thing floating above my shoulders? Maybe the equivalent of a pilot fish?

Krebiozen @78 -- In Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice", one character tells another "Watch your head!" as they pass through some small space.

The reply is "How would I do that?"

Pynchon is a great fan of stupid jokes. A minor character in Gravity's Rainbow, a German secretary, is named "Miss Mueller-Hochleben". It occurred to me about a month after I'd read it that the name translates to "Miller High Life", a popular brand of beer in the US.

I have heard of cases where some authors didn’t even know that they had written such and such paper.

On one or two occasions I learned of a paper on which I was a co-author when I saw the published paper. Some corresponding authors are better than others about contacting co-authors before submitting the publication. Luckily, these weren't dodgy papers, but there is a reason co-authors are supposed to approve manuscripts before submission.

The situation described at your link has happened before, with an Elsevier journal no less--and Elsevier is supposed to be one of the more reputable publishers. I don't have time to search right now, but a few years ago somebody noticed a mathematics journal that featured a disproportionate number of articles authored by its then editor, who resigned in the wake of the scandal. There seems to have been a similar resolution in this case, but Elsevier really needs to make sure it doesn't happen in the future. Once a coincidence, twice a conspiracy, as the saying goes.

I have met some people over the years with a latex fetish, but MJD takes this to quite a different level.

I'll have to differ with Orac on this one: It's not Chopra-level woo, it's worse:

1) The Trivedi Foundation is a cult based on the idea that its founder has some kind of unique connexion to supernatural power and can pass it along to his initiates. Those kinds of cults do not end well.

See also this page: http://trivedifoundation.org/mahendra-trivedi/ particularly the video title 'Journey to Spiritual Leader.' That guy is seriously into _himself_ in a manner that reminds me of Scientology or the Moonies.

One of his initiates is a family member or at least has the same last name. We've all heard of Duck Dynasty, perhaps the Trivedians are getting ready to launch Quack Dynasty?

2) This: 'Guided by the vision of Mahendra Trivedi, the Trivedi Foundation is committed to supporting _research that provides a basis for the development of new products and services_, which will greatly enhance quality of life.' They're trying to 'productise' their woo. That or solicit investors, er, uh, donors.

But unlike Chopra, who is only out to sell books and speaking engagements, these Trivedians are out to productise The Magical Energy Itself.

Pseudo-Hindu guru cult meets Prosperity Gospel. Two horrid heresies for the price of one.

3) The fact that they think nothing of treating a lab full of mice with gratuitous cruelty in order to prove a point, indicates that they rate particularly low on compassion for other living things. _Those_ kinds of cults especially do not end well.

I would have to say that Chopra is downright warm & fuzzy compared to this Trivedi fellow. If I had to choose which one to get stuck with on a jammed lift, I'd choose Chopra in a heartbeat, because goofy is better than creepy any day.

BTW, his little cult is in Nevada USA, a place known for its gambling establishments. There is something fitting about that.

On the whole laying on of hands thing:

The first faith healing the Mr took me to was like something out of a movie, or maybe a National Geographic special. It started with a chair and two men, but of course, that wasn't near enough good will and healing energy. The one man's wife believed herself to be a bit gifted in a lot of the heavenly gifts, and had to join in, and so everyone was invited. So I am sitting in the middle of a crowd of people, two men's hands clamped tight on my shoulders while they take turns praying, one shaking (I guess he had more? Less?), then they put oil on me (that is in the New Testament at least). Since I have had oil annointed on me again, so I have decided they definitely were generous - it was running down behind my ears, dribbling down the back of my neck...- and there are people touching me in various places praying while some are waving and babbling in tongues...

I felt terribly awkward.

When I am told by his church it is my fault that their faith cannot heal me, I do not know what to say. When. I was a little girl who was just starting to be suspicious about Santa Claus, my mother developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was raised a good little Baptist, taken to church from the day they discharged my mom and me from the hospital. It wouldn't have occurred to me not to believe prayer would be answered. Of course I prayed that mommy would get better and everything would be fine again. She didn't even last seven months, and the same adults that taught me Jesus Loves Me told me that I couldn't understand or question God's will. So when faith healers tell me it is my inability to believe that God wants me well (or the universal constant, or most painfully - the ones who tell me how much I love being sick), I do not have an answer.

I can't imagine a lot of people being comfortable being in a faith healing. I know I personally don't have the right "type" to be the center of that kind of focus and scrutiny, be it one person or ten. The other day when I was so sick, no one here even fed me, and I didn't care until 8:30 that night.

#87 Eric Lund

In terms of the author not knowing he/she was on the paper, I meant it was not a case of not realizing the paper had been published but not even knowing who the other authors were.

Off-topic but my advisor had the great story of her "husband" doing the dog & pony show for his first academic job and making a great impression until someone on faculty who knew her but not him ask him how "Mary" was and he had no idea who his wife was.

Ironically her real husband actually got the job a little while later.

The editor issue that Devee Bishop was blogging about may well have been a misunderstanding although I have my doubts.

All this concern over a one-eyed mouse, but no one's bothered by is clearly a photograph of a severed human hand?

jrkrideau,

I can see my nose (well one side at a time). Does this mean I have some strange thing floating above my shoulders? Maybe the equivalent of a pilot fish?

We all have a strange ghostly thing floating above our shoulders I suppose. The idea is that fully realizing that your subjective experience of the world is all that you will ever experience is somehow liberating. A couple of hundred micrograms of LSD does something similar, as I recall, somewhat more persuasively.

Mrs Woo (89), that is horrifying!

My response to your husband's church and all those "good Christians" would be short, sharp and recommending that they go forth and multiply.

Victim blaming be thy name.

Anyone, should I be in such a position, who comes near me with any woo or attempt to blame me for any illness will get similar, no matter how "well meaning" they are.

Since I have had oil annointed on me again, so I have decided they definitely were generous – it was running down behind my ears, dribbling down the back of my neck…- and there are people touching me in various places praying while some are waving and babbling in tongues…

My dad's family has been irreligious as far back as anybody can remember, but I'm pretty sure it was a visit as a teenager to a Pentecostal, "Holy Roller" type church that led my dad to declare all organized religion to be "a bunch of hocus pocus" for the rest of his days.

@ Mrs Woo:

That's terrible!
I have no idea how you can find alternate sources of support / care because you don't seem to be living with people who either don't care or CAN"T care for you ( I know that MR Woo is ill but the children aren't).
Tell people about your situation.

that is YOU SEEM TO BE LIVING

Mrs. Woo does seem to be living, but yeah, I just actually read that last sentence with comprehension, and it is sad and worrying.

Well, Narad is quite the expert in computer typesetting, but even I wouldn't accuse him of having a LaTeX fetish.

There are times I wish I was allergic to LaTeX, like when I'm searching for a missing curly brace in the deluxetable environoment. Bah.

Helianthus: "I was not sold on nitrile gloves because I’m used to them being more blue,"

These are the white Nitrile gloves in our pantry:
http://www.costco.com/Kirkland-Signature%E2%84%A2-Nitrile-Exam-Gloves-4…

And that rodent seems a bit large for a mouse. But it could be.

palindrom: "There are times I wish I was allergic to LaTeX, like when I’m searching for a missing curly brace in the deluxetable environoment. Bah"

Groan. I used that for a while to do a newsletter. It was so long ago that there was no "What You See Is What You Get" graphics monitor. I had to walk to the window of the printer room and have someone hand me my test pages before I could make corrections.

Chris @99. Ah, memories!

People who get nostalgic often don't remember just how awkward and inconvenient things were way back when.

That does look like a latex glove. Nitrile have a different sheen... and that totally looks like a Balb/C mouse.

Since reading and commenting yesterday, last night I could not stop thinking about mice coming in and out of the necks of flasks while making that *pthun* sound of a pneumatic tube.

Well, after visiting the doctor that morning (the doctor and I had rearranged meds and I had a bad reaction to the new one; even though it is new and low dose, I wanted to be sure and yes, I had to wean off, and a better safe than sorry blood test was in order) I retreated to the bedroom with a bag of Cheerios. Mr Woo came up at some point and laid down beside me. Later he was gone. It was really a bad day. The next day was much better. Today not so much. Two steps forward and all that. Tomorrow I get to quit the evil gunk entirely!

There really is no one to tell. A day spent in bed alone sick is a day sick. No close family. We have moved so slowly because Mr Woo struggles with balance when he does too much, I can only do so much, and we don't feel right bothering our busy adult children when we can get by ourselves, just over several months instead of a week or two. Pride goeth before a fall...

Anyhow - the faith healing - it was brought to mind by someone discussing laying on of hands vs close hovering, amount of attention. There is this expectancy by the practitioner when they are done - depending on the type, they will either be very assured and pretty much tell you you are healed, or they will very earnestly inquire about your improvement. I suspect the ones that proclaim healing might be more experienced.

Like any alt-med, failure for the morality to work is purely the fault of the patient. For me, knowing that part of pain is perception (though I have never considered "pain" a problem ever in my life, it is listed as one symptom), part of fatigue is perception, part of disability is attitude... when I am accused by a faith healer that my lack of faith is a problem, my very analytical side really starts considering that. You know - if I could still believe in a God who did whatever you told Him just because you said so (that doesn't even make sense), could I see miraculous improvement?

Perhaps my biggest problem is that I think so much!

#22 Garnetstar:

I've lived in Italy... Italians can actually TALK by just waving hand gestures - it's AMAZING! Is that a form of TT?

Which is better... TT or HT???

Few are aware of the parallel and competing history of both. Those promoting Therapeutic Touch (TT) versus Healing Touch (HT) have been at each others throats for decades. I believe that HT is a splinter off of TT. Nursing CEUs have actually been granted for both in a number of states!

presumptive original image source

@RobRN-it might be - the Italians have always made me feel better!

In terms of the author not knowing he/she was on the paper, I meant it was not a case of not realizing the paper had been published but not even knowing who the other authors were.

Is it something that can be attributed to duplicate names? If you were to try to look for my papers in the ADS database (the rough equivalent of PubMed for physical sciences), you will find a bunch of papers by the ATLAS collaboration (one of the groups that recently discovered the Higgs boson). ADS is by default fairly generous about name matching, and by those criteria I match one of the 3000+ members of the ATLAS collaboration. If you look for me on Google Scholar, you will find a bunch of papers by a plant biologist who was active in the first half of the 20th century. Neither of these people are related to me. It gets worse for people with certain common surnames (e.g., Smith, Kim, Wang). I even know of a case of two scientists with identical (in Pinyin; I'm told they use different characters in their native Chinese) names, both in my relatively narrow specialty. So it's not completely absurd to have publications that aren't really yours because they are your namesake's papers. In my experience, ResearchGate doesn't help this issue, because you don't always know if the F. M. Lastname they think is your co-author really is the F. M. Lastname who was your actual co-author. There is a certain person who was on one of my papers, but ResearchGate thinks it's some other guy in a different field who has a similar name.

The only motive I can see for adding somebody's name to a paper when that person doesn't even know you is to give your paper undeserved credibility from having Prof. Bigshot on the author list.

#107 Eric Lund

The only motive I can see for adding somebody’s name to a paper when that person doesn’t even know you is to give your paper undeserved credibility from having Prof. Bigshot on the author list.

And your point is ... ?

The reports of this were some time ago, perhaps in the '80s and I am hazy on the details and source (Chronicle of Higher Education for one or two perhaps?) But it seemed clear that they were deliberate attempt to capitalize on Mr. Big's name.

Don't forget, before the big internet databases, one had to either read the relevant journals or go through huge paper abstract books when looking for a topic or a paper. The main one I was used to was Psych Abstracts and IIRC they were in at least two very weighty tomes that cross-referenced something with something. I haven't even seen them since the 1980s but they were not something one read for pleasure.

My guess is that for something like Chemistry or some of the biological sciences one needed a fork-lift just to get them from shelf to table.

How likely is someone to look themself up in the abstracts? You know what you wrote and have the reprints in the office.

Place the article in a journal where Mr Big's name carries weight but that he is very unlikely to read and you're likely home free.

OTOH I do know of two chemists with exactly the same, somewhat unusual, name who are sometimes mistaken for one another. Luckily, they are in fairly different fields of chemistry.

I guess we don't have to worry about those CRT monitors any longer. Woo has hit tech. Not as bad as an influence in medicine but still not good because rational thought is again out the window.

San Francisco techies are hiring this Wiccan witch to protect their computers from viruses and offices from evil spirits

And she makes $200/hr.

"I suppose that on a strictly literal basis it’s true. Animals don’t have psychosocial factors."

What is the basis for this assertion?

Are practitioners with larger hands able to exert their effect from greater distances? Can the practitioner undo the effects if he crosses his hands? Does wearing copper-infused gloves magnify the effect? There is so much to learn about this subject!

Krebiozen @ #76,

I have seen it referred to as "fast eyes" before but these days G_ogle is littered with too much about video game play rates to return anything useful on the biology of it all. But at least we know you're not crazy.

Your comment reminded me of the reaction of maintenance men when i would report a fluorescent bulb flickering. I always figured they were lazy and didn't want to see it but they probably really didn't see it. After awhile i stopped reporting on the lights because by the time the bulb was near death and others could see it, it was a quick death after that. Then their laziness paid off in that it would take several weeks for them to change the dead bulb. And, during that time I had relief from both the flicker and the intensely bright light these things give off.

One thing of interest on NN that I managed to decipher a link to was an Emergency Preparedness Checklist.

I like neat camping gear and you can find cool stuff on the survival sites. Most all of these sites have a prepper's list which rarely contains the exact same items outside of a few standard ones. Mike Adams list is mostly standard fare with some squirrely listings like "sponges for cleaning things when there's no power" as if that makes any sense. But I have to hand it to him for product placement with "Immune boosting herbal tinctures and supplements". I've never seen something like that on any list ever, and I'm positive it would be the first thing to be chucked in any real survival situation yet here it is on his list. Outstanding.

^ and that was on the wrong thread. How?

The only motive I can see for adding somebody’s name to a paper when that person doesn’t even know you is to give your paper undeserved credibility from having Prof. Bigshot on the author list.

I am reminded somehow of the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper of 1948, though that doesn't quite fit the description.

NaT: "How?"

Talent? You may have had RI on multiple tabs.

Yep; I had multiple tabs open. That and multitasking (which is going to be the death of me).

Been there, done that. Presently scanning almost sixty year letters from my grandmother to a relative, and speed watching Season Four of Game of Thrones.

@ Chris:

re Season Four GoT.
I started watching GoT over a year ago as someone brought videos. I don't know. Often great production values, good acting, perceptiveness about human nature/ culture, costuming
BUT yiiiiiiiiiiiiii egregious bloody violence, rape, dismemberment of various appendages..
I read Book 1 and part of 2.
I'd be interested in your opinion.

It is a bloody soap opera. There is a reason I watch with software that lets me play it up to twice the speed with sound, and doing something else.

The letters include my grandmother's reaction to my parents eloping, then later my grandmother's stroke and other interesting matters (like the end of WWII and my dad going off to Korea).

@ Chris:

Agreed.
The earliest episodes I saw led me to expect much more.
I DO like the dragons visually though,

I like the costumes. From the letters I learned my mother majored in costume design in college for a while.

@ Chris:

Right.
Cersei gets the best outfits.

Last week I went to the Star Wars Costume Exhibit. It was fabulous to see the ombre silks and velvet, along with everything else. I just wished my mother was alive to see it.

Now I know why some years my mom made me absolutely fabulous Halloween costumes. Then I tried my best to do the same for my kids, which made the youngest become a cosplayer. Which is why I woke up one Saturday morning to several gray skinned aliens in my living room preparing to go to a local "Con". (friends of youngest, who had sculpted many of the alien horns)

Glad to see something entirely natural has been registered and trademarked by a private company.

I was told it was impossible to do, that’s why Big Pharma don’t want to sell vitamins.*

* sarcasm

Actually, the common alt-med wheeze is that natural things can't be patented which is why Big Pharm etc. etc.

However, trademarks are a different type of intellectual property; they lay claim not (necessarily) to the actual subject, but to a means of describing it that identifies the entities standing behind the product. It's literally about the "marks" of "trade"; you might make Vitamin C tablets that are just as good as those sold by SunFree corporation under the name "SunFree NutriC", but if you call your product "NutriC", consumers are going to think "Oh, NutriC! That's the stuff made by SunFree!" and think they're dealing with that entity when they're not. That's not legal, because you're taking advantage of (and jeopardizing) a reputation that's not yours.

What remains legal, however, is a delightful little trick that I call "the Awaketin* gambit". Many years ago, when I entered college, our welcome packets included a sample of No-Doze pills. The label on the side proudly proclaimed that their product was the only one that included the ingredient Awaketin*! The small print noted:

* Awaketin is a trade name for caffeine.

They were technically telling the truth: all their competitors may have been using the exact same ingredient, but they were the only ones using that ingredient and calling it "Awaketin"!

How would a " protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings" respond to all this flask-stuffing and arm-waving?

Chris @124: That was a fantastic exhibit. Though very skewed to the "new" movies, mostly because they didn't have the budget (or knowledge) to do any really fantastic costumes for the "old" three.

Chris, I think it's wonderful that you have all those letters from your grandmother. I really didn't get to know my grandparents (early deaths or far away) and would love to have more than I do to remember them by and learn more about my family.

Sometimes I envy kids growing up today. They are going to have lots of records of themselves and their families. But, then again, maybe I don't. I wouldn't want all my adolescent transgressions saved "forever" on the web.

JustaTech: "Though very skewed to the “new” movies, "

Oh, that budget! I just wanted to dive into those ombre dyed velvets. I hoping there was a book to go with the exhibit, but there was not. There was book just on the costumes of the original three movies. There was one for the new movies, but it was limited edition and no long available.

Not a Troll, it is wonderful. My grandmother had her stroke about the time I was born. There are letters of about that time where my mother is living overseas (the Panama Canal Zone), with a newborn, a six year old son who had issues with his previous school, and a mother who had become delusional and violent. So I never knew my grandmother, though my brother said she had the greatest lap to sit on. He missed her dearly.

So my mother's cousin (who was like a sister to her) kept those letters. I am so grateful my 2nd cousin (her daughter) sent them to me as she was clearing out her house.

What "Thinking" about autism (or anything) is not

oracknows — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 04:00:56 +0000

What "Thinking" about autism (or anything) is not

Yesterday’s post was just too depressing to contemplate and even more depressing to write. It was a total downer after seen the awesomeness that was John Oliver gloriously skewering America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz. That’s why I think it would be good to finish this week on an amusing note. Well, it would be amusing if it weren’t for my knowledge that the woman who wrote the post I’m about to “analyze” has an autistic child and is subjecting that child to quackery. Actually, that’s true of pretty much every woman who blogs at the wretched hive of scum and autism biomed quackery where this post appeared.

Yes, I’m referring to The Thinking Moms’ Revolution (TMR), or, as I like to call it, The Not-So-Thinking Moms’ Revolution, an offshoot of that other wretched hive of scum and antivaccine quackery, Age of Autism whose ability to consistently write incredibly ignorant things about vaccines and autism is unrivaled. Basically, TMR is a wine loving, vaccine hating, coffee klatch of mommy warriors for whom the terms Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance were coined.

Perhaps the most amusing thing about TMR is how they love to capitalize the word “thinker,” thus referring to themselves as “Thinkers” with a capital T. By implication, their referring to themselves as “Thinkers” means that they think of the rest of us as not being Thinkers and thus being sheeple easily duped by the vaccine-pharma-chemical-GMO conspiracy to make every child in the world autistic in order to...well, they never quite say in order to what. Dominate the world? Profit? Be evil for the sake of being evil? A combination of the three? Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. The point is that the boozy, chattery, self-absorbed and arrogant members of TMR think that they are superior to you, the sheeple, because they Know. They Know that vaccines cause a autism and they Know how to cure it with all manner of biomed quackery. Why? Because they are Thinkers, of course! And you’re not!

Apparently, however, all that Thinking requires energy, as in energy healing for autism:

When I first heard that the Thinking Moms’ Revolution was putting together an eConference on Energy Healing, I did the Happy Dance! I was beyond excited that other moms out there were “out there” and exploring these incredible healing modalities for their children.

You see, my son is now almost 16, and I have been investigating and using various forms of energy healing and energy medicine for over a decade, and have felt pretty alone in my interests. While others on the autism journey were into medical testing and biomed (which is great), I became a Reiki Master, learned Reconnective Healing and Quantum Touch, used homeopathy, essential oils, and flower essences, used EAV (electroacupuncture) and muscle testing for diagnosing, and of course, I consulted with mediums to get answers from the spirit world to help my son.

Oh. My. God.

Is there a form of quackery this woman doesn’t believe in? I don’t see reflexology, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and Ayurveda, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if our intrepid “Thinker” believed in all of these as well. Particularly disturbing to me personally is that this particular “Thinker” goes by the ‘nym “Oracle.” That’s way too close to “Orac” for comfort. In any case, Oracle is Laura Hirsch, who is described thusly:

Her first book was an autobiography about her experience of being a young widow, which led to her investigation of mediumship as a therapeutic avenue for grief. She remarried and had two sons, the older one diagnosed at age three with regressive autism. Her love and devotion to her son led her back to mediumship for answers from her loved ones in spirit and others on how to heal her son. Working with a psychic medium and his wife, a spirit artist, they extended an open invitation to the spirit world to help solve the autism puzzle. Her third book, The Other Side of Autism: Famous Spirits Unveil Regressive Autism’s Causes and Remedies is the culmination of their sessions. She is also a Non-GMO advocate and is featured in the documentary Genetic Roulette in the autism segment. Her website is The Other Side of Autism.

On the TMR website, there is a video of an interview of Hirsch by one of the “Thinkers” that’s painful to watch. She describes how she relied on the husband-wife team of Michael & Marti Parry. Michael’s the psychic medium, and Marti is the psychic artist, whatever that is.) Actually, I learned what “spirit art” is from the couple’s website, namely the ability to “draw friends and loved ones that have passed away without ever having seen them, personally or through pictures, or even a description!” Sure thing, Marti.

In the video, we further learn from Hirsch that she learned from her psychic medium that her autistic son is allergic to wheat, among other things. Through her medium, she received wisdom from Bernard Rimland, who died in 2006, as well as “very famous scientists and politicians,” all, I assume, now dead. From these dead people, she learned that autism isn’t caused by just one thing. In other words, the spirits told her that it’s “not just vaccines” although vaccines are definitely a contributing factor. She also learned that it’s diet, particularly GMOs, and radiation. She then relates the story of having a session before Fukushima happened in which her medium drew a picture of a nuclear reactor with a crack in it and predicted a nuclear disaster of some kind. In any case, our intrepidly ignorant Ms. Hirsch goes on to blather how radiation can cause cancer and damage DNA; so of course it must be able to cause autism as well.

The spirits also apparently told Ms. Hirsch how to treat her son. One thing they told her was to eliminate the evil GMOs (of course). Another was iodine and supplements to “pull radiation out of his body.” A third thing was the quackery known as hyperbaric oxygen. She says that she did everything the spirits told her to do, and “it helped him.” Her son is now 15; so I have to wonder how much of this “improvement” Hirsch noted was confirmation bias and the normal improvement that happens in many autistic children just from normal development. (Remember, autism is a condition of developmental delay, not stasis.) The spirits also apparently told her that her son could definitely be “recovered.”

Oh, and in her post she also touts the Autism Healing Intention Program. I went over to the website and immediately wish I hadn’t, as it advertises a “remote energetic healing intention program for autism”:

Autism Pioneer Suzy Miller paired with Stanford Emeritus Professor William Tiller to explore new scientifically successful energetic healing approaches to autism. Dr. William Tiller, Professor Emeritus Stanford University, and featured physicist in the movie WHAT THE BLEEP, and former Pediatric Speech Language Pathologist, Suzy Miller, M.Ed., C.C.C. have taken their understanding of autism and paired it with the most cutting edge remote healing techniques to offer a service for parents and autistic children which is not locale-specific (i.e. can be administered remotely), is all natural with no supplements, and also offers a supportive online community of like-minded parents of autistic children.

Did this really say William Tiller? Founder of the Institute for Psychoenergetic Science? It doesn’t get much woo-ier than Tiller. The dude’s like Deepak Chopra on quantum steroids. I mean, just peruse his website and you’ll find the “Biobodysuit Metaphor”:

Each layer has a unique substance and infrastructure
The outer 2 layers constitute temporal physical reality
The middle shell is non-temporal and could be called the soul
The layer infrastructure and the coupling between layers largely determine the state of the wellness of the whole person of Wellness of the Whole Person

Huh?

It turns out that we’ve encountered Tiller before, but it’s been a few years. For instance, I discussed one of Tiller’s papers back in 2007. If you want the details (and, really, you probably do; it’s one of the more amusing Friday Doses of Woo I ever wrote and the illustrations cribbed from Teller’s paper will either cause you to clutch your head in pain or to laugh uproariously—possibly both), go back to the original post. It’s basically what I referred to as “information theory homeopathy,” in which “a higher-dimensional-level substance, labeled deltrons, falling outside the constraints of relativity theory and able to move at velocities” faster than the speed of light and that act as “a coupling agent between the electric monopole types of substances and the magnetic monopole types of substances to produce both electromagnetic (EM) and magnetoelectric (ME) types of mediator fields exhibiting a special type of ‘mirror principle’ relationship between them” is responsible for homeopathic effects.

In 2010, I took on another bit of Tiller woo that contained an illustration like this outlining what he referred to as “an energy level diagram embracing both classical physical and ”unseen” vacuum levels of substance”:

In any case, Tiller has a page with 30 white papers. I should be thankful. If I ever lack for blogging material, well, there it is!

In any case, this is how Hirsch describes the Autism Healing Intentions Program:

It is a year-long program which includes energetic healing broadcasts to your home on a portion of an hourly basis 24 hours per day, 365 days in the year, providing the stimulus for the information and energetic conditioning of your home, six 60-minute group feedback sessions with Suzy Miller and Dr. Tiller to discuss observations related to the experiment and respond to any questions, and a private online social network community for participants of the Autism Intention Program only. It was very affordable, considering that one session of energy healing can cost $100. The whole family was getting a healing every day for a year! How cool is that?

The very first night of the first broadcast, I was putting my son to bed, and he had forgotten his stuffed bear in my bedroom. After I tucked him in, he said, “Get the bear, yes!” Normally, he would have just said, “Bear.” Coincidence? I think not!

Brain death? I think so!

It turns out that a lot of our “Thinkers” are into “energetic healing,” so much so that in July TMR is holding a conference they call Energetic Healing for Children with Autism and Their Families. Included as the speakers are Tami Duncan, described thusly:

Tami Duncan is a mom of two kids. During her twelve year journey through autism, biomedical interventions, therapies and lyme disease she awakened to her own spiritual gifts realizing that when she integrated energy healing and spiritual practices into her treatment for herself and her son, big things happened. She dove in head first and became a student of the Universe and trained in Reiki, Vibrational Healing, Shamanic Techniques, Multi-Dimensional Frequencies, Garcia Ennergetics, Mediumship, Channeling, Essential Oils, Flower Essences, Telepathic Communication and many more techniques given to her through spiritual guidance. She considers herself both a student and a teacher.

If there’s a form of quackery, spiritual or otherwise, that Duncan doesn’t believe in, I’m hard-pressed to identify it. Also on the list of speakers are a psychic medium (Danielle Mackinnon) an Energy Kinesiologist who also practices something she calls Somatic Emotional Acupressure (S.E.A.®) (Joy Del Giudice), a practitioner of Emotional Freedom Techniques (Kelly Burch), and a practitioner of something called BodyTalk (Heather Fraser). Several of them have embraced quackery other than energy medicine quackery, as well. Of course.

I find it amusing that this obnoxiously arrogant (is there any other way to be arrogant?) coffee klatch of self-absorbed women worried about “toxins” but unafraid of large quantities of wine and coffee, thinks itself so superior in its knowledge of medicine and autism. Think about it. Several of them believe in huge quantities of the very New Age nonsense that inspired Tim Minchin to write Storm. They’re holding a conference including psychic mediums and quacks who think they can manipulate life “energy” and heal over distances. Several of them have apparently become disciples of one of the woo-iest of the woo-meisters, William Tiller. I don’t know what that is, but I do know what it is not: Thinking.

oracknows Fri, 06/27/2014 - 00:00