A peer-reviewed article reporting a bizarre and previously unknown form of amnesia imparts valuable scientific lessons: poorly documented case reports can confuse as well as enlighten, and we should be skeptical of clinical claims modeled after Hollywood plots. It also reminds us why scientific journals need to allow for the self-correction of questionable claims.

Well-documented case reports have substantial value. As Davison and Lazarus (2007) note, case reports can raise useful questions about theories, provide preliminary data to be tested in more rigorous investigations, and “permit the investigation, although poorly controlled, of rare but important phenomena” (157).

Nevertheless, case reports of novel clinical phenomena have their limitations, especially when presented without adequate documentation. As Loftus and Guyer (2002) observed in an article in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, case studies “illuminate, but can also obscure the truth. In many cases, they are limited by what their reporter sees, and what their reporter leaves out. . . . To the scientist, therefore, most case studies are useful largely to generate hypotheses to be tested, not as answers to questions” (26).

To illustrate the problems of poorly documented case reports, we analyze a recent report by Smith et al. (2010) of a purportedly new and exceedingly strange memory disorder. This case was published in Neuropsychologia, one of the world’s premier outlets for neuropsychological articles.

The Apparent Discovery of a Remarkable New Form of Amnesia

Smith and colleagues (2010) described an extraordinary and unique constellation of memory aberrations. Their patient—a fifty-one-year-old woman referred to as “FL”—was involved in a car accident in 2005, during which she briefly lost consciousness. FL reported that since then she accumulates memories continually during the day but then loses all of them after one night of sleep. That is, she experiences overnight amnesia, so she must start afresh with a “blank slate” when she awakens each morning. The investigators noted that FL’s symptoms mimicked the scenario of the 2004 romantic comedy 50 First Dates, in which one of the characters, Lucy (portrayed by Drew Barrymore), suffers from overnight amnesia following a car accident.

Soon after the publication of Smith et al.’s case study, a number of websites rushed to publicize it. The website Neurocritic noted that Hollywood has a long and checkered history of presenting cases of amnesia that bear no resemblance to reality, but “that isn’t true anymore.” The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest reported that “psychologists have documented what they believe to be a clinical first—the case of an amnesic woman whose memory for new material is erased each night that she goes to sleep.” What is notable about these and other web reports is that they were virtually all offered without even a hint of skepticism. In turn, these uncritical descriptions were picked up verbatim by numerous other websites.

The Limitations of Smith et al.’s Case Report

As we will see, all of these reports neglected to mention a crucial fact: the Smith et al. case report was marked by three major limitations.

Limitation #1: Lack of Crucial Background Information

The level of detail regarding FL’s case description is unsatisfactory. The authors inform us that despite FL’s severe memory impairments, “she was able to return to her previous employment after some accommodations were made at work” (Smith et al. 2010, 2834). It is difficult to imagine any job in which recollection of all information gained after a specific date (in this case, after FL’s car accident) is inessential. Furthermore, the article suffers from a striking paucity of information about FL’s work accommodations: did they involve lessened responsibility, fewer working hours, longer breaks, more assistance, and so on? If so, such privileges might constitute an important motive for feigning memory impairments.

As appropriately skeptical readers, we need to know to what extent FL’s overnight amnesia adversely affects her everyday functioning. Nevertheless, Smith and colleagues apparently did not attempt to contact co-workers or friends to confirm that FL’s presumed memory loss has affected her daily behaviors.

Still other information provided by the authors is uninformative. For example, the fact that the patient failed to recover memories of the time after the accident while under hypnosis (2834) does not offer evidence that such memories were inaccessible to her. Hypnosis, despite popular misconception, is not a dependable technique for recovering lost memories (Lynn et al. 2003).

Smith et al. mentioned in passing FL’s involvement with the legal system following her accident. Nevertheless, they do not provide adequate details concerning this involvement. For example, did FL file a personal-injury claim? Research shows that a litigation context is associated with symptom exaggeration and misrepresentation (Faust 1996; Tolin et al. 2004). Indeed, Iverson (2005) found that patients involved in litigation display substantially lower neuropsychological performance (that is, lower scores on standardized measures of memory, attention, and problem-solving) than comparable patients who are not. This pattern suggests that their scores on neuropsychological tests may partly reflect attempts to persuade others (such as attorneys and jurors) that they deserve financial compensation.

Limitation #2: Failure to Exclude Feigning or Inadequate Motivation

A second limitation of Smith et al.’s case report is their failure to rule out feigning or a lack of motivation to remember new material (see Carone et al. 2010). In their case description, Smith and colleagues dismissed the possibility of feigning by arguing that “it was the impression of those who worked with FL that she believed that she had the memory impairment that she described” (Smith et al. 2010, 2839). Yet this reassurance is unsatisfying because subjective clinical impressions alone are known to be grossly insufficient for detecting the feigning of disorders (Rosen and Phillips 2004).

Smith et al. administered several memory tests to FL as well as to healthy participants who were instructed to simulate overnight amnesia. In many respects, the performances of the simulators paralleled that of FL, which should give us pause when interpreting the claim that her amnesia is genuine. The authors also administered several memory tasks that involved tests of learned materials following a delay of twenty-four hours. When they tested FL’s delayed memory covertly—in a way that was not transparent to her—there were clear indications that despite her purported memory difficulties, FL could reproduce material that was presented on the previous day. This performance pattern flies in the face of the overnight amnesia syndrome attributed to FL.

To their credit, Smith et al. did administer Warrington’s (1984) “Recognition Memory Test for Words and Faces” to FL. She obtained a score of 41 on the immediate recognition test; using a cutoff score ascertained in a recent study (Kim et al. 2010), this low score provides preliminary evidence that FL exerted low levels of effort on the neuropsychological tests she was administered. Nevertheless, the authors of her case description apparently overlooked this worrisome indication.

Limitation #3: Lack of Connectivity with the Scientific Literature

Absence of connectivity (Stanovich 2009), a key indicator of questionable science, occurs when investigators neglect the existing corpus of scientific knowledge. Indeed, from both scientific and theoretical perspectives, Smith et al.’s case description is puzzling. There is no known mechanism whereby memories can be acquired during the course of a day only to be wiped clean after a night’s sleep. Moreover, an abundance of literature demonstrates that certain sleep stages promote memory consolidation, whereas sleep deprivation impedes it (Walker and Van der Helm 2009). Yet Smith et al. inform readers that following a sleep-deprivation protocol, FL’s amnesic deficit somehow disappeared and that “her husband reported that she awakens 3.5 h into each night’s sleep and has been able to retain her memory for successive days with this regimen” (Smith et al. 2010, 2834).

The authors’ sleep-deprivation protocol could have afforded them a powerful tool to falsify their hypothesis. What would have happened if the treatment team allowed FL to sleep for only three-and-a-half hours or less but informed her that she had slept for six hours or more? If FL had continued to claim a lack of memories despite sleeping for only three-and-a-half hours or less, this finding would have pointed strongly in the direction of a persistent belief in amnesia in its absence or feigning amnesia rather than amnesia per se.

Hollywood and Amnesia

As we have already noted, FL’s memory loss is suspiciously similar to that of Drew Barrymore’s character in the film 50 First Dates. Interestingly, FL saw the movie several times after her accident, and she reported that Drew Barrymore was her favorite actress. Smith et al. acknowledged that FL’s multiple viewings of the film may well have shaped her beliefs about memory and, in turn, her amnesic symptoms. In the authors’ words: “The idea that memories can disappear overnight became popularized by a fictional film and may have influenced FL’s concept of how memory could fail after a car accident” (Smith et al. 2010, 2839).

Thus, according to Smith and colleagues, FL’s amnesia may reflect her belief that a person can lose all newly acquired memories after a night of sleep. This belief, in turn, may explain the paradox of FL’s reporting that she loses all of her memories overnight co-existing with her ability to retain the previous day’s knowledge when demonstrated on covert testing.

This analysis is logically confused. The term amnesia indicates a condition that can be objectively documented and goes beyond a mere belief patients hold about their memories (see Read and Lindsay 2000). If FL only believes that she suffers from a memory impairment, and her memory actually functions largely within the normal range, her condition would more accurately be described as pseudo-amnesia, not amnesia.

Baxendale (2004) noted that the overwhelming majority of films that portray amnesia do so in a grossly inaccurate fashion—with the 2000 film Memento being a noteworthy exception (see also Lilienfeld et al. 2010). For example, many films depict people with amnesia following brain trauma as having no recollection whatsoever of their identity or past, when in fact such complete loss is exceedingly rare. Other films erroneously depict people who develop amnesia as acquiring remarkable—even superhuman—powers, including extrasensory perception and other paranormal abilities. Ironically, Baxendale singled out 50 First Dates as an especially egregious example of Hollywood’s unscientific portrayal of memory loss, observing that this film “maintains a venerable movie tradition of portraying an amnesic syndrome that bears no relation to any known neurological or psychiatric condition” (Baxendale 2004, 1480).

Avoiding Erroneous Conclusions in Case Reports: Thinking Bayesian

Truzzi’s (1976, 1978) and Sagan’s (1995) maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence makes good sense from a Bayesian standpoint, a statistical and conceptual approach that takes a priori plausibility into account when evaluating the likelihood of claims. The base rate (prevalence) of extraordinary phenomena is by definition extremely low (Atwood 2008; Goodman 1999). If a memory disorder like overnight amnesia exists, its prevalence is surely tiny relative to that of feigning, especially when real-world privileges or judicial outcomes are potentially at stake. As a consequence, the evidence needed to conclude that such a syndrome is present should be overwhelming. As medical students learn, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras,” an admonition to “think Bayesian” when evaluating the likelihood of diagnostic possibilities (Groopman 2007).

Wedding and Faust (1989) advised neuropsychologists to “not become overly focused on the esoteric” (258) and noted that clinicians’ preoccupation with uncommon features is an obstacle to sound clinical judgment. In the case of FL, the scientific guideline of Occam’s razor urges us to assign much higher probability to alternative explanations for her amnesia than to overnight amnesia.

Three Scientific Lessons Imparted by the Smith et al. Case Report

Lesson 1: Welcome the Publication of Case Reports, but Insist on Adequate Documentation

The case report of FL is certainly intriguing. If the existence of an entirely new form of amnesia in her case were to be confirmed, it would not only herald the discovery of a new disorder but challenge existing models of memory loss. Nevertheless, it is difficult to justify the publication of Smith et al.’s report in its present form given the absence of crucial details and failure to rule out plausible rival hypotheses for FL’s symptoms. As a general rule, journals should insist on high standards of objective documentation when publishing case reports of rare or unusual phenomena. If such documentation is unavailable, it is at the very least incumbent on authors to be circumspect in their conclusions.

Lesson 2: Widely Viewed Television Programs and Films May Influence the Presentation of Patients’ Symptoms

Psychologists and psychiatrists have long recognized that certain disorders are partly iatrogenic in origin: that is, they can be inadvertently induced by well-meaning, but mistaken, psychological or medical treatment (Lilienfeld 2007). The case of FL reminds us, however, that in today’s media-driven world, some disorders may be what we term telegenic in origin: induced at least partly by television, films, and news and entertainment media.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly called multiple personality disorder, is a likely case in point of a telegenic disorder (see Byrne 2001). Prior to 1970, there were fewer than 80 such cases reported in the world literature. Nevertheless, following the 1976 made-for-television film Sybil that starred Sally Field, who portrayed a real-life woman with a history of severe child abuse who supposedly possessed sixteen personalities (but see Rieber et al. 2002 for data calling the Sybil case into question), the number of DID cases skyrocketed into the thousands (Boor 1982). Although this finding does not prove that Sybil triggered the dramatic increase in DID cases, there are good circumstantial reasons to believe that the film played at least some causal role. For example, prior to Sybil, remarkably few individuals with DID reported a history of child abuse; following Sybil, the overwhelming majority did (Spanos 1996). Moreover, although most cases of DID prior to Sybil reported only one or two alter personalities, the mean number of DID cases in post-Sybil reports was much higher—in one study it was sixteen, precisely the number reported by Sybil (Ross et al. 1989).

Clinicians who work with individuals who report disturbances in memory and identity must therefore be cognizant of the possibility that their patients’ symptoms can be shaped by Hollywood depictions (Baxendale 2004). Because many of these portrayals are wildly inaccurate from a scientific standpoint, clinicians may be duped into accepting telegenically induced symptoms—which are merely modeled after Hollywood depictions—as reflecting entirely “new” disorders.

Lesson 3: Permit Researchers to Submit Critiques of Case Reports inthe Peer-Reviewed Literature

Editors and reviewers play crucial gatekeeper roles in evaluating whether case reports of patients displaying spectacular symptoms 1) provide sufficient detail, 2) rule out alternative explanations, 3) build on existing scientific findings and theories, and 4) refrain from launching premature diagnostic entities. Nevertheless, if journal editors elect to accept case reports even when they are suboptimal in one or more of these respects, they must at the very least afford critics the opportunity to articulate the shortcomings of those reports.

Remarkably, the journal that published the Smith et al. case, Neuropsychologia, does not accept commentaries on its case reports (or other empirical articles) and refused to even consider a rebuttal of Smith et al.’s case report for publication. Compounding the problem, several other journals (perhaps understandably) refused to consider publishing a commentary on the Smith et al. case report on the grounds that it had appeared in a different journal.

Neuropsychologia’s misguided editorial policy deprives science of one of its most valuable safeguards: self-correction (see Beyerstein 1995). When journals do not allow authors to submit critiques of case reports, they short-circuit the essential role of the peer scientific community in scrutinizing remarkable claims. In turn, they may permit questionable information to make its way into the peer-reviewed and popular literatures, allowing dubious conclusions to be disseminated with minimal qualification. The result, we suspect, is often little more than scientific obfuscation.

Postscript: Another Case of Telegenic Amnestic Syndrome?

Soon after we completed the initial draft of this article, co-author Thomas Merten saw a patient in a hospital’s neurology ward: a twenty-three-year-old male found by his girlfriend in the bathroom following a brief period of reported unconsciousness the previous week. He claimed not to recognize her or anyone else and to have no recollection of his identity. Oddly, he exhibited neither signs of marked brain damage on neuroimaging nor any neurological or neuropsychological symptoms on standardized testing. Yet the man reported that he had lost all memories, plus all of his learned abilities, such as knowing how to open a can. At the conclusion of the interview, he reported that during his previous weekend at home he had watched the movie 50 First Dates with his girlfriend. She informed him they had seen it several times in the past, but he claimed to have no memory of it.

If our speculations about “telegenic amnestic syndrome” are correct, this postscript may end up being merely the pilot episode of a host of others to follow. As they say in the television world, stay tuned.

References

Atwood, Kimball. 2008. Prior probability: The dirty little secret of ‘evidence-based alternative medicine.’ Science-Based Medicine blog, (February 15). Available online at www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=48.

Baxendale, Sallie. 2004. Memories aren’t made of this: Amnesia at the movies. British Medical Journal 329: 1480–83.

Beyerstein, Barry L. Distinguishing Science from Pseudoscience. 1995. Victoria, British Columbia: Centre for Curriculum and Professional Development.

Boor, Myron. 1982. The multiple personality disorder epidemic: Additional cases and inferences regarding diagnosis, etiology, dynamics, and treatment. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 170: 302–304.

Byrne, Peter B. 2001. The butler(s) did it: Dissociative identity disorder in cinema. Journal of Medical Ethics: Medical Humanities 27: 26–29.

Carone, Dominic A., Grant L. Iverson, and Shane S. Bush. 2010. A model to approaching and providing feedback to patients regarding invalid test performance in clinical neuropsychological evaluations. The Clinical Neuropsychologist 24: 759–78.

Davison, Gerald C., and Arnold Lazarus. 2007. Clinical case studies are important in the science and practice of psychotherapy. In S.O. Lilienfeld and W.T. O’Donohue. (Eds.), The Great Ideas of Clinical Science: 17 Principles That Every Mental Health Professional Should Understand (pp. 149–62). New York: Routledge.

Goodman, Steven N. 1999. Toward evidence-based medical statistics: 2. The Bayes Factor. Annals of Internal Medicine 130: 1005–13.

Faust, David. 1996. Assessment of brain injuries in legal cases: Neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric considerations. In B.S. Fogel, R.B. Schiffer, and S.M. Rao (Eds.), Neuropsychiatry (973-90). Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.

Groopman, Jerome. 2007. How Doctors Think. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Iverson, Grant L. 2005. Outcome from mild traumatic brain injury. Current Opinion in Psychiatry 18: 301–17.

Kim, Michelle S., Kyle B. Boone, Tara Victor, et al. 2010. The Warrington Recognition Memory Test for words as a measure of response bias: Total score and response time cutoffs developed on “real world” credible and noncredible subjects. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 25: 60–70.

Lilienfeld, Scott O. 2007. Psychological treatments that cause harm. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2: 53–70.

———. 2010. Can psychology become a science? Personality and Individual Differences 49: 281–88.

Lilienfeld, Scott O., Steven J. Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Beyerstein. 2010. 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior. Malden, MA: Wiley.

Loftus, Elizabeth F., and Melvin J. Guyer. 2002. Who abused Jane Doe? The hazards of the single case history: Part I. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 26(3) (May/June): 24–32.

Lynn, Steven J., Timothy Lock, Elizabeth F. Loftus et al. 2003. The remembrance of things past: Problematic memory recovery techniques in psychotherapy. In S.O. Lilienfeld, S.J. Lynn, and J.M. Lohr. (Eds.). Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology (205–39). New York: Guilford.

Read, J. Donald, and D. Stephen Lindsay. 2000. “Amnesia” for summer camps and high school graduation: Memory work increases reports of prior periods of remembering less. Journal of Traumatic Stress 13: 129–47.

Rieber, Robert, Harold Takooshian, and Humberto Iglesias. 2002. The case of Sybil in the teaching of psychology. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 11: 355–60.

Rosen, Gerald M., and W.R. Phillips. 2004. A cautionary lesson from simulated patients. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law 32: 132–33.

Ross, Colin A., G. Ron Norton, and Kay A. Wozney. 1989. Multiple personality disorder: An analysis of 236 cases. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 34: 413–18.

Sagan, Carl. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House.

Smith, C.N., J.C. Frascino, D.L. Kripke, et al. 2010. Losing memories overnight: A unique form of human amnesia. Neuropsychologia 48: 2833–40.

Spanos, Nicholas. 1996. Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Stanovich, Keith. 2009. How to Think Straight about Psychology (8th edition). Boston: Pearson.

Tolin, David F., N. Maltby, F.W. Weathers, et al. 2004. The use of the MMPI-2 Infrequency–Psychopathology scale in the assessment of post-traumatic stress disorder in male veterans. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment 6: 23–29.

Truzzi, Marcello. 1976. Editorial. The Zetetic (SKEPTICAL INQUIRER) 1(1): 2–6.

———. 1978. On the extraordinary: An attempt at clarification. Zetetic Scholar 1: 11.

Walker, Matthew P., and Els van der Helm. 2009. Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological Bulletin 135: 731–48.

Warrington, Elizabeth K. 1984. Recognition Memory Test. Windsor, United Kingdom: FER-Nelson.

Wedding, Daniel, and David Faust. 1989. Clinical judgment and decision making in neuropsychology. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 4: 233–65.

In the early 1990s, the New Yorker magazine published three articles by Paul Brodeur describing claims that background radiation from nearby power lines caused an outbreak of leukemia in children living in Denver, Colorado (Brodeur 1990a, 1990b, 1992).

In 2008, the Journal of Orthopaedic Research published a claim that therapeutic touch² (TT) practitioners at the University of Connecticut Health Center were able to diminish the growth of human osteosarcoma (cancer) cells by using their hands to manipulate energy fields surrounding the cells (Jhaveri et al. 2008). The cell cultures over which the practitioners’ hands were placed were located in L-shaped rooms, implying that some undefined radiation pattern would not turn corners. That paper’s corresponding author is Gloria Gronowicz, professor of surgery at the University of Connecticut Health Care Center.

Ironically, the reasoning behind both of these claims was based on the presence of a magnetic field of about two milligauss. The source of the “harmful” two-milligauss field that allegedly caused the leukemia outbreak in Colorado was background radiation from power lines (Hafemeister 1996; Brodeur 1993). The “healing” field emitted from the hands of humans at the University of Connecticut was also alleged to be about two milligauss. But there was no indication that the building in which the experiments were conducted was shielded from background electromagnetic radiation.

Both claims concerning the effects of low-level magnetic fields were widely influential. Brodeur’s publications provoked a widespread fear of living near power lines, which became such a powerful urban legend that in 1991 Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to prepare a report on the issue. Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields was published by the NAS’s Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems et al. in 1997.

Eleven years later, Jhaveri and coworkers’ Journal of Orthopaedic Research article concluded with the statement that “therapeutic touch … increased the growth of normal bone cells in culture dishes, but decreased the growth of bone cancer cells” (2008). References to the paper and quotes from it appeared on the websites of wellness clinics offering services in distant healing (also called TT, Reiki, or qigong). References to this and other publications by Gronowicz also appeared on the website of chiropractor Lynn Karew, who practices in Santa Monica, California: “We see that human touch has the capacity to affect even cell growth and thereby has a real healing potential. . . . The findings also give hope to many patients who suffer from abnormal cell growth—in particular cancer patients. By and large, energy medicine treatments, in particular therapeutic touch (TT), promise significant benefits for our bodies” (Karew, n.d.).

In a July 2008 interview, Hartford Courant reporter Hilary Waldman asked Gronowicz, “Should somebody with osteoporosis or a broken leg go to their Reiki practitioner?” Gronowicz replied, “We don’t know” (Waldman 2008).

“Harmful” Magnetic Fields

By the early 1990s, the international community’s panicked reaction to alleged harmful fields emanating from power lines reached such frenzied proportions that some communities sued to have power companies shield the lines and bury them (Thomley 1998; Hafemeister 1996; Committee et al. 1997). Opportunistic vendors peddled monitors of outdoor radiation exposure to worried citizens, and “some city regulations sought to constrain B fields [i.e., magnetic fields] to less than 2 milligauss” (Hafemeister 1996).

Yet scientific studies repeatedly demonstrated that concerns about the effect of extremely weak magnetic fields on human biology are unfounded. The final NAS report examining the potential health hazards of power lines presented a comprehensive study of the alleged dangers. Supporting documentation about background radiation from power lines included measurements by engineers, calculations by scientists, and a critique of epidemiological claims. After a detailed examination of the evidence, the NAS concluded that there is no credible basis for believing that two-milligauss fields are biologically harmful.

The report’s findings were grounded in multiple sources of corroborative evidence. In addition to a lack of confidence in the epidemiological studies, the notion that two-milligauss fields are harmful to cellular biology contradicts the most fundamental laws of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics—from which one calculates the thermal-noise level of a cell—and the laws that govern our understanding and use of electromagnetic radiation. Based on these laws, detailed calculations of the effect of extremely low-level magnetic fields on human cells were published in a series of articles by Robert Adair (Adair 1991, 1992, 1998) and William Bennett (Bennett 1994). The calculations demonstrated that any impact of such low-level fields would be trivial in comparison to the effects of background fields that naturally occur within human cells. For example: imagine yourself, reduced to the size of a molecule, sitting inside a cell. Here you will view electric charges colliding with molecules, creating fluctuations in the electric field. These fluctuations will produce thermal noise with the energy of about eight orders of magnitude, 10⁸, greater than the energy associated with the external background electric field.

The NAS report concluded that there are no accepted theoretical mechanisms for affecting biological processes operating at magnetic fields of such a low level. “Thus even the most subtle of any field driven biological processes must arise from fields that are many orders of magnitude larger than even the fields used in MRI imaging.” Table 1 compares the energies of the magnetic fields produced by a variety of sources, including Earth’s magnetic field, fields occurring in the background environment, and fields produced by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment. The allegedly harmful fields produced by power lines are multiple orders of magnitude weaker than each of these fields.

Thus, the NAS report ruled out carcinogenic effects of living under power lines because thermal-noise fields are far larger than the background fields from power lines. No adverse health effects could be attributed to these low-level fields. Any biological mechanisms that would initiate cancer must start at the cellular level, and these mechanisms can operate only within the laws of physics. The politically driven fears of carcinogenic mechanisms arising from low-level magnetic fields lost all scientific credibility.

“Healing” Magnetic Fields

In contrast to the New Yorker articles that instigated fears about harmful magnetic fields, corresponding author Gronowicz’s (Jhaveri et al. 2008) research on the alleged healing fields produced by TT practitioners appeared to build upon previous scientific studies. Gronowicz’s research citations for healing fields rest on a paper by John Zimmerman (1999), “Laying-on-of-Hands and Therapeutic Touch: A Testable Theory,” in the Journal of the Bio-Electro-Magnetics Institute (BEMI). Repeated attempts to locate this paper and the journal in which it appeared, however, have proved futile.³

Although citations of the Zimmerman paper appear in a number of articles on distant healing, the paper itself appears to have vanished. Gronowicz’s (Jhaveri et al. 2008) research had been funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). It was therefore unsurprising that the Zimmerman paper was also cited on the NCCAM informational website in their overview on energy medicine. Librarians at neither George Mason University nor the NIH, however, were able to locate the journal. A web search for its author, John Zimmerman, a sleep psychologist, led to the reference “Earthing and Earth Fx Products: A Summary of Research and Development 2/10/06” and a citation of an article published in the Brain/Mind Bulletin on September 30, 1985 (volume 10, issue 2). The Earth Fx Products websites (Earthing 2006a, 2006b) advertise a “research company focused on the development of the health sciences and products for biological grounding.”

The librarians’ quest was fruitless in finding the BEMI journal, but it turned up a footnote in the January 1997 Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies that directed readers to contact Zimmerman directly for his article on TT. It appears Zimmerman’s paper was privately published but somehow found its way into citations within complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) journals. In an effort to locate Zimmermann, one of this article’s authors (Eugenie Mielczarek) contacted Zimmermann’s colleagues at his last professional address, but they were not able to confirm his whereabouts.

The legend of the salubrious effects of biomagnetic fields finds its source in Dolores Krieger, a nurse who was inspired by a nun who claimed that her healing properties depended on manipulating the energy field surrounding the body with a set of specialized hand movements (Kreiger 1975). This energy field arises from natural processes such as blood flow and electrical activity of the heart, and it measures about 0.004 milligauss (Hobbie and Roth 2007). A field of this strength is incredibly weak: three orders of magnitude less than background radiation, four orders of magnitude less than environmental background radiation, and an incredible eight orders of magnitude less than Earth’s magnetic field (see table 2).

Krieger’s sensational claim was amplified by the nursing community after she described touch as the “imprimatur of nursing” in her original article on TT (Krieger 1975). In the American nursing community, distant-healing protocols such as TT, Reiki, and qigong are based on a set of hand motions performed above the patient’s body that supposedly release positive healing energy. A video showing these motions being used in the emergency room of the University of Maryland Baltimore Shock Trauma Center can be seen on the web (Donnell 2010).

Curiously, “negative energy” is never defined, leaving unanswered the question, “What happens if the proscribed liturgy for healing is not followed or errors are made?” Jack Hitt, a journalist writing in the New York Times Magazine (2009), partly answered this question. Hitt describes the distant-healing culture in Serbia. Serbian protocol for distant healing can include props, such as antennas that can allegedly be tuned to help or harm at social distances. At least within the Serbian distant-healing culture, then, it is thought that the allegedly healing magnetic field may also be used to cause harm.

The scientific community has paid scant attention to Krieger’s claims. She was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize (the quasi-parody award) in 1998 (Improbable Research, n.d.). Until publication in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research, a peer-reviewed medical journal, claims for the success of this protocol were limited to CAM journals. Thus, claims for distant healing initiated by fields emitted from the hands of TT practitioners largely flew under the radar of the physics community.

“Healing” Magnets Meet the NIH

As the debate over the harmful effects of the magnetic fields surrounding power lines was winding down, science reporters at major newspapers (Brody 2000) were popularizing claims—of physicians writing in the medical literature—of magnetic relief of joint pain and neurologic symptoms (Vallbonna and Richards 1999). Small 300-gauss magnets began to appear on the shelves of drug stores. Mattress pads equipped with magnets were being marketed. A grant awarded by NCCAM resulted in a publication in a CAM journal touting the benefits of healing magnets (Alfano et al. 2001). The study of the power lines was forgotten; magically, the low-field magnets were marketed as curative. Purveyors of the products advertise on the web to this day.

Some purveyors’ rationales for the magnetic-therapy claims were ludicrous. Eugenie Mielczarek, one of the authors of this article, attended one sales pitch in which the sellers claimed their mattress magnets were superior because they incorporated only north poles. Sadly, during this time, friends who were recovering from breast cancer consulted her—hoping for confirmation that their magnetic bracelets would relieve the buildup of postoperative fluid in their breasts and underarms. Mielczarek’s podiatrist seriously asked her if wearing magnetic shoe inserts would improve his golf game, and a friend with diabetes attended a hospital clinic in Pennsylvania at which a purveyor of healing magnets was a speaker. In 2007, a lawsuit against advertisers of these products, brought by the National Council Against Health Fraud, was successfully settled. Mielczarek was one of the persons who agreed to appear as an expert witness if needed. The Federal Trade Commission also threatened to prosecute purveyors who claimed healthful benefits of these products.

The NIH’s NCCAM lends a false air of respectability to CAM protocols. NCCAM’s influence has penetrated the medical education system, lending false respectability to “integrative medicine” courses in medical curricula and programs at hospitals and clinics at esteemed medical institutions.⁴ Donald Marcus and Laurence McCullough (2009), professors of bioethics and medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, evaluated the CAM education grants awarded by the NIH to schools of medicine. They concluded that “these . . . curricula . . . fail to meet the generally accepted standards of evidence-based medicine. By tolerating this situation, health professions schools are not meeting their educational and ethical obligations to learners, patients, or society” (Marcus and McCullough 2009).

In addition, NCCAM’s promotion of questionable CAM extends beyond the medical community to the public at large. NCCAM maintains a website meant to inform the public about the validity of CAM treatments. The website leaves the mistaken impression that biochemistry and biological physics are undeveloped fields of inquiry. Misleading qualifiers are used to maintain a false level of uncertainty regarding the legitimacy of disproven treatments and techniques. For example, the NCCAM website tutorial “Magnets for Pain” (NCCAM, n.d.) states that “mechanisms by which magnets might affect the human body are not yet known”; “scientific researchers and magnet manufacturers propose that magnets might work by . . . changing nerve cell functions, balanc[ing] cell death and growth, increas[ing] blood flow and delivery of oxygen, and increas[ing] the temperature of the body.” Nowhere in NCCAM’s (n.d.) “Backgrounder: Reiki; An Introduction” tutorial is there any mention of the scientific calculations that settled the controversy over “damaging” magnetic fields emitted from power lines. Nor is there any mention that the chemical reactions responsible for these changes in nerve-cell functions, balances in cell populations, and increases in blood flow cannot be initiated by magnetic fields of 300 to 5,000 gauss. Sadly and frustratingly, the publications and well-established conclusions of scientists are ignored.

Is this true ignorance or mere pretense? Does the glaring omission of a large body of highly relevant scientific information reflect true ignorance on the part of the NIH, or does it reflect the political influence of alternative-medicine purveyors and their allies, who seek to maintain government funding for mythological, non-science-based protocols through NCCAM?

The Future of U.S. Medicine

If it is true ignorance that drives NCCAM’s disregard for relevant scientific research, then our medical structure is in serious disarray. If the director of the NIH and the secretary of Health and Human Services cannot recognize this ignorance, the foundations of the nation’s health care system and its fiscal integrity are under threat. Over the past decade, the U.S. government has wasted billions of dollars examining non-evidence-based treatments that have no grounding in the scientific method or in our understanding of basic scientific facts. The rise in government spending on junk medical science was largely brought about through the efforts of Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. As the Senate’s most devoted champion of CAM, Harkin helped dramatically increase NCCAM’s annual budget (Atwood 2003), which now stands at a staggering $128.8 million. Most recently, Senator Harkin secured still more government funding perpetuating CAM by introducing language in health care reform legislation requiring insurers to cover any state-licensed health care providers—including CAM practitioners. A version of Senator Harkin’s provision prohibiting “discrimination” against any state-licensed practitioners survived in the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (2010) that President Obama signed into law on March 23, 2010.

If the scientific and fiscal integrity of our health care system is to be salvaged, this ill-advised course must be reversed. Federal funding of NCCAM and of CAM practitioners under the health care reform act should be redirected toward proven and effective medical treatments and techniques. State governments face an urgent challenge in attempting to make quality health care available to those who need it, while simultaneously reining in the ballooning cost of medical care. To squander our scarce resources on alleged treatments that have no basis in scientific knowledge or experience is an act of gross irresponsibility. Our political leaders owe it to the scientific community, to health care consumers, and to taxpayers to ensure that all government-funded health care is grounded in science-based medical treatment.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the excellent help from librarians, students, and faculty at George Mason University. However, the views expressed here are solely those of the authors.

Notes

1. Recent publications relating to this subject by the authors include:

Eugenie Mielczarek. 2010. Magnetic fields, health care, alternative medicine and physics. Forum on Physics and Society Newsletter (April). Available online at www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201004/index.cfm.

Eugenie Mielczarek and Derek Araujo. 2009. A fracture in our health care: Paying for non-evidence based medicine (September 28). Available online at www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/A_Fracture_in_our_Health_Care_­Paying_for_Non-Evidence_Based_Medicine.pdf.

Eugenie Mielczarek. Fields, alternative medicine and physics. Available online at www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?cat=11.

2. Previous articles examining TT include:

Robert Glickman and Ed J. Gracely. 1998. Therapeutic touch: Investigation of a practitioner. The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 2(1): 43–47.

Bela Scheiber. 1997. Therapeutic touch: Evaluating the ‘growing body of evidence’ claim. The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 1(1): 13–15.

George Ulett. 1997. Therapeutic touch: Tracing back to Mesmer. The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine 1(1): 16–18.

3. In private communication with Harriet Hall, MD, (Hall 2009), the authors discovered that Hall’s similar efforts to locate the BEMI paper by Zimmermann also failed.

4. Examples of institutions that give false respectability to integrative medicine courses:

Brigham and Women’s Hospital (affiliated with Harvard University). www.brighamandwomens.org/Departments_and_Services/medicine/Services/oshercenter

Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. http://my.clevelandclinic.org/departments/integrativemedicine/default.aspx

Scripps Institute. www.scripps.org/services/integrative-medicine

University of Michigan. http://www.med.umich.edu/umim

References

Adair, Robert K. 1991. Constraints on biological effects of weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Physical Review A 43: 1039–48.

———. 1992. Reply to “Comment on ‘Constraints on biological effected weak extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic fields.’” Physical Review A 46: 2185–87.

———. 1998. Comment on “Extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields do not interact directly with DNA.” Bioelectromagnetics 19(2): 136–37.

Alfano, Alan P., Ann Gill Taylor, Pamela A. Foresman, et al. 2001. Static magnetic fields for treatment of fibromyalgia: A randomized controlled trial. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 7(1): 53-64.

Atwood, Kimball. 2003. The ongoing problem with the national center for complementary and alternative medicine. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 27(5) (September/October): 23–29. Available online at www.csicop.org/si/show/ongoing_problem_with_the_national_center/. Accessed on February 5, 2010.

Bennett, William R. 1994. Cancer and power lines. Physics Today 47(4): 23–29

Brodeur, Paul. 1990a. Annals of radiation: The calamity on Meadow Street. The New Yorker (July 9).

———. 1990b. Department of amplification. The New Yorker (November 19).

———. 1992. Annals of radiation: The cancer at Slater School. The New Yorker (December 7).

———. 1993. The Great Power-line Cover-Up. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Brody, Jane E. 2000. Less pain: Is it in the magnets or the mind? New York Times (November 28).

Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems, et al. 1997. Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Donnell, R.W. 2010. Reiki at Baltimore trauma center (January 29). Available online at http://doctorrw.blogspot.com/2010/01/reiki-at-baltimore-shock-trauma-center_356.html. Accessed January 29,2010.

Earthing and EarthFx Products. 2006a. Available online at www.earthfx.net. Accessed October 2009.

———. 2006b. Earthing and EarthFx products: A summary of research and development (February 10). Available online at www.equilibra.uk.com/summaryofearthingbenefits.pdf. Accessed August 4, 2010.

Hafemeister, David W. 1996. Resource letter BELFEF-1: Biological effects of low-frequency electromagnetic fields. American Journal of Physics 64(8): 974–81.

Hall, Harriet. 2009. Private communication (September 7).

Hitt, Jack. 2009. Radovan Karadzic’s new-age adventure. New York Times Magazine (July 26): 24.

Hobbie, Russell K., and Bradley J. Roth. 2007. Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, 4th ed. New York: Springer, 2007.

Improbable Research. n.d. Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize. Available online at http://improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig1998FN. Accessed August 5, 2010.

Jhaveri, Ankur, Stephen J. Walsh, Gloria Gronowicz, et al. 2008. Therapeutic touch affects DNA synthesis and mineralization of human osteoblasts in culture. Journal of Orthopaedic Research 26(11): 1541–46.

Kerew, Lynn. n.d. Local doctor points to new findings in alternative medicine. Available at http://lynnkerewchiropractic.com/blog/local-doctor-points-to-new-findings-in-alternative-medicine. Accessed August 4, 2010.

Krieger, Dolores. 1975. Therapeutic touch: The imprimatur of nursing. The American Journal of Nursing 75(5): 784–87.

Marcus, Donald, and Laurence McCullough. 2009. An evaluation of the evidence in ‘evidence-based’ integrative medicine programs. Academic Medicine 84(9): 1229–34.

NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine). n.d. Backgrounder: Reiki; An introduction. Available online at http://nccam.nih.gov/health/reiki. Accessed November 29, 2010.

———. n.d. Get the facts: Magnets for pain. Available online at http://nccam.nih.gov/health/magnet/magnetsforpain.htm. Accessed July 6, 2010.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Pub. L. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119 Sec 2706. March 23, 2010.

Thomley, Patsy W. 1998. EMF at home: The National Research Council reports on the health effects of electric and magnetic fields. Florida State University Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law. Available online at www.law.fsu.edu/journals/landuse/Vol132/Thom.htm.

Vallbonna, C., and T. Richards. 1999. Evolution of magnetic therapy from alternative to traditional medicine. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America 10(3): 729–54.

Waldman, Hilary. 2008. The right touch: A hint of hands-on healing. Hartford Courant (July 28). Available online at http://articles.courant.com/2008-07-28/news/healingtouch0728.art_1_healing-touch-therapeutic-touch-therapies.

Zimmerman, John. 1999. Laying-on-of-hands and therapeutic touch: A testable theory. BEMI Currents, Journal of the Bio-Electro-Magnetics Institute 2: 8–17. (As listed in Jhaveri et al. 2008).

I feel grateful and privileged that the research I have done on memory in the past three decades has been honored for its contributions to science and human welfare. But of all of these awards, this one, in honor of scientific freedom and responsibility, has a special poignancy for me. I never set out to carry the banner for those glorious words freedom and responsibility; I was merely a scientist interested in the fallibility and malleability of memory—a subject that turned out to be central to the “repressed memory” moral panic that swept this nation in the 1980s and 1990s. If anyone had told me in advance that my scientific commitment to knowledge would make me the target of organized, relentless vitriol and harassment (not to mention expensive litigation), I might have laughed at them—“Memory? Who gets angry over different memories?”

Every now and then I’d find myself wondering: If I’d known this in advance, would I have made the same decisions? Would I have decided to do the same kind of research, to spend countless hours in courtrooms testifying for the falsely accused, to write endless articles in rejoinder to dubious but persistent clinical ideas?

I do know that once faced with the choice between yielding to the wave of hostility and criticism that my research provoked or standing as strong as I could for science and justice, it was a no-brainer for me. But it was a decision that took an enormous personal toll, which is why this award is so meaningful and gratifying to me.

We live today in perilous times for science: conflicts of interest that taint research; pressures on scientists to cut corners to get fast results; a public culture that alternates between hostility to science and irrational expectations of what science can provide. If we as scientists want to preserve our freedom (and the welfare of others), now more than ever we have a responsibility.

And that responsibility is to bring our science to the public arena and to speak out as forcefully as we can against even the most cherished beliefs that reflect unsubstantiated myths.

For a new television series on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) called Miracle Detectives, I was invited to a home in Northern California where myriad icons, statues, and other religious effigies were “miraculously streaming oil”—“healing” oil, some claim. There I joined cohosts Randall Sullivan (whose book The Miracle Detective [2004] prompted the series) and Indre Vískontas (a neuroscientist and skeptic) (figure 1). Indre introduced me on the show by announcing: “Joe Nickell is one of the most prominent debunkers of purported miraculous or supernatural events in the country—maybe even the world.” As it happened, I had long ago suggested the case was one of pious fraud (Fernandez 2001). What would an on-site investigation reveal?

Background

The home I visited in Union City, California, belonged to a diminutive Philippine-American woman named Cora Lorenzo. There, in 1991, she hung by the front door in her living room a holy-water font she had bought on a trip to Lourdes, the French healing shrine. One November evening in 1995, Lorenzo noticed that the water had dried up. The next morning, however, which happened to be the Catholic feast of the Pentecost, the font had mysteriously been refilled with scented oil. Both her husband and twenty-four-year-old son denied that they had placed it there.

Soon, word of the “miracle” spread, and visitors—mostly the Catholic faithful—began to come in swarms. Some left their own icons and holy figurines overnight, only to retrieve them the next day drizzled with oil. Claims of healings—from headaches to rashes to arthritis—began to be reported. More visitors came from as far away as Indonesia, Australia, Holland, and Nigeria.

In 2001, the San Jose Mercury News featured the oil story but included more than a trickle of skepticism. A spokesperson for the Diocese of San Jose urged such claims be given “great caution.” Described as “a professional debunker,” I was quoted in observing that nondrying oils like olive oil could remain fresh-looking for long periods of time. (Since they do not evaporate like water, such oils have become favored for weeping-icon trickery.) I mentioned other cases of “miraculous” oily or bloody effigies that ranged from those that remain unproven and those that have been determined to be fraudulent. Moreover, although there were unverified claims of the oil samples miraculously increasing in quantity (rather like the self-replenishing jar of oil in the Old Testament [2 Kings 4: 1–7]), the Mercury News reported that this did not happen to the vial of oil the newspaper received from Cora Lorenzo (Fernandez 2001).

Figure 2. The author poses with Cora Lorenzo, whose home is famous as a shrine that pilgrims visit for “healing” oil.

Investigating on Site

When I met Lorenzo at her home on May 24, 2010, she hugged me and said she had wanted to meet me ever since I appeared on a Discovery Channel special on miracles some ten years before (figure 2). The home was filled with effigies, including statues of the Virgin and the children of Fatima, multiple copies of the image of Guadalupe and the Shroud of Turin, and other such reproductions.

Initially puzzled by the proliferation of oil, Vískontas nodded understandingly as we toured the display and I pointed out, using a magnifier, how the oil was often suspiciously placed (figure 3): it was spattered onto a mirror, placed above or outside the eyes of statuary for an unconvincing “weeping” look, separately placed (not dripped from the eyes) onto hands, and indeed was indistinguishable from careless human placement. In addition, Vískontas wondered aloud why the oil would appear not only on religious items but also on walls, door jambs, and the like.

Figure 3. The author examines an oil-weeping Madonna on the porch of the Lorenzo home. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

The Miracle Detectives segment on the case, “Mysterious Oils” (the second part of the January 5, 2011, episode), featured a forensic construction expert, Robert G. Cox, who has fifty years’ experience in building inspection. Cox’s findings matched my own. Demolishing the idea that the oil was somehow seeping into the room from outside—as by Lorenzo possibly having “leaky oil tanks in her attic” (Fernandez 2001)—Cox pointed out that the gypsum drywall was covered with enamel paint, which he observed “is a fairly dense material.” Using a pocket microscope he observed “dots” of oil, indicating it had been splattered onto the wall—similar to the spatter patterns I had noted here and there. Cox concluded the oil was therefore appearing from inside the room.

But was the oil freshly flowing as some people believed? It was never doing so, apparently, when the scene was properly observed. As the Mercury News reported nearly a decade earlier (Fernandez 2001), “During a reporter’s two visits to Lorenzo’s house, oil was present on the walls and statues, but did not flow on either occasion.” I showed Vískontas how a trickle that is already on a statue or icon could go unnoticed from one low-light vantage point, then, as the viewer moved, catch light and glint as if it had suddenly appeared. (I have been at sites where flickering candles placed before an oil icon could cause the trickles to seem to be moving—flowing—
although they were actually static.) There were no unambiguous fresh flows during the two days I was on site.

Still, we agreed to test the issue using video surveillance, although Sullivan was somewhat uneasy, feeling it amounted to “testing God.” However, he said to me, “That’s what you’re here to do is test God, so, yeah.” Lorenzo gave her permission to do whatever we wanted, so we wiped down a large oil-exhibiting statue of the Virgin, emptied the Lourdes font, and then trained a surveillance camera on each. We also placed a small statue in a plastic bag, which Vískontas and I heat-sealed to prevent tampering, and (although not shown on the program) I took custody of another that I monitored overnight in my hotel room. The next day the three of us reconvened at the Lorenzo home to check the results of our tests. Not a single trace of fresh oil had appeared anywhere, as far as we could tell—certainly not on the effigies and font we had under observation. Things were not looking very miraculous.

Healing Oil?

Nevertheless, how do we explain the reported healings? First of all, they are just that: reported. Besides, claims of “miraculous” healing are invariably predicated on being medically inexplicable, so claimants are simply engaging in a logical fallacy, argumentum ad ignorantiam (an “argument from ignorance”)—that is, drawing a conclusion based on a lack of knowledge.

In fact, there are many potential explanations. For example, some illnesses such as multiple sclerosis are known to exhibit spontaneous remission. Other reputed cures may be attributable to such factors as misdiagnosis, prior medical treatment, psychosomatic conditions, the body’s own natural healing mechanisms, and other factors. For such reasons, the international panel of physicians appointed by the Catholic Church to identify “miracles” at Lourdes, the French “healing” shrine, announced in 2008 that it would end the practice. Now the panel will only indicate that some cases are “remarkable.” And remarkable healings may happen to anyone—independent of supposedly magical oil (Nickell 2008).

Miracle Detectives examined the claim of a woman named Marlene Alberto who reported having been miraculously healed of an eye ailment. Her “symptoms suggested” that she had a macular hole in her left eye. Reportedly, doctors recommended she have surgery; she preferred not to accept the risk, instead anointing her eye with oil from the Lorenzo home, whereupon the hole surprisingly closed. The show consulted Ronald P. Gallemore, MD, PhD, who pointed out that “spontaneous closure” sometimes occurs in such cases, with the opening filling in with scar tissue as a result of the body’s own healing processes. Although such spontaneous closures are rare, they are not medically inexplicable and do not warrant the term miracle.

A Case of Deception

When we emptied the Lourdes font using a syringe, we filled some flint-glass vials with the oil—one of which I kept while two others were sent to Flora Research Laboratories for testing. Meanwhile, the show consulted David Stewart, author of Healing Oils of the Bible (2002)—which is published by an aromatherapy company and touts the inclusion of God and his creations (e.g., oil-producing plants) in health care. Stewart sniffed a sample of the Lorenzo oil and found it to have a “spiritual” quality. However, he did suggest that analysis of the oil could be significant since “God’s oils are not synthetic by definition.”

Often, the testing of substances from weeping icons is of little benefit because, presumably, a deity could use any substance it wished and, anyway, it is the question of how the substance got on the effigy in the first place that matters. For example, actual “salty tears” were reported to flow from a plaster bas-relief in Pavia, Italy, but then the owner was secretly observed applying the liquid with a water pistol (Nickell 1997). Nevertheless, in several cases tests have been revelatory. In 1913, a color print that “bled” was exposed when the substance failed tests for human blood; in 1985 a bleeding statue of the Virgin at a home in Quebec was exposed as a hoax when the blood was tested and found to be mixed with animal fat (so that when the room warmed from pilgrims’ body heat the substance would liquefy and flow realistically); and a case in Sardinia in 1995 was solved when DNA tests showed the blood was that of the statue’s owner. In yet another instance, involving a home with statues on which oil appeared in the presence of a comatose girl, the substance proved to be 80 percent vegetable oil and 20 percent chicken fat, consistent with the use of kitchen drippings (Nickell 1999).

With such cases in mind, I was happy the Lorenzo oil was to be tested. The laboratory report was instructive. While the substance was a vegetable oil, tests also revealed the presence of a glycol ether—a synthetic compound used as a fixative by the perfume industry (“in order,” Vískontas explained, “to keep elements together”). Sullivan agreed with Stewart that it was unlikely God would need to use a synthetic material.

With regard to the other evidence (especially the placement of the oil), he said to Vískontas that although he was disappointed, “You and I both agree, I think, that somebody’s putting that oil there.” That had always seemed likely to me, but now there was a preponderance of scientific evidence to that effect thanks to the Miracle Detectives investigation.

References

Fernandez, Lisa. 2001. Pilgrimage: Many doubt mysterious oil can heal pain. San Jose Mercury News (February 3).

Nickell, Joe. 1997. Those tearful icons. Free Inquiry 17(2) (Spring): 5, 7, 61.

———. 1999. Miracles or deception? The pathetic case of Audrey Santo. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 23(5) (September/October): 16–18.

———. 2008. Lourdes medical bureau rebels (author’s blog). Available online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/lourdes_medical_bureau_rebels/; accessed April 12, 2010.

Sullivan, Randall. 2004. The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

The psychic then attempts to cause the hands on the TV host’s watch to move backward by way of his “psychic powers.” While doing this, he invites the viewers to concentrate on their own watches, which the psychic is also trying to fix. Suddenly, on the host’s watch we see that the time has gone back two hours! Now is the time to check if something has happened in the homes of the viewers: they are invited to call the TV station and tell about their experiences. The phones in the studio’s offices start ringing with miracles being reported with each call: a watch, stopped for many years, now runs perfectly; another one has jumped ahead one hour; a Rolex watch, whose whole inside mechanism needed to be replaced at an estimated cost of nearly $1,000, now works perfectly. Over twenty-four more phone calls from people reporting to have seen their broken watches being fixed follow!

But that’s not all: dozens of other people call to say that their spoons, forks, and keys have bent; a glass of water has begun to boil; a TV set has gone off; and much, much more (see table 1 for a description of the phenomena reported by TV viewers during this hour of broadcasting).

The episode just described really took place in 1992 when, as a guest on a popular Italian TV show, L’Istruttoria (The Inquest), I had a chance to test a theory I was rather curious about. With the complicity of the show’s host, I intended to pose as a psychic and duplicate a demonstration that, during the 1970s, had made famous a man who claimed to possess real psychic powers: Israel’s Uri Geller.

For a few years, Geller had been able to convince people (including scientists) that he could bend keys and forks, guess drawings in sealed envelopes, and predict future events with the power of his mind. After various investigators showed that his claims had no scientific basis (Randi 1975; Marks and Kamman 1980; Gardner 1981), his career as a psychic superstar faded.

One of the most convincing performances of this charismatic character was, in fact, his apparent ability to cause strange phenomena to happen directly inside the houses of TV viewers. After this phenomenon regularly occurred (as dozens of phone callers could testify each time), the most obvious conclusion for most of the audience was that the phenomenon had to be real because Geller could not possibly have had so many stooges faking support for his claim.

The paranormal, however, most likely has nothing to do with this demonstration; the explanation in fact could lie more easily in an interesting effect of mass suggestion. It was not the first time I posed as a psychic to test this theory. In 1989, in fact, James “The Amazing” Randi asked me to claim psychic powers on a radio show in order to later demonstrate, during the Exploring Psychic Powers Live! TV show, how anyone could duplicate this phenomenon just by the clever use of suggestion. I did as Randi instructed and went on the radio show and claimed that as I was talking incredible things would start to happen in the houses of the listeners.

After only five minutes or so, about twenty people called reporting the strangest things: a television set had turned on all by itself; a cat was behaving strangely; a picture had fallen from the wall; a bulb in a lamp had exploded; a book on spiritualism had fallen from the table; the whole computer network of a lawyer’s office had gone down; and much more.

There was nothing extraordinary about those things. They happen often but nobody pays much attention them or thinks that they must be related to some psychic phenomenon; however, after the listeners had been alerted by me to watch for unusual phenomena, almost any event that occurred while I was talking could easily be interpreted as evidence for my claims by the most suggestible people.

Let’s try, then, to understand the psychological conditions that can generate and enhance a similar belief in some listeners.

Persuasion in Action

We are obviously dealing with some of the major principles of persuasion, including the reciprocity principle, the authority factor, the motivation and coherence principle, the shortage principle, the sympathy principle, and the social confirmation principle. Robert B. Cialdini has summarized these principles very clearly. According to Cialdini, these principles come into play almost automatically and therefore are easily exploited by those who know how they work. Let’s see how these principles apply to the situations described above.

First of all, the “psychic” sets the stage: he presents himself to the public as a believable person. In my case, at the beginning of the radio broadcast, the host told his listeners that some Italian universities were conducting experiments on my powers; on TV, I was able to demonstrate my claimed powers by bending and breaking a spoon, correctly guessing a drawing sealed in an envelope, and making some radish seeds germinate in my hand. In other words, I had offered something solid to the viewers: convincing demonstrations of extraordinary powers. The reciprocity principle, which states that we have to reciprocate when we’re given something, was then activated. In this case, in exchange for my demonstration the TV viewer might have felt more obligated to give what I had to say more attention.

Furthermore, in both cases my claims were not doubted by the hosts: both expressed their belief in their reality and pretended they were very puzzled. This way, I was benefitting from the authority factor, a principle whose strength has been clearly shown by Stanley Milgram. Owing to the sense of compliance toward authority, which is profoundly infused in human beings, some spectators may well have surrendered to the judgment of the hosts and undertaken the same attitude of wonder that the hosts exhibited toward my claims. At this point, the message we wanted to get through—namely, that I had real psychic powers—was already appearing as a consistent hypothesis by a considerable number of the viewers.

For the persuasion to be effective, however, the spectators had to feel motivated to participate in the experiment—and what better motivation than the possibility of personally living an extraordinary experience and coming face-to-face with the supernatural? This persuasion was especially effective because I was constantly repeating that these phenomena didn’t happen all the time and didn’t happen to just anyone: only the few “chosen” ones could live this wonderful experience. This is the shortage principle: an experience appears more attractive if its availability appears to be limited.

Also, the fact that I had an unassuming attitude (and that I apologized various times in case the demonstration failed) helped to make me more likeable: without acknowledging it, the spectators were wishing for everything to go well and were ready to act their part toward achieving this aim.

At this point, the spectators were ready to interpret anything happening in their houses (no matter how prosaic) as proof of the reality of my psychic powers. There was still one more very important persuasive factor that played a role as soon as the phone calls started arriving: the social confirmation principle. “If so many people call to say that their cat is behaving strangely or that their watches are working again,” some spectators may have wondered, “maybe I should call in to say that the light went off for a few seconds!”

The illusion created by the number of phone calls coming in was that all the spectators tuned into that same channel were personally experiencing some spectacular demonstration of psychic phenomena—a fact that inevitably nourished further phone calls and could have very well resulted in headlines on the following day’s newspapers had we not revealed the experiment. In reality, the small percentage of spectators calling was enough to quickly jam the switchboard of the TV station for a few hours.

Conclusion

Considering the complexity of the world in which we live, it is natural that people, in making their decisions, do not take advantage of all the available data but rely only on some isolated and representative item. This “economy” strategy to proceed by shortcuts inevitably leads us to make inferences on the basis of incomplete data; consequently, wrong decisions are often made. As Cialdini (1984) wrote: “We need simple, reliable, and effective rules of conduct. But if the tricks of the sharks undermine their functionality, we loose faith in these rules; we then use them less, and we find ourselves ill equipped in facing the burden of decisions that today’s life places upon us. We can’t surrender to this without fighting. The stakes are too high” (217).

References

Cialdini, Robert. B. 1984. Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things. New York: William Morrow and Company.

Gardner, Martin. 1981. Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Harris, Ben. 1985. Gellerism Revealed. Calgary: Hades International.

Harris, Richard Jackson. 2009. A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication, fifth edition. London: Routledge.

Marks, D., and R. Kamman. 1980. The Psychology of the Psychic. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Pratkanis, Anthony. Age of Propaganda. New York: A.H. Freeman and Company.

Randi, James. 1975. The Magic of Uri Geller. New York: Ballantine. Reprinted as The Truth About Uri Geller (1983). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

A Brief History of Homeopathy

Homeopathy was invented (it is not accurate to say it was discovered, which would imply it has some basis in reality) by Samuel Hahnemann in the late eighteenth century. Hahnemann developed his principles of homeopathy from anecdote and superstition without any chain of scientific research, evidence, or reasoning. It is therefore no surprise that more than two hundred years later, scientific progress has failed to validate any of Hahnemann’s ideas (House of Commons 2010).

Scientific knowledge builds on itself, and when someone discovers a fundamental property of nature, it leads to further discoveries and a deepened understanding. Homeopathy led to nothing. Hahnemann’s “law of similars” is the notion that “like cures like”—that a small dose of a substance will cure whatever symptoms it would cause in a high dose. This, however, is not based upon anything in biology or chemistry. It is often falsely compared to the body’s response to vaccines, but this is not an apt analogy.

Hahnemann’s “law of infinitessimals,” the notion that a substance becomes more potent when diluted, violates the law of mass action and everything we know about chemistry. Also, many homeopathic remedies are diluted past the point where even a single molecule of the original substance is likely to be left behind. Hahnemann believed that the water retained the magical “essence” of the substance, which makes homeopathy a vitalistic belief system.

Hahnemann’s ideas are sufficiently silly that even at the time, early in the history of science, they were ridiculed and dismissed. Homeopathy remains utterly nonsensical, but it is now much more sophisticated nonsense.

A recent fascination with unscientific health modalities has caused a resurgence of interest in homeopathy, leading to many clinical trials of the effectiveness of homeopathic products for specific ailments. After hundreds of clinical studies of homeopathy, systematic reviews reveal that homeopathic remedies are indistinguishable from placebos (another way of saying that they do not work) (Ernst 2010).

This is not even a scientific controversy—the evidence that homeopathy cannot work and does not work is overwhelming. Only ideology, wishful thinking, and scientific illiteracy keep it alive.

Water Memory

Modern defenders have desperately tried to justify homeopathy with scientific-sounding explanations, but they have failed miserably. One such attempt is the notion that water is capable of having memory—that it can physically remember the chemical properties of substances that have been diluted in it.

The notion of water memory was first raised by French homeopath Jacques Benveniste in 1988. He was not studying the water structure itself, just trying to demonstrate that water can retain the memory of antibodies or other substances diluted in it. His research, however, has been completely discredited due to the many flaws in Benveniste’s methods, his lab’s cherry-picking of data, his improper statistics, and his recounting data points that did not fit their desired results (Scrimgeour 2007).

Materials scientist Rustum Roy, who was enamored with spiritual healing, built upon Benveniste’s discredited research, claiming that water molecules are like bricks—they can be used to build structures that contain greater complexity and information than the bricks themselves. Specifically, water molecules can encode in their structure the chemical properties of what was diluted in them.

However, the evidence does not support this claim. What has been demonstrated is that water molecules form transient bonds with other water molecules, creating a larger ultrastructure—but these water structures are extremely short-lived. They are not permanent. In fact, research shows that water molecules very efficiently distribute energy from these bonds, making them extremely ephemeral. One such research paper concludes: “Our results highlight the efficiency of energy redistribution within the hydrogen-bonded network, and that liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure within 50 fs” (Cowan 2005). That’s fifty femtoseconds, or fifty quadrillionths (10^-15) of a second. Contrary to Roy’s claims, water does not hold memory. In fact it is characterized by being extremely efficient at not holding memory. Scientists can argue about whether or not water can display ultrastructure lingering for longer than femtoseconds under certain conditions—but they are arguing over incredibly small fractions of a second.

Recently Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier has given a boost to the “water memory” hopes of homeopaths by publishing a series of experiments in which he claims that DNA highly diluted in water is able to generate radio signals (Montagnier 2009). There are numerous problems with these studies, however. Prime among them is that Montagnier’s study design is laughably sloppy (see Myers 2011). Montagnier used a crude signal detection device hooked up to a computer and generated worthless noise-ridden results. His studies proved nothing (and, not surprisingly, have not been replicated), but that has not stopped homeopaths from seizing upon his work to claim vindication.

So we are still left with no plausibility and no evidence that water can form ultrastructures for a biologically meaningful amount of time. It is amazing that Roy, Montagnier, and others so enthusiastically extrapolated from the claim that water can hold structures slightly longer than previously believed (itself probably bogus) to the notion that this can explain the biological effectiveness of homeopathy. Let’s take a close look at the nontrivial steps they glossed over.

If this kind of water “memory” is an explanation for homeopathy, then these structures would have to survive not only in a sample of water but through the physical mixing of that water with other water. In fact, they would have to transfer their structure, like a template, to surrounding water molecules. This would need to be reliably repeatable over many dilutions. Then these structures would have to survive transfer to a sugar pill (often homeopathic remedies are prepared by a drop of the water being placed onto a sugar pill).

These water structures would then have to be transferred to the sugar molecules because before long the water will evaporate. This pill will then sit on a shelf for days, months, or years before it is finally consumed by a gullible patient. The sugar pill will be broken down in the homeopathy proponent’s stomach, and the sugar molecules will then be digested, absorbed into the blood stream, and distributed through the blood to the tissues of the body.

Presumably, whatever molecules are retaining this alleged ultrastructure are sticking together throughout all of these processes and finding their way to the target organ in which they are able to have their chemical/biological effect.

Absurd does not even begin to cover the leaps of logic that are being committed here. In short, invoking water memory as an explanation for homeopathic effects just adds more layers of magical thinking to the notion of homeopathy; it wouldn’t offer a plausible explanation even if the theory of water memory was true, which it isn’t.

Some chemical bonds are strong enough to survive this process intact and make it through the body to the target tissue where they can bind to receptors or undergo their chemical reactions. Even most chemicals, however, cannot make it through this biological gauntlet with their chemical activity intact—which is why the bioavailability of many potential drugs is too low for them to be useful as oral agents. The chemicals are simply broken down by the digestive process. In other words, the ephemeral bonds of this alleged water memory—if this fiction of water memory even existed—would have a bioavailability of zero.

Conclusion

The notion that water has memory is nothing more than a restating of Hahnemann’s superstitious notion that substances can transfer their “vital essence” to other substances. Water memory is another fiction of homeopathy; it is not based upon any science and is implausible in the extreme.

References

Cowan M.L., B.D. Bruner, N. Huse, et al. 2005. Ultrafast memory loss and energy redistribution in the hydrogen bond network of liquid H2O. Nature 434 (March 10):199–202. doi:10.1038/nature03383.

Ernst, E. 2010. Homeopathy: What does the “best” evidence tell us? The Medical Journal of Australia 192(8) (April 19): 458–60.

House of Commons, Science, and Technology Committee. Evidence check 2: Homeopathy. Available online at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/45/45.pdf.

Myers, P.Z. 2011. It almost makes me disbelieve that HIV causes AIDS. Pharyngula (January 24). Available online at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/it_almost_makes_me_disbelieve.php.

Montagnier L., J. Aissa, S. Ferris, et al. 2009. Electromagnetic signals are produced by aqueous nanostructures derived from bacterial DNA sequences. Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences 1(2): 81–90.

Scrimgeour, H.J. 2007. Water memory tests all wet: A reassessment of the Benveniste experiments by a DVM. Association for Science and Reason (August 8). Available online at www.scienceandreason.ca/pseudoscience/alternativemedicine/water-memory-tests-all-wet/.