Goodness gracious...

Are you feeling like your love life is a little cooler than you'd like?  Are you lacking in the ardor department?  Does it seem like you just don't have the romantic sizzle you once had?

If so, I have the solution.

All you have to be willing to do is to have someone set your crotch on fire.

I'm not making this up, and I wish I was, because after researching this I now feel like I need to spend the rest of the day in a protective crouch.  According to a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, we find out that in China, there has been a surge in the popularity of treating waning sex drive by placing towels soaked with alcohol over guys' privates, and then setting them on fire.

If the description wasn't enough, we have photographs:

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine that my reaction to having flames spouting from my reproductive region would be just to lie there, hands behind my head, with a blissful expression on my face.  Now that I come to think of it, I can imagine no circumstance in which I'd allow anyone to come near my reproductive region with flames in the first place.  But apparently, there are guys in China who love this.  The article quotes a 33 year old banker, Ken Cho, who says, "It is all about keeping blood flow moving rapidly.  The warmth from the burning towels speeds the blood through the body and it makes me perform 50% better in bed.  I have tried all sorts of therapies in the past to keep my sexual performance up to speed but this is by far the best."

Which raises several questions.  With guys, the issue isn't with getting the blood to flow rapidly, it's more with getting the blood to stay put.  If you get my drift.  And the whole "50% better" statistic just makes me think he's making shit up.  50% better for whom?  Did he query his girlfriend one night, asking her to rate his performance, and then he went to get the Great Balls Afire Treatment, and they did the deed again, and she said afterwards, "Yes, dear, that was at least 50% better than last time?"

Somehow I don't think this is the kind of thing that lends itself to a controlled study.

What I really wonder, though, is how anyone thought of this to begin with.  Because, after all, some poor schmuck had to be the first to try it.  Can't you picture it?  Dude goes to his doctor, and says, "Doc, I've been experiencing low sex drive lately," and the doctor says, "Oh, we can treat that.  All we have to do is set your penis on fire."

I don't know about you, but I would run, not walk, out of the office.  Even if many of us would fancy being a Hunka Hunka Burnin' Love, this is not the way to do it.

So what we have here is a combination of the placebo effect, self-delusion, wishful thinking, and high tolerance of risk.  If there was any doubt.

Anyhow, that's our contribution from the Extremely Alternative Medicine department for today.  Bringing up yet again my contention that every time I think I have found the most completely idiotic idea humanity is capable of, someone breaks the previous record.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a brilliant retrospective of how we've come to our understanding of one of the fastest-moving scientific fields: genetics.

In Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book The Gene: An Intimate History, we're taken from the first bit of research that suggested how inheritance took place: Gregor Mendel's famous study of pea plants that established a "unit of heredity" (he called them "factors" rather than "genes" or "alleles," but he got the basic idea spot on).  From there, he looks at how our understanding of heredity was refined -- how DNA was identified as the chemical that housed genetic information, to how that information is encoded and translated, to cutting-edge research in gene modification techniques like CRISPR-Cas9.  Along each step, he paints a very human picture of researchers striving to understand, many of them with inadequate tools and resources, finally leading up to today's fine-grained picture of how heredity works.

It's wonderful reading for anyone interested in genetics and the history of science.

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

Elaborate nonsense

As harsh as I sometimes am about woo-woo beliefs, I understand how fear and lack of knowledge can induce you to accept counterfactual nonsense.  I also get how wishful thinking could draw you in to a set of beliefs, if they line up with the way you would like the universe to work, even though, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."

This combination of desire for the world to be other than it is, and fear of what the world actually is, probably drives most superstition.  All, as I said, understandable, given human nature.

But what continually baffles me is how byzantine some of those beliefs become.  I can accept that it might be an attractive model for some people that the position of the stars and planets somehow guides your life; but I start really wondering once you start coming up with stuff like the following (from Susan Miller's astrology site, on a page devoted to predictions for this month for my astrological sign, Scorpio):

Sometimes, in about 20 percent of the cases, an eclipse will deliver news a month to the day later plus or minus five days.  More rarely, an eclipse will introduce news one month to the day before it occurs, but only in about 5 percent of the cases.  In most cases, 75 percent of the time, an eclipse will deliver some sort of news that things are about to change almost instantly.

This eclipse will be in Scorpio, 11 degrees, and will come conjunct Saturn.  This alone says that the decision you make now will be a big one, and that you will commit all your energy to this decision.  You will be in a serious mode, and it appears a promise you make now will last a very long time, possibly forever.  Mars and Pluto are your two ruling planets (Scorpio is one of the few signs that have two rulers), and remarkably both will be supportive by tight mathematical angles to this eclipse.  This tells me that the final outcome of this eclipse will be very positive.  Every eclipse has two acts, so see how events unfold in coming weeks.

Yes, it's bullshit; but it's really elaborate bullshit.  You might criticize these people for pushing fiction as reality, but you have to admit that they spend a lot of time crafting their fiction.

I ran across an unusually good example of this a while back on the Skeptic subreddit, which is a wonderful place to go for articles debunking pseudoscience.  The site I found posted there is called "TCM - the 24-hour Organ Qi Cycle," which immediately should raise red flags -- "TCM" is traditional Chinese medicine, much of which has been double-blind tested and found to be worthless; and "qi" is a pattern for "energy flow" through the body that basically is non-existent, making "qi" only useful as an easy way of getting rid of the "Q" tile in a game of Scrabble.

What this site purports to do is to get you to "balance your body" using information about when during the day you feel most ill-at-ease.  This then tells you what organ in your body is "out of balance" and which of the "elements" you should pay attention to.  And no, I'm not talking about anything off the periodic table; we're back to a medieval "Earth," "Fire," "Water," "Metal," "Wood," and "Ministerial Fire" model, although the last-mentioned sounds like what they used back in the Dark Ages to burn people at the stake for heresy.

So, naturally, I had to check out what my own out-of-balance part was.  I'm frequently awake, and restless, at 3 AM - 5 AM, so I rolled the cursor over the "color wheel" and found that this means my lungs are out of balance.  "The emotions connected to the lungs are Grief and Sadness," I was told, which makes sense for the time of day because if I'm awake then it means I won't be able to get back to sleep before my alarm goes off.  It goes on to ask me some questions, to wit: "Have you buried your grief?  Are you sad?  Are you always sighing?  It is most healthy to express your emotions as you feel them.  You may need to express your emotions by crying, writing and/or talking to a friend."

Well, thanks for caring, and everything, but I'm actually doing okay, and don't sigh all that much, except at faculty meetings.

Oh, but I am told that if I can get my lungs in balance, I'll have "lustrous skin."  And who could resist that?

On it goes.  If your small intestine is out of balance, you should eat only "vital foods chock full of enzymes."  If you have diarrhea, you need to "strengthen your spleen qi."  If your "kidneys are deficient," you won't have much in the way of sex drive, but you can bring them back into balance by eating black sesame seeds, celery, duck, grapes, kidney beans, lamb, millet, oysters, plums, sweet potatoes, raspberries, salt, seaweed, strawberries, string beans, tangerines, walnuts, and yams.

The entire time I was looking at this site, I kept shaking my head and saying, "How do you know any of this?"  The stuff on this website seems to fall into two categories -- blatantly obvious (e.g. "crying if you're sad helps you to feel better") and bizarrely abstruse (e.g. "engaging in loving sex keeps your pericardium healthy").

I suppose the elaborateness is understandable from one angle; if you want people to believe what you're saying, you'll probably have better success if you make your sales pitch sound fancy.   Convoluted details convince people, especially people who don't know much in the way of science and logic.  So the intricacy of some pseudoscientific models is explainable from the standpoint that the purveyors of this kind of foolishness will sound like scientists, and therefore be persuasive, only if they couch their message in terms that make it appear they've tapped into a realm of knowledge unavailable to the rest of us slobs.

Or, as my dad used to put it: "If you can't wow 'em with your brilliance, baffle 'em with your bullshit."

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I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

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!]

By the pricking of my thumbs...

I tend to have a caveat emptor attitude toward a lot of things.

If you're considering something new -- whether to trust a claim about a medication or therapy, for example -- it's not like information isn't available.  You can always track down reliable data if you work at it.  Sometimes it's hard to sift the good information from the bullshit, but it's a skill that anyone can learn.

That's what critical thinking is all about.

So when people fall for claptrap, I can be a little unsympathetic at times.  If you've been hoodwinked by the latest scam psychic, well, maybe you shoulda known better.

Some claims, however, cross the line.  And I ran into one of those yesterday, a claim so catastrophically idiotic that it's hard to see how anyone could fall for it -- but which, if they do, could easily cost a loved one their life.

The claim is that you can treat (or at least minimize the damage from) a stroke by pricking a person's fingers.

The claim appeared at the site Health Freedoms Alliance, and if you don't believe me, you can check out the link provided.  On the other hand, if you are reluctant to add another count to the site's hit tracker, here's a direct quote about the seven steps you should follow if someone near you has a stroke:

1. Keep the needle — over the fire, a lighter or candle to sterilize it and then use it to prick the tips of all 10 fingers.
2. There is no specific acupuncture, it should only be a few millimeters from the nail.
3. Prick in a way that the blood can flow.
4. If blood does not start to drip, tighten and start squeezing in order to make the blood flow.
5. When all 10 fingers begin to bleed, wait a few minutes — you will see that the victim will come back to life!
6. If the victim’s mouth is distorted, massage his ears until they become red – which means blood has reached there.
7. Then prick the needle in the soft part of each ear, to fall two drops of blood from each ear. A few minutes later, the mouth would no longer be distorted.

Wait until the victim comes to normal, without any unusual symptoms, and then send him/ her to the hospital. 

This method of bloodshed to save the life is part of the traditional Chinese medicine, and the practical application of this method has proven it to be 100% efficient, since it helps people survive strokes.

Okay, yeah, you'd think people would know better.  Any one of my tenth grade intro biology students should know better.  Pricking a person's fingers has absolutely zero effect on a blood clot or aneurysm in the brain, which are the two most common causes of stroke.  It has been shown over and over that any delay in getting a stroke victim competent medical help increases the likelihood of irreversible brain damage.

And that delay would include messing around pricking a person's fingers and earlobes with a needle.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I'm stepping away from my usual caveat emptor stance, and will state for the record: any public media that makes claims like this is acting in a fashion that the word "irresponsible" doesn't even begin to cover.  You're free to dose yourself up with the latest homeopathic sugar pills, have your practitioner balance your chakras, and slather essential oils all over your body.  Have at it, you know?

But when you state a claim that might well cause some poor gullible soul to make a decision that could lead to a loved one's death, you've lost the right to a public forum.  I know it's probably impossible to do, but Health Freedoms Alliance, and any other sites that publish this foolishness, should be shut down permanently.

Elaborate nonsense

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I can understand how fear and lack of knowledge can drive you to accept counterfactual nonsense.  I also get how wishful thinking could draw you in to a set of beliefs, if they line up with the way you would like the universe to work, even though, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."

This combination of desire for the world to be other than it is, and fear of what the world actually is, probably drives most superstition.  All, as I said, understandable, given human nature.

But what continually baffles me is how byzantine some of those beliefs become.  I can accept that it might be an attractive model for some people that the position of the stars and planets somehow guides your life; but I start really wondering once you start coming up with stuff like the following (from Susan Miller's astrology site, on a page devoted to predictions for this month for my astrological sign, Scorpio):

Here is why I say that: Sometimes, in about 20 percent of the cases, an eclipse will deliver news a month to the day later plus or minus five days. More rarely, an eclipse will introduce news one month to the day before it occurs, but only in about 5 percent of the cases. In most cases, 75 percent of the time, an eclipse will deliver some sort of news that things are about to change almost instantly.

This eclipse will be in Scorpio, 11 degrees, and will come conjunct Saturn. This alone says that the decision you make now will be a big one, and that you will commit all your energy to this decision. You will be in a serious mode, and it appears a promise you make now will last a very long time, possibly forever. Mars and Pluto are your two ruling planets (Scorpio is one of the few signs that have two rulers), and remarkably both will be supportive by tight mathematical angles to this eclipse. This tells me that the final outcome of this eclipse will be very positive. Every eclipse has two acts, so see how events unfold in coming weeks.

Yes, it's bullshit; but it's really elaborate bullshit.  You might criticize these people for pushing fiction as reality, but you have to admit that they spend a lot of time crafting their fiction.

I ran across an unusually good example of this yesterday on the Skeptic subreddit, which is a wonderful place to go for articles debunking pseudoscience.  The site I found posted there is called "TCM - the 24-hour Organ Qi Cycle," which immediately should raise red flags -- "TCM" is traditional Chinese medicine, much of which has been double-blind tested and found to be worthless; and "qi" is a pattern for "energy flow" through the body that basically is non-existent, making "qi" only useful as an easy way of getting rid of the "Q" tile in a game of Scrabble.

What this site purports to do is to get you to "balance your body" using information about when during the day you feel most ill-at-ease.  This then tells you what organ in your body is "out of balance" and which of the "elements" you should pay attention to.  And no, I'm not talking about anything off the periodic table; we're back to a medieval "Earth," "Fire," "Water," "Metal," "Wood," and "Ministerial Fire" model, although the last-mentioned sounds like what they used back in the Dark Ages to burn people at the stake for heresy.

So, naturally, I had to check out what my own out-of-balance part was.  I'm frequently awake, and restless, at 3 AM - 5 AM, so I rolled the cursor over the "color wheel" and found that this means my lungs are out of balance.  "The emotions connected to the lungs are Grief and Sadness," I was told, which makes sense for the time of day because if I'm awake then it means I won't be able to get back to sleep before my alarm goes off.  It goes on to ask me some questions, to wit:  "Have you buried your grief?  Are you sad?  Are you always sighing?  It is most healthy to express your emotions as you feel them.  You may need to express your emotions by crying, writing and/or talking to a friend."

Well, thanks for caring, and everything, but I'm actually doing okay, and don't sigh all that much, except at faculty meetings.

Oh, but I am told that if I can get my lungs in balance, I'll have "lustrous skin."  And who could resist that?

On it goes.  If your small intestine is out of balance, you should eat only "vital foods chock full of enzymes."  If you have diarrhea, you need to "strengthen your spleen qi."  If your "kidneys are deficient," you won't have much in the way of sex drive, but you can bring them back into balance by eating black sesame seeds, celery, duck, grapes, kidney beans, lamb, millet, oysters, plums, sweet potatoes, raspberries, salt, seaweed, strawberries, string beans, tangerines, walnuts, and yams.

The entire time I was looking at this site, I kept shaking my head and saying, "How do you know any of this?"  The stuff on this website seems to fall into two categories -- blatantly obvious (e.g. "crying if you're sad helps you to feel better") and bizarrely abstruse (e.g. "engaging in loving sex keeps your pericardium healthy").

I suppose the elaborateness is understandable from one angle; if you want people to believe what you're saying, you'll probably have better success if you make your sales pitch sound fancy.  Convoluted details convince people, especially people who don't know much in the way of science and logic.  So the intricacy of some pseudoscientific models is explainable from the standpoint that the purveyors of this kind of foolishness will sound like scientists, and therefore be persuasive, only if they couch their message in terms that make it appear they've tapped into a realm of knowledge unavailable to the rest of us slobs.

Or, as my dad put it: "If you can't wow 'em with your brilliance, baffle 'em with your bullshit."

Virile as the mighty... kangaroo?

New from the "What The Hell Are They Thinking?" department, today I found out that the Chinese are marketing a new "alternative medicine" treatment for impotence: a supplement made from powdered kangaroo balls.

I wish I was making this up.  Here's an advertisement for the product:

Well, I'm convinced.  That guy has a bottle of "Essence of Red Kangaroo K-max 3000" pills the size of a garbage can, and he is clearly about to get laid.  Or possibly, because judicious photo cropping leaves us unable to be certain, he may already be in the process.  What more evidence do we need?

None, apparently, because John Kreuger, owner of a company that processes kangaroo meat, is now sending over a ton of testicles to China every month.  In fact, he said that in order to separate the testicles from the scrotum, he has had to build a special custom "de-nutting machine," a phrase that I have a hard time imagining any male uttering without immediately going into a protective crouch.

Be that as it may, the dehydrated and powdered roo balls are then put into capsule form in Chinese traditional medicine manufacturing plants, and can fetch $165 for a bottle of 300 once it reaches the market.  The selling point, apparently, is that male kangaroos have been observed to mate with as many as forty females, and "the capability to produce the spermatic fluid of the male kangaroo is twice that of the adult bull," which is a direct quote from the advertisements for the capsules.

I really hoped that the days of sympathetic magic were over -- the ancient idea that two things being similar means that one can be used in place of the other.  It's the origin of the myth that walnuts are good for the brain (they kind of look alike) and that beets "strengthen the blood" (both are red).  Traditional Chinese medicine is rife with these ideas, where both rhinoceros horn and dried tiger penises are consumed as aphrodisiacs.  But given that tigers and rhinos are now both seriously endangered species -- in part, due to the lucrative nature of the use of their parts for this kind of nonsense -- desperately horny Chinese men have had to turn to a more readily accessible source of completely useless supplements.

I guess that if you really do buy into this, though, it's better to go after kangaroos than tigers.  Kangaroos are common, to the point that a good many Australians consider them pests, and they're raised commercially for meat.  May as well use the testicles for something, I guess.

The downside, though, is that people like Kreuger are turning a quick buck based upon the gullibility of people with more money than sense, and perpetuating an irrational belief in the process.  Because, after all, the placebo effect is a powerful thing -- a guy who took his powdered roo ball pill and thinks he's going to have a really good erection is more likely to be, um, successful than a guy who is worried because he ran out of pills, and now is pretty sure he won't.

So on the whole, it's absurd, and kind of annoying that people in this day and age are still falling for this stuff.  But the same might be said for most woo-woo beliefs, even those that are more pleasant to talk about because they do not involve the phrase "de-nutting machine."

Getting to the point

There is one alternative medicine modality that I've always been hesitant to criticize.  That hesitancy has come from the fact that it is widespread, so widespread that I know a dozen people who have used it and reported positive results.  Even though I could see no biologically sound reason why it would work the way its practitioners claimed, it's always seemed to me to fall into that gray area of "things that may work for some as-yet unknown reason."

That modality is acupuncture.  I get asked about it regularly, both in my Biology classes and in my Critical Thinking classes, and I've usually shrugged, and said, "Well, I don't believe in prana and chakras and the rest of it, but could acupuncture be triggering some positive response, in some way we have yet to elucidate?  Sure.  People used medicinal plants long before they understood pharmacology, and the fact that they attributed the plants' success at treating disease to good magic or benevolent spirits doesn't mean that the plants didn't work.  It could be the same here."

Well, I can't make that claim any more.

Just last week, David Colquhoun (University College of London) and Steven Novella (Yale School of Medicine) published a paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia (available here) that evaluates the results of every controlled study of acupuncture in the past ten years, and reaches the following conclusion:

The outcome of this research, we propose, is that the benefits of acupuncture, if any, are too small and too transient to be of any clinical significance.  It seems that acupuncture is little or no more than a theatrical placebo... 

The best controlled studies show a clear pattern – with acupuncture the outcome does not depend on needle location or even needle insertion. Since these variables are what define "acupuncture" the only sensible conclusion is that acupuncture does not work. Everything else is the expected noise of clinical trials, and this noise seems particularly high with acupuncture research. The most parsimonious conclusion is that with acupuncture there is no signal, only noise.

The interests of medicine would be best-served if we emulated the Chinese Emperor Dao Guang and issued an edict stating that acupuncture and moxibustion should no longer be used in clinical practice. 

I have to admit that when I read this paper, my first reaction was to wince.  Part of me, I suppose, really wanted acupuncture to work -- even if we had no idea how it worked, the idea that you could alleviate pain (or anxiety, or insomnia, or depression) simply by sticking someone with little needles seemed preferable to telling people that they simply had to live with chronic conditions if standard medical treatment failed.  But one of the harsher sides of the rationalist view is that you go wherever the evidence drives you, even if you don't want to.  And after reading the paper by Colquhoun and Novella, and taking a look at their sources, I am brought to the inescapable conclusion that they are correct.

It's frequently that way, though, isn't it?  I think most of us, even the most hard-nosed skeptics in the world, would be delighted if some of the wild things the woo-woos claim turned out to be true.  Being a biologist, I would be thrilled if there were surviving proto-hominids like Sasquatch or surviving dinosaurs like Nessie, Champ, Mokele-Mbembe, Kelpies, and the Bunyip.  A convincing demonstration of intelligent alien life would be about the coolest thing I can imagine.  Even the existence of an afterlife is something I'd be mighty happy about (as long as it wasn't the being-tortured-by-Satan-for-all-eternity variety).

But, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."  And it appears that in the case of acupuncture, the Colquhoun/Novella study conclusively demonstrates that there's nothing much there besides the placebo effect -- sorry though I am to have to say so.

Of course, that doesn't mean that acupuncturists are going to go out of business any time soon.  There are still a lot of true believers out there, and they can pull in clients from odd sources, sometimes.  Just last week, the veterinarians at a Tel Aviv zoo decided to call in acupuncturists because their attempts to treat a chronic ear infection in one of the zoo animals had failed.  The patient?

A fourteen-year-old Sumatran tiger.

Now that's some conviction in your beliefs.  You think acupuncture works?  Here, go stick some needles in this live tiger.

Be that as it may, apparently they anesthetized the tiger beforehand (smart move), and the acupuncturists all survived unscathed.  No word yet on whether Kitty's ears have stopped hurting.  My guess, given the Colquhoun/Novella study, is no, since the placebo effect doesn't work too well on cats.

Although to be fair, judging by my success rate at giving pills to my own cats, traditional veterinary medicine generates its own, unique set of problems as well.

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."