The Internet is a wonderful medium for communicating ideas and information in a rapid, interactive way. Many online articles are followed by a section for comments. Like so many things in this imperfect world, comments are a mixed blessing. They can enhance the article by correcting errors, adding further information, or contributing useful thoughts to a productive discussion. But all too often the comments section consists of emotional outbursts, unwarranted personal attacks on the author, logical fallacies, and misinformation. It provides irrational and ignorant people with a soapbox from which to promote prejudices and false information.

To illustrate, let's look at some responses to a piece I wrote about a weight-loss product called Isagenix, which is sold through a multilevel marketing (MLM) scheme. To quote its website verbatim, “The Isagenix cleanse is unique because it not only removes impurities at the cellular level, it builds the body up with incredible nutrition. Besides detoxing the body, Isagenix teaches people a wonderful lesson that they don't need to eat as much as they are accustom [sic] to and eating healthy choices are really important and also a lot of the food we are eating is nutritionally bankrupt.”

I didn't set out to write this article. It started when I received an e-mail inquiry about Isagenix. I posted my answer on a discussion list, and it was picked up and published at http://healthfraudoz.blogspot.com/2006/11/critique-of-isagenix.html. Sandy Szwarc, author of a blog titled Junkfood Science, approved of it and kindly reposted it (see http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2006/11/can-you-really-cleanse-your-way-to.html.)

As I write, the comments on the healthfraudoz website have reached a total of 176. A few commenters approved of what I wrote, but the majority tried to defend Isagenix. Their defense was irrational, incompetent, and sometimes amusing.

It was as if no one had actually read what I wrote. No one bothered to address any of my specific criticisms. No one even tried to defend Isagenix's false claims that toxicity accounts for most disease, that the body protects itself from toxins by coating them with fat, and that internal organs become clogged and deteriorate if you don't cleanse. No one offered any evidence that “detoxification” improves human health. No one tried to identify any of the alleged toxins or show that they are actually removed. No one tried to provide any rationale for the particular combination of ingredients (all 242 of them!) in Isagenix products. No one questioned my assertion that “no caffeine added” is inaccurate labeling because green tea, which is added, contains caffeine. No one commented when I observed that the amount of vitamin A in these products is dangerous and goes against the recommendations of the Medical Letter. No one offered any evidence that more weight is lost by adding Isagenix to a low-calorie diet and exercise. I offered some alternative explanations that might account for people believing that Isagenix is effective when it isn't; no one commented on that.

The medical advisor on the Isagenix website argued that at five dollars per day, Isagenix is less expensive than open-heart surgery. I pointed out that this is a laughable false dichotomy: good health is not a matter of choosing between open-heart surgery and diet supplements. No one commented on that. Instead of rational responses, we got:

Testimonials

The greatest number of comments were testimonials: “I took it and I lost weight.” People claimed not just weight loss but a variety of improvements. Isagenix allegedly cured fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, and hemorrhoids. It facilitated getting off sleeping pills and caffeine, balanced brain chemistry (what does that mean?), improved focus and mental clarity, allowed running longer marathons with less fatigue, saved a failing marriage, stopped irritability and crankiness, and kept an arm from getting sore after pitching.

“Made my son interact appropriately with peers, take care of himself, and want to be hugged and kissed,” claimed one.

“I made money selling it,” said another.

One person wrote, “My out-of-control Irritable Bowel Syndrome disappeared and I had the healthiest BM in about 6 years!... You can't brainwash POO!!”

Two people commented that the Isagenix program provides motivation; one said he needs “structer” (structure?) to stay on a diet.

The plural of anecdote is not data. Two commenters appropriately objected to all this testimonial evidence. They pointed out that testimonials are unreliable and subject to post hoc ergo propter hoc error, that all the “it works for me” comments can be attributed to a low-calorie diet and exercise, and that the testimonials are almost exclusively from people who are selling the product.

Anti-Testimonials

Quite a few commenters reported that they had tried Isagenix and it either didn't work or caused side effects, such as five days of violent diarrhea. One reported gaining a lot of weight while taking it; many reported losing weight just as well without it. Several reported credit-card disputes with the company and failure to get their money refunded. One reported that his parents are using Isagenix and it seems to be slowly killing them: they have decreased energy, declining health, mood swings, and poorer control of diabetes.

Rebuttals to Negative Testimonials

Supposedly the people Isagenix hasn't helped haven't been following the program correctly. Apparent bad reactions are just signs that it is working: “When one is cleansing out years of accumulation of toxins, chemicals, jet fuel, gasoline, arsenic, heavy metals, radiation poisoning-one will have reactions.”

‘Evidence' That It Works

One commenter heard a doctor speak who cited all kinds of studies to support the theory behind Isagenix-that Isagenix cleansing can supposedly solve the problems of environmental toxicity, depletion of nutrients in the food supply, gastrointestinal malabsorption, and our incessant food cravings.

Here are some of the other commenters' opinions, a few of which I've replied to in brackets.

A former Hare Krishna was impressed by the array of nutrients in the products and believed that the doctor on the website had integrity and cared about her patients.

Several people claimed that we need nutritional supplements because the ground has been depleted of nutrients.

“There have been many valid scientific research [sic] to back the claims of Isagenix.” [I couldn't find any, and they provided no clues as to where to look.]

Others claimed that because lots of MDs are recommending Isagenix it must work; these MDs can't all be quacks. [Apparently they can. Lots of MDs recommend homeopathy, and some of them believe in astrology.]

Some commenters pointed out that Isagenix has paid for independent studies. [Where are they? What did they show? If Isagenix was paying, were they truly independent?]

Mainstream physicians are starting to realize cleansing is important, other commenters claimed. [Not any of the ones who practice science-based medicine.]

One commenter proposed that cleansing makes sense because one of the main ingredients of pesticides and insecticides is estrogen. It makes women fat and casues erectile dysfunction in men. Toxicity is a bigger cause of obesity than most people realize.

Another commenter insisted that because these products are “designed and formulated by professionals and advocated by professionals,” they must work.

One MD commenter claimed, “I have the before and after pictures and the lab tests to prove it.”

Pseudoscientific claims peppered many comments, such as this one: “Most people only absorb 8% to 12% of what we eat-the rest is waste which we flush down the toilet. With Isagenix we can absorb up to 94% of what is ingested with less waste going down the toilet. Isagenix is full of good probiotics which help rebuild our digestive systems, fights candida. Isagenix also helps the body become alkaline, which is a healthy body. John Hopkins 2008 Cancer Report stated that cancer cannot live in an alkaline body only acidic bodies. Processed food makes our bodies acidic-thus the epedemic [sic] of cancer and diabites [sic] in the USA along with heart disease.” [This is all nonsense.]

Isagenix is food, many commenters insisted. Regular food is from depleted soils. Organic food made children behave better at lunch in a school study. Genetically modified food is lacking in nutrition. “The majority of people fill their stomachs with foods void of natural nutrition and the evidence supports that they behave poorly, learn less, misbehave more and commit more crimes than those who fill their stomachs with highly nutritious organic produce and meats.” [Wow! Instead of the Twinkie defense, criminals can claim their non-organic lunch made them do it!]

“Isagenix is a divine blessing in this toxic sick world.”

These people apparently expect us to believe unsubstantiated assertions.They have no concept of what constitutes scientific evidence or why controlled studies are needed.

Defense of Multilevel Marketing

“MLM is not a scam, but one of the last bastions of free enterprise.” Some commenters claimed that MLM is good because products approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) don't work, and that MLM is “the most legitimate business out in the world today.” All corporations are a pyramid anyway, they said.

But one commenter called MLM an “exploitative business model” and pointed out that the average yearly income for Isagenix distributors is only $116.87. Another pointed out that 97 percent of MLM schemes fail.

Personal Attacks on Me

“A Dr Harriet Hall wrote a very funny one sided arguement [sic] against [Isagenix] but omitted to inform the world how much money she has made conning patients into taking drugs she should know are harmful to you.”

Some commenters thought I was arrogant: “If it were up to know-it-all MDs like Harriet Hall, I'd still be in chronic pain.”

“To [sic] bad when you look up Dr. Hall in Washington no such person is licensed to practice medicine. Sad day when you have to lie to get people to pay attention to anything you say....” [It took me about one minute to locate verification of my license at https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/providercredentialsearch/SearchResult.aspx.

One commenter questioned whether I am really a doctor and says I have a small brain and a big mouth.

One claimed I write only to feed my ego.

Another said I shouldn't make comments without doing any research.

One thought I should try it for myself.

Another questioned why I didn't learn more by attending a meeting for the product, interviewing company representatives, or talking to the press.

Some thought instead of writing for the public I should have contacted the doctors at the company and discussed my concerns with them.

“Don't try to convince us, Dr. Hall, that you necessarily have ‘the answer.'” [Did I say I did?]

One alleged that I came to a conclusion without any research whatsoever; this is from a doctor who said, “Cleansing is now my first choice for my patients.” One wondered what research he did to make that choice.

“Going out of her way to trash Isagenix this way is pathetic.”

“PS ‘Dr.Hall' your little family practice designation really doesnt buy alot [sic] of cred.”

“Real doctors don't waste their time sitting on the internet making bogus posts about different health products.... could sign as doctor and no one would know.”

“This article is and the author is full of crap. I know it and he knows it.” [I know I'm not a “he.”]

Some commenters thought I didn't know anything and I should just shut up.

“This is just another doctor that stands to loose [sic] their income by the masses becoming healthy.”

“What ever [sic] Dr. Harriet Hall is selling, I'm not interested.” [For the record, I'm retired and the only thing I'm “selling” is critical thinking.]

Some suggested that just because I went to medical school doesn't mean I'm a smart person.

Kudos

A few commenters offered agreement and praise; they pointed out that no one had actually addressed any of the points I made or offered any evidence that what I wrote was wrong. They reprimanded other commenters for resorting to ad hominem attacks.

Attacks on the Medical Profession

Many of the commenters seemed to think that doctors know nothing about nutrition. Doctors just put bandages on problems: they sell pills that mask symptoms and wreak havoc on your body instead of treating underlying causes. They only want to make money. They want to keep people sick so they won't lose their kickbacks. [What kickbacks?] There are lots of malpractice suits.

“Most MD's [sic] will not even take the death dealing treatments they inflict upon the rest of the population.”

Some commenters claimed that even if evidence showed Isagenix worked, conventional medicine still wouldn't adopt it because of competition from drug companies. Many doctors are typically overweight and/or out of shape. The majority of emergency department doctors are lacking skills in emergency procedures.

One person commented, “MD's [sic] keep American's [sic] addicted to drugs! MD's also fancy themselves as God like. They think that being an MD allows them to keep American's from seeking nutrition.”

“Our medical doctors have failed us,” one person lamented.

Another observed: “So sad that people in our medical profession have no idea what they are talking about!!!”

Attacks on Science

Commenters insisted that instead of listening to science, one should listen to one's own body.

Some asked: even if it's only a placebo, why not use it?

Western medicine is trying to “squash Eastern medicine,” one commenter believed.

Another warned: “Things work for different people. Chiropractic and acupuncture work. If you ask for everything to be backed by studies, they just tailor the studies to benefit industry. Research things for yourself and don't be a sheep taking pills from an MD.”

Two commenters attacked the scientifically impeccable website Quackwatch, asserting that Stephen Barrett is literally funded by Big Pharma, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the FDA to produce disinformation aimed at discrediting alternative medicine. [He has no ties to any of those organizations.]

“See how herbs can treat people, not drugs,” one commenter advised.

“Did any of you see Sicko? If you did how could you possibly take one physicians [sic] ‘opinion' about something she didn't even try over the many testimonials.”

Some commenters felt they knew better than any doctor: “I choose to observe how my own body feels and reacts to what I ingest.”

“If you think its [sic] going to help it will,” one commenter suggested.

Some put forth that the real answer is to integrate Eastern with Western medicine.

“Oh, and I have found prayer helps me,” one Isagenix proponent added.

One commenter tried to turn the tables on me: “I feel it is unfair to say Isagenix is making unsubstantiated claims, and that it doesn't actually help you at all....... isn't that an unsubstantiated claim too?” [I didn't claim that it didn't work; I said there was no evidence that it did, and no reason to think it would.]

Attacks on the FDA and Big Pharma

Many commenters suggested that the FDA disclaimer about Isagenix is meaningless and believe we shouldn't take FDA warnings seriously: “It is a terrorist organization that lies, cheats steals, and intimidates anyone who stands between them and the targets of their wrath.”

“Dr Hall if you think the FDA is doing a good job you must love some of the poison they approve, such as Aspartame.”

Some commenters erroneously thought doctors got commissions for prescribing drugs.

One even asserted that a conspiracy of J.D. Rockefeller is behind the pharmaceutical industry and that many prescriptions are made from manipulation of petroleum.

People die from drugs, commenters insisted.

“My doctor wanted me to start beta blockers, after much investigation I decided that I was to [sic] young to have my liver contaminated by these pills... .”

Many commenters assured us that natural remedies work just as well and are safer than prescriptions.

Several commenters fervently believed that pharmaceuticals are the ultimate money-making scam.

Off-the-Wall False Claims

“The FDA (yes, those great friends of ours) just recently put a new advisement out there that we will soon be required to irradiate ALL raw vegetables and fruits [it certainly did not!]. Do you all know what irradiation does to food? It not only kills ‘bad' things like e. coli, but it kills nutrients from your foods as well.”

Try It for Yourself

Numerous commenters seemed to think the best way to determine if a treatment works is to try it yourself. But one commenter rightfully pointed out that the try-it-yourself argument is fallacious and condescending: “One does not have to experience snake venom to know to stay away from snakes.”

Haven't Tried It But Plan To

Several commenters were planning to try it after reading the article and comments. One of these said he knows firefighters who use it and he “would rather have one of the firefighters doing brain surgery on me, than let the average physician tell me what is going on in my body.” [Wow! Does this guy even have a brain?]

It's a Scam

Quite a few people agreed with what I wrote. Several were outspoken in calling Isagenix a scam.

“People would rather rave about this crap than admit that they were fooled into wasting their money.”

“Without even considering the science, common sense helped me spot this as bullshit.”

“Isagenix is a freakish cult perpetrated on the uncritical, by the unscrupulous, using the desperate search for the ever-elusive ‘easy solution.'”

One reported that a cousin and her boyfriend are “making a TON of money selling this stuff to all of you morons stupid enough to buy it and make them rich. ISAGENIX only ‘works' for the people selling it. Diet and exercise WORKS for everyone!”

Concerns

A few commenters expressed concerns about the product. One commenter said the Isagenix company representative couldn't answer questions about origin of ingredients and quality control. There have been no controlled studies. Where is the evidence? How do we know it is safe? Long-term results remain to be seen. How many can maintain this restrictive lifestyle for years? Why isn't Isagenix being regulated by the FDA? “I am a little concerned about the way some people discuss this product in almost cult-like fashion. It makes me wonder if there are mind-control drugs in this stuff.”

Two Jokes

“I got a refund check from [the] IRS after starting Isagenix.”

“I have some magic beans for sale. Try eating right and exercising instead.”

Funny, Unhelpful, and Bizarre Comments

“Who cares whether it works or not. This stuff tastes like 9-day old garbage mixed with water from a sewer.”

One man took it on the recommendation of his chiropractor; he now distrusts both Isagenix and his chiropractor. “I have been feeling better ever since I stopped having my head wrenched and being put on a rack and practically decapitated week after week, except for the apparently permanent click in my neck that wasn't there before.”

“We fertilize our soil with fake nutrients and usually do not replace with all 60 nutrients the plants need to be healthy so they are prone to diesease [sic-a disease that they die from?] and incests [sic].” [Gotta watch out for those incestuous plants!]

“I never hear anything from the medical field about elevating the PH level in the human body to keep in from being to acidic. That study was done by Dr Lioness Paulings medical reseacher and nobel prize winner.” [Errors in original. Lioness?!]

“Whoever started this blog is an idiot.”

“I am amazed at the amount of ingnorance [sic] on this Blog. Whom [sic] ever allows this should be ashamed.”

My favorite comment of all was “Dr Harriet Hall is a refrigerator with a head.” I don't know what that means, but its whimsical imagery appeals to my sense of humor.

In looking back at this whole kerfuffle, it became clear to me that there had been a colossal barrier to communication. The person who had originally asked me about Isagenix, the blog owner, and I were all operating in the arena of science and evidence. Most of the commenters were operating in a whole different universe of discourse based on belief, hope, hearsay, and personal experience. Science is like a foreign language to them, and they were incapable of understanding my points. Pearls before swine... ]]> 2011-04-27T19:10:30+00:00 Harriet Hall http://www.csicop.org//si/show/a_gifted_writer_and_a_book_worth_giving http://www.csicop.org//si/show/a_gifted_writer_and_a_book_worth_giving#When:05:20:47Z Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be.
By Daniel Loxton. Kids Can Press, Toronto, 2010.
ISBN: 978-1554534302. Hardcover, $18.95.

It’s hard to believe that we still have so many evolution deniers among us. Understanding evolution is essential to understanding modern biology as well as a host of other subjects. We need to get to young minds before their neurons have a chance to congeal into unscientific ideologies. Now we have just the book to reach them.

Daniel Loxton is the editor of the “Junior Skeptic” section of Skeptic magazine, where he makes skepticism and critical thinking accessible and entertaining to the younger set. He has expanded one of his “Junior Skeptic” subjects into a superb new book on evolution.

The illustrations are colorful, informative, and whimsical. Loxton introduces us to a blue bird that compromises on a tail that is “not too long, not too short,” some cute “Zooks” that move away and eventually lose the interest and ability to mate with the others, a boy overrun with bunnies that have reproduced without anything to limit survival of the offspring, and some really cool dinosaurs. They’re a joy to the eye, and the text is a joy to the mind.

Loxton covers the basics of evolutionary theory; tells the story of Darwin, the Beagle, and the finches; and answers the questions people commonly ask:

“But have we ever actually seen a new species evolve?” Yes, both in the wild and in the lab.

“Where are the transitional fossils?” Everywhere.

“Didn’t they find some human footprints together with dinosaur footprints?” No, they made a mistake.

“How could evolution produce something as complicated as my eyes?” Loxton shows us how complex eyes gradually developed from simple light-sensitive cells.

“How could walking animals turn into flying animals?” Perhaps from gradual alterations in tree-dwelling, gliding animals.

Then the hard questions: “How did life start in the first place?” Evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life, just how it changed over time. We don’t know how life got started, but scientists are working on it.

And “What about religion?” Loxton handles this neatly by saying that this is a question science can’t help with. He refers readers to their “family, friends, and community leaders.” (He avoids mentioning rabbis, imams, priests, or Flying Spaghetti Monsterologists.)

Loxton has a wonderful knack for simplifying without condescending and for challenging young readers to grapple with complicated concepts. The book is aimed at eight–to thirteen-year-olds, but it could be useful to even a sophisticated old coot. Some of his examples might come in handy in your next discussion with an intelligent design believer or a fence sitter. I loved his illustration of how evolutionary change is not a totally random process but builds on patterns that were already there. He describes how hot-rod builders can lift a car, drop it, chop the roof, and slap on new paint, but they are still stuck with the basic pattern of a body and four wheels (not two or seventeen).

If you have children or grandchildren, this book would be a great way to introduce them to the theory of evolution. If you don’t, you still might want to buy a copy, read it yourself, and donate it to the local public or school library.

I hope Loxton will write many more books like this on a wide variety of skeptical subjects. He has a gift, and we are fortunate that he is sharing it with us.

Carrying a Power Balance card in your pocket will supposedly improve your athletic performance and cure what ails you. The alleged mechanism ("frequencies" in an embedded hologram) is laughable pseudoscientific bunk.

Remember when professional golfers were wearing Q-ray bracelets to improve their game? The Q-ray folks recently had a run-in with the courts. They admitted their product was only a placebo but argued that it was acceptable to lie to elicit the placebo response. The judge disagreed: they were convicted of fraud, forced to pay back $16 million, and required to remove the deceptive claims from their advertising. Now they have a new competitor: Power Balance Performance Technology. Like the Q-ray bracelet, it is based on "resonance." It doesn't even have to come in contact with your body: one version is a card that you simply put in your pocket.

Power Balance representatives demonstrate their products

in sports stores at malls. They test your strength and balance and then give you a Power Balance card to hold or put in your pocket. When they retest you, you miraculously do better. There are some revealing videos on YouTube, including a short clip that shows the subject standing on one foot with arms outstretched. The salesman pushes down on the subject's arm near the wrist, and the subject starts to fall over. After the subject puts a Power Balance card in his pocket, the salesman repeats the test but this time pushes down near the elbow, creating a shorter lever arm that of course reduces the effect of the force applied, so the subject doesn't fall over. In other demonstrations, they use other simple biomechanical tricks like this to create false impressions of improved strength. The amount of force applied is subjective, both parties know when the card is in use, and they know what is expected to happen—it's a recipe for self-deception.

What's in these magic cards? I will quote at length from their Web site for the entertainment value:

POWER BALANCE Performance Technology has been embedded with naturally occurring frequencies found in nature that have been known to react positively with the body's energy field. This helps to promote balance, flexibility, strength and overall wellness.

For thousands of years, eastern medicine has been using the same techniques for personal wellness through finding things in nature that react positively with your body, such as rocks, minerals, crystals, etc. Through kinesiology we have learned that certain foods cause the body to react either positively or negatively as well. Although not all substances found in nature work the same on everyone, we have narrowed it down to a few that we believe are highly beneficial and have put them together to create Power Balance Performance Technology.

It's hard to argue with nature and the fact is that everything in nature resonates at a particular frequency. That is what keeps it all together. We react with frequency because we are a frequency. Most simply, we are a bunch of cells held together by frequency. If you hold processed sugar or a cell phone in your hand and hold your arm straight out to your side and have someone push your arm down while you resist, it goes down pretty easily because processed sugar and cellular telephones do not react positively with the human body. Basically, the frequencies in sugar and cell phones create a reaction that makes your body weaker. Adversely, if you put certain vitamins or minerals in your hand and do the same test with your arm, you will find it is much harder for that person to push your arm down. Your body's energy field likes things that are good for it and craves to be around those things. At Power Balance, we have taken a few of those items and through advances in technology, have been able to duplicate those positive energies and imprint them onto our holographic media.

Why Holograms? We use holograms because they are composed of Mylar—a polyester film used for imprinting music, movies, pictures, and other data. Thus, it was a natural fit. In fact, the hologram is so complex with such infinite depth and minimal surface area, that many companies are now using them as hard drives. Along those same lines, we felt that it would be a lot easier to get someone to put a hologram in there [sic] shoe rather then [sic] a Power Balance equipped rock or apple.

Power Balance products include a ten-pack of stick-on embedded holograms ($59.95), a pendant ($39.95), a wristband ($29.95), and an eight-pack of pocket cards ($59.95).

The company targets athletes, particularly surfers. According to numerous testimonials, Power Balance seems to improve performance. One surfer claims he can even sense the presence of the card: "I can feel it on me." Another testimonial is from Tommy Grunt, United States Marine Corps. Maybe Grunt is real, but ads for quack products have been known to feature fabricated testimonials, and I can easily imagine a copywriter putting tongue in cheek and creating a name like that to relieve the boredom. There are reports of the products' effectiveness in animals, from horses to birds. The products allegedly relieve headaches, menstrual pain, and all kinds of other symptoms. The testimonials give the impression that if you feel unwell in any way, the magic card will restore you to normal. If you already feel well, it will make you better than normal.

"A primitive form of this technology was discovered when someone, somewhere along the line, picked up a rock and felt something that reacted positively with his body." I don't doubt that someone believed he felt something, but I seriously doubt it was due to the frequency of the rock resonating with the frequency of his body.

For resonance to occur, something has to vibrate. You may be able to make a rock resonate, but the rock doesn't create its own vibrations. Crystalline structures can be made to vibrate. The tympanic membrane and the vocal cords vibrate, but the whole body doesn't. When a soprano wants to break a glass with her voice, she can first listen to the sound made by tapping it with a spoon; if she can match that sound frequency, the glass will resonate and possibly shatter. How can you tap a cat to see what its frequency is? Can you imagine a soprano shattering a cat?

This whole resonance and vibration business is pseudoscience emanating from the myth of the human energy field—not the kind of energy physicists measure but some vague life energy like the acupuncturists' qi, the chiropractors' Innate, and the imaginary fields that Therapeutic Touch practitioners claim they are smoothing down with their hands. "We are a frequency" and "We are a bunch of cells held together by frequency" and "Your body's energy field likes things that are good for it" are statements so incoherent, so much at odds with scientific knowledge, that they "aren't even wrong."

The definition of frequency is "the number of repetitions of a periodic process in a unit of time." A frequency can't exist in isolation. There has to be a periodic process, like a sound wave, a radio wave, a clock pendulum, or a train passing by at the rate of x boxcars per minute. The phrase "33 1/3 per minute" is meaningless: you can't have an rpm without an r. A periodic process can have a frequency, but an armadillo and a tomato can't. Neither a periodic process nor a person can "be" a frequency.

Pushing down on the arm is a bogus muscle testing technique known as applied kinesiology. It is supposedly used to diagnose allergies: if you hold a sealed vial of an allergen, your strength supposedly diminishes. It only works if the doctor and patient know what substance is being tested; when double-blind controls have been used, kinesiology has failed every test.

Omitting for a moment the crucial question "Frequencies of what?" how did the Power Balance creators determine which frequencies to use? "We have narrowed it down to a few that we believe are highly beneficial." Okay ... how exactly did they measure the frequencies, and what criteria did they use to narrow them down? I think the wording of the ad is revealing: the company says they "believe" they are highly beneficial, not that they have any evidence that they are—assuming there really are any frequencies and that they have somehow put them in a hologram. I e-mailed the company and asked simple questions like "How do you measure the frequency of a rock?" They didn't answer.

In online discussions, one man "tested" the product by having one hundred athletes try it, with no controls of any kind; not surprisingly, all of the athletes reported improvement. A man watching a demonstration suggested a real test, blinding the subject as to whether the card was present, but (not surprisingly) the salesman wouldn't cooperate.

This would be so simple to test properly. Take five Power Balance cards and five credit cards, put them in opaque envelopes, shuffle, number the envelopes 1 through 10, have a third party slip an envelope in the subject's pocket, and then challenge the salesman to tell which envelopes had the real card. I could not find evidence that they have ever done such a test, presumably because they know it would fail.

These products may actually do some good. Modern versions of an amulet or rabbit's foot (without harm to rabbits), they elicit a placebo response, giving people confidence and possibly making them try harder. They are not exorbitantly expensive and even come with a money-back guarantee.

The marketing is pure genius. If I were a professional scam artist, I don't think I could come up with anything better. The company has an impressive trick demonstration that easily fools most people. They spout a lot of pseudoscientific hooey that sounds impressive to the scientifically illiterate, but they are careful to make only vague claims that the Federal Trade Commission can't object to. The harmless products are inexpensive to manufacture, but the company charges enough to afford a money-back guarantee and still make money. They package the cheaper cards and stickers in multiples so they can charge more, but the prices are still low enough that the average person is willing to take a chance. Who knows what is actually in the products? If it were my scam, I'd put in any old hologram or none at all. No one is likely to investigate your production line to see how you get all those "beneficial frequencies" into the Mylar.

Tell me you use the Power Balance card and it makes you feel better, and I can readily believe you. Tell me your performance improves when you carry it, and I will believe you. But that won't convince me that the improvement has anything to do with bioresonating frequencies in the holograms—or even with the cards themselves.

It's like the tooth fairy. Tell me money appears under your pillow, and I will believe you. But that won't convince me that the tooth fairy did it.

The tooth fairy phenomenon is easily explained by human psychology and parental behavior. The Power Balance phenomenon is easily explained by suggestion, confirmation bias, the placebo response, and other well-known aspects of human psychology that conspire to persuade people that ineffective things work.

Before writing this article, I discussed with CSI Research Fellow Benjamin Radford whether the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry might want to do a simple double-blind test. We decided not to because it is just too silly to bother with. As Radford put it, "This sort of scientific testing should be done by the company; it is not the skeptics' job to spend time and money testing outlandish claims for which no reliable evidence has been offered."

We're not going to bother setting up a video camera to catch the tooth fairy either.

Chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, and other alternative medicine practitioners constantly criticize conventional medicine for “only treating the symptoms,” while alternative medicine allegedly treats “the underlying causes” of disease.

Nope. Not true. Exactly backwards. Think about it: When you go to a doctor with a fever, does he just treat the symptom? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the fever. If it’s pneumonia, he identifies which microbe is responsible and gives you the right drugs to treat that particular infection. If you have abdominal pain, does the doctor just give you narcotics to treat the symptom of pain? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the pain. If he determines you have acute appendicitis, he operates to remove your appendix.

I guess what they’re trying to say is that something must have been wrong in the first place to allow the disease to develop. But they don’t have any better insight into what that something might be than scientific medicine. All they have is wild, imaginative guesses. And they all disagree with one another. The chiropractor says that if your spine is in proper alignment, you can’t get sick. Acupuncturists talk about the proper flow of qi through the meridians. Energy medicine practitioners talk about disturbances in energy fields. Nutrition faddists claim that people who eat right won’t get sick. None of them can produce any evidence to support these claims. No alternative medicine has been scientifically shown to prevent disease or cure it. If it had, it would have been incorporated into conventional medicine and would no longer be “alternative.”

Are these practitioners treating the underlying cause, or are they simply applying their one chosen tool to treat everything? Chiropractors treat every patient with chiropractic adjustments. What if a doctor used one treatment for everything? You have pneumonia? Here’s some penicillin. You have a broken leg? Here’s some penicillin. You have diabetes? Here’s some penicillin. Acupuncturists only know to stick needles in people. Homeopaths only know to give out ridiculously high dilutions that amount to nothing but water. Therapeutic touch practitioners only know to smooth out the wrinkles in imaginary energy fields. They are not trying to determine any underlying cause; they are just using one treatment indiscriminately.

How do you define “cause”? We don’t know what causes gravity, but we understand enough about how it works to overcome it with elevators, airplanes, and rockets to the moon. We may not know what ultimately causes asthma, but we know enough about the causes of airway constriction and inflammation to devise effective treatments.

Let’s take a simple example: strep throat. The symptom is throat pain. Doctors don’t just treat the pain; they do a throat culture, they determine that a strep infection is causing the pain, and they treat the infection with an antibiotic. But what caused the strep infection? The body had to host the bacteria and respond to their presence by developing symptoms; the bacteria had to be capable of multiplying in the human body. The patient had to be exposed to another person who had a strep infection, who in turn had caught it from someone else, involving a chain of social and epidemiologic causes. The bacteria had to evolve from ancestor bacteria and the human from ancestor animals. And so on.

So you see, it involves a chain of causation and there can even be several simultaneous causes. “Cause” can mean pretty much anything you want it to. But however you look at it, doctors definitely do not “just treat symptoms.”

Philosophy has studied causation. Aristotle said everything had four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. And he introduced complications: proper (prior) causation and accidental (chance) causation. Potential or actual, particular or generic. Reciprocal or circular causality as a relation of mutual dependence or influence of cause upon effect. The same thing as the cause of contrary effects when its presence and absence result in different outcomes. He recognized that the subject of causation was complicated.

Alternative providers are more “simple” minded. They often claim to know the one true cause of all disease, which is curious because medical science defines several categories of causes falling under the mnemonic VINDICATE:

V – Vascular

I – Infectious/inflammatory

N – Neoplastic

D – Drugs/toxins

I – Intervention/iatrogenic

C – Congenital/developmental

A – Autoimmune

T – Trauma

E – Endocrine/metabolic

And sometimes more than one cause is involved (e.g., a traumatic injury gets infected). Where science finds complexity, alternative medicine imagines simplicity. As H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple—and wrong.”

Some homeopaths claim to treat “genetic” illness, tracing its origins to six main genetic causes: tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, psora (scabies), cancer, and leprosy. Bet you didn’t know tuberculosis was genetic! Neither did I. Science classifies all these as infectious except for cancer, which is neoplastic. Homeopathy disregards science and redefines genetic to suit its own inscrutable purposes.

Science finds many causes for disease and sometimes more than one cause for a given disease. Pseudoscience has identified the one true cause of all disease—many times. I did an Internet search and found sixty-seven single causes of all disease (see accompanying box). This is not an exhaustive list but rather an exhausted list (I stopped when I got tired of searching).

It never seems to bother proponents of alternative medicine that others have found different “one true” causes. In his book Voodoo Science, Bob Park describes a press conference following a meeting to discuss government funding for alternative medicine research:

Perhaps the strangest part of the press conference consisted of brief statements by individual members of the editorial review board of what they saw as the most important issues for the Office of Alternative Medicine. One insisted that the number-one health problem in the United States is magnesium deficiency; another was convinced that the expanded use of acupuncture could revolutionize medicine; and so it went around the table, with each touting his or her preferred therapy. But there was no sense of conflict or rivalry. As each spoke, the others would nod in agreement. The purpose of the OAM, I began to realize, was to demonstrate that these disparate therapies all work. It was my first glimpse of what holds alternative medicine together: there is no internal dissent in a community that feels itself besieged from the outside.

When scientists encounter two mutually exclusive claims, it bothers them. They experience cognitive dissonance and try diligently to find evidence to reject one of the hypotheses and leave a winner. They eventually reach a consensus. Alternative medicine pseudoscientists don’t seem to mind cognitive dissonance. They are content to look for evidence to support their own chosen treatment while blithely disregarding competing claims. They don’t want to look for evidence that something doesn’t work. While each claims to know the one cause of disease, they don’t seem interested in looking for the one truth.

Live and let live? Create your own reality? Truth is only relative? The same thing may be simultaneously true for me and false for you? Maybe it boils down to a mutual tolerance of delusions (okay, I’ll believe that you are Jesus if you believe that I’m Napoleon). For the cynical, follow the money: “I won’t interfere with your livelihood if you don’t interfere with mine.”

I can play the cause-finding game too. I’ve discovered the one cause of all the one-cause theories: a deficiency of critical-thinking skills combined with an overactive imagination. And, of course, a failure to test beliefs using the scientific method.

I recently read Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny (Barrett Brown and Jon P. Alston, Cambridge House Press, New York, 2007, no relation to the movie Flock of Dodos). It’s a hilarious, no-holds-barred send-up of the lies and poor reasoning employed by the intelligent design movement. I was particularly struck by a quotation from William Dembski’s book Intelligent Design: “We are dealing here with something more than a straightforward determination of scientific facts or confirmation of scientific theories. Rather we are dealing with competing world-views and incompatible metaphysical systems.”

That doesn’t just apply to intelligent design. It cuts to the essence of what skeptics encounter on every front, from

dowsing to homeopathy, from ESP to therapeutic touch. We are trying to evaluate the science behind claims that are often not based on science but on beliefs that are incompatible with science. The claimants are happy to use science when it supports them, but when it doesn’t they are likely to unfairly critique the science or even to dismiss the entire scientific enterprise as a “materialistic worldview” or “closed-minded.” We are talking at cross purposes. How can we communicate if we say “this variety of apple is red,” and they insist “it feels green to me”?

We get frustrated when we show these folks the scientific evidence and they refuse to accept it. Dowsing fails all tests, but dowsers “know” from personal experience that it works for them. Homeopathy is not only implausible, but it has been tested and has failed the tests. Yet proponents refuse to acknowledge those failures and still want to talk about data from the nineteenth century and make claims for the memory of water. We have to realize we are not even speaking the same language. We are trying to play a civilized game of gin rummy, and they are dribbling a basketball all over the card table. Before competing, doesn’t it make sense to define what game you’re playing and what the rules are?

Before arguing with a mathematician about the solution to a geometry problem, it’s essential to establish whether he is following the rules of Euclidean geometry, where parallel lines never cross, or non-Euclidean geometry, where they sometimes do.

Science has been a very successful self-correcting group endeavor. It wouldn’t be successful if it didn’t follow a strict set of rules designed to avoid errors. (Note: there are no rules written in stone; I’m talking about conventions that are generally understood and accepted by scientists, conventions that grow naturally out of reason and critical thinking.) If proponents of intelligent design or alternative medicine want to play the science game, they ought to play by the rules. If they won’t play by the rules, they effectively take themselves out of the scientific arena and into the metaphysical arena. In that case, it is useless for us to talk to them about science.

If you want to play the science game, here’s what you do:

1. Submit your hypothesis to proper testing. Testimonials, intuitions, personal experience, and “other ways of knowing” don’t count.
2. See if you can falsify the hypothesis.
3. Try to rule out alternative explanations and confounding factors.
4. Report your findings in journal articles submitted to peer review.
5. Allow the scientific community to critique the published evidence and engage in dialogue and debate.
6. Withhold judgment until your results can be replicated elsewhere.
7. Respect the consensus of the majority of the scientific community as to whether your hypothesis is probably true or false (always allowing for revision based on further evidence).
8. Be willing to follow the evidence and admit you are wrong if that’s what the evidence says.

If you want to play the science game, here are some of the things you don’t do:

1. Accuse the entire scientific community of being wrong (unless you have compelling evidence, in which case you should argue for it in the scientific journals and at professional meetings, not in the media).
2. Design poor-quality experiments that are almost guaranteed to show your hypothesis is true whether it really is or not. Use science to show that your treatment works, not to ask if it works.
3. Keep using arguments that have been thoroughly discredited. (The intelligent design folks are still claiming the eye could not have evolved because it is irreducibly complex; homeopaths are still claiming homeopathy cured more patients than conventional medicine during nineteenth-century epidemics).
4. Write books for the general public to promote your thesis—as if public opinion could influence science!
5. Form an activist organization to promote your beliefs.
6. Step outside the scientific paradigm and appeal to intuition and belief.
7. Mention the persecution of Galileo and compare yourself to him.
8. Invent a conspiracy theory (Big Pharma is suppressing the truth!).
9. Claim to be a lone genius who knows more than all scientists put together.
10. Offer a treatment to the public after only the most preliminary studies have been conducted.
11. Set up a Web site to sell products that are not backed by good evidence.
12. Refuse to admit when your hypothesis is proven wrong.

Changing Our Minds

Scientists will change their minds when the evidence warrants. Before we waste time arguing, one thing we can do is ask our opponents what it would take to change their minds. One woman I asked said no amount of evidence could change her mind because she knew from personal experience that her claim was true, so any evidence that said otherwise would have to be false and fabricated. End of discussion. She’s out of the game.

The rules of science are pretty clear about what it takes to change our minds. I’ll use the example of Helicobacter and ulcers. We used to think that stress and too much stomach acid caused ulcers; now we think a bacterium causes ulcers. Here’s a summary of why we changed our minds:

1. Scientists noticed bacteria in biopsy samples from ulcers.
2. They identified the bacteria as Helicobacter pylori.
3. They found a strong correlation between ulcers and the presence of the bacteria.
4. One of the researchers, who was healthy and not a Helicobacter carrier, was able to induce an ulcer in himself by ingesting the bacteria.
5. They found that treating patients with antibiotics cured ulcers.
6. They found that antibiotics were superior to previous ulcer treatments.
7. The studies were replicated and conducted in different ways that corroborated each other.
8. The bacterial hypothesis was not inconsistent with the rest of scientific knowledge.

If we had the same quantity and quality of evidence for homeopathy, we’d gladly accept it. In fact, if the evidence met criteria 1 through 7, we’d provisionally accept it while we kept checking the data and tried like crazy to figure out the mechanism behind homeopathy. (For more on this, see “Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism” in the November/December 2004 Skeptical Inquirer.)

There are two issues that are often misunderstood: scientific consensus and prior plausibility.

Prior Plausibility

Homeopathy is completely implausible. We would have to accept robust evidence that it worked, but we would require much stronger evidence than we would for, say, a new antibiotic. If the claims for homeopathy were true, we would have to revise much of what we know about physics, chemistry, and physiology.

The crossword analogy is helpful. If you think the answer to 1-across should be “library” but the clue to 1-down is a five-letter word for the author of Tom Sawyer and the clue to 2-down is a four-letter-word for the name of Eve’s husband in Genesis, you have to reject “library” and keep looking for a word that starts with T-A. You have to recognize that no matter how strong your conviction that 1-across must be “library,” you must be wrong and there must be another answer that you just haven’t considered.

Consensus

It’s easy to dismiss the scientific consensus as a popularity contest, a vote on opinions. But it’s far more than that. The body of evidence stands or falls on its own merits, and when the weight clearly tips the balance to one side, everybody can see it. The scientific community is made up of experts who know how to evaluate the evidence and who thrash out disagreements in medical journals and scientific conferences. It is easy for the scientific community to reach an agreement based on clear evidence. There are times when the evidence is less clear and controversy among scientists is appropriate, but there comes a time when it would be perverse not to accept the evidence, just as it is perverse to deny evolution or germ theory. The scientific consensus on evolution and the germ theory is a recognition of reality, not a matter of opinion.

A reasonable default assumption is that the scientific consensus is usually right; if it isn’t, it will change as the evidence becomes clearer. Truth will prevail. It does no good to attack the scientific consensus as prejudiced or closed-minded. The consensus will change only when it incorporates new and better evidence. One of the irrational tactics we’ve seen over and over is for opponents to cite one or a handful of studies to support their belief. They ridiculously assume that it was new information that the people who reached the scientific consensus had failed to consider or that it somehow outweighs all the other studies that found the opposite to be true.

Play by the Rules or Go Play Your Own Game

There’s no point in arguing scientific facts with someone whose worldview is metaphysical and nonscientific. There’s no point in presenting geological age data to someone who “knows” the age of the Earth from the Bible. Before we get into a useless debate, maybe we should find out what game our opponents are really playing. If they are playing ping pong, it’s silly for us to bring a football to the table. It would be handy if we could get them to say up front what game they are really playing, but all too often they have deluded themselves into truly believing they are following the rules of science.

If they won’t play the science game by the rules, we are justified in crying “foul” and disqualifying them. Then they can go away somewhere else and play their own game by whatever rules they want, and we won’t be able to refute them. If they are relying on beliefs unsupported by evidence, let them say so. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a homeopath say, “I believe homeopathy works based on my personal experience and on nonscientific evidence like testimonials, and I categorically reject the results of any scientific trial that fails to support my beliefs. Homeopathy cured my neighbor’s uncle’s cousin of cancer. Trust me. I’m a nice guy so you should believe whatever I tell you.”

If they’d say that up front, we wouldn’t waste any of our valuable time rehashing scientific evidence that they will just ignore. They would be out of the game, permanently. And patients would have a better basis for giving truly informed consent.

I like to read advertisements for quack remedies. I’ve come to suspect that “clinically proven” means “we gave it to three of our friends and got them to say it worked.” When the ads cite published medical studies, I like to track down and read those studies. I usually find that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the product in question and I get a lot of amusement from the pseudoscience and the testimonials.

I really hit the jackpot when I noticed an ad for a weight-loss product called Akavar 20/50. It made the usual claims: eat all you want and still lose weight. But it had the best advertising slogan ever: “We couldn’t say it in print if it wasn’t true!” I laughed out loud. Anyone can say anything in print until they get caught. These diet ads all say things that aren’t true, and the Federal Trade Commission can’t begin to catch them all.

The ad describes research results on Akavar as “staggering.” It claims to have published scientific research showing that twenty-three out of twenty-four patients using Akavar’s active ingredient lost weight and describes a controlled, randomized clinical trial of the actual product in which twenty-three out of twenty-four patients lost “a substantial amount of weight.” Two questions immediately came to mind: why were the numbers the same in both studies, and if a single active ingredient worked just as well, why was there any need to develop the Akavar formulation?

There was a toll-free number to call for further information. I called and asked where I could read the two studies they referred to. The man who answered was flummoxed: “No one’s ever asked me that before.” He had to go for help. Finally he came up with the names of two journals but no further information.

I searched PubMed for anything in either of those journals that might even remotely be considered studies of Akavar and couldn’t find anything. I wrote the company’s customer service representative and asked for more information. That led to the following surreal e-mail exchange over the next month and a half.

September 30: [Me] Your ad for Akavar describes a high rate of success in clinical studies. I’d like to read those studies for myself. I called your 800 number and the person who answered told me there were two studies published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics and in the journal Medical Psychopharmacology. He was unable to give me the full citations, and I have searched PubMed and elsewhere and have been unable to locate the articles. Could you give me the exact citations (date, author, title of article, journal, volume, and page number)? Or better yet, could you possibly send me electronic copies of the articles? I would really appreciate it.

October 9: [Akavar] Thank you for your interest in Akavar 20/50. I will be happy to submit a request to our Compliance dept. and have these studies prepared for you to send via email or via mail. We request to know as to what use these will be used for and will require a phone number and address. As soon as I have this information I will submit the request and have these prepared for you to save any trouble of having to look these up yourself. Thanks so much.

October 9: [Me] I would prefer you send them by e-mail. What they will be used for? To help me decide for myself whether there is adequate evidence to recommend Akavar 20/50 to patients.

October 10: [Akavar] Thank you so much for this. I will forward this request to compliance and send via email when they have finished preparing the study.

October 15: [Me] I’m still waiting. The delay is making me wonder... if you really have legitimate scientific studies to back up your claims, why are they not posted on your web site or linked to the PubMed abstracts or at least listed in such a way that they can be located by interested physicians?

October 17: [Akavar] I apologize for the delay. I will follow up with our Compliance/Legal department to see if they have prepared these for you or not. I will let you know shortly.

October 30: [Me] It is now October 30, and I still have not received the studies. If they are not available in electronic format, all I really need is a proper citation: title of article, name of journal, names of authors, date, volume and page. If these studies really exist, and if they really support your product, your company certainly doesn’t seem very proud of them! If you cannot provide me with the citations, I will be forced to assume they do not exist and I will report your company for false advertising.

November 2: [Me again] OK. Still no response. I will have to give you a deadline. If you have not sent me the citations by November 5, I will take it as an admission that you are crooks who tell deliberate lies in your advertising and I will report you to the FTC. I will remind you that ALL I’m asking is that you tell me where I can find the clinical studies you advertise as supporting your product.

November 2: [Akavar] I just spoke with our Legal department as I have been out of the office this week. They informed me that they are contacting you via mail as they are requesting more information from you. I can not handle this request other than our legal department. This was sent to the address you provided me below and should be received within normal postal delivery time. [I never received anything by mail.] I apologize sincerely for this delayed response. It should be taken care of now. Thank you.

November 2: [Me] How about you give me the e-mail address of the legal department so you don’t need to act as intermediary? There is no reason for them to request more information from me—that is ridiculous! And even if they are mailing me copies of the studies, there is no reason they can’t also immediately provide me with the citation information via e-mail. Reputable companies usually display that kind of information proudly on their web sites, often with a link to the studies.

November 5: [Akavar] Our compliance/legal department has prepared the following for you and are sending via email at your request via the above attachments. Please respond accordingly. Thanks again for your patience.

[Attachment] We have received your request to provide you with all studies relating to our Akavar 20/50 product. Due to the confidential nature of these studies, we cannot release these studies without a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement. Our standard Non-Disclosure Agreement is enclosed. Pleases [sic] review and sign the Agreement. Upon receipt of the signed Non-Disclosure Agreement, we will happily provide you the information you requested. . . . [This was accompanied by a complicated, multi-page legal document.]

November 5: [Me] You have GOT to be kidding!! I did NOT ask for “all” studies relating to your product. I did NOT ask for any proprietary information. All I asked for was the correct citations for the two published studies referred to in your advertising. This is not anything that requires any signature or agreement. Published studies are in the public domain. This is becoming a surreal experience. Perhaps I’d better start all over again by copying my initial request: [My initial e-mail was copied here.]

Let’s make this really simple:

1. Are there two published studies?
2. If so, please provide me with the information I will need to locate and read those studies: Name of author(s), title of article, name of journal, volume, page number and date of publication.

November 7: [Akavar] Any update from MKF?

November 7: [Me] No. Who or what is MKF?

November 13: [Akavar] We regret that you refused to sign the NDA, which would have allowed us to provide you the highly confidential, proprietary data related to Akavar. We are, however, enclosing the citations for the published articles relating to Akavar’s efficacy. [Lieberman, H.R., Tharion, W.J., Shukitt-Hale, B., Speckman, K.L., & Tulley, R. (2002). Psychopharmacology (Berl), 164(3), 250–261. Andersen, T. and J. Fogh (2001). J Hum Nutr Diet 14(3): 243–50.] Any representation on your part that the published studies comprise the full substantiation for Akavar 20/50 or that the substantiation is lacking in any way would be false and intentionally misleading on your part since your [sic] were not privy to the full documentation. Again because of your refusal to sign a simple NDA. [This letter was signed by a paralegal.]

November 13: [Me] You did not provide the titles of the studies, but I easily found them. I can see why you didn’t provide the titles, and I can see why I didn’t find them when I looked before, because it is obvious that they were not studies of Akavar 20/50.The Lieberman study is titled “Effects of caffeine, sleep loss, and stress on cognitive performance and mood during U.S. Navy SEAL training. Sea-Air-Land.” The Andersen study is “Weight loss and delayed gastric emptying following a South American herbal preparation in overweight patients.” The herbal preparation was a mixture of yerba mate, guarana, and damiana. The patients initially lost a few pounds, but those who took the active drug for 12 months “maintained” their weight during that period. The abstract of the study does not say that the study participants were instructed not to alter their eating habits. And the numbers of patients do not correspond to either of the studies described in your ads.

Your ad says, “this is scientific fact, documented by published medical findings.” Are you now admitting that there are no published clinical studies of Akavar 20/50 and that the statements in your ads are false?

I never heard back from them, and I decided I had had enough fun. I reported them for false advertising. I was not the only one to complain. A class action suit was filed against the company for “fraudulent, deceptive, and otherwise improper advertising and marketing practices.” The lawsuit says, “Akavar has not undergone scientific evaluation by a team of doctors, nor has Akavar been tested in controlled random clinical trials.” The lawsuit also mentions that Akavar is identical to another of the company’s products, Estrin-D, which is also the subject of an unrelated lawsuit.

Later a friend contacted the company and signed the nondisclosure agreement to see what would happen. All he got was a written summary of some unspecified studies with no authors or publications listed.

Imagine a pharmaceutical company telling me they couldn’t divulge the title of an article about their new drug in the New England Journal of Medicine unless I signed a nondisclosure agreement! What planet are we on? Even worse, imagine if a pharmaceutical company asked the FDA to approve a new drug on the basis of two studies that had little or nothing to do with that drug, insisting they had more proof, but it was a secret!

I don’t know why I’m surprised. Quacks have to defend themselves any way they can, since they can’t defend themselves with facts.

You might be curious to know what ingredients are in this miracle product. Nothing even remotely likely to promote weight loss except for caffeine and related xanthines. Drinking lots of coffee is probably just as effective.

A recent issue of the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database newsletter said:

Akavar 20/50 is a new supplement promoted for weight loss. It contains a long list of ingredients, including large amounts of caffeine from yerba mate, guarana, green tea, and kola nut extracts. It also contains damiana, ginger, schisandra, scutellaria, vitamin B6, magnesium, and other ingredients. Some research suggests that a few of these ingredients might help for weight loss, but this is preliminary. There is no proof that this specific combination of ingredients is effective. Product advertising says, “Eat all you want and still lose weight. . . .” Remind patients that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

And remember, the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database could say that in print if it weren’t true—but they wouldn’t!

Gary Schwartz believes many things. He believes in psychics, mediums, and life after death, and he believes there is scientific evidence to support these beliefs. Schwartz is now focusing his powers of belief on a new field: energy medicine. In a new book, The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal, he explains that we all emit human energy fields, that we can sense each other’s fields, and that healers can influence these fields to heal illnesses and injury. He believes these are not just theories but scientifically supported facts.

The book starts with three “gee-whiz” testimonials of supposed energy healing (which are frankly not very convincing and could be easily outdone by any self-respecting purveyor of quack remedies). He goes on to describe experiments done in his own lab that he claims establish not only our ability to detect and alter human energy fields but our ability to detect the thoughts and intentions of others. In the final part of the book, he descends into blethering about quantum physics, the oneness of the universe, the connectedness of all things, and the possibility that energy awareness will solve all of mankind’s problems.

He claims to have demonstrated many things. First, he claims to have shown that a subject can sense when a researcher’s hand is being held over his or her own hand and can sense when the researcher’s hands are being held near his or her ears from behind. Other experiments supposedly show that people can tell when someone is looking at them or thinking about them. He goes on to describe purported measurements of subtle human energy emissions, Reiki influences on lab cultures of bacteria, and photography of biophoton emission from plants, among other phenomena of dubious reality or significance.

He makes a big deal of the fact that humans emit electromagnetic energy (as picked up by EKG, EEG, etc.), and he would like to think energy healers can pick up that energy and decode it in the same way your radio picks up Rush Limbaugh out of the atmosphere. And then he would like to think that energy healers can send something back into the patient’s body to enable healing. He misses the crucial fact that there is information encoded in the electromagnetic waves your radio detects, but there is no reason to think there is any analogous information coming from the body, much less any way to change that information and send it back to produce healing. I only wish we could use “energy healing” on radio and TV waves to improve the quality of programming!

He makes a big deal of the fact that everything affects everything else. He seems to mean this in a holistic, metaphysical, New Age, “the universe is one and is conscious and we can create our own reality” sense. Science recognizes that small events can have far-reaching effects, but that doesn’t mean one thing can predict or control another. The flap of a butterfly’s wings may set up initial atmospheric conditions that will result in a tornado somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean you can predict the tornado or deliberately use a butterfly to cause one. Theoretically, a change in the magnitude or position of your body mass will enter into the overall gravity equations of the universe, but that doesn’t mean one thing can control or predict another. You could hardly expect to meaningfully influence someone out there beyond Alpha Centauri by losing ten pounds or moving to Antarctica. You can’t expect to change the EEG of an astronaut in the Space Station by exercising to change your own EKG. We are talking about very small influences. If a gnat pushes an elephant, it’s not likely to fall over; it’s not likely to even notice. And then there are inconvenient complications like quantum theory and chaos theory.

The only thing of substance in the book is the experiments, which lose credibility because they were not accepted for publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. Schwartz claims this is because of politics. He says prestigious journals tend to reject positive-energy studies. He doesn’t believe that his studies could have been rejected because they didn’t meet the standards of good science. I feel sorry for him: he’s a smart guy, he means well, he really believes he has found something wonderful, but he has a blind spot and just doesn’t get it when others try to point out the flaws in his experimental methods and reasoning. (See Ray Hyman, “How Not to Test Mediums: Critiquing the Afterlife Experiments,” Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2003, and the follow-up exchange between Schwartz and Hyman, May/June 2003, plus the critical letters to the editor in that issue.)

To put the accusation of “politics” into perspective, consider the Helicobacter experiments. When researchers first suggested that ulcers might be caused by bacteria, they were laughed at. They published their results, peer review had a field day, other labs looked into the idea, more data came in, results from various lines of research coalesced, and within a mere ten years it became standard practice to treat ulcers with antibiotics. It didn’t matter that the idea sounded crazy at first; science responded to good evidence. (See Kimball C. Atwood IV, “Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism,” Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2004.) If Schwartz had evidence of equal quality, he would get an equal hearing by the scientific community.

Sure, Schwartz has some data that he finds convincing. So did the discoverers of N-rays, polywater, and cold fusion. Good science demands that we withhold judgment until data can be replicated in other labs and validated by other methods—especially when the data come from a researcher as clearly prejudiced as Schwartz. Even the best researchers can fall prey to errors of unconscious bias and unrecognized pitfalls in experimental design.

A good scientist considers the entire body of available evidence, not just the claims of one group of researchers. Schwartz only describes experiments that support his beliefs. Not until the end of the book does he even bring up the fact that other experiments have directly contradicted his findings. He finally gets around to mentioning Emily Rosa’s landmark experiment, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, which showed that therapeutic touch practitioners could not sense human energy fields as they claimed. She tested twenty-one experienced practitioners of therapeutic touch.1 They all thought they could detect Rosa’s human energy field and feel whether she was holding her hand over their right or left hand, but when they were prevented from seeing where her hand was, their performance was no better than chance.

Rosa was nine years old at the time, and the article grew out of her school science fair project. The experiment was beautiful in its simplicity. Adult true believers had published much research on the techniques and effects of therapeutic touch, but in the true spirit of childlike questioning, Rosa went back to basics and asked the crucial question: “Is the phenomenon itself real? Can they really feel something or is it possible they are fooling themselves?” Amazingly, no researcher had ever asked that question before. They had ignored one of the basic principles of the scientific method as explained by Karl Popper: it’s easy to find confirmation for any hypothesis, but every genuine test of a hypothesis is an attempt to falsify it.

Schwartz dismisses her experiment as having five “potential problems”:

1. It was a science-fair project done by a young girl.
2. She was the only experimenter.
3. She randomized by flipping a coin, which he calls “an unreliable procedure.”
4. One of the authors was the founder of Quackwatch.
5. The subjects did worse than chance.

These objections are just silly; they are either inaccurate or are ad hominem attacks:

1. It shouldn’t make any difference whether Rosa was a young girl or an old man or a sentient purple octopus from an alien planet. It shouldn’t matter whether she did the experiment for an elementary school project, a doctoral dissertation, a Coca Cola commercial, or a government grant. What matters is the quality of the evidence. In this case, her project was well designed and executed, had clearly significant findings, and was of high enough quality to be approved for publication in a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.
2. She was not the only experimenter. Others were involved; the experiment was repeated under expert supervision on Scientific American Frontiers. This should preclude any accusations of deliberate cheating or inadvertent failure to follow the protocol properly. Rosa was the only one to carry out the trials, but what would multiple testers have added to the experiment? The results didn’t depend on any special ability or quality of hers, but on the ability of the subjects who claimed they could sense anyone’s energy fields. For the televised trials, they even got to “feel” the “energy” from each of Rosa’s hands and choose which one they wanted her to use in the trials. About half chose her left hand and half her right. No one objected, “I can’t feel energy from either hand.”
3. Flipping a coin is not an “unreliable procedure”—unless the flipper is deliberately cheating. I hope Schwartz didn’t intend to suggest that. The number of heads and tails was approximately equal, and the distribution appeared random. The editors of JAMA found the method acceptable. There are situations where coin-flipping could legitimately be criticized, for instance in psi experiments where researchers are looking for minuscule differences in large bodies of data and even their computerized random number generators have been criticized for not being “perfectly” random. But in this experiment, the results were clearly significant; it is hard to envision how a different method of randomization could have altered the results. The coin flip was only used to determine which of the subject’s hands she would hold her hand over. The subjects claimed to be able to sense energy fields with either hand, so it shouldn’t have made a bit of difference to their perception. Faulty randomization might have allowed the subjects to perceive a pattern and guess, which would have tended to give false positive results rather than the negative results Rosa got.
4. One of the authors, the founder of Quackwatch, was admittedly skeptical of therapeutic touch. Yes, someone with possible bias was indirectly involved in the experiment. If that is an objection, there is an even greater objection to Schwartz’s own experiments: he and his colleagues are all strongly biased toward belief in energy phenomena and they were directly involved in their experiments.
5. It is simply not true that the subjects did “worse than chance.” Their performance was consistent with chance. If they had done worse than chance (significantly worse) that would have tended to support Schwartz’s claim that some kind of effect was present, even though it would have been the reverse of what he claimed to find.

In my opinion, none of these “problems” invalidates the conclusion that the therapeutic touch practitioners failed to do what they claimed they could do. And if he thinks these were valid problems, why didn’t he simply repeat her experiment in his own lab with multiple experimenters and a more reliable method of randomization? He could have published a failed replication study, and the scientific community could have proceeded to evaluate both studies and sort out the truth. In reality, Rosa’s experiment was a great example of a young child being able to see more clearly than prejudiced adults—a real “Emperor’s New Clothes” story.

I see a lot of “potential problems” in Schwartz’s research—not just ad hominem problems but flaws of experimental design. To start with his most basic experiment: his subjects were blindfolded, sat facing the experimenter with their hands on their laps, and tried to detect which hand the experimenter was holding his hand over. The experimenter held his hands together between trials to keep his hand temperature constant. The subjects often didn’t think they could tell, but they were asked to guess, and their guesses were statistically significant.

The first problem is that blindfolds don’t work. Rosa knew this. Instead, she had her subjects put their arms through holes in a screen and covered the gaps with a towel to preclude any possibility of conscious or unconscious visual cues. She also had subjects lay their arms on a table instead of on their laps, thus reducing the chance of their detecting subtle clues from the person sitting in front of them. Another problem is that when the researcher holds his hands together, that raises the skin temperature and raises the possibility that heat is being detected rather than any other type of energy. And if Schwartz’s results are real, independent researchers should be able to replicate them using the same protocol. Apparently they have not been replicated elsewhere. In fact, Rosa’s experiment amounts to an independent attempt to replicate Schwartz’s basic experiment, only with better controls; and it failed to confirm his results.

If a rigorous scientist thought he had found evidence that people could detect “human energy fields,” he would maintain a healthy skepticism; he would immediately try to prove himself wrong, and he would enlist his colleagues to help show him where he might have gone wrong. He would try to rule out all other possible explanations (the subject might be sensing heat, sound, motion, air currents, might be able to see under the blindfold, etc.). If the phenomenon proved robust, he would try to refine his understanding by doing things like varying the distance to see if it obeyed the inverse square law and interposing a sheet of cardboard or glass to see if the effect could be blocked. Then he would try to use instruments to measure what kind of energy was being sensed.

When a believer thinks he has found something to justify his belief, his approach tends to be less rigorous. Instead of subjecting his original experiment to outside scrutiny, he tends to do more new experiments to try to convince others that he is right. Schwartz goes off on a tangent doing other experiments that purportedly show that the subject is not sensing the energy field but is actually sensing the conscious intention of the experimenter. In one, he claims to show that persons can tell whether someone standing behind them is staring at their head or at their back! If he really believed energy medicine was some kind of psychic thought transmission, he would concentrate on that route of research, but instead he keeps trying to document the ability to detect measurable physical energy fields. His thinking is confused, and he’s trying to eat his cake and have it too.

Schwartz’s style of reasoning was revealed when an experiment to influence E. coli bacteria with Reiki didn’t produce the desired results. Instead of accepting that it didn’t work, he tried to find a way to make the experiment look like it worked. He did some inappropriate “data mining” and tried to show that before the trials where the Reiki practitioners apparently failed, they had been under more stress than before the trials where they apparently succeeded.

He finds a gifted individual who can detect whether a wooden box has a rock in it or not—his success rate is 95 percent for natural crystals, although barely chance for manmade crystals. Unfortunately, before this individual can be tested properly in an independent lab, he develops medical problems and loses his ability. (It’s strange how often these inconvenient things happen when psychic claims are involved.)
Schwartz is mystified by the work of John of God, the Brazilian spiritual healer who performs bloodless, painless surgery. He doesn’t recognize that this charlatan is merely using old gimmicks from the carnival sideshow repertoire to fool the gullible. Schwartz also believes science has established that the human mind can change the pH of water over long distances. He is far less skeptical about such claims than the average scientist.

Schwartz has tried to bolster his credibility by getting a former Surgeon General’s endorsement. In Richard Carmona’s foreword, he says he has seen things he can’t easily explain and says we don’t have all the answers. He helped establish the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM, which he curiously refers to as the National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine). The purpose of the NCCAM was allegedly to test complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and find out which treatments worked and reject those that didn’t. But in its entire history, despite consistently negative results, it has never dared to reject anything. Carmona is currently CEO of Canyon Ranch Health, where Schwartz is the Director of Development of Energy Healing. Canyon Ranch offers integrative medical wellness services, including therapeutic touch. Carmona says, “Where the science supports these integrative concepts of energy medicine, let’s use them. Where there is not enough science, let the studies begin and continue.”

What about “if there is no convincing science or plausible mechanism to support them, let’s stop wasting our time chasing moonbeams”? All of energy medicine hinges on one basic claim: that people can detect subtle human energy fields. If Schwartz is wrong about that, the rest of the claims for so-called “energy medicine” fizzle away.

Since 1996, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has offered a substantial reward (currently $1,000,000) to anyone who can demonstrate an ability to detect a “human energy field” under conditions similar to those of Rosa’s study. Of the more than 80,000 American therapeutic touch practitioners who claim to have such ability, only one person attempted to demonstrate it. She failed. The JREF challenge is admittedly not a definitive scientific test, but prudence would seem to dictate that if no one can even meet this simple challenge, we shouldn’t be wasting research money on what is probably a myth.

Others have attempted to establish the “science” of energy medicine and have failed.2 Even the NCCAM, which is willing to consider almost any possibility in alternative medicine, is skeptical. It distinguishes between real energy (sound waves, electromagnetism, and other energies measurable by physicists) and the kind of “putative” energy Schwartz is trying to validate. It concludes that the “putative” energy approaches “are among the most controversial of CAM practices because neither the external energy fields nor their therapeutic effects have been demonstrated convincingly by any biophysical means.”

Schwartz sounds like a scientist. He tries to talk the talk and walk the walk. He even makes some skeptical noises to try to convince us he is objective. But there is also a lot of very unscientific language in his book.

For instance:

Human rage and pain, especially generated by terrorism and war, create a global energetic climate whose negative effects can extend from the physical and environmental—potentially including climate—to the psychological and ultimately spiritual. . . . [P]ollution is not simply chemical, it is ultimately energy based and therefore conscious as well.

Really? Conscious pollution? So maybe if we talk nice to pollution it will cooperate and go away? Or should we try doing Reiki to lower the atmospheric CO2 levels? Does Al Gore know about this?

“Energy medicine” is an emperor whose new clothes still look awfully transparent to critical thinkers and to the scientific community no matter what glorious colors and fabrics Schwartz and his colleagues imagine they are seeing.

Notes:

1. “Therapeutic touch” is a bit of a misnomer because these practitioners don’t actually touch but simply massage the air a few inches from the patient’s body. They are convinced that they are detecting and manipulating the energy field, balancing and smoothing it, and correcting any abnormalities, thus allowing the body to heal itself.
2. Hall, H. 2005. A review of Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis. Skeptic 11(3): 89–93. Available at quackfiles.blogspot.com.
3. nccam.nih.gov.

References:

• Rosa, L., E. Rosa, L. Sarner, and S. Barrett. 1998. A close look at therapeutic touch. Journal of the American Medical Association. 279:1005–1010. Schwartz, Gary E., with William L. Simon. 2007. The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal. New York: Atria Books.

A couple of years ago, I saw an announcement for an astrology presentation to a local discussion group called Mingling of the Minds. My first reaction was, “Surely, nobody really believes in astrology anymore! At least not in my well-educated community.” I decided to go “mingle my mind” and find out.

I was appalled. These people had heard some of the arguments against astrology, but they entirely discounted them. Their personal experience was that astrology worked, and that’s all they cared about. The speaker had prepared charts for several members of the group, with scientific-looking symbols and calculations, and they seemed very impressed. I tried to introduce a bit of skepticism by asking questions like, “How did the first astrologers learn which human characteristics corresponded to which heavenly signs?” The speaker said that was an interesting question that could never be answered, because we lack any historical records. Of course, he didn't doubt that they had obtained their knowledge by some reliable means.

Sure they had. I heard about a woman who told a group of friends she had identified new constellations for a more up-to-date astrology; instead of names like Sagittarius and Pisces, the new constellations had names like Vacuum Cleaner and Telephone. She explained how those born under the Vacuum Cleaner are perfectionists who like everything to be neat and clean, and how those born under the Telephone sign are verbally oriented, good communicators, and have lots of friends. Her friends didn't get the joke. They asked where they could learn more about this great new system!

In retrospect, I probably should have told the astrologer I wasn't going to believe in astrology because my horoscope said I shouldn't be gullible.

Future “Mingling of the Minds” sessions were planned with psychics and other strange creatures. I decided that these people were in desperate need of a resident skeptic, so I appointed myself. I knew there was no hope of converting any true believers, but I thought there must be at least a few people who had not irrevocably made up their minds and might like to know the facts.

My skeptic friends tried to warn me: “Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.” I knew this, but I didn't think it applied here. I'm an optimist-these were nice, friendly, reasonable people, and I thought at least some of them would enjoy learning some of the things I had learned. I used to believe a lot of weird things myself, until evidence and reason persuaded me to change my mind. I find it intellectually satisfying to discard an error and learn a truth. I thought others might get the same satisfaction. My friends laughed at my naïveté; but I am a skeptic, so I had to find out for myself.

It was the beginning of an odyssey that introduced me to a strange race of people who believed in angels but not in germs. I can only compare it to visiting a carnival freak show of intellectual, rather than physical, anomalies. I observed how the average nonskeptic member of the public reacts to these anomalies. It almost destroyed my faith in human reason.

We heard from a feng shui practitioner. He explained that feng shui is a science, and he went into details like how you should position the head of your bed to the north. I asked him if he meant geographic north or magnetic north. I'm not sure he even knew the difference, but he guessed that it was probably magnetic north because feng shui has to do with forces that are sort of like magnetic forces. The magnetic north pole is in northeastern Canada; I asked him what he would tell a client who lived in northeastern Canada, directly north of the magnetic north pole-if the client put the head of his bed towards the magnetic north pole, it would be actually be pointing due south. His only answer was, “Gee, that’s an interesting question.” I thought so too. It’s an interesting science if it only applies to certain parts of the globe.

The feng shui guy also sells Chinese medicines. He always checks by opening each bottle and tasting or at least looking to be sure it contains what the label says, because sometimes he finds an entirely different herb in the bottle. That’s his idea of quality control. Nevertheless, he is quite confident that these herbal products are safe. One of the safe remedies he showed us was a Chinese pain reliever called Lemonin. I could see from the label that it was an overpriced mixture of paracetamol, caffeine, and vitamin C. He didn't know that paracetamol is the British name for acetaminophen (Tylenol), so of course, he couldn't warn his victims (oops, I mean clients) that taking Tylenol along with Lemonin could result in a fatal overdose.

A chiropractor insisted that newborn babies needed immediate chiropractic adjustment, because their necks are stretched to over twice their normal length during childbirth, even by C-section. I told him that I knew that was not true, because I used to deliver babies. It couldn't be true, because that amount of stretch couldn't happen without killing the baby. He assured us that, yes, it really does a lot of damage.

Another chiropractor explained that he doesn't believe in the germ theory, because if germs caused disease, we'd all be dead. The only reason some people get sick is because their spines are out of alignment. He has never been vaccinated, yet he is confident he could be exposed to any infectious disease without catching it. Next time we need volunteers to treat a case of Ebola, let’s call on him!

A third chiropractor told us how he diagnoses allergies. He has the patient hold a closed vial containing an allergen in one hand, and he tests the muscle strength in her or his other arm. If it is weaker than before, they are allergic to what’s in the vial. He thought one patient might be allergic to his workplace, and he didn't have a vial of “Boeing,” so he had the patient just think about Boeing, and that worked just as well. He found people were allergic to all kinds of things they had never imagined. He had all kinds of testimonials about miraculous cures. I pointed out that this method, called applied kinesiology, had failed all controlled tests and was rejected even by the majority of his own profession. I read him the words of a professor of chiropractic, who essentially said applied kinesiology was about the stupidest quackery any chiropractor had ever fallen for. He was not impressed: his method works.

I took out a small implement and handed it around the group. No one could guess what it was for. I explained that it was a fleam, a lancet used in bloodletting. The ancient Greeks believed there were four humors, and they balanced the humors by bleeding the patient for fevers and other illnesses. George Washington’s death was hastened (if not caused) by bloodletting. The treatment was in use for many centuries, until science finally tested it and found out it did more harm than good. I told the chiropractor that I could come up with more testimonials for bloodletting through the centuries than he had for muscle testing. If he rejected the scientific evidence that applied kinesiology didn't work, it would be consistent to reject the scientific evidence that bloodletting didn't work. If he accepted the evidence of testimonials for muscle testing, it would be consistent to accept the evidence of many more testimonials for bloodletting. Would he use a fleam? No, he wouldn't. A lady friend asked, “But what does his method hurt, as long as his patients feel better?” I reminded her that bloodletting also made lots of people feel better, and I offered to use the fleam on her to see if it made her feel better. She declined. I can't imagine why.

A massage therapist specialized in energy medicine. She could feel the energy fields around a patient’s body and twiddle them to help patients heal. She knew this was real, because a scientist had actually measured the human aura with some scientific instrument. What kind of instrument? Where were the data published? She didn't have the specifics, but she assured me I could learn about it in a book called The Isaiah Effect. I got that book and read every word of it, but couldn't even find the word aura, much less anything remotely scientific. It is arguably the worst book I have ever read, with an average of one and a half errors of fact or logic per page-I counted. I told her that I found nothing in the book about measuring auras, and her only answer was, “Oh.”

A couple of self-styled “intuitives” (i.e., psychics) spoke to us, and did some amateurish cold readings. One explained away apparent failures by saying that she might be seeing something in the future, and that her intuitions could not perceive time; she immediately contradicted herself by saying the next person would have a new job “within the next three years"! She “read” a hypochondriac man and apparently intuited that he wasn't worried enough already, so she told him she could see something terribly wrong in his abdomen that needed urgent care. Another psychic told us she could actually see angels beside each of us. (In psychiatry, this is called a hallucination and is a sign of mental illness.)

Here are just a few of the astounding comments I heard:

“A molecule made in a plant is natural, so it has to be better than the exact same molecule made in a lab.”

“I had to stop taking my homeopathic sleep remedy because it caused side effects.” (Water causes side effects?)

“I know my headache didn't go away because of any placebo effect, because I would be able to tell if it were just placebo.” (So why do you think scientists bother with placebo-controlled double-blind trials?)

“Truth doesn't matter.”

“What’s true for you may not be true for me; it’s okay if we disagree.”

“We create our own reality.”

I asked one woman what she would think of me if I still truly believed, at my age, that the Tooth Fairy really exists. She said, “I'd think that was really sweet!”

The last meeting I went to was a pro-and-con discussion of dowsing. The “pro” side consisted of “I saw it work; there are lots of dowsers.” I gave the scientific “con” side, explaining the ideomotor effect and the consistent failure of dowsers to find water beyond the level of chance when tested objectively. My information did not go over well. They wanted to hear more about how it works and less about how it doesn't work. The “pro” presenter explained to me that science just hasn't learned how to test dowsers to get a positive result; it doesn't know the right questions to ask. He also explained that science is based on assumptions, so he doesn't trust science; he trusts his intuitions more, even though he admits his intuition can be wrong.

The Pig Instructor Reconsiders

At this point, I had to recognize that these people did not inhabit my universe. They rejected the scientific method, they didn't care about objective truth, and they were happy in their superstitions. I tried hard to understand them, but I failed. I find science and reality far more exciting than superstition. I agree with Lily Tomlin that “the best mind-altering drug is the truth.” Why were the people at “Mingling of the Minds” so reluctant to give up their unfounded beliefs?

Maybe there was something wrong with me. Whenever I told my father I had changed my mind about something, he used to tell me, “If I had a mind like that, I'd change it too.” After being exposed to all these “minglers” who refused to change their minds, I began to wonder if I was the one who was abnormal. Maybe I lacked the gene for certainty. Maybe I am unduly prejudiced in favor of reality testing. Maybe they are right: personal experience and belief are all that matters. I was really beginning to get worried.

Then two things happened to reassure me. First, I read the list of obituaries in the Encyclopedia Britannica yearbook. Among the famous in all walks of life, the important people, the people who mattered, there were plenty of scientists who had contributed to human knowledge and welfare; there wasn't a single homeopath, astrologer, or psychic on the list. Second, I read Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Enough people are reading this novel to put it on the best-seller list, and its main character is a skeptic and critical thinker who says, ” . . .[belief in] the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulty and wonders of the real, of the demanding reenactment of the plausible.” Maybe science and reason are slowly winning the war against superstition, even if they are losing some of the smaller skirmishes.

In a sense, the people I met at Mingling of the Minds were the norm and I was the anomaly. Minds are not meant to change easily. Absolute certainty based on authority and eyewitness accounts must have had some evolutionary survival value. Humanity has managed pretty well with instinct, magical thinking, and superstition for a very long time, and it will probably continue to muddle through. The scientific method is a recent innovation; it isn't easy, and it doesn't come naturally.

Time is money, and I finally had to admit that Mingling of the Minds was not a good investment. I cut my losses and resigned. I'm too stubborn to not get the last word in, so I wrote this little fable and sent it to Dan, my opponent in the dowsing debate.

Is the Tooth Fairy Real?: A Fable

Harriet told her little brother Dan that there was no Tooth Fairy; it was their parents who put the money under the pillow.

Dan refused to believe Harriet. He knew there was a Tooth Fairy. Every time he put a tooth under his pillow, there was money there the next morning. And all his friends said the Tooth Fairy brought them money too. And it couldn't be Mom and Dad because he'd wake up if they came in the room and lifted his pillow. Anyway, Mom and Dad said there was a Tooth Fairy, and they wouldn't lie.

Harriet asked him how he thought the Tooth Fairy found out about lost teeth, how she got into the house, where she got the money from, and what she did with the teeth. Dan said he didn't know, but wasn't it a wonderful mystery? Harriet pointed out that older kids all eventually stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy. Dan said that only proved that the Tooth Fairy would only bring money to those who still believed in her.

Harriet got several neighborhood kids to help test whether the Tooth Fairy would appear if the parents didn't know a tooth had been lost. It turned out that every time the parents knew about the tooth, there would be money under the pillow the next morning, and every time the parents didn't know about the tooth, there would be no money. Dan said the Tooth Fairy was just refusing to cooperate in those cases, because she wouldn't bring money if she knew she was being tested.

Harriet got out her Junior Detective kit and dusted Dan’s Tooth Fairy money for fingerprints. Sure enough, she found their parents’ fingerprints on it. Dan said that didn't prove anything, because there are lots of ways the Tooth Fairy could get hold of money the parents had previously touched. Or she could have magically put the evidence there to confuse us. And of course, the Tooth Fairy wouldn't leave any fingerprints of her own because she was magical.

The next time Dan lost a tooth, Harriet spread flour on the floor, and the next morning, she showed Dan their parents’ footprints between the door and the head of his bed. He said that didn't prove anything-his parents had probably just checked on him, and the Tooth Fairy had come later. There were no Tooth Fairy footprints, because fairies don't leave footprints.

The next time Dan lost a tooth, Harriet set up a video camera in Dan’s room and caught their parents in the act. (For those readers with dirty minds, I mean the act of removing the tooth and putting money under the pillow.) Dan told her that didn't prove a thing. Maybe the Tooth Fairy wouldn't appear when a camera was present. Maybe she is a shape-shifter who made herself look like their parents on videotape. Maybe she asked Mom and Dad to do the job for her just this once.

Harriet led Dan into their parents’ bedroom, opened a dresser drawer, and showed him a box containing all of Harriet’s and Dan’s baby teeth neatly labeled and dated. She said that was proof their parents were taking the teeth and leaving the money. Dan said it was no such thing; the Tooth Fairy probably passed the teeth on to parents for keepsakes, or maybe she sold teeth to parents to raise the money she put under the pillows. Hey, yeah, that would explain the fingerprints!

Harriet and Dan confronted their parents, who admitted they had been taking the teeth and leaving the money under the pillow. Dan said either they were lying before or they're lying now, and they're probably lying now. Why trust what anyone says? He was just going to ignore everything except what he knew: the tooth-under-the-pillow thing worked. The Tooth Fairy was real.

Harriet screamed in frustration and tore all her hair out. She left it under her pillow. It was still there in the morning.