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“Sickening accusation” (Munchausen By Proxy)

DYSFCIn 1977, Roy Meadow claimed to identify a phenomenon he called Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. This referred to someone intentionally sickening someone in their care, then seeking medical attention for it. Since then, there have been some rare documented cases, but many more instances of unfounded accusations.

Most of the problem lies with the supposed identification signs. These include: 1. The patient’s mother having substantial medical knowledge for a lay person; 2. The mother being unenthused when the doctor informs her of a possible cure or mitigation. 3. An illness that is difficult to diagnose, with new symptoms periodically creeping up; 4. The mother questioning the doctor’s conclusions or challenging treatment options; 5. Changing doctors, especially more than once.

But these signs describe normal behavior for a mother whose baby has a rare, mysterious illness. This unexplained sickness will cause the mother to look for as much information as possible, a search that is much easier now than in 1977. Further, mysterious illnesses may lead to multiple unsuccessful attempts to diagnose and treat them. Hence, a mother who is told that we now know what is wrong may be hearing that for the fourth time, so the reaction may be less than complete joy. Moreover, the reason she has been going to doctors and hospitals for years is precisely because the disease cannot be pinned down. It is counterintuitive and cruel to use repeated trips to medical centers against her.

Before going further, a word on why I am using gender-specific language. Every false MSBP accusation I’ve come across was leveled at a woman. There may be a microscopic percentage of MSBP accusations thrown at fathers, but this is overwhelmingly suffered by mothers.

Mannie Taimuty-Loomis, who was falsely accused of the syndrome, told Psychology Today, “If it were the man demanding help, wanting to know more and wanting to be involved, no one would think anything of it. But when a mother displays the same characteristics, she’s deemed difficult to work with, overly interested, and very controlling.”

Taimuty-Loomis was a mother with medical knowledge, asking detailed, complex questions while moving from doctor to doctor trying to find the cause of her child’s unexplained illness. This was fertile ground for a MSPB accusation, and she temporarily lost custody of her children. Yet when her son died at age 3, it was learned it was from mitochondrial disease, which had manifested itself in an array of symptoms.

Once a mother is suspected, almost any action can be considered further evidence. While being challenging is one of the supposed signs, so too is seeming to want an intimate relationship with members of the medical staff. So if a mother seems to be seeking approval from nurses, that can be used against her, as can her being seemingly indifferent to them. Being overprotective can be seen as a sign, as can coming across as negligent. Acting calm can be considered evidence, as can being agitated. The same thing with being either congenial or confrontational.

Besides tormenting the falsely-accused mother, focusing on MSBP can also divert doctors from the hunt for the disease and cure. Julie Patrick had her son Phillip taken when doctors at Vanderbilt University suspected MSBP, when the child had actually been struck with a gastrointestinal illness. This was only discovered after his death at age 11 months. The confounding nature of the disease was very stressful to Patrick, whose constant questions and challenges were used as evidence of MSPB.

Loren Pankratz has seen this unfold many times. He is a psychologist who is regularly called to testify in cases involving MSPB accusations. He said there have been two cases he investigated where he concluded MSPB was happening. But there are other times, he said, where, “I have seen mothers accused of MSBP simply because physicians disagreed about the medical management of their child. It is vastly over-diagnosed.”

When a child is removed from the mother, it is partly in an attempt to see if the patient gets better. But this has limitations, as the illness may be subject to flare-ups or fluctuation. Pankratz considers the separation test unreliable since conditions can improve for a variety of reasons, including changes in medical treatment.

The first major backlash against this mass hysteria centered on UK lawyer Sally Clark. She was exonerated after being convicted of murdering her two sons who had died in infancy from unknown causes. Meadow testified the odds of this happening were one in 73 million, when the Royal Statistical Society found this to actually be one in 200.

An investigation revealed the babies had died of staphylococcus aureus. Clark was released but the trauma of the two deaths and a false imprisonment led her to drink herself to death. The Clark case was one of four that Meadow testified in that later resulted in the mother’s vindication. In view of that horrible record, Meadow now concedes that the diagnosis is made far too often.

In another case, though not involving a MSPB accusation, Russian immigrants Anna and Alex Nikolayev had their child seized for a few weeks for merely seeking a second opinion. There have been other cases like this, with Justina Pelletier’s being the most infamous. These abuses of power are somewhat common, as is the infiltration of pseudomedicine in hospitals. As such, I’m wondering if we’ll someday see children seized because their skeptic parents objected to a hospital treating their child’s hepatitis with Reiki.

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“Out of his element” (Alchemy)

BROKEN BEAKER
There’s no doubting the creativity on someone who can come up with the phrase “Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Element.” And that creativity has allowed modern-day alchemists to attach all manner of miraculous properties to these elements, including the ability to cure fatal disease and attain superconductivity at room temperature. It has also allowed them, for 40 years, to convince some people that the elements exist without producing them or offering any other evidence.

These proponents insist the ORME are precious metals existing as lone atoms and forming no bonds in a not-quite-explained state of matter. Besides curative and superconductive properties, they are said to repair DNA, emit gamma rays, pass through solid objects, disappear and reappear, levitate, rejuvenate cells, read minds, make dreaming more lucid, regrow missing appendages, and increase psychic awareness.

The first prominent modern-day alchemist was David Hudson. He claimed he had discovered this alternate state of matter and resultant magic, but that the ideas were dismissed when he introduced them to Cornell University chemistry professors. That’s the one claim of his I find believable. I’m less charitable to his insistence he can cure late-stage cancer with dirt and some abracadabra. He also claims his coming was prophesied in the Bible, as part of the Davidic bloodline. Hey, his name is David, what more proof do you want?

To fund his research, he found some investors, although he has yet to repay them in transformed powdered gold or any other currency. If Hudson did any genuine research, he has not explained his methods or detailed any attempt to test, falsify, or replicate it. He has vaguely insinuated that the power is too great to risk falling into the wrong hands, but has otherwise said little about his lack of verifiable results.

Hudson argues that volcanoes millions of years ago saturated soil in the Southwest with precious metals. What’s more, they have concentrations of hundreds-of-ounces-per ton, exponentially more than the traditional yield from platinum group metals. As to why Arizona farmers are wasting their time harvesting corn instead of palladium, Hudson explains that the metals are in a mysterious form undetectable by normal science. Only he has the ability to recognize and derive them. That explanation leaves unanswered why Hudson is not the world’s first trillionaire.

Hudson has tapped into a knowledge known by ancient cultures, according to a blogger identifying herself as Lucy S6. She tells us, “The ancient Egyptians knew about it, but today’s knowledge is suppressed by dark and powerful sources that are trying to prevent our true evolution to a higher consciousness.”

It was also known to the ancient Babylonians, which Lucy S6 says is why George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Once there, U.S. agents went straight to the Museum of Antiquities and stole Nebuchadnezzar’s treasures, which are bursting with ORME goodness.

And here’s what Bush is getting, according to Lucy S6: “These elements resonate with the primal energy, the zero point from which all life originates and which is a quantum potential of possibilities.” I have no idea what that means, but it means the same if you rearrange the words thusly: “The potential of quantum possibilities resonate from the zero point from which these primal life energies originate.”

For the rest of us who never served as a head of state, the dark lords keep us sick and ignorant by controlling our food supply. Insects instinctively know to eat these foods in order to protect mankind, so the overlords created pesticides, which they learned to manufacture while making nerve gas in World War I. All this leads to an ORME deficiency (I’m all the way down to zero), which makes us ever sicker. This in turn drives us back to the corroborating doctors and Big Pharma. Eventually we are told we have cancer, with the disease actually being delivered to us in the form of chemotherapy, which is a form of mustard gas.

If you’re like me, you have a headache after reading all this. Must be the ORME deficiency.

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“We come in fleece” (Aliens from Taurus)

ALIENMESSAGEAliens usually fall into two categories: The probing, kidnapping, reptilian overlords, and their much kinder cosmic cousins who bestow a message of hope and promises of eternal bliss. The aliens are not precisely the ones delivering these messages. These benevolent types merely came up with the missives, it is humans that came up with the idea of packaging and marketing them.

One set of messages come from the Pleiadians, who come hail from Taurus, a star cluster about 450 light years from Earth. Like Allah (who needed Muhammad), these beings have completely mastered every advanced skill except mass communication. The Pleiadians selected Barbara Marciniak to spread their celestial good tidings. Later, Lia Shapiro claimed she was the true Pleiadian messenger, as unoriginal an epiphany as has ever been received.

Proponents claim the Pleiadians are a super-evolved species. Indeed, their home star system is only about 100 million years old. By contrast, Earthlings were billions of years away from being bacteria at that age. Pleiadians use their accelerated status to travel hundreds of light years and enlighten us on how we can attain their level. That much is reasonably consistent, though their human messengers offer differing tales about their origins, descendants, and which dimension they favor for traveling to and from Earth.

They are described as tall, slender, athletic, and altruistic. In other words, they are an idealized version of humanity. Just to be safe, they are even light-skinned and also go by the name Nordic Aliens. Various proponents have tried to tie them to Atlantis, Lemuria, the ancient Greeks, the Cherokee, and all manner of New Age healing. Others credit them with bringing dolphins from Taurus. Marcinak has argued that humans and Pleiadians have a common ancestor in another universe. While these ideas are distinctive from each other, they have the common thread of the person’s word being the only evidence.

So we are stuck in an evolutionary rut and the Pleiadians are here to give us a biological boost. Yet you are I are at the same evolutionary stage as was George Washington and William Shakespeare, so why are they Pleiadians just now showing up? Because the idea of alien messengers and their human helpers would have been so absurd in colonial America and Elizabethan England that no one could have come up with it, much less been made en masse to believe it. Therefore, demons, witches, leprechauns, and fairies were the prominent fictional characters of those times, and aliens are their modern-day equivalent. The idea is still absurd, but is more palatable to a person familiar with The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T., and Aliens.

Shapiro runs the website Pleiadians.net, which makes the following claims (followed by my commentary):

“There are those that want to help us toward our higher spiritual destiny.” (If it’s destiny, it will happen no matter who tries to help or hinder it.)

“These Special Pleiadian Forces reside at a very high frequency that is lighter than what we know.” (So then how do you know it is there?)

“Eventually, all will become Pure Light at the center of creation.” (Given this inevitability, it remains unclear why we need to buy or do anything to prompt it).

The website says the aliens sometime come in physical form, but most often arrive through human consciousness. Either way, it’s faster than the speed of light, right? Oh no, for they have managed time travel, so beyond-warp speed is not required. But with that being the case, why don’t they just zip us ahead billions of years to our fabulous future?

Besides spaceships and telepathic communication, the creatures can also use dreams or memories. This means that ANYTHING that’s ever been in your conscious or subconscious mind could be a message from them. As to what they are telling us, “The Pleiadians transmitted seven messages for Earth’s inhabitants that convey a grand and glorious hope about the future.” There is one exception to this message of eternal peace and bliss, however, for a sense of urgency exists. You must act NOW to make these purchases, lest your chance for everlasting paradise be whisked away forever!

The final assurance from the Pleiadians is that we will eventually turn into them. Yes, your destiny is to deliver a message of eternal happiness from a super-evolved alien race that conduits will then sell in book form.

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“Brain scam” (Brain types)

BRAIN2As a youth sports coach, Jon Niednagel says he observed that children with similar personalities tended to have similar motor skills. Rather than applying the Scientific Method to see if this was true and what it might mean, he just figured he had the ability to look at someone and tell what kind of brain they had and how skilled an athlete they would be.

Without offering evidence for their existence, he asserted this was due to everyone having one of 16 brain types. Consistent with his pseudoscientific approach, he worked in isolation and sought confirmation for his beliefs rather than submitting his work for peer review. He claims 30 years of rigorous study, but none of it has produced evidence supporting his claims. Those 30 years have included no controlled experiments assessing the effectiveness of brain typing. As Niedgnagel is the only one who claims to be able to do it, his participation would be necessary, and he has declined to do so.

His ideas are comparable to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and reminiscent of the discredited work of Carl Jung. This is most apparent in the 16 types being all-or-nothing categories which ignores people’s complexity and fluidity. One distinction from Myers-Briggs and Jung is that Brain Types emphasizes motor skills, but this adds nothing to its validity.

Niednagel claims a 100 percent success rate at using a person’s body language, posture, and speech to accurately assess their brain type and associated athletic ability. Yet he is both the predictor and analyzer of these predictions. He then touts this as being the basis for a future branch of neuroscience.

Elements of Brain Typing are akin to astrology, perhaps most so when Niednagel writes, “Nature is the single greatest determinant for why we do what we do.” Like horoscopes, his descriptions of brain types are also broad and generic, a necessary element when trying to cram 400 million people into the same box.

His scientific evidence for his assertions is, “Take my word for it.” Here’s the actual quote: “We believe it won’t be long before Brain Types are proven genetically.” I’m seeing now why he hasn’t submitted that for peer review.

Belief may be tied to motivation, but it is specious to pass it off as science. Darwin, Newton, and Einstein all had beliefs, but they employed the Scientific Method, followed the evidence, and published their findings. If they had merely stated beliefs without any backing, we would not know their names and they would not have changed what we know about the world.

Certainly none of them sold a product and waited for scientists to get around to validating it. Niednagel is a businessman, not a scientist. He also speaks with authority, which could sway people. Consider this affirming of the consequent, which features plenty of confidence but no corroboration:

“Brain Typing has become the world’s most accurate and sophisticated approach to understanding why people do what they do. Each person has only one of the 16
Brain Types, which gives them an inborn, genetically predisposed wiring that directly regulates both mental and motor skills. Each Brain Type not only has inherent and specific mental proficiencies and deficiencies but physical ones as well.”

This sounds like the beginning of a racist manifesto, but Niednagel is skilled enough at public relations to snuff that out. So he adds this disclaimer: “These inborn traits…exclude personal ethics and morality. “

He then gets back to emphasizing the fervency of his beliefs: “We believe it won’t be long before Brain Types are proven genetically.” One hallmark of some pseudosciences is that their proponents say they will be validated once a separate branch of science starts doing its part. However, this is the only instance I’ve seen where the field one is promoting is also presented as the one being derelict.

There are no studies supporting Niednagel’s claims, but he boasts several testimonials from professional athletes such as Sammy Sosa and Kevin McHale. This is an appeal to irrelevant authority, and he appeals to vanity as well: “People of the other 15 Types can never attain the distinct giftedness of your particular Brain Type. You could have the same Brain Type as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Oprah Winfrey.” Or the same as Manson, Stalin, and Dahmer.

While the 16 types are different, one similarity they all share is being able to benefit by buying Niednagel’s products. And that will lead to this: “By determining Brain Type, one can know what one is best cut out to do in life, and how best to get there.” And I can tell you that a person following this advice will succeed, through self-fulfilling prophecy, subjective validation, and post hoc reasoning.

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“Ears for fears” (Ear coning)

FACECANDLE
While I have dedicated a portion of my life to the skeptic movement, I can understand how people might get swept up in some of the ideas. For instance, a person exposed to information on the okapi and the coelacanth, and also hearing cryptozoology presented as the expanse of scientific knowledge, might come to believe in the Loch Ness Monster. Or a person unfamiliar with cold reading, and excited by a few vague “hits” and the emotion of seeing a person hearing from a lost loved one, could be convinced that a medium is genuine. Or a darkened castle, a beeping electromagnetic device, and a seeming high-pitched voice could all equal a ghostly presence.

For all this accommodation, however, I cannot fathom sticking a burning candle in one’s ear and considering it beneficial. Yet that is the description of ear coning. During the process, a hollowed candle is stuck in the ear and lit, with this allegedly sucking out earwax and/or negative energy. The candle is run through a hole in a paper plate that is used to catch these melted monstrosities. While wax will appear on the plate, it comes from the candle. The hollow nature of the candle is advertised as a suction device, but no negative pressure is produced and no vacuum is created, so no earwax is sucked out.

Ear coning, also known as ear candling, is most frequently attributed to the Hopi, though the tribe eschews any connection. Others cited as originators include Tibetans, Mayans, Chinese, Indians, and Atlantians. No credible sources back up any of these claims. My suspicion is that it originated in 1978 in the mind of a California woman calling herself Sea Pixie.

The appeal to ancient authority is a logical fallacy and also inconsistently applied by adherents. Proponents of ear coning spread their beliefs on the Internet, not through smoke signals. They travel to ear coning seminars on an airplane, not aboard an ox.

They also claim that candling can alleviate an long list of symptoms, a common ploy in alternative medicine. So the burning wick will not just cure ear ailments, but also sinus trouble, stiffness, blurry vision, circulation problems, fever, and dirtied auric bodies. Hence, any positive trait can be tied back to making one’s self a personified birthday cake. And while the only wax comes from the candle, practitioners may call it dead skin, toxins, yeast infections, or bad juju.

Even if this method produced adequate pressure, the idea of benefits extending beyond the ear canal would be nonsensical from an anatomical viewpoint.  Discomfort in the middle ear during flight descent is due to change in atmospheric pressure. This would not happen if liquids or gas could pass through the ear drum, so no magic smoke is getting through either. If a patient has excess wax, there are noninvasive, non-inferno methods to remove it safely. If I had more business savvy, I would have had Murine sponsor this post.

Potential dangers from ear coning are a burned face, scorched hair, and the ear canal becoming obstructed by candle wax. There has even been one indirect fatality, an Alaska woman whose bed caught fire, leading to her death from an asthma attack.

Tests have been run and none has revealed any wax removal. As such, most ear coning clinicians have moved onto the untestable, crediting the practice with removing negative energy.

There may be no better indication of the all-encompassing nature of the Internet than there being a site called earcandling.com. After getting in the requisite alternative medicine use of “holistic,” the site continues down the New Age checklist by getting two logical fallacies into one sentence, using the appeal to ancient irrelevant authority and an ad populum: “This energy cleansing technique has been around for many thousands of years and has been found in nearly every culture since the beginning of civilization.”

As to the skeptics, “There are also those who do not understand the benefits of cleansing the body, spirit, and mind.” Earcandling.com stresses that ear coning has no healing power itself, but that it will “aid the body in its natural healing process.” But if it’s natural, not outside impetus is needed.

After insisting there’s no direct benefit, the authors seem to contradict that a few paragraphs later by writing, “Ear candles remove toxins and debris from your ears.” So to summarize, ear coning will fill one’s home with debris and toxic fumes.

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“Bad connection” (Ley Lines)

DOTMAP

Ley lines emerged from the imagination of author and self-taught archeologist Alfred Watkins. He deduced that straight lines could be drawn that connected geographic features and ancient sites in Great Britain, and he thought these revealed Neolithic trade routes.

However, there are so many prominent geographic features and places of historic relevance in Great Britain that there seems an almost unlimited number of possible starting and connecting points. One could randomly draw a line connecting any two places and inadvertently have geographic or historic points at both ends.

The idea vanished until author John Mitchell took a break from decoding UFO messages to announce that Watkins was partially correct. The lines were not trade routes, but rather sources of magic energy portals. Since this revelation in the late 1960s, several other similar mystic interpretations have been drawn. Since these mystery spots exist solely in the minds of devotees, they can be anywhere, but usually involve major ancient sites such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Nazca Lines, and the Moai. One could even draw a line from one of those sites to your kitchen and get Wonder Twin powers along with your sloppy joe.

The most costly example of this belief was when the Seattle Arts Commission gave $5,000 to a group of New Age dowsers to do a ley line map of their city. For its money, the commission received this Seattle ley line map, which I suspect was plagiarized from a preschooler’s connect the dots book: http://www.geo.org/qa.htm. They were also given this pronouncement: “The vision of the Seattle Ley Line Project is to heal the Earth energies within the Seattle city limits by identifying ley line power centers in Seattle, neutralizing negative energies and then amplifying the positive potential of the ley-line power centers.” As a bonus, this would lead to Seattle being “a center of power for good on Spaceship Earth.”

To believers, alignments of monuments and natural features are responsible for magic, psychic awareness, and special abilities. But the randomness and subjectivity of deciding which points to include was demonstrated by archaeologist Richard Atkinson who drew a set of similar lines, with each one including telephone booths.

These energies are said to be laid out around Earth in grid form, with significant geographic and manmade features being used to access this energy. This requires accepting that ancient cultures built these massive features without passing onto subsequent generation the reason for doing so.

Ley line energy cannot be detected by magnetometers or other measuring devices. Besides this lack of scientific evidence, there are other disqualifying considerations. How big a hill counts as an important one? Where is the historically relevant cutoff? Drawing these lines can require selecting a point of marginal historic importance while bypassing one of more relevance in order to make it fit. Plotting these lines requires pareidolia, determination, and use of artistic license with a psychic twist.

So what had been a novel but ultimately incorrect hypothesis involving Great British archeology transformed into a worldwide search for secret energy. But the significant ancient sites at the center of these searches were based on practical considerations of geography, culture, and available supplies. Builders of Angor Wat were unaware there was Stonehenge to intersect with. The Great Pyramid was built to ensure a pharaoh’s safe passage to immortality, not so future advanced societies could complete the magic energy triangle with Machu Picchu and the Eiffel Tower.

Some believers, primarily those at ancientwisdom.co.uk, have tried to tie ley lines into other New Age concepts. They introduced Feng Shui in an attempt to establish that major sites were built in order to interact with springs and rivers. Here’s the logic behind that, from the website: “Earth’s natural magnetism was believed to have been used to re-fertilize the soil. Water is extremely sensitive to electromagnetic fields, and as the fields are changed or influenced, so the chemistry of the water may be altered too.” To summarize, castles were meant not to protect from invaders, but from negative liquid energy.

These ideas are too spacey for astrology to not rear its celestial head. The site also tells us, “The St. Michael Ley is aligned along the path of the sun on May 8, which is the spring festival of St. Michael. It can therefore be considered astronomical. This line passes through several megalithic sites before it reaches Glastonbury and Avebury, both significant English landscape features.” There are also many important features it does not pass through, as well as passing though areas without significance.

In fact, it happens that this alleged astronomical ley line does not include Stonehenge, which New Agers consider ancient Great Britain’s most significant astronomical feature. No worries, ad hoc thinking to the rescue: “Stonehenge, whilst not being a part of the St. Michael ley, is connected with both Glastonbury and Avebury through geometry, and also forms the crossing point of several prominent ley lines.”

So even though it passes through other lines, it still counts as being a part of the one they want it to. As we’ve seen, it’s easy to come up with any connection using ley lines, and even easier if you ignore the rules you established in the first place.

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“Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc” (Restful Sleep medication)

SLEEPSPELLWhen I started this blog, alternative medicine was about a fourth-tier topic for me, but has blossomed into my most frequent subject. This will probably always be the case because people will always get sick, and others will always seek to profit from this by offering supposed solutions that are cheap, quick, painless, and absolute. It also appeals to those who want to get one over on Big Pharma and the government for repressing these cures.

Quack medicines are so ubiquitous that I could write about one a day and still have plenty left a year later. I gloss over most of them because they are inseparable from the rest. But I was drawn this week to Restful Sleep because it had some elements that distinguished it.

Sure, it had the usual appeal to irrelevant ancient authority, testimonials in lieu of testing, and regularly transitioned from fact to fallacy to fraud without acknowledging the leaps. It also featured the word that appears most frequently in alternative medicine advertising, chi, only it came with one of those distinctive twists. While chi is never defined, alternative medicine devotees insinuate it is a panacea in energy form. They never tell us what kind of energy, where it comes from, how it’s accessed, or how the peddlers knows of its existence or benefits. But it essentially leads to more pep, alertness, concentration, or strength. With this product, however, chi provides the opposite effect and puts the user to sleep. Medicine based on science is so straightforward and boring. Medicine based on science fiction has so many more bells, whistles, and roads to traipse down merrily.

The ad for Restful Sleep explains how you can know it’s effective. Persons are instructed to wear flat shoes, hold a bottle of Restful Sleep to their chest, and close their eyes. If nothing happens, that proves it works. From the ad: “If your body moves forward or stays neutral, whatever you are holding near your chest is okay for you. Your Chi matches.” My daughter holds her doll close to her chest before going to sleep and racks out for hours, so this system seems valid.

The ad also includes this warning: “If your body moves backwards, whatever you are holding is not good for you. Your body is repelling it. Chi is saying it doesn’t want that.” I fell back while trying to move part of my sectional, so my chi must dislike heavy lifting.

Claims of antiquity in alternative medicine are usually untrue and always irrelevant. A child vaccinated for polio in 1958 wasn’t compromised because Jonas Salk had only introduced the shot one year earlier. Nevertheless, Dr. Yan Ping Xu (We’ll just call her Dr. X) makes this claim about her pills: “They are based on a 2,000-year-old sleep remedy based on balancing the spleen’s Chi. Every organ is affected by spleen Chi. When it is not functioning properly, you may experience fatigue, anxiety, worry, restlessness, and poor concentration.”

My medical knowledge is scant, but I am aware that the spleen filters blood, metabolizes hemoglobin, and synthesizes antibodies. There would seem to be nothing in those attributes that would alleviate anxiety, worry, and poor concentration. But wait, look closer. Dr. X isn’t claiming the spleen can do that, but rather that the spleen’s chi can. So here we go traipsing merrily again.

Dr. X points out that her products contain ginseng and many other herbs without explaining why that matters or what that would accomplish, other than to say it will “bring balance, nourish the Chi, nourish the blood, and calm the spirit.” Three of these claims are medically worthless, and if one’s blood is lacking nutrients, the solution needs to be found somewhere other than a bottle of pills being hawked in USA Today for $29.95.

I tried looking deeper into Dr. X’s site for more substantive information, but the FAQ was limited to tidbits on PayPayl and order confirmations. Next I tried the science tab.

Citing no studies and without outlining her methods of discovery, she asserts that the pills will “help restore balance to your spleen’s and whole body chi so you can have a full night of restorative sleep and wake up refreshed, never drowsy.”

One paragraph starts by accurately stating that the spleen transforms and delivers blood. Next, it notes that if the spleen is malfunctioning, insufficient blood supplies might reach the heart, obviously detrimental. We then spin 180 degrees and go from the medical to the magical: “The heart stores the spirit, called shen, and when this is malnourished it is unable to calm the spirit.”

Next we learn that, “In traditional Chinese Medicine, it’s believed that when you’re having trouble sleeping, your spleen’s chi is off balance. In Chinese medicine, it is believed the spleen is a VERY important organ that every other organ relies on.” On one hand, no amount of belief makes anything true. On the other hand, her “very” was in all caps.

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“Eternal lie” (Reincarnation)

CAGED

I recently made my 150th post to this blog and I don’t believe any of them contain a claim that I have disproven anything. Whether the topic is ESP, ghosts, cryptids, or a healing quartz, one cannot prove a negative. I can simply highlight logical fallacies and other flaws in claims of supposed success. Or I can introduce points adding the mountain of evidence that indicate the unlikelihood of these phenomenon being genuine.

So when addressing reincarnation, we are limited to challenging the claims and critical thinking of those who say it’s real, and of analyzing the sociological and religious reasons behind its genesis and evolution.

Before going further, a definition. Reincarnation is the idea that when someone dies, the body breaks down, but a detached consciousness continues in some form or another on Earth. It is distinct from a belief in Valhalla, Heaven, or Hell, as these locales are reached after this person’s only life, with this postmortem fate being eternal and otherworldly.

The idea can be attractive, mostly because of the immortality. If a person is 52 with no real accomplishments, that’s no big deal since there will be a second chance, along with a 102nd. It also allows one to envision a romantic past in which they were a pioneer, a Revolutionary War officer, and a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer.

The notion of reincarnation likely had its beginnings when primitive peoples noticed that flowers, trees, and vegetation would die in the winter, then come back in the spring. Since humans are part of nature, I had once considered the possibility of this also applying to us. I jettisoned the idea when I realized that those other things weren’t actually dying. Trees, for instance, lose their leaves but not their status as living organisms. When they do die, they shrivel, don’t regain leaves, and never come back.

Reincarnation is mostly associated with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Wicca, with significant differences in each. In Buddhism, the person comes back as a baby and tries to get it right this time. When they accomplish this, they enter Nirvana, sort of like the characters in Defending Your Life.

The relevance of reincarnation varies significantly within different schools of Buddhist thought. Among Zen practitioners, it is scarcely more relevant than it would be to a Humanist. The Zen proponent would think reincarnation occurs, the Humanist would think it does not, but it would be equally irrelevant to both. Both are concerned only with being right here, right now, and doing what they can to better themselves and help their fellow beings. By contrast, reincarnation is of premium importance in traditional eastern Buddhism, most so when a new Dalai Lama is selected on the basis of a Tibetan toddler picking items belonging to his predecessor. The idea is to be Buddhist enough during life to reach Nirvana. Since even the embodiment of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, continues to fall short, this would seemingly be a depressing thought to the rest of the practitioners.

In Hinduism, the post-life smorgasbord features a much broader selection. You can come back as any living creature, including mammals, reptiles, deities, and demons. That is why Indian citizens have starved to death while their great-grandfather who is now a cow remained off-limits for consumption. In an additional misfortune, the cattle die a much worse death from their own starvation than they would if they were quickly slaughtered. The related concept of karma also allowed for an extreme case of state-sanctioned bigotry in the caste system. It was believed Untouchables had brought this on themselves with misdeeds in past lives. While no longer legally enforceable, the caste system still plagues those on the lower rungs. Hindu reincarnation continues until the soul reunites with the Source. I’m unsure what this really means. For further information, consult your local Brahmin.

In Wicca, there is usually not an equivalent of Nirvana or the Source, though some traditions tell of a blissful eternity called Summerland. For most Wiccans, people keep coming back and will continue doing so at least until the sun swallows Earth. A difference between Eastern religions and Wicca is that reincarnation is a relatively bad thing in the former since it means you failed to get it right. By contrast, Wicca teaches that reincarnation is part of the inevitable flow of nature and unrelated to a person’s merits.

Reincarnation is also taught by Taoists, Sikhs, Jains, Inuit, and voodoo worshippers. And it has been embraced by contemporary charlatans. It figures heavily in Scientology and is utilized by those who offer pricey therapy based on past lives, between lives, and future lives.

Per L. Ron Hubbard’s instruction, a spirit spots a woman in labor, then follows her and slips into the newborn’s body. At the risk of stating the obvious, Hubbard offered no evidence to support his obstetrics hypothesis.

Reincarnation is most explicitly rejected by Christianity, especially Protestant evangelicals. A few in the early Church took as literal Jesus’ exhortation that one must be born again, but this never gained favor. In times and places where church and state were inseparable, it was advantageous for the power brokers to teach that failing to follow their dictates guaranteed eternal damnation, rather than teaching that persons get repeated chances.

The closest thing believers have offered for evidence are stories from persons revealing their past lives. The ideas are mostly confined to children, consistent with their creative imaginations, suggestibility, and a desire to please the grownup in charge of the session. When experienced by adults, these manufactured memories are primarily an extension of the person’s ego, as previous incarnations are mostly of chieftains, explorers, and princesses.

These memories require an expanded idea of the notion of the soul. It would require not just a detached consciousness, but an identical wiring of neurons that allow for memory preservation.

One attempt to put the idea of a soul to vaguely scientific test was undertaken by physician Duncan MacDougall, who tried to weigh it. He convinced six moribund patients to lie on their deathbeds while he hooked them to scales (That’s a conversation I’d like to hear). He weighed them before and after death, with most experiencing a reduction of about three-tenths of an ounce.

It would require extremely gracious post hoc reasoning to declare this evidence that persons have a soul of such a weight. MacDougall’s contemporary, Dr. Augustus Clark, noted that he failed to account for the sudden rise in body temperature at death when blood stops being air-cooled. This rise in temperature led to sweating and moisture evaporation that would account for the lost grams.

Another attempt to put a façade of science to the notion was made by psychiatrist Ian Stephenson. He collected several stories of past lives in a dogged attempt to prove that the plural of anecdote is most assuredly data. Since the cause of some diseases could not be attributed to heredity or environment, Stephenson determined it must have come from something brought from a past life. This represents perhaps the most extraordinary leap in the history of conclusion-jumping. While he attempted to frame his terms and methods in medical jargon, he never employed the Scientific Method and set out with his conclusion drawn and sought supporting evidence.

As stated in the opening, I can’t say with certainty whether I fought sabre-toothed cats in my past or will do the same against Andromedan invaders in my future. But in the present, I’m fighting for logic and reason.

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“The Sugar Pill Gang” (Placebo Effect)

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The Placebo Effect refers to someone receiving measured, observed, or perceived health improvement through means other than medicine. For the skeptic, it has two distinct manifestations. First is in controlled experiments, where some volunteers are given an inert substance with no active ingredients and others are given authentic medication. Neither the volunteers nor the researcher knows if the pill being popped is potent or a placebo.

If the tested product substantially outperforms the placebo, it is a good indication it has medical value, especially if this happens in repeated experiments. Even when the medication is valid, some receiving the counterfeit version are reported to have improved, owing to the Placebo Effect. These improvements could be due to the fluctuating nature of illness, spontaneous improvement, stress reduction, an original misdiagnosis, or Pavlovian conditioning.

The second manifestation of the Placebo Effect is it kicking in when an alternative medicine practitioner employs the likes of kinergetics, ionized jewelry, or lavender oil. For the practitioner, any seeming improvement is proof of the product’s efficiency. For the skeptic, it means the Placebo Effect may be coming into play.

The power of the effect has obvious limitations. No matter how convinced the clinician and patient are, a placebo will not cure ALS, restore sight, or regrow limbs. But it may work on pain, gastric ulcers, upset stomachs, or depression. Scientist and author Ben Goldacre found that placebos are seemingly more potent if they cost more, have shiny packaging, or require two large pills instead of one small one. Likewise, injections are considered preferable to pills and an intimate consultation is a better augmentation than just handing the patient a bottle of tablets.

The Placebo Effect is not just in the head. It also has a physiological component, and psychologist Martina Amanzio has shown people can be conditioned to release beneficial chemicals. This helps to explain why patients credit both acupuncture and pretend acupuncture with working. Neither are genuine medicine, but both stimulate the opioid system, accelerating pain relief.

Placebos can be especially effective on stress-related illnesses. A soothing massage, an attentive clinician, and a relaxing koi pond, along with a hopeful attitude, can affect the patient’s mood. This can in turn can spark physical changes, such as release of endorphins, cortisol, or adrenaline.

Lacking a series of properly-conducted tests, there is no way to determine if any improvements are attributable to the alleged medicine or the Placebo Effect. But even if magic hands or oil have no medicinal value, if it indirectly leads to the patient feeling better, isn’t that OK? Well, it may be innocuous in limited, specific instances. But the potential danger is the patient becoming dependent on nonscientific practitioners who employ placebo therapies and treat serious conditions with astrotherapy, bioharmonics, chiropractic, dolphins, or Joy Touch.

Alternative medicine practitioners point to patient testimonials as proof and seldom put their products to the double-blind test. Normally, they employ ad hoc reasoning for this refusal. Aromatherapists have said double blind testing is difficult because there is no way to mask the smell of the authentic oil. Homeopaths say their pills need to be tailored for each individual. Energy healers have said their magic powers might infuse the research laboratory and also impact those receiving the placebo.

These excuses vary in their level of ridiculousness, but the double blind study remains the standard for determining a medicine’s legitimacy. Any products that fail this test, or resist taking it, should never be touted as cures or treatment. And it is a supreme irony to take advantage of the Placebo Effect while zealously guarding against testing for it.

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“Silent Fright” (Infrasound)

GHOSTFAN

Except for being potential topics on a skeptic blog, there would seem to be no connection between ghosts and psychic animals.

But they may have a common explanation through infrasound. These are extreme bass sounds under 20 Hertz, which is too low to be heard by humans, unless at a decibel level much higher than infrasound usually reaches.

Humans make infrasound with large music pipes, detonations, rocket launches, and sonic booms. It is also produced during large releases of energy, such as in extreme weather, earthquakes, meteor explosions, and turbulent mountain air.

Though inaudible, the sound can cause strange and uneasy feelings. These feelings are sometimes akin to seasickness, except the sufferer can never get off the ship. They stay queasy as long as the infrasound continues to pump. It can also cause unease, fear, dread, and sadness, as well as well as unpleasant physiological effects such as nausea, disorientation, and loss of equilibrium. The French movie “Irréversible” included infrasound in its opening scenes to produce these sensations in audience members. It was also tried on a suspecting crowd. During a controlled experiment in a British concert hall, scientists were able to instill morbid feelings in volunteers via infrasound. These feelings included melancholy, chills, and anxiety.

Nazi engineers recognized the phenomenon and tried unsuccessfully to build an infrasound weapon. It would have been quite the tussle if both they and Stalin’s mad scientists had succeeded, and auditory bombers had squared off against ape-men.

Infrasound may explain alleged paranormal activity since it cannot be seen, heard, or felt, yet overtakes people with feelings of fear, dread, and sadness.

Infrasound can also be used to monitor for earthquakes and volcanoes, and some animals can hear and communicate at this frequency. This may explain why they sometimes flee before natural disasters, and the ability is sometimes credited as being animal intuition by the New Age camp. Less frequently, creationists will claim it is God telling the rabbits and moose to commence their scurrying.

Besides poltergeists and animal mysticism, some have tried to connect spiritual experiences at church to long pipe organs that can produce infrasound. I find this unlikely. For one, these uplifting experiences are reported in all churches, the vast majority of which don’t have this musical capability. Also, the feelings reported are the opposite of dread and fear.

The strongest piece of evidence for infrasound’s impact was provided by Vic Tandy, a part-time law lecturer at Coventry University in England. Tandy had a pair of unsettling experiences at the school. First, he felt the unease associated with infrasound while also seeing a gray blob come at him out of the corner of his eye. Another time, his fencing foil was moved by strong vibrations. It is unclear why a law lecturer was armed with a fencing foil, but I’m guessing it was in case the gray blob came back.

Frightened, but determined to find a scientific explanation, Tandy used instruments to measure sound waves and see what he could detect. As a control, he did this during the daytime with others in the room, and checked to see if the dread returned and the foil vibrated. In both cases, they did. Tandy eventually deduced that infrasound was coming from a ventilator in the air conditioner. When the air conditioner was turned off, the vibration and sinking feeling both stopped. This finding suggests that infrasound is a possible explanation for some instances of Sick Building Syndrome.

And it likely goes a long ways toward explaining many paranormal experiences. Ghosts don’t haunt newly-opened malls or condos, but prefer mountain castles, and there is a connection beyond ghost hunters expecting to find them there. Mountaintop castles are regularly bombarded with strong gusts of wind, which can make their way through tunnels and winding staircases and manifest as infrasound. This can be interpreted as paranormal, especially when combined with the post hoc reasoning of attributing any bumping sounds and beeping electronic gadgets to a ghostly presence.