The subtle metaphor of a giant flaming phoenix (in space)

Let’s see if I can be trusted in 2011…

... although this form of acupuncture may carry slightly greater health risks.

So while killing time on facebook researching new science articles I came across this short Guardian article containing a startling headline announcing that:

“Dozens killed by incorrectly placed acupuncture needles”

But before I could begin hunting for news stories about the recent activity of an acupuncture themed serial killer the sub heading informed me that a “survey reveals punctured hearts and lungs among causes of death over past 45 years”. Despite my general lack of statistical competence even I can work out that ‘dozens’ of deaths across more than four decades does not work out as a particularly scary statistic and certainly not one that warrants such a sensationalist headline. In fact as the first paragraph of the article explains the total recorded deaths numbers 86 over 45 years which works out as an average of around 2 deaths a year.

What makes this figure even less impressive is that the number was obtained from worldwide reports including those from Japan and China. Two deaths a year from a treatment that is performed on millions of people, multiple times every year is really not something which people should worry about. Winning the lottery would appear to be more likely than dying from a botched acupuncture treatment.

The study upon which the article is based was conducted by Edzard Ernst, who is the co-author of one of my favourite books ‘Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial‘, and as he notes it is likely that “due to under-reporting” the cases he discovered represent merely “the tip of a larger iceberg”. I suspect he is correct however suspicion doesn’t quite make up for a lack of evidence and at present the evidence suggests that the health risks associated with acupuncture treatments are not great enough to warrant much concern. The proper sterilisation of needles and sufficient training so that the application of acupuncture needles is done without causing injuries are certainly important but the relatively low mortality rate reported in the study does not seem to suggest that there is actually a significant problem in these areas.

Unfortunately I cannot yet get access to the full article, even with Oxford’s university subscriptions, so I cannot really comment about how Ernst presented his findings but from the Guardian summary (which seems to be based entirely on information from the abstract) it seems that he acknowledged that there were only a “handful” of cases across the four decades from the US and the UK. A handful of deaths from what is a pool of millions or at least hundreds of thousands of treatments would seem to suggest that the standards of acupuncture treatments, at least in Western countries, are high enough to make them quite safe rather than something deserving of an alarming headline.

Criticising acupuncture treatments on the basis of 2 deaths a year is also eerily reminiscent of the arguments used by anti-vaccine proponents who present terrifying statistics about lethal adverse reactions to vaccines devoid of the relevant context of how rare such cases are when considered against the amount of people vaccinated every year. Furthermore, the abstract of the article notes that from the 86 cases identified “many are incomplete and causality may therefore be occasionally uncertain” so the number of deaths that can be confidently attributed to acupuncture actually appears to be less than 86.

The point is that bad arguments are bad arguments whether they support a rational position or not and endorsing bad arguments is just not a good strategy for those who care about efficacy and evidence. This is due to the fact that ultimately using such arguments can undermine a well supported position when the flaws in logic are identified and pointed out. Using claims, regardless of their validity, to support a predetermined position is also not very rational and it makes it easier for advocates to dismiss other more relevant criticisms as being ideologically motivated and therefore tainted.

Contrary to the Guardian headline the actual figures quoted seem to show that safety concerns are not a particularly good reason to oppose acupuncture treatments as lethal adverse reactions to acupuncture treatments actually appear to be extremely rare. The reason to oppose, or to at least be critical, of acupuncture treatments is that they have not been able, in properly controlled trials, to produce any beneficial effect beyond that demonstrated by similar placebo treatments. This is all the reason an advocate of science or evidence based medicine should require to be wary of acupuncture. Inventing or overstating the health risks just isn’t necessary as not all alternative treatments that are ineffective will turn out to be actually harmful (most homeopathic remedies being a good example).

A legitimate potential danger with acupuncture treatments is that they could prevent a person from seeking some other proven treatments for serious injuries or illnesses. However, I remain unconvinced that this is the case, as from my own experience with acupuncture it seems that the majority of people using it, at least in the UK, are doing so for pain alleviation or to address niggling back/shoulder/muscle problems.  Nebulous and non-specific pain is notoriously difficult to treat and thus it doesn’t seem likely that acupuncture treatments would typically be preventing people from getting some extremely effective  therapy. For instance, I doubt that acupuncture treatments are typically used as an alternative treatment by say cancer sufferers- although I also have no doubt that there will be isolated examples of this occurring (if anyone has statistics or studies that suggest this is more common than I imagine otherwise please mention them in the comment section).

My problem with the article is not ultimately that is sensationalist and misrepresents statistics but that it seems (judging from the comment section and some facebook remarks) that those who would be very critical of these kind of arguments in another context are willing to ignore the issues with the article because it presents a conclusion they agree with. Rationality and concern for evidence cuts both ways and it is worth recognising that is not just alternative medicine advocates who are capable of misrepresenting statistics and over hyping risks.

The first thing to note about the episode is that the interview itself is actually quite balanced. Alex makes his case for why NDEs are simply unexplainable by current medical knowledge and Dr. Woerlee responds by presenting and discussing the natural explanations for NDEs. As you might predict, Alex does not find such explanations compelling and Dr. Woerlee similarly does not find Alex’s conclusions- that NDEs prove dualism correct and that consciousness can survive bodily death- to be convincing. However, despite the disagreement a respectful tone is kept throughout the interview and Alex gives Dr. Woerlee the time to present his case and respond to points he raises.

The start of the interview is Alex questioning Dr. Woerlee about a point one of his listeners raised regarding how Dr. Woerlee had been wrong to claim that cardiac massage was always involved in NDEs. Dr. Woerlee acknowledged that the criticism had some validity but continued to argue that:

There are a number of factors here. In fact, I still maintain that most of them would have received the cardiac massage for the very simple reason that you lose consciousness within 4 to around 30 seconds after a real ventricular fibrillation begins, or asystole, in other words, no heartbeat at all, begins.

However, rather soon after this point Alex shifts the conversation to a discussion of a specific case which he feels is representative of a number of cases in the literature. This is a technique Alex frequently employs in interviews with skeptics and I have mixed feelings about its utility. On the plus side, it often brings differences relating to how evidence is interpreted into stark contrast but conversely, you lose the chance for a wider discussion and the cases are also typically raised on the spot, and related by Alex, meaning that the researchers have no time to look into the specific details of the case they are discussing.

Despite this I think Dr. Woerlee did a very good job of presenting natural explanations for the experiences of the woman Alex raised. However, for Alex the explanations did not stack up and in particular he seemed focused on the fact that she a) had died and b) was observing events in the operating theatre from outside her body.

But Dr. Woerlee, what we’re dealing with here, what I think most people would focus on, especially in the context of our conversation is this woman died. Her doctor has reported that she died. They hit her with the paddles three times. And just like in all the other discussions we’ve had, she’s viewing this from above and she’s seeing everything happening. There isn’t a good medical explanation for how you could see them preparing and defibrillating your body while you’re dead.

Dr. Woerlee responds to these points by arguing that she did not ‘die’ unless you define death as occuring as soon as the heart stops which is really a matter of perspective. It is irrelevant though because we are all aware that people can be resusciated after their heart stops (it usually occurs at least once in your typical Holywood action movie!) so the fact that someone can come back to life after their heart stops is not really as weird as Alex makes it sound. Alex’s second point regarding the out of body experience Dr. Woerlee explains as being most likely due to the effects of anaesthetics, decreased awareness and muscle relaxant drugs which are known to cause “a loss of body image in many people”.

I would also add the rather straight forward point that Alex’s assertion that she saw and reported her experience accurately is based on anecdotal accounts. Doctors and emergency staff are not infallible and neither are patients when it comes to their memories of high stress situations and as with all NDEs the likelihood is that the ‘out of body’ experience was reported long after the actual event when there was plenty of time for memories to be influenced by information from other sources. Confirmation bias is not something that doctors and nurses are immune from however and it is also perfectly possible that they found her account to be more accurate than it actually was.

Ignoring such factors Dr. Woerlee’s explanation seems to me to be perfectly reasonable but, illustrating once again the huge gulf in responses between believers and skeptics to the same evidence, Alex comments that the natural explanation “sounds like a rather fantastic interpretation of this particular case in particular”.

Finally, towards the end of interview Alex explicitly acknowledges that their debate is really impossible to resolve as their respective positions largely depend on different interpretations of the same evidence with Dr. Woerlee finding natural explanations convincing and Alex firmly convinced that research has now proven that consciousness can survive death.

Hence, Alex comments that:

I guess this is where we get to the point where we just have to kind of back off and leave it to people to decide

and

I don’t know. I think at this point we just have to leave it up to the listeners. If listeners accept your explanation of Kimberly’s case, the woman who was shot, then I guess they just have to go with it.

And Dr. Woerlee agrees…

 But for the rest I think that as you say, basically what we would have here is differences of opinion as regards many things.

So far, so good and the concluding comments by Dr. Woerlee were excellent in summing up the skeptical position by pointing out that there was no single explanation for all NDEs and that it was therefore a mistake to see the various explanations offered by skeptics as competing with each other (they are all likely to play a role in different circumstances). Alex also appeared to acknowledge this as a valid point by responding:

I think that’s a good wrap-up and explanation of why there are so many explanations. Dr. Woerlee, again, thanks for coming back on and we’ll get this out so that we can keep the dialogue going.

All of the above makes Alex’s decision to title the episode as “101. Near-Death Experience Skeptics Running Out of Excuses” a little surprising. To follow up on this inspired heading he then frames the discussion on his website with the ludicrous introduction that:

The idea of an afterlife doesn’t sit well with the science-minded.  Our mind is our brain and when we die we die they claim.  But as conventional medical explanations for near-death experiences fall flat, and NDE research progresses, tradition-minded scientists are facing the impossible notion that the afterlife may be real.

With this Alex abandons any pretence of balance and, instead, declares himself and all those who find the NDE research compelling evidence for an afterlife as vindicated while those “tradition-minded scientists” and their natural explanations all “fall flat”. So much for letting the listener decide and so much for a balanced episode of Skeptiko! Instead, Alex opts to insert his personal position as the definitive ‘sensible’ perspective at the expense of the credibility of the show. Frustrating but sadly predicatable. Overall this was one of the better episodes of Skeptiko because it is a good interview so it is doubly unfortunate that Alex could not resist the urge to insert his bias in post production.

Skeptiko is a pro-parapsychology podcast which attracts a mix of ire and exasperation from the skeptical community due to its misleading title and the tendency of its host, Alex Tsakiris, to promote the show as being an agenda free exploration of ‘controversial science’. A quick listen to any episode of Skeptiko will confirm to an impartial listener that the host, far from being ‘agenda-free’, possesses a painfully evident bias which infusses the entire character and tone of the show. Tsakiris tends to fawn over guests who are on to promote forms of parapsychology he supports and is openly hostile to- the point of occasionally berating- skeptical guests.

In light of the above, and to try and redress some of the bias inherent in the show, I have decided that I will try and offer some skeptical commentary on the Skeptiko shows as Alex adds them and I get time to go through them. It is unlikely that this will have any impact on Alex or the fans of his show, but it might mean that someone who listens to Skeptiko without an agenda and then does a google search on the topic could come across an alternative perspective rather than falling further down the Skeptiko rabbit hole.

So without further adieu, here are my thoughts on ‘Skeptiko episode 100: Dr. Garret Moddel Brings Psi Research to University of Colorado Classroom‘.

The show begins as it often does with Alex extolling the academic credentials of his guest. This is not something unusual in the podcast world, or interviews more generally, but for Alex it frequently serves as the basis for later appeals to authority. In these oft repeated appeals Alex’s general argument is that if some smart academics promote parapsychology then obviously there MUST be something to it. The fact that smart academics across the world promote a whole host of dubious theories including things like intelligent design and aids denialism makes this a less than persuasive argument but that doesn’t seem to ever give Alex much pause for thought… as we shall see later.

For now turning to the ‘meat’ of the podcast, the first thing to say is that Dr. Garrett Moddel is certainly a smart guy and he has probably forgot more about physics than I will ever know. He is a legitimate scientific researcher working in quantum engineering and in the interview he comes across as a reasonable man who seems to have a genuine interest in exploring psi. None of this however, means that his arguments or the studies he presents are compelling and indeed I find that there a host of rather transparent problems besetting his theoretical positions and the parapsychology research he promotes.

An immediate warning sign that his judgement on this topic might be off is that he states early into the show that he was ‘blown away’ when he started looking at the existing research on psi. Now this is, in some respects, a subjective call but frankly, I would love to know what specific evidence it was that ‘blew his mind, as the evidence for psi which is most often cited by psi proponents almost always shows very small effect sizes. And these small effects also frequently disappear when replications are attempted or  better controls are employed. Dr. Moddel seems to freely admit these points at various points during the interview by acknowledging that psi researchers often have problems replicating findings and that psi effects in experiments seem to be very ethereal. Getting blown away by small effects that frequently hover around the border of statistical significance and which disappear with surprising regularity with replications, or when tighter controls are introduced, seems to me to be a strange position for an experienced researcher to take. But that was just the start of the surprises…

Dr. Moddel also discussed how he went about setting up his course in psi research at the university of Colorado. Here aside from criticising the universities apparent initial reluctance to approve the course he also provided details about what the course entails and some of the impressive projects created by students of the course. In this portion of the discussion there were a number of issues that jumped out at me. The first is that after Dr. Moddel explained his vision for the course:

The way I had designed the course, it was discussing psi research and a point-counterpoint discussion throughout the course between skeptical and proponents’ perspectives.

He then goes on to state that for the course “the two textbooks that I’m using are Dean Radin’s Entangled Minds, which is just a wonderful, wonderful book describing psi research and then also Chris Carter’s book on Parapsychology and the Skeptic“. This will immediately set off alarm bells to any skeptic as Dean Radin is one of the most prominent pro-psi advocates today and he is not noted for having anything approaching a balanced position on psi research.

Instead, Radin is one of the strongest advocates for the position that psi phenomena have already been proven and mainstream researchers are ignoring the amazing results because of their conservative bias and prejudices. Using his book as one of the two textbooks for the course might be understandable however if the second textbook provided students with the alternative skeptical perspective and covered some of the common methodological issues which beset psi research. Chris Carter’s book is not the kind of book to provide this information.

Chris Carter, although sharing the same name is not the same individual responsible for the X-Files, I previously made the mistake of assuming they were! However, while he is not famous pro-paranormal TV show creator, his position and clear bias in relation to psi can be seen remarkably clear in a previous episode of Skeptiko during which he declared to Alex that the “so-called skeptics are basically defending an outmoded philosophy of science that’s turned into an ideology”. He also explained how skeptics are motivated to challenge research due to their preconceptions “that these sort of phenomena don’t make any sense and challenge their world-view… they’re going to do anything they possibly can to dismiss evidence that challenges their preconceptions”. This betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the skeptical position and it also indicates quite clearly how unsuitable Chris Carter’s book is for providing any sort of balance to Radin’s perspective.

So if these two books are the ‘core texts’ for the course I think the chances that the skeptical position gets a fair hearing in Dr. Moddel’s class are rather low. A text book discussing how to avoid flaws in statistical analysis or how to design properly controlled experiments would be a lot more valuable for would-be parapsychology researchers than two pro-parapsychology treatises and this becomes even more evident when the topic moved on to the student’s experiments…

The first experiment mentioned in the interview was described as follows:

One of them involves guessing hidden Zener cards. Zener cards are cards that are of five different types having a circle, square, wriggly line, a plus, and a star. What the student did is he got 100 Zener cards, 20 of each, shuffled them, turned them upside-down, and had the subject sit across the table from him so that the cards were blocked and they couldn’t see them because they were upside-down and also because he had a laptop display between the cards and the subject. He then raised one card at a time and had the subject guess which of the five they thought it was.

He went through the entire stack this way. Then he did this with a number of different subjects. He did it with 12 subjects and tabulated the results.

The actual ‘study’ can be found here.

Now reading through the study it seems that the experiment was designed to test the ability of the respondent to use psi to identify what was located on a card that could not be seen from their position. It was not designed to test whether they read the answer from the experimenter’s mind, as the experimenter was also supposed to be blinded to what was on the card. The blinding procedure used was as follows: the cards were shuffled, placed face down, then the experimenter picked up a card and held it up facing away from them and towards the subject.  A laptop on the desk between the experimenter and the subject blocked the subject’s view of the card and then after they guessed it was set face down on the table.

This is an ok procedure but it would be easy to improve. For example, if a person’s psi ability means they can ‘see’ through a laptop you would imagine that they could also ‘see’ through a coloured envelope so why not just limit all chances of accidental detection from the experimenter AND the subject by randomising the cards and getting a volunteer (not the experimenter) to place them in numbered envelopes then carry out the experiment as before. This might seem like an insignificant amendment but when you consider that the research is attempting to test whether a person can use psi rather than any other more mundane signal to gain information then controls and blinding become extremely important!

For example, imagine that the experimenter unconsciously noticed blurred reflections in the laptop screen as he held up the card. That introduces a potential influence that could lead to significant results that have nothing to do with the subjects possessing psi ability so it is essential that such influences be ruled out.

However, there is a bigger problem with the study- the extremely small amount of participants! For such a simple experiment 12 participants is really a very small sample and it also dramatically increases the chances that you will get a statistically significant result which would disappear with a larger amount of participants. However, instead of taking steps to remedy this problem the student then exasperated the problem by breaking the 12 respondents into four different groups meaning that there were now only three subjects in each group! The groups were described as follows:

1) Those who believe and were presented with pro-psi arguments; 2) those who don’t believe and were presented with pro; 3) those who do believe and were presented with anti-psi arguments; and 4) those who don’t believe and were presented with anti-psi arguments.

And the results?

… for the three groups that had a negative input regarding psi, either they didn’t believe or they were told that it was rubbish; they were pretty close to random in their guesses as to what these cards were. However, the believers who were presented with pro-psi arguments got 27% of the cards correct, whereas by random chance, they would have been expected to get 20% correct.

Finding that one group out of the four got a result that was 7% above random chance is hardly surprising. In fact when you have lax controls and a selection of incredibly small groups it is virtually guaranteed that somewhere in your data something will come out as statistically significant.  And it is also worth noting that there is no indication that the experimenter was blinded to which group they were testing. This is important because numerous studies have demonstrated that experimenter’s bias has the potential to significantly influence results by causing them to treat groups differently due to their beliefs/expectations. This again would have been very easy to control for by simply making another experimenter responsible for the grouping or, to be even more thorough, blinding all the experimenters until the study was completed by using randomised envelopes.

As per Dr. Moddel’s point that ‘by random chance they would have been expected to get 20% correct’ well yes and no. It is true the odds of selecting the correct card are 1/5 but that does not mean that we would expect everyone to get exactly 20% anymore than we would expect that 12 people flipping coins 100 times in a row to all get heads 50 times. We would expect some to be over 50 and some to be under and we would also expect that there will occasionally be some outliers! This is exactly what Dr. Moddell and his student found. They got three outliers in their twelve results and the two positive outliers happened to lie in their pro-psi, pro-psi argument group. Now this could be due to the fact that this group’s positive intentions meant they were able to use a psi ability to improve their guesses or it could be due to random chance.

Unfortunately we will never know because the only way to find out if the effect was robust would be to replicate the study with more participants but Dr. Moddell is against both replicating studies and increasing the number of subjects involved. By doing either of these he argues that the experimenters enthusiasm and interest would drop and that could cause the effect to disappear because it is reliant on both subjects and experimenters being enthusiastic. That’s one potential explanation… but the other much simpler explanation is that the effect will disappear because it is a random anomaly that only exists due to poor controls and small sample size. The boredom objection also doesn’t really hold up because it would be a simple matter to get a group of different group of students to replicate the study with a different group of participants. Hence, their boredom should be no greater than the original experimenter as they would be doing the study for the first time.

Discussing the dangers of boredom Dr. Moddell asserts that:

When you do these experiments, if you’re enthusiastic and interested, you put your intention and interest into it and they work. In fact, that’s probably why, as you’ll see, most of the experiments that my students carry out, work because they’re young and enthusiastic and probably most important, they only do one set of trials. They do enough so that it’s statistically significant, but they don’t do it to the point of boredom.

But what he seems to completely ignore is that getting biased researchers to do small one off studies is also the best way to get biased experimental results which report a chance random effect that is statistically significant but which is, in reality, meaningless. And if psi phenomenon really is so incredibly fleeting that it only amounts to things like improving people’s ability to guess the predict the correct card to 7% above chance as long as no-one in the vicinity has any doubt in psi and those involved haven’t heard anything negative about psi recently then I have to wonder how Dr. Moddell can justify statements like this:

It is truly mysterious and it’s appearing that the answer to understanding consciousness is going to involve psi phenomena. That psi is not just a little pimple on the large experience that we have in life, but instead, psi is one of the major phenomena that controls almost every activity and every thought that we’re involved with.

If psi disappears in the presence of skeptics, repeated measures or simply if enthusiasm dips due to boredom then how can it also be a ‘major phenomena that controls almost every activity’. It seems Dr. Moddell want’s to have his cake and eat it by simultaneously claiming that psi is a huge fundamental force and that, at the same time, it only produces small effects that disappear with the slightest hint of a bad vibe in the area.

At one point after explaining another experiment involving people using their intention to increase the reflection of light in which the experimenter again appears to have been unblinded and a very small sample is used Alex enthusiastically exclaimed:

But I think it speaks to a couple of things. One, clearly for anyone who has any doubts, you’re a guy who knows how to set up and run an experiment like that, or at least oversee someone else doing it. You have all the credentials and you’re a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. I don’t even know what that means.

The typical appeal to authority is here but the point that Alex misses is that Dr. Moddell’s ability to run a Physics experiment is not in question nor is his ability to employ scientific equipment properly. What is in question is whether he has the experience to design properly controlled experiments with human participants and to implement proper controls to rule out experimenter bias and/or control for non-psi effects. Physicists and electrical engineers do not typically spend much of their time during their studies learning about the unique challenges involved with conducting research with human subjects and facts such as Dr. Moddell being a Fellow of the Royal Optical Society bear absolutely no relevance to his ability to conduct good parapsychology research. Mistaking academic expertise in one area for expertise in parapsychology and how to conduct good experiments with humans is a mistake constantly made on Skeptiko discussions and it seems to me that the various expert’s lack of relevant expertise is often the key source for the problems in parapsychology research.

There is much more that could be said about dodgy statistics and poor controls but I think the final experimental example Dr. Moddell provided illustrates a large number of the problems that beset the approach to research that he and his students follow. In this case he described how students in the class tried to use ‘associative remote viewing’ to see into the mind of the experimenter, draw an image of what they saw and thus predict the future. That sounds strange (and it is) but stick with me. The experimenter was supposed to have decided on two different images with one being associated with the stock market going up the next day and one with the stock market going down the next day. He would then show the students one of the images at the end of the following day depending on what the stock market had done.

So to be clear… in this experiment the students were collectively supposed to be able to not only read the mind of the experimenter but also use the image they saw to predict his actions in the future and thus predict the activities of the stock market! Dr. Moddell claimed that using this method his class was able to correctly predict the future activity of the stock market seven times in a row. Setting aside for now the bizarre nature of the claim the first point to note is that since the students were not informed of the two images the experimenter chose a ‘judge’ was included in the experiment and this judge took the collected drawings and then decided on which of the two images the students drawings most resembled.

This sounds like an incredibly subjective judgement and it is also absolutely crucial that the ‘judge’ had no idea which image was associated with which outcome as otherwise his knowledge of what was going on with the stock market could easily influence the result. Furthermore, it is also crucial that the experimenter was kept unaware of the final outcome of the judges deliberations as otherwise they could unconciously alter which image refers to which outcome. Absolutely stringent controls would be needed here as otherwise the prediction would have been a self fulfilling prophecy and yet I can’t help being skeptical that this would have been the case.

Furthermore, although getting the correct result seven times is unlikely it is certainly not as amazing as Dr.Moddell and Alex seem to believe. After all the stock market is not something which each day has a 50/50 chance of going up or down. In some periods the stock market might be stable and growing and in others such as a recession it is quite obvious that its going to be falling more often than its growing. It may have also been the case that of the two images used one was more likely to represent a positive outcome than the other and hence the judge who was probably not an unbiased observer may have been unconciously effected in how he interpreted the students drawings.

In short for experiments like this one, which claim incredible effects (reading minds and predicting the future stock market), you really want to make sure that you have super tight controls in place and that the effect is actually there i.e. multiple replications and repeated independent samples. Dr. Moddel’s theoretical positions forbids things like replications however and also provides a nice escape hatch that if skeptics cannot replicate his results then it is their mindset which is responsible. We are therefore left with nothing but claims of extraordinary results which are never replicated and which are in all likelihood down to poor controls, inadequate samples and experimenter bias. Dr. Moddel acknowledged for instance that when he continued to try and reproduce the effect it disappeared.

I continued using this effect with a few of us afterwards, and we found that as we continued to do it, a little less formally than we had done it with the class, that the effect started going haywire.

This could be as Dr. Moddel believes because those involved became to interested in the outcome but it is also exactly what we would expect to see if the original experiments were statistical flukes or being influenced by some problem with the experimental setup.

The bottom line is it all sounds very flakey and despite possesing clear credentials as a physicist Dr. Moddel (and his students) do not seem to be very capable of designing or implementing well controlled parapsychology experiments. Instead what we get is yet another series of extraordinary claims from a random academic with a suite of poor evidence from individual studies to back them up and a host of dubious explanations to account for why skeptics or even other researchers will likely not be able to replicate their results.

The final point I would mention and one which Alex seemed to pay little attention to during the interview is that Dr. Moddel while stating his endorsements of various ‘alternative’ research topics also alludes to what appears to be an endorsement for aids denialism:

So the topics that we consider are psi phenomena, of course. UFOs, advanced energy concepts, so zero point energy, what used to be called cold fusion is now called low energy nuclear reactions, just second law of thermodynamics issues. We also look at cosmology and astronomy, issues there.

We look at phenomena such as AIDS and HIV. There are alternative theories as to how AIDS is caught. In fact, I think pretty soon you’re going to see mainstream changing around and realizing that the connection between HIV and AIDS that was originally supposed is not quite right.

Then advanced propulsion techniques. Even cryptozoology. There are a number of different topics that are pursued.

So to return to my original point and one Alex and fans of Skeptiko’s approach would do well to heed. Someone being an expert in one field does not mean they are therefore experts in completely unrelated fields. Dr. Moddel’s comments about aids denialism should indicate that he might not be particularly good at assessing medical research and likewise when he claims that “somebody with an open mind, looking at the literature, has got to accept that these psi phenomena exist” I remain skeptical.

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Simon Singh finally won his appeal!

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Detailed analysis of the victory and what it means, as always, is available from Jack-of-Kent who has provided four excellent articles on the decision (one, two, three and four). Jack’s dependable analysis has also been joined on this occasion by a raft of coverage in the mainstream media, with articles and news segments appearing on practically every notable UK news source (a partial roundup is available here).

The impact of the coverage has particularly struck me, in that I have had friends and family who previously knew nothing about the case (and thus suffered at the hands of my diatribes), contacting me to ask if I saw the decision on the news.  The coverage has also typically included discussion of the wider campaign for reform of the libel laws and has therefore increased the publicity for this excellent cause too!

The dramatic increase in mainstream media interest in the case over the space of a year is something which has been, at least from my perspective, quite startling and hard to ignore. During the recent birthday celebrations of a certain notable lawyerly skeptic, I was reminded that back when I began blogging about Simon case, in March 2009, it would have been entirely possible to count all of the mainstream articles discussing the case on the fingers of one hand. Similarly, at the disastrous first hearing in May, there were roughly ten supporters of Simon present and the subsequent mainstream press coverage of the event was less than overwhelming. In contrast, at Simon’s most recent appeal hearing extra seats had to be brought into the courtroom to accommodate all of the observers and the news interviews after the recent appeal decision was announced reveal a throng of photographers and reporters filling the pavement outside the Royal Courts.

The extra coverage is certainly a welcome development and I think it also serves as an indication of the growing influence and impact that good quality blogging and the grassroots skeptical and scientific community can potentially have. The value of the consistent high quality blogging on the case by people like Jack of Kent, Zeno, Gimpy,  Martin Jobbins and a whole host of others would be difficult to calculate and even with the new mainstream attention their detailed coverage should remain the first port of call for anyone wanting to really get their head around the ins and outs of the case. However, a large part of the credit for increasing the visibility of the case also should go to organisations like Sense About Science and Index on Censorship who have been instrumental in promoting the case to a wider audience.

All in all the result and the increased coverage is good news for supporters of Simon and those who recognise the value of open scientific discussion and criticism of medical claims. It is also a little bit of a blow against the stifling effect of the current English libel laws as the publicity the case has attracted will likely make people hoping to make a minor critic disappear quietly at least a little hesistant. And while this by no means signals an overall victory for Simon it certainly gives some call for optimism!

It is to my lasting regret that I haven’t been able to keep up with my own coverage of the case since moving up to Oxford but it is heartening to realise that while it was possible for me to keep track of all the articles discussing the case just over a year ago, to do so now would require a herculean feat! Now let’s hope that the growing momentum the case has helped to build can roll over into a victory in Simon’s case and then carry on into Westminster and get some much needed reform passed into law!

Peering back into the echo chamber...

When I started blogging it was primarily because I wanted to make sure that while I was working in a relatively dull office job I had some motivation to keep reading studies and research relevant to my academic interests and to create a record of  my thoughts and research that I could go back and refer to if I ever needed/wanted to. Of course it was not an entirely private endeavour and I also hoped that at least some others would read the posts, find something worthwhile and occasionally leave comments telling me what they thought about the topic or my perspective.

One thing I had not been prepared for was that blogging could have any kind of significant impact or that it could introduce you to an entirely new community of people. My experience with the Simon Singh case and subsequent meetings with fellow UK skeptics woke me up to these possibilities and are now a significant motivation for getting back on the blogging horse.

My main motivation however is that I have decided that the best way to try and avoid blogging from interfering with my studies is to try and make it a part of my study. Two of the three things this blog is supposed to be about are anthropology and religion and I am currently studying ‘Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology‘ which involves reading papers every week about the cognitive science of religion! Writing a coherent description of research or topics necessarily requires that I actually have a coherent understanding of said research or tipic and so it seems entirely silly that I haven’t been using the blog as an opportunity to help me study and push what I am reading into my longer term memory!

I’m going to try and rectify that situation now and so I will begin blogging again from this week on. To give myself even fewer excuses I am also going to try and keep to a blogging schedule of just one post a week posted on Saturday. If I find myself with extra time or something terribly interesting happens I may write more but one post a week- with my current schedule- seems like a perfectly feasible target so that’s what I’m going to aim for.

So that’s that… I’m back and there is nothing anyone can do about it!

Nice Chandelier!

So it’s 2010. Time to put those new year resolutions into practice and get myself organised and in this futuristic decade what better place to start than my hi-tech internet blog. Granted it is now almost a week since New Years day but since I am technically still ‘on holiday’ in Japan I think getting the blog back in order at this early stage of the year can almost pass for an achievement!

Being in Japan at the moment I can’t help but feel like I am missing out on the predictable collapse of society that occurs in the UK following any unexpected weather. However, I can at least console myself by enjoying the sites of Tokyo and visiting the various bizarre cafes and bars that are littered across the city. This post is about one such venue called the ‘Christon Café’ which aside from being a nice place to eat also provides a pretty good illustration of the paradoxical attitude towards religion found throughout Japan of widespread indifference alongside a fascination with religious iconography and aesthetic.

The ‘Christon Café’ I visited was located in the trendy Shinjuku area (there are another 7 across Japan) and as the name suggests it is a café/restaurant that is decorated with a ‘Christian’ theme. This means that there are large murals of Jesus, Mary and other Christian figures on many of the walls, a plethora of crosses and statues everywhere you look and perhaps most impressively a large stained glass window overshadowing the entrance. The few bits of décor which lack a Christian motif are distinctly gothic and this generally serves to enhance the ‘Christian theme’, or at least it does if you are from an Irish Catholic background and have a long standing familiarity with stone floored churches and semi-gothic architecture.

The café is in actual fact more like a restaurant but it is also a place that groups come to eat and have a few drinks. Drinking while surrounding by the overpowering Christian iconography gave me the odd sensation of having sneaked into a church to drink some beers but the weirdness is what makes it fun and this I suspect is also what attracts the Japanese customers. That and the fact that Japan seems to have a love of ‘themed’ locations and from bars to restaurants to hotels it’s possible to find practically any theme imaginable if you look hard enough. And while it is true that themed locations exist in the UK we really do not put as much effort into it as the Japanese do (see the pictures below for evidence).

Stained Glass Entrance

In the UK and across Europe you will certainly find things like nightclubs called ‘the Buddha bar’, a Walkabout chain bar in a converted Church and rock bars with some gothic religious iconography but what you are very unlikely to find is bars or cafes that have gone so far as to install an authentic Buddhist altar, decorate their bar with pages from the Lotus sutra and place mini stupas across the wall. That is the level of effort on show in the ‘Christon Café’ locations.

Passing Mary statue on the way to the bar...

The reason that the bar exists is certainly partly down to a general fascination with Western culture in Japan and the fact that Christianity is a distinctly minority religion undoubtedly robs the religious imagery of most of its typical associations however I cannot help but feel that due to the somewhat less severe way that religion is approached in Japan by most people a similarly themed Buddhist café would face little opposition if someone felt it would prove popular. This is also reflected in the popular culture which often includes references to religious imagery without incurring any protest.

This more permissive attitude surrounding religion and religious locations was also on display all throughout the New Year period as many temples and shrines play host to not only hundreds and thousands of people seeking a New Year blessing but also a variety of food vendors and small entertainment and goods stalls. There are certainly those in Japan that take religion very seriously and who may well have an issue with the Christon Café but such people are in a distinct minority.

Eneru a villain with Buddhist motifs from the popular manga 'One Piece'

Personally, I don’t have any issue with the café except for the fact that the food wasn’t that great and it’s semi-over priced but still it was an interesting dining and drinking experience and I’m generally in favour of anything that makes things more interesting especially when it helps to take away some of the mysticism and seriousness surrounding religions.

I also think that the drab church affiliated cafés that I occasionally come across in Oxford could attract a lot more people if they took a page out of the Christon Cafés book. Not likely maybe but who knows in 50 years? After all the mega churches in America are already providing a more over the top caricature of Christianity than any themed Japanese café ever could!

World's Smallest Snowman created by David Cox

Nano-Guitar made by Dustin Carr from Cornell

Nano-Toilet by Takashi Kaito

Nano-Athlete by Keith Morton

Nanobama by John Hart & other Nanobliss folks

Nano-Enterprise by Takayuki Hoshino & Shinji Matsui

Nano-Playboy by John Hart & other Nanobliss folk

Nano-Chess by A. Linden & S. Bauerdick

Nano-Yacht by Takahiko Morita & Shinji Matsui

Nano-Yoga by Chiaki Minari & Shinji Matsui

Nano-Debutantes by Tim Savas

Nano-Vodka by John Hart & other folk at Nanobliss

And finally…

I for one welcome our new ant overlords (by Frank Hartley & Jayant Neogi)

* More nice pictures can be found here and here.

So here is my response to Charles the chiropractor…

I am a practicing chiropractor with some research experience, albeit minimal. I find the tennor the discussions intriguing. This is because I fail to see why there is such an emotional charge about the whole issue, particularly to those who appear to have no involvement in the issues at hand.

I think the emotional involvement comes from a very tangible sense that a science writer being sued for telling the truth about the lack of evidence for chiropractic claims is a sincere injustice. This initial reaction then combined with further frustration and bemusement as the BCA dispatched increasingly silly and vindictive press releases. If the BCA had not sued Simon Singh and instead decided to write an article in response, like Simon and the Guardian offered, the case would never have attracted the attention it has.

So in essence it is the BCA’s attempt to use Britain’s deeply flawed libel laws as a weapon that has focused so much attention on the situation.  Generally speaking when well financed organisations try to silence lone critics with legal threats it never goes down very well with the public. And in Simon’s case it has gone down especially poorly because the critic in question is a well regarded science journalist who was telling the truth about the state of the scientific evidence.

I know mine is that I have worked with patients for 28 years and have never advertised or promoted myself in any way that I could not substantiate through the evidence, most usually the best evidence was patient outcome to care. Over the years it became interesting to me when patient coming in for low back or neck pain would remark that some other non-musculoskeletal issue resolved, but I just chalked that up to coincidence.

Herein lies an excellent illustration of how chiropractors routinely misunderstand what counts as compelling evidence in evidence based medicine. The fact that people feel better after receiving treatments is NOT an indication that the treatment is effective. Intuitively, it may seem that way but there is a tonne of research demonstrating that people tend to report improvements when they receive ANY treatment- including fake placebo treatments! This is why treatments which have been proven to be useless or harmful, such as bleeding, were praised as effective by healers for centuries. History demonstrates that when all we have to go on is fallible human perception and anecdote, medicine doesn’t progress very quickly and many useless and harmful treatments remain popular.

When I attended chiropractic college I had never been to a chiropractor and was extremely skeptical. The fun for me as a pracitioner is being skeptical at all times but also trusting my feelings which are difficult to quantize. This is similar to quantitative versus qualitative chemical analysis. The qualitative part leads to the “art” of chiropractic whereas the quantitative portion to the scientific aspect.

1. It is highly unlikely that you had no interest in chiropractic and were very skeptical towards chiropractic if you chose to attend a chiropractic college!
2. No-one is suggesting that you cannot make use of personal experience and judgement in medicine. What they are suggesting is that personal experience does not trump clinical trials and that before you start promoting a treatment for an illness (especially for childhood ailments) you should at least have some evidence that it works beyond the placebo effect.

For me the main issue that seens to be glossed over is that most healthcare interventions offered by clinicians have a limited evidence base of high level research. That is why the term evidence based practice is coming into vogue. With evidence based practice we see that included in a clinical decision is the doctor’s experience which incorporates the multifactorial unique nature of each and every patient.

Stealing from my earlier response to another chiropractor who made essentially the same point:

Arguments concerning the lack of evidence for certain mainstream treatments are over exaggerated. Proving to be more effective than a placebo is a basic requirement for a mainstream medicine and while it is true that treatments have, occasionally, been later found to be no better than a placebo, when this has occurred it is generally big medical news and the treatments are abandoned.

I wonder if this has ever happened in the history of chiropractic? Are there any treatments previously considered effective that have later been studied and found to lack evidence and be removed? There are none I know of and this is the general pattern one sees in practically all forms of alternative medicine. This indicates a severe problem namely chiropractic, as with most alternative medicines, seems to be more about tradition than about evidence.

However, even if we accept your point and agree that mainstream medicine has treatments which are not supported by good evidence. This does not help validate chiropractic treatments. Indeed, it just serves to further illustrate that we need to more rigorously evaluate the evidence basis for treatments so we are not just promoting placebos.

Also, the notion that chiropractors take a more holistic approach to treating patients is somewhat contradicted by the fact that for almost every ailment it will be a spinal manipulation that will be the prescribed treatment. On top of this it is simply false to suggest that mainstream doctors do not treat the patients as individuals. If they didn’t why would they bother with things like collecting patient histories?

There is a valid point to be made about the amount of attention doctors afford individual patients but simply providing a greater amount of attention does not prove that chiropractic treatments work. A person who gets healing crystal treatments will likely get more time and attention than they would on a GP visit too so would you argue that crystal therapy should be respected as a valid medical treatment too?

With the limited nature of most healthcare evidence a higher level of stress should be placed upon risk benefit ratios. I do know that determining benefit can be a difficult path to walk since no chiropractic adjustment sham has been properly validated and it is hard to blind a patient and doctor from the chiropractic treatment process.

Really? I can think of a rather straightforward way.

You take a group of patients who are unfamiliar with chiropractic treatments, you provide them with a standard chiropractic consultation and then split them into two groups. The first group then receives a treatment from a different chiropractor (presumably working on instructions from the first) and the second group receives a treatment from some sort of massage therapist (and if you want to be flash you could throw in a placebo pill group/no treatment group). During the treatments the individuals are not allowed to speak the patients only provide the treatment to avoid influencing the patient or accidentally revealing their identity. Then you look at the results and you see if there is a difference between a simple massage and a chiropractic treatment. If there is no difference then uh oh… and if there is then great news for chiropractors!

That is an example off the top of my head but yet it is better designed than most of the trials the BCA referenced during the Singh case. It is really not that difficult to think of ways to test if treatments work better than a placebo.

However risk can be readily identified and comparisons can be made of patients who have head, neck and low back pain and compare the alternatives, which is not usually doing nothing. What are the associated risks with medication or other more invasive procedures?

How about the risks associated with massage therapy or regular exercise classes which tend to cost a lot less and provide the same benefit? Doctors aren’t always so quick as alternative medicine practitioners believe to recommend surgery for every minor ache and pain.

What about non-musculoskeletal complaints and chiropractic care? If the risk of a procedure is low, the patient has attempted other interventions and are not willing to either accept the associated risks, side effects, or choosing to do nothing, then some alternative with low risk might be worth investigating. The question involves then how much evidence and what level of evidence is necessary for a patient to attempt a low risk intervention such as chiropractic for a non-musculoskeletal condition?

Here you are assuming that patients would only seek out chiropractic treatments after exhausting all other avenues but this is not how chiropractic is advertised. Chiropractors don’t generally say ‘hey there is no real evidence this will help but since you’ve done everything else why not give our treatment a go?’ They say chiropractic can be effective in treating common childhood ailments such as colic, ear infections, bed wetting and so on. Is manipulating a child’s spine when they have an ear infection really a low risk treatment?

I do not believe that every child with colic, bed wetting, sleep disturbances or whatever need chiropractic care or would systematically benefit. But I do believe that clinically significant percentage would. The difficulty is getting the research community to embrace this type of study and like Jon C noted the pharmaceutical community and those outside of chiropractic are not interested. Developing a clinical prediction rule for patients with non-musculoskeletal complaint that could be treated by chiropractors would be an intriguing study.

Unfortunately you have no evidence for your intuitions because no good studies exist. If it is a significant group that would benefit then it should show up in a well designed study. However, if you are talking about something like 1 in 50 people might think it helped them with something then that is not likely to be statistically significant and in fact it is much more likely that such a result would be down to a simple coincidence. Bodies heal and people often take medicine at the same time as they are receiving chiropractic treatments so the fact that you there are going to be some patients reporting random benefits is not surprising nor should it be taken as evidence that chiropractic works for non-musculoskeletal problems.

As regards the failure of the ‘research community’ to investigate chiropractic properly, hang on, shouldn’t that be the job of the chiropractors? They are the ones claiming the effect so they should be the ones demonstrating it by publishing well designed trials and thus attracting interest and funding. There are national bodies of chiropractors which have research grants and there are many alternative medicine research programs so what are the chiropractors waiting for?

I have found, not exclusively, that some patients who have a physical trauma associated with a non-musculoskeletal complaint sometimes will have their non-musculoskeletal complaint resolve as they receive treatment for their physical trauma. That might be one factor that could be utilized in differentiating patients. But the issue is that the ratio of patients with non-musculoskeletal complaint helped by chiropractic care would be low and that would mean a large sample for a study would be needed for it to generate worthwhile information.

This sounds like exactly the kind of pattern you would record if there was no real correlation. Imagine if dentists asked their patients about their other ailments and claimed to be able to help them by treating their teeth. You would likely find a very small number of individuals who reported that some of their other ailments were cured after they received the dental treatment. That does not mean dental treatments are able to help with ear infections which is the kind of conclusion you seem to be drawing from the same kind of evidence.

I like the idea of a large well designed study but what about the already existing large negative studies? Do they give any pause for thought?

Does anyone know how much funds it would take to coordinate such a study? Who is willing to take it on? Wouldn’t it be something a government would want to investigate for its people? A relatively low cost, low risk procedure for a subset of patients suffering from various non-musculoskeletal complaints would save money and improve general public health. I know I would be happy to volunteer my time to be part of this study. I like most of my chiropractic colleagues just want to help our fellow man (and woman) and would love to have more information, research, and answers to help guide us.

It is somewhat telling that you have been a chiropractor for 28 years and yet have seemingly no familiarity with how you would even go about getting research organised. It is a positive sign that you are interested in conducting or taking part in clinical trials but doesn’t it seem a bit backwards that you and the BCA are already promoting treatments for ailments which you don’t have any evidence that they work for? Do you mention that to your patients?

I suggest a good first step to getting involved with research would be to read the literature and contact some of the respected researchers, like any of the folks from Edzard Ernst’s group for instance. I’m sure they could point you in the right direction.

I know that most chiropractors are not bad people and are often motivated by a desire to help people. The problem is that just having the intention to help does not mean the treatment you provide therefore really works. That is why it is important to get good evidence that a treatment really helps BEFORE you promote it for an ailment. Otherwise you can not be sure that what you are offering is not just a fancy placebo. Unless of course you are happy treating people with a fancy placebo but I don’t see many chiropractors willing to take that stance.

Well that’s all I look forward to your response if you come across this.

Repeat with banging

Over the past week there has been an ongoing  ’evidence check’ by the ‘House of Commons Science and Technology Sub-Committee’ to see whether the governments current policies on issues relating to homeopathy were supported by scientific evidence. The manner in which the evidence is being checked largely revolves around a series of expert panels being questioned by a committee of MPs.

In the first of these panels which took place on the 25th November 2009 the panels of experts stacked up as follows:

Panel 1

Dr. Ben Goldacre- Medical doctor, writer and Guardian columnist. Merciless mocker of bad science and tireless advocate of good science.
Tracey Brown- Managing director of science advocacy charity Sense About Science. Another tireless promoter of science who is a familiar face to all those following the Simon Singh libel case.
Prof. Jayne Lawrence- Chief Scientific Advisor for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. Title says it all really.
Paul Bennet- Professional Standards Director of well known pharmaceutical retailer, Boots. Present because Boots is one of the largest retailers of Homeopathic remedies in the UK.
Robert Wilson- Chairman of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers. Shockingly an advocate for homeopathy.

Panel 2

Prof. Edzard- Director of Complementary Medicine Group at Peninsula Medical School. Long term researcher into the validity of alternative treatments and co-author of Trick or Treatment: Alternative medicine on trial with Simon Singh.
Dr. James Thallon- Medical Director of NHS West Kent. Not familiar with the chap but he seemed to be an advocate of evidence based medicine and hence less than impressed with homeopathy.
Dr. Peter Fisher- Director of Research at Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. Hard to direct research at a homeopathic hospital without being a staunch advocate for homeopathy. A practising homeopath and a medical doctor.
Dr. Robert Mathie- Research Development Advisor of the British Homeopathic Association. Another staunch advocate for homeopathy.

Both sessions lasted around an hour and they can be viewed online here. For anyone thinking of watching them I would give advance notice that they are at entertaining and informative while simultaneously quite depressing. They are informative because there is a lot of discussion around what constitutes good evidence, when regulation is appropriate and what effects current government policies have on legitimising homeopathic treatments. They are entertaining because of the amusing comments offered at several points by the chair of the debate, Phil Willis, and due to the various uncomfortable evasions elicited after persistent questioning from the skeptical MP extraordinaire Dr. Evan Harris. And they are depressing because you have to listen to science and evidence be repeatedly mangled by the supposed ‘creme da la creme’ of the UK homeopathic world. All the same tired cliches including versions of ‘lots of people use it’ and ‘it is really old’ are trotted with complete seriousness as evidence for why continued support for homeopathy is necessary.

Since it has been a week now and we now live in the blogging era there has already been a lot of commentary and analysis of the panel discussion so here is a quick round up of some useful coverage:

• Skepticat provides a good overview of the main highlights and also points out that Boots may have got off lightly given the statements it makes about homeopathy on its Learning Zone website.
• Majikthyse gives another interesting recap from the perspective of a clinical scientist.
• Ben Goldacre recalls some of his favourite bits from the discussions and uses some of the more lamentable claims made during the panels to illustrate some interesting information about placebos and nocebos and why they are important.
• Various newspapers including The Telegraph, The Times & The Daily Mail picked up on Paul Bennet’s admission that Boots sells homeopathic remedies because they are popular not because there is evidence that they are effective. On top of those, the ever vigilant Prof. David Colquhoun discussed the admission in a follow up to a post discussing Boots shoddy standards of evidence.

I’m sure there is a lot more out there if you have a hunt but there are a few universal points that crop up in the discussions, namely:

1. Defenders of homeopathy have a really poor grasp of how science and medicine work! They cherry-pick their trials so hard and fast that I fear for the job security of any fruit picker alive. Obscure single studies are trotted out with aplomb as if they make looking at the rest of the research literature unnecessary and meta-analysis and reviews are discarded with nary a word  if they happen to have arrived at conclusions that the homeopaths don’t like.
2. Defenders of homeopathy do not appear convincing when presented alongside scientists. Seriously… a telling example is when Dr. Evan Harris asked Prof. Ernst for clarification about whether the meta-analysis of homeopathy really showed, as the homeopaths claimed, that 4 out of a total of 5 meta-analyses had been positive. Ernst’s response? He casually mentioned that he was aware of around 24 meta-analyses all of which were negative and he speculated that the only positive meta-analyses he was aware of contained case studies, non controlled studies and non randomised studies.
3. Phil Willis MP, the chair of the committee, is an amusing man and is good at highlighting the absurdity of arguments. As demonstrated when he responded to a comment from Robert Wilson suggesting that homeopathy deserved respect as a centuries old tradition by pointing out that the same could be said for prostitution.
4. Evan Harris MP, is an excellent illustration of how important it is to have the sceptical perspective represented in politics. His questions were probing and incisive and he managed to draw out the logical conclusions from a wide variety of impressively slippery and tangled obfuscations.
5. Boots sells remedies because they are popular and make them money and not because there is evidence that they work. This seems to have been treated as some kind of revelation but I thought it had been self-evident for a number of years. Regardless, it is nice to see such things being raised to the public’s attention.
6. All of the pro-science participants presented themselves well but Tracey Brown and Ben Goldacre, in particular, deserve several pats on the back for a job well done. Ben is already a well known figure in skeptic circles but Tracy despite being at the centre of a number of high profile Sense About Science campaigns including Simon Singh’s libel case remains less familiar. That is a shame and is something that will hopefully be rectified because she is an eloquent and well informed speaker.

And there you have it. If you have time and enjoy train wrecks or just want to check if the homeopathy advocates did as bad as I am claiming then go and have a look and judge for yourself…

Oh and one further point, the second committee meeting took place yesterday, this time with a bunch of figures from the current government. I was expecting this to be a more sober affair, displaying a bit more sense and a keener grasp of the (lack of) scientific evidence since there were no homeopaths around and the Chief Scientist was there but boy was I wrong. Have a look at this post from the Lay Scientist for further details of the silliness.