The ideologue

I told myself that I wasn't going to do another political post so soon after Tuesday's, but dammit, my good intentions got blasted to smithereens by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (53427511876) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Let me open by stating my bias up front.  My considered opinion, as a 32-year veteran science teacher with fifteen years of experience writing on science-related topics, is that RFK is a certifiable lunatic.  He combines the worst of the alt-med nonsense -- the kinds of things promoted by Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and Vani "Food Babe" Hari -- with outlandish and debunked conspiracy theories, then dishes it all up as if it was peer-reviewed science.  Here are the three stories that destroyed my resolve to stay away from politics for at least a few days:

• In a town hall moderated by "Dr. Phil," he was asked by an audience member what he was planning on doing about "chemtrails."  You probably know that "chemtrails" are a completely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that The Bad Guys are putting stuff into jet fuel -- the "stuff" varies from heavy metals to radioactive isotopes to pathogens like anthrax -- so that when the exhaust is released into the upper atmosphere, it settles down on all of us and poisons us.  Notwithstanding that this has to be the absolute stupidest idea for a poison-delivery method I've ever heard of, it's been studied (I can only imagine the eye-rolling done by the scientists assigned to the research), and... nothing.  Contrails are almost entirely water vapor, with small amounts of soot from incomplete burning of jet fuel.  That's it.  But did RFK say that?  Of course not.  He's all in on chemtrails.  "It’s done, we think, by DARPA [the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency]," he said.  "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel -- so those materials are put in jet fuel.  I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.  We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable."

• An article in Ars Technica provides evidence -- in the form of RFK's own words -- that he doubts the basis of the medical science of infectious disease, the "Germ Theory of Disease."  Which claims that many diseases are (1) caused by pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi, or protists, and are therefore (2) communicable.  You'd think this'd be beyond question by this point, right?  Wrong.  RFK believes that any disease involving a pathogen is caused by having a weakened immune system -- i.e., all pathogens are opportunistic.  Get enough clean water, food, air, and sunlight, and you'll never get sick.  This is the basis of his anti-vaxx stance; if you live right, you shouldn't need 'em.  If this was a rational stance -- which it is not -- I'd ask him why, then, did childhood death rates go down so dramatically during the 1950s and 1960s, when mandatory vaccination programs against diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio were instituted?  Did all the kids suddenly start eating right, or something?

• He stated outright that it was reasonable that religious people would shun the MMR vaccine, because it contains "aborted fetus debris."  Needless to say, this is untrue.  Vaccines against viral diseases are cultured in cell lines grown in labs, not in aborted fetuses.  If this were true, it'd be kind of funny that some of the most anti-abortion people around -- the leaders of the Catholic Church -- have no problem with vaccines, and in fact, strongly recommend that children get all of the critical childhood vaccines on the schedule recommended by most doctors.

Look, it's not that I'm against the idea that we need good food and clean air and water.  I'm also well aware that Big Pharma has a lot to answer for in how it produces, vets, and prices drugs.  But going from there to something I saw posted on social media a couple of days ago -- a 32-point-font banner saying, "BIG PHARMA HAS NEVER CURED A SINGLE ILLNESS!" is blatant idiocy.  To give just one example, a friend of mine, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age eighteen and is now a happy and healthy young woman in her late twenties, would not be alive today without the chemotherapy developed and produced by "Big Pharma."  

But under RFK, cancer research -- and also research into Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, and most recently, Ebola fever -- has been defunded in favor of spurious projects to "stop chemtrails" and "look into the connection between vaccines and autism."  (tl;dr: There isn't one.)

In short, RFK is a dangerous ideologue who shouldn't be allowed within hailing distance of our national health policy.  His continued occupation of the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to result in irreparable damage to the American health care system.

But a man like him is never going to step down, because he can't conceive of the possibility that he could be wrong.  An attitude which, of course, is endemic in our government right now.

I wonder how many people will have to die before anyone will step in and fire him?

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

Quantum homeopathy

In response to a post I did a while back about the tendency of people to believe loony ideas if they're couched in ten-dollar vocabulary, a loyal reader of Skeptophillia sent me a link to a paper by one Lionel Milgrom, of Imperial College (London), that has turned this phenomenon into an art form.

The name of the paper?

"'Torque-Like' Action of Remedies and Diseases on the Vital Force and Their Consequences for Homeopathic Treatment."

ln it, we witness something pretty spectacular: an attempt to explain homeopathy based on quantum mechanics.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I'm not making this up, and it doesn't seem like a spoof; in fact, the paper appeared in the open-access Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Within the developing theoretical context of quantum macroentanglement, a mathematical model of the Vital Force (Vf) has recently been formulated.  It describes the Vf in terms of a hypothetical gyroscope with quantized angular momentum.  This enables the Vf's state of health to be represented in terms of a "wave function" derived solely from secondary symptom observables produced in response to disease or homeopathic remedies.  So far, this approach has illustrated the biphasal action of remedies, resonance phenomena arising out of homeopathic provings, and aspects of the therapeutic encounter.

So right out of the starting gate, he's talking about using the quantum interactions of a force no one has ever detected to explain a treatment modality that has been repeatedly found to be completely worthless.  This by itself is pretty impressive, but it gets better as it goes along:

According to this model, symptom expression corresponds to precession of the Vf "gyroscope."  Conversely, complete removal of symptoms is equivalent to cessation of Vf "precession."  However, if overprescribed or given in unsuitable potency, the curative remedy (which may also be formulated as a wave function but this time derived solely from changes in Vf secondary symptom observables) may cause the Vf to express proving symptoms.  Thus, with only observation of symptoms and changes in them to indicate, indirectly, the state of a patient's Vf, the safest treatment strategy might be for the practitioner to proceed via gradual removal of the symptoms.

When I read the last line, I was lucky that I wasn't drinking anything, because it would have ended up splattered all over my computer.  Yes!  By all means, if a sick person comes in to visit a health professional, the health professional should proceed by removing the sick person's symptoms!

Because proceeding by making the symptoms worse is kind of counterproductive, you know?

His talk about "overprescription" made me chuckle, too.  Because if you'll recall, the late James Randi demonstrated dozens of times that the result of consuming a whole bottle of a homeopathic remedy is... nothing.  On the other hand, since the homeopaths believe that the more dilute a substance is, the stronger it gets, maybe "overprescribing" means "prescribing less."

Which reminds me of the story about the guy who forgot to take his homeopathic remedy, and as a result died of an overdose.

*rimshot*

And if this isn't enough, Dr. Milgrom (yes, he has a Ph.D., astonishingly enough) has also published other papers, including "The Thermodynamics of Health, Healing, and Love" and "Toward a Topological Description of the Therapeutic Process."

What's next, "The Three-Body Problem: A Classical Mechanics Approach to Handling Love Affairs?"

I have to admit, though, that there's something almost charming about this guy's attempt to bring pseudoscience under the lens of physics.  His blathering on about imaginary "vital forces" and the precession of microscopic gyroscopes as a mechanism for disease is, if nothing else, creative.  While what he's claiming is complete bollocks, Dr. Milgrom's determination to keep soldiering on is kind of adorable.

The good news, of course, is that his papers are unlikely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The only danger is the undeserved veneer of credibility that this sort of thing gives homeopathy in people whose minds aren't yet made up.  One can only hope that the thorough debunking of this fraudulent practice that has been done by actual scientific researchers will prove, in the end, to be more persuasive.

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

A remedy against pseudoscience

I've got a medication for you to take.  Here are the ingredients:

• nux vomica -- the seed of the plant Strychnos nux-vomica, the natural source of strychnine.
• belladonna -- Atropa belladonna, also called deadly nightshade.
• hydrastis -- another toxic plant, Hydrastis canadensis, better known as goldenseal.
• kali bichromicum -- chemists call it potassium dichromate, and it's carcinogenic and causes contact dermatitis.
• ephedra vulgaris -- an extract of the plant of the same name, which contains the dangerous stimulant ephedrine.
• histaminum hydrochloricum -- the organic compound produced by the human body in response to an allergic reaction, which is responsible for much of the misery of allergies and colds.  (Thus -- antihistamines.)

If by this point you're getting worried that anyone would suggest ingesting any of these, much less a combination of all six, fear not: the manufacturer takes them, dissolves them in water, then dilutes the combined solution by a factor of ten, six times in a row.  By this time, what's left has one millionth the concentration of the original.  And in fact, the advertisement for this "remedy" reassuringly tells prospective customers that it "contains no ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or alkaloids."

So, for twenty-five bucks, you too can purchase a spray bottle filled with a liquid containing no active ingredients whatsoever.

Oh, and I didn't tell you what it's supposed to cure; snoring.  It's called "SnoreStop," and you're supposed to squirt it up your nose.

People in the know (and certainly regular readers of Skeptophilia) will recognize this as a prime example of the pseudoscientific horseshit known as homeopathy, which -- for some reason -- is still a lucrative business.  You can find homeopathic "remedies" on pharmacy shelves pretty much everywhere; they come in liquid and tablet form, and are recognizable by the presence of a number like "10x" on the label (that's the dilution factor; 10x would be diluted to one part in ten billion).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dr. Moumita Sahana, Homeopathy globules, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But what sets apart SnoreStop from even the common run of homeopathic "remedies" -- which aren't going to cure anything, but at least won't make you sicker -- is that SnoreStop nasal spray has been found to contain potentially dangerous numbers of pathogens, including yeasts, molds, and bacteria like Providencia rettgeri, which can cause pneumonia and bacterial meningitis.

The company that produces SnoreStop, Green Pharmaceuticals, was notified of this back in 2022, but did nothing to fix the problem; in fact, why this comes up now is it just came to light that instead of destroying the contaminated lots, they simply relabeled, repackaged, and sold them.  They've also been charged by the FDA for selling an unlicensed and unregulated drug designed to treat a specific disorder, without going through the approval process.  (I guess they forgot to put the "This product is not intended to treat or cure any disorder, disease, or ailment" disclaimer on the package, which seems to be some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for these charlatans.)

The problem is, even if SnoreStop is taken off the market -- even if Green Pharmaceuticals goes out of business -- it's only the tip of the iceberg.  Homeopathy scams people for millions of dollars yearly.  And despite my previous statement that at least most of these "remedies" don't make you sicker, there is real harm done, when people refuse conventional (i.e. effective) medical treatment for illnesses in favor of homeopathy and magical thinking.  (There's good evidence that computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs significantly hastened his death from cancer by foregoing medical treatment for "alternative medicine.")

I know, caveat emptor and all that sort of thing.  People are gonna make ill-informed decisions, and you can't legislate away stupidity.  But what the producers of homeopathic remedies are doing -- as well as homeopathic "doctors" -- is deliberately misleading sick people into risking their health by taking a thoroughly discredited pseudoscientific concoction that relies on nonsense like water molecules having a "memory."

The only remedy against pseudoscience is science.  Learn some -- preferably before you need to make decisions regarding your health.

Just remember what the inimitable Tim Minchin said, in his wonderful diatribe against alternative medicine called Storm: "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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

Acid test

Apparently the most popular fad in alt-med nutrition these days is the so-called "alkaline diet."

The idea here is that lots of diseases -- cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's are the four most commonly mentioned -- are caused by your body having an "acid pH."  All you have to do, they say, is alter your diet to foods that result in "alkaline ash" (residues with a pH above 7) and you'll be healthy and happy and disease free.  (Here's one example.)

As is the case with most of these sorts of claims, it has a kernel of truth.  There are foods that result in alkaline ash; others that have acidic ash; and some that have neutral (pH = about 7) ash.  The easiest way to monitor this is to test your urine pH, as your kidneys regulate your blood pH by excreting or retaining hydrogen ions, which is what pH is measuring in any case.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Further, a lot of the alkaline ash foods -- fruits and nuts especially -- are certainly part of a healthy diet, and some of the acidic ash foods -- meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains and alcohol -- are problematic if they make up too great a percentage of your diet.

But that's where the realistic bit ends, and the pseudoscience takes over.

The fact is, you can't change your body's pH, for the very good reason that it's one of the most tightly-regulated homeostatic factors in your body.  If you're in good health, your blood pH is always 7.4.  If it varies more than 0.1 pH points either direction, you are in a world of hurt.  Here's a quick summary of what happens if your blood becomes more acidic:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.3 -- blood acidosis; symptoms are shortness of breath, headache, confusion
pH = 7.2 -- dead

And the same for moving in the alkaline direction:

pH = 7.4 -- happy and healthy
pH = 7.5 -- blood alkalosis; symptoms are nausea, muscle spasms, twitching, numbness
pH = 7.6 -- dead

So the idea that by eliminating meat from your diet, you'll become more alkaline, and that's somehow a good thing, is idiotic.  Each tissue in your body has a particular pH at which it functions best -- some are acidic (e.g. the stomach), some are alkaline (e.g. the blood and the small intestine), and (more importantly) changing that pH in any of them would be a seriously bad idea.

The bottom line is that if our pH yo-yoed around every time we ate a cheeseburger or an apple, we'd be dead.  End of story.

Now, it's true that your urine pH varies a lot; that's because your kidneys are regulating your blood pH by excreting whatever it takes to keep your blood in homeostasis.  So of course your urine pH changes.  It's compensating for what you eat and drink.  But there's nothing healthier about having alkaline urine.  All it means is that your kidneys are working, which is the same thing that having acidic urine means.

The funny thing is, the "alkaline diet" site I linked above gives a nod to that idea in the following paragraph: 

Even very tiny alterations in the pH level of various organisms can cause major problems.  For example, due to environmental concerns, such as increasing CO2 deposition, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and various life forms living in the ocean have greatly suffered.  The pH level is also crucial for growing plants, and therefore it greatly affects the mineral content of the foods we eat.  Minerals in the ocean, soil and human body are used as buffers to maintain optimal pH levels, so when acidity rises, minerals fall.

Right.  So that's why we have kidneys.  So that kind of shift in pH and other electrolytes doesn't kill us.

You'd think that a quick perusal of sites regarding actual research on the effects of diet (here's a good example) would immediately settle that point, but unfortunately the availability of correct information hasn't stopped the claims.  And worse, there are people now selling all sorts of supplements that are supposed to regulate our pH, and without which dire things are predicted to happen.

Me, I'm fond of the dietary advice "everything in moderation."  Listen to your body, eat a good balance of nutrients, get plenty of exercise, stay hydrated, don't spend your money on useless supplements, and don't go crazy overboard on something like the amazing grapefruit-and-peanut-butter diet.  (I don't know if that actually exists, but given some of the bizarre diets out there, I'll bet it does.)

Best of all, learn a little bit of biology.  It's cool, it's interesting, and it'll keep you from getting suckered by alt-med nonsense.  And with that, I think I'm going to go have some bacon and eggs for breakfast, confident in the knowledge that my kidneys are up to the challenge.

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

Internet expertise

What is it with people trusting random laypeople over experts?

Okay, yeah, I know experts can be wrong, and credentials are not an unshakable guarantee that the person in question knows what they're talking about.  But still.  Why is it so hard to accept that an actual scientist, who has a Ph.D. in the field and has done real research, in general will know more about the topic than some dude on the internet?

The topic comes up because of a conversation I had with my athletic trainer yesterday.  He is pretty knowledgeable about all things fitness-related -- so while he's not a researcher or a scientist (something he'd tell you up front), he's certainly Better Than The Average Bear.  And he ran into an especially ridiculous example of the aforementioned phenomenon, which he was itching to show me as soon as I got there.

Without further ado, we have: the woman who thinks that the amino acid L-glutamine is so named because it is important for developing your glutes:

And of course, it must be right because she heard it from "the TikTok Fitness Girls, and they don't lie."

The whole thing reminds me of something I heard every damn year from students, which is that the ingredient sodium erythorbate in hotdogs and other processed meat products is made from ground-up earthworms, because "earthworm" and "erythorbate" sound a little bit alike.  (Actually, sodium erythorbate is an antioxidant that is chemically related to vitamin C, and is added to meat products as a preservative and antibacterial agent.)

But to return to the broader point, why is it so hard to accept that people who have studied a subject actually... know a lot about the subject?  Instead, people trust shit like:

• Noted scientific researcher Gwyneth Paltrow recommending coffee consumption... which she wants to administer by squirting it up your ass.
• Another noted scientific researcher, Kim Kardashian, suggesting combating wrinkles and other visible signs of aging by withdrawing blood from your arm and injecting it under the skin on your face.
• A claim that chemotherapy actually causes cancer.
• A person who recommends using crystals to treat illness in dogs.
• Selling people charcoal-based "detoxifying juice cleanses" -- which have the unfortunate side-effect of absorbing important substances you may have ingested, like vitamins, minerals, and medications.
• A belief that you'll die if you eat more than seven bananas in a day, which started out as a joke told in an interview by British comedian Karl Pilkington that then got out way of hand.
• "Ear candling," which is sticking a lit candle in your ear in an attempt to suck out the earwax.  There are two confirmed cases of people falling asleep while ear candling and setting their houses on fire, and dozens of people who've ended up in the emergency room after dripping hot wax down their ear canals.
• The practice of "perineum sunning," which unfortunately is just what it sounds like.  You take off all your clothes and expose your butthole to direct sunlight, which is supposed to rotate the tires on your energy meridians or something, but in actuality risks a sunburn that I'd rather not even think about.

And I feel obliged to make my usual disclaimer that I am not making any of the above up.

I wonder how much of this attitude, especially here in the United States, comes from the egalitarian mindset being misapplied -- that "everyone should have the same basic rights" spills over into "everyone's opinion is equally valid."  I recall back when George W. Bush was running for president, there was a significant slice of voters who liked him because he came across as a "regular guy -- someone you could sit down and have a beer with."  He wasn't an "intellectual elite" (heaven knows that much was true enough).  

And I remember reacting to that with sheer bafflement.  Hell, I know I'm not smart enough to be president.  I want someone way more intelligent than I am to be running the country.  Why is "Vote Bush -- He's Just As Dumb As You Are" considered some kind of reasonable campaign slogan?

I think the same thing is going on here -- people hear about the new health miracle from Some Guy Online, and it sounds vaguely plausible, so they give more credence to him than they do to an actual expert (who uses big complicated words and doesn't necessarily give you easy solutions to your health problems).  If you don't have a background in biological science yourself, maybe it sounds like it might work, so you figure you'll give it a try.  After that, wishful thinking and the placebo effect do the rest of the heavy lifting, and pretty soon you're naked in the park sunning your nether orifice.

There's a willful part of this, though.  There comes a point where it crosses the line from simple ignorance into actual stupidity.  To go back to my original example, a thirty-second Google search would tell you that L-glutamine has nothing to do with your glutes.  (In fact, the two words don't come from the same root, even though they sound alike; glutamine comes from the Latin gluten, meaning "sticky," and glutes comes from the Greek γλουτός, meaning buttocks.)  To believe that L-glutamine will develop your glutes because the TikTok Fitness Girls say so, you need to be not only (1) ignorant, but (2) gullible, and (3) uninterested in learning any better.

And that, I find incomprehensible.

I'll end with the famous quote from Isaac Asimov, which seems to sum up the whole bizarre thing about as well as anyone could: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

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

Diluted nonsense

Every time I think homeopathy can't get more ridiculous, I turn out to be wrong.

I thought they'd plunged to the bottom of the Crazy Barrel with their announcement of a remedy called "homeopathic water."  This is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like.  It's water diluted with water, then shaken up, then diluted again and again.

With water.

So I thought, "This is it.  It can't get any loonier than that."

I was very, very wrong, and found out the depth of my mistake at Frank van der Kooy's site Complementary Medicine -- Exposing Academic Charlatans, wherein we find out that watering water down with water is far from the nuttiest thing the homeopaths make "remedies" from.

Here are a few things that van der Kooy discovered form the basis of a homeopathic remedy:

• Black holes.  Yes, I mean the astronomical object, and yes, I'm serious.  An amateur astronomer put a vial of alcohol on a telescope aimed at the location of Cygnus X-1, the first black hole to be discovered.  My guess is that said astronomer had consumed a good bit of the alcohol first, and that's how he got the idea.  But after the vial had sat there for a while, and gotten saturated with the Essence of Black Hole, it was diluted to "30C" (known to the rest of us as one part in ten to the thirtieth power).  The homeopaths say if you consume it, it causes you to have a "drawing inward" sensation (because, I'm guessing, black holes pull stuff in).  One person who tested it said it felt like her teeth were being pulled backwards into her head.  Why this is supposed to be a good thing, I have no idea.
• Vacuum.  I'm not talking about the machine, I'm talking about the physical phenomenon.  I don't have a clue how you would mix a vacuum in water, nor what "diluting a vacuum" even means.  The "practitioner," however, says it's really good for treating the flu.
• The note "F."  Why F and not C# or Ab or something, I'm not sure, but apparently this is made by playing the note F at some water, then diluting it a bunch.  After that, it's good as a "tranquilizer" and "cardiac regulator."
• The south pole of a magnet.  Again, I'm not sure what's special about the south pole, but if you somehow introduce south-poliness into some water, you can use it to treat frostbite, hernia, dislocations, ingrown toenails, and "levitation."  (I feel obliged at this point to state again for the record that I'm not making this up.)
• Dog shit.  Supposedly, consuming diluted dog shit helps you get over feelings of self-disgust, which you would definitely need if you're consuming diluted dog shit.  It also helps if you dream about dogs, or "feel like your arms and legs are getting shorter," which I didn't know was even a thing.
• The Berlin Wall.  A remedy made from a chunk of the Wall -- and not to beat this point to death, but the Wall piece was shaken up in water and diluted a gazillion times -- is good for treating despair.  I could use some right now, because after reading about how many people believe this kind of thing works, I'm inclined to agree with Professor Farnsworth.

I really should stop reading stuff like this, because I really can't afford any further declines in my opinion about the general intelligence of the human species.

Once again, I'm struck not by people coming up with this nonsense, because selling nonsense to make money has been a pastime of humans for a long, long time.  What gets me is that apparently people read this stuff, and don't have the response that I did, which is to snort derisively and say, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."  Instead, they pull out their credit cards and start buying.

So here we are again, shaking our heads in utter bafflement.  At least I hope you are.  I hope you haven't read this and said, "What's he pissing and moaning for?  This all makes perfect sense."  If that was, in fact, your response, please don't tell me about it.  Now y'all will have to excuse me, because I'm going to go take my anti-despair Berlin Wall remedy, mixed well into a double scotch.  That might actually have some effect.

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

In the ether

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia emailed me a couple of days ago.

"I think I've figured out why you're such a doubter," he said.  "From my extensive research, it's because your 'etheric DNA' hasn't been activated.  I strongly recommend you look into this immediately so that you can ascend to the next astral plane, where you belong."

He then signed off, but added in a p.s., "(... take the bait, little mouse... take the bait...)".

Well, naturally, I couldn't let something like this just sit there.  So I did a search for etheric DNA, and spent the next forty-five minutes reading.  Unfortunately, I was mostly done with a glass of scotch at the time, and I got the worst case of the giggles I've had in years.  I would read a line from one of the articles to my dog, who was sitting on the floor next to my desk watching me intently, and then I'd erupt into laughter.  Rosie was clearly amused as well, given the fact that each time I read her a line, she wagged her tail in a cheerful fashion.

Or maybe she was just glad I was finally paying some long-overdue attention to the health of my eternal celestial spirit.  I dunno.

Anyhow, I thought it best to put the topic aside until I was thinking more clearly.  And I'm not sure whether it's good or bad news that the "etheric DNA" stuff doesn't make any better sense when you're stone-cold sober.  So naturally, I had to share some of it with you here, because I'm just a generous, open-handed sort of guy.

Up to you if you get yourself a glass of scotch first.

The first article I found was from an online open-access (surprise!) journal called MedCrave.  MedCrave's tagline is "Step into the World of Research," which right away sets my teeth on edge because I am absolutely sick unto death of people using the word "research" that way, e.g. reading three articles from various websites and saying, "Well, I did my research."  No, you fucking well did not do any research; you found three articles that happened to agree with what you already believed.  You do not work in a lab, you did not publish anything in a peer-reviewed journal, you did not spend years studying the subject and becoming an expert.  Hell, I spent over three decades teaching biology, and I am not an expert; I'm very much a generalist and always will be.

So I'm not a researcher, either.  The difference is, I'm not claiming to be.  

But at least I know how to recognize legitimate research in an actual scientific journal.  And MedCrave ain't it.

Anyhow, the article is by "Spiritual Scientist" Linda Gadbois, and is called "DNA -- The Phantom Effect, Quantum Hologram, and the Etheric Body," which won out over the next most sensible title she could come up with, which was "Woogie Woogie Woogie Pfthththbtbtbtbtb."  There's no way I can give you a flavor of just how wacky this article is from a mere summary, so here's an actual excerpt:

DNA is actually composed of a liquid crystalline substance that acts as a form of antenna, receiver, and transmitter of holographic information.  It’s constantly in the process of taking in information from its environment and the ether as signs, archetypes, and imagery and translating it into holograms.  It operates predominately out of radionics where whatever frequency its tuned to, is acts as a receiver for various forms of information within that same frequency that comes in as an acoustic wave that serves to form an electromagnetic field (EMF) as a holographic shape that’s composed initially of subtle energy, which provides the blueprint or spatial mapping for constructing an exact replica as its material equivalent.  Information inherent in the Ether (Akasha) always comes as a “pairing” or “wave coupling” (like the double helix) that contains both an acoustic sound and optical (visual) image as the geometric patterning inherent in the vibratory frequency.

Right!  Of course!  What?

My other favorite part was when she explained (not sure if that's the right word) her concept of the "phantom effect" thusly:

The two waves of information form an interference pattern that together produce a 3-D holographic image as the subtle template for constructing the material body through a growth and development process.  This holographic image as an invisible energy field organizes and animates matter into what’s called the “phantom effect”.  This phantom is an invisible 3-D shape as a field formed out of information as a dynamic series of interrelated planes or parallel interlaced and correlating dimensions that operate without any cross-talk to form a chain-of-association as phase conjugation adaptive resonance.

"Dimensions" of "phase conjugation adaptive resonance?"  All we need is "entangled quantum frequencies" in there somewhere and we'll have collected the whole set of quasi-scientific woo-woo buzzwords.

And please don't think I've selected these two passages because they were unusually abstruse.  It all sounds like this.  And it goes on for pages.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DNA methylation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The other article I looked at was from Positive Health Online, an open-access (surprise again!) journal about "integrative health."  This one, by "healer and guide" Carole Easton, is called "DNA Activation -- Etheric Surgery Using an Activated Crystal Wand."  It begins with the sentence, "DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid," which is also the last correct statement in the article, because it immediately after that launches into telling us how our DNA only seems to have two strands; it actually has twenty-two other "shadow strands" that don't exist until you activate them:

22-strand DNA activation... is done through etheric surgery using an activated crystal wand.  It involves 12 receptor sites to the DNA, known as codons, and they are accessed through the etheric spine and illuminated with light (I have actually seen this light whilst I was administering the wand to this area).  This activates 22 of the 24 strands.

What does all of this do for you?  Well, she's a little vague on that point:

Our DNA contains the master plan, or blueprint, for who we are, our life purpose and our Divine Potential – who we are as a Divine Being.  Holding the encoded information relative to both our physical and spiritual lineage, it is unique and very personal.  It determines our physical form, hereditary maladies, mental proclivities, emotional behavioural patterns, spiritual gifts and more.  It is God-given, holy and sacred and defines our uniqueness.  It is who we are!  Locked within our DNA are emotional codes that are handed down from our ancestors from generation to generation.  These emotional codes are then triggered through our belief systems and through life altering events.

Given the fact that my ancestors seem to have been a random assortment of rogues, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals, and the majority of the ones I knew personally were also weird as fuck, I'm not sure I want "emotional codes" handed down from generation to generation.  My inclination is to tiptoe away and let my twenty-two extra DNA stands continue to sleep quietly.

Oh, but Carole Easton tells us this is an ancient mystical tradition that traces its origins all the way back to King Solomon!  (Because the ancient Israelites were clearly experts on genetics.)  So how can I turn my back on such a gift?

Um.  Yeah.  She can just stay right the hell away from my etheric spine with her activated crystal wand.  I doubt I'd be able to go through her ritual without laughing, and I'm sure that'd destroy all the entangled quantum dimension phase resonance oscillations or whatever the fuck is supposed to be happening, so it wouldn't work for me in any case.

So there you have it.  Etheric DNA.  As far as the loyal reader who got me started on this, I hope you're happy.  At least my dog is.  She's currently staring at me with a hopeful look on her face.  I think she wants me to do a Tarot reading for her, or something.  

Or maybe her etheric stomach just wants breakfast.

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

Magnetic nonsense

Loony people are hardly a new invention.  Any claims that "people are crazier now than they used to be" generally springs from one of two things, the first of which is a bad memory.

The other, though, is more interesting, as well as more troubling.  In the past, when Great-Aunt Ethel started babbling in public about being visited at night by a sexy alien who wanted to take her up to his spaceship and bring her back to Zeta Reticuli to be his immortal love slave, we had the option of saying, "That's wonderful, auntie, but let's go inside and get you a nice cup of tea and watch The Beverly Hillbillies, okay?  Wouldn't that be fun?"

Now, the Great-Aunt Ethels of the world have computers with internet access, where they can connect with all the other Great-Aunt Ethels.  And influence people who are already on the borderline, so as to create the next generation of Ethels.  And because a lot of social media sites now allow you to monetize your content, they're able to make tons of money off it, extending their reach even further.

We're in a world where the Ethels have just as great a capacity for being heard as the scientists do.

And this brings us to Sherri Tenpenny.

Tenpenny is an anti-vaxx activist who was identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" -- the twelve people who, put together, are responsible for 65% of the vaccine misinformation out there online.  (Other shining lights on this list are Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Christiane Northrup.)  Tenpenny, though, brings things to a whole different level, way beyond the usual "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Here's one example:

The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things.  I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House Committee in Columbus, [Ohio].  Well, guess what?  It’s all true.

The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the "Internet of Things," the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected.  You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop.  It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God-given body that we were born with.  And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about.  All of these things are real...  All of them.  And it’s happening right now.  It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.

Sure it is, Great-Aunt Sherri.  Here, have a nice cup of tea.

The trouble is, Tenpenny and others like her are getting rich off this stuff.  Some social media sites -- notably Facebook and YouTube -- have taken steps to stop her from spreading her insane lies, but even so, her message is still getting out there.  Business management information provider Dun & Bradstreet reported that her clinic, the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, has an average annual sales total of a bit over four million dollars.

And that's despite the fact that the State Medical Board of Ohio recently revoked her medical license.

What gets me is that nothing she says, however ridiculous, seems to diminish her popularity.  In June of 2021 she stated that she had "spent over ten thousand hours studying the origins and effects of COVID since the pandemic began," despite the fact that at that point only eleven thousand hours had passed since the pandemic was declared.  She also claimed that the vaccine turns you into a human magnet:

I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized.  They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks…  There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.

Well, I can state definitively that based upon an experiment I just ran with my car keys, this is incorrect. 

And this is considering that I've now had four COVID shots (the original two plus two boosters), and have been vaccinated against all the usual childhood diseases, as well as typhoid, yellow fever, shingles, hepatitis A and B, and a yearly flu shot since (if memory serves) 1995.  Despite all this, as the above highly scientific photograph shows, I am not even a tiny bit magnetic.

I have also not been turned into an electronic avatar or a transhumanist cyborg, which I honestly feel a little disappointed about, because that sounds badass.

Given the fact of the connectivity we have now for information of all sorts, we no longer have the option of hustling Sherri Tenpenny back into the house and getting her settled in the recliner in front of The Beverly Hillbillies.  The best thing we can do is to shine as bright a light as possible on her nonsense.  We can't let her go unchallenged, especially on such subjects as vaccination, where peoples' health and lives are at risk.

It'd be one thing if she was talking about sexy aliens from Zeta Reticuli.  She's not.  Her rhetoric is, literally, killing people.

We're not going to be able to stop her from shouting.  The important thing is that the sane people, the ones who actually know what they're talking about shout back -- louder.

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

Rock recall

First, we had a "Quantum Pendant" that was supposed to realign your chakra frequencies (or something like that), but was recalled when the authorities found the rock it was made from was actually radioactive.  Then we had the warning issued because people with ear wax impactions were sticking lit candles in their ears to "suck out the wax," which resulted in several hospitalizations and at least one person setting their house on fire. Yet another warning was put out by doctors when the woo-woos started recommending taking off all your clothes and exposing your butthole to direct sunlight, risking a sunburn that I don't even want to think about.  Then there were the homeopathic "remedies" that were taken off the shelves because, by some horrific mistake, they turned out to have some actual active ingredients.

So you'd think after all this -- and, allow me to say, I didn't make any of the above up -- either (1) the general public would realize that the woo-woo alt-med types are full of shit and stop listening to anything they say, or (2) I'd stop being surprised by what new idiotic "natural health" fads crop up.

Neither of those, in fact, has happened.

This comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to a story out of Australia about a company that distributes chunks of a rock called rough serpentine to stores specializing in woo-woo crystal nonsense.  Serpentine is common -- it's a characteristic rock found in areas that once were part of oceanic plates -- but it's pretty enough.  It often has green and black bands, and occurs in two main forms, a shiny, smooth "platy" variety (sometimes nicknamed "false jade"), and a fibrous, grainy "rough" variety.  If you're curious about what they claim serpentine can do, one source says that it "is believed to help establish control over one's life.  According to metaphysical beliefs, serpentine provides a clearing of thought to better facilitate meditation.  Serpentine is said to clear clouded areas of the chakras and stimulate the crown chakra, promoting spiritual understanding and psychic abilities."

Pretty impressive, no?

There's a wee problem with rough serpentine, though.

It contains asbestos.

Rough serpentine [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tiia Monto, Talk on Serpentine, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Asbestos exposure, as I probably don't need to mention, is associated with lung cancer, emphysema, and mesothelioma.

"Consumers should immediately stop using this product and wrap it in thick sturdy plastic or a heavy duty sturdy plastic bag where the seal cannot be broken," said a spokesperson for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.  "The supplier – Alliz Trading Pty Ltd – will contact consumers to provide advice about safe disposal of the stones and arrange a full refund."

I really shouldn't be surprised this happened.  It's all part and parcel of the "if it's natural, it must be good for you" mentality, which conveniently ignores the fact that strychnine is all-natural and 100% organic.

For what it's worth, this was completely natural, too.  I'm guessing the dinosaurs' chakras were pretty fucking clouded afterward, though.  Pity no one was around to give them some serpentine.

In any case, it brings home the fact that modern science and medicine have done a good job of improving our lives.  Yes, they're far from perfect.  I'm aware of the issues with the pharmaceuticals industry, and the ongoing health insurance mess here in the United States.  I know that modern technology has created a good many problems itself.  But on balance, we live longer, healthier lives, and more of our children survive to adulthood, than ever before, and that's not because more of us are waving crystals around, taking "remedies" that have been diluted to the point that there's basically nothing left but water, or (heaven forfend) exposing our nether orifices to direct sunlight.

So learn a little science, okay?  And stay away from rocks containing asbestos.  Those things are dangerous.

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

Heavy-duty nonsense

Yesterday I ran into a claim that, even by comparison with most alt-med nonsense, is way out there. The gist of it is that you can fix all your physical ailments if you just stop drinking water with deuterium in it.

Deuterium, as I probably don't need to explain, is "heavy hydrogen" -- hydrogen atoms whose nucleus contains a proton and a neutron (rather than only a proton, as in ordinary hydrogen).  Heavy water has a few different physical and chemical properties from ordinary water -- such as (unsurprisingly) being 10.6% more dense and being more viscous.  It has an ability to slow high-energy neutrons down without absorbing them, making heavy water important in nuclear fission reactors. Additionally, deuterium forms stronger bonds to carbon and oxygen than ordinary hydrogen.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dirk Hünniger; Derivative work in english - Balajijagadesh, Hydrogen Deuterium Tritium Nuclei Schmatic-en, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The "Beginner's Guide to Deuterium and Health," however, has some information that would be seriously scary if it weren't for the fact that nearly all of it is wrong.  It starts with a definition of "deuterium," which is correct, and is honestly the last thing on the entire webpage that is.  You're put on notice about the veracity of the site in the first paragraph, wherein we find that the details of how awful deuterium is for you is only accessible to "those with an understanding of advanced bio-chemistry, bio-physics and quantum health."

What, pray, is "quantum health?"  The health of your subatomic particles?  The health of people who are so extremely small that they can only be detected with sensitive instruments?  The health of people who jump from "sick" to "well" and back again without passing all the stages in between?

Or, perhaps, does it refer to someone who is both sick and well at the same time until they go to a doctor, at which point the Alt-Med Wave Function collapses, and they become one or the other?

Then we find out that our health depends on how fast our mitochondria are spinning.  No lie, here's the relevant passage:

At a quantum level hydrogen plays a vital role in mitochondria function.  Mitochondria are the powerhouse batteries of the body.  They ultimately facilitate energy production.  Within the mitochondria there is a spinning head that rotates very fast, the rotation speed of this spinning head determines how efficiently you create energy.  The faster the spinning head rotates the more energy you make and the healthier you will be.  The slower the spinning head rotates the less energy you will make and this leaves you more susceptible to chronic mismatch diseases and faster aging.

What this is referring to, insofar as I can understand it, is the electron transport chain, wherein electrons in your mitochondria give up some of their energy through a series of oxidation/reduction reactions, and that energy is used to shuttle hydrogen ions across the mitochondrial membrane.  The ultimate result is the generation of ATP, a crucial energy storage molecule.

The amusing part is that the rate of this reaction is controlled incredibly tightly.  You need about seventy million ATP molecules per second, per cell, and you use them equally quickly -- ATP doesn't store well.  If your rate of production went up without your rate of consumption going up, you wouldn't be healthier; the ATP would break down, liberating the energy as heat, and you'd spontaneously burst into flame.

So the site is right to the extent that if this happened, worrying about illness and aging would be down near the bottom of your Priorities List.

Anyhow, what we're told is that deuterium kind of gums up the works, making the "spinning head" run more slowly, giving us chronic diseases.  What kind of chronic diseases is never specified, because apparently they're all caused by the same thing, whether you're talking about arthritis or high blood pressure.

The pièce de resistance, however, is when the website tells us what to do about all this.  In order to avoid this bad stuff, the solution is simple: we have to start drinking water with the deuterium removed.

But how do you do this?

Easy.  You take ordinary tap water, and freeze it.

If you put water in the freezer, they say, the heavy water will freeze first.  So you wait until a crust of ice forms, and either chip off and remove that, or else pour off the still-liquid part of the water.  Do it again and again, and eventually you'll have healthful "deuterium-depleted" water.

It works even better, they say, if you start with water "from glacial regions," because it's already been de-deuterium-ized naturally.

I know that the people who construct nuclear reactors would be glad to hear this.  The current method of producing heavy water for industry is called the Girdler sulfide process, which produces one ton of heavy water for every 340,000 tons of water you start with.  This means the stuff's expensive -- one place I looked is charging $680 per liter.  If all they had to do is freeze regular water and pull off the ice, it'd be quite a cost savings.

As with many wacky claims, there's a (small) grain of truth to this stuff.  Heavy water does have a higher freezing point than ordinary water (3.7 C as compared to 0 C).  It's also toxic, but only if you replace 25% of your body's water content with heavy water -- an expensive proposition given its cost.  (One source said, "accidental or intentional poisoning with heavy water is unlikely to the point of practical disregard.  Poisoning would require that the victim ingest large amounts of heavy water without significant normal water intake for many days to produce any noticeable toxic effects.")

What about our consumption of heavy water from contamination of ordinary water?  Well, since in virtually all tested water sources, the concentration of heavy water is one part in 3,200, I don't think you have much to worry about.  But if it amuses you to partly freeze your drinking water and throw away the icy part, by all means have at it.

Oh, and the website also says that once you "flush out the deuterium" from your body, your "energy level will increase, along with your magnetic field."  Which sounds potentially dangerous to me.  I would hate to have just made myself all healthy and deuterium-free, then I walk into Home Depot and my magnetic field starts attracting metal implements, and I get impaled in the forehead by a screwdriver or something.

So there you have it.  How to go through a lot of folderol to remove something from your water that (1) is there in vanishingly small amounts, and (2) has no toxic effects at that dosage.  Me, I'm more inclined to eat right and exercise regularly, but maybe I'm only saying that because the deuterium has gummed up the "spinning heads" in my brain's mitochondria and I'm not thinking straight.  You can see how that could happen.

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