When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.

—John D. Bogart

As evidence for human-caused climate change has mounted, global warming denialists have responded by blaming the messengers. Climate researchers have endured abuse by bloggers, editorial writers, Fox News pundits, and radio talk show hosts who have called them liars and vilified them as frauds. The attacks had become increasingly vile as the past decade, the hottest in human history, came to an end. Angry activists have called for firings and criminal investigations, and some prominent scientists have received physical threats.

Politicians have also gotten into the act. In 2005, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) referred to global warming as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) sent a harassing letter to Michael Mann (now a professor at Pennsylvania State University) and his coauthors of the famous “hockey stick” paleoclimate paper, demanding that they drop everything to provide him with extensive documentation about what he claimed were “methodological flaws and data errors” in their work.

Denialists have attempted to call the science into question by writing articles that include fabricated data. They’ve improperly graphed data using tricks to hide evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They chronically misrepresent the careful published work of scientists, distorting all logic and meaning in an organized misinformation campaign. To an uncritical media and gullible non-scientists, this ongoing conflict has had the intended effect: it gives the appearance of a scientific controversy and seems to contradict climate researchers who have stated that the scientific debate over the reality of human-caused climate change is over (statements that have been distorted by denialists to imply the ridiculous claim that in all respects “the science is settled”).

Science, however, has ground rules. Those who don’t follow the rules are entitled to their opinions but cannot legitimately claim to be participating in a scientific debate. One rule that must be followed for scientific results to be accepted is that they must be subjected to review and published in a scholarly scientific journal. This is a necessary but insufficient condition (nobody is compelled to accept the conclusions of a paper just because it has been refereed).

This rule is not intended to create a “high priesthood” of scientists or keep others from participating. On the contrary, the culture of science welcomes dissent and encourages contrarians to publish their ideas so they can be subjected to the same scrutiny that is applied to conventional thought.

Peer review is designed to screen out material that is demonstrably wrong, flawed, illogical, or fabricated. Non-specialists are not always able to quickly spot errors in a highly technical piece of work, so experts are recruited to make sure any mistakes are corrected and necessary documentation is provided before the science is published.

The first thing I do when I read an editorial or blog entry is check to see if the supposed science has been published in scientific literature. If not, I don’t see why I should bother to read what nobody could be bothered to put through scientific peer review. My reasoning is not that such material is necessarily wrong, but without any scientific review I have no assurance that anyone has checked to see if the equations are right, data sources correctly cited, figures properly attributed, or other workers’ conclusions fairly represented.

The global warming debate continues, at least among the science-challenged. The calculation of the mass of CO₂ produced from burning a gallon of gasoline was the subject of a recent vigorous disagreement on the letters page of our local newspaper. This is a question that a decent high school chemistry student should be able to answer, but the highly opinionated letter writers were not able to resolve their differences, despite the fact that reaction stoichiometry is indisputably settled science.

Likewise, a competent high school physics student understands how the so-called greenhouse effect works and that conservation of energy is also settled science. It has been known for over a hundred years that adding CO₂ to the atmosphere increases its infrared opacity, and when this happens, more energy from sunlight enters Earth’s atmosphere than escapes. The atmosphere must heat up on average. There is no scientific debate about this fact, and nobody has ever published a “zero-warming” theory to explain how it could be otherwise.

There is, however, a healthy, open, honest, and active scientific debate in the peer-reviewed scientific literature about the degree of climate change. The best scientific estimate of the amount of warming (when CO₂ levels double, which is likely to happen this century) is about 3°C. There are scientists who disagree—some think it’s higher and some lower—and have published the basis for their disagreement.

Having lost the scientific debate, denialists have now resorted to hacking into a computer system and stealing private correspondence to distract those who prefer controversy to science. To those of us in the scientific community, it came as no surprise that researchers who had endured personal attacks had trouble rising above the fray. But the harsh tone of some messages by Mann and others caught the attention of the voyeurs who read them precisely because they were in sharp contrast to the way scientists usually speak in public. The attempts to force editors not to publish papers critical of the scientists and suggestions to boycott journals were inappropriate and unsuccessful (journal editors resisted pressure and published the papers anyway). They also were not unusual—certainly not beneath those in the opposite camp. And even though the widely reported “trick” used to “hide the decline” was legitimate (using real temperatures instead of a faulty tree-ring proxy to represent the temperature record), it sounded like something denialists would do, so it was assumed to be crooked.

The very fact that Climategate was newsworthy is evidence that reporters hold scientists to a much higher standard than they hold denialists, even if they won’t admit it in their quest to report a controversy.

Both sides have made significant efforts to establish scientific credibility with the public... . Those favoring action rely heavily on the IPCC-2007 science report [by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].... In contrast, [the office of dissenter] James Inhofe…the ranking Republican member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works ... has issued a ... report titled United States Senate Minority Report on Global Warming.... As of January 2009, the number of ... individuals identified [in the Report] as scientists who allegedly dissent over [man-made global warming] claims ... was 687 [including] some quite well-known scientists.

Jordan then discusses the efforts of CFI’s OPP to “vet the list [of 687 dissenting scientists] carefully to establish how credible it is overall.” Though he doesn’t mention its official name in the piece, the OPP dubbed this endeavor the “Credibility Project.” And, as Jordan relates, its findings appear devastating for the dissenters.

After thus laying the groundwork for the following ostensible no-brainer, Jordan ends by rhetorically asking “the skeptic who is not acquainted with the relevant science where he or she thinks the most credible scientific assessment lies—with the scientists whose published research is reported in the IPCC-2007 science report or with the much smaller group of scientists collected for the Senate minority report.”

Some background: In May 2009, CFI’s OPP had disseminated a “Dear Citizen” announcement about its upcoming July 18–21 Second Annual Civic Days at the Nation’s Capital (see inset). From its introductory paragraph: “You will hear about ... an OPP-sponsored project exposing fake ‘scientists’ who oppose global warming.” But two months later, in an invitation to the Credibility Project’s July 17 press conference at the National Press Club, the OPP no longer referred to the dissenting scientists as fake. When I inquired as to whether this reflected “an evolution on CFI’s part,” OPP executive director Toni Van Pelt replied, “It is true, Gary, that your many e-mails [I routinely copy her when corresponding on this subject] influenced my decision to commission this research.”

Because I harbor my own doubts about the existence of a man-made global warming crisis, I anxiously awaited the details of the Credibility Project’s assessment of the skeptical scientists. Its most significant finding constitutes the deck of Jordan’s piece: “CFI vets list of 687 ‘dissenting scientists’ in Senate minority report; 80 percent haven’t published peer-reviewed climate research.” Largely for this reason, in its July 17 press release, OPP concluded that its findings “expose a lack of credibility among dissenting scientists challenging man-made global warming.”

But in my follow-up to Toni, I explained why “it simply does not logically follow that [those skeptical scientists] necessarily lack the credibility to speak to the issues at hand,” any more than I lack the legitimacy to critique, for example, medical studies touting prayer and healing, as I have done in CFI-sponsored magazines despite never having published studies of my own in the peer-reviewed literature.

Speaking further to Jordan’s key point that “80 percent haven’t published peer-reviewed climate research,” Skeptical Inquirer columnist Robert Sheaffer e-mailed a letter to the editor (see page 64), which was copied to other interested parties (including Jordan and myself), pointing out that OPP also should have vetted the list of IPCC scientists, since perhaps as few as 20 percent of them have had any professional dealings with climate, much less published in the peer-reviewed climate literature.

In his e-mailed reply to Sheaffer (et al.), Jordan advises:

One of the favorite tactics of global warming deniers is to refer to the [IPCC’s summary] report for policymakers, which summarizes [their separate] science report [authored by 2,000 real climate scientists]. There [in the summary report] it is true that the majority are not climate scientists, because they are presenting a summary, that is based upon the science report, to government officials, in the language of policy recommendations. Clearly this is comparing apples and oranges. The IPCC-2007 report titled “The Physical Science Basis” is a true science report, written by and summarizing the work of approximately 2,000 real scientists.

However, Sheaffer’s letter compares apples to apples—he does not reference the “summary” report, authored by fifty-one members of the IPCC. In an addendum offered after Jordan’s initial response, Sheaffer points out that OPP apparently also failed to ascertain how many of the “2,000 real scientists” actually contributed to the writing of the science report (620), and how many of those have published in the relevant literature.

Thus it seems that the Credibility Project, conceived by CFI’s Office of Public Policy for the purpose of “exposing fake ‘scientists’” who dare dissent from the prevailing climate of climate-change alarmism, has some credibility problems of its own. After polishing the project’s clouded lens, as one again examines Jordan’s question about whether “the most credible scientific assessment lies ... with the [IPCC] scientists ... or with the ... scientists collected for the Senate minority report,” the answer doesn’t appear to be such a no-brainer after all.

After more than sixty years of experimentation, researchers have failed to reach a consensus about the existence of psi (psychic ability). Some argue that there exists overwhelming evidence either for or against the psi hypothesis, while others believe that it simply isn’t possible to answer the question one way or the other. One of the main obstacles to closure on the psi question involves the way in which null results are viewed (Alcock 2003). Many parapsychologists have adopted a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to their work, viewing positive results as supportive of the psi hypothesis while ensuring that null results do not count as evidence against it.

Cherry-Picking New Procedures

Parapsychologists frequently create and test new experimental procedures in an attempt to produce laboratory evidence for psi. Most of these studies do not yield significant results. However, rather than being seen as evidence against the existence of psychic ability, such null findings are usually attributed to the experiment being carried out under conditions that are not psi-conducive. They are either never published (the “filedrawer effect,” see Douglas M. Stokes, “The Shrinking File­drawer,” SI, May/June 2001) or are quietly forgotten even if they make it into a journal or conference proceeding. Once in a while one of these studies produces significant results. Such studies frequently contain potential methodological artifacts, in part because they are using new procedures that have yet to be scrutinized by the research community. In addition, the evidential status of these positive findings is problematic to judge because they have emerged from a mass of nonsignificant studies. Nevertheless, they are more likely than nonsignificant studies to be presented at a conference or published in a journal, usually viewed by proponents as tentative evidence for psi, acting as a catalyst for further work.

To my knowledge, only one paper has revealed an insight into the potential scale of this problem. Watt (2006) summarized all of the psi-related final-year undergraduate projects that have been supervised by staff at Edinburgh University’s Koestler Parapsychology Unit between 1987 and 2007. Watt tracked down thirty-eight projects, twenty-seven of which predicted overall significant performance on a psi task with the remainder predicting significant differences between experimental conditions. The work examined a range of new and established procedures, including, for example, dowsing for a hidden penny, the psychokinetic control of a visual display of a balloon being driven by a fan onto spikes, presentiment of photographs depicting emotional facial expressions, detecting the emotional state of a sender in a telepathy experiment, ganzfeld studies, and card guessing. Interestingly, Watt’s paper also demonstrated a reporting bias. Only seven of the thirty-eight studies had made it into the public domain, presented as papers at conferences held by the Parapsychological Association. All of these papers had predicted overall significant performance on the psi task. There was a strong tendency for parapsychologists to make public those studies that had obtained positive findings, with just over 70 percent (five out of seven) of the studies presented at conferences showing an overall significant result, versus just 15 percent (three out of twenty) of those that remained unreported. Watt’s analysis, although informative, underestimates the total number of psi-related studies undertaken at Edinburgh University because it did not include projects undertaken by students prior to their final year, experiments run by postgraduate students and staff, or any work conducted before 1987. Multiply these figures by the number of parapsychologists who have conducted and supervised psi research across the world over the last sixty years or so, and the scale of the issue becomes apparent.

Explain Away Unsuccessful Attempted Replications

If a procedure seems to yield significant psi effects, additional follow-up studies using that procedure are conducted. Although these additional studies occasionally take the form of strict replications, they usually involve some form of variation. If these follow-up studies obtain significant results, they are often the subject of considerable debate: proponents argue that the findings represent evidence of psi, and skeptics scrutinize the work for possible methodological and statistical shortcomings. However, any failure to replicate can be attributed to the procedural modifications rather than to the nonexistence of psi. Perhaps the most far-reaching version of this “get out of a null effect free” card involves an appeal to the “experimenter effect,” wherein any negative findings are attributed to the psi-inhibited nature of the parapsychologist running the study.

This nullifying of null findings permeates parapsychological literature. For example, Kanthamani and Broughton (1994) report a large-scale attempt to replicate the alleged ganzfeld telepathy effect, wherein one participant (referred to as a receiver) experiences a mild form of sensory deprivation and is then asked to identify a target being viewed by another person (a sender) in a distant location. Parapsychologists have employed various types of targets in these experiments, including photographs and drawings (static targets) and video clips (dynamic targets). In the studies described by Kanthamani and Broughton, the target material consisted of randomly chosen pictures (mainly postcard-sized art prints). The project involved a huge amount of work: researchers ran a series of experiments over a six-year period and conducted more than 350 individual ganzfeld sessions. The studies yielded a nonsignificant cumulative effect. However, Kanthamani and Broughton spent no time discussing whether this null finding might act as evidence against the psi hypothesis and instead simply concluded that “it is probably safe to say that static picture targets remain a less than ideal choice for ganzfeld experiments.”

Once again, this process represents the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle. Successful replications are seen as evidence of psi, while null results are attributed to the non-psi-conducive conditions under which the replication was carried out.

Data Mining

In addition to explaining away null findings via allegedly failed procedural modifications, some parapsychologists also adopt an “any anomaly will do” attitude and data mine in an attempt to produce some kind of psi-related result. Although such post hoc data mining might help guide future work, it has little if any evidential value. Nevertheless, parapsychologists often present it as tentative evidence in support of the psi hypothesis.

Willin’s (1996) description of his ganzfeld psi studies presents a striking example of this process at work. Willin conducted one hundred ganzfeld sessions over a fifteen-month period, taking the unusual step of using musical clips as targets. The study obtained a nonsignificant result. However, rather than explore whether this null finding counts as evidence against the psi hypothesis, Willin conducted a series of post hoc analyses, exploring, for example, the relationship between participants’ psi scores and their age, profession, hobbies, previous paranormal experiences, and relationship with the person acting as the sender. Additional analyses explored psi scoring as a function of the month and time of day each trial was conducted. Most of these analyses yielded inconclusive results, but Willin eventually found that trials conducted early in the experiment obtained a higher hit rate than those conducted later and suggested that this might have been due to “less interest being shown by the Receivers and the Senders or by an unintentional goat effect being displayed by the Experimenter.”

This type of data mining again shows the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle in action, with any null effects being nullified by the apparent discovery of post hoc findings.

Meta-Analyses and Retrospective Data Selection

After several studies have been conducted using a new procedure, parapsychologists usually carry out some form of meta-analytic review of the work. If the combined outcome of the studies is significant, the meta-analysis is usually the subject of considerable debate, with proponents believing that the finding represents evidence of psi and skeptics arguing that it may have a normal explanation (including, for example, publication bias, inappropriate inclusion criteria, and poor methodology). However, if the cumulative effect is nonsignificant, parapsychologists often attribute this null effect to the non-psi-conducive procedural variations described in the preceding section.

Perhaps more important, the procedurally heterogeneous collection of studies usually presents parapsychologists with an opportunity to “explain away” overall null effects by retrospectively identifying a subset of studies that used a certain procedure and yielded a significant cumulative effect.

A striking illustration of this occurred in the late 1990s during a meta-analytic debate surrounding the ganzfeld psi studies. In 1999, Milton and Wiseman published a meta-analysis of all ganzfeld studies that were begun after 1987 and published by the start of 1997, and they noted that the cumulative effect was both small and nonsignificant (Milton and Wiseman 1999). Some parapsychologists criticized this analysis, arguing that they had included all of the ganzfeld studies conducted during this period and that they should have instead focused on those that had employed a “standard” procedure developed by parapsychologist Charles Honorton and his colleagues during a seminal set of ganzfeld studies conducted at the Psychophysical Research Laboratory (PRL) in the late 1980s. The difficulties with this approach became clear when researchers were unable to settle on what would constitute a “standard” set of procedures (Schmeidler and Edge 1999). Eventually, Bem, Palmer, and Broughton (2001) set out to tackle this issue experimentally, asking several people to rate the degree to which the studies in our analysis had employed Honorton’s “standard” ganzfeld procedure and then correlating their ratings against the effect size of each study. Rather than provide their own description of this “standard” procedure, Bem, Palmer, and Broughton had the raters read relevant sections in two previous papers describing the PRL studies. However, they also added a series of additional conditions, informing their raters, for example:

You should treat as standard the use of artistic or creative subject samples (as one of the most successful components of the PRL experiments used such a sample) or subjects having had previous psi experiences or having practiced a mental discipline such as meditation (as such subjects were shown to be the best scorers in the PRL experiments).

The addition of participant selection as an allegedly “standard” condition was not mentioned in the method section of either of the papers describing the PRL work. As such, it could be seen as an excellent example of retrospective data fitting, wherein parapsychologists decide which studies to analyze (or, in this instance, the weight assigned to them) on the basis of their known outcome.

Once again, it’s the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle. A significant overall effect is seen as evidence for psi while a null effect initiates post hoc searching for pockets of significance.

Decline Effects and Jumping Ship

The alleged psi effects associated with a certain procedure frequently have a curious habit of fading over the course of repeated experimentation. Skeptics argue that this is due to the parapsychologists identifying and minimizing potential methodological and statistical flaws over time. However, some parapsychologists have come up with creative ways of explaining away this potential threat, arguing that such decline effects are either an inherent property of psi or that psychic ability really does exist but is inversely related to the level of experimental controls employed in a study (see Kennedy 2003 for a review of this approach).

The decrease in alleged psi often causes some parapsychologists to abandon ship in search of a new procedure, placing them back at square one, ready to repeat history. This is not a new observation. For example, writing over thirty years ago, parapsychologist Joseph Gaither Pratt noted:

One could almost pick a date at random since 1882 and find in the literature that someone somewhere had recently obtained results described in terms implying that others should be able to confirm the findings.... One after another, however, the specific ways of working used in these initially successful psi projects have fallen out of favor and faded from the research scene—except for the latest investigations which, one may reasonably suppose, have not yet had enough time to falter and fade away as others before them have done. (Pratt 1978)

This constant “ship jumping” is one of the defining features of psi research, with new paradigms emerging every decade or so. Take, for example, the different trends in ESP research that have emerged over the years. Initial work, conducted between the early 1930s and late 1950s, primarily involved card guessing experiments in which people were asked to guess the identity of specially printed playing cards carrying one of five simple symbols. By the mid-1960s parapsychologists had realized that such studies were problematic to replicate and so turned their attention to dream telepathy and the possibility of participants predicting the outcome of targets selected by machines. In the mid 1970s and early 1980s, the ganzfeld experiments and remote viewing took over as dominant paradigms. In 1987, a major review of the area by parapsychologists K. Ramakrishna Rao and John Palmer argued that two sets of ESP studies provided the best evidence for the replicability of psi: the ganzfeld experiments and the differential ESP effect (wherein participants apparently score above chance in one condition of an experiment and below chance in another). More recently, parapsychologists have shifted their attention to alleged presentiment effects, wherein participants appear to be responding to stimuli before they are presented. Finally, there are now signs that the next new procedure is likely to adopt a neuropsychological perspective, focusing on EEG measurements or functional MRI scans as people complete psi tasks.

Conclusion

Parapsychologists have tended to adopt a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to their work, viewing positive results as supportive of the psi hypothesis while ensuring that null results do not count as evidence against it. This involves cherry-picking new procedures from a mass of chance results, varying any allegedly “successful” procedures and then blaming these variations for any lack of replication, searching for pockets of post hoc significance whenever a meta-analysis produces a null result, explaining away decline effects as an inherent property of psi, and finally jumping to the next new promising procedure. This giddy process results in an ambiguous dataset that, just like the classic optical illusion of the old hag and attractive young woman, never contains enough information to allow closure in one direction or the other.

To help the field move forward and rapidly reach closure on the psi question, parapsychologists need to make four important changes in the way they view null findings. First, they should stop trying lots of new procedures and cherry-picking those that seem to work and instead identify one or two that have already yielded the most promising results. Second, rather than varying procedures that appear successful, they should instead have a series of labs carry out strict replications that are both methodologically sound and incorporate the most psi-conducive conditions possible. Third, researchers should avoid the temptation for retrospective meta-analysis by pre-registering the key details involved in each of the studies. And finally, researchers need to stop jumping ship from one experimental procedure to another and instead have the courage to accept the null hypothesis if the selected front-runners don’t produce evidence of a significant and replicable effect.

I hope that this process will help consign the psi debate to the history books and parapsychologists will no longer find themselves sitting on the fence arguing the “there is enough evidence to justify further work but not enough to conclude one way or the other” position. Rather than nullify null results, experimenters should be brave enough to give it their best shot and finally discover whether psi actually exists.

References

• Alcock, J.E. 2003. Give the null hypothesis a chance: Reasons to remain doubtful about the existence of psi. In Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal, ed. J. Alcock, J. Burns, and A. Freeman, 29–50. Charlottes­ville, VA: Imprint Academic.
• Bem, D.J., J. Palmer, and R.S. Broughton. 2001. Updating the ganzfeld database: A victim of its own success? Journal of Parapsychology 65: 207–218.
• Kennedy, J.E. 2003. The capricious, actively evasive, unsustainable nature of psi: A summary and hypotheses. Journal of Parapsychology 67: 53–74.
• Kanthamani, H., and R.S. Broughton. 1994. Institute for Parapsychology ganzfeld-ESP experiments: The manual series. Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 37th annual convention, 182–189.
• Milton, J., and R. Wiseman. 1999. Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin 125: 387–391.
• Pratt, J.G. 1978. Prologue to a debate: Some assumptions relevant to research in parapsychology. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72: 127–139.
• Rao, K.R., and J.R. Palmer. 1987. The anomaly called psi: Recent research and criticism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 539–51.
• Schmeidler, G.R., and H. Edge. 1999. Should ganzfeld research continue to be crucial in the search for a replicable psi effect? Part II. Edited ganzfeld debate. Journal of Parapsychology 63: 335–388.
• Watt, C. 2006. Research assistants or budding scientists? A review of 96 undergraduate student projects at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit. Journal of Parapsychology 70: 335–356.
• Willin, M. J. 1996. A ganzfeld experiment using musical targets. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 61: 1–17.

Alternative practitioners constantly claim that conventional medicine treats only symptoms while they treat underlying causes. They’ve got it backwards.

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.

Although there has been some progress in the war on cancer initiated by President Nixon in 1971, the gains have been limited.

In 1971, President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. Since then, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort (Kolata 2009b). What have we gained from that huge investment? David Nathan, a well-known professor and administrator, maintains in his book The Cancer Treatment Revolution (2007) that we have made substantial progress. However, he greatly overestimates the potential of the newer so-called “smart drugs.” Re­searchers Psyrri and De Vita (2008) also claim important progress. However, they cherry-pick the cancers with which there has been some progress and do not discuss the failures. Moreover, they only discuss the last decade rather than a more balanced view of 1950 or 1975 to the present.

On the other hand, Gina Kolata pointed out in The New York Times that the cancer death rate, adjusted for the size and age of the population, has decreased by only 5 percent since 1950 (Kolata 2009a). She argues that there has been very little overall progress in the war on cancer.

In this article, I will focus on adult cancer, since child cancer makes up less than 1 percent of all cancer diagnosed. I will then place the facts in proper perspective after an overview of the epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment (especially with smart drugs) of adult cancer in the United States.

The Cancer Facts

Figure 1 shows the ten biggest killers in the United States in 2006. Cancer (23 percent) has almost caught up with heart disease. Figure 2 shows the death rates from cancer in men and women (adjusted for the size and age of the population) since 1975; the cancer death rates have declined in men but not in women. The decline in men is largely due to fewer lung cancer deaths in men due to less smoking (see figure 3). However, there were about 200,000 more deaths from cancer in 2006 than 1975 because of the substantial increase in the U.S. population.

These summary statistics show that the war on cancer has not gone well. This is in marked contrast to death rates from stroke and cardiovascular disease (adjusted for the age and size of the population), which have fallen by 74 percent and 64 percent, respectively, from 1950 through 2006; and by 60 percent and 52 percent, respectively, from 1975 through 2006 (Kolata 2009a). These excellent results against stroke and heart disease are mainly due to improvements in drug therapy, especially the control of high blood pressure to prevent stroke and the use of statins, aspirin, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, and ACE inhibitors (now all generic) to prevent and treat heart disease. Cancer therapy is clearly decades behind. However, these data conceal a great deal of useful information and do not provide guidance on how to make progress against cancer.

Methodological Issues

To understand the issues, we must describe a few statistical traps and define our terms (see table 1). For example, there are several types of detection bias. First, if one discovers a malignant tumor very early and starts therapy immediately, even if the therapy is worthless, it will appear that the patient lives longer than a second patient (with an identical tumor) treated with another worthless drug if the cancer in the second patient was detected later. Second, detection bias can also occur with small tumors, especially of the breast and prostate, that would not harm the patient if left untreated but can lead to unnecessary and sometimes mutilating therapy. Another type is publication bias, whereby positive studies (especially those funded by the pharmaceutical industry) tend to be published while negative studies do not.

What is cancer? Cancer is a large group of diseases characterized by the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells locally, regionally, and/or distantly (metastatically) (American Cancer Society 2009). A carcinoma (cancer) in situ is a small cancer that has not invaded the local tissue. Some cancers grow very slowly, and the patient may survive for ten years or more with minimal treatment. Other cancers (e.g., lung and pancreas) grow quickly and, even today, kill more than half of the patients in less than one year (see table 2) (American Cancer Society 2009). The therapy for cancer is generally surgery, if possible, and/or chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy. Chemo­therapy aims to kill the cancer cells, but most chemotherapeutic drugs are nonspecific and also kill sensitive normal cells, especially in the intestine and bone marrow. Radiation therapy is also nonspecific. In chemotherapy and radiation therapy, a partial response is defined as shrinkage of the tumor in each dimension by 50 percent; a complete response means no detectable tumor, but this does not necessarily mean a “cure.” Many complete responses are only transitory. Median survival is the length of time in which one-half of the patients in a cohort die.

What Do We Know about Cancer?

The “causes” of cancer are shown in table 3 (American Cancer Society 2009), though there is still much we don’t know. For example, we do not know exactly how smoking causes cancer; in most cases, we do not know how “acquired” mutations cause cancer. In some cancers, there are more than five hundred identifiable genetic abnormalities—no one knows which one(s), if any, is “causative” (Downing 2009). The importance of epigenetic changes is currently speculative. It is quite possible that there is a completely unknown causal mechanism in many cancers.

The diagnosis of cancer today is relatively straightforward with imaging techniques (x-ray, CAT, MRI, PET) and biopsies that are subjected to routine histology, electron microscopy, and immunological techniques.

Cancer Therapy

To have a reasonable discussion of cancer therapy, we need to agree on the objectives of therapy (Fojo and Grady 2009), as shown in table 4. Everyone agrees that meaningful prolongation of life, preferably complete surgical removal of the tumor and cure, is a high priority. The treatment should also improve the quality of life. But, as is well known, many chemotherapeutic and radiation regimens cause mild to devastating—even fatal—side effects. Nathan (2007) compares conventional chemotherapy to “carpet-bombing,” an extreme but realistic metaphor. Finally, the results of a cost-benefit analysis must be reasonable (Fojo and Grady 2009). (In some cases, justifiably and importantly, chemotherapy and/or radiation and/or other drugs are used as palliative measures exclusively to counter symptoms from the disease [e.g., pleural effusions in the chest cavity or bone pain] or from the treatments [e.g., vomiting, mucositis, low white blood counts, heart failure, nerve damage, diarrhea, and/or inflammation of the bladder]). In the final analysis, what counts are the criteria in table 4. Partial or even complete remissions, unless they prolong life and/or improve the overall quality of life at a reasonable cost, are scientifically interesting but of little use to the patient.

Currently there are a few metastatic cancers that can sometimes be cured with chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, but unfortunately these cures make up a very small percentage of the whole cancer problem. These cancers include testicular cancer, choriocarcinoma, Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and rare cases of breast and ovarian cancer. A few cancers can be made into chronic diseases that require daily treatment, e.g., chronic myelogenous leukemia.

Returning to table 2, lung cancer, the most common cancer, is a devastating disease; if the surgeon cannot totally remove it, the diagnosis is grim. In fact, about 60 percent of lung cancer patients are dead within one year of diagnosis with the best available therapy, and only 15 percent survive five years.

There has been some progress in the death rate from colo­rectal cancer (figures 4 and 5), especially in women. This is mainly due to earlier diagnosis and surgical therapy.

Cancer of the breast is often a slow cancer and has a five- to ten-year median survival rate with just surgical therapy. As can be seen in figure 5, there has been a modest decline in death rates from breast cancer since 1975. It is worth noting that currently, if the breast cancer is metastatic, five-year survival is only 27 percent (American Cancer Society 2009). However, breast cancer presents a serious dilemma. Early detection of invasive breast cancer by screening is good; however, about 62,000 cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) are also discovered every year (American Cancer Society 2009). In greater than 50 percent of these women, especially older women, these lesions will not progress and do not need treatment. However, it is difficult to predict who will not need therapy, so the American Cancer Society (2009) recommends all patients with DCIS undergo therapy—generally breast surgery. Thus, more than thirty thousand patents annually are unnecessarily treated (Evans et al. 2009). We need to figure out which DCIS are harmless in order to avoid unnecessary treatment. On balance, I feel that breast cancer screening has a small but positive net benefit (Esserman et al. 2009).

Pancreatic cancer is devastating (see table 2 and figures 4 and 5), and little progress has been made against it since 1975. Pancreatic cancer is very challenging because the tumors are surrounded by dense fibrous connective tissue with few blood vessels (Olson and Hanahan 2009). Because of this, it is difficult to deliver drugs to pancreatic tumors. Moreover, this explains in part why chemotherapy is so ineffective for pancreatic cancer (see table 2). Better animal models are needed.

Prostate cancer mortality has declined slightly since 1975 with an unexplained increase in the mid-1990s (see figure 4). But prostate cancer therapy also presents a serious quandary. At autopsy, approximately 30 percent (or more) of men have cancer foci in their prostate glands, yet only 1 to 2 percent of men die of prostate cancer. Thus less than 10 percent of prostate cancer patients require treatment. This presents a serious dilemma: whom should the physician treat? Moreover, recently, two large studies of prostate cancer screening with prostate specific antigen (PSA) have seriously questioned the utility of screening. In one study, the investigators had to screen over a thousand men before they saved one life. This led t o about fifty “false positive” patients who often underwent surgery and/or radiation therapy unnecessarily (Schröder et al. 2009). The second study, conducted in the United States, was negative (Andriole et al. 2009), i.e., no lives were saved due to the screening, but many of the screening-positive patients with prostate cancer were treated. Welch and Albertson (2009) and Brawley (2009) estimate that more than a million men in the U.S. have been unnecessarily treated for prostate cancer between 1986 and 2005, due to over-diagnostic PSA screening tests. In the end, screening for prostate cancer will not be useful until methods are developed to determine which prostate cancers detected by screening will harm the patient (Welch and Albertson 2009; Brawley 2009). Many men—especially elderly ones—with a histological diagnosis of prostate cancer elect “watchful waiting” with no therapy, a rational strategy (Esserman et al. 2009).

There are many other things we do not understand about cancer—even on a phenomenological level. For example, in the United States, the incidence and death rates from cancer of the stomach have fallen dramatically since 1930 (see figures 4 and 5). The reason for this is unknown but may be due to changes in food preservation; it is not due to treatment.

Smart Drugs

David Nathan (2007) extols the virtues and potential of the new “smart drugs.” Smart drugs are defined as drugs that focus on a particular vulnerability of the cancer; they are not generalized but rather specific toxins. But the Journal of the American Medical Association (Health Agencies Update 2009) reports that 90 percent of the drugs or biologics approved by the FDA in the past four years for cancer (many of them smart drugs) cost more than $20,000 for twelve weeks of therapy, and many offer a survival benefit of only two months or less (Fojo and Grady 2009). Let us take bevacizumab (Avastin), the ninth largest selling drug in America ($4.8 billion in 2008), costing about $8,000 per month per patient (Keim 2008). Bevacizumab, a putative smart drug, is an intravenous man-made antibody that blocks the action of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEFG). It sometimes works because tumors (and normal tissues) release VEFG to facilitate small blood vessel in-growth into the tumor. These small blood vessels “nourish” the tumor (or normal tissue). The idea is to “starve” the growing tumor with once or twice monthly intravenous injections of bevacizumab.

The FDA has approved bevacizumab for the cancers listed in table 5 (Physicians Desk Reference [PDR] 2009; Health Agencies Update 2009). Since the median survival of colorectal cancer is eighteen months, bevacizumab therapy would cost about $144,000 (in such a patient) for four months prolongation of survival (Keim 2008). In the other cancers in table 4, there is no prolongation of survival. Moreover, bevacizumab can have terrible side effects, including gastrointestinal perforations, serious bleeding, severe hypertension, clot formation, and delayed wound healing (PDR 2009). By the criteria in table 4, bevacizumab is at best a marginal drug. It only slightly prolongs life, demonstrable only in colorectal cancer, has serious side effects, and is very expensive.

Bevacizumab is frequently cited as an example of the so-called newer smart drugs. But by interfering with small blood vessel growth throughout the body, it is a nonspecific toxin—and hence has serious side effects. It is not so different from the older non-specific chemotherapy.

The use of bevacizumab and similar drugs raises another issue. According to Gina Kolata, 60 to 80 percent of oncologists’ revenue comes from infusion of anti-cancer drugs in their offices. Many believe that such economic incentives are the reason for the substantial overuse of expensive chemotherapeutic drugs (Kolata 2009c). However, it is very difficult to document the extent of the overuse of cancer chemotherapy. Does it make sense to employ such expensive drugs that do not prolong life (see table 5) and have such serious side effects (Fojo and Grady 2009)? Moreover, although VEGF and bevacizumab are interesting science, there has been gross exaggeration of bevacizumab’s clinical utility in the press (see tables 4 and 5).

So why does the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve bevacizumab (and other drugs) that do not improve longevity and/or the quality of life (see table 5)? The answer is that bevacizumab coupled with other drugs can cause partial remissions, “stabilization” of the cancer, or “lack of progression” for several months. However, this often does not lead to prolongation of life in most of the cancers in table 5. Moreover, many patients pay a heavy price in terms of side effects and cost. It is also worth noting that several European national regulatory authorities do not accept the utility of some of these smart drugs and do not license them for sale in their countries. In agreement with the Europeans, scientists at the U.S. National Cancer Institute are urging the oncology community, regulators, and the public to set limits on the use and pricing of such marginal drugs (Fojo and Grady 2009). They view the current situation as unsustainable.

Why Has the War on Cancer Failed?

As documented above, unlike the successes against heart disease and stroke, the war on cancer, after almost forty years, must be deemed a failure with a few notable exceptions (Watson 2009). Why? Is it because cancer is an incredibly tough problem, or are there other explanations? In table 6, I have listed six reasons for the failure, although there is little doubt that effective, safe therapy of the various cancers is a difficult problem.

Where Should We Go from Here?

In my view the principal problem is that we just do not understand the causes of most cancers. We don’t even know if the problem is genetic or epigenetic or something totally unknown. In theory, problems 2 through 6 in table 6 are all correctable with political and scientific will and more knowledge. Even though we know cancer of the lung is caused by cigarette smoking, we do not know the mechanism, and (except for surgery) we do not know how to meaningfully intervene (see table 2). The pharmaceutical industry cannot make real progress until we understand the mechanisms and molecular causes of cancer so that industrial, academic, and governmental scientists have rational targets for intervention. We will make no progress if there are five hundred or more genetic abnormalities in a single cancer cell. Where would one begin?

What Should We Do Now?

We can still do a lot even today (see table 7). Smoking and hormone replacement therapy are a cause of lung and breast cancer, respectively, and should be stopped or minimized. For hepatitis B (which causes over 50 percent of liver cancer) (Chang et al. 2009) and papilloma virus (which causes almost all cervical cancer and some anal and mouth cancers), we can vaccinate with vaccines that are essentially 100 percent effective. Helicobacter (the probable cause of some stomach cancer) can be easily eliminated with antibiotics. Prophylactic finasteride and tamoxifen (both generic) can decrease prostate and breast cancer, respectively (in high risk patients). We must also decrease alcohol intake (liver and esophageal cancer) and obesity. Obesity is associated with increased cancer risk but the mechanism, if causal, is obscure (Dobson 2009).

We can screen for cervical, colorectal, and breast cancer, although the value of breast cancer screening is not clear (due to overdiagnosis), as I discussed above (Singer 2009). How­ever, in my view, the benefit of breast cancer screening slightly outweighs the harm. For example, if DCIS treatment could be rationalized and provided only to those who need it, breast cancer screening would then be unarguably useful. All attempts to screen for lung cancer, even in smokers, have so far been futile (Infante et al. 2009).

If all these recommendations were followed, we could cut cancer deaths in half. Moreover, with better mechanistic understanding of cancer, we could make truly “smart” drugs, as has been done in recent years for atherosclerosis (heart attacks), hypertension (strokes), gastrointestinal diseases (ulcers), and AIDS—with truly remarkable results. Let us hope cancer is next.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Michiko Spector for her help in preparation of this manuscript and Dr. June Spector for her critical reading of the manuscript.

Tables / Figures

References

• American Cancer Society. 2009. Cancer Facts and Figures 2009. p.1–38.
• Andriole, G.L., R.L. Grubb III, S.S. Buys, et al. 2009. Mortality results from a randomized prostate-cancer screening trial. New England Journal of Medicine 360: 1310–1319.
• Brawley, O.W. 2009. Prostate cancer screening: Is this a teachable moment? Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1295–1297.
• Chang, M-H, S-L You, and C-J Chen, et al. 2009. Decreased incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma in hepatitis B vaccinees: A 20-year follow-up study. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1348–1355.
• Dobson, R. 2009. Obesity is risk factor in 70,000 European cases of cancer a year. British Medical Journal 39: 316.
• Downing, J.R. 2009. Cancer genomes—continuing progress. New England Journal of Medicine 361: 1111–1112.
• Esserman, L., Y. Shieh, and I. Thompson. 2009. Rethinking screening for breast and prostate cancer. Journal of the American Medical Association 302: 1685–1692.
• Evans, A., E. Cornford, and J. James. 2009. Overdiagnosis of breast cancer. British Medical Journal 339: b3256.
• Fojo, T., and C. Grady. 2009. How much is life worth: Cetuximab, non-small cell lung cancer, and the $440 billion question. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1044–1048.
• Health Agencies Update. 2009. Journal of the American Medical Association 302: 838.
• Infante, M., S. Cavuto, F.R. Lutman, et al. 2009. A randomized study of lung cancer screening with spiral computed tomography. American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicene 180: 445–453.
• Keim, B. 2008. Wired.com, February 28.
• Kolata, G. 2009a. In long drive to cure cancer, advances have been elusive. The New York Times, April 24.
• ———. 2009b. Playing it safe in cancer research. The New York Times, June 28.
• ———. 2009c. Lack of study volunteers is said to hobble fight against cancer. The New York Times, August 3.
• Nathan, D.G. 2007. The Cancer Treatment Revolution. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
• Olson, P., and D. Hanahan. 2009. Breaching the cancer fortress. Science 324: 1400–1401.
• Physicians Desk Reference. 2009. Montvale, NJ: Thomson Reuters.
• Psyrri, A., and V.T. DeVita. 2008. The impact of research on the cancer problem: Looking back, moving forward. In: Everyone’s Guide to Cancer Therapy (5th ed.), 349–359. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing.
• Schröder, F.H., J. Hugosson, M.J. Roobol, et al. 2009. Screening and prostate-cancer mortality in a randomized European study. New England Journal of Medicine 360: 1320–1328.
• Singer, N. 2009. In push for cancer screening, limited benefits. The New York Times, July 17.
• Watson, J. 2009. To fight cancer, know the enemy. The New York Times, August 6.
• Welch, H.G., and P.C. Albertson. 2009. Prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment after introduction of prostate-specific antigen screening: 1986–2005. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1325–1329.

The California Board of Registered Nursing (CBRN) oversees and licenses more than 350,000 registered nurses in the Golden State.¹ Nurses in California must complete thirty hours of continuing education units (CEUs) every two years to remain licensed. These units must be issued by certified CEU providers and “must be relevant to the practice of nursing.”² The courses may, however, be related to topics as varied as “social and behavioral sciences . . . therapeutic interpersonal relationship skills. . .and nursing administration.”³

There is no ongoing reporting mechanism to keep track of each individual’s CEUs. Nurses comply based on the honor system but are expected to submit proof of coursework if requested. Correspondence courses can qualify for credit, and the board requires little substantiation that anything has been learned.⁴

A Tectonic-sized Crack in the System

The Independent Investigations Group (IIG) at the Center for Inquiry/Los Angeles has been an active skeptics group since January 2000. When we at the IIG learned that a nursing CEU provider called Clearsight was offering credits for a class in “energetic medicine,” we investigated. “Energetic medicine” is Clearsight’s name for therapeutic touch (TT), the manipulation of alleged energy fields such as chakras and auras over the body. (The practitioner’s hands make no actual contact with the patient.) Clearsight advertised that they were licensed by the state of California to teach the following to registered nurses:

The skills of “seeing energy” to see and diagnose body organs; to scan the physical and energetic bodies for dis-harmonies or illness; and to heal the aura and chakras, the energetic systems of the body.

Clearsight introduces you to the skills of Free Will, the art of energy diagnosis, how to make Separations from your Healee so you do not take another person’s energy or dis-ease home and how to release old patterns and stuck energy in your body and auric field. When you use Clearsight healing skills you clear and clean the entire energy field (chakras, channels and aura) and grow and evolve evenly at the rate of growth you are ready to access.⁵

Our shock at discovering that such a pseudoscientific course had been sanctioned by an ostensibly scientific government agency led us to inquire about Clearsight’s application. Had Clearsight defrauded the CBRN in order to cash in on the CEU market?

Sacramento, We Have a Problem

After some prodding to remind the CBRN that Clearsight’s provider application was public record, the IIG received a copy of the application and discovered that it was blank in some places and that the instructor’s educational credentials consisted of a BA in comparative religion and a ministerial certificate from the Church of Divine Man a psychic institute that offers healings, psychic readings, and other such activities.⁶ The application also made the unsubstantiated claim that “medical science has recognized and quantified the existence of a human energy field which, when blocked, may result in a broad range of physical and psychological ailments.”⁷

From January to May 2006, IIG investigators had a frustrating series of exchanges with the nursing board. Initially, we asked that they withdraw Clearsight’s certification to teach energetic medicine based on the omissions in the application and the lack of supporting medical value for the practices being taught. We naively thought that after we pointed out these (what we thought were stunning) revelations, the board would recognize their oversight and withdraw Clearsight’s certification to teach New Age malarkey. We had no idea our odyssey was just beginning.

In a February 2006 letter, then CBRN Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry wrote to IIG investigator Owen Hammer that “nurses . . . need to be informed about these techniques in order to understand the patient’s/client’s perspective and learn what is involved in each technique.”⁸

IIG Chair James Underdown addressed the board personally in May and June of 2006 and argued that Clearsight’s course was not a class about energetic healing; it was a course teaching (i.e., endorsing) energetic healing, an unscientific concept. The IIG submitted a proposed rewrite of the current rules that would help prevent future lapses in science standards.

The current rules say (in effect) that content must be relevant to the practice of nursing, related to scientific knowledge, or related to client care.⁹ Our proposed change was that content must be relevant, scientific, and related to client care. We also submitted a clause clarifying the definition of scientific and a change providing for automatic withdrawal of certification from CEU providers who give false information on an application.

The IIG then contacted the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees nursing regulations, and received a reply in July 2006 that defended the granting of Clearsight’s certification. In August 2006, Underdown addressed the board’s Education/Licensing Committee in Sacramento. There, the IIG was informed¹⁰ that the board will “award a CE Provider number to the applicant if the alternative or complementary medicine modality is discussed in the publication Best Practices in Alternative and Complementary Medicine¹¹

Best Practices, which would be key to our investigation, is a hard-to-find publication that is regarded by the board as its guidepost to educational policy. It contains sections on TT, magnet therapy, Reiki, aromatherapy, homeopathy, and qigong. The material on these topics is highly credulous¹² despite poor scientific support and wide criticism in the Skeptical Inquirer and other journals. The board nevertheless defended the licensure of energetic medicine classes and other alternative medical practices by citing Best Practices as an acceptable standard.

After an exhaustive search, we found Best Practices in a library and carefully read the sections that dealt with TT. We then crafted a comprehensive, well-documented refutation of Best Practices’s TT claims and sent copies of this refutation to each board member. This was in addition to literature we had already given the board, including material from Robert Park’s SI piece “Alternative Medicine and the Laws of Physics”¹³; “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch”¹⁴ by Linda Rosa, Emily Rosa, Larry Sarner, and Stephen Barrett (in TheJournal of the American Medical Association and Kevin Courcey’s “Further Notes on Therapeutic Touch,” which is available online at www.Quackwatch.org.

Oddly enough, Rosa et al’s JAMA paper was cited in the Best Practices literature despite the fact that it elegantly refutes claims that TT works!

The board promised to consider our suggested changes to the regulations, but we never heard from them or saw any sign that the item was listed on any subsequent board agenda or addressed at any meeting. We were stonewalled.

You Want Crazy? You Got It!

We then decided to see for ourselves just how lax California’s CEU provider application process really is. We created a CEU provider called the California Foundation for Institutional Care or CFI-Care and sent an application with the $200 fee to the CBRN. We called our course “Feng Shui for Home Care Providers” and listed IIG investigator Karen Kensek as the instructor because she teaches architecture at the University of Southern California and thus meets the qualifications of a certified instructor. But we didn’t stop there.

The following sections appear on our application for this course aimed at professional nurses:

1. Möbel Kinesiology (Möbel is the German word for furniture, so möbel kinesiology is, essentially, furniture moving.)
2. Feng Shui (a practice in which a structure or site is chosen or configured so as to harmonize with its qi, or life energy)
3. Chinese ShŽy—u (translation: snake oil)
4. Vapor and Reflective Surfaces (another way to say smoke and mirrors)
5. Apophenia (the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data)
6. Anthropomancy (divination through human entrails)
7. Canupiary Flexibility (The word canupiary exists in no language we could find. We made it up.)

When the unfamiliar content on our application was initially questioned, we simply pointed out that the sections we proposed were consistent with material found in Best Practices, the board’s own gold standard for educational content. They would either have to certify CFI-Care or reject Best Practices.

CFI-Care was certified as Continuing Education Provider #15166 on August 28, 2008. We were officially in the for-profit business of teaching wacky ideas to professional nurses.

Feng Shui for Nurses: The Class

After much discussion about how to use our newfound state-sanctioned authority to disseminate false information, we decided to teach the class as-applied-for at the Center for Inquiry/Los Angeles. Part of the class would include revealing our motives to embarrass the CBRN into recognizing the flaws in its continuing education system. We certainly wouldn’t want to see a class like “Feng Shui for Home Care Providers” taught for real.

In late March 2009, we issued press releases announcing that we would be teaching this state-approved class for the first time. We invited nurses, the press, and any other concerned citizens interested in the state’s healthcare status. We even offered nurses free entry, free coffee, and two hours of CEU credit for attending.

But the board had one more roadblock to throw in front of us. Days after publicizing the class to the world, we received a letter (dated March 27, 2009) from CBRN Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry stating that our certification had been “issued in error” and was now rescinded. We found it interesting that it took the CBRN eight months to discover this (as yet unnamed) error and only after our extensive publicity campaign spotlighting the folly of their approval.

We taught the class anyway, with no promise of CEUs, to an amazed and incredulous crowd. The handful of nurses who attended the class with around seventy-five others were appalled that the class’s ludicrous content had been approved by the board. Jim Underdown reaching into an anatomically correct rubber corpse and flinging an armful of bloody latex entrails onto the stage to read the future was particularly memorable.

As of late July 2009, our inquiries into the reason for the revocation have been ignored.

Arnold Terminates the Board

On July 13, 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger replaced six of the seven appointed members of the CBRN.¹⁵ The following day, CBRN Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry resigned. It seems that while the board was taking its time responding to our objections over the teaching of pseudoscience, it was also taking its time (an average of three to five years, according to the nonprofit news organization ProPublica) investigating and closing complaints against nurses. The Los Angeles Times and ProPublica reported last fall that nurses with serious or multiple criminal convictions kept their licenses for years before the board acted against them.

We should note that the former board was not unanimously against our efforts and that the IIG is not taking sides regarding the replacement of the California Board of Registered Nursing. We are hopeful that the new board will take this opportunity to reexamine its continuing education polices. We will petition them to support high scientific standards in the care of California residents. Nurses and patients both deserve the best information scientific medicine can provide. l

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable help and dedication of the rest of the IIG with special thanks to Karen Kensek, Jim Newman, Jerry Buchanan, Wendy Hughes, and Bernie Eisenberg. They would also like to thank Linda Rosa, RN, and Wally Sampson, MD, for their advice and guidance throughout this investigation.

Notes

1. http://www.rn.ca.gov/about_us/whatisbrn.shtml.
2. California Code of Regulations, Title 16, Division 14, Article 5, Section 1456.
3. Ibid.
4. CME Resource Catalogue 2009.
5. www.clearsightaura.com/index.php?topic=engmed (accessed July 20, 2009).
6. See their Web site at http://www.c-d-m.org/.
7. Clearsight application for certification as a provider of continuing education units in the State of California, 1994. Page 1.
8. Letter to IIG investigator Owen Hammer from CBRN Executive Director Ruth Ann Terry, February 2, 2006.
9. Paraphrasing of “Nursing Practice Act with Rules and Regulations,” section 1456.
10. Language copied from the official minutes for the California Board of Registered Nursing Education/Licensing Committee meeting on August 31, 2006.
11. Formally, Best Practices in Complementary and Alternative Medicine: An Evidence-Based Approach with Nursing CE/CME by Lynda W. Freeman. Aspen Publishers 2001.
12. The studies cited had no control group, were not blinded, were never replicated, were conducted in secret, or actually disproved the efficacy of TT.
13. Skeptical Inquirer September/October 1997.
14. JAMA 1998.
15. http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/12803/.

I doubt it. These men had the laudable ambition to organize leading thinkers and social critics to respond authoritatively to growing trends of credulity in society: increased belief in the power of psychics, the phenomenon of Uri Geller, UFO beliefs, ancient astronaut theories, popular belief in ghost hauntings and channeling, faith healers and religious charlatans, and the like.

The founders of CSICOP succeeded admirably by many measures: they published magazines and books, spoke out in the entertainment and news media (including on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which repeatedly featured CSICOP founders), and convened national and regional conferences for subscribers.

But I submit that they didn’t plan a movement from the start. The movement grew organically around the ideas that CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer, and later other skeptical organizations and magazines, promoted.

Within about a decade of the Skeptical Inquirer’s launch, the members of the educated public who subscribed found that it wasn’t enough for them to get a magazine about skepticism in the mail four or six times per year. So
CSICOP helped found local skeptical organizations, often at the behest of subscribers in a given area, initially drawing from CSICOP’s own magazine subscriber lists. Groups were formed in the Washington, DC, and Los Angeles regions and in a number of other cities around the U.S. and abroad. A movement, not merely a magazine, was beginning to form.

In recent years, new developments in technology and society have allowed this skeptical movement to reach out in new directions, sometimes departing from tested ways of advancing the skeptical outlook that have worked in the past. This is the next generation of skepticism. This is Skepticism 2.0.

New Media for New Audiences

Often citing inspiration from the founders of CSI, an “average Joe” skeptical citizen, possibly without special training or background in skepticism and with the help of only a computer connected to the Internet, can reach out to an audience that the skeptical magazines and organizations never would have reached just a few years ago. Blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow anyone—including skeptics and believers—to advance a point of view to the wider public.

Promise and Problems of Skepticism 2.0

Podcasts such as the New England Skeptical Society’s Skeptics Guide to the Universe, online communities such as the one found at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Web site, and blogs such as Rebecca Watson’s Skepchick.org shine as examples of Skepticism 2.0, as do amateur skeptical projects such as Tim Farley’s WhatstheHarm.net and the growing SkeptiCamp events started by Reed Esau. But local individuals and groups using the Internet to reach out to and inform the public about skepticism can do only so much.

The national organizations, such as CSI, offer an opportunity for inspired local activists and groups to avoid “reinventing the wheel” and may provide valuable promotional and underwriting support of important new local projects, as well as offer expertise on various skeptical topics (Joe Nickell’s work comes to mind). Even more important is the professionalizing of the movement, which the national organizations allow for and encourage. A case in point is skeptical campus outreach: a national organization, with the support of donors and a paid staff, can impact campuses in joint effort with local activists in ways that neither can do alone.

Skepticism’s cultural competitors (purveyors of “woo woo,” as James Randi would call them)—the New Age movement, alternative medicine hucksters, UFOlogists, etc.—often draw on the resources and organizational power of national groups devoted to pushing those agendas. The same should be true of the next generation of the skeptical movement, Skepticism 2.0.

Skeptics in the Pub and the Future of Skepticism

Over the last few years, fueled primarily by Internet outreach through social networking Web sites, Skeptics in the Pub and similar activities (skeptical meet-ups and Facebook groups, etc.) have cropped up in dozens of cities, often independent of preexisting local or national skeptical organizations.

What happens when these groups grow and their members want to “take it to the next level”? New local groups are formed with structure, leadership, and programs. Money is raised, membership programs are created, and if all goes well staff is hired and buildings are bought. In other words, new national organizations may grow out of the local and independent projects of Skepticism 2.0. But is that the best path to plot if the movement is to be plotted and planned?

I think a better model is for independent local projects—the successful examples of Skepticism 2.0—to find organizational homes. When they need resources, they should look to the long-standing local and national organizations for support. They should be part of the organized skeptical movement, not outside of and apart from it.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Where did people come from?”

“You mean babies? Well, um, first the man takes his penis and . . .”

“No, no, I mean the very first people. Where did the first people on Earth come from?”

I was dumbfounded. What could I say? I knew this moment was coming and yet was completely unprepared. I would be more than happy to discuss sex with him, but evolution? How could I explain evolution to my three-year-old when I myself was fuzzy on the process? I was, after all, the product of the South Carolina public education system.

And that is when I said the worst possible thing any parent can say to a child asking about this controversial subject. No, I did not tell him that we came from God or that we were planted here millennia ago as an extraterrestrial experiment. I told him something much, much worse.

“Baby, one day monkeys turned into people.”

Skepticism is a worldview that has come to me slowly over the years, under less than illustrious circumstances. Although I had been an atheist for years, I was not practicing critical thinking and had never heard of skepticism. Due to hormonally-based “appreciation” of a certain skeptical magician, I began to listen to the now-defunct Penn Radio show. One of his guests was Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. After hearing Phil on the show, I went to his blog and was hooked. With Penn and Phil acting as the gateway drugs of skepticism, I quickly found myself needing harder and harder fixes. I listened to Point of Inquiry and Skepticality, read the blog of P.Z. Myers, and devoured the writings of both Richard Dawkins and Neil de Grasse Tyson. Ultimately, I went to the source of the love and appreciation of science and critical thinking for many of us in the movement, the works of Carl Sagan. He was my heroin of skepticism. There was no going back to the dark for this small-town Southern girl. I had become a full-blown skeptic.

Although being a skeptic usually involves many, if not all, aspects of a person’s life, turning the skeptical lens on our personal lives is sure to bring attention to the most sacred of cows. How do you put critical thinking into practice without losing friends and alienating family? Although my husband and I had agreed to raise our children without religion, I found myself wanting to go even further. I wanted to help my children develop critical thinking skills I had only recently acquired myself.

Why Parent at All?

Many of the skeptical parents I talked with came to skepticism after having children and admitted that choosing to become a parent was not always a rational decision. Even for those of us who planned our parenthood, many of us did it because it just “felt right” or seemed like the “right next step” in our life plan. Though not logical, our love for children and desire to have them was reason enough. Sara Rosinsky of Lakeland, Florida, admits that choosing to have a child was a “bit of a leap of faith,” an approach that can be quite foreign to many skeptics. Jason and Kim Bilotta of Punta Gorda, Florida, said that although they discussed the pros and cons of having children, they are not entirely sure if the decision could be considered rational.

Of course, having children greatly reduces free time available for skeptic-related activities. Blogs, books, and magazine articles can get pushed to the wayside after the arrival of children, and funds that would go to registration at the Amaz!ng Meeting or a Center for Inquiry conference often go for private school tuition or medical care (not that I am bitter). In fact, it is not surprising to this author that many of the most prolific writers/activists/members of this movement are either women without small children or men.

Raising Skeptics

Once parenthood is achieved—by choice or by happenstance—the challenge of raising a child to be a critical thinker begins. So many of us were indoctrinated with a religious or political worldview as children and want nothing more than to avoid indoctrination in our own families. So what should the goal be? Are we trying to raise a flock of miniature James Randi clones? Do we want to tell our children what skepticism says the world is or, as Jeff Wagg, communications director for the James Randi Educational Foundation, says, accept that “the process teaches kids to think about things.” Critical thinking and science are tools to learn about the world, and teaching our children to correctly use these tools will help them not only to understand the true nature of the world but be the innovators and visionaries of the next generation.

Children are born scientists. Toddlers are tiny behavioral psychologists taking detailed notes on just how many times the large people in charge will bend over and pick up the sippee cup hurled at their heads. This curiosity can be harnessed and used for less painful lessons by encouraging a dialogue with your child. When your child asks you why the sky is blue, which Jeff Wagg claims is a deceptively complicated answer, ask her what she thinks and then research the topic together. You can even help your child design experiments; you can ask her what her hypothesis is and then help her to test and retest the hypothesis to form a theory. This works especially well in crowded stores when she asks you what you are going to do if she refuses to stop screaming at you while stamping her feet!

Science can be woven into children’s lives at every opportunity. Sara Rosinsky, mother of ten-year-old Helen, says that “Science is the soundtrack by which we live our lives.” There are many new and amazing resources available for bringing science to children. One of my favorites is www.CharliesPlayhouse.com, an online store with games and toys inspired by Charles Darwin. Children also love dinosaurs, a trait the Creation Museum in Kentucky exploits to get bodies in the door. Even children, though, can understand the foolishness of believing that dinosaurs and humans lived together in harmony before the fall of man or that the giant, sharp teeth of Tyrannosaurus Rex were used to eat plants before Eve ruined everything by eating the apple. The Creation Museum does score points, however, by offering children the chance to ride a triceratops. Science needs to work on that—perhaps by cloning!

The Real World

Although most of the parents I talked to were raising children with fellow skeptics, this is not always the case. Although my own lovely husband refuses to call himself a skeptic, he has been my best resource in learning the value of critical thinking. Perhaps it is less important that we wear the same team hat and more important that we agree on the importance of using evidence over faith in making decisions.

A few of the single parents I talk with struggle with exes who want children involved in organized religion. Even for those of us who are married to skeptics, extended family often presents many opportunities for children to be exposed to pronouncements about the world with which we disagree. In these instances, I find it helpful to tell my children that religion is what people “believe,” not what “is.”

When my children go to church with their grandparents, I tell them that while a man named Jesus probably existed 2,000 years ago, some people think he was the son of god and other people do not. I then tell my children that I see no evidence that such claims are true or that the Bible is anything other than a book of stories. We have also used the fantastical nature of biblical stories to explore the validity of miracles, and we question the lack of miracles present today. This approach must also be tempered with a warning to children to use discretion in talking with family and friends about religion. Grandma and Grampa may not be ready to hear their precious grandchild talk like Nietzsche.

Holidays and cultural celebrations can cause strife with family and friends but can also be used as another opportunity to teach critical thinking. It seems that many skeptics do what Michael Blanford, president of the Skeptical Society of St. Louis and father to three-year-old Atom, calls the “half-assed Santa” approach—you don’t tell the children there is a Santa but don’t tell them Santa is fake either. When the child is old enough to ask questions, the whole thing is presented as an exercise in skepticism, and the child is helped in drawing the correct conclusions through scientific inquiry. Brad Fusilier, president of the Southern Skeptical Society and father of four, asks his children “Why wouldn’t Santa be able to deliver 2.2 billion presents in twenty-four hours with or without time zones?” Again, though, as with religion, children must be warned that these matters should not always be discussed with other children. Hell hath no fury like a mother whose child has been told the truth about Santa against her will.

Skeptic parents consider the love of learning one of the most important values to pass on to their children. They often see themselves as their child’s first teacher and seek out the highest quality education available. Many of the people I talked to were fortunate enough to live in areas with excellent public schools and had no qualms about sending their children there. Others, like Myndee White of Lakeland, Florida, mother of sixteen-year-old Kyree, fourteen-year-old Nate, and eleven-year-old Tyson, found their best solution was to home-school the children for much of their educational career. Myndee tries very hard to keep the study of science fun and relevant to everyday life and has particularly enjoyed the Growing Up in the Universe series by Richard Dawkins. Still others, myself included, have chosen to send our children to private school to avoid poor-quality public schools and the lack of inquiry-based curriculum. (Plus, public school teachers in my town seem to be unappreciative of a child who respects evidence over authority!)

Before anyone reports me to Child Protective Services or, worse, to Richard Dawkins, I did go back and explain evolution to my child correctly. I told my son that I was not sure how evolution worked, and we went to the library and read as many books as they had on the subject. I then went online and ordered many amazing books on evolution written especially for children. (See Center for Inquiry librarian Tim Binga’s piece “Skeptical Books for Children and Young Adults,” on page 43.)

The point of that story is not that I was an idiot but that I took a question from my child and used it as an opportunity to help him learn the process of critical thinking. Instead of passing dogma down from generation to generation, skeptical parents seek to teach their children the importance of inquiry. Inquiry, and the willingness to consider ideas on the merit of their evidence, can make parenting more complicated and certainly more mentally exhaustive, but the results speak for themselves.

When one of my son’s friends told him that he had a ghost in his house and that the friend’s mother “confirmed” the story, my son was not frightened at all. He simply looked his friend in the eye, raised his eyebrow, and asked, “Where is your evidence?”

I have never been more proud in my life.

I started with the premise that critical thinking as a methodology is the main divide between skeptical inquirers and scientific naturalists and those whose worldview is based on other ways of knowing. I then explained how such a methodology, when applied to different scopes of inquiry, leads to both the secular humanist worldview and skepticism of the paranormal.

As it turned out, the students were proficient critical thinkers, although critics might be a more apt label. Here are some dos and don’ts they taught me that might be of use to anyone attempting to introduce skeptical thinking to Generation Y, or, as some call them, the Entitlement Generation.

DO explain the major tools for critical thinking and argumentation. No high school I know of has a course in critical thinking, and few do a good job of introducing the real spirit of how science approaches questions beyond the stale list of steps given almost as the doctrine of the Scientific Method. These independent presentations are therefore ideal opportunities to rectify that lacking. However . . . 

DO NOT engage in long blackboard lessons. My attempt to introduce the concept of skepticism and critical thinking through a history of the various schools of philosophy going back to the ancient Greek Pyrrhonians did not go over well. The presentation was too detailed and abstract and probably too similar to an everyday classroom lesson. Clearly the students were anticipating a break from that and wanted engagement in more interactive discussions.     

DO incorporate multimedia where appropriate. My presentations included excerpts from Richard Dawkins’s Enemies of Reason, featuring a simple double-blind test debunking water dowsing and a short interview on the dangers of spiritualism addiction with famous magician Darren Brown, with whom many of the students were familiar. We listened to a clip from a Point of Inquiry episode featuring Andrew Fraknoi on our body’s cosmic history. Finally, we watched an excerpt from Here Be Dragons, a video that serves as a critical thinking primer from Skeptoid podcast host Brian Dunning. This led into a discussion of the red flags and keywords of pseudoscience, such as “ancient wisdom,” “energy fields,” “all natural,” or simply ads featuring a man in a lab coat.

DO incorporate interactive games. To investigate the veracity of the newspaper horoscopes many of the students read, students were divided along the wall of the room based on zodiac sign. The day’s horoscope was then read from a local newspaper and each student was asked to identify whether the descriptions did or did not apply to their day. Unbeknown to the students, a deception was taking place, for students in fact read from the horoscope that corresponded not to their own sign but to the one following theirs. Upon completion, we tallied the number of “hits” and “misses,” compared them to what might be expected by chance, and then announced the deception.

DO NOT read FAQs directly. I prepared well-articulated answers to a self-created list of Frequently Asked Questions, such as “Why are you concerned with people’s personal beliefs” and “Would any evidence convince you of paranormal activities beyond science?” Although these made me feel I had gone through all my material comprehensively, it left little time for answering the student’s own questions and probably made me appear overly distant. So . . .

DO interact directly with the students. It would be much better to first entertain questions from students in order to respond to the exact nuance and examples given by a questioner and then read from any remaining FAQs that have not been covered. Other more creative interactive activities might have the students reflect on the possible bias or misrepresentation of particular science articles in the newspaper or ask them to apply critical thinking to a contemporary political issue or the recent speech of a local politician.

DO personalize the presentation. I provided a short background to the events that lead me to adopt a skeptical and secular humanist worldview. I included a slide with names and photos of famous skeptics and freethinkers from lots of different fields—scientists, philosophers, authors, lawyers, politicians, activists, and celebrities.

DO take the opportunity to promote the wonders of science.  This is a good opportunity to excite students by explaining how science affects our lives and our society. I covered the scientific outlook, focusing on science that speaks to our biggest questions—evolution, cosmology, and neuroscience—as well as the scientific revolution’s historical ties to notions of democracy, freedom, and progress. Much of this science is covered in technical detail in classes but would never have been tied to these larger societal issues.

DO define new terms like skepticism, atheism, secularism, naturalism, and methodology, but . . .

DO NOT over-define. Differentiating between weak and strong atheism, for example, will probably confuse the bigger issues.

DO NOT leave students with homework, but . . .

DO leave students with handouts. I ended by passing out copies of the Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines, skepticism-themed stickers, excerpts from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, and a list of books, podcasts, and films of interest.

In the summer of 2008, Georgians Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer claimed to have found a Bigfoot carcass. These claims were initially made via a number of YouTube videos that garnered significant attention in the cryptid community. In August 2008, they partnered with well-known cryptozoology personality Tom Biscardi for a national press conference. Almost immediately the carcass was revealed as a hoax involving a Halloween costume.

But a month earlier, rival Bigfoot enthusiasts and skeptics had carefully pored over one of Whitton and Dyer’s promotional videos on YouTube (“Bigfoot Tracker Video 8”) in which they met an alleged Texas scientist named Paul Van Buren who said he would authenticate the carcass (Bigfootpolice 2008). Sharp-eyed viewers quickly determined that “Van Buren” was actually Whitton’s brother, a wedding photographer from Texas, and even found pictures online of the two together at one of their weddings (Coleman 2008).

The video was pulled off the Web and acknowledged by the hoaxers as a fake days later in another video. Whitton and Dyer said the video was an attempt to distract people who were harassing them. (They did not explain how a hoaxed video would accomplish such a thing.) This all happened weeks before the national press conference. Those who followed the whole fiasco from the beginning via YouTube were not surprised when the hoax was finally revealed nationally weeks later.

YouTube might seem an unlikely venue for skeptical investigations. The online video site originated as a way for individuals to easily share videos online without having to deal with technical issues like file formats and software compatibility. YouTube gained fame through a series of “viral” videos of various ephemera such as laughing babies, stunts gone wrong, adorable kittens, and so on. It hardly seemed a good venue for skepticism in those early days.

But like most new tools, uses far beyond those initially anticipated were soon discovered. The availability of low-cost video cameras and editing software means that video production is now something that many hobbyists can attempt at home. Purchased by Google in 2006, YouTube is now home to hundreds of millions of videos and serves over a hundred million individual video views per day. Google claims that over thirteen hours of new content is uploaded on YouTube every minute (Google 2008).

Many skeptical organizations now use YouTube to distribute video content to the public. Videos of the James Randi Educational Foundation’s July 2009 test of dowser Connie Sonne for their Million Dollar Challenge, among other videos, can be found on JREF’s own channel (JREF 2008). The Skeptical Inquirer’s parent organization, the Center for Inquiry, also has its own YouTube channel (see figure 1) with hundreds of lectures, debates, and other videos. It is often rated in the top ten most viewed nonprofit channels on the site (Center for Inquiry 2006). These are fantastic educational resources for both skeptics and the general public.

The site has always been friendly toward individuals as well as organizations, and individual skeptics have fittingly stepped forward to create content. Richard Wiseman used YouTube videos to promote and support his book Quirkology by demonstrating optical illusions and other psychological effects (Wiseman 2009). His video “Amazing Colour Changing Card Trick” has been viewed over three million times and has even been redone by several other YouTube users (Wiseman 2007; see related story). Phil “The Bad Astronomer” Plait has a channel as well, where he posts his own special mix of skepticism and astronomy (Plait 2009).

Some of the most interesting aspects of skepticism on YouTube do not come from organizations or professional skeptics but are occurring at the grassroots level between individual users. Simple, short videos debunking paranormal or pseudoscientific concepts, when created with cleverness and good visuals, can be very effective. One example, “Bigfoot Myths: Where are the Bones?” addresses the simple question: Why have we never found Bigfoot bones? (Doctor Atlantis 2007). Resources like this can easily be hyperlinked from discussions of the topic online or even embedded directly into posts on other Web sites. They help to explain key scientific concepts using visuals instead of words alone (in this case, photos of actual bear bones and interview footage with a cryptozoologist).

Aside from the general availability of the service and the fact that it is free, there are two other key elements that help maintain the grassroots skepticism phenomenon on YouTube: the fair use clause in U.S. copyright law and the explorative nature of the YouTube user interface.

Figure 2: Captain Disillusion

Fair use is vital to the very existence of YouTube. The law holds that it is legal to reuse small portions of copyrighted material, even without the owner’s permission, for comment, criticism, or parody (Stanford 2007). This allows skeptics to freely post online videos that include portions of the pseudoscientific or religious videos they are debunking.

The Uri Geller videos posted by YouTube user The Friendly Skeptic are a good example. By implicitly invoking fair use, The Friendly Skeptic can post small broadcast clips from programs in which Geller’s conjuring and trickery is plainly visible. In one he shows quite clearly where Geller puts on a false thumb tip just prior to making a magnetic compass move ostensibly by paranormal means (The Friendly Skeptic 2007). When, in another video from an older talk show, Geller bends a spoon using a decidedly nonpsychic technique (i.e., his hand), the exact moment is highlighted (The Friendly Skeptic 2008).

Another creative use of this method is employed by putative superhero Captain Disillusion (portrayed by actor and filmmaker Alan Melikdjanian; see figure 2). As Captain Disillusion, Melikdjanian humorously deconstructs the very viral videos that make YouTube so successful by explaining the digital editing techniques used in their creation (Captain Disillusion 2007). Many of these are simply viral advertising but others cover skeptical topics. Captain Disillusion debunked the November 2007 “Blue Ghost” incident at a Parma, Ohio, gas station, re-editing the news coverage to clearly show the actual cause: a bug on the camera lens (Captain Disillusion 2008). There were other, more scientific YouTube debunks of this incident as well; an excellent example included hypotheses, predictions, and conclusions (Answers in Skepticism 2007).

The skeptical movement online has flourished in part because of YouTube’s site design. It is in Google’s own interest to keep users on the site as long as possible since their revenue comes from advertising. The site is designed to encourage exploration with features that link videos together via “responses,” add hyperlinks between videos, and mark a video with a world location so it can be found within mapping services (see figure 3). These features allow skeptics to make their content more discoverable from within the site and elsewhere. Debunking videos, for instance, can be posted as responses that are directly linked to (and therefore discoverable from) the original pseudoscientific content. This technique has been used in responses to the Georgia Bigfoot hoaxers, in Captain Disillusion’s videos, and elsewhere.

This explorability of YouTube helps address a key question often asked among online skeptics: Where should we focus our efforts? Many skeptics post almost exclusively on skeptic-run Web sites, forums, or blogs. The obvious disadvantage is that one often ends up “preaching to the choir.” The alternative posting on Web sites run by believers in pseudoscience or paranormal has its own hazards. Often these sites are not interested in debate and will delete skeptical posts or even ban skeptics from posting entirely.

By posting material on YouTube and making the content as discoverable as possible, skeptics avoid both issues. The content can still be embedded or hyperlinked from skeptic sites as desired, but it can also be found by many more people via the YouTube site directly. This helps get the skeptical message out to those who most need it.

Figure 3: Example of a skeptical YouTube video being discovered via a mapping application.

One of the most visible uses of the YouTube discoverability and response format are the creationism-related videos posted by users VenomFangX and ThunderF00t (VenomFangX 2006; Thunderf00t 2006). VenomFangX is the online handle of Shawn, a Christian teenager who posted a series of videos in which he claims to debunk evolution. YouTube user Thunderf00t (an adult academic) responds to each of the teen’s videos and answers them point by point in the series “Why do people laugh at creationists?” The entire exchange lasted for almost two years. Thunderf00t also addressed the claims of other evolution deniers in the series, such as Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute and evangelist Ray Comfort. Each video (over thirty in all) received at least 100,000 views, and some have been seen nearly half a million times (Thunderf00t 2009).

The Thunderf00t versus VenomFangX exchange also highlights one of the current pitfalls of U.S. Copyright law: the application of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Takedown Notices. This is a clause in the DMCA under which copyright owners who believe their work is being infringed upon (beyond fair use) via the Internet can merely notify the carrier to remove the material. On December 9, 2008, someone claiming to be a third party acting on behalf of VenomFangX contacted YouTube claiming that Thunderf00t’s videos violated copyright. Two videos were restricted as a result. Thunderf00t issued a counterclaim, and a very public war of words ensued between the two parties (Thunderf00t 2008). The issue was resolved when VenomFangX’s parents became aware of his activities. He withdrew the DMCA claims, apologized, and temporarily stopped posting.

False DMCA claims and other digital shenanigans continue to be a problem for skeptics on YouTube. According to Thunderf00t, creationists hurt his videos’ rankings in the YouTube rating system by using automated scripts to send thousands of negative votes to each of his videos. The comments system provided by YouTube is also somewhat hit or miss. Occasionally some videos will attract reasonable commentators, but most of the time the comments aren’t much better than digital graffiti. (The problem is so rampant on YouTube that a number of third-party software tools have been designed solely to “clean out” undesirable comments from YouTube pages.)

Overall, however, YouTube is an excellent avenue for skeptical outreach on the Internet. Its ease of use and lack of fees lower the barrier of entry so almost any skeptic can participate. Fair use ensures a steady stream of source material to debunk. The high traffic of the site and its explorability make the skeptical message accessible to people who may not even be aware of organized skepticism. Any skeptic with minimal audiovisual editing skills should consider YouTube an outlet for their efforts. l

References

1. Answers In Skepticism. 2007. Blue gas station ghost explained. November 23. Available online.
2. Bigfootpolice. 2008. Bigfoot tracker video 8. July 20. Available online.
3. Captain Disillusion. 2007. Captain Disillusion’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
4. —. 2008. Gas station ghost recut. Available online.
5. Center for Inquiry. 2006. Center for Inquiry’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
6. Coleman, Loren. 2008. Bigfoot body brouhaha. July 23. Available online.
7. Doctor Atlantis. 2008. Bigfoot myths: Where are the bones? Available online.
8. The Friendly Skeptic. 2008. Uri Geller bends a spoon with his hand! May 22. Available online.
9. —. 2007. The moment Uri Geller cheats . . . watch the thumb. April 2. Available online.
10. Google. 2008. The future of online video. September 16. Available online.
11. The James Randi Educational Foundation. 2008. James Randi Foundation’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
12. Plait, Phil. 2006. The Bad Astronomer’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
13. Stanford University Library. 2007. What is fair use? Available online.
14. Thunderf00t. 2006. Thunderf00t’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
15. —. 2008. False DMCA consequences. Available online.
16. —. 2009. Why do people laugh at creationists? Thunderf00t’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
17. VenomFangX. 2006. VenomFangX’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
18. Wiseman, Richard. 2007. Quirkology YouTube Channel. Available online.