Slap shot

Every time I find what I think must be the stupidest possible alt-med quack "cure," the alt-med crowd says, "Hold my beer."

We've looked at fire cupping.  We've considered quantum downloadable medicines.  We've investigated homeopathic water, bee sting acupuncture, and "rectal insufflation" (also known as blowing ozone gas up your ass).

But this one is the odds-on winner for the 2018 "How Gullible Can You Get?" Award: slapping therapy.

The idea here, which comes out of Traditional Chinese Medicine, is that if you're sick, the flow of chi through your meridians is stuck, and what you need is to jar it loose, similar to when you smack the bottom of a ketchup bottle to get the last bit out.

But I'm not talking about a few little love-taps, here.  This is one patient following a "treatment:"

The link I included above, which is to Frank van der Kooy's outstanding blog about scientific charlatans and medical quackery, describes a darker side of this kind of bullshit.  A six-year-old Australian boy with type-one diabetes, Aidan Fenton, was brought by his parents to a "self-healing course" run by Hongchi Xiao, and subjected to slapping therapy.  Xiao charged each participant $1,800, smacked their bare skin, and told them they could not receive ordinary medications during the "therapy" because it would "interfere with the flow of chi."

The boy, deprived of his insulin, went into hyperglycemic shock.  He was rushed to a hospital, but could not be revived.

The only positive note is that Xiao is being charged in the boy's death, and it's possible charges of negligence will be brought against the parents as well.

Let me cut to the chase, here.  There is absolutely no rigorous evidence of "chi" and "meridians," much less that something like a slap could change it somehow with beneficial results for your health.  If you don't take my word for it -- and you shouldn't, as I'm a layperson at best with respect to medical claims -- take a look at this article from way back in 1995 by Peter Huston, who has researched Traditional Chinese Medicine extensively.  It's fair and thoughtful -- and comes to the inevitable conclusion that there is no evidence for it whatsoever.  (This takedown of TCM in The Skeptic's Dictionary is equally unequivocal, and not nearly so gentle.)

So once again, we're faced with the objection of "what's the harm?" having a very specific answer.  The principle of caveat emptor should apply -- if someone who is ill wants to try a crackpot cure, that's their choice -- but when a child's life is at risk, the moral calculus changes.  In this case, it's criminal negligence at the very least.  And quacks like Hongchi Xiao need to be put out of the way for a long, long time.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Hugh Ross Williamson's Historical Enigmas.  Williamson takes some of the most baffling unsolved mysteries from British history -- the Princes in the Tower, the identity of Perkin Warbeck, the Man in the Iron Mask, the murder of Amy Robsart -- and applies the tools of logic and scholarship to an analysis of the primary documents, without descending into empty speculation.  The result is an engaging read about some of the most perplexing events that England ever saw.

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

Canine chakra cleansing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nose lasers redux

One of the nice things about science, and skepticism in general, is that it self-corrects.  Properly applied, skepticism leads you along based upon one thing and one thing only; the data.  Hard evidence is always the ultimate arbiter.

Now, you can still go astray, especially with complex data sets or experimental protocols that require extreme precision.  And there are the unfortunately unavoidable pitfalls that come from having a fallible human brain that can sometimes take all of the right information and still put it together wrong.  But with sufficient time, effort, and energy, and usually helped by having many pairs of eyes trained on the same question, science usually arrives at a pretty solid answer.

That self-correcting mechanism, however, means that we skeptics have to eat crow sometimes.  A few weeks ago I posted a rather sardonic piece about "Intranasal Light Therapy," to the effect that the practice of aiming a beam of light up your nose couldn't possibly generate any positive therapeutic effects.  A couple of days ago I got a very courteous response to the post, informing me that the procedure had, in fact, been double-blind tested and was found to have results that definitely land it in the "hmmm, interesting" department.  The gentleman who responded sent me some source material, and asked me to study it and reconsider my position.

The most interesting link he sent me was to a paper published in the International Journal of Photoenergy, entitled "Randomized, Double-Blind, and Placebo-Controlled Clinic Report of Intranasal Low-Intensity Laser Therapy on Vascular Diseases," by Liu et al.  I encourage you to take a look at it.  The researchers postulate that the laser light used might be generating its effects via stimulation of the olfactory nerve, but they were up front that there are other possibilities.  What made me sit up and take notice is that the findings were statistically significant, with patients in the experimental group showing reduction in blood indexes associated with inflammation, including plasma viscosity, red blood cell aggregation, and low-density lipoprotein levels, as compared to the control group.

So far, it's suggestive that there is "something going on here" beyond the usual woo-woo placebo effect that I have written about so many times before.  I do have two quick caveats, though, neither of which may be all that significant, but which are still enough to keep me from being sold 100%.

First, the lead author of the study, Timon Cheng-Yi Liu, is the science adviser for MedicLights, Inc., the company that is in business to sell intranasal light units.  This doesn't exactly constitute a conflict of interest -- many scientists have connections to industry, and it would be cynical indeed of me to think that they were all biased because of it.  But it is interesting that Liu listed in the "affiliations" section of the paper his connection to South China Normal University, and not his connection to MedicLights, Inc., given its relevance to the topic at hand.

Second, and more troubling (to me at least) is a mention in the introduction that the effects of intranasal light therapy may be mediated through the "meridians" that are described in traditional Chinese medicine.  As far as I can tell, "meridians" don't exist.  According to a 1997 statement from the National Institute of Health,

Despite considerable efforts to understand the anatomy and physiology of the "acupuncture points", the definition and characterization of these points remains controversial. Even more elusive is the basis of some of the key traditional Eastern medical concepts such as the circulation of qi, the meridian system, and the five phases theory, which are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information but continue to play an important role in the evaluation of patients and the formulation of treatment in acupuncture.

Which sounds pretty unequivocal to me.  So bringing in claims from a system of questionable medical knowledge hardly earns any validity points in my estimation.  Still, it must be said that even when people medicated themselves with herbs and credited the improvement in their conditions to spirits that inhabited the plants, the effect was there even though the explanation was wrong.  So I'm not willing to jettison the entire thing because they decided to dip their toes into the rather muddy waters of traditional Chinese medicine.

Anyway, there you have it.  At least a partial retraction, and a desire to learn more.  Woo-woos are fond of quoting Hamlet -- "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Usually, it's meant to throw a literary version of "You don't know everything" at skeptics -- a statement that is literally correct, but that doesn't give you license to claim that any damnfool thing you came up with has to be true because of it.

However, interpreted correctly, I think the quote from Hamlet is quite right.  You never know what curve ball nature will throw at you next, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that science is always capable of surprising me.  There are far weirder ideas than improving your health by shining a laser up your nose -- and although it very much remains to be seen what exactly the laser is doing, just the fact that it's doing something leaves Intranasal Light Therapy filed under "this deserves further investigation."