Imagine that one of your limbs did not feel as if it belonged to you or was a natural part of your body. In a weird way the “extra” limb makes you feel incomplete, less than your whole self. The limb functions, you can feel it, and its completely healthy – it’s just not yours. It is a constant irritant. Eventually you become obsessed with the idea of amputating the limb. You fantasize about amputation and imagine yourself without the offensive body part.

This desire to amputate a healthy limb was described and named apotemnophilia  by Money in 1977. It has recently been renamed Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This is a rare and interesting disorder – at first it was thought to be psychological, but it is more likely to be a neurological disorder.

Recent fMRI evidence suggests that people with BIID have decreased activation of their right superior parietal lobe when the “extra” limb is touched. This likely relates to the brain’s internal map or schema of the body.

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Social media has been getting a bad rap recently. Blogs, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media outlets have certainly had a dramatic impact on how people communicate. They are powerful tools and many people have put them to good use.

There are some unintended consequences as well, and as a society we are still learning to adapt to this new factor in our lives. There are issues of privacy, the rules of social behavior, and the ethics of spreading dubious information online.

We discussed two related issues recently on the SGU. The first was about the recent paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” by Lewandowsky. Essentially Lewandowsky wrote a paper about conspiracy theories around the denial of global warming. Part of the backlash against that paper by self-described global warming skeptics included further conspiracy theories about the paper. Lewandowsky could not resist the irony, hence his subsequent paper.

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I’m a big fan of solar energy, and specifically photovoltaics (PV). The earth is bathed in free clean energy, far more than we need to run our civilization, and all we have to do is harvest it. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

There are many ways to calculate the efficiency and effectiveness of PV technology. One way it to calculate its cost-effectiveness compared to other forms of energy. The bottom line for any consumer is this – if you install PV in your residence, what is the total cost of installation and maintenance compared to the cost savings of the energy produced?

You can also think about the energy efficiency of PV – what is the total energy cost of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of PV across its lifetime compared to the amount of electricity it generates.

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What was actually in Thompson’s Cattle Powder, Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, or Hamlin’s Wizard Oil?

Prior to regulation by the FDA, over-the-counter medicine in this country was largely a creation of small businesses. There was a large variety of so-called “patent medicine,” each a proprietary blend of – what?

The term “patent medicine” has nothing to do with being issued a patent. The term refers to a letters patent, which is  essentially permission to use a royal endorsement. Most patent medicines were not actually patented mainly because the promoters did not want to disclose their ingredients.

Instead, such products were branded and their brand heavily marketed.

As a result the ingredients of these patent medicine products were largely unknown. Compounding pharmacists were familiar with the ingredients, however, and often sold cheap knockoffs, making it all the more important for promoters to protect and promote their brand.

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It’s always amusing to see two pseudosciences combined into one greater pseudoscience – it’s like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s not uncommon because those who would embrace one pseudoscience are likely to follow the same flawed logic and process to accept others. My colleague David Gorski has termed this effect “crank magnetism.”

Take, for example, Gian Paolo Vanoli. He has been making international headlines recently because of his claim that vaccines cause homosexuality, which he insists is a disease. The story appears to have been first picked up in English by the Huffington Post – all other reports of this story I have found cite this article as their source.

Because of the date of this article (4/1) I wanted to make sure I had another source, but the only other sources are in Italian. The story does seem to check out – here is one article: Gian Paolo Vanoli: Cricket on the urine that has been around the world. 

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This is just a quick note to inform my readers that the SBM website is temporarily down. There appears to be an automated bot attack trying to hijack our servers. We thought we fixed it yesterday but it went down again overnight. Troubleshooting is commencing. We will have it back up as soon as possible.

Update: SBM is back up, and fully functional. You will need to reset your password to sign in and comment, however. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

I am fascinated by the mind of the crank. Cranks are their own species of pseudoscientist – they are generally intelligent, full of information, and highly creative. There is something malfunctioning in their process, however.

Cranks tend to be far too enamored of their own ideas. They are loners who don’t have the patience to justify themselves to the barbarians who occupy mainstream science.

Their fatal flaw, however, is that they are not skeptical of themselves and their own ideas. They see endless beauty and elegance in their own theories, and then enthusiastically seek to confirm them, without ever truly asking the question – but is it real?

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We are seeing the beginning of technology to interface computers and brains. I have been writing about brain-machine-interface (BMI) technology, and brain-machine-brain interface technology. Now we have a report of brain to brain communication, which is currently as close as we can come to telepathy.

Actually, the technology is – brain to machine to another machine and then to another brain – technology. Imagine having a computer chip implanted in your brain that can read your brain activity. This information is then transferred to a computer chip implanted in someone else’s brain, who can then access that information.

If this exchange were happening in real time through wireless transfer with sufficient resolution, that would essentially be telepathy.

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A recently published survey at PLOS One of UK primary care doctors reports that 97% have prescribed an “impure placebo” at least once in their career. Most news reporting of this survey leave off the “impure” bit.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means.

The survey asked about “pure” placebos, which are inactive sugar pills or a similar inactive treatment, and “impure” placebos, which are effective medicines given in a way that might not have a clinical effect. The survey found that only 12% have ever prescribed a pure placebo, and only 1% do it on a regular basis. However, 97% have prescribed impure placebo ever, and 77% on a regular basis.

The survey had a 48% response rate, which is not bad for a survey, but this is why surveys are not considered strictly scientific. The low response rate introduces the potential for systematic bias – perhaps people who choose to respond do so because of a  certain attitude or belief that biases their responses.

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Yesterday I discussed a recent debate in which I participated at UCONN, focusing on the plausibility of homeopathy. Today I will discuss the clinical evidence, and address some of the strategies employed by my opponent in the debate, Andre Saine.

Does Homeopathy Work?

Yesterday I made the case that homeopathy is highly implausible in many ways, and after two hundred years of scientific advance this extreme implausibility has only become greater. Two centuries has apparently not been enough time for homeopaths to make their case and convince the mainstream scientific community. The only reasonable explanation for this is that homeopathy is simply not valid.

I also took the position that overall scientific plausibility must be considered when looking at any new claim – how well does it comport with existing scientific evidence? In medicine this means, when considering clinical evidence for a treatment, that evidence needs to be put into the context of the scientific plausibility of the treatment.

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