Christ on a bike

The last thing I’ll say for the people that don’t believe in cycling – the cynics and the skeptics. I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry you can’t dream big. And I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event, and you should believe. 

From Lance Armstrong's more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sermon to those poor benighted haters who disbelieved in the cycling miracles he wrought by faith alone (110% positively, definitely, absolutely without any form of pharmacological assistance whatsoever). Lifted from a great post at Salty Current, which perfectly nails the corrosive effect of militant faitheism on public discourse:

The most aggravating aspect of Armstrong’s project was his promotion of faith in faith and celebration of the faithful identity. He and the cycling big wigs consistently worked to create a community of the faithful that would exclude and shun doubters. He flattered his more credulous fans with the notion that they were better people for promoting Hope and Belief. While the believers were in reality the overwhelming majority, they were sold an image of themselves as members of a small elite whose gift of spirit set them apart from the cynical, faithless masses...
...More generally, skeptics were castigated in the traditional way: contrasted with the virtuous faithful, they were portrayed as mean, callous, lesser people who lacked the life-affirming spark of faith. 

The take-out from Demagoguery for Dummies seems to be that you gotta have faith (or, rather, your followers gotta have it). Get that bit right and dealing with impertinent critics is a breeze - here are some bullet points for aspiring Machiavellians:

• Make your evidence-lite assertions loudly, confidently and often. 
• If anybody questions those assertions or, heaven forbid, tries to engage with the evidence, point out that the critic must be some sort of small-minded, out-of-touch nitpicker. 
• Always remember to keep on repeating how flawed your faithless critics are, in order to avoid getting bogged down in the (lack of) evidence behind your own assertions (attack is the best form of defence).

Follow these rules and, with any luck, you'll never need to do anything as embarrassing or uncomfortable as having a fact-based discussion.

That's not to say that most people of (usually confused) faith aren't perfectly honest, harmless, guileless and even benign. It's when it gets out into the public sphere and people with power, or people with something to hide, use it to shut down evidence-based argument that faith goes really toxic.

Faith might be the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions and the opium of the people, but it's also the weapon of choice for cheats, con-artists, demagogues and the peddlers of quack remedies. Militant faitheist obfuscation makes the strong stronger and the crooked more comfortable.

Evidence is the democratic weapon you can fight back with, if only you can get your hands on it.

Crystal balls

Or why the Large Hadron Collider is a colossal waste of time and money, Part 2. Because, using just a small piece of shiny rock, those boffins at CERN could have discovered everything worth knowing about our Multiverse and found out what happened before the Big Bang:

Crystal Cap Amethyst assists in exploring the multitude forms that life encompasses, not just the physical and material reality. It connects you to the immensity of life and attunes you to the most profound guidance. Crystal Cap Amethyst takes you into civilzations not as firmly corporeal as present one. You connect to Lemuria and live beyond the stars in other galaxies and universes, bringing back the wisdom and skills you garnered there. The stone conveys you to the start of our present universe and beyond to experience what went before.

With more New Age wibble than you can shake a dowsing rod at, The Crystal Bible 3, by Judy Hall, (an authority on 'spiritual development ... crystal healing, karmic astrology and past life therapy' no less) retails at £13.99 although, if you were to take its cosmological, archaeological and therapeutic claims seriously, its true price would be far above rubies (which are, apparently, most effective when embedded in a matrix of granite - 'The powerful lifeforece of Ruby or Garnet is magnified and focused by its granite matrix. It assists the transport of Qi around the body, energizing every cell. Excellent for repairing a broken heart, physically or psychologically').

My son has a copy of The Crystal Bible 3, a well-meaning present from somebody who knew that he was interested in rocks, minerals and gems, but failed to notice that TCB3 has less to do with mineralogy and geology then with such esoterica as 'karmic incrustations', 'high vibration energy', 'etheric blueprints' and out of body experiences.

Fortunately there are still plenty of books containing Actual Facts about rocks, minerals and gemstones (how they are formed, what they are made of, where they are found, the Mohs scale and so on). Rocks and Minerals, by Dan Green is especially good at summarising this stuff in a format likely to appeal to a seven-year-old. It's also way cheaper than TCB3, at a very reasonable £6.99:

Any publicity is good publicity

A new age entrepreneur offers to beam healing Reiki goodness to pets. Scaryduck is unimpressed. I caught this post on Google Reader, where Google AdSense had made it unintentionally funnier by displaying content-relevant ads for Jedi Reiki masters and a 'weak chakra' diagnosis service (click screenshot to embiggen):

The Force is strong with this one.

Brides of Dracula

Vampire Dermal Therapy

An amount of your plasma is taken and separated into platelet rich and platelet poor plasma. The rich plasma is injected sub dermally into wrinkles and areas needing rejuvenation.

This is a piece of genuine copy for a real beauty treatment, currently being punted to ladies who lunch, at two hundred quid per face.

Truly, the living dead are among us.

To be fair, it's a canny piece of marketing. After all, colonic irrigation's been around for a long time now and there has to be a market for a more on-trend medical-sounding intervention to relieve Hollywood starlets and bored golfing wives from the pent-up discomfort of all that excess money. And the word "vampire" exudes an altogether more classy image of sexiness than having a hosepipe stuffed up your bottom for no very good reason.

The name "vampire dermal therapy" conjures up the dangerous allure of the vamp, from Theda Bara to the ubiquitous sexy vampires of contemporary pop culture; when I imagine colonic irrigation, I think of a freshly de-gibleted chicken having its body cavity washed out. If you're a well-off wannabe siren-goddess, I'd say it's no contest (it must be a real bummer if you're a needle-phobic alt-med fadster, though).

Friends in high places

Kevin Trudeau, the king of too-good-to-be-true late-night TV scams, must pay $37.6 million in fines and restitution after he ignored an FTC order to stop making infomercials.

A federal appeals court has ruled, after thirteen years of litigation, that the feds were within their rights to ban him from making TV ads for his books, which include "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About" and "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You To Know About."

The FTC's pursuit of Trudeau goes back to at least 1998, when the FTC fined him $500,000 for deceptively advertising Eden's Secret Nature's Purifying Product, which falsely claimed to improve your immune system.

After that, Trudeau graduated to perhaps his most cynical infomercial in which he claimed that eating coral calcium could cure cancer. 

According to Business Insider.

 Me, I just love informercials.

For most people a $37.6 million dollar legal bill would be inconvenient, at the very least. Fortunately for Kevin Trudeau, he just happens to be an 'ex-member of The Brotherhood' [that's The Illuminati to you, peasant], who, along with 30 other members of various seceret societies have [sic] created a BRAND NEW elite, private organization that YOU are allowed to join.' This elite, private club was, apparently, 'created to empower the masses.'

With friends like these, not to mention the ablity to achieve the apparently imposssible feat of creating a club that is at once elite and private, yet open to a mass membership consisiting of absolutely anybody who can click on a web link, Mr Trudeau  is clearly not a man not to be trifled with.

In the almost infinitely unlikely event that anyone at the Federal Trade Commission is reading this, please guys, save yourselves while you still can! Don't keep upsetting Mr Trudeau. A man with connections like that could crush you all like ants.

via

Homeopathy reconsidered

I used to think homeopathy was a daft idea. Take the whole dilution thing. In his splendid book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Francis Wheen pointed out that a typical dilution of 30C, (one part cure to 100³⁰ parts water) represents one single molecule of homeopathic ingredient diluted by more water than exists in all the world's oceans. The alleged active ingredient of the homeopathic cold and flu remedy oscillococcinum is, according to Wheen, 'duck's liver', 'diluted to an even more fantastic ratio of 200C.' That's one molecule, diluted by more molecules than exist in the entire observable universe.

It turns out, though, that Wheen was wrong about oscillococcinum. A manufacturer of homeopathic pills, Boiron, is currently making legal threats against an Italian blogger who dared to make fun of oscillococcinum. This piece of lawfare got a mention on quite a few web sites, including  a couple I follow, with links to some articles about oscillococcinum. Wheen was right about the absurd levels of dilution, but interestingly wrong about the allegedly active ingredient of oscillococcinum. Wheen thinks it's duck's liver. In fact, it's a bit more complicated than that:

In the 1919 flu epidemic a physician who did not understand that artifacts on the slide, probably bubbles, move randomly due to Brownian motion. Looking at the tissues of flu patients with a microscope, he found what he thought was not only the cause of influenza, but the cause of all diseases: small cocci (round balls) that oscillated under the microscope. He found these wiggling bubbles in all the tissues of all the ill people he examined and thought he discovered the true cause of all disease. Sigh. Yet another cause of all illness. He is the only person, before or since, to see these oscillating cocci. Hence the name. 

From Science-Based Medicine. Apparently, the researcher who "discovered" these oscillating cocci thought he'd seen a lot of them in duck livers. So homeopaths mashed up duck liver because they thought it contained flu-causing cocci, presumably on the homeopathic principle that "like cures like." Only it was a mistake. There is, literally, no such thing as oscillococcinum. The term "daft" no longer seems adequate.

Right, I think I've got my head round this. To make a best-selling homeopathic flu remedy:

1. Take an ingredient that doesn't exist.
2. Dilute it to a point where, even if it did exist, it would stop existing 
3. Add sugar and evaporate the water containing the non-existent trace of the non-existent ingredient to make a sugar pill.*
4. Flog sugar pills at whatever price the market will bear.

Wanna buy some?

*These are just the most outrageous stages of the process. As Guy Chapman points out in his detailed dissection of "the canonical quack remedy", 'Oscillococcinum exhibits fractal wrongness. However you zoom in on its errors, you just find more errors just as big.' Massive kudos for the phrase "fractal wrongness."

Duck hunting season still open

First, the Telegraph blew the whistle on Members of Parliament wasting taxpayer's money on duck islands. Now MPs are blowing the whistle on the National Health Service wasting taxpayer's money on quacks:

The NHS should stop funding homeopathy, MPs say.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said using public money on the highly-diluted remedies could not be justified.

The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works...

It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS, helping to fund four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and numerous prescriptions.

Reports the BBC. Robert Wilson, of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers is apparently 'disappointed'. Since every pound of public money squandered on this discredited nonsense is a pound not available for proper, effective treatments, his disappointment gives me immense pleasure and some hope for the future.

Then I hit his face, now I'm a believer

Shortly after having left his local mosque, Shamso Miah went into a bank. He had a row with another man in the bank queue and hit him twice, fracturing his jaw. His case was heard by Cherie Blair or Cherie Booth QC, as she's known when she's doing the judging who generously announced that:

I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before... You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.

The Heresiarch finds her comments quite surprising.

In other news:

Osama Bin Laden would find himself at the sharp end of a £200 fine if he was tried in a British court, Cherie Blair said last night...

Mrs Blair stressed that until he started organising a systematic campaign of devastating suicide attacks against western targets, Mr Bin Laden had never been in trouble before.

She added: "Recruiting hundreds of disillusioned young men and training them to become mass killers is not acceptable behaviour, but he's a religious man and so obviously he already knows that.

That last quote was from The Daily Mash, may Allah bless it and grant it peace.

It doesn't come as any surprise to me that the woman's two coupons short of a pop-up toaster. Cherie and that husband of hers have form going back years. Mad as a sack of badgers, the pair of them. Here's the magnificent Francis Wheen, with memories of the Blairs in their wacky prime:

Cherie Blair finds her devout Catholicism no impediment to flirtations with New Age spirituality, as she proved by inviting a Feng Shui expert to rearrange the furniture at No 10 and wearing a magic pendant known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with "a matrix of specially-cut quartz crystals" that surround the wearer with "a cocoon of energy" and ward off evil forces. Last December, amid the frenzy of media indignation at the discovery that the conman Peter Foster had helped the Blairs buy two flats in Bristol, some of us were far more alarmed by the disclosures about Foster's girlfriend Carole Caplin, who is employed by the prime minister's wife as a 'lifestyle guru'. Through Caplin, Mrs Blair has been introduced to an 86-year-old 'dowsing healer', Jack Temple, who treated Cherie's swollen ankles by swinging a crystal pendulum and giving her strawberry leaves grown within the 'electro-magnetic field' of a neolithic circle he has built in his back garden.

It was long assumed that Tony Blair, who wears his Christianity on his sleeve, did not share his wife's unorthodox enthusiasms. In 1999 he demanded the resignation of the England football coach Glenn Hoddle, who had told an interviewer that disabled people were paying off the bad karma they collected in previous incarnations. Blair thought this "offensive", though it was not discernibly more offensive than the doctrine of original sin held by many of his fellow Christians. Besides, from a Buddhist viewpoint Hoddle was quite correct: no less a figure than the Dalai Lama confirmed as much, but added that "if you live in a Christian country, you should keep these views to yourself. It is difficult to have a mish-mash of religions".

Not so, as Blair confirmed when he and his wife underwent a 'rebirthing experience' under the supervision of one Nancy Aguilar while holidaying on the Mexican Riviera in the summer of 2001. The prime ministerial mudbath was revealed by New Humanist contributor Tom Baldwin in a gobsmacking report for the Times:

"Ms Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out…Within the Temazcal, a type of Ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks, to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs' 'energy flow'."

Ms Aguilar chanted Mayan songs, told the Blairs to imagine that they could see animals in the steam and explained what such visions meant. They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before 'rebirth' and venturing outside. The Blairs were offered watermelon and papaya, then told to smear what they did not eat over each other's bodies along with mud from the Mayan jungle outside.

The prime minister, on holiday just a month before the 11 September attacks, is understood to have made a wish for world peace.

Crimes, follies and misfortunes

"History" wrote Edward Gibbon "is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind". That view makes some sort of sense if you stick to the "traditional" sort of history that's really just a chronicle of wars and monarchs (the crowning examples of human malice and stupidity). Include the history of invention, discovery and thought, the overthrow of tyrannies and the occasional triumphs of justice, reason, fairness and human happiness and the picture becomes more balanced.

In that spirit I've decided, without being too Pollyanna-ish to seek, out more of life's positives in future. There is, of course, plenty still to rant against and sometimes having a good old rant against crimes and follies is a pleasure in itself. So before I start putting my new resolution to the test, one last look at two of the most enjoyable demolitions of malice and stupidity I've come across this year. After all, if shops can start hawking Christmas tat when bonfire night's still a month or more in the future, I don't see why I can't beat the rush and get my New Years' resolution and 'best of 2009' out of the way in December. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

First, the malice. I have zero interest in celebrity gossip, boy bands and associated media froth, so, in general I have no interest, in what anybody chooses to think about these subjects. But this response to Jan Moir's unprovoked, venomously petty attack on someone who'd just died at a tragically early age was a magnificently concise summation of everything there is to detest about Daily Mail editorials composed of one part narrow-mindedness to one part bullying. It's been reproduced a million times already and I make no apologies for reproducing it for the million and first time:

It has been 20 minutes since I've read her now-notorious column, and I'm still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It's like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

Thank you, Charlie Booker, for summing up, in one paragraph everything you really need to know about the world-view of the average Daily Mail Columnist. As rants go, that was truly majestic.

Next, the stupidity. The war against Complementary And Alternative Medicine is, I fear, being lost on all fronts, with scarce, precious NHS resources being squandered on unproven quackery, degrees in mumbo-jumbo being awarded by universities and Prince Charles using the accident of his birth to puff the peddling of snake oil to the deluded. Still, at least the skeptics can still come up with the most entertaining comments. Check this out:

Are you a bit hard of thinking? Do you regularly find people taking advantage of your gullibility? Most importantly, have you got more money than strictly necessary for a person of your limited intelligence? Then I would like to introduce you to Tomatso Therapy.

Tomatso Therapy is relatively new to the West, as I've only just thought of it. It is heavily influenced by the teachings of Dr. Mascari Hamsuit 34th Grandmaster of the nine schools of Ninja Turtles in Japan. It takes a holistic approach to a client's financial affairs, seeking to rebalance them in the therapist's favour. After all too large a pension fund, or too large a wallet could easily lead to back aches or other symptoms.

Tomatsu practitioners use many different techniques to suit the circumstances of the patient, but these normally involve tying the patient to the couch and blindfolding him while an assistant goes through his pockets.

The purpose of Tomatso is to aid in the restoration of my bank balance and is extremely effective because it has this core principle: - "The person with the best knowledge of the client's problem is the therapist, so give him all your money."

This means as a Tomatsu practitioner, I will observe you carefully as you fill in our special 'financial disclosure form/power of attorney' before making the necessary adjustment and allowing your body to heal naturally, free of the worry of all that excess money.

If you would like an initial consultation please visit www.Tomatso-Practitioner.co.uk.

Respect goes out to the Saltburn Subversives for that one. And to DC's Improbable Science, where I found it, Professor David Colquhoun's anti-quackery soapbox.

I've done crimes and follies, but I'm not going to do misfortunes (crimes and follies deserve to be mocked, but misfortune deserves only sympathy). Still, two out of three ain't bad. That was so much fun, I can see it's going to be hard to stick to my New Year's Resolution. Good job I started early.

Free your mind

Blogging's been light recently - I've been quite busy with one thing and another (although that's not necessarily the same thing as being productive). I've been reading Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, the book of the newspaper column. It would have been an entertaining read if Goldacre had simply pointed at some of the more bizarre claims of Complementary and Alternative Medicine and laughed. In fact I'd be a bit worried about anybody who couldn't see the funny side of claims that wearing a bit of quartz round your neck, sticking a candle in your ear, or putting a hosepipe up your bottom represent new "wellness paradigms" or some such nonsense. Taking the mick out of the more obviously wacky side of CAM is easy (although no less entertaining for all that), but Goldacre tackles some more tricky targets, in particular, high profile nutritionists.

These people are harder for the lay person without any scientific training to spot. They've been called the stealth bombers of the CAM movement, deploying the sort of words a real scientist or medical professional might use - vitamins, trace elements, enzymes, proteins and antioxidants, rather than showing up on the nutter radar by ranting on about chakras, meridians, auras and electromagnetic vibrational systems. I must admit to having been taken in myself, having taken a look at a copy of Patrick Holford's The Optimum Nutrition Bible a few years ago.

To my shame, after a not very rigorous skim through a few chapters which I thought might be relevant, I gave his book the qualified benefit of the doubt (fortunately I've been in generally good health, so I didn't feel obliged to read any of his advice with great attention, but I might have given it a try if I'd had some of the symptoms of the conditions he attributed to suboptimal nutrition). Reading one of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science columns about Holford, some time later, it began to dawn on me that I'd been had. I could have read more about exactly was wrong with Holford, but I wasn't sufficiently interested in health and "wellness" issues to follow it up - I was aware of the, the Holford Watch site, but didn't spend any time on it, partly because the the various single-issue "watch" sites sound a bit obsessional to me. Which is a pity, because the Holford chapter is a gem.

It was humbling but instructive to read Ben Goldacre taking The Optimum Nutrition Bible apart in detail, picking out such choice nuggets as:

• cherry-picking the data to support his conclusions
• citing flawed, and now retracted papers by a discredited researcher
• over-interpreting the results of valid studies to make claims the researchers wouldn't recognise
• a claim that doses of vitamin C are more effective than AZT in treating AIDS
• making dramatic claims, (for example that giving autistic children doses of vitamin A has an extraordinarily beneficial effect on their social interactions) without any references
  
• reassuring the reader by throwing in the occasional piece of commonplace, common-sense dietary advice among the impressive-looking tables, diagrams and technical-sounding stuff about hormones, lipoproteins and digestive enzymes.
  

Underneath the sometimes plausable-sounding complexities, it's really simple - The Optimum Nutrition Bible is a book by a supplement pill salesman, explaining how most of our medical problems can be solved by eating more supplement pills.

In reality, better minds than Holford's are confused by the intricacies of diet. As Goldacre points out, in theory, ingesting more antioxidants sounds like a good idea. When the idea is tested in trials, the results suggest that there's no beneficial effect from increasing your antioxidant intake - in fact, high levels may even be harmful. In reality, the best advice is the stuff that's simple and easy to understand - eat a varied diet, including plenty of fruit and veg, don't smoke, don't drink too much alcohol, take exercise. It might not be easy to do, but it's easy to get your head round - so chuck out the spin and over-complication, along with the pills the nutritionists would love you to buy and free your mind.

There's lots more good stuff in Bad Science about the relationship between medical science, flawed medical science, PR, the media, pharmaceutical companies torturing the data to push the latest miracle cure and much, much more. It's a piece of hard investigative work and clear thinking that stands head and shoulders above much of the reflexive "churnlism" that propagates so much of the misinformation Goldacre uncovers.

After being so easily taken in by Holford, maybe I am getting the message. One of the pharmaceutical companies' tricks, pointed out in Bad Science is the medicalisation of an ever-greater range of conditions which were formerly just normal, if sometimes unpleasant, parts of life (inventing a syndrome to fit a pill they just happen to have). In one of his recent columns Ben Goldacre notices the invention of Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder as the latest example of this trend. A while ago, with less style, knowledge and insight, I noticed the same thing - this reassures me that I do occasionally pay attention.

Cough syrup - the new alternative therapy

Dr David Newman, writing in The New York Times tells that several much-used remedies just don't work:

Recent press reports detailing the dangers of cough syrup for children have noted that cough syrup doesn’t work. True: No cough remedies have ever been proven better than a placebo....

Patients with ear infections are more likely to be harmed by antibiotics than helped...

Back surgeries to relieve pain are, in the majority of cases, no better than nonsurgical treatment...

More than a half million Americans per year undergo arthroscopic surgery to correct osteoarthritis of the knee, at a cost of $3 billion. Despite this, studies show the surgery to be no better than sham knee surgery, in which surgeons “pretend” to do surgery while the patient is under light anesthesia....

Treatment based on ideology is alluring. Surgeries to repair the knee should work. A syrup to reduce cough should help. Calming the straining heart should save lives. But the uncomfortable truth is that many expensive, invasive interventions are of little or no benefit and cause potentially uncomfortable, costly, and dangerous side effects and complications.

The full article can be found here (originally found on Slashdot Science).

Time to chuck out the Benylin? Alternatively, someone in the "complementary and alternative medicine" business could harness the money-making potential of yet another class of unproven and apparently ineffective treatments. I'll be looking out look out for Gillian McKeith's patent expectorant, or Prince Charles adding a "natural" cough syrup to his Duchy Original range...

Kitchen Nightmares

No, it's not a post about Gordon sodding Ramsay, I'm pleased to say, but about a little gem I just found in a magazine devoted to the therapy "Emotional Freedom Technique" (EFT). I'm not sure how EFT is supposed to work, but the magazine describes EFT as "complementary" and carries adverts for an association of people dealing in"meridian energy therapies", so my bullshit detector has already started ringing at a deafening volume.

Still, EFT World Magazine was worth a glance for one little nugget. In the magazine, one Gary Williams, an EFT practitioner describes, how he freed a client from a distressing affliction using EFT techniques and the following affirmation:

Even though I have this overwhelming fear of baby sweet corn inside, I deeply and completely accept the way I feel.

I know it's wrong to find hilarity in other people's problems, but that's the funniest thing I've read all week.

Alternatives

The last couple of times I’ve visited Glastonbury, I’ve had lunch at a rather good vegetarian café. The food’s better than the salty, processed mush which often passes for food in the UK, the atmosphere is relaxed and there’s an attractive courtyard garden round the back which is perfect for sitting out in on a sunny day.

I’m not a veggie myself, but I do understand the motivations of some vegetarians. There’s a lot of cruelty and suffering involved in packing the supermarket shelves with affordable meat. In terms of food production in a hungry world, you can produce a greater quantity of food by arable farming than you ever will by trying to turn the equivalent amount of plant material into animal flesh. Finally there are the health benefits of eating more fruit and veg. This is where I do part company with the veggies (especially the pale and sickly looking ones) – a lot of us would benefit from eating more fruit & veg and eating rather less meat, but cutting out meat (not to mention eggs and dairy) altogether doesn't seem like a good move. Meat & dairy are good sources of protein and iron and I’m not convinced that it’s easy to keep well whilst abandoning the omnivorous diet our bodies have evolved to run on.

Still, two out of three good reasons to go veggie ain’t bad. I just wish that a lot of the other stuff being promoted in Glastonbury was as understandable as vegetarianism. The café I’ve mentioned is surrounded by shops selling books on ley lines, crystal healing, faries, homeopathy, colour healing and a host of other unlikely-sounding subjects. The small ads in the shop windows are for services such as angel readings (whatever they might be), reflexology, tarot readings, feng shui advice, clairvoyant services, Chakra balancing and astrology.

I’ve no doubt that a lot of the people offering and consuming these volumes and services are sweet, gentle, fluffy, would’t-harm-a-fly people, but I still can’t escape the conclusion that what they’re getting involved in here is a load of gibberish.. I’ve tried dipping into some of this stuff, just to try and find out what people are getting out of it, but it leaves me completely baffled.

Flicking through Whispering Winds of Change by New Age Guru Stuart Wilde, for example, I read that the average speed of humanity circa 1700A.D. was lower than it is today “perhaps hovering at twelve thousand cycles per second”), but the band of separation between the highest and the lowest was not great. By 1960, apparently, human and etheric metaphysical vibrational speeds were spread over a much broader band of between twelve to fifty thousand cycles per second. “Etheric” apparently refers to the electromagnetic field produced by the human body. According to Wilde, you can train yourself to see the etheric energy field surrounding people by concentrating on your peripheral vision and tilting your head slightly. If you want to try this at home, dusk is allegedly the best time to see etheric energy. Oh, and it’s also important to remember that the vibrational speed is only a hypothetical speed – “of course”, Wilde points out, the real speed must be much higher, since “light oscillates at the very high frequency of about 10¹⁵ cycles per second” but apparently we don’t need the real speed to understand the concept - “a hypothetical speed will do.”

Make sense of that if you can. There are a few places in the book where he expresses himself a bit more clearly – at one point he suggests that by the simple measure of abolishing all taxes we would all be a lot richer. At least it’s a bold, simple and easily grasped idea, although I suspect that economics of running a functioning state without any form of revenue might be a little more difficult than he seems to think. Come to think of it, he might have been suggesting that we should allow the state to collapse and let the evolving Planetary Group Soul take over its functions – I can’t say for sure because after a immersing myself in this stream of New Age Speak for a little while, I was losing the capacity for rational thought.

What a very strange set of things for any sane person to believe in. I’m indebted to a number web sites and blogs for tirelessly picking though a lot of this sort of stuff so I don’t have to – Ben Goldacre’s splendid Bad Science Column is always a welcome antidote to the tide of nonsense and I was impressed by a fairly recent post at I Kid You Not with some thoughts on visiting a New Age shop.

Why do people believe in this stuff? I don’t know, but we don’t live in an ideal world. I’m guessing that belief in an “alternative” set of values and beliefs is the reaction of people unsatisfied with society as it is, with its meaningless jobs, unsatisfactory relationships, relentless commercialism, atomised society, eroding civil liberties, the obfuscation of democracy with spin and manipulative half truths, environmental degradation, poverty, war and injustice. Not a bad impulse – I wouldn’t give you tuppence for anybody who didn’t want the world to be a bit better than that. But what seems to have happened is that somehow rationality has taken the blame for all that’s wrong with the world and abandoning critical thought has become the “alternative” prescription for everything that’s gone wrong. And that’s profoundly worrying, because critical thought and trying to see the world as it really is, are absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to change things for the better.

Knowing what’s really going on is the best start if you want to change things. An example from the recent history of ideas springs to mind. When autistic spectrum disorders were first identified, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts developed a theory to account for the symptoms. They hypothesised that autism in children was caused by cold, perfectionist parents, who didn’t emotionally nurture their offspring. There was even a shorthand term for a parent who “caused” her child’s autism – the “refrigerator mother” (sorry mum, but it's all your fault). A plausible enough theory for the “open-minded” to accept. Unfortunately, it proved to be dead wrong.

The precise causes of autism are still not well understood, but subsequent research has shown the condition to be caused by physical problems in brain development, perhaps associated with mutations and the interaction of different genes. Although researchers don’t know exactly what leads to these effects, it’s now as certain as any fact can be that the problem exists at the level of the physical structure of the brain and has a genetic component. The current understanding of the true basis of Autism only emerged in the 1970s and slowly began to come into the mainstream thereafter, although the syndrome had been recognised since the 1940s.
So, for at least 30 years, parents who were distressed by their childrens’ strange behaviour, who were struggling to understand what was going on, trying to communicate with and support their child were being consistently mis-diagnosed. They were having the agony of being unable to interact with their own children compounded by being told that the problem stemmed from their own lack of parental affection and intimacy. All in the name of a theory that turned out not to stand up.

Compared to some new age explanations of the world, the “refrigerator mother” theory wasn’t particularly wacky – especially given the fact that the tools needed to uncover the true explanation of the condition weren’t available when autism was first identified as a condition. If a theory which has a ring of plausibility about it can be so damaging and counterproductive, what hope can we have from the scribblings of new age gurus whose respect for critical thinking seems to be non-existent? However benevolent your intentions, subscribing to any weird theory about the world which floats your boat isn’t a neutral act. If what you believe in, or cause other people to believe in, is factually wrong, or plain bizarre, then acting on it at best won’t change this unsatisfactory world of ours for the better and at worst could cause the sort of distress suffered by those so-called “refrigerator mothers”, labelled and stigmatised by psychoanalytic gurus who were utterly confident in their particular pet theories.

Alexander The Possibly Quite Good

I see that the Alexander Technique has received a positive write up in the British Medical Journal. Despite my scorn for "complementary" and "alternative" quackery, I'm quite prepared to give the Alexander Technique the time of day - there's nothing ostensibly risible about the benefits of good posture/movement and not damaging your body by putting it under unnecessary strain - any workplace training video in manual handling demonstrates what damage you can do by, for example, lifting things incorrectly. The converse, positively getting into good habits of posture and movement could well have benefits. After all, we're not talking way out crazy stuff about crystals, auras, healing energies or homeopathic infinitesimals.

So, just to prove that, although sceptical about unproven treatments, I'm not completely closed-minded, the picture above is of a group of people on an Alexander Technique Course in Spain a little while back - a group including yours truly.

I don't know if it really works or not, but it felt good and there might be something in it - the jury's out at the moment but whereas I'd be truly astounded if someone produced convincing proof for the benefits of homeopathy or crystal healing it wouldn't amaze me if the Alexander Technique had real benefits beyond the placebo. Not yet Alexander the Great, but interesting territory on the edge of conventional therapy, as opposed to the wilderness way beyond reason....

Radovan Karadžić and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Fantastic news on several levels; former Supreme Commander of the Bosnian armed forces, the butcher of Srebrenica, Radovan Karadžić has been captured and charged with war crimes.

And just in case anyone was still tempted to take the genocidal maniac seriously, it turns out that the vicious old loon has been in hiding disguised in a long white beard and practising as a a purveyor of "alternative" medicine. Is it too much to hope that the idea of this horrible man peddling healing crystals, iridology, colonic irrigation and similar old blather will kill two birds with one stone, discrediting the merchant of death and the mumbo-jumbo merchants in equal measure? I was wondering what sort of alternative treatments the old fraud was specialising in - ethnic cleansing of your aura or something? The answer to my question is at hand - at the Harry's Place blog some digging's been done and the website of the company he was working for, "Psy Help Energy" (the "psy" presumably being short for "psychopath") has been uncovered. Glorious.

Quack attack

After the homeopathic hospitals, more depressing news about the onward march of the ever-victorious "alternative" medicine movement here. The barbarians aren't at the gates any more; they've moved into the house, lounging around on the sofa, raiding the fridge, messing up our stuff and criticising the feng shui.

Homeopaths challenged to substantiate claims, flounce off in a huff

Here's something interesting I saw on the New Scientist website the other day. There's £10,000 on offer to the enterprising homeopath who can provide convincing evidence that homeopathy actually works. All the practitioner would have to do is submit homeopathic medicines to a clinical trial, where half of the patients receive the homeopathic preparation, half a placebo.

Apparently, a spokesperson for the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths is offended by the suggestion that somebody might want to actually test the claims made for homeopathy. "We have nothing to prove, and certainly not to people with closed minds," a representative of the homeopaths' trade association spluttered.

They can refuse to submit their claims to rigorous scrutiny if they want, but I'm not convinced by the homeopaths' refusal to be tested, any more than I am by Labour's refusal to debate civil liberties in the by election triggered by David Davis' resignation. In both cases, the official position is "we're not going to dignify this stunt by engaging in the contest" - i.e. they're already losing the debate and are reduced to the PR equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears, singing "la, la, la, not listening" and chanting "we're not talking to you, you smell," having run out of rational arguments.

I've got two particular grounds for wanting the homeopaths to "put up or shut up":

1. I've no scientific training, but even I can grasp that one of the basic claims of homeopathy is quite astonishing. Homeopathic remedies contain just a trace of the active ingredient, being diluted down to a level where, often, not a single molecule of that ingredient remains in the solution. In other words, homeopaths claim to be able to treat medical conditions with something that no existing form of chemical analysis can distinguish from distilled water. If true, that would be amazing.

If of water really retains a "memory" of substances it has once been in contact with, eventually some chemist will be walking off with a Nobel Prize for demonstrating this effect in a reproducible experiment, and rewriting the text books. It might happen, but I'm not holding my breath. Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence.

To borrow an example, if I met somebody at a party who told me that he drives a Ford Fiesta, I probably wouldn't question his claim - I've seen many people driving Ford Fiestas with my own eyes and, as Tom Jones would say, it's not unusual. If I met someone at a party who told me that he drives an interplanetary flying saucer, I might be a bit more skeptical. I haven't seen anybody driving a flying saucer and I don't believe that a such a thing as a workable flying saucer exists - as far as I know the nearest thing ever created was a cool-looking Canadian prototype flying disc called the Avrocar, which was cancelled after a few wobbly test flights demonstrated that the craft was unstable when it got more than a few feet off the ground. So as far as I'm concerned, the homeopathic space cadets have got something to prove; either show me your flying saucer, or bugger off back to the mother ship.

2. As someone who pays my National Insurance contributions (with a brief interruption - I've been between jobs for the past two weeks, but start my new one on Monday), I'm paying for some of this stuff. As the British Homeopathic Association boasts here, homeopathy has been available on the National Health Service since the NHS was founded in 1948. There are, apparently, five NHS Homeopathic Hospitals and some General Practitioners will refer patients for homeopathic treatments.

Resources in the NHS are stretched notoriously thinly, so I would expect the minimum standard for a treatment which is funded by public money to be some convincing evidence that it works better than a placebo. As far as I'm aware, properly-conducted trials have never been able to demonstrate this. Until they do, homeopaths, you do have something to prove to all of us whose money funds homeopathy on the NHS and to every patient denied an effective treatment, tested in clinical trials, because some of the money which might have paid for it went to publicly funded homeopathy instead.

So, homeopaths, take up the challenge, prove yourselves right, the skeptics wrong and rub our noses in it if you like. If you can't, then put your toys back in the pram and play nicely.