Wow! I Didn't Know That....

This is why I love skeptic talk shows, podcasts and websites. I may be a scientist but I sure as shit don't know everything about it, and I may be a vehemently anti-woo skeptic but I don't know about all of the fraudulent crap peddled out there.

While I was listening to another episode of The Atheist Experience (or was it The Non-Prophets? I'm not sure, but I think it was Russel who mentioned it) a useful website for the combating of the "why not just let people believe what they want to believe" argument came up, called www.whatstheharm.net. Brilliant! That sounds like fun. So I clicked on it and had a little gander.

I found a lot of woo that I was very familiar with, but then I saw a subheading that stopped me in my tracks. Ear candling? Really? What is the harm in ear candling? Not that I know all that much about it, but I have seen it advertised in some waxing salons and such, I even figured I might do it sometime if I felt I had too much earwax buildup. I never saw it advertised as anything other than a way to remove excess ear wax, so it never pinged my woo-meter. The information, however, opened my eyes, and on reading further into the information linked on the page, my woo-meter went off the charts. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, these excerpts are particularly damning:

More recently, two investigators tested candles to see whether the wax accumulated after burning came entirely from the candle or included wax that came from the ear. To do this they burned candles with the tip (a) inside the ear, (b) outside the ear, so the wax dripped into a bowl of water, and (b) inside the ear but with a tube in place that would permit ear wax to move into the tube but would block candle wax from moving downward. They demonstrated that all residue originated from the candle and that no ear wax was removed from the ear.

Since wax is sticky, the negative pressure needed to pull wax from the canal would have to be so powerful that it would rupture the eardrum in the process. However, candling produces no vacuum. Researchers who measured the pressure during candling of ear models found that no negative pressure was created. The same investigators candled eight ears and found that no ear wax was removed and candle wax was actually deposited in some of them! 

Ouch! Well, color me convinced! I'm just glad I've stumbled across this juicy bit of information before shelling out any money on a useless and potentially harmful procedure! 

How Lucid Dreaming Contributed To My Woo Thinking

So a couple of days ago I told you about how I have been a lucid dreamer for as long as I remember. I allowed myself a little back-patting with the recent study indicating that lucid dreamers are more self-aware, but now I want to revisit the subject to discuss how lucid dreaming may have slowed my progress out of woo thinking and into rational thought.

Those of you who have read this blog more frequently may remember my post on how I became an atheist, written in response to an open call by PZ Myers on Pharyngula. In it I briefly touched on my fascination with forgotten religions and all things magical and woo. I was raised by a mother who is still very much attached to her new age-y beliefs, I don't think she has stopped believing in anything from aromatherapy to crystal healing, and I know for a fact she still believes in fairies, so of course I had little hope of rejecting these ideas as a child. Plus, let's face it, believing in magic is fun! At least for a while. The fact that she encouraged this fantastical thinking definitely hindered the development of my skeptical muscles, although the tendency to do so was always in my personality. Despite the fact that it is in my nature to be a skeptic, however, I later noticed that my lucid dreaming was, in a small way, responsible for keeping me back, at least with regards to some views of the world.

I mentioned in my previous post on the subject that it is difficult for one to escape one's own context, as it was for me with lucid dreaming. So when I was introduced (by my mother, of course) to the concept of "mind over matter", everything just made sense to me. She showed me programs like What the Bleep! (which at the time I of course had no idea was pseudo-scientific drivel) and convinced me that there were many gurus who had achieved things like levitation and walking on water. Not to place all the blame on her shoulders, I took little convincing. While I was skeptical about many things in my childhood (for example, I never bought the existence of the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy for a second, no matter how hard my mother tried), the idea that matter, which was made up of mostly empty space, was only solid to the touch because your conscience expected it to be, made perfect sense to me. The reason this made sense in my mind was directly because of my lucid dreaming.

Those of you who are capable of lucid dreaming know that honing your skills at it requires a lot of concentration. It requires you to shut out that little doubting voice in the back of your mind. Let's say, for example, you are dreaming you have the power of telekinesis, which you are using to defeat the monster in your nightmare. The second there is a little doubt in the back of your mind that says "oh no! What if this power stops working?" POOF! you don't have the power any more (I also blame movies and TV shows which always put the hero of the story in a bit of jeopardy with a twist like that for those doubts.... dumb movies). Perfecting your abilities in lucid dreaming is all about mind over (albeit perceived) matter. That is why I needed to get better at flying: at first I could only jump off of buildings and soar, and if I carried anything it would weigh me down. I then managed to pump my arms like a bird and take off from the ground. It took me years to be able to soar into the sky carrying any burden at will, because I had to concentrate, convince myself it was possible, and completely eliminate any doubt or fear. It is the same reason why making things disappear in your dreams is easier than changing their appearance, unless you close your eyes or place your hand in front of them while doing so. 

Because I was so well versed in the art of this kind of concentration, the reason the "mind over matter" concept made so much sense to me was because I figured that modifying your reality was like modifying your dreams, only infinitely harder.

Although lucid dreams are incredibly vivid and, at times, freakishly realistic, they still have that "taint" of a dream. You can still tell, once you wake up, that reality just feels much more "real" than dreams do, despite how real the dreams felt at the time. Because of this, it made sense to me that "mind over matter" would be much easier in dreams than reality. It made sense to me that it would take years of the kind of concentration I had been practicing in my sleep to be able to erase every last trace of doubt from your mind that your hand will not pass through that table, or that your body will not hover a few inches off the ground. It also made sense to me that it would require an even longer time concentrating to be able to pull off such a feat in front of others, with their disbelieving huffs tainting the back of your mind. 

It was because of the fact that I could dream this way, and that I had no idea that I was in the minority, that I clung on to this particular brand of woo for the longest of all of my woo thinking. It made so much sense to my context, to my life, that it made me wonder: are the inventors, or the major proponents of "mind over matter", also lucid dreamers? 

How. Fucking. Embarrassing

Good job Italy. Now you’ve got the whole world talking about how badly you’ve just fucked this one up. The most scientifically illiterate court ruling since Galileo, people are rightly calling it, and I could not be more embarrassed for my country.

As you may have heard, my country has sentenced six scientists for manslaughter on the grounds that they did not accurately predict the 2009 earthquake in Aquila that killed over 300 people. This has people all over the world astounded, for as they obviously point out no scientist can accurately predict such an earthquake, and the one in question was also extremely out of the ordinary. This has everyone comparing the Italian court system to the likes of creationists in the US and Turkey, and Mithras do I wish it was that simple. Ignorance and illiteracy can be educated and corrected, willful corruption can not. 

I may sound a little conspiratorial here, but unfortunately this is something that we see often in this country. The fact is, there was someone who could have been to blame for all of those deaths, but it sure as shit wasn't the scientists. 

What happened to the reports that had uncovered that the buildings that collapsed were not built properly as per the laws of that time, and that reports of cracks in the masonry from the earlier shocks were ignored and the buildings were not evacuated?  

On no, but that would be complicated. That would involve looking into who gave the go ahead on the buildings, did the engineers and architects knowingly OK the unlawful structures, did they receive permission to do so in a back room deal with the mayor at the time, did the building inspectors get a payoff to look the other way, were the inspectors never sent at all out of negligence? Who, when are you ever going to get to the center of that tootsie pop?! Forget it, hey if the scientists had accurately predicted it they would have evacuated the entire area (yeah right) and hundreds of lives would have been saved, go to the source, convict the scientists, shut up the people that are crying for justice.

The scientists are appealing though, and the amount of global backlash to this decision has, I hope against hope, taken them aback. Everyone is watching, and they better listen to reason. 

We need no other encouragement to be more disillusioned with our country right now.

Says It All

Thank you Why Evolution Is True for this little gem:

Catholic Church, This Time You Made Me LOL

I have mentioned the Catholic Church at its worst in this blog, but sometimes you just have to laugh. OK, so the implications of this video made by Catholic nuns in the US are pretty horrendous, but the Children of Mary Order have made a video that perfectly embodies that classic Italian saying: da ridere per non piangere

For those of you who have not read (or do not remember), that means "to laugh, so as not to cry".

If you don't think you can hadle 14 minutes of pure stupid, have the shorter version with the apt mocking from TYT

Seriously now, this is just ridiculous. You're honestly perpetuating the stereotype that in order to be religious you must be monumentally stupid - not doing yourselves any favors there

Thinking Scientifically, Always

I work in the science field, so I know all too well that scientists and atheists are pefectly capable of cognitive dissonance and all kinds of backwards thinking that we often accuse others of doing. Although we are human, of course, we should know better given our training, so it makes me so angry when I see people in my field of work not applying their critical thinking skills to anything outside of the particular experiment they happen to be working on.

In this case I suppose I shouldn't have expected much more, since the person in question is also a die-hard Catholic (albeit one with an extensive historical knowledge and very much a "the whole thing is one big allegory and full of copying errors so it's all to be taken with a grain of salt" type Catholic). Still, she was perfectly able to crawl right under my skin when I happened to bring up how disgusted I am with what is going on in Greece.

In case you haven't heard, A 27 year-old man in Greece has been arrested and faces up to 2 years in prison for making fun of a Greek Orthodox monk, Geron Paisios. He created a Facebook page in which he called the monk Geron Pastitsios, a type of Greek lasagna, possibly using it as an extended parody linking the monk to Pastafarianism. To face 2 years in jail for something so asinine is ridiculous and something I expect of Iran or Saudi Arabia, not the country that invented democracy. My colleague doesn't agree, or rather, she doesn't believe it.

"Greece is a civil country", she says, "so he must have done something far worse than what you think. You're an idiot if you think that online newspapers are 100% reliable, so he must have said something horrible. Besides, you're not allowed to offend people, you can sue someone for saying terribly offensive things, maybe that person doesn't go to jail but there is a precedent in other civil countries. So, whatever, I'm sure he deserves it".

Oh deary me. A part from her horrible mangling of free speech and libel laws, the core of her argument is so rotten I almost fell out of my chair. What in the hell kind of scientist are you?!

You don't get to work your way backwards from a conclusion, I tried to explain. Of course you can't assume that newspapers have all of their facts straight, but that is entirely besides the point. We have a certain amount of evidence: I have read many articles about this, and they all say the same thing regarding his "crimes". With the evidence that we have, my conclusion is that no, Greece is not behaving like a "civilized country", not even close. That does not mean that this conclusion cannot change based on new evidence that can arise later, however I really don't care how mercilessly he poked fun at the guy, he could have inserted the guy's face into this NSFW cartoon and plastered it all over Facebook, unless he credibly threatened followers of the cult or some similar real crime was committed, my conclusion remains the same: Greece is not to be considered "civilized" so long as they have these totalitarian laws.

You know what the real problem is? Even putting it in the hypothetical: let's say that all he really did was call this guy a pasta name. Let's say for the sake of argument, it is 100% confirmed that that is all he did. Would you be willing to revise your conclusion then? Her answer was still no.

This is about not wanting to see what lies in front of you, not about not being able to or not knowing how. It's about her being religious, and she wouldn't want anyone calling Ratzinger Pope Spaghetti, so she just wont admit that one of the core and most important principles of a free country are being slowly but surely crushed underfoot. 

And ultimately, this is about not thinking what you do in life has any importance outside of the lab. If I was to think in this way regarding an experiment she'd be the first to kick my legs out from under me in utter disgust. 

I, on the other hand, was attracted to this line of work specifically because I value the importance of thinking scientifically, and I think it is the best, most fair, most objective and therefore most humble way to view life.

If you ever see me working backwards from a conclusion, slap me.

I'm Back To Eviscerate

Well I’m back, my computer is fixed (for the time being) and I’m ready to dig right back in with another wrong, wrong I’m-not-sure-if-you’re-trolling-but-let’s-address-this-anyway person clogging up the comments section of my video of Penn and Teller on the Boy Scouts who identifies himself as LordSignur.

Now I don’t usually comment much on my own videos, even though I do read the vast majority of the comments that are left on them. Usually I only get involved if someone is asking me a direct question, but once in a while a comment is so glaringly wrong and I have just enough time to butt in, I will say something. This was one such case, in talking about the Boy Scout’s officially unofficial policy of excluding gay men from working there or gay scouts from participating.

they aren't born with anything.

sexuality is decided by your environment and the decision you make. There is actually a gene that make you more likely to have sex with anybody but it doesn't make you gay.

Would you look at that! The old being gay is a choice argument! Oh how annoying you be, and how very very wrong. I responded in kind.

you dont choose who you are sexually attracted to. you may choose to actually sleep with them, but the basis of the sexual attraction remains innate and perfectly natural. Can you suddenly decide to be sexually aroused by the sight of a naked man? Dont know about you, but I cant decide to be aroused by anything that doesnt arouse me, because its not a choice

He gets insistent, and intelligible English becomes harder and harder to come by

It isn't completely conscious. but you do choose who you sleep with.

About the attraction, again, if you had experience where you come up with the idea that men a beautiful then you might be gay.

You even have gay that pretend to be straight now and get aroused by women. Are they lying?

the simple idea that there is a good way is stupid.

And you do choose everything, consciously or not. You don't realize it, that's all

What?! I gave it one last shot

If they are sexually aroused by women they are probably “bi”. Sexuality and gender are not as binary as you think they are. And the idea that you "choose" everything is ridiculous. Do you "choose" to be depressed or anxious? Do you "choose" to be schizophrenic? Do you "choose" what you dream and who you dream of? Christians love to say that people "choose" to be attracted to the same sex because it lets them off the hook for hating people for being born that way, but it doesnt make it true

 And now, for the very last comment, that prompted to make me turn this exchange into a post, since there is no way that 500 characters could ever be enough to address this sheer amount of wrong

first : I AM NOT CHRISTIAN, I AM AN ATHEIST.

You choose everything even if you don't know about it. It come from unconscious part of you but still it's you. Sexuality isn't binary. Because you do whatever you want. the fact that you don't know yourself enough to see it doesn't change that it is.

schizophrenia is caused by genetic issue. this have nothing to compare to love.

Depression is a choice you made Saying that "it's someone else fault" is the best way to never overcome it.

Wooow, OK, where do I start?

So I’m not going to shit on the guy for obviously not being a native English speaker, but that does not give him the right to make up definitions of words. Let’s start with this very fuzzy idea of what choosing something actually entails. To the dictionary!

Oxford English dictionary:

Choose: To take by preference out of all that are available; to select; to take as that which one prefers, or in accordance with one's free will and preference.

Merriam-Webster:

Choose: to select freely and after consideration <choose a career> b : to decide on especially by vote : elect <chose her as captain>

2a : to have a preference for <choose one car over another> b : decide <chose to go by train>

By definition, you can’t unconsciously choose something. There can be things that unconsciously influence your choice, like the color of two people’s shirt can influence which one you choose to think is more trustworthy without you realizing it, but you are still making a conscious choice, a selection, between two people which is influenced by a variety of variables.

If you define a choice as anything your body does whether you have conscious control over it or not then you choose to be blond, because you know your body is the one making the pigment, even if you don’t realize it, so hair color is a choice.

The second word this guy seems to want to redefine is sexuality, Sexuality is not defined as “the people that I choose to sleep with”. There are many definitions, but let’s stick to the ones that are relevant to humans. Back to the dicitionary!

Oxford English Dictionary:

Sexuality: Sexual nature, instinct, or feelings; the possession or expression of these

                   A person's sexual identity in relation to the gender to which he or she is typically attracted; the fact of being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual; sexual orientation.

A person who someone is attracted to, who they are aroused by, is not a conscious decision. Ask any teenage boy how many erections they consciously decided to have in the middle of class, and how much anyone not having sex would love to be able to say “tonight I’m going to have a wet dream! Woop!” Arousal is not something that we can choose, it is a physiological response that we can sometimes try to influence (oh crap it’s happening… think of dead kittens…. Think of grandma in her underwear; or, alternatively; oh crap this isn’t working… think of that awesome porn I watched last night… Jessica Alba taking her bra off… Licking honey off of that blond dude from Sex and the City’s abs… mmm…) but effectively have very little control over.

Then we get into where LordSingur actually does draw the line between a choice and not a choice, and this is where it gets unbelievably ridiculous. Let me refresh your memory

schizophrenia is caused by genetic issue. this have nothing to compare to love.

Depression is a choice you made Saying that "it's someone else fault" is the best way to never overcome it.

Let’s forget what the hell love has to do with anything at this point in time, but WHOA the stench of condescension with that last part. Depression is caused by shifting blame? And that is your expert medical opinion yes?

So the only thing here that is not a choice in his mind is schizophrenia, because it is “caused by a genetic issue”. Well, I have news for you, it’s not as simple as that. There is certainly a genetic component to schizophrenia, a friend of mine wrote an entire thesis on it, but it is definitely not as simple as whether or not you have “the schizophrenia gene”, and there are a variety of other factors that influence it. One fascinating hypothesis circulating at the moment is about the possible contribution of Toxoplasmagondii infection to the incidence of schizophrenia, but that’s a story for a later date.

Interestingly enough, depression also has a studied genetic component as well, would you look at that! Looks like depression is actually very similar to schizophrenia in that regard, unless our friend would like to redefine the word “depression” too while we’re at it.

In summary, the only thing that LordSingur seems to acknowledge is not a choice is something that is caused by genetics, or at least has a genetic component to it. Therefore, even by his own, wrong definition of the word choice, homosexuality is a choice because it is not genetic, correct?

Oh dear

Oh please

Make it stop

So much research

So many papers

What am I going to do??!!

Of course the genetics behind sexuality is still complex and needs to be explored, and there is no one “gay gene” that will “make you gay” if you have it. However, the fact that sexuality does have a significant genetic component to it is a virtual certainty.

One final note, I don’t give a shit what religion you ascribe to, or lack thereof. If you’re wrong you’re wrong, and not believing in an omniscient deity does not automatically make you right about anything else, nor does it eliminate the possibility that you have your own motives for wanting to believe in nonsense.

Guys, There Is Such A Thing As Too Much LSD

I get a few videos sent my way on my youtube channel, usually they are music videos, occasionally there are a couple of questions about my thoughts on a particular scientific or political topic, but one of my first subscribers has taken to sending me his, um, spiritual training videos. Now I am fully aware that he is spamming thousands with them in the hopes of getting as many people as possible to pay for his program, but yesterday I actually found twenty spare minutes in my day to finally take a look at one of them. After all, my interest was piqued with the title "How To Have A Metamorphosis Of Your DNA!" as part of a series of videos involving "Superhero Training". This should be fun.

I was expecting to be far more amused and far less annoyed. A part from the weird dude in the blue pajamas at the beginning, the grating pronunciations of  the words "lychee" and "metamorphosis", and the random pig that just appears out of nowhere (that one at least was a little cute), I was surprised at just how incoherent these two are. I was expecting some semblance of an argument, albeit a ridiculous and scientifically ignorant one, but this was just amazing.

If unlike me you do not have twenty minutes to spare to watch the whole thing for yourself, let me transcribe one of my favorite incoherent ramblings:

So, you know, I look at myself today 'cause we're all like sort of becoming our own hero, because you have such underdeveloped DNA potential that you couldn't imagine, remember you're only two, strands activated like having a car that has twelve cylinders let's say or a lot of cylinders and you only have two activated now wouldn't you be sort of curious to see how it would run on maybe two and a half cylinders, or maybe three? And what would you have to do to do that? Mmha, a lot of different upgrades, or what we call terrain modifications, that we sort of have been playing with for many years and you've been playing with a lot of the terrain modification for this thing up here, the supercomputer, and I've been doing it for this little machine also called the, the dream machine, yeah, we dream this thing and actually it does what we want to at light speed and of course, you don't know how to do this do you? (opening and closing his hands) Do it. Try it. You open your hands in and out, only to dream this motion behind the scenes thousands and thousands of reactions are going along circulating your blood as I focus my eyes, as I hold my urine, as I do nothing, because this realm we're talking about, the realm that he's talking about here is sort of like the invisible realm or the mythological realm or the realm that maybe we don't "preceive" as real. 

My head hurts, mostly because that facepalm was a little too hard.

Of course they follow up by saying that scientists are telling us all how to make "microadjustments" to our DNA by thinking them into existence. I'm sure that you all know that it is a bunch of made up crap. There's no point in me pointing out that the double-stranded helix is simply referring to the structure of DNA and that there are actually billions of copies in our bodies, where they are all partially activated, and that there are no "other strands" to "activate" just waiting around, and that DNA is not the energy power source of our bodies, etc. etc. 

I was expecting to respond to a little amusing pseudoscientific tinkering, but this far beyond response. The most shocking part is it only has 3/42 dislikes, and most of the comments are from people who actually think these two are speaking wisdom, let alone capable of forming a coherent and grammatically correct sentence. Do they filter the comments section? Or perhaps they're not spamming as many people as I thought with their videos, but maybe subscribed to me and send me them because they saw videos of mine with titles like "Alternative Medicine" not realizing they are bullshit? Or do more people than I want to believe actually buy this crap?

Incidentally I do know quite a few people that are into this New Age-y crap, but none of them are this bad at explaining themselves. The ones I know are relatively intelligent people, if scientifically illiterate, overly empathetic and quite gullible. In fact the only person I know that comes close to this level of incoherency is my one friend who did far, far too much LSD in her life.

So guys, I'm sorry to say I think you've wrecked your heads quite permanently. I hope the effects are reversible, but you should probably stop doing those drugs now. If it's been a few years since your blow-out days, then I'm afraid you're stuck with the damage. 

Just please take me off the mailing list, I don't get any amusement out of it.

Bad Science: When There's No Science At All

I have to admit I do enjoy National Geographic. Sure some of the articles can be a little wishy-washy, but the pictures are stunning and it definitely keeps my attention and keeps me company far more than an any “women’s” magazine ever would (no, I could give a shit if those are Angelina Jolie’s real boobs, and if she has an eating disorder it is none of my business). This month, however, when flipping through I came across an article that bothered me called Rhino Wars.

The article talks about the illegal trade in rhino horn from Africa to Asia, where it is rumoured to have medicinal properties ranging from fever reducing properties to a cure for cancer. Despite the lack of scientific peer-reviewed evidence, many people believe in this and even doctors suggest it as a possible treatment for cancer.

Because of this demand, poachers have driven all five species of rhino onto the Endangered Species List, selling the horn for up to twice its weight in gold. This has also led to entrepreneurs trying “rhino farming”, where they keep the animals alive and sever their horns two-three inches above the base, which ensures its re-growth within a few years. While it doesn’t seem like an optimal solution, the argument for rhino farming is that it makes for competition for poachers (who kill the rhino before severing its horn) and is a good way to ensure the species' survival. However, there is one big glaring problem that this NatGeo article completely fails to mention:

What about the millions of people that are duped into paying a fortune for something that most likely doesn’t work?

This is where the lack of science becomes incredibly bad science. A search through the literature on this subject has led me to only two studies, from the 1990s, on the effects of rhino horn on hypothermic rats. OK, so it seems as though they have been published in an actual journal with an actual Impact Factor, which is a good start. Unfortunately I cannot access the full article in order to take a good look at their methods, but here is an excerpt from one of the abstracts:

Intraperitoneal administration of an aqueous extract of rhinoceros horn at 5 2.5 and 1 g/ml, showed a significant antipyretic effect in rats with hyperthermia induced by subcutaneous injection of terpentine oil. Similar assays with extracts of the horns of saiga antelope, water buffalo and cattle at 5 g/ml also caused a significant drop in fever

Let’s say for the sake of argument that this is true, and that this effect translates over to humans. So rhino horn reduces fever, so what? So does paracetamol. We already have drugs that do this. Also notice that cattle horn has the same effect. Well, if you have to use some kind of horn, why not use one from an animal that is already farmed and has the same effect?

Here’s the problem, I cannot find a single peer-reviewed paper on the effects of rhino horn on cancer treatment. So what the hell are we waiting for?!

Although I highly doubt that rhino horn will have anti-cancer properties, I have explained again and again that not thinking something likely is no reason to not investigate it. There are doctors that are suggesting this, there need to be studies done. If one, two, three studies are done that show no health benefits, these results need to be plastered in these doctors’ faces and all over the news, only that way can we have any hope of educating people and getting them to devote their efforts to other, tried and tested treatments, possibly saving lives. You want to save the rhino and decrease poaching? Start by decreasing the demand.

And what if these studies demonstrate that rhino horn actually does have an anti-cancer effect? Well great! We can start looking for the active ingredient in the rhino horn so that it can be purified in the lab.

If it turns out that rhino horn does aid in cancer treatment then maybe I’ll be in favour of expanding and trading from rhino farms, at least until scientists are able to identify and replicate the compound that has these medicinal properties. But, until then, I think that rhino farming is a terribly flimsy band-aid over this festering problem.

By supporting rhino farming you are supporting financial interests in keeping the rhino horn trade alive. You may decrease the poaching and black market trade a little, but you are supporting people that do not want it to get out that rhino horn doesn’t have the medicinal benefits people think, because that would hurt sales. I know that there are going to be people that believe in traditional medicine no matter what, but to think that education could not make a huge dent is ridiculous. You only have to look at the past hundred years to see how this is not the case.

The fact of the matter is that, while NatGeo is right to point out the lives of rhino’s that are being saved, they fail to make the more obvious point. It is not just rhinos that are losing lives in this “war”, it is countless sick, desperate humans that are losing their lives as well.

Woo Woo and the Scientific Method

The other day I wrote a blogpost about en example of bad science, in which I explained that a common misconception that people have about scientists is that they dismiss anything that they can't explain. The idea that everything has to have an explanation and until that explanation is found it is completely rejected is fundementally untrue. The problem here lies in confusing the word "explanation" with the word "evidence".


I think that an excellent example of this is this video that I saw a few weeks ago on TheYoungTurks about a study on the effectiveness of prayer in curing AIDS

This kind of study is one that left many non-science minded people scratching their heads. Prayer? But that's bullshit! How can mumbling some words about someone help their sickness in any way? What a waste of time and money! Well yes, it is bullshit, but how do we know it's bullshit? By doing a study.

Our logic tells us this doesn't work, but what if it does? If the study were to demonstrate that people who were prayed for were statistically more likely to get better we would have evidence that prayer might work, even if we wouldn't necessarily have an explanation as to why it works. The topic would be pursued and an explanation would be searched for, but many scientists would stop their scoffing and take a look at what might be going on. To do this, prayer would have to pass the same test that any other drug would: a double-blind random placebo-controlled study. Placebo-controlled meaning that people would not know what group they are in, therefore you control for the placebo effect. The double-blind part ensures that the researchers/doctors that collect the data for the study also do not know which patients are in which group, minimizing their own (conscious or unconsious) bias in collecting the data. Random so as to ensure that any patient has an equal chance of being placed in either group, to avoid (consciously or unconsciously) placing people that are doing slightly better in one or the other. If prayer passes this first hurdle then there is evidence that prayer might help, and the subject is pursued further. Problem: it hasn't.

It is not a useless waste of money. It is a valuable demonstration that prayer does not work. When scientists say that prayer doesn't work it is because there is no scientific evidence that it works, not because they simply can't figure out how it could therefore dismiss it offhand. Although there will always be people that refute evidence and believe whatever they want, studies like these keep logically minded people informed and hopefully further from the hands of scheming faith healers and con artists.

Don't be afraid to demand the same evidence of "spiritual" or "supernatural" phenomena that you would anything that comes out of a lab. At the same time, don't spit on studies like these that thoroughly debunk these phenomena as "too obvious to waste money on". Believe it or not scientists do have a very open mind, they are open to the possibility that these things could work, the only problem is that there hasn't been a single supernatural phenomenon to pass the first basic scientific tests. That is why scientists (most, of course) do not believe in this crap - not because they don't want to, but because they have no good reason to.

Bad Science: Urine Therapy

I get asked a lot of questions about strange alternative therapies quite often, and this is one that has been on my radar for a while now. People who drink their own urine for therapeutic reasons. Gross right? Well, yes, but that's hardly the reason why I'm going to call it out now. My father drank a cup of horse blood every day for two weeks after a terrible car crash left him very dangerously anemic in order to get his iron levels back up, and that's pretty disgusting too, but that doesn't mean it didn't work. I'm going after urine therapy for the two most important, fundamental reasons:

1. It doesn't make any sense
2. There is no scientific evidence for it

Reason number 1 can never stand on its own. Just because something doesn't make any immediate sense it doesn't mean that there isn't another unknown mechanism at play that could be having an effect. This is a common misconception held by many proponents of alternative medicine, that scientists say "I don't get how it works, therefore it doesn't". This would be incredibly arrogant and completely contrary to the scientific method. Tapping away at something with our logic is only half the job, the rest is devising experiments that test to see if the conclusion our heads came up with work. If the tests find our logical conclusion lacking our theory needs revisiting, and that is the whole point. Nevertheless, it is useful to see why exactly this doesn't make any sense, given our current knowledge of human anatomy and physiology.

Unlike faeces, urine is not a dangerous substance from an infectious point of view. It is a sterile solution, which is why so many people have been able to drink it and/or wash themselves with it without risking adverse health effects. However, urine is still a waste product. The whole purpose of peeing is to eliminate nitrogen waste that our cells produce, which our species excretes as urea, as well as to keep a decent balance of salts and water in our bodies. It's a laborious and essential process that all vertebrates undergo to ensure the elimination of toxic nitrogen waste from their bodies, and what are humans doing when they are partaking in urine therapy? Putting it right back in. Now that is just downright disrespectful to those poor cells. In cases of extreme dehydration it can buy you a couple more days before dying of thirst, but other than that there is no point.

As I said earlier, this is what logic leads us to believe. How could an excreted liquid filled with our cells' toxic waste be good for us? Still, evidence can negate these steps in logic if it demonstrates otherwise. The man in the video I previously linked states that there is research and abstracts available attesting to these health benefits, while conveniently forgetting to mention any of them, and also stating in his video description that one thing a "urine therapy community" could accomplish is "a global scientific experiment on the efficacy of urine therapy run by scientists and doctors". Well, a look through the scientific literature does not yield any evidence to support the practice of urine therapy.

The only article I have managed to find is this one on the anti cancer benefits of cow urine. Exceedingly curious I opened it immediately, to find that it was published in the International Journal of Cow Science, which you'll be shocked to discover does not have an Impact Factor. Go figure. Also telling is the wonderful English the article is written in. Here is a brief excerpt from the abstract

It has been recognized as water of life or “Amrita” (beverages of immotality), the nector of the God. In India, drinking of cow urine has been practiced for thousands of years. It is an important ingredient of panchgavya, a term used to describe five major substances (urine, milk, ghee, curd and dung), obtained from cow. All the five products possess medicinal properties, and are used singly or in combination with some other herbs against many diseases, even those not curable by allopathic treatments. This kind of alternative treatment, termed as ‘panchgavya therapy’ or ‘cowpathy’, has been reported to be beneficial even for dreaded diseases like cancer, AIDS and diabetes.

Experimentally it has been proved that among all sorts of urines, the urine of the Indian cows is most effective. Seeing the potential use of indigenous cow urine in several ailments including even the cancer, the use of Gomutra (cow urine) of indigenous breeds of cattle should be promoted extensively. However, scientific validation of cow urine therapy is required for its worldwide acceptance and popularity. This review highlights the anti-cancer activity of cow urine and the strategies for promoting its vital medicinal potential and prospectives for the benefit of mankind with the view that cow urine therapy needs immediate attention, promotion, and wide popularity and proper support of the scientists, researchers and clinicians to strengthen this alternate low cost therapy having no side effects, as generally observed with chemotherapy and radiation therapy being followed for curing cancers, and thus inspire confidence in the public about its good virtues.

So it has been experimentally proved to work, but scientific validation is required for it to become accepted?! This needs proper support from the scientists! Ha OK, I think we can all agree this one is a swing and a miss when it comes to evidence for urine therapy.


If there are any real articles on this subject out there that I am unaware of please let me know. However, as of now, urine therapy fails on both levels, which is why I am giving it the label of bad science.


Don't agree? Prove me wrong