Showing posts with label Skepticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skepticism. Show all posts

Sunday 7 February 2010

More Trick or Treatment?

This will be a relatively quick summary of the remaining two talks in the Trick or Treatment? meeting I mentioned in my prior post.

The second speaker was Andy Lewis, better known as "Le Canard Noir" of the Quackometer website. His talk was a funny and entertaining look at alternative medicine down the ages. After a brief discussion of Bath, a city whose modern wealth was, to an extent, founded on alternative medicine, he turned to tractors. No, not that sort. These were, in fact, pointed metal rods that supposedly pulled out (hence 'tractor') malign electrical energies from a patient.

These things were very popular in their day, and were cited as having successfully cured a number of conditions. The crucial point here is that these devices were invented by a man named Elisha Perkins, around 1795, just a few years after Samuel Hahnemann invented homoeopathy. So why is it that we all know about Hahnemann's technique, but not Perkins'? There are probably changes in fashion that are relevant here. Perkins' tractors relied on electricity, which was a very cool and mysterious sounding sort of thing at the time - a bit like the use of the word 'quantum' these days in all manner of pseudoscience. The fact that Perkins was out to make a lot of money, and patented his devices, is probably also significant - his techniques required special kit that you could only buy from his company. Hahnemann, by contrast, spread his ideas widely, intentionally making it easy for other people to copy him, and for his technique to long outlive his death.

Lewis presented a list of features that any good alternative medical treatment should have if it is do well - one almost certainly needs a bit of luck and promotional skill as well, of course. He discussed Hopi ear candles, which you stick in your ear and light up to draw out noxious substances. (Which they apparently don't, in case you were wondering). These are an example of an alternative medical technique that claims an ancient pedigree to make itself sound more impressive. Supposedly, they were used by the Hopi tribe, whose origins date back at least eight centuries. Yet, interestingly, the Hopi themselves deny this, and say it has nothing at all to do with their culture. In fact, there doesn't appear to be any clear evidence that the candles existed before their manufacturer went into business in the late 20th century.

There was also some discussion of how some early examples of a book about "natural medicine" by John Wesley, better known as the founder of Methodism. There were a great many remedies in this book, and a lot of them involved turnips. It's interesting to note that many of these would actually have been quite effective. While its unlikely that, say, rubbing turnips into a woman's breasts will cure very much (although I'm sure a few people would be willing to give it a try), Wesley's recommendation that they be used to treat scurvy would have been quite sound. Not only do turnips contain vitamin C, but, for most people of the day, they would have been much easier to get hold of than lemons.

The last speaker of the day was Professor John Garrow, of HealthWatch. He has spent much of his career studying obesity, and discussed a number of alternative treatments that, essentially, promise to get rid of your flab without any actual effort on your part. Which one can certainly see the appeal of, but, as you might imagine, tends not to work very well.

His particular focus was on HealthWatch's efforts to fight misleading adverts for such cures, through the Advertising Standards Authority and Trading Standards Officers. In particular, he mentioned the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, which effectively outlaws dodgy advertising of this type - but which has never been used to prosecute anyone since its introduction in 2008. HealthWatch itself having so far failed to get apparent breaches of the regulations prosecuted, he proposed a wider study to determine whether there is any will on the part of the relevant officials to do so. If there should, for some reason, turn out to be a systematic bias against enforcing the regulations in the UK, then that would be a violation of British commitments to the EU, and action could potentially be taken on those grounds.

Saturday 30 January 2010

Trick or Treatment?

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work?
"Medicine".
- Tim Minchin, "Storm"

Which rather encapsulates my problem with so-called complementary and alternative medicine. It is, at least in principle, not that hard to test whether a given medical treatment works or not, and anything that falls into the "alternative" camp has generally either not been tested at all, or if it has, has tended to fail the test. My view is that, if you're going to make medical claims you really ought to be able to back them up. And that's really the bottom line.

For instance, I see no particular reason why herbal medicines, for instance, shouldn't work. But they really ought to be tested to check exactly what they do (and what side effects they have, if any) and should only be sold and advertised based on what the evidence actually says. As a professional healthcare worker, this is something I do regard as important. Because the danger is that someone might take an inert treatment for a serious condition, and delay real treatment that might genuinely help them. There should be no double standards. (And that, incidentally goes for any malfeasance that the regular pharmaceutical companies might engage in).

So, anyway, I was obviously going to be interested in the latest event to be held by CFI London at Conway Hall. The "Trick or Treatment?" was a series of three talks on the subject of alternative medicine, and was well up the usual standard.

As it so happened, this was the same day selected by the 10:23 campaign to conduct a mass overdose to protest the selling of homoeopathic remedies by Boots the Chemist as if they were real remedies. Boots have been singled out here because, on 25th November 2009, Paul Bennett, the Professional Standards Director of the company testified before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that he did not personally believe homoeopathy worked, but that he was happy to sell it if people wanted to buy it. This strikes me as a pretty irresponsible attitude.

The overdosing had nothing to do with the event at Conway Hall, although some of the campaigners were outside. [Video of short discussion here]. But it does illustrate where this sort of thing can be useful. It's not going to convince the homoeopaths to change their mind, or anything like that. Nor any of their customers who have already made an informed decision (albeit, in my view, an erroneous one). But one has to wonder how many users know what homoeopathy really is. Do they, perhaps, think, that a homoeopathic preparation labelled, say, "Belladonna", actually contains any... well, Belladonna? Once they realise that, in all but the "weaker" preparations, it actually doesn't, then they might be in a better position to make that informed choice. And then it's up to them.

Anyway, the actual event opened with Simon Singh talking about acupuncture, chiropractice, and, of course, libel law. Acupuncture, as I probably don't need to explain, is the hypothesis that the human body contains channels, or "meridians" of magical energy called "Chi", and that by altering this flow by inserting needles into specific points along the meridians, it is possible to alleviate pain, and maybe also cure disease.

It's interesting to note, as a later speaker did, that this method may not be quite as ancient as commonly thought. Earlier references to the method apparently actually refer to cutting into patients with flint knives, which isn't quite what we think of today. Although, in fairness, the underlying concept is much the same. Some forms of acupuncture are even more modern. "Auricular acupuncture" only dates from the 1950s, when it was realised that the human ear looks quite like a foetus - and that it therefore obviously followed that, if you stuck needles in the parts of the ear that corresponded to where the meridian points would be if it were a whole body, the therapeutic effects should be the same.

Uh huh.

That aside, it has to be said that an interesting problem arises when we look at testing acupuncture to see how effective it is. To rule out the possibility of a placebo effect, with any proposed treatment it's important to test two groups of patients: one actually receiving the treatment, and another who think they are, but actually aren't. That's easy enough with a pill, but most people can tell if you've stuck a needle into them or not.

The problem isn't completely intractable however. The meridian lines are supposed to be quite deep, so you could just make a very shallow puncture, and see if that makes a difference. Or you could use fake needles, rather like stage daggers, that appear to stick into you, but, in fact, just retract. Or you could just put the needles in the wrong place - if acupuncture theory says they should go into the hand, put them into the feet, for instance. (Obviously this last one doesn't work if the patient knows enough about acupuncture to realise what you're up to).

And, guess what - when you do these sorts of studies, the "fake" treatments work pretty much as well as the real acupuncture. Which isn't to say that they don't work at all, just that acupuncture appears to be a fairly effective way of harnessing the placebo effect, and that all the stuff about Qi and meridians has no bearing on that.

Chiropractice was originally based on the theory that the body maintains its health by channelling vital energy through the spinal nerves. Virtually all disease, claimed its founder, Daniel David Palmer, was due to misalignments, or "subluxations" of the spine, blocking the passage of this vital energy to the relevant body parts. Now, not all chiropractors today necessarily believe that, but some it seems, still do, and claim that manipulating the spine can cure, for example, ear infections. One would have thought there was quite enough money in curing just back pain, but there you go.

In fact, it's probably worth mentioning that, regardless of what it might do for ear infections and the like, there does seem to be some reasonable evidence that chiropractice can help to relieve back pain. Perhaps surprisingly, it's not terribly good at doing even this - but in fairness, neither is anything else (such as, say, mainstream physiotherapy). In this particular respect, I'm not aware of any clear evidence that it's any different from the various alternatives, and at least some of the time, it does seem to work.

This brings me back to the point I made earlier about informed knowledge. Many people, it seems, are unaware that chiropractors aren't MDs, and that, at least when it comes to conditions other than back pain, there really isn't an awful lot of evidence that the technique works.

Given that my verbosity has once again got the better of me, I'll move onto the other two speakers at a later time.

Saturday 7 November 2009

Sea Monsters

As I indicated last time, this will be a report of a session I attended about sea monsters. Not the Gloranthan sort, but ones in our world. Since Kingdom of Heroes is due for general release from 28th November, those waiting for a review of that may not have too much longer, and I don't at present have any other meetings of this sort planned before January, so that review should be the next thing up here.

The event, like some of the prior ones I've mentioned, was hosted by CFI London and held at Conway Hall. The first talk was presented by Charles Paxton of St Andrew's University. He defined a "sea monster", not unreasonably, as "an unknown marine animal larger than 2 metres" - that is to say, probably bigger than YOU.

By this definition, it's interesting to note just how many sea monsters have, in fact, been discovered in recent years. Now, granted, some of these are actually instances of animals that were already known, but not identified as being a separate species before. (An example of this kind of thing from dry land would be the recently discovered forest elephant). But some are genuinely new and surprising - the megamouth shark, for instance, was only discovered in 1976, and doesn't really resemble anything known before that time. Just within the last ten years, we've discovered at least two species of beaked whale, a group about which remarkable little is known, along with such things as giant rays. Given all this, it would frankly, be rather surprising if there weren't any new species out there that we haven't yet seen. In fact, it would be downright astonishing.

Most, of course, are going to be cetaceans (whales & dolphins) or cartilaginous fish (sharks & rays). Some will probably be other sorts of fish, seals, or even giant squid. They are not, on the whole, going to be plesiosaurs, but more on that later.

What the talk focused on primarily, however, was sightings. What should we make of reports of giant creatures roaming the seas that just don't fit any known species? Some may well be genuine, but many probably aren't. For one thing, even assuming that the reports are genuine (and most probably are, in fairness), if the observer isn't a zoologist, they might not know what they're looking at. Take this, for example, which shows a historical drawing of a sea serpent encounter and a modern photograph of what's very probably the same thing:

You can, perhaps, understand the mistake, but, of course, that photo isn't really a whale being attacked by a pair of sea serpents.

Come to that, the following critter looks pretty much like a sea serpent (it's about 30 feet long), but is perfectly well known to science:


It's called an oarfish, and it's really quite cool.

One might expect - and I certainly did - that most reports of sea monsters would be of the creature being some distance away. For one thing, that would make it harder to identify, if it was, in fact, something well known. Also, since it is very hard to measure distances at sea, one might well think that something is further away - and thus, much larger - than it actually is. But it turns out that's not so. In fact, according to Paxton's analysis of sightings from 1748 onwards, most sea monster sightings are at much closer quarters than one would expect by random chance. That is, if a given creature is real, you would reasonably expect people to have seen at least some of them from a fair distance off, but actually that's not what they report.

There's a number of possible reasons for this. It could be that, having seen the beast, people then often approach it to get a better look, and report that as the distance. It could be that, from a longer distance, people quite reasonably conclude it's probably something familiar they can't recognise that far away, and don't report it. For that matter, exaggerations, intentional or otherwise, are quite likely, especially when one is telling an exciting story.

The afternoon session was presented by Darren Naish, writer of the Tetrapod Zoology blog, of which I was already a fan. He focussed on the Prehistoric Survivor Paradigm; that is, the contention among many (but not all) cryptozoologists that many of the things they're hunting for are survivors of lineages so far known only to exist as fossils. Most obviously, of course, the plesiosaurs. After all, the argument goes, the coelacanth had been thought to go extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, until it was found alive and well in 1938. So couldn't the same thing have happened to the plesiosaurs?

Well, no, actually it couldn't.

There are quite a few good reasons for this. For a start, the fossil record of the two groups is quite different. Coelacanths were already very much in decline by the time they disappeared from the fossil record with the dinosaurs, whereas plesiosaurs were extremely abundant - anything short of total extinction would surely have left a bunch of more recent species in the fossil record. Secondly, it's a damn sight easier to identify a plesiosaur fossil than a coelacanth one. The bones are much more distinctive in shape, they're unusually solid (making it easier for the creature to dive) so that they should fossilise better, and... well, they are a bit bigger. Harder to miss, you'd think. Coelacanth bones, by contrast, mostly look like those of other fish - at least, aside from the fins - and they're smaller and more fragile. And, on the gripping hand, since 1938, some fossil coelacanths have been discovered from post-dinosaurian deposits, so the gap is a good deal smaller than one might suppose.

Another good reason for thinking this unlikely is that most "plesiosaur" sightings don't look a whole lot like plesiosaurs. They look more like this model (picture from Wikipedia):

Which may be the classic view of what real plesiosaurs looked like, but is, in fact wrong. The most notable point here is the head - notice how it bends forward, like a swan. Real plesiosaurs had relatively stiff necks, so that the head should be tilted upwards if the neck were at this angle. In fact, plesiosaurs might not have been able to lift their necks this much anyway; the long neck was, most likely, for bending downwards to pick shellfish off the bottom. But, even if it could do so, the animal's centre of gravity would have meant that the poor creature would have gone over if it had tried to achieve such a feat.

There was particular discussion of the "merhorses" reported from the northern Pacific. They may, or may not, be an unknown creature, but whatever they are, they're certainly not a plesiosaurs, because the descriptions really don't come close. Some kind of unknown long-necked seal is a better bet, if it's not just misidentification of something otherwise known.

Similar objections apply to other claimed prehistoric survivors, of which the most prominent are perhaps mosasaurs and basilosaurids. Claims that they may have evolved into something quite different since they vanished from the fossil record really don't address the absence of that record, and are a bit like groping for an excuse. Plus, it's fairly unlikely, as is sometimes claimed, that modern plesiosaurs might be furry, or that some modern basilosaurids might look like a cross between a turtle and a centipede (no, really).

The afternoon concluded with a workshop playing with a computer program to estimate the likelihood of something still being around after a gap in the fossil record, and trying to estimate the species diversity of coloured straws in a bucket (courtesy of yours truly, since nobody else volunteered!)

Oh, and if you're still trying to puzzle out that first photo: there are two whales in that photo. Two very happy boy whales...

Monday 23 March 2009

God in the Lab

On one of the Glorantha lists, I recently commented that I seem to be able to attend skeptical meetings more often than I manage to get any gaming in this days. And so it seems, since I've only had gaming session this year so far, yet I have attended two skeptical meetings.

The latest was titled "God in the Lab", and it was about scientific studies into the basis of religion. One of the talks was about religious analgesia, in which Catholics had reported feeling less pain while viewing a picture of the Virgin Mary (together with some brain scans that showed they were indeed, Not Making This Up). I wasn't terribly clear of the point of this; certainly the researcher wasn't trying to claim that they had actually been divinely protected. Basically, so far as I can tell, viewing the image put them in a frame of mind where they felt comfortable and protected, and that was reflected in their psychological and physiological perceptions of pain. One suspects the same could have been achieved with other comforting images, that were not necessarily religious - but apparently, nobody has done that study. Getting ethical approval for studies that involve electrocuting people probably isn't all that easy...

Two of the other talks had a fairly similar theme, although addressed from different angles. They both concluded that children have an innate tendency to believe in gods, and in the separation of mind and body. It is intuitively "obvious" to most people that the mind and the body are different things - that, for example, "I" want to do something, but "my body" won't let me. While the specifics of beliefs in the nature of the soul vary widely, the broad ideas behind what properties a disembodied spirit would have are remarkably consistent across different cultures. One could, of course, equally attribute this to "and that's because disembodied spirits really do have these properties" as much as to "this tells us something about the way our brains deal with the world."

Similarly, children naturally attribute the natural things about them to purposeful design, regardless of their religious upbringing (or lack thereof). And these things remain as holdovers even into our adult lives. For example, a three year old child has no conception that other people do not know what they know - in essence, they assume that everyone is omniscient, at least about things they know themselves. As they grow up, it's not so much that they have to be taught that God is an omniscient being, but they have to learn, as their brain develops, that everyone except God isn't. (An interesting aside here, though not brought up in the talk, is that chimpanzees are, so far as I know, the only other animals demonstrated to be able to pull off this trick - essential if one wants to, say, lie...)

These sorts of things, I think, explain why religion is so ubiquitous... although they have nothing directly to say about whether or not it is true. The remaining talk addressed another reason: that some people have religious experiences in which they personally contact the Divine. Now, often this in the form of mystical experiences, in which one feels at one with the universe, or the Godhead, or whatever it may be, and loses a sense of self. But this particular talk was about the more extreme form of experiences, in which God, or a guardian angel, or whatever, speaks to the person. These experiences, it seems, are virtually identical phenomenologically to psychotic episodes, save for the crucial difference that they are positive and life-affirming, rather than deeply unpleasant. But the underlying processes in the brain do seem very similar (although clearly there must be some difference, and these things probably lie on a continuum from clinical insanity to religious revelation).

In particular, brain scans conducted while people were hearing such voices showed the same activity whether they were psychotic or experiencing something benevolent. Indeed, I found it interesting that the scans look very similar to those of people simply asked to imagine hearing a voice - that is, the brain areas for interpreting speech light up, while those for actual sound do not. The difference being that, when you imagine a voice, centres of the brain associated with planning and taking action light up immediately beforehand, but in the psychotic and religious experiencers, the voice interpretation areas just light up on their own, without any prior warning. It's also worthy of note that anti-psychotic medication seems to be able to dampen these positive experiences as well, in those that experience both - although, for ethical reasons, one can't really try them out on people whose experiences are only ever positive, and aren't, therefore, mentally ill in some way.

So, a pretty interesting day, and one which gives some food for thought. Lets see if I can get another gaming session in before the next Centre for Inquiry meeting, though...

Monday 19 January 2009

Weird Science

As some of you will have noticed, my usual e-mail sig includes the description "Gamer and Skeptic". This blog has been largely about gaming until now, because, let's face it, to the extent hat anyone is interested in what I'm doing, its probably because of my gaming books. (Well, aside from my relatives, presumably...) But, for today, let's talk about the second half of that, and the wonderful world of Doubt!

Of course, what I mean by this isn't the extreme philosophical skepticism of doubting everything. Granted, I can't prove (by the nature of the claim) that I don't live in The Matrix, with everything I'm experiencing being an illusion, but it seems pretty freaking unlikely. Skepticism is really about testing claims to see whether they stand up to scrutiny, and changing ideas as available evidence comes in - which is pretty much the basis of science. Or, at least, it is in an ideal world, because scientists are as fallible as anyone else.

At any rate, I mention this because of the Centre for Inquiry, a skeptical think tank which opened its London branch early last year. I was able to attend the opening event, which was quite interesting, but was followed by what was pretty much silence. Well, they finally got around to organising their first proper post-opening event on Saturday, and I went along. This was an all-day event, with four speakers holding forth on the general topic of "Weird Science", and very enjoyable it was, too.

First we had Richard Wiseman, describing his work in the weirder realms of psychology, performing simple magic tricks to illustrate perceptual illusions and so on. It's pretty much the same talk he always give at these sort of events, and its probably as well that it has been several years since I last saw it (since it has evolved in that time, as he's done more new things), but it is very well presented. And, of course, it included the Colour Changing Card Trick - and, if you haven't seen this, you really should.

Next up, Chris French, talking about his work at the Anomalous Psychology Research Unit. Unfortunately, there were a number of technical hiccups during this presentation, but as always, it was interesting and informative. Who would have thought Haunted Homes would present a mysterious sound as being unexplained (and implying it was made by a ghost) when they knew perfectly well what it actually was? It's almost enough to make you distrust what you see on TV...

After lunch, we had philosopher Stephen Law on the verifiability of Creation Science. I've only seen him once before, but he was an effective speaker on that occasion, too, and certainly somewhat provocative! And, lastly, Ben Goldacre gave a talk called (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) something like "The Lies That the Media Tell About Science and Which are So Fucking Incredibly Wrong that they Just Make Me Want to Slam My Cock in the Door and Revolving Especially Around Instances When They Had an Opportunity to Teach Something About Real Science But Didn't Because They Would Rather Just Tell Lies I Mean Why Would Anyone Want to Do That, Why?". Which was pretty much what it sounds like, and both passionate and entertaining.

After which, we all went down the pub, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Skeptics in the Pub. I attended the very first of these, way back when they were on Fridays, making returning home after 1 am not so unreasonable. I haven't been for a long time, and this was just a pub meeting, rather than including a talk as they usually are (which would have been a bit redundant on this occasion, obviously...) A good evening, giving me the opportunity to talk a bit about evolutionary theory, as well as lots of other things, and to meet (albeit briefly) Rebecca Watson, one of the presenters of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, the only weekly podcast that I never miss.

All of which goes to show that Doubting Stuff can be fun! Especially when there's beer involved.