Would you be willing to pay $35 for a sticker you put on the back of your phone? What if it had “magical” properties that protect you from something that is not harmful in the first place? That is the idea (it seems to me) behind the SmartDot product, made in the UK. On Amazon they claim: “smartDOT Radiation Protection is a low powered magnet programmed with an intelligent combination of natural harmonizing frequencies which reduces harmful EMF radiation emitted by your wireless devices and alleviate symptoms of electro-stress.”

This is now boilerplate EMF pseudoscience. What are “harmonizing frequencies”? Nothing – this does not even exist as a concept in science. It’s just nice-sounding jargon for the scientifically illiterate. Also, EMF from smartphones are not dangerous and do not cause any known health issues. Further still there is no such thing as “electro-stress”.

One thing I wanted to point out is what happened when the BBC investigated these stickers. They report:

“But University of Surrey tests for BBC News found no evidence of any effect.”

Total lack of surprise there. The stickers were just stickers, with no energy, no field, and no apparent effect that could be detected. The company responded in a typical way – to make their claims essentially unfalsifiable, or at least as difficult as possible to falsify.

“The Devon-based company told BBC News the stickers were programmed with “scalar energy”, which the scientists’ equipment would be unable to detect.”

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In a recent article in Medpage Today, Vinay Prasad offered his critiques of what he calls “medical skepticism”. Essentially he is talking about Science-Based Medicine and all my colleagues who engage in related activities. I am always open to criticism and love to engage about these topics. Unfortunately, Prasad’s criticism’s were based largely on his ignorance of what it is, exactly, that we do, wrapped around some huge logical fallacies. They are also arguments we have dealt with on numerous occasions before, so he could have saved time by just reading some of the very literature he felt knowledgeable enough to criticize. (And as an aside, the “skeptical of skeptics” meme is way overdone and ready to be retired.)

If I had to give a paraphrasing executive summary of Prasad’s article it would be this – medical skeptics should stop focusing on what they think is important, and should instead focus on what I think is important, even though I don’t really understand what it is that they do. In fact there is so much wrong with Prasad’s article it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with some basic framing. Part of what Prasad is criticizing is our science communication (scicom), but again he seems to be unaware that scicom is a field unto itself, and so he is making some basic false assumptions, without being aware that he is doing so. This false assumption leads Prasad to conclude that medical experts should restrict themselves to the big problems within their area of medical expertise, without seeming to realize that scicom itself is an area of expertise.

Before I go further it is important to understand what we in the Science-Based Medicine and broader skeptical community do, and what our expertise actually is. First, we are science communicators, and this involves studying science communication itself. The big lessons of the last few decades, backed by actual research, is that the old “knowledge deficit” paradigm is mostly incorrect (not completely) and definitely insufficient. In most contexts you cannot change the way people think or behave by just giving them facts. You have to also engage with what they already believe and the complex motivations and patterns of belief that underlie them. Scicom involves, therefore, not just addressing scientific literacy but also critical thinking skills and media literacy. And in order to do this you need to understand the complex relationship between science and pseudoscience, and cognitive biases, conspiracy thinking, science-denial, and a host of other “critical thinking” skill sets.

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In the movie Interstellar, which takes place in a dystopian future where the Earth is challenged by progressive crop failures, children are taught in school that the US never went to the Moon, that it was all a hoax. This is a great thought experiment – could a myth, even a conspiracy theory, rise to the level of accepted knowledge? In the context of religion the answer is, absolutely. We have seen this happen in recent history, such as with Scientology, and going back even a little further with Mormonism and Christian Science. But what is the extent of the potential contexts in which a rewriting of history within a culture can occur? Or, we can frame the question as – are there any limits to such rewriting of history?

I think it is easy to make a case for the conclusion that there are no practical limits. Religion is also not the only context in which myth can become belief. The more totalitarian the government, the more they will be able to rewrite history any way they want (“We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”). It is also standard belief, and I think correctly, that the victors write the history books, implying that they write it from their perspective, with themselves as the heroes and the losers as the villains.

But what about just culture? I think the answer here is an unqualified yes also. In many Asian cultures belief in chi, a mysterious life force, is taken for granted, for example. There are many cultural mythologies, stories we tell ourselves and each other that become accepted knowledge. These can be the hardest false beliefs to challenge in oneself, because they become part of your identity. Doubting these stories is equivalent to tearing out a piece of yourself, questioning your deeper world-view.

These cultural beliefs can also be weaponized, for political purposes, and for just marketing. A century ago Chairman Mao decided to manufacture a new history of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). He took parts of various previous TCM traditions, even ones that were mutually exclusive and at ideological war with each other, and then grafted them into a new TCM, altering basic concepts to make them less barbaric and more palatable to a modern society. Now, less than a century later, nearly everyone believes this manufactured fiction as if it were real history. Only skeptical nerds or certain historians know, for example, that acupuncture as practiced today is less than a century old, and not the thousands of years old that proponents claim. Mao’s propaganda has become history.

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Pangolin’s are adorable and weird animals. They are mammals, with eight (although some references say seven) species in their own order, the Pholidota (all eight species are also in the same family and genus). They have scales, no teeth, and a long tongue, and are native to Africa and Asia. They are also endangered for a very specific reason – their scales are valued as medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine. They are endangered because of culturally and politically sanctioned pseudoscience.

This is why it has come as welcome news that China has finally removed pangolin scales from the list of official TCM treatments. They have also upgraded pangolins to the highest level of protection. I applaud this decision, which may be a “game changer” in terms of protecting pangolins, but I do have to point out that China is just mitigating a problem entirely of its own creation. It’s like announcing that you are going to stop beating your wife. Congratulations.

What remains to be seen is how strictly they are going to enforce their new protections. Striking pangolins from the list of official TCM products will not magically erase centuries of culture, or a very lucrative black market – just as banning ivory did not instantly disappear the ivory trade and save the elephant. Further, China needs to do the same thing for the entire list of TCM treatments based upon animals parts. No tiger bones, bear bile, or rhino horn.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) is one of those entities that are so essential if it didn’t exist it would need to be invented. But at the same time, it is a frustratingly flawed institution.  Some of those flaws are being highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the WHO is not alone in this – Covid-19 is an extreme stress on the system, and it is revealing multiple weaknesses. The big lesson I hope at least a majority of people take from this entire episode is that we actually need continuity of competent government.

The WHO is essential for establishing international standards of medical care, and helping deliver modern medicine to the developing world. They are a critical source of information on epidemiology, and often the first source I go to when researching a medical topic. They have become a critical trust of medical, public health, and epidemiological expertise. They are also critical in dealing with things like pandemics. Here is their list of their primary goals, but in short:

Our goal is to ensure that a billion more people have universal health coverage, to protect a billion more people from health emergencies, and provide a further billion people with better health and well-being.

The WHO is a creature of the UN and came into existence in 1948 (just three years after the UN itself). They have 7,000 employees in offices in 150 countries. Ideally, an organization dedicated to health would be apolitical, nonpartisan, and heavily science-based. In a way the WHO represents the highest ideals of the UN – many nations getting together to cooperate for mutual benefit. But predictably it’s difficult to get so many different cultures and perspectives to collaborate seamlessly, and this has lead to what I consider some major problems with the WHO.

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As a skeptical science communicator I am constantly walking the line between hope and cynicism. On the one hand, I very much take to heart Carl Sagan’s approach to science – focusing on the absolute wonder of the universe, and celebrating the curiosity and ingenuity of humanity. We have peered into the past, walked on the moon, and decoded many of the secrets of life. Science is a powerful tool that has transformed the world more in the last few centuries than in tens of thousands of years beforehand. And yet, humanity still struggles with the demons of our evolutionary history. We are tribal, superstitious, and capable of surrendering our critical thinking to a charismatic leader.

What this all means is that when we are faced with a challenge, even a crisis, we are capable of meeting it. We can bring the tools of science, philosophy, and politics to bear to solve almost any problem. And yet the extent to which we will fail to do so is a consequence of our own stupidity and lack of critical thinking. There is nothing like a pandemic to reveal all of this – the good and the bad.

On the bright side, there have already been thousands of studies of the novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) and the disease it produces, COVID-19. Researchers are already exploring possible treatments and developing a vaccine. Meanwhile, we have solid mechanisms everyone can use to protect themselves and slow the spread of disease. Where implemented properly and in time, these strategies work. Compare this to just 100 years ago, during the 1918 flu pandemic. That pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide – and that magnitude was created largely by the world’s collective failure to properly understand and deal with the virus. They had no treatment, no vaccine, and utterly failed to enact adequate public health measures (for sure, this was partly due to the fact that they were fighting a world war and many politicians prioritized the war effort over mitigating the pandemic). Go back a bit further to the black death, which killed a third of Europe, and they did not even understand the nature of the pandemic. Their ignorance made them all but helpful before it.

Today, through science we understand exactly what is going on, down to the molecular level. And we have the methods to quickly (relatively speaking) figure our how best to address it. It is still a challenge, because the pandemic is moving quickly, but all we really have to do collectively is not panic and listen to our own experts. But of course, it’s never that simple. Some people will find a way to screw it up, because humanity is a complex mixture of motivations, biases, and emotions.

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Binaural beats are an auditory illusion created by listening to two tones of slightly different frequency. This produces a type of feedback effect in the brain that produces a third illusory sound that has a pulsating quality, hence binaural beats. All perceptual illusions are fascinating, at least to neuroscientists, because they are clues to how the brain processes sensory information. What we ultimately perceive is the result of a complex constructive process (not passive recording) and understanding the process offers insight into the strengths and weaknesses of human perception.

But there is another angle to binaural beats about which I have always been, appropriately, skeptical. There is popular belief that listening to the binaural beat illusion is a method for “hacking” into the brain and affecting mood and cognition, improving memory and alertness. Most “brain hack” claims turn out to be false, or at least massively overstated, so initial skepticism is warranted. Such claims are often based on, “Look, something is happening in the brain, therefore…” types of evidence.  But the brain is a machine, albeit a biological one, and it is not impossible that outside stimulation can make the machine work more or less efficiently. So I filed this away as – a small effect is not impossible, but I would need to see convincing evidence before I believe this “one simple trick” claim.

There is a recent study of the effects of binaural beats which prompted this review, but this is just the latest in a couple of decades of research. Let’s first look at the most recent study – Binaural beats through the auditory pathway: from brainstem to connectivity patterns. The study looked at two things, the effect of binaural beats on the overall pattern of brain activity, and the effect on mood. What they found is discouraging for those who think binaural beats have some special effect on the brain. They found: Continue Reading »

This has to be the worst opinion piece I have read in a major news outlet in a long time. The authors, Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block, leave behind them a killing field of straw men and empty containers of metaphorical “Kool Aid.” Here is the short version – they are defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and the recent Netflix series Goop Lab with all the tropes of pseudoscience they can muster. They wrap them all up in a narrative of female empowerment, and dismiss out-of-hand all the legitimate criticism of the dangerous advice Goop sells as a conspiracy of the “patriarchy.”

Ironically, and sadly, I would argue that Paltrow, and by extension Albert and Block, are exploiting women, making them more vulnerable, and depriving them of true empowerment – which is knowledge. When you give someone misinformation, you are taking away their ability to have informed consent. This is what con artists do. Alternative medicine is frequently a double-con, in which those who promote it are themselves deceived and are just paying the deception forward.

All the talk about the “patriarchy” is also just another version of a conspiracy theory, in which all legitimate counter arguments and evidence are dismissed as part of the conspiracy (as I am sure some will do with this very blog post). Conspiracy theories work best if they contain a kernel of truth, or if they are built around a legitimate historical grievance, as in this case. All you have to do is wipe away all the nuance, and cherry pick the details that serve your narrative.

Let’s dig in to some of the details of the article. They start with a rather blatant straw man:

The show would surely promote “dangerous pseudoscience,” peddle “snake oil,” and be “undeniably awful for society.”

Six episodes of the show finally dropped late last month, and so far civilization seems to be more or less intact.

Right, so because civilization did not instantly collapse, none of the warnings about the dangers of pseudoscience are valid. But they were just getting started and this was a mere warm up. The next paragraph frames the discussion: Continue Reading »

There is plenty of fraud and corruption in the world, even in the halls of science. No one has a monopoly. But there are some hot spots that deserve specific attention. Recently significant concerns have been raised about the published research of Xuetao Cao, a Chinese Immunologist. This story is newsworthy because Cao is not just any immunologist – he is also the President of Nankai University, in Tianjin, China. But more to the point – he is the Chairman of research integrity in all Chinese research. When your head of research integrity is exposed for massive scientific fraud, you have a problem.

Here is a thorough treatment of the evidence for fraud, which covers over 50 published papers. The fabrication of data was noticed because much of it has to do with pictures, of either western blots, gels, flow cytometry images, and microscopy images. There appears to be two general types of fabrication going on. One type results from sending the same sample multiple times through analysis, but treating the data as if it came from different samples. In this case the resulting imaging will be strikingly similar in pattern, but not identical. The second type of fabrication is to simply photoshop copy and paste images.

Either way, the resulting data fabrication is undeniable once it is noticed. The images are simply too similar (and again, sometimes identical) to be genuine data. Once researchers started pouring through Cao’s other papers, the extensive fraud became obvious. When confronted with this revelation online, Cao responded by first standing behind his work, then stating:

Nevertheless, there is no excuse for any lapse in supervision or laboratory leadership and the concerns you raised serve as a fresh reminder to me just how important my role and responsibility are as mentor, supervisor, and lab leader; and how I might have fallen short.

Wow – you see what he just did there? He simultaneously apologized and took responsibility, but only for failure of supervision. So essentially he is throwing all of the people who work for him under the bus. Either way, however, this is really bad for Cao. Even in the best case scenario, all the fraud was perpetrated by others under his watch. Keep in mind, he is in charge of research integrity for all of China, but apparently can’t keep an eye on his own lab. There are certainly famous cases where research assistants were the ones perpetrating the fraud. Another immunologist, Jacques Benveniste, claimed to have evidence of immunological activity from high “homeopathic” dilutions. An investigation found his results to be highly unreliable at least, and likely straight-up fraudulent (although may have been do to really sloppy techniques and bias). But it also appears that the positive results all seemed to come from one lab assistant, Elizabeth Davenas – certainly a disturbing pattern.

Perhaps a similar pattern will emerge from Cao’s lab, but it seems unlikely that an overzealous assistant can be responsible for data fabrication in 50 published studies. This is clearly a systemic problem.

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It’s nice to get the occasional good news, to know that there are other people out there who respect facts and science. The Spanish government announced that it plans to ban alternative medicine from state health centers. This is a bold move, and completely justified. In fact, any other approach is nothing short of outrageous.

In Spain there is a robust state health system, which covers all people living and working in Spain – about 90% of the population use public health care. About 19% use private health care to some extent. Spain is considered to have one of the best health care systems in the world, and has the life expectancy to go with it.

Now they want to make their health care system even better by purging it of harmful and wasteful pseudoscience. They have not yet provided a comprehensive list of what they consider “alternative” but gave homeopathy and acupuncture as examples (a good place to start). The Guardian reports:

The proposal, unveiled by the science and health ministers, aims to avoid the “potential harmful effects” of the practices when they are used as an alternative or a complement to treatment that is itself based on “proof and scientific rigour”, the government said in a statement.

At its core it is a simple and even obvious standard – provide health care that the best available scientific evidence says is safe and effective, and is the best option available, provided by licensed professionals. I have yet to hear even a semi-reasonable argument against this basic approach. The “alternative” is to use treatments that are not safe, not effective, or have been inadequately tested, provided by those who are not legitimate experts or professionals.

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