Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

[Barry Karr <SkeptInq@aol.com>]

1)   HoaxWatch
See the newest update to CSICOP's HoaxWatch Web page dealing
with the French bestseller, L'Effroyable Imposture, by Thierry Meyssan.
The book which alleges that the real facts of 9/11 attacks--in particular, on
the
Pentagon--were covered up by the U.S. government and arms industry.
An English-language edition of Meyssan's book is due out at the end of the
month.    http://www.csicop.org/hoaxwatch/

2)  PBS: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FRONTIERS

PUTTING ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE TO THE TEST:
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FRONTIERS PRESENTS "A DIFFERENT WAY TO HEAL?"
PBS Airdate:  Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 8 p.m. ET (check local listings)

"Today there's growing interest in a branch of medicine that many doctors
don't consider medicine at all," says Alan Alda in "A Different Way to Heal?"
The program, which airs Tuesday, June 4, 2002,
8-9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), puts "alternative" or "complementary"
therapies to the test.
Acupuncture, herbal medicine, chiropractic and therapeutic touch are part of
a booming, multi-billion dollar industry.  But do they hold up under
scientific examination?  Retired Stanford Medical School oncologist Wally
Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, tells Alda
that the scientific basis of healing is establishing cause and effect. Most
people recover from illness spontaneously, yet people often incorrectly
attribute their improved health to whatever therapy they tried just before
getting better.
Sampson and Alda visit a Chinese herbal medicine shop and a health store
selling hundreds of loosely-regulated "nutritional supplements." Sampson
points out that traditional herbal remedies and popular supplements--like
Echinacea for colds or IP-6 for cancer--have either never been scientifically
studied, or have shown equivocal effects at best.
In the mid 1990's, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco
attempted to conduct a clinical trial of PC-SPES, a nutritional supplement
that became popular as a prostate cancer remedy. PC-SPES  (PC stands for
prostate cancer; SPES is Latin for "hope") is a mixture of eight traditional
medicinal herbs--seven Chinese, one American. Initially, patients in the
trial showed dramatic improvement, but suspicion grew that the remedy had
been laced with DES, a synthetic hormone that is a standard prostate cancer
therapy. Lab analyses revealed traces of DES, although the UCSF team was
unable to say what medical effect, if any, it might have. Nevertheless the
trial was halted, and PC-SPES is now off the market.
The PC-SPES story demonstrates the difficulty in getting scientifically
rigorous results with herbal remedies. An herbal mixture may contain hundreds
of different chemicals, and it's hard to know which ingredients might be
active--or even what they are. Although PC-SPES might still be useful, we may
never know for sure--and that's true of most herbal remedies.
A healthy dose of skepticism led John Badanes, a qualified and experienced
chiropractor, to leave his field. Invented by Daniel Palmer in 1895,
chiropractic aims to correct blocked nerves--what Palmer
-more-
 claimed were the cause of all disease--with "adjustments" to the spine. But,
as Badanes tells Alda, chiropractic has no basis in anatomy. Conducting a
typical examination, Badanes shows how a simple error can lead a chiropractor
to assess that a patient's legs are different lengths, requiring chiropractic
adjustment to bring them into line--even though that's anatomically
impossible. Badanes explains how patients and chiropractors alike
misinterpret the popping sound that accompanies spinal manipulation. Really
it's dissolved gas being released in the joint fluid (the same thing that
happens when you crack your knuckles) and not a sign that vertebrae are
changing position--another anatomical impossiblility.
    Like Badanes, physician Robert Baratz, executive director of the National
Council Against Health Fraud, takes issue with chiropractic. Baratz is
concerned about the risk of injury during neck manipulation, which can place
severe strain on a vertebral artery, leading to blood clotting and stroke.
Although chiropractors maintain this type of injury is very rare, a recent
Canadian study estimated that 20 percent of all strokes caused by artery
damage could be a result of neck manipulation. That figure translates into
more than 1,300 strokes a year in the United States.
Perhaps the most widely accepted alternative therapy is the ancient Chinese
practice of acupuncture, although the scientific jury is still out on its
efficacy.
In animal studies, John Longhurst, Chief of Cardiology at the University of
California, Irvine Medical Center, found a link between acupuncture and the
release of natural opiates in the brain, which reduced the animals' reaction
to stress, suppressing blood pressure. Now he's trying to find out if the
same is true for humans, but results so far are hard to interpret.
Subjects pedal on an exercise bike until they're exhausted, when their blood
pressure reaches its peak. Subjects who got acupuncture before exercising
showed significantly lower peak blood pressure than those who did not--even
though some of the acupuncture points used in the trials weren't supposed to
affect the cardiovascular system. Longhurst believes that acupuncture--and
most alternative therapies--works by turning on the body's own opiates.
At Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, researchers have studied
therapeutic touch, an increasingly popular alternative therapy whose
practitioners claim to remotely manipulate people's "energy fields." The
study looked at patients recovering from heart bypass surgery. Some received
treatment from therapeutic touch practitioners, some received a sham
treatment and some received nothing. The same treatments were given to cancer
cell cultures, but no identifiable effects were seen anywhere.
-more-
In 1996, a science project by 11-year-old Emily Rosa cast doubt on a
fundamental principle of therapeutic touch--the ability to detect another
person's energy field. With therapeutic touch practitioners unable to see
what she was doing, Rosa placed one of her hands near one of the
practitioner's hands--and asked them to state which of their hands she was
near. Practitioners' success rates were no better than pure chance.
Rosa's study was considered rigorous enough to be published in the Journal of
the American Medical Association, making her the youngest author to appear in
its august pages.
    SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FRONTIERS is produced by The Chedd-Angier Production
Company in association with Scientific American magazine. National corporate
funding for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN FRONTIERS is provided by Agilent
Technologies. Additional funding is provided by public television viewers. "A
Different Way to Heal?" is written, produced and directed by John Angier and
David Huntley. The series is presented on PBS by Connecticut Public
Television.
###
Press Contact:

Tina Vaz
Promotion Director
The Chedd-Angier Production Company
(617) 926-9437