There are already a fair number of scientific studies looking at various herbal products for specific indications. There is nothing inherently implausible about the usefulness of plant-based remedies. Many modern drugs are derived from plants. Plant parts contain many substances, some of which are pharmacologically active and can be exploited for medical use.

The deception inherent to the herbal product industry, in my opinion, is the notion that herbs are something other than drugs. This is closely tied to the naturalistic fallacy: the idea that a substance that is “natural” (a poorly defined concept) is somehow magically safe and effective.

In reality, herbs often contain multiple active ingredients that potentially have drug-like activity in the body. These drugs are often poorly understood, may not even be identified, and exist in highly variable doses within herbal products (Wurglics et al. 2001). Herbs have drug-drug interactions and the same potential for side effects and toxicity as any drug, mitigated only by the fact that herbal products generally contain low doses of active ingredients.

Some popular herbal products have been studied in standard placebo-controlled trials, and they have generally not fared well. A recent scientific study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, looked at the drug silymarin for the treatment of liver disease due to chronic hepatitis C that has not responded to standard therapy with interferons (Fried et al. 2012). Silymarin is an extract of milk thistle, an herb commonly used to treat liver disease.

There have now been large, double-blind clinical trials of echinacea and cold symptoms (Barret et al. 2002; Taylor et al. 2003; Turner et al. 2005), Gingko biloba and memory loss or Alzheimer’s disease (Snitz et al. 2009), black cohosh and hot flashes (Newton et al. 2006), saw palmetto and benign prostatic hypertrophy (Tacklind et al. 2009), and others. Even St. John’s Wort, which is supposed to be a big herbal remedy win, has been shown to have no effect on moderate or severe depression (although the jury is still out on minor depressive symptoms; see Hypericum Depression Trial Study Group 2002). Many of these studies were funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).

Despite this string of negative studies, the herbal remedy industry continues to rake in billions of dollars every year. Large, rigorous, and negative studies seem to have little impact on the sales of herbal products overall (although they may affect the relative popularity of specific herbs to some extent).

To make matters worse, in the United States herbal drugs were essentially deregulated in 1994 by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Herbs are now regulated more like food rather than drugs. Further, a special category of health claims, so-called structure function claims, was carved out for supplements. Companies can market herbs without any prior approval from the FDA or need to provide evidence of safety or effectiveness. They can even claim that their product supports the structure or function of the body in some way, as long as they don’t mention a specific disease by name. This amounts to a massive loophole easily exploited by any savvy marketer.

The deal that DSHEA and NCCAM made with the public was this: Let the supplement industry have free reign to market untested products with unsupported claims, and then we’ll fund reliable studies to arm the public with scientific information so they can make good decisions for themselves. This “experiment” (really just a gift to the supplement industry) has been a dismal failure.The result has been an explosion of the supplement industry flooding the marketplace with useless products and false claims.

Part of the problem is that negative studies are too easy to dismiss. In every case the supplement industry finds some reason to minimize the implications of the studies showing their products do not work, instead preferring to cherry pick small and unreliable studies with positive results. No study can possibly address every possible permutation of how an herb can be used.

For example, herbal apologists may claim that the dose was not high enough, the wrong part of the plant was used, the preparation was not correct, or the treatment population was wrong in some way. For echinacea they claimed that the wrong cold viruses were used. There is always something they can point to. Of course, this logic works both ways: if it’s so difficult to find the right preparation for the right condition, then how do they justify selling highly variable products to the general population with broad claims?

How are the “traditional” uses of herbal products derived in the first place? The impression that is often given is that centuries of successful traditional use is behind many herbal product claims, but this is often a modern marketing fiction.

It seems reasonable to require manufacturers and marketers of herbal products to prove that their product is safe and effective for whatever it is they claim it treats. Not only is this not required under DSHEA, companies can continue to market their herbs with claims that have been contradicted by major scientific studies funded by taxpayer dollars.

As with many things, the marketing of herbal products is largely based on ideology and a compelling narrative rather than actual science and evidence. For the most part consumers are left to their own devices to sort out which products are likely to be useful.

Finally, keep in mind that if an herbal product contains a useful active ingredient, it would likely be identified, purified, and properly studied. The best result is likely to come from taking a precisely measured amount of a specific active ingredient with known pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics as well as drug-drug interactions.

Herbs are not only drugs, they are a mixture of various drugs of unknown dose, activity, and interactions, often with evidence that they do not work. It takes effective marketing to convince the public this is somehow better than taking highly purified and studied pharmaceuticals.

References

Barrett, B.P., R.L. Brown, K. Locken, et al. 2002. Treatment of the common cold with unrefined echinacea: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Annals of Internal Medicine 137(12): 939–946.

Blumenthal, M., A. Lindstrom, C. Ooyen, et al. 2012. Herb supplement sales increase 4.5% in 2011. HerbalGram 95: 60–64. Online at http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue95/hg95-mktrpt.html.

Fried, M.W., V.J. Navarro, N. Afdhal, et al. 2012. Effect of silymarin (milk thistle) on liver disease in patients with chronic hepatitis C unsuccessfully treated with interferon therapy, a randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 308(3): 274–282. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.8265.

Hypericum Depression Trial Study Group. 2002. Effect of Hypericum perforatum (St John’s Wort) in major depressive disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 287(14): 1807–14.

Newton, K.M., S.D. Reed, A.Z. LaCroix, et al. Treatment of vasomotor symptoms of menopause with black cohosh, multibotanicals, soy, hormone therapy, or placebo: A randomized trial. Annals of Internal Medicine 145(12): 869–79.

Snitz, B.E., E.S. O’Meara, M.C. Carlson, et al. 2009. Ginkgo biloba for preventing cognitive decline in older adults: A randomized trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 302(24): 2663–2670. doi:10.1001/jama.2009.1913.

Tacklind, J., R. MacDonald, I. Rutks, et al. 2009. Serenoa repens for benign prostatic hyperplasia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (April 15) (2):CD001423. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD001423.pub2.

Taylor, J.A., W. Weber, L. Standish, et al. 2003. Efficacy and safety of echinacea in treating upper respiratory tract infections in children: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 290(21): 2824–2830.

Turner, R.B., R. Bauer, K. Woelkart, et al. 2005. An evaluation of Echinacea angustifolia in experimental rhinovirus infections. New England Journal of Medicine 353(4): 341–348.

Wurglics, M., K. Westerhoff, A. Kaunzinger, et al. 2001. Comparison of German St. John’s Wort products according to hyperforin and total hypericin content. Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Wash) 41(4): 560–66.

More humans have died than you will ever meet, see, or learn about. Since our split from the apes, Earth has been littered with the detritus of human demise—nearly 110 billion bodies. If spirits did live on after death, most of the people you meet will have already met their end.

Every single house on Earth would be haunted by default.

If becoming a ghost were the next stage of life after death, our planet would be absolutely packed with ectoplasm. Earth currently harbors over seven billion human beings, all very much alive. We pack them in skyscrapers and in endless suburbs. But adding another 110 billion souls to the population would make everyone a neighbor. If ghosts could interact with matter, they would need space to haunt, and in the United States, we value our space. If the seven billion humans alive today wanted to live like Americans, they would need over four times the landmass currently available on Earth. By extrapolation, all the haunting space required by ghosts would push that number to 185 times all the landmass on Earth. If ghosts existed, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one (or it passing through one). Ghost hunter’s thermal cameras would see a blur of reds and blues wherever they looked.

Famous for being able to pass through matter, ghosts might simply pack together instead of being neighbors to everyone on the planet. Just how much space these phantasmal people would require is impossible to determine. How many ghosts could fit on the head of a pin? How many Ghostbusters’ ecto-containment chambers would you need to hold them all?

A new view of death accompanies real-life ghosts. When the body is just a vessel—a way station for the eternal spirit—life is a race to your best self. If ghosts manifest themselves as a picture of the person at the instant they died, old, grotesque ghosts would evaporate. Like how most animals strive to raise their children to reproductive maturity, all humans would occupy this material plane only until they looked however they wanted to look for eternity. Droves of twenty-somethings would commit suicide, seeking to remain young for all time. Billions of Dorian Grays make their pacts with death. Why live until you are old if you are bound to exist in that form forever? “Live fast, die young” is sound advice in a world where ghosts exist.

Carrying on as a ghost taking the last form of the deceased still would be spooky. Unfortunate fetuses and grotesque accident victims would float around with the twenty-something ghosts who had control over their demise. The universe extinguishes the lives of millions of children under the age of five each year. A world where ghosts exist suffers the hauntings of billions of supremely creepy (and presumably naked) baby ghosts.

If you thought the NSA’s spying was bad, a world filled with spooks has no privacy at all. Able to float through walls and haunt at will, each of the 110 billion ghosts is a real-life Santa Claus. They see you when you’re sleeping; they know when you’re awake. They know when you’ve been bad or good; so don’t do anything you wouldn’t want every single ancestor you have to see and judge you on.

The cottage séance industry quickly tanks, because whom your great aunt wants you to marry is a simple haunt away. The sale of ghost hunter tools like EMF detectors and thermal imaging cameras would skyrocket. Knowing when you are truly alone would be big business. And if ghosts do interact through electromagnetic radiation, as hunters claim, we might have to re-think our radio and Wi-Fi systems. Dearly departed grandmothers would mess with our Internet.

Death is no longer a release in a world where ghosts exist. The paranoia that comes from knowing every member of the human race can judge each and every action you take would surely create a new form of PTSD. But being in contact with a dead relative that can phase through walls has its benefits. Every locked door would be effectively transparent. Earth would be filled with 110 billions lenses of truth. The term secret would lose its value.

Depending on ghost “rules,” there might be far fewer than you’d expect. If the only ghosts that remain after death have “unfinished business,” at least it wouldn’t be so crowded. But if even a small percentage of humans were wronged before death, you would have to deal with billions of ornery phantoms—surely enough to make their presence known.

Instead of asking “who you gonna call” every second of every day, there remains no evidence of the life of death. Where there should be billions of ghosts, there are bumbling investigators, specks of dust in camera lenses, and psychologically dubious recollections. We should be swimming in ghastly illusions, so what do you see?

Skeptics often say they are trying to expose pseudoscience, but in reality we tend to use this term loosely. Creationism, homeopathy, al­ternative medicine, and cold fusion are clearly pseudoscientific, but what about ancient aliens, UFOs, alien abductions, Bigfoot, crystals, the Moon hoax, and many other claims investigated in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer? Are these examples of pseudoscience, just bad science, or perhaps not related to science at all?

One definition of pseudoscience presents it as claims that are presented as scientific but do not adhere to valid scientific method. Another describes pseudoscience as the misuse of methods that seem scientific in order to undercut real science. In his excellent new book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, Princeton historian Michael D. Gordin asserts that scientists only apply the label of pseudoscience—which he defines as “doctrines that are non-science but pretend to be, or aspire to be, or are simply mistaken for scientific”—to ideas that they feel are threatening because of their public appeal. It is the way pseudoscience masquerades as real science and is used to attack real science that sets it apart from the easily dismissed claims of cranks and charlatans.

No advocate for an unorthodox perspective ever calls his or her work pseudoscience. This is a term of opprobrium, assigned by scientists who are defending the consensus. Gordin notes that in practice, the term pseudoscience is generally reserved for ideas that are perceived as major challenges to science—especially in the eyes of the public. Less threatening ideas are simply labeled as bad science or non-science, on the assumption that they will self-destruct and be quickly forgotten.

Gordin’s highly readable book ex­amines in detail several twentieth-century examples of pseudoscience. Major emphasis is on the pseudocosmologist Immanuel Velikovsky. His other prime examples are Trofim Lysenko, who nearly destroyed mid-century Russian genetics, and the advocates for Biblical creationism who attempted to establish a scientific basis for a planet less than ten thousand years old. Lysenkoism was a threat be­cause of the personal support given by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, which virtually outlawed research that challenged Lysenko and thereby had a strong negative impact on Soviet agriculture. In a sense, Lysenko could be held responsible for the death of millions in the U.S.S.R. The creationist authors who developed “flood geology,” primarily George McCready Price, Henry Morris, and John Whitcomb, have been (and continue to be) a threat because of support by Christian fundamentalists who use these ideas to attack evolutionary biology in particular and science in general. Velikovsky is different, in that he achieved substantial fame and influence on his own merits without the support of any organized religious or political institutions.

Many readers of the Skeptical Inquirer are familiar with the outlines of Velikovsky’s rise and fall. Gordin had access to the complete Velikovsky archives held by Princeton University, which he used to document many details of this story. He places in context the “Velikovsky affair,” which dealt with the opposition to his 1950 book Worlds in Collision. One of many controversies he illuminates is the question whether Velikovsky’s book was reviewed (or refereed) before publication. The fact is that it was reviewed by several scientists who said, in effect, even though it was bunk as science, the book was still likely to be popular enough that its publication would be a sound business decision.

That is exactly what happened. Scien­tists excoriated the book for its obvious failings, but many non-scientist reviewers lavished praise upon it. This deep division between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities came as a shock to many scientists. Velikovsky, while of course pleased that his book rose to the top of the bestseller lists, was also stung by its unanimous condemnation by scientists. He never understood their criticism of planets rapidly shifting orbits within historic time, and he sought their recognition as a bona fide scholar. He did not do this by publishing papers or making presentations at scientific conferences, but rather by courting individual scientists—especially his Princeton neighbor Albert Einstein. These efforts at personal diplomacy were not successful. Scientists immediately recognized that his planetary collisions, and his suggestion that electromagnetism rather than gravitation dominated planetary motions, were (in Einstein’s terms) “crazy.” Velikovsky was simply not speaking the same language as the scientific community.

But this is only half the story. It seemed likely that for all the immediate popularity of his book, he would quickly be forgotten. What makes this story so interesting, what elevates Velikovsky to the rank of true pseudoscientist, was the resurrection of interest in his work during the Vietnam War years, when he became a darling of the counterculture, gaining support among humanist scholars as well as rebellious students. He was invited to speak on campuses, conferences were held to discuss his ideas, and his books again ascended the best-seller charts. Precisely because of his rejection by the scientific community, he became the symbol of the lone scholar defying the conservative establishment.

Gordin also explores the relationships between different pseudoscientists. Superficially, there were striking similarities between Velikovsky and the creationist positions of Price in The New Geology (1923) and Whitcomb and Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961). All rejected the uniformitarian geology of their time. All sought to explain many geological features in terms of recent catastrophic events. And both sides sought evidence to support or verify events in the Old Testament, such as the Noachian flood and the escape of the Israelites from Egypt. Velikovsky began correspondence with Price in 1951, and he sent the manuscript of his second book, Earth in Upheaval, to Price for his comments. Price replied that “While I have not always been able to agree with some of the details. I have admired the handsome way in which you have demolished Charles Lyell as well as [Charles Darwin].” Later in a review, Price described “Earth in Upheaval as one of the most thought-provoking books of modern times.” However, Velikovsky and the creationists soon fell into dispute. Velikovsky sought naturalistic explanations for the Bible stories, while the creationists preferred direct attribution to acts of God. In the end, each side ostracized the other and went its own way, not acknowledging any commonality of ideas.

In his final chapter, Gordin turns to the new phase of pseudoscience, practiced by a few rogue scientists themselves. Climate change denialism is the prime example, where a handful of scientists, allied with an effective PR machine, are publicly challenging the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is due primarily to human consumption of fossil fuels. Scientists have watched in disbelief that as the evidence for global warming has become ever more solid, the deniers have been increasingly successful in the public and political arena. One has only to attend a meeting of atmospheric and climate scientists, such as the December 2012 American Geophysical Union, to appreciate the overwhelming support and increasing sophistication of our understating of human-caused global warming. At this gathering, thousands of scientists made hundreds of presentations of research results, ranging from the minutia of modeling the feedback of cloud formation on the greenhouse effect to documenting the incredible rate of loss of Arctic ice. Leaders of the scientific community made impassioned statements about the threat we face and the necessity for action. Yet outside the halls of science, polls show that half of Americans deny the reality of climate change, while Senator Jim Inhofe recently announced not only that human induced climate change is a hoax, but also boasted, “we have won” in the court of public opinion. Today pseudoscience is still with us, and is as dangerous a challenge to science as it ever was in the past.

The greatest thing about a sound bath is that it is perfectly acceptable to fall asleep during the procedure. Packed with forty or fifty people into a small, domed room in the California desert—a room supposedly blueprinted by aliens—listening to a middle-aged nurse play quartz singing bowls, a person might think they were supposed to stay awake. Not so. At the Integratron, falling asleep is a given.

I get to the Integratron by way of Ross’s old pickup truck. We drive the three and a half hours from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, reading printed pages from the website as we go. George Van Tassel, the facility’s designer, said aliens gave him the instructions. The building was supposed to rejuvenate the body, adding decades to a visitor’s life. Tesla coils and other technology would give the Integratron its power. Unfortunately, Van Tassel died “mysteriously” before completing the job. Today, it stands—still powerful—but not as powerful as it could have been.

“Do you think it’s INtegratron, or InTEGratron?” I ask Ross.

“InTEGratron,” he says, pretty confidently, almost as if it were a word.

We pull into the parking lot around noon and are greeted by a smiling group of folks in organic cotton and cowboy hats. I see several Sanskrit tattoos. Everyone is chatting. Some are lying in “Hammock Village,” just south of the Integratron itself. A group of tourists are fanning themselves in the desert sun. We pay for our $20 sound bath tickets and head in.

The building is a huge boob. The nipple is open to the sunlight and fresh air. The structure has two levels. Artifacts and photos line the walls of the bottom floor. The docent tells us to remove our shoes and head upstairs. He warns us not to take pictures of anyone’s face, because “this is a Church of the Face.”

He hands us yoga mats and blankets, and we lie on the floor. I lie horizontally and am immediately corrected by the docent.

“You want your head to be toward the center to get the best effect,” he says. I realize I’m the only one who hasn’t done this automatically. My internal head placement compass is off. I adjust.

Everyone is breathing quietly now, staring up at the smooth, wooden ceiling. A lovely middle-aged woman takes her seat among the singing bowls. She will be our instrumentalist. The quartz bowls are huge, translucent, and soft pink. They take up a full twenty square feet of space, and are gleaming in the sunlight.

“I’m an old cardiac nurse and a huge skeptic. The guy who built this place says aliens gave him the design. Yeah, okay...” the woman says with a snicker, “but how could he know that the human energy field is exactly fifty-five feet across, just like this building?”

Yeah! How could he know? This seems like a good point, if the human energy field is a thing. Just to make sure, I check when I get home. It’s not a thing.

“The one problem here is snoring. Snoring is amplified, just like the sounds of the bowls. If someone snores, tell them to stop,” she says.

We’re all thinking about the farting situation, but no one says anything.

The nurse tells us that the vibrations of the bowls are powerful healing tools. She invites us to lie down and listen. The tones start out low and rhythmic and grow steadier and louder. Some of them sound like a dial tone, and my brain keeps misfiring: “Hang up the phone!” Some of the sounds are downright unpleasant, but most are lovely and comforting. It’s very easy to fall asleep. Within minutes, I’m completely out.

When I wake up, people are gathering their blankets and leaving. I’m startled into wakefulness, thinking I’ve failed. I’ve missed the whole thing! But Ross has been awake the whole time and tells me I’ve missed nothing; it was all music and the steady breathing of a room full of sleeping people. I don’t feel anything mystical or metaphysical, but I do feel peaceful and rested.

Outside, we meet Trevor, a staff person, who is dressed in a cowboy hat and has a friendly smile. We ask him about the building and where it gets its special powers. He explains that the building is built exactly over a spike in the earth’s magnetic field.

“What does that mean exactly?” I ask.

“Well, scientists have come here and confirmed it.”

“Oh…. Okay.”

He says the building has powerful forces that heal people by restoring our negative ions, which are lost primarily through standing in heavy wind. When I ask him what happens when you don’t have enough negative ions, he’s not sure. But it’s definitely bad.

“So what about people in a really windy place like Tibet? Do they just lose them all the time?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, “but scientists say a good way to combat it is to wear a scarf.”

Oh.

It’s clear that “the scientists” are the ones providing the information here, but Trevor can’t give us any names. They come through a lot, to study the place, he says. They’ve verified that there’s something inexplicable going on, here. Something beyond science’s grasp. He seems pleased. The scientists have validated the Integratron, and that’s enough for him. In a sense, I can’t blame him. Scientists could say little to add to my most-beloved experiences. They are beloved, perhaps, because they are outside a need for explanations.

When we head out, Trevor shakes our hands and says it was great to meet us.

“This place attracts the coolest people, man,” he says. “Robert Downey Jr., Robert Plant, and people like you guys.”

We start the three and a half hour drive home. The sun is beating down, and Ross’s air conditioner is feeble. The truck rocks us slowly along the dirt path. I sleep the whole way home.

It’s been a month of interesting times for anti-vaccinationists in Australia, with a slew of commentary, media campaigns, documentaries, and even political condemnation for their failure to follow international health guidelines—to the point that in the state of New South Wales, they’re even considering getting religious exemptions en masse to avoid new vaccination policies.

We cannot claim that a single person or group is behind these changes; to do so is to neglect the hundreds and thousands of people who have raised their voices in many different ways. It takes more than a Facebook group, or a spokesperson, or even a whole newspaper to keep momentum going when it comes to public health—particularly with a solution to preventable deaths that has gained unnecessary and dangerous levels of controversy. While I usually despair when it comes to mainstream media’s coverage of pseudoscientific claims, particularly when it comes to eager attitudes about (false) balance, I’ve been personally overawed by the support for vaccinations on a number of fronts. Here’s a few of the highlights.

One massive newspaper campaign in NSW, which was then echoed by a number of other media outlets, has been particularly influential—the “No Jab, No Play” campaign, which started on May 5 and ran for two weeks. Stories included personal accounts of family tragedies and resilience (such as the Dana McCaffery case), regional effects of low vaccination rates, and even political pressure resulting in changed laws in support of vaccination. Other media outlets, like the Sydney Morning Herald and Herald Sun, soon echoed the pro-vaccination rally.

I wrote to Claire Harvey, the Features Editor for the Sunday Telegraph, News Limited, as to how the campaign started:

Basically it started because I was searching for a childcare centre in NSW and became aware of the loophole in the law. I asked Sunday Telegraph editor Mick Carroll and Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker if they were keen to let me run a campaign. They were - so I assigned reporters led by Jane Hansen to about thirty-five story ideas and we approached state and federal governments telling them what we were about to do. Neither had a commitment to change the law so we started rolling out the stories from May 5th.

We ran approximately sixty stories and by two weeks later, NSW Opposition leader John Robertson and Tony Abbott both said they would act. Robertson said he would introduce bills to parliament - whereupon premier Barry O'Farrell announced he'd put a plan to Cabinet that went even further than Robertson's proposed bill. We are still campaigning for federal change - although Abbott is on board, we'd rather have legislation before parliament than a promise.

We have copped a huge amount of vitriol and nastiness but also vast support from our readers. Our heartland is western Sydney, where the vast majority of parents vaccinate. Their children's health is put at risk by parents in wealthy parts of Sydney where rates are much lower, and in 'alternative lifestyle' areas like Byron Bay where rates are shockingly low.

We are proud to have changed the law but now we want to help change people's attitudes by continuing to report the facts about vaccinations - they save lives.

On May 9 in the New South Wales House of Assembly, the Minister for Fair Trading, the Honourable Anthony Roberts, presented a speech in reply to the question “What action is the Government taking to protect the community from being misled by the Australian Vaccination Network?” He outlined the Government’s actions to finally enforce the change of the highly misleading name of the anti-vaccination group, the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN):

Just the day before, in the Upper House, the 2013 Health Legislation Amendment Bill passed, prior to being sent to become law. The Hansard transcript includes a number of interchanges in support of vaccination, including:

The Hon. TREVOR KHAN: …The Australian Vaccination Network publishes a website that could be described as highly sceptical, indeed far more than that.

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: I think “insane” is the word you are looking for.

As the Telegraph continued their No Jab, No Play Campaign, on May 26 the documentary “Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines” was aired on the TV station SBS—directed by award-winning documentary maker Sonya Pemberton. While the reach of the documentary was limited, due to SBS being a traditionally low-rating and occasionally difficult to tune into station, the film was made available via internet streaming and for purchase through the website. Reviews were favourable, such as this one on the AusMed site by Janet McCalman, which particularly notes the documentary’s effort not to judge families regarding their choices. A forum with the director Sonya Pemberton is planned for Wednesday, June 5 in Melbourne.

The Conversation website, known as an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community, ran an interview on the May 27, “Pneumococcal rates plunge after widespread vaccination of infants.” It was conducted by the editor, Sunanda Creagh, with Public Health Physician Clayton Chiu and Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases David Isaacs, on the plunging rates of pneumococcal rates as a result of widespread vaccination. In it, they discussed the benefits of vaccinations, particularly “because of the herd immunity we get in the community.”

On May 29, the Telegraph ran the story “Big win for No Jab, No Play as NSW state cabinet approves tough new vaccination laws,” announcing that Health Minister Jillian Skinner amended the Public Health Act to make the checking of vaccine records compulsory—and to give staff the power to turn away those who aren't up to date. That same day, opinion columnist Janet Albrechtsen wrote “Zealots Forget The Epidemics” for the Commentary pages in the national broadsheet The Australian:

“According to our federal Department of Health, there is a whooping cough epidemic in this country…it’s not hard to figure out why. In Australia, up to one in five children in some regions are not fully immunised…Recent moves by NSW Labor Opposition Leader John Robertson and federal Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to empower childcare centres to refuse care to unvaccinated children are a good start, but let’s go further. No parent should receive tax benefits if they refuse to vaccinate their children.”

This was also the day that Bill Gates arrived in Australia—and as a staunch advocate (and financial backer) of vaccination, he was reported voicing his support in a number of news items and radio shows, particularly for his address at the National Press Club in Canberra and on ABC’s panel program Q&A.

By May 30, the Daily Telegraph was reporting on how Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network had “urged followers on social media to join the ‘Church of Conscious Living’ as a way of avoiding vaccination laws,” which included the rejection of vaccination for adults, children, and animals. This will not be the end of challenges against vaccination, but at least with raised awareness and hastened responses to improving flawed laws and limited regulations, the month of May will hopefully be a significant turning point for improving vaccination rates in Australia.

Many thanks to Claire Harvey for her quotes for this article.

Image Credit: Various homeopathic remedies by Javier Mediavilla Ezquibela

If homeopathy worked, its tenets would carve out new medical, ethical, and economic landscapes. Like would cure like, water would have memory, and extreme dilution would flip the potency curve of chemicals 180 degrees. You could become your own doctor, but you could also drop dead without warning.

A Disease For What Ails You

Forget placebos, a world where homeopathy works is a world without disease.

Homeopathy strives to find remedies that produce the same symptoms as the ailment of the patient, meaning that all disease would be a potential cure for itself. Allergy problems? Make a remedy out of outside allergens and drink it (what do you do for irritable bowel syndrome?). Problem solved, in a world where homeopathy works.

When homeopathy is a medical reality, diseases and cures are in constant tension, like the struggle between anti-matter and matter. The unstoppable force and the immovable object; the Joker and Batman. Each malady is a potential miracle. If a cure were just an anti-disease, medicine would encounter an enormous ethical obstacle. With all the potential cures available in our bodies, herb gardens, and duck livers, the question is no longer how should we treat, but who should we treat. To meet the demand of an ailing population, enormous storehouses of homeopathic tinctures would need to be erected. Like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault does for the world’s seeds, tincture vaults would safely store cancer cells, allergens, viruses, and other anti-diseases.

You are your own doctor, your own specialist, to the delight of holistic healers, when homeopathy works. Homeopaths advise you on potencies, but medicine would basically be in your hands. Recipes are free for all to see and make. With this knowledge shift, entire academic medical institutions would shut down their learning programs. Medicine as we know it falls out of favor when a decade of traditional medical school is abandoned for homeopathic educations. The crippling debt of US medical students flows back into the economy, maybe to be spent on the massive demand for Oscillococcinum.

What Is Water’s RAM?

Our ancestors lived in a “middle-world.” The objects and interactions that they had to worry about were middle-sized, moving at a middle-speed, changing in middle-time. Our evolved perception of a middle-world is partly the reason why staring up at the night sky can be so evocative, or why looking into a microscope and seeing life can be so moving.

Because of our middle-perception, it’s hard to handle the fact that there are more molecules in a cup of water than cups of water in all the world’s oceans. We can’t accurately conceptualize the idea that you have had molecules in you that were in dinosaurs, and in Hitler, by probability alone. And we would have trouble accepting that in a world where homeopathy works, where water has memory, water knows more about you than Facebook.

If water remembered what was diluted in it, your DNA-imprinted excretions would quickly circle the Earth. Following the water cycle, your water-diluted DNA flows through meters of intestines, eventually into a toilet, into a water treatment plant, and finally back into a body of water that shares its molecules with the sky. Considering all the things that water could remember—dinosaur pee, Genghis Khan’s morning tea—homeopaths could access whatever memories they want in a world where their theories are correct. Aiding police and investigation agencies around the world, homeopaths could access anyone’s DNA in wastewater. New databases would spring up. Cold cases could be closed. Homeopathic detectives would shame psychic ones.

Soon, water memory purifying machines would be engineered. When any molecule of water that passes through you could speak volumes, privacy protection goes to the nano-scale. With such power residing in water’s RAM, infrastructure around the world would have to be rerouted as people increasingly refuse to drink water that somehow retains its fecal quality. The Clean Water Act would have to be completely redrawn.

When homeopathy works, when a pool could “know” precisely who peed in it, current technology like memory-foam has nothing on memory-water.

Less is More

A remedy doesn’t need an active ingredient when homeopathy works. Nearly anything could be diluted into watery oblivion, flipping each and every dose-response curve for every drug known to man a full 180 degrees. An uphill curve becomes a downhill slope. Potency would be measured in atoms, not milligrams. To cope with the reversal, engineers would have to innovate the most sensitive scales ever devised. We have experimented with yottagram resolution scales—able to measure individual protons—and these would be sensitive enough, but they first need practicality and then mass production.

The dark side of homeopathic potency is that any dangerous chemical, any particle of poison, is grim death. Ultra-filtered gas masks would become part of the national uniform, because inhaling even a few atoms of lead would lead to a neurotoxic demise in a world where homeopathic principles are true. The old medical adage that pretty much everything is carcinogenic at some level would dominate new information campaigns about safe breathing habits. Would-be poisoners would become the most devious of murderers when a lethal dose of arsenic is measured in yottagrams.

Drunkards would have the time of their lives in a world where homeopathy worked. Ethanol diluted in water in any amount makes the drink a spirit. The lower the alcoholic content the better. You would need a microscope to find a drunkard’s flask.

When the remedy revolution comes, the economics of medicine would radically shift. Companies that exist solely for shipping medicine can now pack their planes and trucks with a million times more material. Shipping costs plummet and medical costs soon follow. If one molecule or less can have some effect on health, a cup of acetaminophen could treat the entire human population a billion times over.

Instead of a revolution on par with the germ theory of disease, homeopathy—in complete opposition to everything we know about biology and medicine—isn’t recommended for any clinical use. You know how the world would change if homeopathy really worked, now what do you see?

Captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel led the hunt for a beast that was attacking and devouring victims in the Gevaudan, France, in 1794. He had a problem. He could not catch and kill the man-eating monster. Being a proud man, he had to justify why he could not conquer this particular foe. Since the option that he was an inadequate huntsman was not acceptable, the creature must be supernatural in its abilities to escape his capture. The characteristics of the beast were exaggerated—it was huge, cunning, and not just an ordinary wolf. Captain Duhamel left defeated by what must truly be an extraordinary beast.

The cognitive dissonance experienced by the French captain is reflected today by those who can't capture Bigfoot. When normal processes and causes fail to satisfactorily explain events or answers to questions, then the reasoning slips beyond nature, into super nature, beyond the testable claims of science.

I call this "supernatural creep." Although, I swear I'm not the first one to name it as such. I searched to find where I have seen this referenced before. (If anyone knows, please email me so I can give the originator due credit.) Once I noticed this kind of reasoning, I saw it frequently. Wherever I come across this concept, it reveals a bit about human nature:

If you have to choose between the belief or a rational explanation, the rational explanation may be that which gets rejected.

The effect of supernatural creep can be seen with UFOs, anomalous natural phenomena (Fortean topics), and in bizarre stories categorized as "high strangeness" (which I'll explain a bit further on in this piece). A perfect example is that of "black dogs" whose appearance is spectral or demonic and is associated with either protection from or nearness of bad spirits. Could it be just a big black dog? Witnesses perceive that it's more than that. When the circumstances feel uncanny, we slip into thoughts of the supernatural. An enjoyable book that illustrates supernatural creep quite nicely is Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. Fun stuff.

With phantom black dogs, there is a connection to local legends and ghost stories. A modern example of the dispute about supernatural creep is evident in the Bigfoot/Sasquatch community.

Bigfoot proponents generally fall into two camps: those who search for a real animal that functions as nature intended (called 'apers') and those who entertain the option that the entity is not natural (paranormalists).

In their 2006 book, The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot, authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper appear to have a parting of the ways when trying to explain all the Yowie accounts at face value—some of which, like our American Bigfoot are pretty bizarre. What is up with an animal that is sometimes described as having three toes, sometimes four or five? And, after all this time, why can't we trap one or find a body? The creature has a stupendous ability to escape human grasp by eluding our cameras and leaving only tenuous, dubious traces of its corporeal existence. It can run outrageously fast and may be able to see infrared light. With the Yowie, we can't think of a way to get a wild man on the island continent. It seems so implausible. But as Healy and Cropper note, it's uncomfortable to explain the Yowie as a paranormal entity, perhaps as a psychic phenomenon, because it results in replacing one mystery with another.

Characteristics of hairy hominids or other unidentified cryptids may be just marginally odd—avoiding detection for decades among people, expert at hiding in plain sight, unusually developed senses of hearing or sight, fantastic strength or incredible speed. Or, they may get a bit spooky—glowing eyes, inability to be photographed, immunity to bullets, seen everywhere but found nowhere. They get to the point where it's beyond natural—telepathy, shape-shifting, apporting or dis-apporting, signaling illness or death. In the case of some monster sightings, they are associated with UFO sightings, sychronicities, and time loss or distortion.

In order to hang on to the literal interpretation of eyewitness accounts, researchers may take tiny steps away from a purely natural explanation of their quarry. If the animal is shot at close range, why is it not injured or killed? Instead of questioning the story (or the marksmanship of the gunman), the assumption is that the thing must have some extra quality like bullet-proof skin, or perhaps it is impervious to bullets. If these stories are regarded as valid, and more like it come along, instead of doubting the witness, the researcher concludes there must be something paranormal going on to explain it.

The slip down the supernatural slope is really apparent when there are accounts of "high strangeness"—mind-boggling stories that have absurd elements. This term was originally used by Dr. J. Allen Hynek to describe extremely peculiar UFO cases that appeared to be associated with dream-like details, such as mysterious phone calls, electronic glitches, and Men in Black visits. If a report is one of "high strangeness," it's more than the typical "I saw a UFO" or "I saw a Bigfoot" story. It turns into a "I saw a Bigfoot go into a UFO" story—a whole other level of weirdness that now strains a natural explanation, if true.

And so it goes with Bigfooters. I recently read a blog post about a person who was rejected from the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BRFO) because he dared mention a telepathic experience related to a Bigfoot encounter. There are Bigfoot researchers who discard reports that involve any paranormal or supernatural element because it sounds less credible to admit such ideas if they wish their work to be taken seriously. (This is a bit weird for the BFRO, I thought, since Matt Moneymaker ascribes some incredibly bizarre, paranormal talents to Bigfoot like the ability to "stun" people and immobilize them. I can't take his speculations seriously.)

In my last Sounds Sciencey post, I noted that it appeared that the ghost investigation field seemed to be moving away from the sciencey focus and more into the supernatural, dealing with demons, angels, and religious qualities of hauntings. Science is failing them, as well. In order to retain that important core that ghosts, or whatever X-file, is real, the natural explanations are no longer suitable as explanations; it must be something beyond human understanding. The cryptozoological community is sliding down a similar path at the behest of authors like Redfern who think that the field should expand to include "zooform" phenomena—entities, not actual animals, that appear in animal form. This would constitute a shift from scientific inquiry to a completely experienced-based view. How convenient. You gain great flexibility when you discount natural laws.

You may be able to see the immediate problem with an experience-based view and accounts of high strangeness. Since many skeptical paranormal researchers are very aware of the problems with eyewitness accounts, we notice the mistake certain non-skeptical researchers make when reading popular accounts of local tales or Charles Fort’s collection of books. The writers take every detail of the witness at face value! We know, however, that people mess up observations. We know that our memories are flawed, and we know that stories change over time, often becoming very different from the original account. Stories are poor evidence. To build a conclusion on just these story elements means that you must reject the foundation of knowledge we already have about how the world works (which is pretty well tested) and accept that there are visitors from other dimensions harassing our rural population or that we are able to conjure up monsters just with our collective mind power. That’s absurd. I’ll need more than a few good stories to accept that.

Supernatural creep is the way researchers hold onto their cherished ideas that a mysterious phenomenon, as they perceive it, is really out there. Being too invested in the idea to let it go, they reinvent reality instead.

By the way, the Beast of the Gevaudan? It was wolves. They were only unusual in that they were really hungry and good at catching people and not getting caught themselves. They were eventually dispatched. But the legend remains of the monsters of the Gevaudan. It's too good of a story to give up.

References

Bord, Janet and Colin. 1981. Alien Animals. Stackpole Books.

Healy, T. and P. Cropper. 2006. The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot. Anomalist Books.

Redfern, Nick. 2004. Three Men Seeking Monsters. Paraview Pocket Books.

Smith, Jay M. 2011. Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast. Harvard University Press.

I’m standing outside of a massage parlor/day spa/oxygen bar called Zen Zone in Universal City, California, with my adventure-partner Ross and his family of two. His son, Andrew, is ten, and looking at us like we’re idiots. His wife, Cara, smiles at us and says they’ll be back in half an hour.

“Do you want to watch?” Ross asks.

“We’ll be back in half an hour,” she repeats.

We snap a photo below the sign—I guess to prove that we don’t just make this stuff up—and enter. We’re not there for massages, which instantly sets us apart.

“Hi,” I say, “we just want to use the oxygen bar.”

“Oh, great!” says Gavin, the attendant (not his real name). “You sit here, and you sit here.” He puts us in front of machines that will allegedly ooze pure oxygen into our nostrils. Each one has four scents that can be added to the oxygen in any amount. Ross looks at his: peppermint, piña colada, strawberry, and watermelon.

“Aww, man, yours are better,” he says. He’s wrong. We switch.

Gavin is untangling some of those soft plastic things you see dangling from a hospital patients’ noses when they can’t breathe on their own. These will go in our nostrils, he explains. They will deliver us pure oxygen—double the amount we usually get in the air! It helps cure hangovers. (“Hangs-over,” I pretend to correct him, for no reason at all. He looks at me the way I should be looked at.) It ends fatigue. It helps with muscle pain and weakness. It curbs jet lag. It dissolves headaches. The headaches bit is pretty exciting for me. I have been getting chronic headaches for almost a year, and some of them become crippling migraines. I would suck on a garden hose for twenty minutes a day if it made those go away. Some places make even loftier claims about oxygen bars, like that they can help halt cancer or aid chi flow.

“I read that the oxygen gets rid of toxins,” I say. “What exactly are toxins?”

“You’ve got me there,” he says. “I’ve never heard of toxins.”

“Fair enough,” says Ross, giving me a look.

We put our soft plastic thingies in our noses and put the attached oxygen tubes behind our ears. I accidentally put mine around the crown of my head. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

“Your ears, not your head!” says Gavin. This happens a lot.

I get the tubing around my ears, and so does Ross. Gavin begins to tool with the knobs on the machines in front of us.

“Straight up noon, and that scent is at maximum. All the way on its side, and that scent is off. You can mix and match,” he says.

Two of mine are peppermint and piña colada. I crinkle my nose at the thought of combining them. Even though there are ten empty machines, Gavin has sat Ross at one with a broken knob. No matter what combination he chooses, a slow dribble of watermelon is included. He immediately likes a scent called Sex on the Beach. I identify strawberry as not-strawberry, but some sort of hospital smell. I quickly opt for all peppermint, all the time. Gavin is watching us, nodding and smiling.

“The other day I was so hungover,” he grins. “I came to work, hooked myself up to the oxygen. Few minutes later, bam, feeling good.”

“That’s impressive,” I say, trying to encourage him. “So, how exactly does it work?”

“We all need oxygen to do our business, right? Go about our lives, do our work.” He looks at us expectantly.

We nod emphatically, overdoing it a bit. “Yeah, yeah! Need oxygen to work, right!”

“Yeah,” he says, “So, if you don’t get enough, you get tired, rundown. Then you come here, get that extra oxygen you need, you’re all energized again.”

I ask how much oxygen is in the machine. He raises one finger. I’ve hit the jackpot.

“Twenty-four percent!” he says. “Double the amount in the air.”

Ross and I look at each other. Neither of us likes making a scene. In the two years since we started our podcast investigating unlikely claims, we’ve been cupped, accupunctured, exorcised, and baptized. We’ve managed not to get anyone mad at us (except the Raëlians), even if we frustrated all of them with our incessant questions. But it is always hard when they hit us with a bold, inconsistent claim.

“Doesn’t the regular air have twenty-one percent oxygen?” I ask, trying to sound unsure. I’m sure.

“Yeah,” Gavin agrees, “So you’re already breathing that in because of the extra space in your nostrils, around the tubes. If you cut off the outside air, you wouldn’t get double.” He pinches his nostrils to make sure I get it. “But, together, it’s double.”

“Oh, uh huh,” says Ross, “So... should we feel something?”

“Oh yeah, you will soon,” Gavin confirms, smiling and grabbing a massage tool to relax us.

“I’m sorry. Just real quick,” I jump in. “If the oxygen in the regular air is 21 percent, then if this machine were just full of air, and I were breathing that in, along with the outside air, I would still be breathing in 21 percent oxygen, but it wouldn’t double... Right?”

Gavin blinks at me. “I’m no scientist,” he says, “But that’s how it works.” He pinches his nose again to make sure I understand. I really do.

It’s now been about fifteen minutes of breathing in the double-oxygen (or whatever it is), and neither of us is feeling a thing. We had both expected some kind of head rush, or the feeling of being in the woods, or some notable physiological effect, but neither of us is feeling a thing. In fact, I’m starting to feel a little sick of the artificial peppermint smell coupled with leftover piña colada clogging the pipes. Gavin lets us stay an extra twenty minutes. After all, he explains, if the place is empty, it’s harder to draw in more business. We’re keeping the place alive, sitting at our machines, our noses plugged in like we’re receiving a lifesaving medical treatment. Who wouldn’t want to join us?

Before we leave, Gavin tells Ross he looks like David Duchovny and says I look like Meg Ryan, fifteen years ago.

“Have you seen You’ve Got Mail?” he asks with a flirty smile. Then he tries to sell me a $200 electronic massage kit that looks like a knockoff iPod.

When Ross’s wife and son return to pick us up, they are snickering and pointing at Ross from out the door. Andrew has never seen his dad hooked up to an oxygen machine before. But they’ve come to expect this sort of thing from both of us. We thank Gavin and leave, giving him just $40 for our almost sixty minutes of combined service. He’s disappointed that we aren’t buying the knockoff iPod, but he offers us a special deal if we come back. We pretend this is very exciting.

Outside, we tell Cara and Andrew how ineffective the whole thing seemed and explain Gavin’s bizarre notion about how oxygen “doubling” works.

“But hey,” I offer, “you never know. Maybe there will be some improvement we just couldn’t perceive yet.”

“Maybe,” Cara says.

The next day, I get a headache.

The intent of Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite is to provide scientific explanations for various monsters found in historical legend and literature up through the monsters of today as seen, mostly, in film. Had Kaplan succeeded in this task, he would have produced an exciting and interesting book. Instead, the book is filled with over-explanations, just-so stories, and college-level film criticism, all leavened by one howling error.

The topics covered are arranged in rough chronological order. Thus, the first half of the book deals with monsters from ancient myths and legends such as the Nemean lion, chimeras, the Minotaur, Medusa, Charybdis, and the like. But modern monsters are tossed in too—King Kong and the giant squid (the latter doesn’t really belong since it does exist).

The explanations for ancient beasts are often fairly reasonable. For example, monsters that are giant versions of already scary animals are scary because, well, a giant version of something already scary (e.g., a lion) is even scarier. Snakelike monsters are scary because snakes are scary in the first place. Why do snakes, to this day, generate fear? Kaplan argues, convincingly, that the fear of snakes is part of human’s evolutionary heritage. They posed real danger as proto-humans evolved. So there is an advantage to avoiding snakes even if one has not had a direct scary experience with them.

There is, however, a bit of a problem with this explanation of the commonality of snakes as ancient monsters. Spiders, like snakes, continue to generate fear. Spiders, like snakes, posed a hazard to humans while we were evolving. However, spiders, unlike snakes, did not serve as the basis for legends of any ancient monsters, as far as I know.

Kaplan does occasionally go overboard by trying to come up with a specific explanation for every little variation in a myth. For example, on pages 54 and 55 there is a discussion of the possible factual basis of the “cruel bellowing” of the Minotaur. There is much discussion of caves and other geologic phenomena. But isn’t it just simpler to explain the details of this, and other, myths as devices to make them scarier? Or, as Amazon reviewer sonabeta pointed out in a November 20, 2012, review, “People sometimes just make things up.”

Similarly, on page 102 the discussion turns to dragons. The question is why dragon myths are not consistent across time and place—some with wings and some without, some breathing fire and some not. Well, dragons aren’t real so why should all stories about them be consistent? Still, Kaplan’s explanation for the fire-breathing part is plausible and I won’t spoil it for the reader by giving it away here.

Chapter 6 on “Hauntings—Demons, Ghosts, Spirits” is long on description of these phenomena and short on explanations. Hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations go unmentioned, although there is a brief discussion of sleep atonia and sleep paralysis. But the full power of hypnogogia—with all of its attendant hallucinations—to convince people that ghosts are real is not made clear at all. This is a serious omission.

The book does contain one major and inexcusable howler in Chapter 7, a chapter dealing with vampires, zombies, and werewolves. Kaplan swallows hook, line, and sinker the long-refuted claim of Wade Davis that zombies are real and that they can be created by witch doctors using the poison tetrodotoxin (TTX), found, among other places, in the skin and internal organs of puffer fish native to Haiti. In accepting Davis’s claims Kaplan ignores the overwhelming scientific literature that shows that 1) the “zombie powder” that Davis claims had TTX in it didn’t and 2) even if it did, TTX in any quantity cannot produce zombies. TTX is a nerve poison that does not get into the brain. In terms of motor control, it affects only the skeletal musculature. Its specific effect is to render victims paralyzed, but it is not the stiff (rigid) paralysis of zombie legend but a flaccid paralysis where muscles lose their tone. In addition, in nonlethal doses TTX causes nausea and vomiting. The idea that just the right dose of TTX could transform a person into a zombie and keep them that way while they were walking around being productive slaves is absurd. And its absurdity has been known since the late 1980s. Sadly, Kaplan obviously didn’t get the memo. For a more detailed discussion with appropriate references, see my article “Zombies and Tetrodotoxin” in the May/June 2008 Skeptical Inquirer (vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 60–62).

The last few chapters change focus from creatures of ancient myth and legend to more recent creations, especially alien abductions and movie monsters. The discussions here are quite poor, almost sophomoric, especially where movie monsters are concerned. The first topic in Chapter 8, “The Created,” is the golem. Here either through bad writing or ignorance (or maybe both) Kaplan seems to state that there was only one golem, in Prague, and the whole golem legend dates only from 1909. In fact, there is ample evidence that the golem legend is much, much older. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (Facts on File, 1992) notes that the legend dates from at least the fifteenth century. The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (Ktav Publishing, 1964, reprint of the 1901–1906 edition) states that “In the Middle Ages arose the belief in the possibility of infusing life into a clay or wooden figure of a human being, which figure was termed a ‘golem’ by writers of the eighteenth century” (p. 37). Sadly, missing from this chapter is any discussion of that most modern of mythical creatures, the chupacabra. The creation of the myth of this creature was ably told by Ben Radford in his 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra.

Chapter 9 is devoted to “Terror Resurrected—Dinosaurs.” Here Kaplan discusses the recreation of our old thunder lizard friends in the movies and the possibility for real recreation through use of dinosaur DNA, which, of course, is the theme of the movie Jurassic Park. The discussions of both the film and dinosaur DNA leave much to be desired. Kaplan’s critique of the problems with using DNA to recreate a dinosaur does not come close to that of Desalle and Lindley in their 1997 book Science of Jurassic Park. Kaplan does nicely discuss the problems of recreating a species that would find itself without its natural ecosystem to live in and would thus be confined to some sort of enclosures. However, even here he stumbles by an embarrassing acceptance of the characterization of chaos theory taken directly from the movie—a characterization that is typical Hollywood fantasy. In the film the character Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) says that chaos theory means that “biological systems are uncontrollable by [their] nature and therefore inherently threatening” (p. 187). Thus, no matter what protective measures are taken, any recreated dinosaurs will break free and terrorize the world. Or at least the local natives. This is Hollywood nonsense. It bears about as much relationship to actual chaos theory as the view of quantum mechanics espoused by New Age proponents does to actual quantum mechanics. In fact, chaos theory deals with systems in which tiny changes in initial conditions can have very large effects on the state of these systems at later times. The theory does not allow the impossible to happen or even predict that the very unlikely will.

The final chapter, “Extraterrestrial Threat—Aliens,” suffers from much the same problem as the section on ghosts: long on description but short on explanation. The chapter starts with a description of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case. It then states that: “Countless tales of abductions and bizarre sightings followed” (p. 198). Kaplan then asks why aliens are visiting Earth but not being detected by “all the space scanning technology that has been developed during the past decades” (p. 199). His answer? “It is an enigma.” No, it’s not, as even a slight familiarity with the skeptical literature on UFOs and alien abduction would have made clear. The rest of the chapter wanders in sort of a haze through various alien-themed science-fiction movies, including an interesting digression on parasites and how they can change animal behavior. And then it stops. It doesn’t end. It just stops.

Perhaps this review should just stop as well. In summary, the book does contain a few interesting insights into the factual backgrounds of several legendary creatures. But in general it is poorly researched and written. Is it good enough for me to recommend that my university library purchase a copy? No. I make the same recommendation for the readers of this review.

Strip club patrons would get quite a show, more so than usual, if people really were magnetic.

Amid the dollar bills and drunk-at-noon businessmen, a magnetic stripper, if she spun fast enough around the poll, would melt it. At the very least she would shock herself before shocking the crowd. When a conductor like metal meets a changing magnetic field, the magic of reality induces an electric current in it. Flip-flop this current around enough, and the metal heats up to the point of melting.

If people really were magnetic, they would be terrible navigators. Taking to their smart phones and computers, their screens would blur out and become unusable. Going back to the old methods, a compass wouldn’t help much either. It would be more likely to find you than Earth’s magnetic north.

Like all interesting human qualities, magnetic people would have a range of field strengths. Perhaps there would even be schools and universities dedicated to harnessing or improving your output. In any case, the strength of the field matters quite a bit. It’s the difference between being a glorified refrigerator magnet and being able to free fall down a metal tube without dying.

Magnetic people with the strength of refrigerator magnets would produce a field 100 times stronger than the Earth’s. But if any fortunate “Magnetos” existed, perhaps with MRI-like output, they would have one million times the field strength of Earth. For the refrigerator-strength people, you wouldn’t have to change much. But a public warning would have to go out whenever those Magnetos were about. Entire houses, entire cities, would have to be shielded; all metal objects not tied down turn into deadly projectiles. In fact, a rogue oxygen tank once proved this danger, killing a patient during an MRI scan after rocketing across the room, drawn by the monstrous amount of teslas. (You can see the incident re-created here.) And at this strength, you better avoid your friend’s stack of old floppy disks and unshielded hard drives, as you could shuffle their bits into blurry oblivion.

But it wouldn’t be all bad. Magnetic craftsmen would find that every part of their body has become a convenient tool and nail holder. Salmon fishermen could experience a huge boom. As salmon navigate their way home according to the Earth’s magnetic fields, a giant magnet in the form of a fisherman could disorient or even attract the fish. Magnetic lifeguards could take to the ocean as shark repellants.

Lovers might find it annoying however, as there is no telling when your poles, so to speak, would line up.

If people really were magnetic, it would eliminate the need for elevators, at least as a way down. A strong enough magnet can be dropped into a metal tube, fighting gravity all the way, and descend slowly, impossibly, to the ground. Abandoning elevators for simple metal tubes, magnetic people working in office buildings could simply jump into the tube, allowing their fields to slow their descent. Getting back up is another matter. Like Spiderman and his abnormally “sticky” hands, magnetic people could just walk up the side of a metal edifice. Of course, a lot of modification would be in order, as would leg workouts.

Recreation would change for the magnetic humans. Think of the joy in frolicking around a ferrofluid-filled pool. Silly putty goes from cool to amazing in your hands. But sticking spoons to your nose would hardly be anything to brag about.

If a kind of biological magnetism were the norm, medicine as we know it would change. Metal scalpels would be abandoned for fear of losing grip of them. What was meant to mend would turn into a missile. Pacemakers would lose the beat as induced currents surged through the wires. Metallic implants would shift curiously inside us. And needless to say, an MRI machine could make quite a mess.

Handrails at malls and airports the world over would not only need to be cleaned, but de-magnetized. As millions of magnetics ran their hands across the rails, they too would become attractive. People would lose their car keys and loose change to these invisible pickpockets. However, it would make it easier to pick up change off the street, if you could just collect it all from your feet and ankles.

All of this could be avoided with a little science. Magnetic shields—materials that draw fields into themselves, preventing magnets from interacting beyond the shield—could eliminate many of the potential hazards. The clothing industry would have to incorporate completely foreign materials. Conventional design structures would mold around materials like Permalloy, a metal used in shielding, instead of polyester. Expensive at first, the booming new industry would soon drive down prices so that even the refrigerator magnet-strength people could get in on it. Engineers would continue to find ingenious ways to weave shielding into clothing and accessories. It would be a paradigm shift in textile design—a style revolution to follow a magnetic one.

So many things would have to change—our technology, the tools we use to operate on medical patients, our transportation systems, the way we play sports, the way we move, even the way we kiss—in a world were opposites really do attract.

A world where human magnetism is an anomaly would be very different from one where it is the norm. A singular magnetic man, the only one of his kind, would be a freak, for lack of a better term. Sadly, he would probably meet his end at the sharp point of some scientific scalpel. Of course, before he met his end he would be, effectively, a superhero. He could spend his days re-creating scenes in Star Wars, pulling metal lightsabers his way. He could do the same with Thor’s hammer, if he didn’t kill himself with a flying pot or pan instead.

Instead of finding these amazing feats of electromagnetism, we find slightly more sticky humans whose abilities are defeated by talc powder. Science tells us what to expect, now what do you see?