You could just die laughing
This is the text of a presentation given by Peter Bowditch to the 2004
Annual Convention of Australian Skeptics
on November 13, 2004, and to the 2004 Annual Conference of the
Manly Warringah Division of General Practice the following day.
When I give these talks I introduce myself by mentioning the three parts
I play in the skeptical world. I am the Vice President of
Australian Skeptics, the Boss and
Chief Decision Maker of the RatbagsDotCom
Empire, and the Executive Officer of the Australian Council Against Health
Fraud. One thing I have noticed over the years is that the followers of alternative
medicine and the believers in woowoo and the paranormal generally seem to
lack a sense of humour. An example of this is that there have been several
comments about me assuming the title of "Boss and Chief Decision Maker", as
this apparently indicates that I have a colossal ego and am extremely self-important.
These claims may indeed be true, but most people would assume that the title
was meant to be amusing. I always respond by saying that as I am the only
inhabitant and employee of the RatbagsDotCom Empire, I can call myself whatever
I like.
This lack of a sense of humour may explain the continued existence of some
of the claims and cures of alternative medicine, simply because they are so
ridiculous that it is almost impossible not to laugh when first meeting them.
The sad thing is that not only do some people fail to see the humour, they
actually take them seriously. The sites mentioned below illustrate this. These
sites are drawn from the collection of oddities at
Quintessence of the Loon, and all
were alive on the web on November 11, 2004.
Horse Iridology
I
have spent a lot of time around racehorses. They are delicate animals,
so delicate in fact that the merest hint of the weight of my money on their
backs can cause them to run slower than usual. Like most gamblers, sorry,
track investors, I like to go down to the saddling enclosure to check out
the withers, hocks, fetlocks, gaskins and croups, and after I have inspected
the jockeys I look at the horses. I must admit that I have never paid much
attention to horses' eyes, except for those times when one of the animals
gives me one of those superior, baleful looks to remind me that when I am
walking home because I don't have the bus fare, he will be riding in an air-conditioned
van. Not to mention how each of us are going to spend our retirement years.
Iridology
is not the only quackery practised on horses. There are acupuncturists who
somehow manage to thread their fine needles through the tough skin of horses
to reach the vital meridians inside, but my favourites are horse chiropractors.
A racehorse is a well-trained athlete, with all that means for muscle condition
and density. The muscles between a horse's spine and the top of the horse
are quite substantial, and seem to be adequate for supporting the spine even
when the horse is carrying 55Kg of jockey, saddle and lead shot. Horse chiropractors
claim to be able to manipulate the vertebrae of horses, but I certainly would
not like to shake hands with anyone with that much strength in his thumbs.
(Especially if he is a Mason.)
Reiki Attunement
A
couple of years ago I took a course to become a Reiki practitioner (it took
three days), but I haven't been keeping up with progress in this healing modality.
Reiki heals by the practitioner channelling some higher power, and apparently
it can be done remotely, such as by telephone. As well as Reiki Healing, which
fixes all the usual things that alt-med heals, like cancer, arthritis and
piles, there is also Reiki Attunement which aligns the chakras and generally
gets you feeling good. (This is best explained by analogy to a car, where
replacing the gearbox is healing, but getting a tune-up is attunement.) The
problem is that all the time and money spent at the attunatorium can be wasted
if you get stuck behind a Volvo and in front of a road-rager at a red light
on the way home, because what goes on after the light turns green can seriously
disrupt the holistic you.
According to this web site, you can now have remote attunement as well
as healing, although there seems to be some controversy in the Reiki community
about this. The conventional orthodoxy is that healing can be done remotely
but attunement needs physical proximity. The author of this site believes
that the matter has been settled scientifically, and he presents evidence:
Some, like William Rand, (see his article on Reiki Distant Attunement
at his site at www.reiki.org ) feel that distant attunements might work,
but his clairvoyants feel that distant attunements do not contain all the
"frequencies" of energy that the regular attunements contains. (Although
how they could determine this I cannot imagine, especially there is no known
or reliable method of determining the strngth or completeness of anyone's
reiki. Perhaps they invented a Reiki-Om-Meter to measure the energy?) Clairvoyants
that I know tell me that they have watched both Distant and Hands-On attunements
and they see the same thing occuring in both. So is this a case of my clairvoyants
are better than yours?!! Or perhaps we might take into account that clairvayancy
has never been the most reliable of practices. If we through intent do an
attunement hands on or distant, then we should trust that the creator, the
source of Reiki will ensure that everything is exactlty as it is supposed
to be! Many people in the Usui/Tibetan schools of reiki are taught that
the "reiki guides" do the attunements (this is not a belief held by the
majority of reiki practitioners). If your teachings/beliefs are that the
"reiki guides" do the attunements, is it not an inconsistent belief to think
that since they do them that they can certainly do them distantly?
Fundamentally it has to come down to a question of evidence, proof
and faith. Where is the evidence to back up claims such as these? That is
the problem with making such claims when they are unprovable. I can make
claims. For example, i could claim that the space aliens started reiki millenia
ago, buy shooting humans with their Reiki Ray Guns which focused cosmic
energy on them. In reality when you doodle when talking on the phone you
are subconsciously linked to the space guys and they are giving you new
symbols! And i can say that i know cause i channeled them while on the phone
and they told me. Barring objective evidence, this has exactly the same
validity as anyone's claims regarding distant attunements. This is more
about faith and belief than anything else.
However, having said that, we must evaluate what evidence we do
have. Countless thousands of reiki practitioners and masters have been attuned
distantly. In the final analysis - barring any way to objectively measure
the energy or process - we must examine whether or not they can do reiki.
From what i can tell, and alot of people with much much more experience
than I, The answer to that is yes, they can.
Urine
Therapy
It's
a real nuisance when you need to get some pharmaceutical supplies late at
night and the shop's closed. Of course, the inconvenience level depends on
what you wanted to buy and what you planned to do with it, but we are talking
about medical emergencies here. If it is something minor then perhaps it can
wait, but if you have just discovered, for example, that your hippocampus
is inflamed then something needs to be done real quick. Similarly, it is discouraging
to turn up at the ER with a raging case of hangnail only to find that the
victims of an explosion at a pickle factory are getting all the attention.
Isn't it lucky, then, that you can carry a first aid kit around with you all
the time? Not only that you can do it, but that you do do it. I'm relieved.
There seems to be a large overlap between those who believe that urine
is good for trauma treatment and those who claim that humans have not evolved
to eat cooked food of any kind, and we should all eat nothing but raw vegetables.
The extremists of the raw food movement promote a system called "Natural Hygiene".
It was one of these people who came the closest I have ever seen to getting
supporters of alternative medicine to challenge an alt-med claim when he said:
[M]enstruation as most of us experience it is neither natural nor
healthy. Ovulation does not depend on it. And it can be changed very much
for the better - even to the extent of not experiencing it at all yet remaining
healthy and fertile. How this can be done has been known and written about
by health practitioners for centuries, and practised just as long by women
willing to make the simple but significant lifestyle changes involved.
So why haven't most of us heard about this before?
It is because the lifestyle improvements involved, although simple,
are quite a change from most modern women's habits of living and eating.
No drugs or even nutritional supplements are required, but what is essential
is the adoption of what health writer Leslie Kenton calls a "high raw way
of eating"
That's right - women only have periods because they don't eat right! The
cessation of menstruation seen in anorexics is evidence of an adequate diet!
This really would be funny if it wasn't so stupid. As I said, this gave even
hardened alternative supporters something to think about, although none of
them in the particular forum where this was posted could actually bring themselves
to declare it nonsense. I suppose getting them to ask "Are you sure about
that?" was at least a step in the right direction.
Biophotonic
Therapy
The
use of coloured lights has a long history in the annals of quackery. Sometimes
it takes the form of shining lights on people to fix what ails them, but this
is different. Biophotonic Therapy involves taking a sample of the patient's
blood, exposing it to some exotic energy source and then putting it back into
the patient's blood vessels. Once inside it increases the chemiluminescence
of the red blood cells. This can only mean that it makes them glow in the
dark. The value of this is not immediately obvious, but it could be that the
glowing erythrocytes transport the magical healing powers of light to all
the hard-to-reach parts of the body. One obvious side effect that I can see
is that this would suffuse your body with a pink glow when the lights were
out. I imagine that this therapy would require hospitalisation, as it would
be quite disturbing to household pets and small children to have someone wandering
about the house looking like a pink nightlight. In hospital, though, it would
make it easy for the night nurses to check vitals, because they would just
have to look over the curtains to see if your aurora was still reflecting
off the ceiling tiles.
[If you think that this is nonsense and could only be on a web site
and not anywhere in real life, consider this: after I gave this presentation
to the Australian Skeptics convention, one of the interstate visitors told
me that there was a Biophotonic Therapy conference taking place that very
day in the hotel where he was staying.]
Dr. Bertha L. Veronneau, D.D.,D.Sc
Do
you remember the science you learnt at school? It doesn't matter if you have
forgotten it, because it was probably all wrong. For example, did you know
that the heart has seven ventricles and pumps air? I'll bet you thought those
models of molecules you see in museums are just metaphors, but if you look
through a microscope you can see real molecules, and they have little red,
blue and black dots in them. The black dots are metals. Did you know that
the liver chews things and then sends kelp or alfalfa to the thyroid gland
and penicillin to the salivary glands?
Bertha is one of the great loons of the 'net. No collection of kooks and
loons is complete without a reference to her, but she has the unnerving habit
of occasionally disappearing. When this happens, calls are made to loyal web
site visitors to find the new location of her site and eventually it is found
and everyone can get back to normal. The other unnerving thing about Bertha
is that she has followers who think that she knows something. Here is another
quote from Dr, Bertha L. Veronneau, D.D.,D.Sc:
At this time of life of the intelligence of the Cosmos, we understand
the Molecule (Ion, atom) to be the basis of all chemical substance, A chemical
substance can be a monad, or a kenetic grouping. A determination of the
quality of the substance is determined by the molecule as seen in the microscope.
Is it of the human body, or is it toxic to the human body? This is important
to know. Are we consuming foods and medicines, or applying lotions to our
bodies that might case deterioration. When a product has a side effect it
is destroying something in your physical self. We need to learn to renew
our bodies... rebuild. You cannot rebuild the body with toxic substance.
I should mention here that, just as I am a qualified Reiki practitioner,
I also hold the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Well, I will after I send in
the $25 final payment.
Another wonderful loon who shares with Bertha the quaint trait of vanishing
without trace and then popping up again after everyone has despaired of ever
seeing her again is Nancy Luft. Nancy doesn't have a lot to say about alternative
medicine, but as she believes that the entire world is run by a network of
conspiracies she probably thinks that the pharmaceutical companies are connected
to the great CIA conspiracy. Her speciality is telling us about how the conspiracists
use satellites (she always calls them "sputniks") to beam messages into our
brains. She says that the explosion of Mount St Helens was not volcanic but
was caused by a sputnik missing its target. I have seen the hole in the side
of the mountain with my own eyes and all I can say is that the target brain
must have been extremely dense or protected by a very good tinfoil helmet
if that much energy was needed to rearrange it.
Amber Rose
When
I first saw this site it was talking about "beesting therapy". I misread this
as "beasting" and thought for a moment that I had stumbled on one of those
web sites from Belgium or Holland that the moralisers keep talking about.
It now talks about Bee Acupuncture, which seems to have two possible modes
of operation. One would be to grind up the contents of a beehive, smear the
mixture of honey, wax, dead bees and bee excrement over the patient, and then
stick needles through it into the flesh beneath. The other would be to train
bees to sting patients at acupuncture points. A major problem with the training
regimen would be that the bees die after stinging someone, so the training
would have to be only up to the stage of the bee locating the relevant meridian
and then walking along it to the desired acupuncture point. The bee could
then be annoyed by an external stimulus to make it drive in the stinger. Perhaps
it could be connected with a couple of tiny electrical wires and the therapist
could press a button to give it a shock when stinging time came. It all sounds
very complicated to me.
To get serious for a moment, many people have violent immune reactions
to bee stings and even bee dander. Bee stings are comparatively rare (I have
only been stung once in my life) and it is possible for someone to be highly
susceptible and not know it until the first sting happens. I doubt that a
naturopath's office is the location of choice for someone's first experience
of anaphylactic shock. But, of course, alternative medicines are all natural
and have no side effects.
DigiBio
One
criticism directed at alternative medicine is that it is not backed by science.
The usual response to this is to point to Dr Jacques Benveniste and his body
of work showing that dilution beyond Avogadro's Number does not remove the
effect of solutions of chemicals. I was saddened to hear that Dr Benveniste
passed away on October 3, 2004. He was the man who came up with the idea of
water having a memory, thus providing much encouragement to homeopaths who
used this to claim that there was some scientific evidence for their fantasies.
He later claimed that it was possible to extract this memory and store it
in an electronic form, and to then transmit it to other places where it could
be installed in different water. Almost exactly five years before his death,
Dr Benveniste wrote to me to say:
Our experiments have been recently reproduced in a major American
University and several labs in France. We should be launching momentarily
the international replication by 10-15 other labs worldwide. ... Upon completion
of the present replication job, a scientific report will be submitted to
a major journal.
I am still waiting for the results to be published. I hope someone goes
through his notes and gets his work into a form where it can be released to
overthrow the current paradigms of physics and chemistry. Dr Benveniste is
no longer eligible for a Nobel Prize, as these are only awarded to the living,
but I am going to suggest to the appropriate authorities that he be immortalised
by the concept of Benveniste's Number. This is Avogadro's Number raised to
the power of Avogadro's Number, and represents a limit to dilution which could
make even the most ardent homeopath start to think about what is possible.
Now things start to get personal. In August 2004 an item with the title
"The Evil Works Of Peter Bowditch" appeared in an Internet forum related to
alternative medicine. It quoted an article by an Australian journalist, Eve
Hillary, and came from a site owned by a man named David Icke. He is famous
for his theory that the central committee of the Illuminati, the world's most
powerful and secret society, are all lizards and regularly change shape (the
process is called "shape-shifting") to reveal their reptilian characteristics.
Known members of this group are the British Royal Family and the US royalty
of The House of Bush.
Reptilian Agenda
There
are certain characteristics which help to identify the lizard people. One
of them is Rh negative blood. I am AB negative, but there's more to the story.
From the earliest I can remember, my favourite word has been "lizard". When
I was a surfer, I always liked to sit on a flat rock at the end of the beach
rather than on the sand. I was born on an equinox, the perfect time of the
year for exothermic creatures because in summer your flat rock can get too
hot to walk on and in winter you can become as sluggish as a creationist's
brain activity. Not only was I born on a suitable date but it was following
a major flying saucer sighting, and one of the theories is that the lizard
genes were introduced by aliens to establish a fifth column for when the visitors
return to take over. (I have tried to discuss these things with my mother
but she just looks embarrassed and tells me not to be silly.) I was a failure
at catching games like football when I was at school, and apparently it had
something to do with the articulation of my shoulders making it difficult
for me to catch the ball.
David Icke Medical
Archives
Not
only does David Icke have web pages about the reptiles, but he also has a
site about medical conspiracies. It was here that the article mentioning me
was published (it is on some other non-Icke sites as well -
you can read it here). At this point I should mention that Eve Hillary,
who wrote it, often has material published in Australian alternative health
and lifestyle magazines and is treated as if she is a serious journalist.
In this piece she refers to research from 1995 showing that 18,000 people
die each year from medical mistakes in hospitals, but a year earlier she had
been citing a 2000 paper by the same researchers and saying that it said 10,000
(it didn't). She simply does not care whether what she writes is the truth
or not, and she assumes that her readers will never check her "facts". (You
can see more of my comments about Eve Hillary
here and
here.)
Here is a quote from the article:
The Australian Skeptics group has spawned a number of offshoots.
Peter Bowditch, a ruddy faced man with a blunt military manner is the vice
president of the group. He keeps busy running a number of websites, one
of which is www.ratbags.com/rsoles. Not one to trifle with social niceties,
he has compiled an extensive list of persons and organisations that he states
on his website are, "a collection of a thousand arseholes". Among those
targeted are Christian websites, anti-vivisection and animal welfare organisations,
alternative medicine and environmental groups. He invites anyone to contact
him by e-mailing "The Proctologist". His targets, however, are not accorded
the right of reply. Bowditch makes no apologies; "owners of sites linked
to from here may be offended and feel that I am holding them up to ridicule
by calling them arseholes." Furthermore, he makes it clear that those displeased
enough to consult a lawyer about defamation will have their law firms; "immediately
placed on the arseholes list and linked from this site.“ Normally, Bowditch,
the website and the Skeptics could be dismissed as just another group or
a byte in cyberspace, were it not for the fact that their spur leads into
the corridors of political power in much the same ways as Steven Barrett's
Quackbusters do in the US.
My only comment is that the way that my "targets" are "not accorded
the right of reply" can be seen at
the mailbox pages
on this site.
When I talked about my lizardness before, I assume that everyone took it
as a joke. Remember how I said that alternative medicine believers have no
sense of humour? Here is another quote from Eve Hillary's article:
Bowditch also has a link to a restricted access discussion group
that is only open to “approved” members. The discussion group, QuackbustersOfTheIlluminati,
states its purpose as being: “This is a meeting place for the anti-alternative-medicine
committee of the Illuminati, where we can meet and consider our attack on
health freedom within the broader agenda of world domination.” It is not
known what relationship Bowditch has with this group, why it is secretive
or why it was formed.
I emailed Ms Hillary and invited her to join the secret society, although
I told her that she would have to serve a probation period before I could
introduce her to the Queen, the Pope and Bill Gates and that I was not high
enough in the organisation to go further than that. She would have to speak
to one of them if she wanted to meet Rupert Murdoch. She never answered my
email.
I would like to finish on a serious note. The sites I have shown may appear
to be ludicrous, but for every one of them there are people who believe what
is written there. If people can be deceived by such obvious nonsense, or by
the ridiculous conspiracy theories put about by people like David Icke and
Eve Hillary, then it is no wonder that they can be taken in by the seemingly
legitimate quackery sites which are full of scientific words and pretend research,
or by the fearmongers talking about the dangers of vaccines, or by pseudoscientists
who claim to have the only correct answer (which is suppressed by the orthodoxy
to protect turf and income).
The people who are deceived by these quacks are not stupid - they simply
do not have the scientific knowledge or even the critical thinking skills
to separate truth from nonsense. It is the duty of doctors and skeptics to
not only oppose quackery but to educate consumers and patients about what
is possible and what is not. This will not be an easy task, but difficulty
is no excuse for giving up the fight.
