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.

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What's the harm?

One of the questions I get asked pretty frequently, apropos of my work as a debunker and critic of woo, is "What's the harm?"  So what if people want to believe in astrology or divination or whatnot?  Surely it's harmless to check your horoscope daily or make your decisions on your latest Tarot card reading.  Just leave people alone and let them do whatever floats their boat.

The problem is, these kinds of beliefs aren't harmless.  I see three different ways in which such practices generate a potential for direct harm.  First, belief in something despite a complete lack of evidence establishes a habit of credulity; so your acceptance of something fairly benign (like astrology) can predispose you to believe something that isn't benign at all (like the claim that homeopathy is a legitimate way to treat human disease).  Once you've fallen for one bit of nonsense, the next one is that much easier to fall for.

Second, a great many of the people who are purveyors of this nonsense are in it for one reason: money.  They are happy to relieve you of your hard-earned cash in exchange for a tissue of lies.  One good example of this is faith healing, which even today brings its practitioners millions of dollars a year, ripped off from the gullible and the desperate.

Last, though, is that some forms of woo -- the ones that, like homeopathy and faith healing, claim to alleviate something real, something with an actual physical cause -- lead people to abandon practices that might actually work, and seek out what amounts to magic.  And that brings me to Christina Lopes, a self-styled "healer and life coach."

I ran into Christina Lopes over at the r/skeptic subreddit, where someone posted one of her videos along with some rather acidic commentary.  I'd never heard of her, so I decided to watch the video.

In order to save you a half-hour of your life that you'll never get back, allow me to summarize the main points.

First, she says we're all "ascending."  Our bodies, supposedly, are in the process of transforming into something "higher."  What she means by "higher" is never defined in any rigorous way, but apparently it has to do with two things -- your "light quotient," the amount of light your body can hold, and the rate at which you're vibrating.  Lopes subscribes to the idea that the faster something is vibrating, the better it is, an idea you'd think anyone would realize is false just based on sound waves.  (If you don't believe me, you listen to a guy playing a solo piccolo for an hour, and I'll listen to a guy playing a cello, and we'll see who has a headache afterward.)  Better still, consider that claim applied to the light she likes talking about so much; compare the effect on the body of very high-frequency light (e.g. gamma rays) as compared to lower-frequency light (e.g. visible light).

I know which one I'd want bombarding me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Salma2789, Spirit man, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So far, nothing so different than a lot of these kinds of wacky spiritual claims.  But then she goes into the health effects of "ascension," and that's where things get dangerous.

She says that when you start "ascending," it's hard on the body.  Our cells (which she claims are sentient) "literally purge themselves of lower energy."  If she means "literally" literally, it's hard to fathom why the scientists have never detected this energy purge, since you'd think it would be measurable somehow.  But she goes on to tell us that this phase of things creates some real physical symptoms -- muscle inflammation, which "could be anywhere" including your chest, and mental agitation (disjointed, dark, or violent thoughts).  If this happens to you, she says, don't be afraid, because fear is a "dense emotion" which will just make things worse.  You should also increase water intake, because "water is a conductor of energy."  (Good idea, but for the wrong reason.)

At this point, she's moved into the realm of advice that could cause actual harm.  The symptoms she describes -- inflammation and mental agitation -- can be the result of real, and potentially serious, medical conditions.  Believing her bullshit explanation about this being just a natural result of "ascension," and nothing to worry about, means someone might forgo legitimate medical treatment, perhaps until it's far too late.  (For fuck's sake, chest pains and mental agitation are signs of a heart attack.  If you're feeling this, don't mess around with wondering if you're "ascending," get your ass to a hospital now.)

It's to be hoped that the scope of damage she's doing is limited; not only is she not especially widely-known (I couldn't find any mention of her on RationalWiki, for example), but fortunately a lot of the little aches and twinges we experience, and many of the disjointed or chaotic thoughts, are completely normal and not the sign of any dire problems.  But one person dying of cancer because he thought his symptoms were signs of "ascension," and he put off seeing a doctor, is way, way too many.

It's amazing how quickly beliefs can move from "weird but basically harmless" to "actively dangerous."  The problem is, setting aside rational thought so you can accept the former means you'll be much more likely to accept the latter without question.  All the "your body is light" and "high-frequency vibrations are good" stuff is innocuous enough; but as you can see from Lopes's video, those lead directly to "here are some real physical symptoms you shouldn't worry about."

I don't see any way to stop her from posting her videos; her advice is mostly vague enough that trying to establish culpability for harm in a legal sense would be next to impossible.  Failing that, the best we can do is to stress once again how important education in critical thinking is.  Not to mention a solid background in actual science.  If enough people call this out as the bullshit it is, purveyors of snake oil like Christina Lopes will be permanently out of a job.

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The magic stick

Illustrating the general principle that there is no idea so stupid that you can't change it so as to make it way stupider, today we springboard off yesterday's post, which was about some alleged 5G-blocking wearable items that actually turned out to be radioactive, and look at another twist on this claim that moves it from "dumb mistake" into "outright fraud."

I owe both today's and yesterday's post to the same alert reader, my friend and fellow writer Vivienne Tuffnell, of the lovely blog Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking (which you should all subscribe to -- and while you're at it, check out her fiction links, because her books are wonderful).  Viv's lately contribution to the ongoing diminishment of my opinion of the general intelligence of the human race comes from Ars Technica, where we read about yet another gizmo that's suppose to block the evil 5G-rays from infiltrating your brain.  This one is a gadget that plugs into a standard USB port, and costs £283, on the order of $350.  It's called the "5G BioShield," and according to the manufacturer's website, "is the result of the most advanced technology currently available for balancing and prevention of the devastating effects caused by non-natural electric waves, particularly (but not limited to) 5G, for all biological life forms."  The 5G BioShield provides "protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF emitting device."  

Best of all, you don't even have to plug it in for it to work.  Just set it on your desk, and presto.  "The 5GBioShield makes it possible, thanks to a uniquely applied process of quantum nano-layer technology, to balance the imbalanced electric oscillations arising from all electric fog induced by all devices such as: laptops, cordless phones, wlan, tablets, etc... [bringing] balance into the field at the atomic and cellular level restoring balanced effects to all harmful (ionized and non-ionized) radiation...  [it] transmutes the signals and harmonizes all harmful frequencies into life affirming frequencies."

It's always on, they say, thanks to the "quantum nano-layer technology."

All of which, of course, is just stringing together ten-dollar words into a paragraph of meaningless sci-babble.  There's no such thing as an "imbalanced electrical oscillation," nor are there some sort of magical "life-affirming frequencies."  As such, what we have here is the usual fancy-sounding nonsense to sell something to people who evidently never took high school physics.  

But what sets this apart from the previous claims is that the folks at Ars Technica actually forked over $350 to see what the thing actually was, and when they took it apart, they found out the "5G BioShield" is actually...

... a 128 MB memory stick worth a little over six bucks.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The people at Pen Test Partners, who did the actual analysis, said, "the 5G BioShield is nothing more than a £5 USB key with a sticker on it...  Whether or not the sticker provides £300 worth of quantum holographic catalyzer technology we'll leave you to decide."

Thanks, I've decided, mostly because "quantum holographic catalyzer technology" is about as real as "spectrum polarity unicorn repellent."

See, I can string together big words, too!

The company that sells the 5G BioShield are, of course, admitting nothing.  Their response to the Pen Test Partners analysis basically implied that they were too stupid to understand what they had in their hands.  "It is... hard to take your evaluation seriously, since you have evidently not researched the background facts in any meaningful way," a company spokesperson said.

And, of course, the controversy brought an outpouring of testimonials from people who'd tried the 5G BioShield and found that it worked, making them "feel calmer" and "have better dreams."  (Cf. "the placebo effect.") 

I'd like to think this will be the end of this nonsense, but of course it won't be.  The Ars Technica article said that the latest from the anti-5G people is a claim that cellular technology is being used to spread COVID, illustrating that they not only have no idea how physics works, they also have no idea how biology works.  But blatant stupidity didn't stop these wackos from damaging cell towers, because evidently this makes better sense to them than getting vaccinated and wearing a fucking mask.

I mean, really.

Anyhow, I can only hope this will be the last time I have to deal with this here at Skeptophilia, allowing me to get back to more pressing matters.  Like actually developing Spectrum Polarity Unicorn Repellent.  A big seller, that could be.  The beta test has proven highly effective.  I sprayed some all over my home and I haven't seen a unicorn yet.

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I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

That healthy glow

You may recall that a few days ago, I posted about a company that sells beanies and boxer briefs designed to protect you from the supposed ill effects of 5G, and electromagnetic fields in general.  The upshot of my post was that the low-level EMFs we're exposed to in the ordinary course of things have never been shown to cause harm, so at best such purchases are a waste of money that could be more productively used for other purposes, which in my opinion includes using it to start a campfire.

I choose the words "at best" deliberately, because in one of those weird synchronicities that happen sometimes, I ran into an article just yesterday on the BBC News that said there's another reason to avoid these products.  You ready?

It's because some of them are...

... wait for it...

... radioactive.

My reaction upon reading this was, and I quote:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, wheeze* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

I mean, you can't make this stuff up.  The Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection found that nine products from a company called EnergyArmor -- all of which allegedly protect you from the dangers of 5G and electromagnetic radiation -- themselves give off enough ionizing radiation that the agency recommended owners stop wearing them immediately, put them aside (preferably in the original packaging and away from close proximity to people and pets), and call the company to ask for a refund.  

This includes the amusingly-named Quantum Pendant™, which you can tell is extremely quantum because it says "Quantum Pendant" about eighty times on the box.

Why this pendant is any more quantum than anything else, given that all matter -- including dogs, avocados, umbrellas, cow shit, and Mitch McConnell -- is made up of the same set of subatomic particles that obey the same rules of quantum physics, is never explained.  My guess is they have no idea themselves.  The original claim ("low-level EMFs are harmful") has nothing to do with science, and as I've remarked before, it's very hard to logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

Also, in this case, the fact that lots of gullible people are willing to hand over their hard-earned cash for this nonsense is a hell of an incentive to make it sound sophisticated.

So the purported health benefits of anti-5G-wear is offset fairly dramatically by the (real) hazard of wearing something radioactive against your skin.  Sad to say, but we appear as a species not to have progressed very far from when Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and found that radium salts glowed in the dark, from which people immediately concluded that these were soothing healing rays that could be used to treat damn near everything, and this includes a guy who (I am not making this up) fixed a radium-infused gizmo onto a jock strap, presumably to jazz up his sex life.

Didn't work.  Poor slob died of bladder cancer.

That, of course, was over a hundred years ago, and science has learned a lot since then.  Unfortunately -- and this is the sad part -- people in general apparently haven't.  There are still folks who prefer to believe foolishness over evidence-based research.  As my dad used to say, you can fix ignorant, but you can't fix stupid.

But the timing of the product recall in the Netherlands was just too wonderful not to comment upon.  And maybe this will wake a few people up.  I'm not really holding out that much hope, though.  The 5G-blocking-stuff manufacturers will probably just put the Dutch Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection on their (long) list of groups that are in on the conspiracy, joining the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control, and the National Institute of Health.  I'm probably in there somewhere, too, most likely on their "shill" list.  Which, by the way. makes me wonder where the hell my Shill Check™ is.  You'd think that all of my scorn would earn me something.

Maybe it was delayed in the mail.  The Post Office is probably on to the conspiracy and is preventing us shills from getting paid.  You know how it goes.

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I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The problems with falling back

Here in the United States we've just gone from Daylight Savings Time back onto Standard Time, and like a lot of us, it's playing hell with my circadian rhythms.

I'm a morning person, which you'll know if you've ever noticed the timestamp on my Skeptophilia posts.  This means, of course, that by the evening I'm pretty wiped out.  The result is that we have to make sure any social engagements we have are over by nine o'clock, or my wife will look over and find me curled up on the floor in the corner, asleep.

Which may explain why we don't get invited to many social engagements.

Anyhow, a lot of people look forward to the "Fall Back" in November, because it gains them an hour's sleep (for one weekend, at least), and until their bodies adjust to the new schedule they don't feel like they're getting up so damned early.  I have exactly the opposite response.  The "Fall Back" is worse for morning people than for night owls, because now we're waking up even earlier (by the clock), and now it's eight o'clock, not nine o'clock, that our brains start to shut down.  The "Spring Forward" in March is actually easier on me, because it brings the clock into closer sync with my natural body rhythms, even though I do lose an hour's sleep.

But the whole thing still strikes me as a colossally silly idea.  I'm in agreement with whoever compared Daylight Savings Time to cutting the top off of a blanket and sewing the piece onto the bottom to make it longer.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jamain, Sleeping man J1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A study released this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association looks at some of the physiological and neurological repercussions of jerking around our body clocks.  In "Are Daylight Savings Time Changes Bad for the Brain?", Beth A. Malow, Olivia Veatch, and Kanika Bagai conclude that the answer is "Definitely yes" (thus breaking Betteridge's Law, that says that any headline that asks a question can be answered by the word "No.").

The whole idea of Daylight Savings Time was about saving energy, and eleven years ago a study by the Department of Transportation found that the energy savings accrued from the change is a whopping 0.02%.  On the other hand, in the days following the March "Spring Forward," Malow et al. found that:

• a dramatic jump in the number of strokes;
• a 5% increase in the number of myocardial infarctions;
• a reduction in sleep duration among high school students that persisted for weeks after the transition;
• overall lower quality sleep (as measured by the amount of deep sleep) in just about everyone for at least two weeks after the transition.

This is on top of the fact that most of us sleep like crap anyhow, and it's having terrible effects.  Another study that came out this week, this one in Nature Human Behavior, found a strong link between sleep duration and quality, and the severity of anxiety and stress.  One sleepless night, the researchers found, causes a 30% jump in anxiety -- and like the Daylight Savings Time study, the ill effects persist for days or weeks afterward.  So it's not enough just to say "I'll sleep tomorrow night;" you need adequate sleep every night.

And most of us aren't getting it.

"We have identified a new function of deep sleep, one that decreases anxiety overnight by reorganizing connections in the brain," said study senior author Matthew Walker, a University of California-Berkeley professor of neuroscience and psychology.  "Deep sleep seems to be a natural anxiolytic, so long as we get it each and every night...  Without sleep, it’s almost as if the brain is too heavy on the emotional accelerator pedal, without enough brake."

"Deep sleep... restored the brain’s prefrontal mechanism that regulates our emotions, lowering emotional and physiological reactivity and preventing the escalation of anxiety," said study lead author Eti Ben Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley's Center for Human Sleep Science.  "People with anxiety disorders routinely report having disturbed sleep, but rarely is sleep improvement considered as a clinical recommendation for lowering anxiety.  Our study not only establishes a causal connection between sleep and anxiety, but it identifies the kind of deep NREM sleep we need to calm the overanxious brain."

We need to start looking at adequate sleep (both in duration and quality) not as a luxury, but a necessity, both for physical and mental health.  Unfortunately, our society isn't structured this way.  The students I used to work with were, almost without exception, chronically sleep deprived, from the demands of school, extracurricular activities, jobs, family, and some effort to have a social life.  But any serious look at rectifying this situation is usually greeted with a shrug and a comment like, "Yeah, I remember I hardly slept when I was that age."

The subtext -- "I got through it, so you can" -- is poisonous.  As my wife puts it, "Just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean it's not a really, really stupid idea."

At least there's hope, from the time-switch perspective; the Malow et al. paper tells us that there are only four states -- Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, and Maryland -- that aren't currently considering proposals to switch to a permanent clock.  Whether it's Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time doesn't matter; the problem is the clock change twice a year.  If those proposals are evaluated using the best available science (I know, our current government doesn't exactly have a sterling track record for making policy decisions based on science, but maybe wiser heads will prevail, this time at least), then there'll be one less thing to worry about with regards to getting adequate sleep.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The right to bigotry

New from the "What The Hell Did You Think Was Going To Happen?" department, we have: states that have passed "Religious Freedom Restoration Acts" -- which allow doctors and other professionals to refuse services to LGBTQ people on the basis of "freedom of religion" -- have markedly poorer health outcomes for sexual minorities than ones that have not.

An analysis done in Indiana by medical researchers at the Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analyzed the number of "unhealthy days" -- days on which the individual reported poor physical or mental health -- before and after the passage of an RFRA law, as a function of whether the subjects were heterosexual or LGBTQ.  The results couldn't be clearer.  Before and after the passage of the RFRA, the number of unhealthy days climbed for LGBTQ individuals, but remained constant for heterosexuals; and the same statistic in states that did not have RFRAs showed no change for either demographic in the same time period.

"Although we can’t say for certain what caused this significant increase in unhealthy days for sexual minority people in Indiana, the change coincided with intense public debate over enactment of the RFRA law," said lead author John R. Blosnich, assistant professor at the Pitt School of Medicine.  "If some other general, statewide factor was at work, we would expect to see the same increase in unhealthy days for heterosexual people in Indiana, and we didn’t see that."

"The Indiana case suggests that the character of the RFRA law might be an important factor in its broader impacts on public health,” said study co-author Erin Cassese of the University of Delaware.  "Some RFRAs are stronger than others, and Indiana’s RFRA law ‘has teeth’ in the sense that it can be used in private litigation, including cases where businesses wish to deny services to sexual minorities. It also permits courts to grant compensatory damages against whomever brings the suit – making a court challenge to a service denial a much riskier proposition...  This project adds to a growing body of research demonstrating that experiences of discrimination are associated with poor health outcomes in a range of minority populations.  While debate over RFRA laws doesn’t typically engage with questions of public health, this project suggests negative health outcomes might be a consequence of this type of policy, and thus warrant some consideration by policymakers."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I find it absolutely infuriating when mainstream Christians portray themselves as a persecuted group whose religious views have to be enshrined in law even if those views allow them to discriminate against others.  And here I thought one of the main teachings of Jesus was "love thy neighbor as thyself."  I guess what Jesus meant to say was "love thy neighbor as thyself, unless thy neighbor is the wrong color, wrong religion, or likes to do things with his or her naughty bits that make you feel squinky."

Oh, and then there's the part about "First, cast out the beam from thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to remove the mote from thy brother's eye."  Also kind of inconvenient, that.

And lest you think this is only a problem in the United States, Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been staunchly defending a law currently on the books in every state but Queensland and Tasmania that allows schools to expel kids if they come out as LGBTQ.

"That is the existing law," Morrison said.  "We are not proposing to change that law to take away the existing arrangement that exists."

Which is about as articulate as Donald Trump's comment that Hurricane Florence "was one of the wettest we've ever had from the standpoint of water." 

As an aside, where the hell are we finding these politicians, anyhow?  Back in the day, it seemed like at least they could put together a grammatical sentence, even if what that sentence contained wasn't necessarily something I agreed with.

Oh, but I'd forgotten about Dan "Mr. Potatoe" Quayle, who once said that we should be optimistic, because "things are more like they are now than they ever have been."

Never mind.

What I honestly don't get about this is how often discrimination rests on religious views, when you hear "mercy" and "charity" and "love" as being some of the cardinal virtues in pretty much any religion you look into.  It's kind of appalling when the people who sing "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" and "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" in church on Sunday are the same ones who are telling gay people to roast in hell the other six days of the week.

So that's today's exercise in anger induction.  You'd think we'd have gotten past all this bigotry as a species by now.  I guess we've come a way -- when I was a kid, hardly anyone would even admit to being LGBTQ, much less make a stink about it if they were discriminated against.  But what this makes clear is that the bigots aren't ready to give up their narrow-mindedness without a fight... and that we still have a long way to go.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Foot bath cure

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a guy who claimed that all you need to do to purge your home of "negative energies" (whatever those are) is to place a glass of vinegar and salt on your windowsill.  Vinegar, which clearly has magical properties, will then de-negativize you and your house.

The whole thing made me wonder why you couldn't achieve the same effect with, say, a jar of pickles.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago, a good friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the note, "Hey!  Here's something else you can do with vinegar!  I thought you'd want to know."

So I clicked the link, and was brought to the site Delishist, specifically to an article called "Soak Your Feet in Vinegar Once a Week, and You Will See How All of Your Diseases Disappear."

I am not, for the record, making the name of this article up.

My first thought, of course, was, "All your diseases?  Like, if you have a brain tumor and Parkinson's disease and narcolepsy simultaneously, you can get rid of all of them by soaking your feet in vinegar?  That can't possibly be what they mean."

But yes, that is in fact what they mean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, (391-365) Relaxing in bath (6427571119), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It will at this point be unsurprising to any of you that the whole thing revolves around "toxins."  What these specific toxins are, we're never told.  Maybe it's elemental mercury.  Maybe it's DDT.  Maybe it's battery acid.  Maybe it's all three at once.  In any case, we're led to believe that whatever they are, they're bad, and not only can't your body get rid of them by itself, there's no way to take them out except through your feet.

Which seems to me a little odd.  Why the feet?  Could I, if I wanted to, soak my ass in vinegar?  (Let me state for the record that I don't want to.  But my question stands.)  I mean, the human ass is much more directly connected to the process of getting rid of stuff we don't want in our body, although to be fair, the gluteus maximus muscle that makes up most of it has very little to do with it.

So I'm baffled as to why the feet are what we should be soaking.  Maybe it's because the feet are generally below the head, and toxins are heavy, or something.

In any case, here's how the authors explains the process:

You can also use ionic foot bath to detoxify your body from toxins.  This bath is based on electrolysis, which is a method that uses electrical current to make a chemical reaction.  You should use warm water to open your pores and salt is used as an anti-inflammatory astringent. Ions are absorbed through the feet and your body is getting a detox.  If the salt water becomes dark, that means you are eliminating toxins from your body.

Okay, so the basic principle is ions = good, and toxins = bad.  Got it.

But what about ions that are toxic?  Like the cyanide ion, for example?  I don't care what Delishist says, I'm not soaking my feet in cyanide.

And they're right about the definition of electrolysis, but the problem is, combining it with a vinegar foot bath would be a seriously bad idea.  Another thing I'm not going to do is stand in a tub of vinegar and then run an electric current through it and/or me.  Yes, it'd generate some serious ionage.  The downside, however, is called "electrocution."

The website also suggests soaking in a bath to which you've added ginger and hydrogen peroxide.  This is yet another thing I'm not going to do.  First of all, wouldn't that bleach your pubic hair?  I mean, it's fine if that's the look you're after, but I thought I'd mention it.  Another, and more serious, problem is that hydrogen peroxide works as an antiseptic because it kills nearly everything it touches, and given long enough, that would include your skin.  I know a guy who used peroxide on a cut, but it stayed open, and he decided it was infected, so he kept applying more and more peroxide.  Within a week he'd turned a minor cut into a gaping wound -- not from infection, but because he was putting something on it that was killing his own tissue.  So applying peroxide to my entire body, including my sensitive bits, sounds to me like a seriously bad idea.

So thanks anyhow, but I'll pass on soaking my feet in vinegar.  I find that washing them periodically keeps them relatively clean, and as for "getting rid of toxins," my liver and kidneys are perfectly capable of that.  My advice is to go back to using vinegar for making pickles, because a lot of the other stuff it's supposed to be good for is USDA Grade-A horseshit.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Frequency flim-flam

One of the things that strikes me, both about many purveyors of alt-med bullshit and their customers, is how little effort they exert even to make their arguments sound like legitimate science.

I mean, it's not like the science is inaccessible, or something.  Whatever else you can say about Wikipedia, it's a pretty good resource for quick, substantially accurate information.  (In fact, a 2005 study found that Wikipedia was close to Encyclopedia Brittanica in terms of overall accuracy.)

So finding out how stuff works is, honestly, only a click away.  Which is why the link a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a couple of days ago is appalling on so many levels.

It's called "A Bright Future for Lyme -- AmpCoil."  What it claims is that it can reduce the symptoms of Lyme disease by 84-93% through "non-invasive sound wave vibrations" delivered by a "pulsed electromagnetic field."  I live in an area of the United States where Lyme is common, and have two friends who have struggled dreadfully with it, so naturally, I wanted to know what this was all about.  I clicked the "Science & Technology" link they provided.  Here's what I found:

When parts of your body become stressed or diseased, they no longer produce the correct sound vibrations.  In other words, your body and its organs are not vibrating at its optimal resonant frequency.  By introducing the tones of healthy organs, minerals, nutrients, electrolytes, enzymes, flora, etc. back into your body, you can relax knowing that the rejuvenation and restoration process is underway... 

All matter (everything around us) is a result of a frequency and if you amplify the frequency, the structure of the matter will vibrate and change.  To many, sound vibration is simply something you hear such as music.  The idea that frequency can have an effect on our familiar physical reality seems a far-fetched notion.  But it's not far-fetched at all - it's quantum mechanics! 

It’s hard to argue against the fact that music makes you feel good, but can sound vibration actually shift your body?  Everything in nature owes its existence solely and completely to frequency and sound vibration.  Sound is the basis for form and shape and the component that holds life together.

Well, I think this might be the odds-on favorite for the Most Highly Distilled Bullshit Ever contest.  Amongst the inaccuracies I found:

1. Disease has nothing to do with "resonant frequencies."  Resonant frequencies (also called natural modes of vibration) are the modes of vibration that an object tends to oscillate at in the absence of a driving or damping force.  A simple example is a child's swingset.  You may have noticed how hard it is to get a swing to oscillate at anything but one frequency -- this is because that is its resonant frequency, the one that requires the least amount of energy input.  It's true that everything has a particular resonant frequency, but it has nothing to do with disease, all it has to do with is mass distribution around the axis of oscillation, which is why you so seldom see sick swingsets.
2. "Amplifying the frequency" doesn't make things improve, all it does is (if you're talking about light) move it toward the violet end of the spectrum, or (if you're talking about sound) raise the pitch.  High frequencies aren't good and low frequencies bad, or else everyone would instinctively prefer piccolos over cellos.  If anything, I suspect the opposite is true.
3. Matter is not the "result of a frequency."  Matter, or at least its distinctive property of mass, is apparently the result of the interaction of its constituent fundamental particles with the Higgs field.  "Matter is a result of frequency" comes as close to a meaningless pseudoscience-babble statement as anything I can think of.
4. Sound vibrations and electromagnetic field vibrations are not the same thing.  At all.  Sound vibrations are compression waves in a medium such as air or water.  EMF vibrations are oscillating changes in the electromagnetic field in space (and do not require a medium to travel through, which mystified the hell out of scientists at the turn of the 20th century, until Einstein came along and said, "Hey, guys, take a look at this.")  Light is an example of an EMF oscillation.
5. Quantum mechanics has zero to do with the effect of sound waves on matter.
6. Sound vibrations have zero to do with holding matter together.

And that's just from the bit I posted.  If you'll check out the link, you'll see that it goes on for pages and pages in that fashion.  Along the way, you find out that the AmpCoil -- the thing they're peddling -- is supposed to cure not only Lyme disease, but fibromyalgia, headaches/migraines, chronic back pain, arthritis, and a host of autoimmune diseases.

One other statement from their home page stood out, that I just have to tell you about:

Imagine the possibilities if harmful pathogens could no longer hide from beneficial hertz frequencies by burrowing into cell walls?

From one sentence, I have two further responses:

1. What the fuck is a "hertz frequency?"  "Hertz" is the unit for measuring frequency.  So "hertz frequency" is a little like saying "inch distance" or "liter volume."
2. I'm not terribly concerned about Lyme pathogens burrowing into my cell walls, for the very good reason that my cells don't have cell walls, given that I'm not a plant.

Then, at the bottom of the page, in teensy print, is the following:

AmpCoil units have not been evaluated by governments and are Consumer Products for personal use.  Disclaimer: The AmpCoil System is not intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure or prevention of any disease, medical condition, physical or psychological disorder.  It should not be considered a replacement for medical advice or treatment.

Say what?  What, exactly, do you call the following statements, taken right from their website?

• Safe & simple alternative Lyme treatment for everyone.
• The AmpCoil, powered by the BetterGuide App, can help reshape the form and function of vibrational imbalances in the body by re-tuning each and all parts of one’s physiology and anatomy.  AmpCoil is like a tuning fork for the human body!
• The AmpCoil is a non-invasive PEMF sound technology that brings the body back in tune, vibrating in its original, pure state faster than you might expect.

So okay, enough for the ranting.  But what appalls me about all of this is how quickly these claims would vanish into a puff of foul-smelling vapor if you just looked up some of this shit on Wikipedia.  That's all you have to do.  You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or biology.  You don't need to be a microbiologist.  You don't have to understand how to build a machine that can deliver a pulsed electromagnetic field.

All you have to be able to do is to go online and read critically for about five minutes.

What's worst is that there's legitimate research out there on the effect of electromagnetic field stimulation on a variety of disorders.  TCMS (trans-cranial magnetic stimulation) has shown promise in treating cases of intractable depression, for example.  But you will get nowhere (1) diagnosing yourself, and (2) buying an electric field generator, and (3) applying it to random body parts.  All that'll happen is either the placebo effect, or worse, you'll avoid getting legitimate medical care for an actual disease.

Amazingly, the scientists actually know what they're doing.  Listen to them.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So that's today's dip in the deep end.  Bottom line: do some research.  If someone makes a claim, see if you can find independent corroboration.  And remember what Tim Minchin has to say about this kind of stuff: "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just mindblowing fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

Heavy-duty nonsense

Online Critical Thinking course -- free for a short time!

This week, we're launching a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking through Udemy!  It includes about forty short video lectures, problem sets, and other resources to challenge your brain, totaling about an hour and a half.  The link for purchasing the course is here, but we're offering it free to the first hundred to sign up!  (The free promotion is available only here.)  We'd love it if you'd review the course for us, and pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested!

Thanks!

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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 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 won't be healthier; the ATP will break down, liberating the energy as heat, and you'll 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 a Williams-Sonoma and my magnetic field starts attracting metal kitchen implements, and I get impaled in the forehead by a meat cleaver 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.

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This week's featured book is a wonderful analysis of all that's wrong with media -- Jamie Whyte's Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders.  A quick and easy read, it'll get you looking at the nightly news through a different lens!