Sense, nonsense, and microwaves

One of the difficulties in detecting spurious claims occurs when the writer (or speaker) mixes fact, and real science, in with spurious bits and stirs the resulting hash so thoroughly that it's hard to tell which is which.  When a claim is made of unadulterated bullshit, our job is easier.  Mixtures of science and pseudoscience, though, are often hard to tease apart.

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a good example of this yesterday, a link to an article on the website NaturalSociety called "Microwave Dangers - Why You Should Not Use A Microwave."  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, Microwave oven (interior), CC BY-SA 3.0]

In this piece, author Mike Barrett describes the terrible things that microwave ovens do to the people who use them and to the food that's cooked in them.  Amongst the claims Barrett makes:

1. Microwave ovens heat food by making water molecules move "at an incredible speed."  This differs from conventional ovens, which gradually transfer heat into the food "by convection."  Further, this energy transfer into the water molecules results in their being "torn apart and vigorously deformed."
2. Microwaves are radiation.  This radiation can "cause physical alterations" even though microwaves are classified as "non-ionizing."  This radiation "accumulates over time and never goes away."
3. Microwave exposure has a greater effect on your brain than on your other body parts, because "microwave frequencies are very similar to the frequencies of your brain," and this causes "resonance."
4. Exposure to microwaves causes all sorts of problems, from cancer to cataracts and everything in between.
5. Raw foods have "life energy" in the form of "biophotons," that came directly from the sun.  These "biophotons" contain "bio-information," which is why eating sun-ripened raw fruits makes you feel happy.  Microwaving food destroys the "biophotons" which makes it lose all of its nutritional value.
6. Microwaving foods causes the conversion of many organic molecules into carcinogens.
7. Microwave ovens were invented by the Nazis.

Okay, let's look at these claims one at a time.

1. First, all heating of food makes the molecules move faster.  That's what an increase in temperature means.  A piece of broccoli heated to 60 C in a microwave and a piece of broccoli heated to 60 C in a steamer have equal average molecular speeds.  Ordinary ovens don't heat most foods by convection; convection heating requires bits of the food itself to move -- so, for example, heating a pot of soup on the stove creates convection, where the bottom part of the soup, in contact with the base of the pot, gets heated first, then rises, carrying its heat energy with it.  Foods in conventional ovens are heated by a combination of radiation from the heating coils, and conduction of that heat energy into the food from the outside in.  Further, heating the water molecules doesn't "tear them apart," because then you'd have hydrogen and oxygen gas, not water.
2. Microwaves are radiation.  So is sunlight.  Sure, microwaves can cause physical alterations, which is why it's inadvisable to climb inside a microwave oven and turn it on.  But not all kinds of radiation accumulate; the microwaves themselves are gone within a millisecond (absorbed and converted into heat) of when the magneto shuts off, otherwise it wouldn't be safe to open the door.  Barrett seems to be making an unfortunately common error, which is to confuse radiation with radioactivity.  Radioactive substances, or at least some of them, do bioaccumulate, which is why strontium-90 showed up in cows' milk following the Chernobyl disaster.  But your microwaved bowl of clam chowder is not radioactive, it's just hot.
3. When oscillations of one body trigger oscillations of another body at the same frequency, this is called resonance.  However, your brain does not oscillate at the frequency as microwaves -- the frequency he quotes for microwaves inside a microwave oven is 2,450 megahertz (2.45 billion times per second), which is actually correct.  Brains, on the other hand, don't oscillate at all, unless you happen to be at a Metallica concert.
4. Agreed, exposure to microwaves isn't good for you.   Thus my suggestion in (2) above not to get inside a microwave oven and turn it on.
5. There is no such thing as a "biophoton."  You do not absorb useful energy in the form of photons in any case, for the very good reason that you are not a plant.  The only "bio-information" we have is our DNA.  Sun-ripened fruit may taste better, as it's ripened more slowly and has a longer time to develop sugars and esters (the compounds that give fruits their characteristic smell and taste), but microwaves don't destroy "life energy."  This bit is complete nonsense.
6. Microwaving food may cause some small-scale alterations of organic molecules into carcinogens, but so does all cooking.  In fact, the prize for the highest introduction of carcinogens into food has to be awarded to grilling -- the blackened bits on a charcoal-grilled t-bone steak contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are known carcinogens.  The problem is, they're also very tasty carcinogens, which is why I still like grilled steaks.
7. Microwave ovens weren't invented by the Nazis.  The first microwave oven was built by Percy Spencer, an engineer from Maine, in 1945.  The mention of the Nazis seemed only to be thrown in there to give the argument a nice sauce of evil ("anything the Nazis invented must be bad").  But it's false in any case, so there you are.

So, anyhow, that's my analysis of Barrett's anti-microwave screed.  He's pretty canny, the way he scatters in actual facts and correct science with poorly-understood science, pseudoscience, and outright nonsense; the difficulty is, you have to have a pretty good background in science to tell which is which.  All of which argues for better science education, and better education in critical thinking skills.  But any effort I make in that direction will have to wait, because my coffee's getting cold, and I need to go nuke it for a couple of seconds.

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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.

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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.

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.