Reason

Faulty Premises 1

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Faulty Premises Part 1

Last time we discussed how to dissect an argument, by finding its premises and the conclusion. I also spoke briefly about non-sequiturs—something which is known as a logical fallacy. There are many different kinds of logical fallacy, all of which when used weaken the strength of an argument. In this post I will outline some of the more common logical fallacies, not only so that you can spot them in the arguments made by others, but perhaps more importantly, you can spot them in your own.

A logical fallacy is, as the name implies, a use of false logic to support a conclusion. The best way to highlight exactly what a logical fallacy is, is through showing examples of them.

 

Ad hominem

An ad hominem is when something derogatory is said of a person making an argument or holding a position in place of an actual argument. An example of this is as follows:

Creationists are stupid therefore creationism is false.

The statement ‘creationists are stupid’ by itself is not a logical fallacy (though not a particularly nice thing to say), it is only when the derogatory statement is used as a premise for the conclusion that it is a logical fallacy. Even if the statement is valid, it does not follow from it that the conclusion is true, therefore it is a fallacy.

 

Argument from ignorance

(Argumentum ad ignorantiam)

This fallacy is when someone argues the following:

We don’t know that X is false

Therefore X is true

A few common example of this would be:

Science doesn’t know everything, therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the supernatural exists.

Telepathy is possible – we don’t know everything about the human brain after all.

All that can really be derived from an absence of knowledge is the conclusion; we don’t know. A specific area of ignorance does not make a positive claim plausible or even possible. When one makes a positive claim such as ‘the supernatural exists’ or ‘telepathy is possible’, it needs to be supported with positive evidence. An area of ignorance does not allow one to fit anything that one likes into that gap.

 

Argument from personal incredulity

This fallacy is committed when someone states that they cannot believe how something could be true and then uses this to support their conclusion that this is something is false. A common example of this would be the creationist argument:

I do not understand how something as complex as the human eye could have evolved by chance, therefore evolution is not true.

The logical error committed here is that one’s personal inability to comprehend something is grounds for dismissing it. In reality this is not true, and whilst you personally might not be able to understand something, this does not mean that nobody can. In the above example, there have been numerous instances in which scientists have explained precisely how the eye could evolve via gradual incremental steps (I’d recommend Richard Dawkins’ book Climbing Mount Improbable for such an example). ‘I don’t understand X’ means nothing when used as a premise.

 

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

(Correlation does not imply causation)

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is Latin for ‘after this, therefore because of this’. This fallacy is made when someone assumes a causal link between two things simply because one occurred before the other. In formal terms this fallacy is written thus:

X occurred before Y

Therefore X caused Y

An example of this fallacy would be:

Since the MMR vaccine was introduced diagnosis rates for autism have risen, therefore the MMR vaccine causes autism.

The argument is assuming that there is a link between these two events; the introduction of the MMR vaccine and the rise in diagnoses of autism. However these events following each other does not necessarily mean that one caused the other. Therefore in order to accept the conclusion as valid the person presenting the argument would need to demonstrate that there is indeed evidence of a causal link between the two events that extends beyond the fact that one event preceded the other.

There are cases in which correlation does imply causation, however in these cases there is more evidence to support the claim of causation than the fact that the two phenomena occurred around the same time. X occurring before Y by itself is not sufficient grounds for claiming that X caused Y.

 

I shall end this here for fear of rambling on too much. I will endeavour to highlight more examples of logical fallacies in the next few posts of this series. Until then I can point the interested reader towards the following links, should you wish to know more:

Wikipedia’s list of logical fallacies

The Nizkor Project – Fallacies

www.logicalfallacies.info/

I hope you have enjoyed this post. Feel free to respond with any comments, questions, ideas, suggestions, disagreements or whatever in the discussion thread.

Medicine, Science

The great vaccination scare

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Most of you will have heard of the MMR vaccine controversy. A man, Dr. Wakefield, suggested that the MMR vaccination increased the likelihood of autism in infants and children. People stopped vaccinating their kids, which resulted in a few thousand cases and a few deaths. All of them could have been avoided, had it not been for Dr. Wakefield.

As we know, people don’t learn from their mistakes, the deep-rooted fear still possesses them. In a previous blog entry, I talked about my homeopath/M.D. aunt, among other things. She’s a lot of things I could make fun of, but one of the things that makes me sad is that she also opposes vaccines. She went to Kenya without a single vaccination, even though yellow fever is a deadly disease. Her whole family is the same, they all oppose vaccinations.
Recently, I talked to a friend of mine. She’s also against vaccinations, because they can “harm your immune system”.

Let’s look at anti-vaccers claims:

Vaccines are not effective, vaccines are not safe, vaccines are not moral or vaccines are against my religion.

We can dismiss the last two claims out of hand. If you don’t want to use them due to your religion then your religion is pretty fucked up.
I also reject the case for personal liberty. If your idiocy is putting other people at risk, you have no say. Period. Your rights should be stripped away to protect the rest of the population.

So we’re left with two questions:

1) Are vaccines effective?

2) Are vaccines safe?

The efficacy-question is easily answered: Vaccines are among the few things to come out of the pharma-industry that are so very obviously effective that we shouldn’t even have to think about this.

Forbes recently posted a short article on the topic. The following info-graphic was compiled from a recent article, linked in the Forbes-post.

Vaccines Info-graphic

Smallpox was once one of the most prolific killers, with an estimated 300-500 million killed just from Smallpox alone. And now, it’s virtually eradicated.

Thanks to vaccines? I think the above is ample evidence to that extent, but there’s more. The following graphic (Wikipedia) was compiled for the prevalence of rubella, but it could equally have been compiled for any other vaccine. It always follows the same path: A vaccine is introduced and given, the prevalence of the disease goes down.

Prevalence of rubella

 

So on to the second argument: Safety.

When I was a baby, I was immunized against MMR. The batch I received was tainted, I fell ill. I could have died, but was given medication and survived. But even in the best of circumstances, people can have adverse reactions to the immunizations.

Here’s the deal though: These reactions are incredibly unlikely to happen.
A paper from a  few years ago discussed this and came up with the following conclusion: “[T]he expressed doubts about the safety of vaccines are unjustified.”
That’s it really. Vaccines are an effective and safe way to counter several potentially deadly diseases. To eradicate these diseases, we all need to take the vaccines. If you don’t immunize yourself, you not only put yourself at risk but also the rest of the population, by allowing the disease to survive.

I don’t think any argument can be made that vaccinations are dangerous or ineffective. If you think there is, please, I need a laugh right about now.

Culture, History, News, Politics, Religion

Habemus Papam! And what do believers say?

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A new Pope has been elected. I won’t comment on the choice, it’s obviously the outcome of an internal political struggle and a need to show that people outside of Europe are represented in some way or other. Note that the Pope is still white, so no thought was given to true multiculturalism. It may even be considered that he only grew up in Argentina, but because his parents were Italian he can’t be said to be South American with a straight face. It’s been said that this Pope, just like the last one, will result in a decline in followers and possibly even help speed along atheism, but while the former is almost certainly true the latter is up for debate.

That all of this clashes with the idea that God elects the Pope is glaringly obvious, but I’ll skip all of that and focus on something else entirely: What are the responses by believers to the new Pope?

To look at that, I’ll pick some comments from FB, twitter or newspapers and check what people are saying.
The choice of comments is not representative and merely reflects the biases of the author.

 

The first comment comes from one of my friends, posted on FB. The English translation reads:

Francesco I. from Buenos Aires. A good choice. A good prayer.

How this guy knows that it was a good choice is a mystery to me. Others have already complained that this Pope was a bad choice, being a homophobe, conservative, anti-progressive kook. It also once again calls into question what any of this choosing has to do with God’s will. If God were choosing, we’d have a Pope in the first few minutes by unanimous vote but NO!, it sometimes takes ages to elect a new one.

The second thing is the “A good prayer” bit. It can be understood in two ways, one of them is entirely bizarre.
1) After seeing that a new pope was elected, said friend prayed and felt good about it. Slightly weird, but not bizarre.
2) He or someone else prayed for the outcome to be what it is or prayed for a good outcome. The second bit is subjective, so I’ll address the first. If that really were the case, why did God answer those prayers and not the other ones? What happens to God’s will if he has to bow down to your prayer?

 

The second comment can be found here at HuffPo:

Just a matter of time before all the criticism and nasty comments show up before the man has a chance. Pope Francis’ religous beliefs and convictions belong to him. He doesn’t have to justify those beliefs. You may not agree with his beliefs. At least acknowledge that he too is entitled to free speech. We keep getting away from that. Live and let live. No one should be bound and gagged because they reject abortion, reject same sex marriage and reject life styles. As long as that person is civil towards fellow mankind….why, why do others condemn? I don’t agree with abortion. I don’t agree with same sex marriage. This doesn’t mean I don’t love others. I simply do not agree…what is so bad about that? OK…I’m ready for all the ugly feedback. 🙂

I find it strange that a Pope’s religious beliefs belong only to him. Isn’t he supposed to guide his sheep in their faith-struggle? Even worse, isn’t he supposed to uphold the views presented in the Bible? (He is upholding the whole “no gays” part, so that’s not what I’m complaining about. I’m complaining about the commenter’s views that he can have other views.)

The second part about not “binding and gagging” people because they reject “… life styles” is a wicked idea. People who condemn others because of personal choices that do not harm others (i.e. homosexuality, etc.) is despicable and should not be tolerated in anyone, even less so in people who present a business or a group of people. People get fired about such comments every day, but the Pope is applauded for them. We live in a weird world.

Many other posts are either along the lines of

He was the best we could hope for. Thank GOD

or rationalisations of both his crimes and the crimes of his predecessors.

All of this should lead to some kind of point, right?
Well, going through about 500 comments or so on the BBC, NY-Times, HuffPo, Guardian and some Austrian newspapers’ sites, I noticed three things:

1) There are more people critical of the new pope than there are people endorsing him. It seems that even Christians are aware that he may not have been the best choice.

2) The ones who do protect the pope are very often ignoring large parts of his history. The few who acknowledge that he did some evil things in his past sweep that under the rug and claim that this has no effect on his current stance.

3) Christians who did neither of those, that is to say neither endorse in a weird way nor reject him, post things that are supremely weird.

This post was just a short insight into the weirdness of “moderate” and “enlightened” Christians. Nothing will follow.
I do have one question though: How long do you think it will take before the new Pope says something really stupid? And I’m not talking about the statements issued a few hours after his election á la “homosexuality is bad”, I’m talking “AIDS is bad, but not as bad as condoms”-stupid.

My guess? Before summer.

Education, Entertainment, Reason

How MonsterQuest disproved Bigfoot

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A far lesser known hobby I have is dealing with crypto-zoology (I have not dealt with this for years). However, recently I sat through a marathon of MonsterQuest to see how much new information cryptozoology has compiled. The only thing that I have learned is that the crypto-zoologists have all but disproved Bigfoot and all other land based cryptids with just one episode.

The main difference in the MonsterQuest pseudo-documentary compared to most other cryptid pseudo-documentaries I have seen is the use of trail cameras. A trail camera is a camera left in the wilderness for weeks to years taking pictures or video of anything that sets the motion detector off. Now, the episode of MonsterQuest that disproved land based cryptids is entitled “Lions in the Backyard” (episode 7: season 1). This episode deals with reports of black cats seen in the U.S., and of course, they were unable to show any black cats in the U.S.

However, how does an episode about black cats in the U.S. disprove Bigfoot and all other land based cryptids? Well, in the episode they eventually get to a section at ~21 minutes in where they talk to two actual biologists that use trail cameras. The two biologists explained that jaguars used to live in the U.S. (mostly the southwest) during historic times, but were now thought to be extinct in the U.S., thanks in large part to humans. Nevertheless, they were able to show, using trail cameras, three separate individual jaguars in Arizona; essentially proving that jaguars are expanding their territory back to somewhat historic ranges. Furthermore, they were able to prove this over an 8-year period.

Now, trail cameras are in use all over the U.S., not just by crypto-zoologists, but also by actual zoologists and hunters. Does anyone truly believe that something the size of Bigfoot, or any of the other cryptids crypto-zoologists love to talk about, could go undetected by these trail cameras for decades when they photographed several jaguars in 8 years? In addition, the photographs are not ambiguous, they were able to determine that two of the three individuals were male (the other remains unknown at the airing of this episode), that is how wonderful the pictures of these animals came out.

In every episode of MonsterQuest that dealt with a land based cryptid, trail cameras were placed in the areas the animals were thought to roam and yet no photographs of the cryptid were ever produced. I must point out that MonsterQuest only sets up these cameras for perhaps a month or two, but the actual crypto-zoologists, zoologists, and hunters have trail cameras that are in use for most (if not all) of the year, for years! One would think that if these cryptids were real, at least one of them would be captured on camera in the decades that trail cameras have been in use.

There are two things I learned from watching MonsterQuest; the first is that crypto-zoologists appear to be just as dogmatic as creationists are when it comes to their preconceived notions. I know that this information does not definitively disprove Bigfoot and his kin, but it seems to be very compelling evidence that any rational person should consider.

The second is I really want a trail camera now. Here in New Mexico there is a lot of wildlife that would be very interesting to photograph without human interference. Seeing the price tag on most of the trail cameras makes this dream something that will probably never happen for the simple fact that I do not think I would waste that much money on a hobby. However, one can dream.

Edited by Dean, 12/03/2013
Reason for edit: Grammatical corrections.

Culture, Education, Politics, Random

Have some vision!

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As I might have said already, I’m training to become a teacher. In my studies, I’m often confronted with interesting kids (both negative and positive) and equally interesting colleagues (also both negative and positive).

The funny part? With kids, the positive outweigh the negative about 10:1 or 20:1. But teachers? It’s the other way around, 1:10 or 1:20. The amount of stupid, unmotivated, socially incompetent, bored and vision-less teachers I’ve met is appalling. I recounted the one event where a teacher declared us to be “different from other animals because we evolved”. That’s fairly stupid, but it can easily be corrected by a somewhat competent biology teacher.

But what happens if you get teachers who are unwilling to teach a certain concept simply because it’s “hard to teach”? No kidding, that’s what a teacher said on Thursday, March 7th. Note that this took place one day before International Woman’s Day. Here’s the conversation from a seminar. The teacher (~30 years of experience) was in the audience:

Teacher: So basically, I don’t teach students from other countries that it’s important to treat women in the same way as men because their parents will come to school and complain. Plus, the parents don’t even want to shake hands with me because I’m a woman so why should I bother?

* Nods of approval from the audience*

Me: I don’t want to sound offensive, but what you’re doing is actually against the law. The Austrian curriculum says, among other things, very specifically that we have to teach “tolerance towards others, minorities and other cultures”. I’d suggest that “others” includes women. A different law (which I’m unable to recall at this moment) also states that we have to raise kids to be “mündige Bürger”, which I’d translate as mature/responsible citizens. Part of that is adhering to the basic norms we’ve got in our culture, in this case treating women equally well as men.

The teacher wasn’t able to respond, obviously, so that was that.

Now I put it to you that this is not exclusive to teaching. You’ll have idiots in every job, people who’ll stall progress. But I’d also argue that teaching is so incredibly important that we have to single it out. We raise the next generation, we are responsible for the future. If we fuck up badly, everything is potentially fucked.

End rant.
My message? Have some vision! Don’t let other people wear you down, don’t forget the ideals you had when you were young. Stick to them, no matter how hard it is.

Education, Medicine

Evidence-based medicine: Introduction Part 2

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In my first post on medicine I talked about the various dangers that can arise from medicine that’s neither effective nor particularly harmful. In my second post, I talked about one particular alternative medicine, PSE, showed that it’s not based on any evidence whatsoever and most likely does not work, though that can’t be confirmed because in it’s 15-year runtime it has yet to be properly and fairly tested. That’s fairly common in alternative medicine.

In this post, I want to tackle an argument you can often hear from advocates of alternative medicine: “Why should I want evidence when all the “evidence-based” medicine isn’t based on any actual evidence?” I’ll also give an introduction into evidence-based medicine, albeit a very brief one.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll recommend two excellent books:

Goldacre, B. (2012) Bad Pharma – How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients

Evans, I., Thornton, H., Chalmers, I. & Glasziou, P. (2006) Testing Treatments – Better research for better healthcare

About 90% of my examples come from these two books, mainly because they give nearly all the relevant sources. (Meta studies and so on)

As Evans et al. document: (P.13-14) As a parent, the most horrible thing that can happen to you is your child dying. Naturally, parents will immediately do what a doctor tells them if it’s said to reduce infant suffering and death. In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock‘s book “Baby and child care” suggested babies sleep on their backs. In 1956, he revised that statement, saying:

There are two disadvantages to a baby’s sleeping on his back. If he vomits he’s more likely to choke on the vomitus. Also he tends to keep his head turned towards the same side… this may flatten the side of the head… I think it is preferable to accustom a baby to sleeping on his stomach from the start.

That sounds like incredibly sound advice, which is why many parents (millions?) opted to do so. However, there was one serious flaw: This practice, never evaluated, led to an estimated 50,000 deaths. A first study suggesting harm was published mid 1960’s, a second in the early seventies, two further ones in the mid 80’s. It was only properly acted on in the mid 90’s. (In some cases until 2002!)

Now one might argue that this is a case of “evidence-based medicine” gone wrong. I disagree, it’s precisely the opposite. Here, no evidence or very shoddy evidence was provided, which eventually led to tens of thousands of deaths. Had the evidence been appraised correctly right away, many if not most of these deaths might have been avoided.

There are dozens of examples like this in the two books, so I won’t go through them. The authors have gone to great pains to document these cases and I recommend you read about them yourselves. I just want to bring this back to the point I was trying to make: Evidence-based medicine can only function if we look at the evidence carefully and without bias, and if we then act on the evidence as swiftly as possible.

This system is by no means perfect, because humans will always find a way to either intentionally interfere with the process (for political or monetary reasons) or to be so stupid as to fuck up. However, it’s better to have a system that’s based on evidence we can theoretically gather (evidence-based medicine) than basing it on a system that involves nothing more than guesswork. (alternative medicine)

At this point, I should probably point out how incredibly fragile this review process is. Ben Goldacre documents: (P. 69)

Imagine you’re conducting a study on a particular drug. Let’s call it pregabalin, a drug to help diabetics handle pain when their nerves have been affected by the disease. You gather test subjects, you double-blind the study, you do everything you’re supposed to. But some subjects drop out of the study, due to various reasons. It might be that they still feel pain and don’t want to continue or the side effects might be too severe. Whatever the reason, you’re now faced with a problem. You’ve got half a dataset for the drop-out patient. How can you incorporate the results in the study?

The researcher, let’s call him Pfizer, does a clever thing: He uses the “last observation carried forward”-method. That’s a fancy sounding name for “I’ll put down the last result I got into every column. Basically, the patient had pain levels of 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 5, 6, 5, and then dropped out. So Pfizer fills in the last six data-points with all 5’s. Before the study, you will notice, the patient had pain levels of 10.

The research then gets published and your drug looks quite good indeed. But wait! what’s that? Some researchers disagree with your method? But why? Well, the reasoning is this: The patient dropped out, so their pain level is back to 10. Obviously, the side effects were worse than the pain and they stopped using the drug. So we have to put all 10’s for the last six data-points instead of all 5’s. That’s called the “baseline observation carried forward”-method.

The difference between the two methods is staggering: With the LOCF the drug gets overestimated by nearly 25%!

That, you will agree, is quite a lot. Once again it shows: Medicine must be based on the best possible evidence, not on guesswork and shoddy methods.

I’ll leave you with a few points:

  • Biased testing will leave you with incorrect data, thus putting patients at risk.
  • All medicine should be tested and carefully evaluated. Failing to do so puts patients at risk and should be persecuted.
  • Trusting doctors blindly is not always a good choice. Ideally, your doctor should be able to show you what research (s)he’s basing his/her decision on.
  • Basing therapies on theories instead of real-world outcomes is again putting patients at risk.
  • As suggested in my first post, using treatments that are neither directly harmful nor beneficial is also not recommended.
  • Established treatments are not necessarily beneficial: Check and re-check. I explained that partially in my second post.
  • Tests should be as fair as possible, that is to say: Randomised (double-blinded) Controlled Tests (RCT’s), comparing like with like, meta-studies, etc. This requires that potential researchers and future doctors be trained in the best available methods.

I’ll leave it at that and once again recommend the two above mentioned books. Remember, all science needs evidence and we need laws to ensure the best standards.  We need institutions like the Cochrane Collaboration to appraise the available evidence without interference from commercially or politically driven institutions. Read “Bad Pharma”, it’ll really shock you.

Medicine, Research, Science

Evidence-based medicine: Introduction Part 1

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In my last post, “What’s the harm?”, I talked about the problems of taking medicine (or treatments!) that’s neither good nor bad for you. I also talked about “evidence-based medicine”, but didn’t really delve into that topic. I won’t do that in this post, either!

So what, you may well ask, do I want to talk about now? I want to give you a look into what a few doctors do and why their approach is deeply flawed. I’ll give one specific and not-well-known example of alternative medicine as well as some obstacles I found when investigating its efficacy.

In short, I’ll talk about why medicine needs evidence and why practitioners of alternative medicine might be reluctant to look for evidence. I apologise if the post is fairly long, but I need to flesh out my example to make sure you understand the practices behind it.

 

First, let me try to explain PsychoSomatic Energetics (PSE).

Watch this video. Read this page. (If you speak German, read this book. Or don’t, it costs money… Twenty pages are also available here.)

Done? Now what do you know about PSE? Not very much, I’d think. You know it has something to do with “energy blocks” and with measuring the “subtle energy field”. But how does it work?

Here’s where I come in. I’ve read the book and I’ve talked not only to people who’ve taken a seminar in PSE, meaning they’re qualified to test with it, but I’ve also E-Mailed one of the inventors of PSE, the ex-Wife of the guy in the video. What I will now lay out will sound confusing, mad even. If you don’t trust me, read the book and cross-check what I’ve said. If anything I’ve said sounds exaggerated or false, feel free to criticize me in the comments.

PSE is based on Freud’s psychoanalysis, basically issues from the past are said to influence your current health. In Freud’s case, that meant mental health, in PSE language mental health influences physical health. Up until now, the theory’s sound. Of course depressions and other mental problems can affect the body, but the effects can be hard to spot and even harder to treat.  That’s why psychotherapy is such a difficult field, why so many therapists have to take long vacations and why they are given the harshest, yet most self-preserving advice.*

Here, then, is PSE’s amazing promise: Not only can we find out what is wrong, and how much is wrong, but we’ll even be able to cure them in a relatively short time using homeopathic remedies. Now we haven’t yet looked into homeopathy, so we’ll assume for now that the remedies are 100% effective. That’s how generous I have to be just to take PSE seriously. So what should strike us about the above is this: It claims to cure all energy-related problems. Any remedy that claims to cure everything of anything can be almost immediately dismissed.

Now I’ve failed to tell you two things:
1) What does PSE supposedly treat? “Energy problems” is not very specific a term in this context. I’d refer you to Dr. Banis’ book, but that’s not very helpful: “Most illnesses are caused by blockades of the soul, which can’t be tested nor treated early enough. That’s what we try to counter with PSE.” If you found that illuminating: Congratulations, you’re smarter than I am.
I have talked to some people though, and their answer is the same: “Almost everything can be treated with PSE, if it’s found early enough”. I’ll be generous and say “Non-serious mental problems (slight depressions, slumps, feeling worn-out, etc.) and small boo-boos (coughs, “feeling unwell”, etc.) can be treated”.

2) What is energy and how does it relate to PSE?
Remember that PSE is bound to eastern traditional medicine. In that tradition, the body has “energy” and that energy is located in one of the seven “chakra-points”. That energy is generally an astral “energy”, a sort of “I’m full of energy”-thing, but recent attempts (Deepak Chopra et al.) have tried to make this “energy” a real energy, a physical force.
If you read the PSE-book I’ve referenced above, you can find at least three definitions of energy:
a) The above described astral energy
b) Magnetism, in this case the slight magnetic field around the body.
c) The energy we know from physics known as “force” and the energy we know from electricity known as “electric charge”.

According to PSE, we can measure the energy at every chakra-point on a scale from 1-100, with every one of those points further being divided into four “energies” known as “vital”, “emotional”, “mental” and “causal”. We don’t  need to understand them, we just need to know that according to PSE, if any one of those energies suffers (note: that’s 28 different measurements!) then we won’t have enough energy, which can either result in us feeling depleted (think of it as forgetting to turn off a light at home, it drains your money) or in us becoming sick (a light bulb pops due to it being overused). I won’t go to tell you that it’s then compared to the four “juices” of the body, also known as the “four temperaments“. That would just be mean and discredit the whole thing immediately.

In any case, back to PSE. Now that we’ve understood what is to be tested, we can see how it is tested. The process is relatively simple:

Take a machine, in this case the Reba® special test device and hook the patient up to it. You do that by placing the machine on a flat surface, lying the patient down next to them and attach a wristband to one of their wrists.
Next, you take an vial of the homeopathic remedy you want to test (one vial corresponds to one of the 28 levels I described above) and place it into the receptor of the machine. Note that at no point does the actual remedy get into contact with the device.
Having done that, you switch on the machine and test for the first of five levels. (100/5=20, so you test at 20, then 40, then 60, etc.) To do that, you (being the doctor) take the arms of your patients and lightly pull on them. (Arms outstretched behind/above your head) If one arm is longer than the other one (supposedly called “kinesiological arm-length reflex”), you know that energy is lacking.

Practical example: If you test vial one and your patients arms are the same length at 20, but one is shorter at 40, then you write down “20”, because that’s the “available energy level”. If they’re the same length at 20 and 40, but different at 60, you write down 40. And so on.

And that’s it, basically. You repeat that 28 times and write down the results. If they’ve got energy level 100 everywhere save for vial 28 (associated with “wrong thinking”), you give them remedy 28 to “boost their energy level” at that point. After six to twelve months, the patients come back and if they tell you that they feel better, then everything’s fine. If they don’t, you re-test them and give them more remedies.

Now obviously, there’s so much wrong with that, I won’t be able to go into all. A quick overview:

  • What is energy and why do they use so many different, conflicting definitions?
  • How can PSE supposedly treat “everything”?
  • How can we test if “chakra-points” really exist?
  • Why are they using outdated concepts like the “four-temperament” theory?
  • How does the test device work?
  • Is the arm-reflex reliable? (Hint: NO!)
  • Isn’t the whole thing a bit subjective?

But most importantly of all, I want you to focus on one very specific problem: Where’s the evidence that it works? Anybody can say that it works (more on that much later), but how can I prove that it does?

Here’s where PSE encounters some very serious problems. There are four!!! relevant studies to this, with a total sample size of about 2000-2500. That’s not a bad sample size, it should be enough to see if PSE works or not. Below are the four studies:

Schmetterlingsstudie – Butterflystudy

Banis R, Banis U: Psychosomatische Energetik – Ergebnisse einer Praxisstudie. Schweiz Zschr Ganzheitsmed 2004;16:173–178.
Holschuh-Lorang B: Psychosomatische Energetik in der Allgemeinmedizin – Ergebnisse einer Praxisstudie. Schweiz. Zschr. GanzheitsMedizin 2004;18,368–371.
Banis R: Multizentrische Praxisstudie zur Psychosomatischen Energetik. Schweiz Z Ganzheitsmed 2010;22:269–272.

If you look at them, they all document a large percentage of “good” and “very good” results. But didn’t I just tell you PSE had serious problems when it comes to evidence?

Yes, because the above is not evidence of anything. It’s worthless trash, not worth the bits it’s written in.
That may sound harsh, but I’ll explain myself and I hope you’ll share my view.
Take note, because this is what the whole post has been building up to!

Eye-witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence in science, especially so in medicine. You can get better without the medicine or treatment doing anything (placebo effect), you can think you’re getting better even though the evidence shows no benefit and you can think the drug as a whole is beneficial (just not in you) even when it’s actually actively killing people. In his excellent book Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre documents (pages 140-143) the effects of a drug called Iressa on the general population. Basically, Iressa showed no real-world improvements for patients, yet they gave positive testimonies nonetheless.
So at the very least, we can expect PSE to look slightly beneficial just due to this misinformation or misunderstanding or whatever you would like to call it. We will also expect it to look more beneficial because of the placebo effect and, because often people go to get treated with nothing more than “feeling bad” or “anxiety”, even better because people care for them and talk to them.

None of that would matter if PSE were ever tested fairly, that is to say using real, measurable effects. Since none exist (bar the subjective “I feel well” from patients), we would at the very least expect PSE to be tested against a placebo. After all, we know how potent the placebo effect can be. No, none of that. After over 15 years of PSE having been practised, NOT A SINGLE study has been conducted comparing PSE to a placebo. I even went as far as suggesting a cooperative effort between Dr. Banis and myself, but that failed due to a number of factors. (She was interested and would even cooperate with me, but no suitable venue nor funding was found.)

This is what this post has been about: More than fifteen years of practising PSE have passed and we don’t even know the most basic thing about it: Does it work? (I’d say no, but then you shouldn’t take my word for it.)

So I asked a practitioner (or at least advocate) of PSE about the lack of evidence for PSE, not to mention the various pieces of evidence against PSE. What does she make of that?
Her response: “I don’t care about evidence, I have seen it work with my own eyes. And I probably wouldn’t change my mind if I saw studies to the contrary.”

This staggering lack of curiosity about the evidence is baffling. Why don’t you want to know if it works? Isn’t evidence something to actively seek out? And even if you don’t want to conduct the studies yourself, wouldn’t you at least like to know?
Interestingly, I was then chastised by nearly everybody at the table for daring to challenge a doctor and for being a “damn skeptic”.

So as of today, the evidence is still not in on PSE, but it most definitely is in on homeopathy and since that doesn’t work we can safely assume that PSE doesn’t work either. If new evidence comes along, I’ll review my view and make a second post on this issue.

For now though, I hope you’ve taken one thing away from this: Medicine needs evidence, otherwise we don’t know if something works or not. I’ll give specific examples for that in the next post, this one here was mainly to give one example of practitioners or advocates of alternative medicine being reluctant to seek out evidence against which to measure their medicine or treatment.

Beware of alternative medicine.
*In a lecture, future therapists were told the following: “Some day in the future, a person will walk through your door. This person will be extremely friendly and will immediately open up to you. They’ll tell you that you’re the only person who’s ever understood them and that all previous doctors just couldn’t find the answer but that they just know that you’ll be better. If that ever happens, THROW THEM OUT! They’re lunatics and you can’t help them”. -unsourced

Edited by Dean, 06/03/2013
Reason for edit: Spelling correction [1].

Reason, Science

Of species and kinds

7 Comments

 

One familiar argument an evolutionary proponent will encounter when dealing with creationists is the “species problem”. Essentially the argument is that there is not a definitive definition for a species. This almost inevitable argument comes up because the evolutionary proponent asks the creationist if they could define kind. Creationists believe that since biologists cannot come up with a consensus on species that applies to every organism, it gives them a free pass to not define kind.

 

The problem with this argument and the reason we have a “species problem” in biology is that different forms of life reproduce differently. For example, a definition for bacteria will not work for a population of mammals because they reproduce in a different manner. Thus, one is able to produce a robust definition of a species for organisms that reproduce sexually (i.e. reproductive isolation), but have a more fluid definition for species when it comes to asexually reproducing populations.

 

However, this is all beside the point and can be considered a red herring, thus one does not even have to address it. The main issue with this creationist argument is that the definition for kind should be vastly more robust than any definition of species. Young Earth Creationists believe that their God came to Earth, seeded all life on this planet, and made sure that each kind would reproduce after its kind. Thus, if a god(s) truly wanted to do this we would be able to see distinct genetics unique to certain kinds, which are not shared with any other animal outside of their kind. That is, there should be genetics shared only between the cat kind or dog kind that are not found in other organisms and we should not be able to find shared genetics between the two kinds.

 

Nevertheless, this is not what we see when we look into the genetics of life. Every time we look into the genome of an organism, we can see its shared life history with every other living organism on Earth. To date, we have not found a gene sequence unique to a group of organisms except at the species level, and those unique genes are what make that species different. It is this fact that is the real reason creationists refuse to define kind and would rather hide behind the “species problem” when asked to define kind. If the creationists were correct, and god(s) created different kinds then geneticists would be unable to create phylogenetic trees linking all organisms into clades based on their evolutionary history. To make this problem worse, other phylogenetic trees, based on morphology, embryology, etc…, should not be able to produce similar (statistically the same) trees. One would think that their genetics would be different, since all the kinds were created separately with no relation to the other.

 

Thus, the next time a creationist refuses to define kind, kindly remind him that comparative genetics has definitively proven universal common descent and that there have been no genetic markers to indicate that there ever were unique kinds. The “species problem” is not equivalent to the lack of a definition of kind.

Edited by Dean, 25/02/2013
Reason for edit: Minor corrections of grammar & punctuation.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Paleontology, Science

What is a …

12 Comments

I would like to answer a frequent question I hear while volunteering at the natural history museum. That question is “what is a paleontologist?” I will also throw in archeologist and anthropologist for good measure.

To answer the first question, a paleontologist is a person who studies the history of life on Earth. They are the people that dig up dinosaur fossils and other amazing plants and animals that once lived on our planet. The excavation and curation of the fossils they discover is what gives us our understanding of Earth’s past. There are several subfields of paleontology, which include paleobotany (plant fossils), invertebrate paleontology, and vertebrate paleontology. All of those can also be broken down into more fields.

So what is an archeologist?

An archeologist is a person that studies human prehistory. Archeologists are the people that dig up human remains, artifacts, and animals once preyed upon by humans. Since most of human history happened before anything was written down, archeology is our only look into the vast majority of our history on Earth. There are several subfields of this as well, such as bio-archeology (human remains), zoo-archeology (animal remains), lithic analysis, ceramic analysis. From there the fields are usually broken up into the area of the world you study and the time period you are investigating.

So what is an anthropologist?

An anthropologist is a person that studies primates, everything from lemurs to humans. In fact, in the U.S. archeology is considered a subfield of anthropology (most European countries place archeology into history). The other subfields are biological anthropology (anatomy of mainly humans), ethnology (or cultural anthropology), and human evolutionary ecology.

Now, there is some overlap in all three, but major distinctions between the three as well. for example if you found something you thought might be a fossil, you probably would not want to ask your local archeologist what it is, on that same note, if you discovered a arrowhead, a paleontologist would not know much more than you already know.

However, an example of the overlap is the subfield of anthropology I someday hope to become a part of. That subfield is called paleoanthropology and that is the field that studies the hominins and other ancient primate species. This subfield deals with primates (thus anthropology), which are very old and mostly extinct (thus paleontology) and some of the specimens can be classified as human and were creating lithics (thus archeology).

I hope this short overview of these three scientific fields was helpful and may have cleared up any questions you might have had. If anyone has any questions about any of the three fields, please ask away. I will be more than happy to address any questions.

Entertainment, Introductions, Random

Me me me, it’s all about me.

25 Comments

Not wanting to be the chap to rock the boat, I thought I would follow in the footsteps of my fellow contributors and introduce myself.

My name is Rob, I’m 26 and 3/4 years old and I’m in training to become a teacher. Here I am playing the drums dressed as a shark.

I’m currently studying for my BSc degree in Natural Sciences (high five Laurens) and will be teaching a short Introduction to Evolutionary Biology course in Spring. Other than Biology I have a healthy interest in Religion and Philosophy and was even lucky enough to teach this at A-level for 6 months last year.

Other than my academic pursuits, I play the drums for a nautical themed ska-punk-folk-anti folk-bugle blowing outfit known to few as the seas of mirth, and I also do a fair amount of writing, involving reviews, promotional features and a book. My book is about how I’m joining 12 religions over 12 months. I have only just started. It’s terrifying.

The reason for me wanting to blog here, is that I want to do better at knowing things. I have always found that being shown to be wrong is an entirely wonderful way of learning, so putting my thoughts down and having you chaps show my errors and expand on certain areas was too good an opportunity to miss. Saying that however, I hope I can provide you all with something with at least a smattering of interest.

The topics I will most likely babble about will be science and the love of science, philosophy, psychology, politics and a whole plethora of other such things. I can be quite faddy so best not to set too much in stone now.

Can’t wait.