Acupuncture + biophotons = colorpuncture

Acupuncture is one of those "alternative medicine" treatments that has long seemed to me to live in that gray area between scientific soundness and woo-woo quackery.  It has a lot of woo-woo characteristics; all manner of goofy explanations about why it works (qi and chakras and energy meridians), and that mystical haze that always seems to surround something that comes from China.  However, enough friends of mine (of the decidedly non-woo-woo variety) have tried it, with positive results, that it's always made me wonder if the treatment itself might be beneficial, even though the explanations were incorrect -- in much the same way that medicinal plants were used to treat disease, and were thought to be inhabited by the spirit of healing magic, long before pharmacological chemistry was a science.

Just yesterday, however, I came across a piece from a few years ago in the excellent, well-researched, and multiply-sourced medical science blog, Respectful Insolence that takes acupuncture's claims and evidence apart at the seams.  It particularly attacks the so-called scientific studies of acupuncture, citing major methodological flaws that render the studies that found positive results invalid.  Whether or not you are a believer in acupuncture, it's an interesting read and makes some points that are difficult to counter.

In any case, all of that is just a lead-in to what I wanted to write about today.  Today's topic is about a new therapy that grew out of acupuncture, one that was developed because you can't undergo acupuncture without letting yourself get stuck by needles.   And a lot of people are afraid of needles.   So practitioners gave a lot of thought to how you could somehow achieve the same thing -- stimulating the qi and jump-starting your energy meridians, or whatever the hell it's supposed to accomplish -- without punching the patient full of tiny holes.

Enter "colorpuncture."

Interestingly, from what I've read about it, "colorpuncture" has been around for a while.  First proposed in 1988 by a German woo-woo named Peter Mandel, it combined the ideas of acupuncture with the ideas of Fritz-Albert Popp.  Popp is a German biophysicist who believes, despite a rather unfortunate lack of evidence, that cells in living organisms communicate via "biophotons."  So, Mandel's plan: combine an alternative medical technique that is questionable at best (acupuncture) with a hypothesis that seems to be complete nonsense (biophotons), and use that as the basis of a new treatment modality.

You'd think that Mandel would be aware that the more ridiculous ideas you incorporate into your theory, the more ridiculous it becomes, but evidently that line of reasoning escaped him somehow.

So, in "colorpuncture," rather than having the practitioner stick you with a lot of nasty needles, all (s)he does is point a little beam of colored light at the correct spot on your skin, and that stimulates the qi (or whatever).  Or maybe your "biophotons" get all excited and happy.   Who the hell knows? All of the sites I looked at spent so much time blathering on about energy meridians and vibrational frequencies that it was impossible to determine what they actually are claiming is happening in your body.  One of the funny things I read about "colorpuncture" is that "warm" colors such as red, orange, and yellow are supposed to increase your "energy flow," whereas "cool" colors such as green, blue, and violet are supposed to decrease it.  Why is this funny?  Because as you go up the spectrum from red to violet, the frequency of the light, and thus its energy, actually increases -- violet light is considerably more energetic than red light is.  But there never was any real science behind this, so why start now?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Philip Ronan, Gringer, EM spectrumrevised, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, it took a while for "colorpuncture" to catch on after Mandel had his big idea back in 1988.  But apparently it's really made a jump into the woo-woo scene recently -- and given the hunger people have for "alternative treatments" that don't require a visit to an actual, trained doctor, I suspect this one is going to be big.

Interestingly, there are plenty of reputable studies that have looked into the effects of light on human physiology -- two of the more interesting ones are Richard J. Wortman's study out of MIT, and one by Jeanne Duffy and Charles Czeisler, from Harvard School of Medicine.  Most of the papers I saw looked into the effects of light on human circadian rhythms -- the sleep cycle, for example.  (Reading these papers made me wonder how all of our artificial lighting is affecting our physiology, especially apropos of the entrainment of our biological cycles -- it's certainly incontrovertible that the light from computer screens affects melatonin levels, and thus our ability to sleep.)

But "colorpuncture?"  Not a single peer-reviewed study that I could find.  I suspect the practitioners of this dubious art would claim that this is due to the closed-mindedness of scientific researchers and peer review boards, but come on -- if acupuncture, which at least involves something entering the body, can't prove any therapeutic results beyond the placebo effect, "colorpuncture" doesn't have a prayer.

At least one thing, however, is in its favor; no one ever got a blood-borne disease from a little colored flashlight.  So I suppose that medical science's first rule -- "do no harm" -- is being followed, at least as long as you're not counting your pocketbook.

**********************************

The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Bee all, end all

Why in the hell are people still listening to Gwyneth Paltrow on health-related matters?

It's a rhetorical question, really.  People still reject the commentary of experts and embrace the opinions of the drastically unqualified in a lot of realms other than medicine.  But when it comes to mistakes that can kill you quickly and painfully, taking bad medical advice really can't be beat.  Which is what a 55-year-old woman found out when she underwent a Paltrow-approved procedure called "bee acupuncture," and proceeded to die of anaphylactic shock.

If you're wondering if "bee acupuncture" can possibly be what it sounds like -- yes, it is.  I didn't know about it, either, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an article about it a couple of days ago.  The way it works is a "practitioner" holds a live bee in forceps, and puts it on your skin, squeezing the bee until it gets pissed off and stings you.  In a 2016 article in the New York Times, Paltrow said it's a wonderful therapy:

[G]enerally, I'm open to anything.  I've been stung by bees.  It's a thousands of years old treatment called apitherapy.  People use it to get rid of inflammation and scarring.  It's actually pretty incredible if you research it.  But man, it's painful.

Then she tells us about something called a "sound bath," wherein you lie back and expose your body to "different frequencies" to "achieve a meditative state."  "That may even be too hippie for me," Paltrow said.

But back to the bees.  There's no particularly convincing evidence that acupuncture by itself works; there have been studies that show a higher-than-placebo improvement rate in patients subjected to acupuncture, and some pretty convincing evidence that any improvement is due to endogenous opioids produced in response to someone sticking a needle into your skin.  So I'm still doubtful about the whole thing.

Then you bring bees into the picture, and you add the whole extra frisson of the possibility of dying of an allergic reaction.  If you're curious, the woman who died of anaphylaxis after her bee treatment had been stung before -- this was her twenty-fifth bee acupuncture session -- and never had a problem other than localized swelling.  This time, her blood pressure dropped, she went into shock, started gasping for breath -- and because she wasn't receiving this quasi-medical treatment in a hospital or clinic, had to wait for thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive.  They treated her with an epi-pen, but the damage was too great.  She lingered in the hospital for a few weeks, but never regained consciousness, and ultimately succumbed to multiple organ failure triggered by the reaction to the venom.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this brings up my initial question, which is why the hell you'd take the medical advice of a woman whose main qualifications for dispensing such dubious wisdom is being rich enough to start her own "natural health and alternative medicine" company.  There seems to be a huge drift in this country toward distrusting experts (i.e. the people who have actually put in the time to understand the subject in question) and trust instead overconfident laypeople whose stock in trade is folksy "that seems like it should work" anecdote and wacko quack remedies.  In fact, the outcome of the presidential election can be looked at as a rejection of expertise -- replacing people who were career politicians who, whatever else you can say about them, know how government works with people whose philosophy can be summed up as "wing it, hope for the best, and when shit blows up, claim that everything is okay and that it's Obama's fault anyhow."

At this point, I'm beginning to shrug my shoulders when I hear about people who injure themselves after falling for Paltrow's nonsense, and instead simply saying, "Natural selection at work."  It sounds harsh, and I'm normally more compassionate than that, but honestly, I don't see much difference between this and the folks who still take up smoking even though the medical establishment showed that smoking causes lung cancer fifty-odd years ago.  If you're dumb enough to do it anyhow, then you deserve what you get.

But it does make me wonder how far Paltrow and others like her are going to have to step over the line before the FDA will say, "I don't care if you say 'This product is not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose any medical condition' on the packaging, you're killing people and you fucking well need to stop."  (Okay, the FDA probably wouldn't phrase it like that, which is why I don't work for the FDA.)

In any case, let me make it clear, for anyone still considering buying products from "Goop:" you're doing so at your own risk.  Gwyneth Paltrow is not a medical professional, nor even a well-informed layperson, she's a nut who jumps on any bandwagon that sounds appealing, and markets highly-priced and dubiously effective health aids that have not been rigorously tested for efficacy or safety.

In other words: caveat emptor.  But in this time, the buyer might have to beware of bodily injury or death.

Getting to the point

There is one alternative medicine modality that I've always been hesitant to criticize.  That hesitancy has come from the fact that it is widespread, so widespread that I know a dozen people who have used it and reported positive results.  Even though I could see no biologically sound reason why it would work the way its practitioners claimed, it's always seemed to me to fall into that gray area of "things that may work for some as-yet unknown reason."

That modality is acupuncture.  I get asked about it regularly, both in my Biology classes and in my Critical Thinking classes, and I've usually shrugged, and said, "Well, I don't believe in prana and chakras and the rest of it, but could acupuncture be triggering some positive response, in some way we have yet to elucidate?  Sure.  People used medicinal plants long before they understood pharmacology, and the fact that they attributed the plants' success at treating disease to good magic or benevolent spirits doesn't mean that the plants didn't work.  It could be the same here."

Well, I can't make that claim any more.

Just last week, David Colquhoun (University College of London) and Steven Novella (Yale School of Medicine) published a paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia (available here) that evaluates the results of every controlled study of acupuncture in the past ten years, and reaches the following conclusion:

The outcome of this research, we propose, is that the benefits of acupuncture, if any, are too small and too transient to be of any clinical significance.  It seems that acupuncture is little or no more than a theatrical placebo... 

The best controlled studies show a clear pattern – with acupuncture the outcome does not depend on needle location or even needle insertion. Since these variables are what define "acupuncture" the only sensible conclusion is that acupuncture does not work. Everything else is the expected noise of clinical trials, and this noise seems particularly high with acupuncture research. The most parsimonious conclusion is that with acupuncture there is no signal, only noise.

The interests of medicine would be best-served if we emulated the Chinese Emperor Dao Guang and issued an edict stating that acupuncture and moxibustion should no longer be used in clinical practice. 

I have to admit that when I read this paper, my first reaction was to wince.  Part of me, I suppose, really wanted acupuncture to work -- even if we had no idea how it worked, the idea that you could alleviate pain (or anxiety, or insomnia, or depression) simply by sticking someone with little needles seemed preferable to telling people that they simply had to live with chronic conditions if standard medical treatment failed.  But one of the harsher sides of the rationalist view is that you go wherever the evidence drives you, even if you don't want to.  And after reading the paper by Colquhoun and Novella, and taking a look at their sources, I am brought to the inescapable conclusion that they are correct.

It's frequently that way, though, isn't it?  I think most of us, even the most hard-nosed skeptics in the world, would be delighted if some of the wild things the woo-woos claim turned out to be true.  Being a biologist, I would be thrilled if there were surviving proto-hominids like Sasquatch or surviving dinosaurs like Nessie, Champ, Mokele-Mbembe, Kelpies, and the Bunyip.  A convincing demonstration of intelligent alien life would be about the coolest thing I can imagine.  Even the existence of an afterlife is something I'd be mighty happy about (as long as it wasn't the being-tortured-by-Satan-for-all-eternity variety).

But, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."  And it appears that in the case of acupuncture, the Colquhoun/Novella study conclusively demonstrates that there's nothing much there besides the placebo effect -- sorry though I am to have to say so.

Of course, that doesn't mean that acupuncturists are going to go out of business any time soon.  There are still a lot of true believers out there, and they can pull in clients from odd sources, sometimes.  Just last week, the veterinarians at a Tel Aviv zoo decided to call in acupuncturists because their attempts to treat a chronic ear infection in one of the zoo animals had failed.  The patient?

A fourteen-year-old Sumatran tiger.

Now that's some conviction in your beliefs.  You think acupuncture works?  Here, go stick some needles in this live tiger.

Be that as it may, apparently they anesthetized the tiger beforehand (smart move), and the acupuncturists all survived unscathed.  No word yet on whether Kitty's ears have stopped hurting.  My guess, given the Colquhoun/Novella study, is no, since the placebo effect doesn't work too well on cats.

Although to be fair, judging by my success rate at giving pills to my own cats, traditional veterinary medicine generates its own, unique set of problems as well.

Canine chakra cleansing

After having dealt, in the last few days, with problems with the oversight of public education, the ongoing effort to force the teaching of Intelligent Design in biology classrooms, and the attitudes of the religious toward atheists, it's time to turn to a much more pressing issue, to wit: Do dogs have chakras?

Chakras, you may know, are "energy flow centers" in your body, and are connected with the "meridians" that are the basis of a lot of alt-med modalities, including acupuncture, reflexology, and tapping.  The idea, apparently, is that human diseases are caused by having clogged chakras.

The Skeptic's Dictionary says about chakras, "According to kundalini yoga, a chakra (pronounced chuckrah and meaning wheel or circle in Sanskrit) is a center of prana or energy. It is said that there are several of these that begin at the base of the spine and end at the top of the head... The alleged energy of the chakras is not scientifically measurable, though some have tried to connect the chakras with physical organs such as the pineal gland and the thymus."  The wonderful site Skeptics South Australia is blunter still: "The fact that, even amongst so-called ‘chakra experts’ there are so many different opinions as to their numbers, and locations, strongly suggests that chakras exist only in the imagination of believers, that they are nothing more than a metaphysical belief that has no substance in reality."

Now, of course, we should never let a little matter like whether something actually exists stop us from blathering on about how it might manifest in other species.  Which brings us to an inadvertently hilarious article on the site The Blissful Dog called, "Dogs Have Chakras, Too!"

The chakras can have various levels of activity. When they’re open, balanced or aligned the Chakras are considered working as they should. Ideally, all chakras would be balanced. Instincts would work with our feelings and thinking. However, this is usually not the case. Some chakras are not open enough (being under-active), and to compensate, other chakras are over-active. The ideal state is where the chakras are completely balanced. This is as true for your dogs as it is for you! Especially since they pick up and take on so many of our emotions.

Mostly what my dogs seem to pick up is dropped food, but maybe that's just because their TableScraps Chakra is over-active.

Then we hear about how despite Skeptics South Australia's pointing out that hardly anyone agrees about where these mysterious (i.e. nonexistent) forces reside, everyone really agrees, especially with regards to dogs:

Most agree that there are seven major Chakras and for simplicity’s sake, we will work with that system for now for our dogs. I do feel that additional Chakras are located in their paws, tails (or tail area) and in their noses, in my humble opinion and will share information as I gather it.

 
One specific example will suffice, but I strongly recommend that you go to the website and read them all.  I will not be responsible for damage to your computer screen if you are drinking anything while you do so:

Third Eye Chakra – Color: Indigo Stone/Crystal: Sapphire, tourmaline, sapphire, sodalite, azurite and clear quartz. The Third Eye chakra is about insight and visualisation. When it is open and balanced, your dog will be intuitive and well balanced between the world of people and that of dogs. If it is under-active, your dog will not be not very good at thinking for herself, and you [sic] may tend to rely on you too much and might even get confused easily.

This clearly sounds like the problem with my dog Grendel, who is very well-meaning but who seems to have about three active synapses in his brain, two of which are devoted to the concept of "Let's play tug-of-war with this rope toy."  He is a very sweet dog, but his facial expression can best be summed up by the word, "Derp?"  I guess I'd better balance his Third Eye using sapphire, or something.

So, the important question is: what do you do for your dog if his chakras are unbalanced?  Turns out it's simple:

Your dog may fit some of the patterns discussed above and you want your beloved one to be BALANCED! There are a few things you can do quite easily… You can also spend more time alone, in a quiet space with your dog. Pet them, even a brief massage and just concentrate on THEM for 10-15 minutes a day. This can be pretty miraculous in itself…the intention is the focus, isn’t it?

Well, I'm sure that both my dogs would be completely in favor of that.  Petting could happen for 24 hours a day, and they would both still be of the opinion that it was Insufficient To Meet Their Needs.

But this all raises a more important question: if dogs have chakras (The Blissful Dog says, "... why not?  They are energetic beings!"), do other animals?  Does a cockroach have chakras?  How about a tapeworm?  Or a jellyfish?  Doing acupuncture on a jellyfish sounds downright messy.  What about possums?  I'll be damned if I'll give a possum a massage.  Those things creep me right the hell out.  They're just going to have to continue to waddle around the back yard with misaligned meridians.

So, anyhow, the bottom line is: spend more time petting your dog.  This is actually good advice, even if you take the whole chakra thing out of it.  I know when I have a hard day, it always makes me feel better to sit on the floor and snuggle with Grendel for a while.  And it always warms my heart when, after I've spent some time scratching his ears, he looks up at me with a searching expression in his big brown eyes, as if to say, "Hey, rope-toy?  Whatcha think, huh?  Derp?"

Acupuncture + biophotons = "colorpuncture"

Acupuncture is one of those "alternative medicine" treatments that has long seemed to me to live in that gray area between scientific soundness and woo-woo quackery.  It has a lot of woo-woo characteristics; all manner of goofy explanations about why it works (qi and chakras and energy meridians), and that mystical haze that always seems to surround something that comes from China.  However, enough friends of mine (of the non-woo-woo variety) have tried it, with positive results, that it's always made me wonder if the treatment itself might be beneficial, even though the explanations were incorrect -- in much the same way that medicinal plants were used to treat disease, and were thought to be inhabited by the spirit of healing magic, long before pharmacological chemistry was a science.

Just yesterday, however, I came across an excellent, and well-researched (and multiply-sourced) medical science blog, Respectful Insolence, that did a piece four years ago (here), that takes acupuncture's claims and evidence apart at the seams.  It particularly attacks the so-called scientific studies of acupuncture, citing major methodological flaws that render the studies that found positive results invalid.  Whether or not you are a believer in acupuncture, it's an interesting read (and I'm definitely going to put Respectful Insolence in my blog feed).

In any case, all of that is just a lead-in to what I wanted to write about today.  Today's topic is about a new therapy that grew out of acupuncture, one that was developed because you can't undergo acupuncture without letting yourself get stuck by needles.  And a lot of people are afraid of needles.  So practitioners gave a lot of thought to how you could somehow achieve the same thing -- stimulating the qi and jump-starting your energy meridians, or whatever the hell it's supposed to accomplish -- without punching the patient full of tiny holes.

Enter "colorpuncture."

Interestingly, from what I've read about it, "colorpuncture" has been around for a while.  First proposed in 1988 by a German woo-woo named Peter Mandel, it combined the ideas of acupuncture with the ideas of Fritz-Albert Popp.  Popp is a German biophysicist who believes, despite a rather unfortunate lack of evidence, that cells in living organisms communicate via "biophotons."  So, Mandel's plan: combine an alternative medical technique that is questionable at best (acupuncture) with a hypothesis that seems to be complete nonsense (biophotons), and use that as the basis of a new treatment modality.

You'd think that Mandel would be aware that the more ridiculous ideas you incorporate into your theory, the more ridiculous it becomes, but evidently that line of reasoning escaped him somehow.

So, in "colorpuncture," rather than having the practitioner stick you with a lot of nasty needles, all (s)he does is point a little beam of colored light at the correct spot on your skin, and that stimulates the qi (or whatever).  Or maybe your "biophotons" get all excited and happy.  Who the hell knows?  All of the sites I looked at spent so much time blathering on about energy meridians and vibrational frequencies that it was impossible to determine what they actually are claiming is happening in your body.  One of the funny things I read about "colorpuncture" is that "warm" colors such as red, orange, and yellow are supposed to increase your "energy flow," whereas "cool" colors such as green, blue, and violet are supposed to decrease it.  Why is this funny?  Because as you go up the spectrum from red to violet, the frequency of the light, and thus its energy, actually increases -- violet light is considerably more energetic than red light is.  But there never was any real science behind this, so why start now?

In any case, it took a while for "colorpuncture" to catch on after Mandel had his big idea back in 1988.  But apparently it's really made a jump into the woo-woo scene recently -- and given the hunger people have for "alternative treatments" that don't require a visit to an actual, trained doctor, I suspect this one is going to be big.

Interestingly, there are plenty of reputable studies that have looked into the effects of light on human physiology -- take a look at this one, done at MIT (here) and this one, from Harvard School of Medicine (here), for example.  Most of them have looked into the effects of light on human circadian rhythms -- the sleep cycle, for example.  (Reading these papers made me wonder how all of our artificial lighting is affecting our physiology, especially apropos of the entrainment of our biological cycles.)

But "colorpuncture?"  Not a single peer-reviewed study that I could find.  I suspect that the practitioners of this dubious art would claim that this is due to the closed-mindedness of scientific researchers and peer review boards, but come on -- if acupuncture, which at least involves something entering the body, can't prove any therapeutic results beyond the placebo effect, "colorpuncture" doesn't have a prayer.

At least one thing, however, is in its favor; no one ever got a blood-borne disease from a little colored flashlight.  So I suppose that medical science's first rule -- "do no harm" -- is being followed, at least as long as you're not counting your pocketbook.