Raw nonsense

Despite the fact that our modern lifestyle has increased our life expectancy to longer than it's ever been in the history of humanity, romanticizing the practices of the past is still ridiculously widespread.

People who claim that "everything causes cancer" conveniently ignore two things: first, that a good many forms of cancer would decline dramatically if we'd do things doctors recommend, like cutting out tobacco and getting vaccinated against HPV; and second, that one of the reasons cancer rates have climbed is that we're no longer dying of other stuff, like diphtheria, typhoid, measles, and smallpox.

But that kind of thinking seldom makes any inroads into the minds of people committed to anti-vaxx (or completely anti-medical) propaganda.  The levels of irrationality some of this thinking reaches are truly staggering.  I had one person comment on one of my posts -- in all apparent seriousness -- "my great-grandma never got vaccinated against anything, and she survived."

Well, of course she did.  If she'd died at age three of diphtheria, she wouldn't have been your great-grandma, now would she?

How about asking great-grandma how many of her siblings and cousins died of childhood infectious diseases -- like my grandfather's two oldest sisters, Marie-Aimée and Anne-Désée, who died five days apart at the ages of 22 and 16 -- of measles.

The person who posted that comment should win some sort of award for compressing the greatest number of fallacies into the shortest possible space.  Confirmation bias, cherry-picking, anecdotal evidence, and the post hoc fallacy, all in nine words.  Kind of impressive, actually.

Despite all this, there are huge numbers of people who want to return to what our distant ancestors did, claiming that it's "healthier" or "more natural," conveniently neglecting the fact that back then, as Thomas Hobbes so trenchantly put it, "life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The result is the kind of thing I ran into in an article in Ars Technica last week about a trend I hadn't heard of, which is to drink "raw water."  "Raw water," which you might guess from the name, is water that hasn't been filtered or treated, but is collected (or even bottled and sold) right from a spring or river or whatnot.  And predictably, what happened was that nineteen people fell ill with a diarrheal disease (specifically Campylobacter jejuni) when it turned out that their trendy "natural spring water" turned out to be just ordinary runoff from a creek drainage that had been contaminated by bacteria from bird nests.

The amount of pseudoscience you run into with this stuff is astonishing.  In researching this topic, I found people who claim that "industrially-processed water" (i.e. most tap water) has "mind-control drugs" in it, designed to turn us all into Koolaid-drinkin' sheeple, and even one that said treatment plants deliberately "alter the molecular structure of water, turning it into a toxin."

Making me wonder how, or if, these people passed high school chemistry.

I spent the summers during my twenties and thirties back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics, and I know how careful you have to be.  The clearest bubbling mountain brook can be contaminated with nasty stuff like Giardia and Salmonella, two diseases that should be high on the list of germs you never want to have inside you.  I used iodine sterilizing tablets for all the water I drank -- and I never got sick.  But I knew people who did, and as one of them vividly described it, "Having Giardia means that for three weeks you're going to be on a first-name basis with your toilet."

Which is funny until you find out that in the process, he lost twenty pounds and spent three days in the hospital hooked up to an IV so he could stay hydrated.

Look, I know our high-tech world isn't perfect.  I know about pesticides and herbicides and industrial contamination and coverups and food additives with dubious health effects.  My wife and I try as hard as we can to eat locally-sourced organic meat and produce, not to mention growing our own vegetables.  But the admittedly true statement that technology and the pharmaceuticals industry have created some problems does not equate to "therefore we should jettison everything they provide and return to the Stone Age."

Speaking of fallacies, there's another one for you: the package-deal fallacy.  You get into this stuff, it reads like the "what not to do" section of a critical thinking textbook.

So if you're inclined to switch over to "raw water," just don't.  Drinking water is treated for a reason.  Our Stone Age ancestors didn't have such great lives, and idealizing it as some kind of idyllic Garden of Eden is complete horse shit. 

Horse shit ironically being one of the things that might well be in your "raw water."

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Bee all, end all

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

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

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

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

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

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

The pharmaceutical greenhouse

Three hundred years ago, a lot of the medicines that were used to treat human conditions were identified using the "Doctrine of Signatures."  The idea was, if something -- especially a part of a plant -- looked like a human body part, it must be useful for treating diseases of that part.  It also gave a lot of plants their names; most of the plants that have names that end in "wort" (from the Old English wyrt meaning "herb") come from this idea, and it's why we have plants like lungwort, spleenwort, liverwort, ribwort, bladderwort, navelwort, and nipplewort.  And, for the record, I didn't make any of these up.  It's also why a lot of plants have scientific names that come from human body parts, such as the orchid.  Orchis is Greek for "testicle."

I didn't make that up, either.

I should probably mention at this juncture that a lot of the patients who were treated using the Doctrine of Signatures died.  It did lead to the discovery of some plants that did have important therapeutic use -- such as digitalis -- but more often than not, the various worts are useless, and some are actually toxic.  So it's a good thing for those doctors that they lived before the concept of "malpractice lawsuit" was invented.

The problem is, some purveyors of "natural medicines" are still using the same sort of argument today, and people are still falling for it.  Take the whole "pine pollen extract" thing that has been making the rounds lately.  Given that pollen is the male spore of a plant, and produces the sperm cells, guess what they say it's used for?  Yup!  Got it in one!

Raw pine pollen is the richest seedbed of testosterone derived from plants; since it is the male sperm of pine trees, it fosters plush growth in all living creatures, from trees and plants, to animals, to humans. Some experts claim that pine pollen is an ingredient in certain pharmaceuticals designed to treat low testosterone levels in both men and women.  [Source]

I'm not sure if I want to experience "plush growth," myself.  The whole thing reminds me way too much of the Moss Guy from the movie Creepshow.

Be that as it may, is there any evidence that pine pollen actually works to make you, um, Stiff Like The Mighty Pine Tree?  The answer seems to be "not much."  I did a fairly intensive search, and found one source that said that I should use it because my "manhood is grumbling with hunger... for nature's invincible transmitter of life energy;" another that said that pine pollen is "adaptogenic, so it will cater to exactly what your body needs and treat any area of distress;" and a third that said that after a pine pollen cocktail, you might radiate so many Sex Vibes that you'll end up having your leg humped for 45 minutes by a female dog.  Although why that's a selling point, I have no idea.

Then, of course, you have your anti-aging cream made from "raspberry plant stem cells," which works because "(p)lant stem cells are equipped with regenerative properties, and can 'self-renew.' They can either form a large reservoir of unspecialized cells, or upon stimulation grow into 'differentiated' plant elements and become a new root, leaf, flower or other part of the plant."  I'm assuming that they're talking in some vague way about parenchyma, the unspecialized tissue that all plants have (and which is usually used for starch storage, as "filler" cells in stems, and for regrowing damaged tissue).  The idea here being, I suppose, that if plants have cells that regenerate organs, if you smear those cells on your face, you'll regenerate youthful skin, or something.

It bears mention that I also looked for any peer-reviewed research that showed any results for either pine pollen or "raspberry plant stem cells," either for or against.  No luck.  My sense is that the people who are selling this stuff are making up the whole thing as they go along.  So, who knows?  Maybe the next big seller will be a kiwi fruit extract for male pattern baldness, I dunno.

So, anyway, that's our modern-day answer to the Doctrine of Signatures.  In today's litigious society, though, sellers of snake oil have to be a little more careful than the people who sold Decoction of Lungwort for bronchitis three hundred years ago.  This is why, on virtually all of these products, you'll see a tiny little label that says "Not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease or ailment."  Which will protect their asses quite nicely.  No application of Salve of Buttockwort needed.

Okay, I did make that one up.

Weekend wrap-up

It's been a busy week,  here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  I and my investigative team (made up of my two highly-trained dogs, Doolin and Grendel) have dug up some wonderful stories that will hopefully not make you lose complete faith in the intelligence of the human race.

First, from Indonesia, we have word that there is a law being drafted that will make black magic illegal.  Not only will casting spells and harming someone be punishable by jail time, even claiming to be able to do so will be considered a criminal offense.  Khatibul Umam Wiranu, an MP from the Democrat Party, believes that these measures are necessary to protect the populace from evil magicians.  But, he cautions, any charges of witchcraft filed should be "based on fact finding, not [just] on someone's statement."

Well, that should at least make it less likely anyone's going to be arrested.

Other proposed changes to the penal code include increasing jail time for such crimes as having sex with someone you're not married to.

The best part?  Proponents of the new laws are calling this a push to "modernize" Indonesia's out-of-date criminal code, which was last revised in 1918.  Because worrying about who's getting laid by whom, and claiming that the creepy-looking old lady down the street is a witch, is so 21st century.


Go a few hundred miles north into China, and we find our second story, which is a "beauty treatment" called "huǒ liáo" that involves setting your face on fire.  [Source]

I thought that mooshing charcoal paste and nightingale poop extract on your skin was the dumbest beauty treatment I'd ever heard, but this one takes the prize.  Huǒ liáo consists of soaking a towel in alcohol and a "secret elixir," and the practitioner putting it on your face or other "problem area" and then setting it ablaze.  The practitioner is supposed to quickly smother the fire with another towel.  Don't believe me?  Here's a picture of someone having the treatment:

Nope, I see nothing at all that could possibly go wrong with that.

When asked about the treatment, a doctor who specializes in "natural cures," Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum, said, "While alcohol will help carry whatever is in the elixir into the body, it's not really necessary to light it on fire.  However, one explanation is that extreme heat triggers an adrenaline response which can shift your body's chemistry, improving some symptoms like indigestion and slow metabolism."

You know, if I want an adrenaline rush, I'll just go ziplining or ride a roller coaster.  Anyone who needs to set his/her face on fire in order to get an "adrenaline response" has other problems besides dull skin.


Next, we have a story in from Spain that someone has discovered a carving in some stonework in a cathedral that dates from the 12th century that depicts...

... an astronaut.

The carving, which apparently shows a guy in an Apollo-program-style space suit, is on the Cathedral of Salamanca.  Want to take a look?  Here you go:

 

 Of course, this has given multiple orgasms to the whole "ancient astronauts" crew, the ones who think that Chariots of the Gods is Holy Writ, who think the pyramids were built by aliens, and so on.  The only problem is, the cathedral was renovated in 1992, and this stonework was clearly added then by an artist with a sense of humor.  In fact, Snopes.com has a page on this claim, and they even found an article in a Portuguese newspaper that described the figure:

The renovation of the Cathedral of Salamanca in 1992 integrated modern and contemporary motifs, including a carved figure of an astronaut.  The use of this motif was in the tradition of cathedral builders and restorers including contemporary motifs among older ones as a way of signing their works.  The person responsible for the restoration, Jeronimo Garcia, chose an astronaut as the symbol of the twentieth century.

Well, that sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?  Unfortunately, this hasn't convinced anyone except the people who were already skeptical, and all it's done is hooked up the Ancient Astronauts crew with the Conspiracy Theories crew, and now we have claims that the Spanish (and/or Portuguese) governments are covering up the evidence of ancient alien invasion, for god alone knows what reason.


In any case, this brings us to our last story, which is about a petition that is currently out there to save planet Earth from an extraterrestrial attack.  How, exactly, signing a petition is going to help, I don't know.  Maybe when the aliens get here, and are on the verge of blowing us to smithereens with their laser cannons, we can shout, "No!  You can't do that!  WE HAVE A PETITION!"  Maybe the idea is that if enough people sign it, governments will for god's sake do something, such as to deploy a protective shield around the Earth in the fashion of the historical documentary Men in Black III.  I dunno.

In any case, the petition has currently garnered a whole fourteen signatures.  They're shooting for 100,000.  You can sign if you want to.  Me, I probably won't.  My general feeling is that any species that modernizes laws by outlawing witchcraft and premarital sex, and considers setting your face on fire a beauty treatment, deserves everything it gets.

The lure of the exotic

One of the first things we do in my Critical Thinking classes is to learn some of the basic logical fallacies, and afterwards, students are assigned to peruse current print media and find examples.  One of my students this semester, a highly intelligent and perceptive young lady, came up to me a few days ago with a frown on her face.

"I think there's a fallacy you didn't tell us about," she said.

"I'm sure there is," I responded. "We just hit some of the common ones.  What did you find?"

"Well, it's like... the 'exotic fallacy.'  Sort of the opposite of the naturalistic fallacy.  If something sounds exotic, and especially if it comes from some place distant and mysterious like Japan or Tibet, it must be real, or useful, or beneficial."

And she's right, of course.  Attributing anything -- especially some sort of health-related item -- to the Wisdom of the Ancients gives it immediate credibility.  And you'll notice that those Ancients never seem to come from, for example, Omaha:

The exotic fallacy is especially common in the area of "alternative medicine," where nearly all of the "alternatives" are herbs, extracts, and minerals from Asia and Africa.  Now, note that I'm not implying here that all of these treatments are useless; assuming that a traditional cure is useless because it comes from some faraway place is just as illogical as assuming that it must be useful because it does.  I'm more commenting on the immediate appeal -- especially, the selling appeal -- of the exotic:

Of course, this also applies to religion and philosophy, doesn't it?  Wicca wouldn't have nearly the esoteric air it has without the constant mention of the Druids -- who, if not exactly from an exotic place (sorry, British readers), still have that same air of the mysterious.  A quick Google search turned up literally hundreds of books, videos, and websites that purport to teach you about Ancient Wisdom from (these were just the first few I saw):

• the Bolivian Andes
• Tibet
• various Native American tribes (especially those in the Southwest)
• Japan (usually connected to Zen practices)
• India
• the Yucatán

As far as the last one goes, think about why the whole Mayan Apocalypse thing caught on like it did.  I'm sure that it was, in some part, because it was a Mayan Apocalypse.  As Harold Camping found out, apocalypses don't go nearly so well when they're managed by old white guys from Oakland.

It's a little mystifying why some places have a lot of exotic cachet, and others don't.  Polynesia has always seemed to me to be the ultimate in exotic destinations, but you don't hear much about Ancient Polynesian Vitamin Supplements or the Teachings of the Mystical Polynesian Elders.  (One exception is that the cult of Cthulhu comes from there, but I'm not sure that it would qualify in most people's books as "appealing.")  Likewise, Peru and Bolivia have appeal; Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia, right next door, don't.  Exotic stuff from Africa is seldom attributed to a particular country, because most of the governments of African countries are in such a disastrous state that any gain in exotic appeal a product might garner by being from, say, Cameroon would be canceled out if the potential customer knew what it was like to actually live in Cameroon.  So stuff from Africa is often attached to tribes rather than countries:

So, anyway, there you are.  A new fallacy to look out for.  I've traveled a lot, and if there's one thing I've learned from being in other countries, it's that no place, and no group of people, has cornered the market on wisdom, ethics, intelligence, rationality, or morality.  All cultures, including my own, have come up with good ideas and bad ones, smart practices and completely moronic ones.  Myself, I'd rather use my brain to figure out whether an idea or a product is worth anything, rather than just deciding that it must be good just because it supposedly comes from somewhere exotic. 

On the other hand, I have to say that I'd pass up a nice juicy hamburger if I could get some Trinidadian curried goat roti.  So I suppose, like most things, it's all a matter of what you find appealing.

I feel pretty

A friend of mine recently sent me a link about beauty treatments.  She wasn't, I think, trying to give me any sort of unsubtle suggestion about my need to use such products.  The reason she thought of me was that the world of cosmetics is no longer a simple matter of cleansers, scents, and body paints of various sorts.  It's now its own little mini-universe of pseudoscience, filled with jargon, half-truths, and outright lies.

The link my friend sent me, which you can view here, is only a small sampling of the types of beauty products that the gullible can spend lots of money on.  If you'd rather not peruse the whole list, I present below a few of the most egregious examples, along with the prices, which I am not making up.

1)  Ina White Gold Detoxifying Crystal Salt ($85).  The advertisement says, "This bathing treat uses Himalayan crystals to draw out toxins lurking in the body.  In fact, a 30-minute soak is equivalent to a three-day detox!"

First of all, you don't have any toxins "lurking in your body" that your kidneys and liver aren't perfectly well equipped to deal with.  Anything toxic your body produces isn't excreted through the skin in any case, so I don't care what you put in your bath water, you're not going to draw much out through your skin except for water.

Which brings me to the next claim:  that this stuff "leaves your skin feeling firmer."  I'll just bet it does.  It's... salt.  Plain old sodium chloride, which is the same regardless of whether it comes from the Himalayas or from the shaker on your dinner table.  ("Ina White Gold" does have some herbal extracts in it to make it smell nice, though.)  And the reason it leaves your skin feeling firmer is because you've dehydrated your upper skin layer -- same as when you've gone swimming in the ocean and not showered off afterwards.  Your lower epidermis has lost water and shrunk a little, and your skin will feel a little too tight for a while afterwards.  It has nothing to do with toxins, toning, or the Himalayas.

2)  The Energy Muse "Miracle Bead" Wearable Scents bracelet ($25).  This one combines energy field nonsense with magic bracelet nonsense and aromatherapy nonsense to create a woo-woo trifecta.  It is a little bracelet with a "natural seed" that emits "positive vibrations," treated with a perfume that will give you "movement, vitality, and confidence."  All I can say is that if spending $25 of your hard-earned cash for a seed on a string gives you confidence, you must come by your confidence a different way than I do.

3)  Origins "For Men" Skin Diver Active Charcoal Body Wash ($19).  Charcoal, as we all know because it's barbecuing season, has purifying properties.  So we're supposed to slather charcoal glop all over our bodies to "draw out pore-clogging toxins."  I'll stick with soap, thanks.

4)  The Organic Pharmacy Detox Cellulite Body Oil ($58).  More detox stuff, this one scented with grapefruit and rose oil.  This one, in addition to "drawing out toxins" again, is supposed to get rid of "cellulite."  What is cellulite, you may ask?  Sit down, children, for a brief biology lesson.

Cellulite is fat.  No different than any other fat.  Why, then, does it look dimply?  Because the distribution of connective tissue on the upper legs and butt is different from that on the stomach.  The skin layers on the lower torso are "pegged down" by heavy collagen fibers, similar to the stitching on a mattress, so when you gain weight there, it creates a puckery appearance.  No diet, no vitamins or herbal extracts, and certainly no "detox body oil" is going to "get rid of cellulite."  The only way to get rid of cellulite is to do what gets rid of every other kind of fat in the body, to wit:  eat less and exercise more.


And if you haven't already blown enough money on stuff like the above, you can go to the Shizuka Day Spa in New York City ($180) and have them paint nightingale poop extract on your face, the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel Reliquary Spa ($225) and have them drum on you with bamboo reeds to "balance your energy flow," or The Peninsula Spa of Beverly Hills ($275 and up) to have a massage with "gem oils," which is massage oil colored to look like emeralds, rubies, or sapphires.

I wish I was making this stuff up.  Even the cheap beauty products, the kind you can find on grocery store shelves, are advertised using pseudoscience; look at the shampoos which are "enriched with protein and vitamins," as if humans are some kind of alien life form that can somehow absorb nutrients through our hair.  I suppose the drive to look youthful and vibrant is strong enough to induce people to drop serious quantities of money on whatever they think will work -- but besides the lamentable gullibility factor here, there's the sheer greed of the manufacturers for misleading these people about what these products do.  The gullibility is unfortunate; the lying should be outright illegal.