Here we go again, then. The annual round-up of the good, the
bad and the ugly in healthcare, nutrition and general daftness.
Let’s start with some good news: this is a great thread by Simon Singh on Skeptic successes in the past few years.
HEALTH
Following a consultation, the Charity Commission has decided
that charities must support their alternative medicine claims with good
scientific evidence.
In other good news, homeopathy is no longer publicly funded
on the NHS – and about bloody time too - but of course they won’t go down without a fight: homeopaths
are going to take the NHS to court.
Homeopathic vets also had a hissy fit because the RCVS
demands its members use evidence-based treatments. Because science doesn’t know
everything, right? Even though vets are scientists.
Cancer patients using alt med rather than conventional
treatments have a worse survival rate. And it’s not just people self-treating; research finds that ‘Doctors who are attracted to homeopathy
despite a lack of evidence may be generally less good at keeping up to date on
treatment guidelines and safety alerts or be less willing to work with
colleagues to improve. Doctors who offer it to patients tend to do worst on scores
for effective use of conventional medicines.'
Mixing alt med with real meds is like running an
unsupervised and potentially deadly experiment.
Natural does not equal better. Or safe. Look at what happened to that
great self-doser Dr Jekyll.
Twenty years on, the legacy of the MMR vaccine and autism scare lies
continues to take its toll across Europe. Cases of measles have hit a record high, according to the
World Health Organization. Experts blame the surge in infections on a drop in
the number of people being vaccinated. Although, inevitably, it’s a bit morecomplicated than that.
There has been some interesting research on how anti-vax
attitudes correlate with belief in conspiracy theories and how this may affect
pro-vax campaigns. It’s not surprising that there would be cross-overs as the
same mindset is transferrable from one false belief to another.
It wouldn’t be a Skeptic Round-up without some mention of La
Paltrow. Don’t put coffee up your bum even if she tells you to. And don’t use live bee stings either, even if she says ‘I’m open to anything. I’ve been stung by
bees. It’s actually pretty incredible if you research it.’ Probably not so
incredible for the bees, though.
Paltrow says anyone who challenges the healing powers of her
'wellness' products is against the empowerment of women. As if that passive
aggressive act would shut down all debate. Lucky for us, her main challenger is
a woman. The wonderful Dr Jen Gunter attended the GOOP conference and
reported from the frontline of 'wellness' where she found that the Goop store is “90%
quackatorium, and there was no evidence supporting Gwyneth Paltrow’s claim that
Goop does not engage in pseudoscience as a commercial venture."
There is some good news. Goop has agreed to pay a
substantial settlement over unproven claims about the health benefits of its infamous
vaginal eggs. ‘Under the settlement Goop
is banned from making any claims regarding the efficacy of its products without
reliable scientific evidence.’
Enough about her.
Plain packaging doesn’t decrease the number of smokers –
quite the opposite. It’s also failed in France and Australia. It certainly
wouldn’t have deterred me when I smoked. The intention may be to deter new smokers (children) but it's impossible to determine accurately whether any one factor has an influence on either current or potential smokers.
A naturopath treated a child with rabid dog saliva to cure
behavioural problems, claiming he was in a ‘dog state’. She claimed that
"The dog that bit him may have recently been vaccinated with the rabies
vaccine or the dog bite in and of itself may have affected the boy with the
rabies miasm … Either is possible and the phenomenon is well-known in
homeopathy. A bite from an animal, with or without rabies vaccination has the
potential to imprint an altered state in the person who was bitten, in some
ways similar to a rabies infection."
A miasm is a homeopathic term for ‘the ghost of the disease
state still rampant in the energy system.’ The non-homeopathic definition of the word is
‘noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or
germs polluting the atmosphere’. Pretty much sums it up. Just as well it wasn’t
a werewolf that bit him.
Another naturopath is promoting peat tampons. Just don’t go
there.
DIET
Weight loss magnets – at last, what we’ve all been waiting
for! Oh, wait a minute … This is why magnets don’t work like that.
Taking fish oil supplements for a healthy heart is nonsense
says a Cochrane report.
Is sugar the new heroin? Normally everything ‘bad’ is
compared with smoking these days. And ‘bad’ has become shorthand for ‘I
disapprove of…’ Sugar is not addictive. Repeat. Sugar is not addictive.
Sugar is not addictive.
The truth about Public Health England’s sugar reduction scheme: ‘The idea is to reduce sugar content in most foods by 20 per
cent by 2020. The first target was a five per cent reduction by 2017 but this
has not happened. It was never likely to happen. Instead, there has been a two
per cent reduction across the eight categories that PHE is most interested in… Food
companies need little incentive to shrink their products while keeping the
price the same (Nestlé and Mars were frantically shrinking their products
before the sugar reduction plan officially began - and before Brexit). But the
government is now encouraging them to do it. Indeed, it is effectively
compelling them to do it because that is the only realistic way of cutting
sugar content in chocolate, confectionery and biscuits, which are the main
sources of sugar.’
In some cases, the sugar content has gone down but overall
calories have gone up. If you take the sugar out you have
to put something in so that the product doesn’t taste like cardboard smeared in
brown fat.
And other research states "We were unable to find
evidence that any sugar tax actually implemented anywhere in the world has led
to improvements in health." Sorry, Jamie Oliver.
Water has become a big fad this year. There has been a new
raw water craze. Mmm yummy poo and germs and bits of twig and insects and
insect poo.
Need a mental boost? Try rosemary water. Only £4 a bottle.
Check out the science section: ‘The herb features in Greek mythology, the New
Testament, and Shakespearean drama’. Yes, it did say science.
Or there’s alkaline water that has been treated to have a
higher pH level than the usual 6.5-7.5. The makers say it provides “better
hydration” and is “designed to obtain optimum body balance” because it “uses specialized
electronic cells coated with a variety of rare earth minerals to produce
scientifically engineered water”.
Science says: “Your body regulates its [blood] pH in a very
narrow range because all our enzymes are designed to work at pH 7.4. If our pH
varied too much we wouldn’t survive… you’re literally just flushing money down
the drain”.
GENERAL NONSENSE
A sceptical look at the long history of Personality Testing
– including the bunk that is Myers-Briggs which is basically corporate
astrology.
Exorcism is on the rise. These truly are the Dark Ages.
A Mexican priest claims: ‘The vast majority of people who
see him have normal problems or mental illnesses, and he says he has sent
people to seek psychiatric help. But he says 2-3% show signs of demonic
“vexation” … His subjects, he says, have problems that cannot be explained in
normal medical terms. One, who he believes may have been cursed by her
mother-in-law, feels an almost constant sensation of daggers entering her legs,
knitting needles in her arms, and a clenched hand at her chin. Another was so
obsessed by self-gratification that he masturbated 40 times a day. “Normally
speaking it is humanly impossible … so that is a satanic thing”.’
I do like the term ‘vexation’ and will attempt to use it in
general conversation. How does the woman know what daggers entering her legs
actually feel like, or knitting needles in her arms? As a knitter, I can say
that it would be bloody hard to stab with a knitting needle,
they’re just not sharp enough. I’d use an embroidery needle.
It’s not just Mexico where exorcism is on the rise. A top
Irish exorcist called for more exorcists because ‘there has been increasing
evidence of the malicious activity of the evil one’. Pope Francis gave formal
recognition to the International Association of Exorcists in 2014. According to
Fr Collins, ‘it’s only in recent years that the demand has risen exponentially’
and he blames ‘a growing apostasy within the Church’. Scare tactics, then. Come back to Church or the Evil One will get you.
The ‘malicious activities of the evil one’ has a great ring
to it. I shall be using it to refer to anyone I don’t like in future.
According to vets, the government is being very economical
with the truth about the efficacy of badger culling: “Badger culling has not worked. They are issuing barefaced lies in this matter." The former head
of DEFRA’s wildlife epidemiology unit who advised the department on its TB
strategy for more than 40 years says: "Defra has been cherry-picking the
science since they started culling. The fact that they are rolling it out on
such a vast scale is a travesty of the available science."
The Indian education minister says evolution is
‘scientifically wrong’ because no one has ever seen an ape turn into a man. He
seems to be confusing science with shape-shifting. I have however seen a man
turn into an ape on several occasions. Generally after the application of
alcohol.
This debunks the myth that women talk more than men. Men of
course have much more important things to say. At great length. Even when we’re
the expert in the subject and they just read an article by Jordan Peterson and
shut up or I’ll send you death threats on social media for daring to mention
this.
The ‘psychology’ of the power stance has also been debunked.
Politicians should keep on doing it. So much of what comes out of their mouths
is inane/terrifying/depressing that they might as well give us a laugh.
So-called ‘healing crystals’ often come from ethically and
environmentally dubious sources. So they’re not just pretty shiny things.
Koko the gorilla’s language skills were not at all as we’d
been lead to believe, more a mixture of wishful thinking and ignorance about
how language actually works. Damn it.
Who doesn’t love a chatty gorilla with a pet kitten?
There is no evidence that tech is as ‘addictive as cocaine’. Nor are cupcakes, ice cream, power, carbs, World of Warcraft,
sugar etc etc. Claims are often based on a misunderstanding of what
addiction is and an oversimplified description of what the brain chemical
dopamine does, according to clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell.
Hunt’s screen time limits for kids is yet more evidence free policy, yet another moral panic: ‘the recognition of so-called gaming disorder
by the World Health Organisation is premature.’.
Andy Przybylski, associate professor and director of
research at the Oxford Internet Institute said: “The thing that is very, very
important to understand about this is that these correlations are extremely
small,” he said. “And 99% of a child’s wellbeing has nothing measurable to do
with screens, no matter how you measure them.”
It turns out it’s a myth that Victorian doctors treated
hysterical women with vibrators. Damn,
that’s another fun one out the window then.
There are times when I so wish magic was real. A coven of
New York witches put a hex on US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and,
just to make the story even more fun, a Catholic priest and exorcist in
California countered the spell by saying prayers for the justice at Mass,
saying "This is a conjuring of evil - not about free speech."
They claim that similar hexes on Trump have been successful "We
feel the rituals were a success as they sought to expose Trump for what he is,
and that has happened on many levels; from the Russia probe to the exposé on
his finances to Stormy Daniels."
It is of course impossible to tell without an unhexed
control Trump whether they worked or not.
A real treat to end with– an archive of occult recordings.
Everything from the voice of Alistair Crowley to voices beyond the grave to all
manner of spooky shit. Enjoy.
For vaccination against nonsense, dangerous or otherwise,
join us at London Skeptics in the Pub or find your local Skeptics group. London is the original SitP and 2019 sees the twentieth anniversary
of our founding. There will be celebrations and they will not be carb-free.
