The Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium on Pseudoscience

So, Monday and Tuesday were the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, a yearly event at McGill which provides a free public forum for people to watch scientists talk about science. Basically.

I’ve not gone before, but this year it was on pseudoscience, so how could I resist? The Friday event I mentioned last post kicked it off.

Monday afternoon there was a ‘press conference’ at the McGill Faculty club (which is posh as hell), which was really more of a student Q&A with the speakers: Michael Shermer, David Gorski (of Science-based medicine and the blog of a friend of his), and Ben Goldacre of Bad Science.

It was pretty good. There were questions about what ought to be covered by health insurance, the placebo effect, the infiltration of quackery into academics, how to engage with people, and so forth. It was a nicely intimate setting.

After that myself and a friend met up with some folks from the CFI to talk about events before heading into the Monday night talk.

The event was opened by the Dean of Science at McGill and the Provost, with the introduction by Joe Schwarcz of the OSS.

Shermer was up first. I don’t know him as well as the others, and I’ve never read any of his writing besides a blog post or two. He was very brash and pugnacious, and did a good talk on how cognitive issues in humans make it difficult for us to think and act skeptically. Useful talk, though up here he comes across as very American.

Gorski was after him, and he gave a talk focused on breast cancer quackery, and gave some good advice on how to deconstruct cancer testimonials. He’s definitely as big a nerd as the internet indicates – while I enjoyed his talk, I think he’s still getting used to addressing large public audiences instead of medical-scientific groups or individual patients.

Goldacre was probably the best speaker that night, though since I have the usual Canadian love for an English accent I might be biased. He did a brisk talk on supplements and quacks, and some of the legal trouble he’s had.

Shermer was the only one who managed to keep it pretty light. People dying of cancer is rarely funny, so Gorski’s speech ended up being a bit of a downer, and Goldacre ended up talking about Matthias Rath, who’s basically one of the more evil people walking the earth today. And the only reason I can write that is because I’m in Canada and not the UK.

There was a question period too! Sadly, the only questions I remember were from nuts. The first was a self-proclaimed lawyer who said that he’d examined each and every alternative and mainstream medical treatment, and knew that all alt-med was bunk. Except, of course, for Rrrroyal Rrraymond Rrrrife, whose experiments in the 1930s were never replicated! The frequencies were lost sirs, and why has the scientific community never embraced this great man’s work I ask you yes you sir what are you afraid of, that you will not reconstruct the great work of Rrrroyal Rrrraymond Rrrrife? Even Gorski ended up butting in to ask if he was going to ask an actual question, which he spent 10 minutes doing. Given Gorski’s a cancer surgeon/researcher and had spoken on the topic I was impressed by his restraint.

The other one was told he could ask a one-sentence question, and bargained for 30 seconds. He then proceeded to ask Shermer at great length about the Kennedy assassination (!), for 39 seconds. I was impressed, both because he’s clearly been on about this for 40-some odd years at least, and that he managed to pack a question into 39 seconds. If only the first nut had been so brief…

I hung around after and got to meet Ben Goldacre, who’s a great bloke. Very friendly, easy-going, and pleased to sign something for me. And I got to meet David Gorski! You’ll have to forgive the fannish-ness, but given the huge influence his writing has had on me in the past few years I was pretty excited.

A bunch of us CFI and Freethought types went out after for a few drinks after, and had some good conversation.

Tuesday James Randi gave a presentation at McGill. Though I’ve not read any of his books, I knew who James Randi is, and he’s a living legend. Much like Harry Houdini, he started out as a stage magician and ended up as a skeptic and investigator, even working with scientific committees to critically examine claims which scientists are not always equipped to investigate.

The talk was excellent. Randi is tiny, but he has an amazing stage presence. Lots of old-but-good jokes, some conjuring tricks, and an explanation of why he’s so devoted to skepticism. Long story short – charlatans and frauds hurt people by preying on their belief. He showed how he exposed Peter Popoff, how he demonstrated psychic surgery, mentalism, etc. I was impressed. Magic fascinates me, though I’ve never really been tempted to take it up, and I always love to find out how the trick was done.

I’d talk more about Randi, but as I don’t know him as well as the Monday speakers, I don’t have as much to say.

If you’d like to see or listen to the talks, you can go to the following link:

http://bcooltv.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?CourseID=3113

Pseudoscience and The Living Matrix – not even wrong.

So McGill hosts these “Freaky Friday” events, in which McGill scientists are supposed to explain some of the actual science behind films and pop culture. Ostensibly, anyways. Mostly it seems to be a science lecture followed by a movie. You can find details on them here.

I was put off of them last year by the UFO ones, in which a professor abused the philosophy of science to tell us that we’ve totally been visited by UFOs and there’s a massive global cover-up. That wasn’t so cool, especially since there’s enough disinformation out there already. We don’t need people muddying the waters even more.

But I’ve gone to two this year, and they’ve both been pretty cool. The last one was by a biogeologist talking about the work being done looking at indirect evidence of life earlier than was previously thought, using Carbon-12/13 ratios and the atmospheric ratios of different Sulpher isotopes. It was neat. I never thought finding old rocks, grinding them up, and then analyzing them would be so cool, but it was. The movie for that was Night of the Triffids, which was an awesomely bad old sci-fi flick.

Tonight was a lot closer to my heard. Joseph Schwarcz was the presenter, which was cool. The talk was on the growth of quackery, and as he made clear it really hasn’t changed much – more sophisticated maybe, but the claims and the content are pretty similar.

He brought us through snake oil salesmen and patent medicine, talked about Houdini’s skepticism, and showed some more modern quackery like Asea http://www.teamasea.com/, which is a 5% salt water solution. And really, it doesn’t even scratch the surface. I’m not going to go into the history of quackery, or all the various forms and authors, but suffice to say it was interesting. Check out Dudley J. Leblanc and Hadacol for an example from the 50s.

I’ll just mention one other, since it’s so overblown. Bill Nelson (you have to read his ‘bio’) invented the EPFX-SCIO, which claims the following:

The EPFX-SCIO scans the body for 9000 frequencies, each associated with a different compound, much as anti-virus software would do for a computer. The EPFX-SCIO operates at biological speeds (up to 1/1000 of a second) charting the resonance or responsse of the body to these frequencies, comparing them to a norm and ranking them in degree of reactivity, identifying both acute and chronic imbalances. Clients can then be provided information about the results and energetic therapy can be given to attempt a balancing or harmonizing of any aberrant frequencies. Offering over 200 biofeedback therapies in 72 modalities, it is the largest healthcare software package in the world, combining both eastern and western philosophies and techniques.

I don’t even know where to start…

After that we watched a film called “The Living Matrix”.

Let’s play a game. Watch the movie, and take a drink every time someone makes a claim that runs counter to basic science, or makes a factual scientific error.

Now that you’re out of the hospital, I’ll remind you that you can’t sue me for your alcohol poisoning.

The film is a painful mishmash of healing touch, energy medicine, ‘The Secret’-esque intentionality stuff, and a hefty dose of what I’ve started thinking of as “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work” syndrome. I can’t even address their claims, since they often conflict. Near the beginning they claim that consciousness is not in the brain, and that the body does not need some sort of central organizer. But then in the second half, they spend a bunch of time wondering how the body can function without a central organizer.

They even wonder how cells can communicate with each other, and I foolishly thought they would start speaking about inter-cellular communication. Hah! No, they claim that some central organizer needs to send out simultaneous signals to all the cells at once (since they claim the different speeds of nerve transmission make complex behaviour impossible). They claim that the actual central organizer is the heart!

That’s right, we’re right back to fucking Aristotle. They say it can “imprint information” on the body using “sound waves, electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetism” and that the nerve tissue on the heart (which, you know, the brain uses to maintain a heartbeat) is actually to tell the brain what to do. Seriously – some of the same arguments as 2300 years ago when Aristotle argued the heart was the centre of consciousness. And how does it talk to cells? Well, they’ve got these receptors embedded in the cell membrane…

*facepalm* Which are used for chemical signalling between cells. Apparently they missed that bit in high school or first year bio. And none of this is about the more egregious nonsense about “fields” which is addressed a bit here.

Anyways. Suffice to say that me, the developmental biology student next to me, the one across the room, and the engineer sitting below me were all choking back astonishment and outrage for most of the film. The phrase “not even wrong” comes to mind.

The after talk was… interesting. There were a couple people who were really into it, and they talked about how they believed in intuition, or telepathy because they would think of someone and then that person would call them. This old nonsense always ignores the huge numbers of times when you’re thinking of someone and they don’t call.

So, it was fairly fun even if the film was frustrating as hell. Anyone care to explain how Rupert Sheldrake has a position at Cambridge? Oh, the they mentioned Adam Dreamhealer. Oh yeah.

You can see more thorough review of the film here.

I wonder sometimes if I’m even speaking the same language as these people.

On egregious nonsense

So. Of all the pseudoscientific nonsense out there (and there’s a LOT), homeopathy bothers me more than any other I can think of offhand. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it’s because homeopathy lacks even the prima facie sort of plausibility possessed by modalities like acupuncture or chiropractic.

The background for homeopathy has been covered much more expertly elsewhere, so I’ll just give a quick summary. Back in the 1800s, a doctor named Samuel Hahnemann took a bit of quinine (used as treatment for malaria). It’s also poisonous, and when he took it he felt it induced symptoms similar to those of malaria. He decided that things which cure someone who is sick will create the symptoms of that illness in a healthy individual. This is the ‘like cures like’ concept of homeopathy, that by giving substances to healthy persons and noting how they feel, you can use those substances to cure those symptoms in a sick individual.

Note that this isn’t like vaccination – you aren’t acclimatizing their system or provoking an immune response so your body will recognize a virus later. It’s literally supposed to be curative.

There’s another principle. Hahnemann noticed that when he gave substances to his patients (like arsenic, for example) they ended up healthier when the substance was more dilute. This makes some sense – after all, you’ll be much healthier if you consume almost pure water or a sugar pill than if you consume arsenic or quinine (unless in the latter case you have malaria). Thus the second principle – dilution. Homeopathic ‘medicines’ are typically diluted to 20-30C, each C standing for a 1-in-10 dilution. So take 1mL of a 10mL solution, mix it with 9mL of pure water, and repeat 19-29 more times.

Now, a dilution of 10-23 or so will have about one molecule of the original substance in one mole of the solution (so 1 molecule per 16 grams) of water. It gets much less likely that you’ll find a single molecule of the original substance for every ‘to the minus’ that you go. So at 10-30 you’d have to drink oceans and oceans of a homeopathic solution to actually consume a single molecule of whatever substance was originally there.

Thus. We have a medical principle (like cures like) that’s not actually true, and a technical principle (of increasing potency with increasing dilution) that doesn’t actually make sense.

The key part I’ve left out? Succussion. Hahnemann said it would only work if you shook/tapped the substance between dilutions. He recommended a certain number of taps on the cover of a bible, to ‘potentize’ the substance. It won’t work otherwise, you see.

Homeopathy isn’t naturopathy (which I have my own problems with). It isn’t herbalism. It’s nonsensical magic that ought to be transparently useless at first glance.

I’ll leave you with the video below, and if you want more information I suggest the ‘Homeopathy’ category at Science-Based Medicine.

Tim Minchin Movie!

So, those of you in the skepticism community have likely heard of Tim Minchin, a comedian/musician. His piece ‘Storm’, a 9-minute beat poem, is being turned into a short animated film. Here’s the trailer.

For those of you unfamiliar with the original, here’s the poem.