Theory of Knowledge

Evidence that Homeopathy Works

2008-09-16T22:11:00.001+08:00

Isn't it nice when the only research that you publish supports your case.
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An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys The European Network of Homeopathy Researchers March 2007 This document has been produced by the European Network for Homeopathy Researchers (ENHR). The ENHR was established in 2004 with support from the European Council for Classical Homeopathy (ECCH). ECCH currently assists the ENHR in its secretarial work. The ENHR consists of 66 individuals from 15 different countries involved in or with a special interest in homeopathy research. The ENHR is open to membership for any individual involved or interested in homeopathy research. Purpose of the European Network of Homeopathy Researchers (ENHR): • The primary aim of the ENHR is to contribute to improving homeopathy research for the benefit of patients. • A long-term objective of the ENHR is to contribute to carrying out international EU funded research projects within the area of homeopathy research. • The ENHR consists of researchers, research advisors and representatives of the homeopathy profession as well as consumer/patient groups with an interest in the area of homeopathy research. • Members of the ENHR inform each other about homeopathy research that is in the planning stages or being carried out, as well as published research articles. Introduction This document contains a sample of brief summaries of positive homeopathy research, together with the full references. Additional information may be found in the document entitled 'Facts about homeopathy and other CAM therapies’ (an ECCH document), and on the enclosed list of website addresses. Readers are recommended to read the full research articles in order to acquire a more profound knowledge base of research that has been undertaken. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 1 of 21 Content litst Use of homeopathy and other CAM therapies User surveys showing patient satisfaction with homeopathic treatment Safety of homeopathic treatment Reviews and meta-analyses Key trials and surveys Diarrhoea in children Respiratory tract complaints Musculo-skeletal problems Hay fever, asthma and perennial rhinitis Pre menstrual syndrome (PMS) Menopausal complaints Homeopathy after oestrogen withdrawal Hot flashes after breast cancer therapy Infertility Sperm quality Pregnancy-related problems ADHD ME/CFS Surgery Dengue haemorrhagic fever Cost benefit Basic research – The effect of high dilutions Treatment of animals Research website addresses Page 3 5 6 7 10 10 10 11 12 13 13 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 16 16 17 18 19 20 An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 2 of 21 USE OF HOMEOPATHY AND OTHER CAM THERAPIES Homeopathy is being practised in 41 out of 42 European countries. The Legal Situation for the Practice of Homeopathy in Europe, revised report, May 2006, European Council for Classical Homeopathy. Legal Status of Traditional Medicine and Complementary/ Alternative Medicine: A Worldwide Review, World Health Organization, 2001. Homeopathy is the most frequently used CAM therapy in 5 out of 16 surveyed countries in Europe and among the three most frequently used in 11 out of 16 surveyed countries. Norges offentlige utredninger, NOU 1998:21 Alternativ medisin. (Official report published by the Norwegian Department of Health. Available at: http://odin.dep.no/hd/norsk/publ/utredninger/NOU/030005-020019/index-ved005-b-n-a.html) Ot.prp. nr. 27 (2002-2003). Om lov om alternativ behandling av sykdom mv. Public interest in, and acceptance of alternative treatment increases in most European countries. Percentage of the population using alternative treatment varies from 18 to 71 % depending on country. Ot.prp. nr. 27 (2002-2003). Om lov om alternativ behandling av sykdom mv. Det kongelige helsedepartement. http://odin.dep.no/repub/02-03/otprp/27/ Homeopathy is officially recognised and included in the national health system in a number of countries within and outside of Europe. Legal Status of Traditional Medicine and Complementary/Alternative Medicine: A Worldwide Review, World Health Organization, 2001. Three Europeans out of four know about homeopathy and of these 29 % use it for their health care. Homeopathic medicinal products. Commission report to the European Parliament and the Council on the application of Directives 92/73 and 92/74. A study of 1097 patients visiting 80 Norwegian homeopaths showed that one in four patients were children between 0 and 9 years of age, compared to one in ten in 1985 and in general practice. The most commonly presented complaints were respiratory, skin and psychological complaints. Steinsbekk A, Fønnebø V. Users of homeopaths in Norway in 1998, compared to previous users and GP patients. Homeopathy (2003) 92, 3-10. A survey of 1400 patients treated in a homeopathic clinic showed that 36 % were under the age of 16 in 2004, compared to 26 % in 1995. Respiratory complaints, complaints of ears and skin accounted for 70 % of patients in the age group from 0 to 10 years. More than half of the patients had university or other higher education. Viksveen P, Steinsbekk A. Changes in patients visiting a homeopathic clinic in Norway from 1994 to 2004. Homeopathy (2005) 94, 222-228. A survey of more than 70 000 citizens showed that approximately 9 million people in Italy (15.6 % of the population) have used at least one unconventional therapy in the period from 1997 to 1999. Homeopathy was the most frequently used (8.2 % of the population). Homeopathy was also quite commonly used by children (7.7 %). The use of CAM therapies has almost doubled since 1991. Menniti-Ippolito, F., Forcella, E., Bologna, E., Gargiulo, L., Traversa, G., & Raschetti, R. Use of unconventional medicine in children in Italy. Eur J Clin Pharmacol 2002 Apr;58(1):61-4. Homeopathy is one of several alternative therapies that are used in treating infertile people. CAM therapists take a more holistic view of infertility treatment than allopathic health professionals. Veal L. Complementary therapy and infertility: an Icelandic perspective. Complement Ther Nurs Midwifery. 1998 Feb;4(1):3-6. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 3 of 21 USE OF HOMEOPATHY AND OTHER CAM THERAPIES Research has shown that homeopathy is one of a number of alternative therapies that women experience as useful in treating endometriosis. Wienhard J, Tinneberg HR. Alternative treatment possibilities of complaints due to endometriosis. Zentralbl Gynakol. 2003 Jul-Aug;125(7-8):286-9. Infertility can also be caused by difficulties in men, including low sperm numbers and poor quality. Men with infertility problems also consult with CAM practitioners such as homeopaths. Oldereid NB, Rui H, Purvis K. Male partners in infertile couples. Personal attitudes and contact with the Norwegian health service. Scand J Soc Med. 1990 Sep;18(3):207-11. CAM therapies such as homeopathy are gaining acceptance in countries across the world, both among health providers and consumers. A majority of patients consulting with CAM practitioners are women, often seeking help for reproductive health problems, menstrual disorders, menopause, problems during pregnancy and childbirth. Beal MW. Women’s use of complementary and alternative therapies in reproductive health care. J Nurse Midwifery. 1998 May-Jun;43(3):224-34. A number or studies have shown that women make up between 64 and 80 % of the clientele visiting homeopaths. Viksveen P, Steinsbekk A. Changes in patients visiting a homeopathic clinic in Norway 1994-2004. Homeopathy (2005) 94, 222-228. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 4 of 21 USER SURVEYS SHOWING PATIENT SATISFACTION WITH HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT In an observational study of 6544 consecutive patients during a 6-year period, and over 23,000 consultations, results showed that 70.7 % reported positive health changes, with 50.7 % recording their improvement as better (+2) or much better (+3). Of the 1270 children that were treated 80.5 % had some improvement, and 65.8 % were better (+2) or much better (+3). Spence DS, Thompson EA, Barron SJ. Homeopathic Treatment for Chronic Disease: A 6-Year, University-Hospital Outpatient Observational Study. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Volume 11, Number 5, 2005, pp. 793-798. In a prospective, multi-centre cohort study with 103 primary care practices treating 3981 patients, disease severity decreased significantly (p<0.001) over a 2 year period. Major improvements were observed for quality of life for adults and young children. 28 % (1130) of the patients were children and 97 % of all diagnoses where chronic with an average duration of 8.8 years. The most frequent diagnoses were allergic rhinitis in men, headache in women, and atopic dermatitis in children. Witt CM, Luedtke R, Baur R, Willich SN. Homeopathic Medical Practice: Long-term results of a Cohort Study with 3981 Patients. BMC Public Health 2005, 5:115. Seven out of ten patients visiting Norwegian homeopaths reported a meaningful improvement in their main complaint 6 months after the initial consultation. Steinsbekk, A. Patients' assessments of the effectiveness of homeopathic care in Norway: A prospective observational multi-centre outcome study. Homeopathy, Volume 94, Issue 1, January 2005, Pages 1016. One year after their first visit to a homeopathic clinic, 609 patients were asked to rate their general health compared with a year ago. 73.5 % reported a marked or moderate improvement in their health status. F. Attena et al. Homeopathy in Primary Care: self reported change in health status. Complementary therapies in Medicine Vol 8 No 1. March 2000. A study of 829 patients treated with homeopathic medicines, where conventional treatment had been unsatisfactory or contraindicated. 61 % had a substantial improvement with homeopathy. Sevar, R. Audit of outcome in 829 consecutive patients treated with homeopathic medicine. British Homeopathic Journal Vol 89 No.4. Oct 2000. A survey of more than 900 patients treated homeopathically showed substantial improvement in quality of life over the first 6 months after treatment and this effect remained more or less stable over the following years. Güthlin C, Lange O and Walach H. Measuring the effects of acupuncture and homoeopathy in general practice: An uncontrolled prospective documentation approach. BMC Public Health 2004, 4:6. British prospective survey of homeopathic treatment of 223 patients, 1996. 90% improvement or more: 32%. 60% improvement or more: 65% 50% improvement or more: 72%. Report on NHS practice-based homoeopathy project. Analysis of effectiveness and cost of homoeopathic treatment within a GP practice at St. Margaret's Surgery, Bradford on Avon, Wilts. Elizabeth A Christie, Andrew T Ward ISBN 1 901262 006 British prospective survey of homeopathic treatment of 160 patients, 1994. Very positive effect: 73%. Some effect: 27%. No effect: 0%. Report on a Homoeopathy Project in an NHS Practice. Covering 18 month period from February 1993 to August 1994. Elizabeth A Christie, Andrew T Ward,. Reprinted February 1997. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 5 of 21 USER SURVEYS SHOWING PATIENT SATISFACTION WITH HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT British prospective survey of homeopathic treatment of 37 patients suffering from psychological complaints, 1998. Very satisfied: 81%. Satisfied: 16%. Not satisfied at all: 3%. Homoeopathy within the NHS. Evaluation of homoeopathic treatment of common mental health problems. 1995 - 1997. Alistair Dempster,. Rydings Hall Surgery, Brighouse, West Yorkshire. ISBN No 1901262014. Retrospective survey of homeopathic treatment, Danmarks Farmaceutiske Højskole, 1995. 73% of patients stated they improved after homeopathic treatment. Andersen HE, Eldov P. Klassisk homøopati - og dens brugere. Institut for Samfundsfarmaci, Danmarks Farmaceutiske Højskole. 1995. Andersen, Helle Egebjerg. En undersøgelse af Klassisk Homøpati. Teorier, praksis og brugererfaringer. 1999. ISBN 87-987279-0-7 The effect of homeopathy, acupuncture and osteopathy. Result: 89% of patients stated they experienced positive effect from the treatment. Particularly clear effect on reduction of pain, increased vitality, ability to function socially and with regards to limitations at work and in daily activities influenced by physical problems. Homeopathy was particularly effective for patients suffering from arthritis, hay fever, asthma and skin complaints. Richardson J. Quasi-randomised control trial to assess the outcome of acupuncture, osteopathy and homoeopathy using the short form 36 item health survey. Health Services Research and Evaluation Unit, The Lewisham Hospital NHS Trust. December 1996. A telephone survey of more than 850 women aged 45 to 65 years showed that 76 % used alternative therapies (9). This included 22 % who used these therapies to treat their menopause symptoms. As many as 89 % found these therapies to be somewhat or very helpful. Newton KM, Buist DS, Keenan NL, Anderson LA, LaCroix AZ. Use of alternative therapies for menopause symptoms: results of a population-based survey. Obstet Gynecol. 2002 Jul;100(1):18-25. SAFETY OF HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT It is the clinical experience of thousands of homeopaths over the last two centuries that homeopathy is comparatively safe even for women in pregnancy and in labour. Research into the safety of homeopathy has shown that about one in five experience an aggravation of their symptoms for a short while after treatment, but these effects are mild and transient. Bornhöft et al. Effectiveness, Safety and Cost-Effectiveness of Homeopathy in General Practice – Summarized Health Technology Assessment. Forsch Komplementärmed 2006;13(suppl 2):19-29. Adler M. Efficacy, safety of a fixed-combination homeopathic therapy for sinusitis. Adv Ther 1999; 16: 103–111. Dantas, F. & Rampes, H. 2000. Do Homeopathic Medicines Provoke Adverse Effects? A Systematic Review. British Homeopathic Journal. 2000; 89: 70-74. Thompson 2004. A preliminary audit investigating remedy reactions including adverse events in routine homeopathic practice. Homeopathy 93;203-209 An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 6 of 21 REVIEWS AND META-ANALYSES A meta-analysis is a means of combining results from more than one trial to look for overall trends. (NB! In general complicated research terminology such as OR, CI, and words such as significant or randomized should only be used in communications with people who will understand such terminology. Otherwise stick to what can be understood by all, e.g. a survey of all the high quality research that has been carried out clearly shows that homeopathy is effective.) Results were found in favour of homeopathy in 20 of 22 systematic reviews on the effect of homeopathic high-potencies on cells or living organisms. For upper respiratory tract infections and allergies six out of seven studies were in favour of homeopathy. The authors of this article concluded that the effectiveness of homeopathy can be supported by clinical evidence and treatment is safe. The article has been published by authors who took part of the Program for Evaluation of Complementary Medicine (PEK), the same program which in August 2005 resulted in the publication of an article by Shang et al, where the conclusion was that the effect of homeopathy is placebo. Bornhöft et al. Effectiveness, Safety and Cost-Effectiveness of Homeopathy in General Practice – Summarized Health Technology Assessment. Forsch Komplementärmed 2006;13(suppl 2):19-29. In a review of homeopathy research the authors found three independent systematic reviews of placebo-controlled trials on homeopathy that reported effects that seem to be more than placebo, and one review that found its effects consistent with placebo. Jonas, W. B., Kaptchuk, T. J., & Linde, K. 2003b, "A critical overview of homeopathy", Ann.Intern.Med., vol. 138, no. 5, pp. 393-399. A systematic review and meta-analysis showed highly significant results for surveys adding up to a total of 2 617 patients (P=0.000036). Results were not that significant for high quality surveys (P=0.08). The author concludes that further high quality studies are needed to confirm results. Cucherat, M., Haugh, M. C., Gooch, M., & Boissel, J. P. 2000, "Evidence of clinical efficacy of homeopathy. A meta-analysis of clinical trials. HMRAG. Homeopathic Medicines Research Advisory Group", Eur.J.Clin.Pharmacol., vol.. 56, no. 1, pp. 27-33. A systematic review of results from 93 substantive RCTs was carried out by Robert Mathie (2003). It concludes that of the 35 different medical conditions covered by these trials the weight of evidence favours a positive treatment effect in 8: childhood diarrhoea, fibrositosis, hay fever, influenza, pain (miscellaneous), side-effects of chemotherapy or radiotherapy, sprains and upper-respiratory tract infections. Mathie, R. The research evidence base for homeopathy: a fresh assessment of the literature. Homeopathy 92: 84-91. 2003. Meta-analysis of 89 trials of homeopathic medicine versus placebo. Result: significantly in favour of homeopathy (OR 2,45 (95% CI 2,05-2,93)). This meta-analysis included 186 placebo-controlled studies of homeopathy published until mid-1996, of which data for analysis could be extracted from 89. The overall odds ratio was 2.45 (95% confidence intervals 2.05-2.93) in favour of homeopathy, which means that the chances that homeopathy would benefit the patient were 2.45 times greater than placebo. When considering just those trials of high quality published in MEDLINE listed journals, and with predefined primary outcome measures, the pooled odds ratio was 1.97 and significant. Even after correction for publication bias the results remained significant. The main conclusion was that the results "were not compatible with the hypothesis that the effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo". If the result of new trials were to show no difference between homeopathy and placebo, we would have to add 923 trials with no effect with 118 patients in each in order to balance the two. Linde K, Clausius N, Ramirez G, et al. Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials. Lancet 1997;350:834-43. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 7 of 21 REVIEWS AND META-ANALYSES HMRG report with overview of clinical research in homeopathy, identified 184 controlled clinical trials. They selected the highest quality randomized control trials, which included a total of 2617 patients for a meta-analysis. This meta-analysis resulted in a p-value of 0.000036 (which means that results are highly significant) indicating that homeopathy is more effective than placebo. The researchers concluded that the "hypothesis that homeopathy has no effect can be rejected with certainty". Homeopathic Medicine Research Group. Report to the European Commission directorate general XII: science, research and development. Vol 1 (short version). Brussels: European Commission, 1996:16-7. Of the 105 trials with interpretable results, 81 trials indicated positive results. Most studies showed results in favour of homeopathy even among those randomized controlled trials that received highquality ratings for randomization, blinding, sample size, and other methodological criteria. They came to the following conclusion: "The amount of positive evidence even among the best studies came as a surprise to us. Based on this evidence we would readily accept that homeopathy can be efficacious, if only the mechanism of action were more plausible. The evidence presented in this review would probably be sufficient for establishing homeopathy as a regular treatment for certain indications". Kleijnen J, Knipschild P, Ter Riet G. Clinical trials of homoeopathy. British Medical Journal. 1991b;302:316-23. A health technology assessment report on effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and appropriateness of homeopathy was compiled on behalf of the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health. Results showed a positive overall result in favour of homeopathy in 29 studies on upper respiratory tract infections and allergic reactions. Results also showed many high-quality investigations of pre-clinical basic research proved homeopathic high-potencies inducing regulative and specific changes in cells or living organisms. 20 of 22 systematic reviews detected at least a trend in favour of homeopathy. Boarnhoft G, Wolf U, Ammon K, Righetti M, Maxion-Bergemann S, Baumgartner S, Thurneysen AE, Matthiessen PF. Effectiveness, safety and cost-effectiveness of homeopathy in general practice – summarized health technology assessment. Forsch Komplementarmed. 2006; 13 Suppl 2: 19-29. A meta-analysis of three trials on homeopathic immunotherapy. Result: significant effect in favour of homeopathic treatment. Reilly D, Taylor MA, Beattie NGM, Campbell JH, McSharry C, Aitchison TC, Carter R, Stevenson RD. Is evidence for homoeopathy reproducible? Lancet. 1994;344:1601-1606. A review of placebo-controlled clinical trials using homeopathic medicines to treat people with AIDS or who are HIV-positive found 5 controlled clinical trials. Results showed statistically significant results in subjects with stage III AIDS, and specific physical, immunologic, neurologic, metabolic, and quality-of-life benefits, including improvements in lymphocyte counts and functions and reductions in HIV viral loads in patients receiving homeopathic treatment. Ullman D. Controlled Clinical Trials Evaluating the Homeopathic Treatment of People with Human Immunodeficiency Virus or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Volume 9, Number 1, 2003, pp. 133-141. Meta-analysis of 105 articles on laboratory research. Result: positive effect 50% more frequently than negative effect among trials of highest methodological quality. (1994) Linde K. Jonas WB, Melchart D, Worku F, Wagner H, Eital F. Critical Review and Meta-Analysis of Serial Agitated Dilutions in Experimental Toxicology. Human and Experimental Toxicology. 1994;13:481-492. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 8 of 21 KEY TRIALS AND SURVEYS Diarrhoea in children Treatment of acute childhood diarrhoea in Nicaragua This trial involved 81 children aged from 6 months to 5 years in a randomised, double-blind trial of intravenous fluids plus placebo versus intravenous fluids plus homeopathic remedy individualised to the patient. The treatment group had a statistically significant decrease in duration of diarrhoea. Jacobs J. Treatment of acute childhood diarrhoea with homeopathic medicine: a randomized clinical trial in Nicaragua. Pediatrics 1994; 93: 719-725. Treatment of acute childhood diarrhoea, repeated in Nepal In a replication of a trial carried out in Nicaragua in 1994, 116 Nepalese children aged 6 months to 5 years suffering from diarrhoea were given an individualised homoeopathic medicine or placebo. Treatment by homoeopathy showed a significant improvement in the condition in comparison to placebo. Jacobs J., Jimenez M., Malthouse S., Chapman E., Crothers D., Masuk M., Jonas W.B., Acute Childhood Diarrhoea- A Replication., Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 6, 2000, 131-139. A meta-analysis of childhood diarrhoea trials This meta-analysis of 242 children showed a highly significant result in the duration of childhood diarrhoea (P=0.008). It should be noted that the World Health Organisation consider childhood diarrhoea to be the number one public health problem today because of the millions of children who die every year from dehydration from diarrhoea. J. Jacobs, WB Jonas, M Jimenez-Perez, D Crothers, Homeopathy for Childhood Diarrhea: Combined Results and Meta-analysis from Three Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trials http://homeopathic.com/articles/research/diarrhea_t.php Respiratory tract complaints Homeopathy versus conventional treatment in respiratory tract complaints In an outcome study, 30 practitioners in four countries enrolled 500 consecutive patients with at least one of three complaints: upper respiratory tract complaints including allergies; lower respiratory tract complaints including allergies; or ear complaints. Of 456 patients, 281 received homeopathy and 175 conventional treatment. The primary outcome criterion was response to treatment, defined as cured or major improvement after 14 days of treatment. Results showed a response rate of 82.6% in the homeopathy group compared to 67.3% in the group receiving conventional medicine. The authors concluded that homeopathy appeared to be at least as effective as conventional treatment of patients with the three conditions studied. Riley D, Fischer M, Singh B, Haidvogl M, Heger M. Homeopathy and conventional medicine: an outcomes study comparing effectiveness in a primary care setting. J Altern Complement Med 2001; 7: 149–159. Homeopathy versus conventional treatment in recurrent acute rhinopharyngitis in children Prospective pragmatic study, comparison of homeopathy versus antibiotics in the treatment of recurrent acute rhinopharyngitis in children (18 months to 4 years) over a 6 month period. Results showed that homeopathy was significantly better than antibiotics in terms of episodes of rhinopharyngitis (2.71 vs 3.97, p<0.001), number of complications (1.25 vs 1.95, p<0.001) and quality of life (global score: 21.38 vs 30.43, p<0.001). Homeopathic treatment also contributed to lower medical costs (88 Euros vs 99 Euros, p<0.05) and significantly less sick-leave (9.5% of parents vs 31.6% of parents, p<0.001). Trichard M, Chaufferin G, Nicoloyannis N. Pharmacoeconomic comparison between homeopathic and antibiotic treatment strategies in recurrent acute rhinopharyngitis in children. Homeopathy. 2005 Jan;94(1):3-9 An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 9 of 21 KEY TRIALS AND SURVEYS Respiratory tract complaints Homeopathy versus conventional treatment in otitis media Prospective observational study, comparison of homeopathy versus conventional treatment in acute otitis media. Conclusion: homeopathy should be first line treatment in acute otitis media. Results showed median duration of pain of 2 days in the homeopathy-group and 3 days in the conventional medicine group. 70.7 % of the children receiving homeopathic treatment did not have another ear infection the next year and 29.3 % had a maximum of three ear infections within one year. 56.5 % in the conventional medicine group did not have another ear infection the next year and 43.5 % had a maximum of six ear infections the next year. Results showed that in the group receiving homeopathic treatment only 5 out of 103 children needed antibiotics. Friese K-H, Kruse S, Ludtke R, Moeller H "Homeopathic treatment of otitis media in children: comparisons with conventional therapy". Int J Clin Pharmacol Ther. 1997; 35: 296-301. Acute otitis media in children A study involving children suffering from acute otitis media suggests that a positive treatment effect from homeopathy when compared with placebo in acute otitis media cannot be excluded. There were fewer treatment failures in the group receiving homeopathy after 5 days, 2 weeks, and 6 weeks, with differences of 11.4, 18.4, and 19.9%, respectively, but these differences were not statistically significant. Diary scores showed a significant decrease in symptoms at 24 and 64 h after treatment in favour of homeopathy (P<0.05). Jacobs J, Springer DA, Crothers D. Homeopathic treatment of acute otitis media in children: a preliminary randomized placebo-controlled trial. Pediatr Infect Dis J 2001; 20: 177–183. Acute otitis media in children In a trial of 230 children who were given homeopathic treatment to treat acute otitis media, pain relief was achieved in 39% of the patients after 6 h and another 33% after 12 h. The resolution rates were 2.4 times faster than in placebo controls. No complications were observed and compared to conventional treatment the homeopathic approach was 14% cheaper. Frei H, Thurneysen A. Homeopathy in acute otitis media in children: treatment effect or spontaneous resolution? Br Homeopath J 2001; 90: 180–182. Glue ear in children In a pilot study in children suffering from glue ear treated with homeopathy 75% had normal tympanogram, compared to 31% in the group treated with conventional medicine. A higher proportion of children receiving homeopathic treatment had a hearing loss less than 20 dB at follow-up, though the difference was not statistically significant. The authors concluded that further research comparing homeopathy to standard care is warranted; 270 patients would be needed for a definitive trial. Harrison H, Fixsen A, Vickers A. A randomized comparison of homoeopathic, standard care for the treatment of glue ear in children. Compl Therap Med 1999; 7: 132–135. Acute sinusitis In an uncontrolled clinical trial of 119 patients suffering from clinical signs of acute sinusitis were treated using homeopathic medicines. Typical sinusitis symptoms, such as headache, pressure pain at nerve exit points, and irritating cough, were reduced after a mean of 4.1 days of treatment. Ninety-nine received only a homeopathic test medication, 20 patients were able to discontinue concomitant medication at the first visit, and only one patient needed antibiotics. Average duration of treatment was 2 weeks. At the end of treatment 81.5 % described themselves as symptom free or significantly improved. No adverse medication effects were reported. Adler M. Efficacy, safety of a fixed-combination homeopathic therapy for sinusitis. Adv Ther 1999; 16: 103–111. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 10 of 21 KEY TRIALS AND SURVEYS Musculo-skeletal problems Rheumatoid arthritis Forty-six patients with rheumatoid arthritis received an individualised remedy or placebo in a 3-month randomised trial. Both groups were allowed to continue standard anti-inflammatory drugs. After 3 months, the double-blind code was broken and remedies were given to members of the placebo group in a single crossover study. Articular index, limbering up time, grip strength and pain all showed statistically significant differences. Gibson RG, Gibson SLM, MacNeill AD, Buchanan WW Homeopathic therapy in rheumatoid arthritis: evaluation by double-blind clinical therapeutic trial. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 1980; 9: 453-459. Osteoarthritis In this trial, 65 sufferers of Osteoarthritis (OA) were split into 2 groups, and through a double blinding process were given either a homoeopathic medicine or Acetaminophen, a commonly prescribed drug for pain relief in OA. Researchers found that homoeopathy provided a level of pain relief that was superior to Acetaminophen, and produced no adverse reactions. Shealy C.N., Thomlinson P.R., Cox R.H., and Bormeyer V. Osteoarthritis Pain: A Comparison of Homoeopathy and Acetaminophen. American Journal of Pain Management, 8, 3, July 1998, 89-91. Fibromyalgia A double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial of individualised homeopathic treatment (LM potency) versus placebo in 53 patients, concluded that individualised homeopathy is significantly better than placebo in lessening tender point pain, improving the quality of life and overall health, and less depression of persons with fibromyalgia. A broad selection of homeopathic medicines in LMpotencies were prescribed and the trial was carried out over a 4 month period. Bell IR, Lewis II DA, Brooks AJ, Schwartz GE, Lewis SE, Walsh BT, Baldwin CM. Improved clinical status in fibromyalgia patients treated with individualized homeopathic remedies versus placebo. Rheumatology Advance Access, January 20, 2004. http://rheumatology.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/keh111 Fibrositis In a randomised placebo-controlled trial of patients with fibrositis, only those patients in whom Rhus toxicodendron was ‘unequivocally indicated’ were admitted to the study. After 1 month’s treatment, there were highly significant improvements in objective and subjective parameters. Fisher P. An experimental double-blind clinical trial in homoeopathy. British Homoeopathic Journal 1986; 75: 142-147. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 11 of 21 KEY TRIALS AND SURVEYS Hay fever, asthma and perennial rhinitis A study of 200 patients suffering from hypersensitivity illnesses, including asthma, eczema, urticaria, hay fever and other allergies, showed that homeopathy was at least as effective as conventional treatment. The study, which was retrospective and comparative, looked at the experienced effect in everyday clinical practice of general practitioners and classical homeopaths. Where most patients who were treated by medical doctors experienced an aggravation of their symptoms when stopping conventional drugs, only 1/3 of patients in the homeopathy group experienced such an aggravation (P = 0.002). Only one patient on conventional treatment experienced improvement of symptoms after stopping medication, compared to improvement in 2/3 of homeopathy patients. Patients in the homeopathy group reported a larger improvement in their general state of health, with 57% improving, compared to 24% in the conventional group (difference P = 0.004). Homeopathy patients also experienced more positive change in their psychological state (P<0.0001). For quality of life 53% in the homeopathy group improved, compared to 15 % in the conventional group. Launsø L, Kimby CK, Henningsen I, Fønnebø V. An exploratory retrospective study of people suffering from hypersensitivity illness who attend medical or classical homeopathic treatment. Homeopathy (2006) 95, 73-80. A survey of 147 patients suffering from respiratory allergies showed that 87.6% improved. Out of 42 patients suffering from pulmonary allergies, only two aggravated and three were unchanged. Colin P. Homeopathy and respiratory allergies: a series of 147 cases. Homeopathy (2006) 95, 68–72 Reilly and colleagues have conducted a series of trials in patients with hay fever, asthma and perennial rhinitis. Patients were given skin tests and remedies were chosen on the basis of reactivity. This design allows individualisation whilst avoiding the issues of case-taking and the effect that this has on the process. The results demonstrate a significant difference between the placebo and homeopathic groups which is reproducible. (NB! Strictly speaking these are trials of isopathy.) Anon. Reilly’s challenge (editorial). Lancet 1994; 344: 1585. Reilly DT, Taylor MA. Potent placebo or potency? A proposed study model with initial findings using homoeopathically prepared pollens in hay fever as a model. British Homoeopathic Journal 1985; 74: 65-75. Reilly DT, Taylor MA, Campbell J, Beattie N, McSharry C, Aitchison T, Carter R, Stevenson R. Is evidence for homoeopathy reproducible? Lancet 1994; 334: 1601-1606. Reilly DT, Taylor MA, McSharry C, Aitchison T. Is homoeopathy a placebo response? Controlled trial of homoeopathic potency, with pollen in hay fever as a model. Lancet 1986; ii: 881-886. Taylor MA, Reilly D, Llewellyn-Jones RH, McSharry C, Aitchison T, Lancaster T, Vickers A. Randomised controlled trial of homeopathy versus placebo in perennial allergic rhinitis with overview of four trial series British Medical Journal 2000; 321: 471-476. Double-blind clinical trial comparing homeopathic preparations from common allergens (tree, grass, weed) with placebo. 40 patients diagnosed with moderate to severe seasonal allergic rhinitis symptoms were treated over a 4 week period. Results showed significant positive changes in the homeopathy group compared with the placebo group (p<0.05). No adverse effects were reported. Kim LS, Riedlinger JE, Baldwin CM, Hilli L, Khalsa SV, Messer SA, Waters RF. Treatment of Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis Using Homeopathic Preparation of Common Allergens in the Southwest Region of the US: A Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial. Ann Pharmacother. 2005 Apr;39(4):61724. Epub 2005 Mar 1. Related Articles, Links An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 12 of 21 KEY TRIALS AND SURVEYS Pre menstrual syndrome (PMS) In a randomized controlled double-blind clinical trial (1992-94) 19 women suffering from PMS were treated individually with homeopathy. 90 % of the patients who had received homeopathic treatment experienced more than 30 % improvement (P=0.048). Only 37.5 % of patients who received placebo experienced a similar improvement. Sick-days before menses were reduced from 0.75 to 0 in the homeopathy-group, and was unchanged in the control group. Use of conventional drugs was also reduced in the homeopathy-group. Yakir M, Kreitler S, Brzezinski A, Vithoulkas G, Oberbaum M, Bentwich Z. Effects of homeopathic treatment in women with premenstrual syndrome: a pilot study. Br Homeopath J. 2001 Jul ;90(3): 14853. A randomised controlled trial of homeopathic treatment for PMS confirms that homeopathy is helpful in PMS. Jones A. Homeopathic treatment for premenstrual symptoms. J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care. 2003 Jan;29(1):6-7. Menopausal complaints In a prospective study 81.4% of 102 patients reported improvement of menopause symptoms after homeopathic treatment. Main symptoms noted were hot flushes and sweats, tiredness, anxiety, sleeping difficulties, mood swings and headaches. Women referred to homeopathy were those who either could not take hormone replacement treatment (HRT), for whom HRT was unsuccessful, who did not want or who had to come off HRT. Mean length of homeopathic treatment was 5 months. Relton C, Weatherley-Jones E. Homeopathy Service in a National Health Service community menopause clinic: audit of clinical outcomes. Journal of the British Menopause Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2005. An outcome study and service evaluation of homeopathy service found that 88% of patients reported clinically significant improvement in their primary symptom. Greatest clinical benefit was reported by women for headaches, tiredness, vasomotor symptoms, locomotor symptoms and sleeping difficulties. Thomas KJ, Luff D, Strong P. Complementary Medicine Service in a Community Clinic for Patients with Symptoms Associated with the Menopause: Outcome and Sercive Evaluation. ScHARR, University of Sheffield, 2001. An observational study of homeopathic treatment of menopausal symptoms found benefit in menopausal symptoms, mood and quality of life. Clover A, Ratsey D. Homeopathic treatment of hot flushes: a pilot study. Homeopathy 2002;91:75-9. Homeopathy after oestrogen withdrawal 40 out of 45 women with breast cancer withdrawing from oestrogen and then treated homeopathically, experienced significant improvement in their primary symptoms, anxiety and depression, as well as improvement in quality of life. Primary symptoms changed from 7.8 to 5.4, and from 7.2 to 4.1 (p<0.001). The homeopathic approach appears to be clinically useful in the management of oestrogen withdrawal symptoms in women with breast cancer. Thompson EA, Reilly D. The homeopathic approach to the treatment of symptoms of oestrogen withdrawal in breast cancer patients. A prospective observational study. Homeopathy. 2003 Jul;92(3):131-4. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 13 of 21 Hot flashes after breast cancer therapy Homeopathy may serve as an alternative in treatment for hot flashes in women suffering from early menopause as a result of conventional treatment of breast cancer. Graf MC, Geller PA. Treating hot flashes in breast cancer survivors: a review of alternative treatments to hormone replacement therapy. Clin J Oncol Nurs. 2003 Nov-Dec;7(6):637-40. Boekhout AH, Beijnen JH, Schellens JH. Symptoms and treatment in cancer therapy-induced early menopause. Oncologist. 2006 Jun;11(6):641-54. Carpenter JS, Neal JG. Other complementary and alternative medicine modalities: acupuncture, magnets, reflexology, and homeopathy. Am J Med. 2005 Dec 19;118 Suppl 12B:109-17. Clover A, Ratsey D. Homeopathic treatment of hot flushes: a pilot study. Homeopathy, 2002 Apr;91(2):75-9. Jacobs J, Herman P, Heron K, Olsen S, Vaughters L. Homeopathy for menopausal symptoms in breast cancer survivors: a preliminary randomized controlled trial. J Altern Complement Med. 2005 Feb;11(1):21-7. An overview of 12 studies of menopause-related symptoms showed that CAM therapies such as homeopathy have significantly improved hot flash frequency and severity, mood changes, fatigue and anxiety (13). Researchers also found that these therapies had few side effects. Carpenter JS, Neal JG. Other complementary and alternative medicine modalities: acupuncture, magnets, reflexology, and homeopathy. Am J Med. 2005 Dec 19;118 Suppl 12B:109-17. A survey carried out in a British homeopathic hospital showed that homeopathy is effective in treating hot flushes in both women who have reached menopause and women who suffered from breast cancer. Researchers found an effect both in women who were taking hormonal drugs for their breast cancer and those who where not. Clover A, Ratsey D. Homeopathic treatment of hot flushes: a pilot study. Homeopathy, 2002 Apr;91(2):75-9. Homeopathy reduced symptoms in a trial of women suffering from hot flashes after having undergone surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment for breast cancer. These women particularly seemed to experience an improved general health state (quality of life) even one year after homeopathic treatment. The effect was particularly significant in women who were not on conventional hormonal drugs. The study was a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled US study of women who suffered from hot flashes. Jacobs J, Herman P, Heron K, Olsen S, Vaughters L. Homeopathy for menopausal symptoms in breast cancer survivors: a preliminary randomized controlled trial. J Altern Complement Med. 2005 Feb;11(1):21-7. Infertility In a trial on fertility disorders researchers found positive effect of a homeopathic prescriptions in 38 out of 67 women (57 %). Positive results were found on inducing pregnancy, as well as a number of factors that are important to enable pregnancy, including regulating menstruation (both to induce spontaneous menstruation and shorten the menstrual cycle), regulating hormones (improved concentration of progesterone in the luteal phase) and earlier ovulation. Bergmann J, Luft B, Boehmann S, Runnebaum B, Gerhard I. The efficacy of the complex medication Phyto-Hypophyson L in female, hormone-related sterility. A randomized, placebo-controlled clinical double-blind study. Forsch Komplementarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 2000 Aug;7(4):190-9. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 14 of 21 Sperm quality A research trial of 45 sub-fertile men showed that homeopathy improved both the number and the quality of sperm. Significant changes were found in sperm density, percentage of sperm with good progressive motility and density of sperm with good propulsive motility. The general health of the patients also improved significantly. It did not matter whether these men were subject to stress or had been childless for a long period of time. Gerhar I, Wallis E. Individualized homeopathic therapy for male infertility. Homeopathy. 2002 Jul;91(3):133-44. Pregnancy-related problems Homeopathy can increase well-being prior to pregnancy, improve the chances of conception, treat morning sickness during pregnancy, post-partum bruising of mother and newborn infant, breast feeding problems and postnatal depression. Kaplan B. Homoeopathy: In pregnancy and for the under-fives. Prof Care Mother Child. 1994 AugSep;4(6):185-7. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 15 of 21 KEY TRIALS AND SURVEYS ADHD A randomised double blind placebo controlled crossover trial of 62 children showed significant improvement of visual global perception, impulsivity and divided attention (p<0.0001). The trial suggests scientific evidence of the effectiveness of homeopathy in the treatment of ADHD, particularly in the areas of behavioural and cognitive functions. Frei H, Everts R, von Ammon K, Kaufman F, Walther D, Hsu-Schmitz SF, Collenberg M, Fuhrer K, Hassink R, Steinlin M, Thurneysen An. Homeopathic treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled crossover trial. Eur J Pediatr. 2005 Jul 27. In a trial to assess the efficacy of homeopathy in 115 hyperactive patients (mean age 8.3 years, range 3-17 y) compared to methylphenidate 75% of the children responded to homeopathy, reaching a clinical improvement rating of 73%. Children who did not respond to homeopathic treatment were prescribed methylphenidate (after an average period of 22 months of homeopathic treatment). Frei H, Thurneysen A. Treatment for hyperactive children: homeopathy and methylphenidate compared in a family setting. Br Homeopath J. 2001 Oct;90/4):178-9. ME/CFS A randomised double-blind trial involving 62 patients with ME, reported in some detail, found that 33% of patients in the group receiving homeopathic remedies showed definite improvement compared with none in the placebo group. Awdry R. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 1996; February, March, April. In a triple-blind randomised controlled trial of 86 patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients in the homeopathic medicine group showed clinically significant improvement with significantly more improvement on fatigue, compared to patients receiving placebo. Weatherley-Jones E, Nicholl JP, Thomas KJ, Parry GJ, McKendrik MW, Green ST, Stanley PJ, Lynch SPJ. A randomised, controlled, triple-blind trial of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment for chronic fatique syndrome. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 56 (2004) 189-197. Surgery In a survey of 26 patients receiving homeopathic Arnica montana or placebo after face-lift operation, patients receiving homeopathic Arnica montana had statistically significant smaller areas of ecchymosis (bruising) after operation. Seeley BM, Denton AB, Ahn MS, Maas CS. Effect of Homeopathic Arnica montana on Bruising in Face-lifts. Results of a Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial. Arch Facial Plast Surg/Vol 8, Jan/Feb 2006. Dengue haemorrhagic fever Dengue haemorrhagic fever Dengueinum 30 was administered to at least 39,200 people in the Delhi area during an epidemic of Dengue haemorrhagic fever. Follow-up of 23,520 people 10 days later showed only 5 people (0.125%) had developed mild symptoms, with the rest showing no signs or symptoms of the disease. (During epidemics of dengue, attack rates among susceptible are often 40-50 %, but may reach 80-90 %, World Health Organisation) Central Council of Research in Homoeopathy. CCRH News 1996-1997. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 16 of 21 Cost benefit In a comparative cohort study of 493 patients with chronic diagnoses results indicated greater improvement in patients’ assessments after homeopathic versus conventional treatment (adults: homeopathy from 5.7 to 3.2; conventional 5.9 to 4.4, p = 0.002; children: from 5.1 to 2.6, and 3.9 to 2.7, p < 0.001). Physician assessments were also more favourable for children who had received homeopathic treatment. There were no significant differences in costs between the two treatment groups. Witt C, Keil T, Selim D, Roll S, Vance W, Wegscheider K, Willich SN. Outcome and costs of homoeopathic and conventional treatment strategies: A comparative cohort study in patients with chronic disorders. Complementary Therapies in Medicine (2005) 13, 79-86. A 4-year study of 84 patients treated homeopathically showed average cost savings for drugs per patient of £60.40 (range £12.48 to £703.95). 64 patients were cured, 16 showed significant improvement, 5 moderate improvement affecting daily living, 5 showed no change or were unsure, and 10 are still under treatment. No side-effects of treatment were reported. Jain A. Does homeopathy reduce the cost of conventional drug prescribing? A study of comparative prescribing costs in General Practice. Homeopathy (2003) 92, 71-76. In a survey of 223 patients in an NHS General Practice, the number of consultations with general practitioners was reduced by 70% in a 1 year period. Expenses for medication were reduced by 50% when homeopathic treatment was made available. Christie EA, Ward AT. Report on NHS practice-based homoeopathy project. Analysis of effectiveness and cost of homoeopathic treatment within ad GP practice at St. Margaret’s Surgery, Bradford on Avon, Wilts. September 1996. The Society of Homeopaths. ISBH 1 901262 006. In a study of 351 adults suffering from allergies, 35.3% received homeopathic treatment, the researchers concluded that alternative medicine is used widely for allergies by the general population and is associated with considerable costs. This has freedom of choice and cost-benefit implications for the healthcare system and health policy. The study also showed that alternative medicine users were better educated than non-users, and assessed the results of alternative medicine as very good (28.6%) or rather good (53.8%). Schafer T, Riehle A, Wichmann HE, RingJ. Alternative medicine in allergies—prevalence, patterns of use, and costs. Allergy 2002; 57: 694–700. A study of the cost and effectiveness of homeopathy suggested that doctors practising homeopathy issue fewer prescriptions and at a lower cost than their colleagues. The main costs for homeopathic treatment are for consultations with each individual patient. Costs for the actual medications used are relatively low, particularly when compared with conventional drugs. Swayne J. The cost, effectiveness of homoeopathy. A pilot study, proposals for future research. Br Homoeopath J 1992; 81: 148–150. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 17 of 21 Basic research The effect of high dilutions In an experimental study of ultra-high dilutions of litihum chloride and sodium chloride, researchers found emission of light even in dilutions beyond Avogadro’s number (10-30 g cm-3). The solutions were irradiated by x- and gamma-rays at 77 K, then progressively rewarmed to room temperature. Thermoluminescence was studied during the process. Rey L. Thermoluminescence ofultra-high dilutions of lithium chloride and sodium chloride. Physica A 323 (2003) 67–74. In an experimental study of extremely diluted and succussed solutions (< 1x10-5 mol kg-1, chemically identical to distilled water) researchers found that the diluted and succussed solution resulted in exothermic excess of heat (heat resulting from chemical reactions), higher electrical conductivity and pH compared to an untreated substance. The authors conclude that they show that successive dilutions and succussions can permanently alter the physico-chemical properties of the water solvent. The authors are unable to explain the phenomena. Elia V, Niccoli M. New physico-chemical properties of extremely diluted aqueous solutions. Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry, Vol. 75 (2004) 815–836. In a multi-centre study including four research centres in Europe the effect of high dilutions of histamine (10-30 – 10-38 M) were confirmed. Researchers were able to document that high dilutions of histamine inhibit human basophil degranulation. Results cannot be explained through molecular theories. Belon P, Cumps J, Ennis M, Mannaioni PF, Roberfroid M, Sainte-Laudy J, Wiegant FAC. Histamine dilutions modulate basophil activation. Inflamm. Res. 2004; 53: 181-188. The effect of high dilutions was documented in an experiment showing the effect of highly diluted Belladonna on acetylcholine-induced contraction of the rat ileum. The model is reproducible and highly recognised in ‘the scientific world’. Bastide M (ed). Signals and Images. Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997: 161-170 A placebo-controlled homeopathic pathogenic trial, more commonly known as a proving, clearly demonstrated that provers who took the substances in C30 potency experienced significantly more symptoms than a placebo group (P<0.001). Provers were given either Etna Lava C30, Hydrogenium peroxidatum C30, or placebo. Where the placebo group experienced some symptoms, they were more short-lived compared to the verum group which experienced persistent symptoms for the first 30 days. Provers in the verum group also experienced more ‘old symptoms’ returning. A weakness of the survey is that it only included 21 provers. Researchers have now called for more data from more provers. Dominici G, Bellavite P, di Stanislao C, Gulia P, Pitari G. Double-blind, placebo-controlled homeopathic pathogenetic trials: Symptom collection and analysis. Homeopathy (2006) 96, 123-130. In an experimental study on the effect of histamine on basophile granulocytes, researchers found an effect of histamine diluted beyond Avogadro’s number. Lorenz I, Schneider EM, Stolz P, Brack A, Strube J. Sensitive flow cytometric method to test basophil activation influenced by homeopathic histamine dilutions. Forsch Komplementarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 2003 Dec;10(6):316-24. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 18 of 21 Treatment of animals In a blinded study where rats were treated for urinary infections results showed that rats treated with homeopathic remedies had clear reduction of bacterial colonies. Results were at least as clear as for treatment with antibiotics. Untreated rats had no changes in bacteria colonies, compared to a reduction to 33 % of original bacteria levels in rats treated with antibiotics, and 22 % and 39 % in rats treated with homeopathic remedies (Phosphorus and self-nosode). Gonçalves et al. O uso da homeopatia no tratamento da infecção urinária em ratas. Anais do VIII SINAPIH; 20-22 May, 2004: p.25-26. A study of homeopathically protentised remedies showed a reduction in the need for repetition of insemination and reduced semen loss in treatment of fertilisation of female pigs. Riaucourt A. L´Exemple de la Filière Porcine. Annals of the “Entretiens Internationaux de Monaco 2002”, 5-6 October, 2002. In a study of homeopathically potentised remedies the incidence of haematomas was reduced by 30 % in turkeys during transportation. The study was randomised, placebo controlled and double blinded. Filliat C. Particularité de l´utilisation de l´homéopathie en production avicole. Annals of the “Entretiens Internationaux de Monaco 2002”, 5-6 October 2002. An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 19 of 21 RESEARCH WEBSITE ADDRESSES CAM base http://cambase.dmz.uni-wh.de/opencam/index_en.html HomBRex Database (Carstens stiftung) http://www.carstens-stiftung.de/hombrex/index.php Pubmed (National Library of Medicine) www.pubmed.com British Medical Journal http://bmj.bmjjournals.com (search for 'homeopathy') New Scientist www.newscientist.com (search for 'homeopathy') Healthworld Online (Medline, Medical Research & Document Delivery) www4.infotrieve.com/newmedline/summary.asp Biomail www.biomail.org This site offers free regular updates by e-mail. Hosted by Medical Informatics Department at State University of New York, Stony Brook University Hospital and Medical Centre. An evidence-based resource about Complementary and Alternative Medicine www.cam.org.nz Funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Health. Annals of Internal Medicine www.annals.org/cgi/search?fulltext=homeopathy University of York www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/ehc73.pdf Biomed Central (homeopathy review) www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/1/12 British Homeopathic Library www.hom-inform.org The Research Council for Complementary Medicine www.rccm.org.uk Groupe International de Recherche sur l'Infinitésimal www.giriweb.com National Centre for Homeopathy www.homeopathic.org/research.htm Homeopathic Educational Services www.homeopathic.com/articles/research/index.php Homeopathy (the journal) www.harcourt-international.com/journals/homp Boiron www.boiron.com/en/htm/04-politique/clinique.htm Official Indian research centre www.ccrhindia.org Carstens stiftung (Germany) http://www.carstens-stiftung.de/eng/index.html (English pages) ISI Web of Knowledge (resembles PubMed but includes more areas) http://isi3.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine (free articles) www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882 NAFKAM, Tromsø (Norway) (research info will be included) http://uit.no/nafkam/omnafkam Vifab (Denmark) www.vifab.dk Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients publishes a print alternative medicine magazine. www.townsendletter.com An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 20 of 21 Comments and corrections to the ENHR report on ’An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys’ March 2007 Comments ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ Corrections ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ Name: ___________________________________________________________ Address: _________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ Telephone number: ____________________________ Fax Number: ______________________________ Email address: ____________________________________________________ Please return to: European Network for Homeopathy Researchers (ENHR) Kate Chatfield Petter Viksveen E-mail: kchatfield@uclan.ac.uk E-mail: homeopat@email.com An Overview of Positive Homeopathy Research and Surveys, ENHR, March 2007 Page 21 of 21

How Does Homeopathy Work?

2008-09-16T22:06:00.000+08:00

How Does Homeopathy Work?

This page will tell you about Homeopathy.

Select a topic, or scroll through.
* What is Homeopathy?
* Selecting A Remedy
* Potency
* Taking A Remedy
* How Do I Know If Its Working?
* Homeopathy and Vaccinations
* So, is Homeopathy Just For Runny Noses?

What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a method of treatment that supports the body's own healing mechanism. It 's based on the law of similars "like cures like". A homeopathic remedy is an extremely pure, natural substance that has been diluted many times. In large quantities these subtances would cause the same symptoms the patient is trying to cure. In small, pure, diluted doses, it is not only safe and free from side effects, but it will trigger the body to heal itself. Example: Allium cepa is a remedy that is used for watery eyes and runny nose, it is created from red onion. If you've cut open a red onion you'll notice the same symptoms. When the body creates a similar "symptom picture" to Allium cepa and you take a dose of Allium cepa, it activates the body to go about the process of stopping watery eyes and a runny nose.

Homeopathic remedies are regulated and manufactured under strict quality controls by the United States Food and Drug Administration-FDA. Homeopathic remedies come in several forms tablets, powders, liquids and ointments. Tablets are the most common and popular. Tablets are sugar pills with the liquid remedy infused. They are taken sublingually (dissolved under the tongue).
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What is the Difference Between
Homeopathy and a Vaccination?

A vaccination infects the person with the actual disease. This is why some people may get sick from the vaccination. Homeopathy on the other hand uses a remedy that will produce similar symptoms to the disease. In fact homeopathic remedies can be very useful to offset negative reactions to vaccinations.
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How Do I Select A Remedy?

The important part of selecting the correct remedy is to 'match' the symptom picture of the remedy as closely to your own symptoms. Symptom pictures, or descriptions of symptoms take into account the condition of the whole person, not just one symptom. If two remedies seem to be very close and hard to decide between, pick the one that best matches your most annoying symptom.
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Potency

Homeopathic remedies are classified into three levels of potencies. X,C and M refer to 10, 100 and 1,000 in terms of the amount of dilution. The confusing and amazing aspect of Homeopathy is that the more a tincture is diluted, the more potent it becomes. So, while a C is more dilute than an X, the C is more potent. The M classification is very potent and is usually prescribed by Homeopathic physicians.

Homeopathic remedies begin with part of the original substance dissolved in alcohol, called the mother tincture. The mother tincture is then diluted many times. After each dilution the solution is shaken or "succussed", this shaking activates the remedy. The solution is then made into pills, powders, tinctures or creams. A 1X potency is created by mixing 1 part of the mother tincture and 9 parts alcohol or distilled water. In each successive number (increasing the potency 2X, 3X, 6X ), 1 part is taken from the previous potency and diluted according to the new potency.
Example: A 3X remedy (10x10x10=1000) has one part of the 2X remedy to 999 parts of alcohol or distilled water.

What does this mean to you when you are trying to select the remedy and potency?
1) The higher the potency (30th potency) the more confident you need to be that you have selected the correct remedy.
2) Use the lower potency (6th potency) when you are uncertain of the remedy.
3) Higher potencies take less doses. Lower potencies take more doses.
4) A general rule is double the C potency number to get the equivalent X potency.
15C = 30X
6C = 12X
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How Do I Take A Homeopathic Remedy?

The remedies should be kept in cool, dark place. Be careful not to touch the tablets when taking them, pour the tablets into the cap and then into your mouth. Allowing them to dissolve under your tongue. Always follow the recommend dosage on the packaging.

There are just few guidelines to consider when using Homeopathy. Certain foods, substances or odors are thought to interfere, or antidote the action of the remedy. Garlic, onions and caffeine should be avoided. The use or smell of strong perfumes, eucalyptus, menthol or anything minty, (baking soda can be a good alternative for toothpaste). Also avoid eating anything 15 minutes before or after taking a remedy.

These are only guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Some people feel that these things greatly interfere with the remedy, others do not. It is just a matter of finding out how sensitive you are.

Typically only one remedy is taken at a time. Although when you go to the store to purchase a remedy you will undoubtedly see combinations of remedies, packaged to treat a sore throat, or flu. Here again, there seems to be two schools of thought on the subject, and again it is up to you to decide what works best for you.

Homeopathic remedies can be found in most health food stores, and are starting to be carried in regular pharmacies. You can also get them through mail order.
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How Do I Know if its Working?

There are several ways the body reacts to homeopathy.

1) Physical symptoms get a little worse, but the mental state improves. Later the physical symptoms improve.

2) Most common reaction is improvement of mental and physical symptoms. Often the improvement is rapid, 20-45min..

3) The patient starts to feel better, then progress seems to level off or decline. If the symptoms are still the same then take another dose of the same remedy.

4) The patient starts to feel better, then progress seems to level off or decline. If the symptoms have changed since the initial remedy, select a new remedy.

5) The patient does not improve, feels worse or the physical symptoms improve but the mental state is worse. These reactions could signal a few things. The incorrect remedy was selected initially. The illness is due more to a constitutional imbalance. Depending on the seriousness of the condition; try selecting a remedy again, or see a doctor.

The rule of thumb is if there is improvement the patient should be left alone. While Homeopathy is safe, over-prescribing can be a problem, as it can confuse the symptom picture. We tend to think; if a little is good - more is better. With Homeopathy a little goes a long way. Be patient, and watch the symptoms.
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So Is Homeopathy Just For Runny Noses?

Homeopathy can be used to treat not just acute illness, but it can also be used to strengthen and support the immune system by means of constitutional remedies. A constitutional remedy is one that works on a deep cellular level to bring the body and emotions back into state of health and balance. By doing so it makes the whole system more resistant to disease. To find your constitutional remedy you will need to see a trained Homeopathic Physician. They will ask you many of questions, some may seem irrelevant, like what kinds of foods do you crave, or if you prefer the mountains or the seashore. And don't be surprised if you are given a single dose. Constitutional remedies are deep and long acting. Many people find that it is useful to get a "constitutional tune-up" once a year or at the change of the seasons.
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Great article about Acapuncture

2008-09-11T15:22:00.001+08:00

NeuroLogica Blog » Why I Am Skeptical of Acupuncture
Acupuncture is the practice of placing very thin needles through the skin in specific locations of the body for the purpose of healing and relief of symptoms. This practice is several thousand years old and is part of Traditional Chinese Medicine. As practiced today it is often combined with other interventions, such as sending a small current of electricity through the needles or burning herbs on the acupuncture points (a practice called moxibustion).

Acupuncture has recently been transplanted to the West, riding the wave of tolerance for unscientific treatment practices marketed as “complementary and alternative medicine.” While advocates have been successful at pushing acupuncture into the culture, the scientific medical community has still not accepted the practice as a legitimate scientific practice. I count myself among those extremely skeptical of acupuncture. I outline here the reasons for my continued skepticism.

1) Acupuncture is a pre-scientific superstition

Proponents often cite acupuncture’s ancient heritage as a virtue, but I see it as a vice. Acupuncture was developed in a pre-scientific culture, before anything significant was understand about biology, the normal functioning of the human body, or disease pathology. The healing practices of the time were part of what is called philosophy-based medicine, to be distinguished from modern science-based medicine. Philosophy-based systems began with a set of ideas about health and illness and based their treatments on those ideas. The underlying assumptions and the practices derived from them were never subjected to controlled observation or anything that can reasonably be called a scientific process.

An example from Western culture of philosophy-based medicine was the humoral theory - the notion that health was the result of the four bodily humors being in proper balance while illness reflected one or more humors being out of balance. Treatments therefore sought to increase or decrease one or more of the humors (such as the practice of blood-letting) to re-establish balance. The humoral theory survived for several thousand years in Western societies, perpetuated by culture and the power of deception inherent in anecdotal evidence.

Acupuncture is based upon the Eastern philosophy of chi (also spelled qi), which is their name for the supposed life force or vital energy that animates living things. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) chi flows through pathways in the body known as meridians. Illness results from the flow of chi through the meridians being blocked, or by the two types of chi (yin and yang) being out of balance. Acupuncture is the practice of placing thin needles at acupuncture points, which are said to coincide with points at which meridians cross, to improve the flow and restore the balance of chi.

There is no more reason to believe in the reality of chi than there is in the four humors, or in the effectiveness of acupuncture than the effectiveness of blood letting.

2) Acupuncture lacks a plausible mechanism

Centuries of advancement in our understanding of biology has made the notion of life energy unnecessary. Further, no one has been able to detect life energy or formulate a scientifically coherent theory as to what life energy is, where it comes from, and how it interacts with matter or other forms of energy. Withn science, the vitalists lost the debate over a century ago.Without chi, there is no underlying basis for acupuncture as a medical intervention.

Recent attention given to acupuncture has attempted to bring it into the scientific fold by hypothesizing physical mechanisms for its alleged effects. For example, some proponents argue that the needles may stimulate the release of pain-killing natural chemicals, or relax tense muscles, or inhibit the conduction of pain through counter-irritation.

These potential mechanisms, while more plausible than the non-existent chi, remain speculative. Further, they would only explain a very non-specific effect of acupuncture (no better than rubbing your elbow after accidentally banging it against something hard). They might account for a temporary mild reduction in pain. Such mechanisms could not account for any of the medical claims made for acupuncture, or the alleged existence of acupuncture points.

Further, it is misleading to say that such mechanisms could explain “acupuncture.” Acupuncture is the needling of acupuncture points to affect the flow and balance of chi. Using needles to mechanically produce a temporary local counter-irritation effect is not acupuncture - even though it may be an incidental consequence of this practice and may have contributed to its perceived effectiveness.

3) Claims for efficacy are often based upon a bait-and-switch deception.

The most common example of the “bait-and-switch” for acupuncture are studies that examined the effects on pain of electrical stimulation through acupuncture needles. This is not acupuncture - it is transcutaneous electrical stimulation (TENS), which is an accepted treatment for chronic pain, masquerading as acupuncture.

This is not a quibble. Science requires unambiguous definition of terms and concepts. If acupuncture is said to be something scientifically then it must have some specific and unique characteristics. In medicine that means it should have a specific mechanism of action - and it is that mechanism that we would call acupuncture. Electrical stimulation is no more acupuncture than if I injected morphine through a hollow acupuncture needle and then claimed that any resulting pain relief was due to “acupuncture.”

Further, during a typical acupuncture treatment there are many other incidental effects that may occur. The atmosphere is often relaxing, and practitioners typically will palpate the “acupuncture points” prior to inserting the needles, for example. Practitioners also provide their kind attention, which has a positive psychological therapeutic value. There are therefore many nonspecific subjective effects that could lead to clients feeling better, making the actual insertion of needles an unnecessary component.

Reports of acupuncture anaesthesia are also misleading. Independent investigation shows that patients having surgery under anaesthesia (dramatic reports of which are largely credited with acupuncture’s popularity in the West) reveal that patients were receiving morphine in the IV fluid. Other reports indicate that patient were experiencing great pain, but were simply instructed to remain quiet by the surgeon (a product of Eastern culture). There are no verified reports of acupuncture serving as effective anesthesia during surgery.

4) Clinical trials show that acupuncture does not work

The previous points are all reasons to be highly skeptical of the claims made for acupuncture, but they are all also trumped by the ultimate consideration - the direct scientific evidence. There is a surprisingly large published literature on the clinical effects of acupuncture. Most people are equally surprised to learn that the literature is essentially negative - probably because the press cherry picks apparently positive studies and re-prints without investigation the press releases of acupuncture proponents.

It is important to evaluate the literature as a whole to see what pattern emerges. The pattern that does emerge is most consistent with a null effect - that acupuncture does not work.

Controlled clinical trials of actual acupuncture (uncontrolled trials should only be considered preliminary and are never definitive) typically have three arms: a control group with no intervention or standard treatment, a sham-acupuncture group (needles are placed but in the “wrong” locations or not deep enough), and a real acupuncture group. Most of such trials, for any intervention including pain, nausea, addiction, and others, show no difference between the sham-acupuncture group and the acupuncture group. They typically do show improved outcome in both acupuncture groups over the no-intervention group, but this is typical of all clinical trials and is clearly due to placebo-type effects. Such comparisons should be considered unblinded because patients know if they were getting acupuncture (sham or real).

The lack of any advantage of real over sham acupuncture means that it does not matter where the needles are placed. This is completely consistent with the hypothesis that any perceived benefits from acupuncture are non-specific effects from the process of getting the treatment, and not due to any alleged specific effects of acupuncture. In other words, there is no evidence that acupuncture is manipulating chi or anything else, that the meridians have any basis in reality, or that the specific process of acupuncture makes any difference.

More recent trials have attempted to improve the blinded control of such trials by using acupuncture needles that are contained in an opaque sheath. The acupuncturist depresses a plunger, and neither they nor the patient knows if the needle is actually inserted. The pressure from the sheath itself would conceal any sensation from the needle going in. So far, such studies show no difference between those who received needle insertion and those who did not - supporting the conclusion that acupuncture has no detectable specific health effect.

Taken as a whole, the pattern of the acupuncture literature follows one with which scientists are very familiar: the more tightly controlled the study the smaller the effect, and the best controlled trials are negative. This pattern is highly predictive of a null-effect - that there is no actual effect from acupuncture.

Criticism of an Acapuncture trial

2008-09-11T15:19:00.000+08:00

Respectful Insolence: The largest "randomized" acupuncture study ever done: Why did they even bother?

Believe it or not, there was one area of so-called "alternative" medicine that I used to be a lot less skeptical about than I am now. Homeopathy, I always realized to be a load of pseudoscientific magical thinking. Ditto reiki, therapeutic touch, and other forms of "energy healing." It didn't take an extensive review of the literature to figure that out, although I did ultimately end up doing fairly extensive literature reviews anyway. Then, the more I looked into the hodge-podge of "healing" modalities whose basis is not science but rather prescientific and often mystical thought, the less impressed I was.

Even so, there was always one modality that I gave a bit of a pass to. There was one modality that, or so I thought, might actually have something to it. There was one modality that seemed to have a bit of suggestive evidence that it might do something more than a placebo. I'm referring to acupuncture. No, I never bought all the mystical mumbo-jumbo about how sticking needles into "meridians" somehow alters or "unblocks" the flow of a mysterious "life force" known as qi that is undetectable by science. I did wonder if perhaps it worked as a counterirritant or by releasing endorphins.

Then I actually started paying attention to the scientific literature regarding acupuncture, including literature like this and this. The more I read, the more I realized something. I realized that there was far less to acupuncture than I had previously thought, and, even with my previous openness to it, I hadn't thought all that much about it anyway. What I had thought about it was that it might have a very mild beneficial effect. What I know now is that acupuncture is almost certainly no more than an elaborate placebo. What I know now is that virtually every study of acupuncture claiming to show a positive effect has serious methodological flaws and that the better-designed the study the less likely there is to be an effect. What I now know is that any study without a true "sham" acupuncture arm is worthless, and that well-designed studies show "sham" acupuncture to be no different than "real" acupuncture; i.e., no different than placebo.

And now comes yet another in a long line of studies that is consistent with just that, and, worse, it's billed as (and probably is) the "largest randomized study of acupuncture ever done." Too bad it depends on what you mean by "randomized." Too bad the press coverage misses the point:

For the current study, published in the journal Cephalalgia, German researchers followed more than 15,000 adults with chronic headaches; all had been suffering from either migraine or tension-type headaches at least twice a month for 1 year or more.

Of these patients, nearly 3,200 agreed to be randomly assigned to either have acupuncture added to their regular therapy or to stay with their usual care alone. The rest of the patients began on acupuncture treatment.

All of the acupuncture patients received up to 15 sessions over 3 months, and all study patients were reassessed after 6 months.

In the end, the study found, acupuncture patients reported greater pain improvements than those who stayed with their usual care only. At the outset, they reported an average of 8.4 headache days over 3 months; that dropped to 4.7 by the study's end.

Take a minute here. If you're a regular reader of this blog, I'm betting that you can pick out the huge methodological flaw in this study from just the press report alone. Do you have it yet? Don't worry, I'll get to it very soon. However, I don't like to rely on just the news coverage of such a study. Whenever possible, I always like to go to the original study, and, as I usually do, I did just that. Here's the abstract:

We aimed to investigate the effectiveness of acupuncture in addition to routine care in patients with primary headache (> 12 months, two or more headaches/month) compared with treatment with routine care alone and whether the effects of acupuncture differ in randomized and non-randomized patients. In a randomized controlled trial plus non-randomized cohort, patients with headache were allocated to receive up to 15 acupuncture sessions over 3 months or to a control group receiving no acupuncture during the first 3 months. Patients who did not consent to randomization received acupuncture treatment immediately. All subjects were allowed usual medical care in addition to study treatment. Number of days with headache, intensity of pain and health-related quality of life (SF-36) were assessed at baseline, and after 3 and 6 months using standardized questionnaires. Of 15 056 headache patients (mean age 44.1 ± 12.8 years, 77% female), 1613 were randomized to acupuncture and 1569 to control, and 11 874 included in the non-randomized acupuncture group. At 3 months, the number of days with headache decreased from 8.4 ± 7.2 (estimated mean ±s.e.) to 4.7 ± 5.6 in the acupuncture group and from 8.1 ± 6.8 to 7.5 ± 6.3 in the control group (P < 0.001). Similarly, intensity of pain and quality of life improvements were more pronounced in the acupuncture vs. control group (P < 0.001). Treatment success was maintained through 6 months. The outcome changes in non-randomized patients were similar to those in randomized patients. Acupuncture plus routine care in patients with headache was associated with marked clinical improvements compared with routine care alone.

Got it yet?

I'm sure that most of you do; so I'll just move on. This study has three design flaws so glaring that I almost don't even care what it shows because the flaws are so significant that they scuttled the study before it even started. Here they are:

1. The study is not only not double-blind, it's not even blinded in any way. Both the patients and the health care practitioners know who is receiving what therapy. That alone makes its result entirely explainable by placebo effects.
2. There isn't even an attempt at a sham acupuncture group. Remember my previous posts on the importance of sham acupuncture and how sham acupuncture is indistinguishable from "real" acupuncture.
3. The "randomization" isn't even really a randomization. Of 15,056 patients with a complaint of headache, only 3,404 accepted randomization to control or acupuncture. Normally a clinical investigator, when faced with this situation, studies only the patients who agreed to be randomized. Not these intrepid woo-mavens! They included the remaining 11,652 patients anyway. Actually, they included 11,874 nonrandomized patients.

There are a number of other flaws, but, really, they pale in significance to the three above and are hardly worth mentioning except in passing. For example, there were significant differences between the randomized and nonrandomized groups, including higher pain intensity and a shorter duration of chronic headaches, making them prime candidates to be prone to regression to the mean. The study is also suspect because it lumps together all headaches, rather than separating out the migraine headaches, which have a different physiological mechanism behind them than run-of-the-mill headaches. Another problem was that the authors relied on questionnaires, rather than a pain diary. Because a questionnaire relies on patient memory, rather than the patient writing down an incident as it happens, it's prone to recall bias. There are also numerous other nits to pick, but none of them even come close to the three flaws listed above.

Regarding the failure to use a sham acupuncture group or to blind, it makes me wonder if all the studies coming out showing that sham acupuncture and "real" acupuncture are indistinguishable are starting to get to acupuncture advocates to the point where they really aren't even trying anymore. After all, an unblinded study is almost guaranteed to produce an effect, but an investigator has no way of knowing whether that effect is greater than placebo if there is no valid placebo group. True, the authors did all sorts of fancy statistics and handwaving to try to take the reader's mind off of this fundamental fatal flaw, but none of that changes anything.

Reading the discussion is very instructive, as it demonstrates very well the torturing of language and logic that is used by advocates of "alternative" medicine. While they admit flat out that this was an unblinded study and that , the excuse used was that this was a "pragmatic" study designed "chosen to reflect general medical practice." Yes, that's a great excuse not to do the necessary placebo/sham acupuncture control that would make the results of this study interpretable. It's also a lovely excuse to allow patients in essence to self-select for acupuncture by refusing randomization, thus making the likelihood of a placebo effect even greater--except that there's no control that allow us to know if it's just a placebo effect or not. Here's part of what they argue:

Although differences with respect to both baseline characteristics and treatment outcomes between randomized and non-randomized patients were small in absolute numbers, our findings indicate that randomization was associated with some selection effects. Therefore, the use of study designs that also include non-randomized patients appears to be desirable.

It is of note, however, that treatment benefits were similar in the randomized and nonrandomized acupuncture groups after adjusting for baseline differences. This suggests that the results of randomized trials can be representative of routine medical care situations, at least in large pragmatic studies.

No, it suggests that the placebo effect was operative in both the randomized patients and the patients who refused to be randomized. The use of study designs that include non-randomized patients is only "desirable" if you want to maximize the chances of a seemingly positive result. Bravo, though, to the study authors for having the chutzpah to try to change this study's most glaring weakness into a strength. It was a nice try, but it won't fly.

What's truly depressing is the editorial by Dr. H-C Diener of the University Hospital Essen in Germany, where he actually makes this argument:

Despite the fact that I have major design issues with the study, my view is that studies like this have to be published in high ranked journals to promote discussion on trial design in non-drug trials

Dr. Diener actually lists two of the same flaws that I did, namely the unblinded nature of the study and the lack of adequate "sham" acupuncture controls. In spite of this, he still argues that this article should be published in high ranked journals "to promote discussion"? Funny, but I always thought that high ranked journals are high ranked because they post the most scientifically sound and medically interesting articles. Think New England Journal of Medicine. I always thought the reason for such journals to publish an article is because it is scientifically sound and studies a clinically important and/or interesting question. As a reason to publish such an article, "to promote discussion" is about as far down on the list of reasons as "because the author has nice hair."

The bottom line is that this study is yet another of a long line of studies of "complementary and alternative" medicine that are entirely consistent with the placebo effect. Worse, it didn't even really try to distinguish between a treatment effect and placebo effect. Maybe that's the point. Whatever the point was, what I do know is that if I were a German citizen, I'd be mightily pissed off that so much money was wasted on this study. I'd also wonder why it was a consortium of insurance companies who funded the study. Maybe I was wrong about insurance companies funding woo. Maybe it is cheaper in the long run for them to pay for CAM than actual scientific medicine that's more than just a highly elaborate placebo.

REFERENCES:

1. Jena, S., Witt, C., Brinkhaus, B., Wegscheider, K., Willich, S. (2008). Acupuncture in patients with headache. Cephalalgia, 28(9), 969-979. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2982.2008.01640.x

2. (2008). Acupuncture for the treatment of headaches: more than sticking needles into humans?. Cephalalgia, 28(9), 911-913. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2982.2008.01650.x

A great article about Evidence and Bias

2008-09-11T15:15:00.000+08:00

NeuroLogica Blog » An Acupuncture Debate

An Acupuncture Debate
Published by Steven Novella under Science and Medicine
Comments: 15

Recently I was invited to write my views on acupuncture for a website called Opposing Views. I pre-published (with permission) my side of the debate on “Does Acupuncture Work” here at NeuroLogica. Taking the pro-acupuncture side is Bill Reddy - his profile states that he is “currently serving on the Executive Committee of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.”

The format of the website allows for moderated comments, which are intended to allow for a written debate with the two sides. Here are my responses to the first round of arguments.

Bill Reddy wrote:

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1983 to develop a consensus on the use of Acupuncture to treat a number of common illnesses.

He then give a long list of medical conditions acupuncture is supposed to treat.

Bill Reddy asserts that the WHO and NCCAM in 1983 have reviewed the evidence and support acupuncture as safe and effective for a number of medical conditions, but this assertion is simply wrong. Bill does not provide a specific reference or any quotes.

One reason to doubt the claim is that the NCCAM did not exist in 1983. It began its existence as the Office of Alternative Medicine in 1993.

The WHO had this to say about acupuncture in 2002:

“Since the methodology of clinical research on acupuncture is still under debate, it is very difficult to evaluate acupuncture practice by any generally accepted measure.”

and

“Only national health authorities can determine the diseases, symptoms and conditions for which acupuncture treatment can be recommended.”

Finally, reviews of the acupuncture literature performed by scientists and academics, rather than political organizations, have consistently found that there is no compelling evidence that acupuncture is effective for any condition.

Even politically motivated and biased panels, when constrained by the scientific evidence, must admit that the evidence does not support any specific effect from acupuncture. The 1997 NIH consensus conference on acupuncture was packed with acupuncture proponents and did not contain any skeptics or scientists who had found negative results. Despite this obvious bias the panel had to concede that the best controlled trials showed no difference between “sham” acupuncture and “true” acupuncture for any indication, but then tried to spin these results by saying that well-controlled trials must therefore be unreliable.

Bill’s strategy is ultimately deceptive. He cites a 25 year old political assessment of acupuncture, then vaguely refers to later research. In fact later better-designed trials of acupuncture have been essentially negative.

In his next point he writes:

As a former Aerospace Engineer who flight tested helicopters and performed cutting-edge research in the field of turbulent aerodynamics, I can honestly say that acupuncture is a thoroughly proven system of healthcare. Proving acupuncture efficacy is relatively easy - western medicine and modern science are having a difficult time understanding the underlying mechanisms as to how acupuncture works.

If you type in the key word “acupuncture” into the NIH national library of medicine “PubMed” database, it will return over 13,000 peer reviewed journal articles.

This argument shows very poor scientific reasoning. Arguments concerning mechanism of action and efficacy are mixed together in a confusing way. The lack of a plausible mechanism makes acupuncture very suspect, and raises the bar for an appropriate level of evidence before accepting acupuncture as a treatment. But the clinical evidence of acupuncture stands on its own – and is convincingly negative.

Bill Reddy gives us his anecdotal experience (combined with an argument from authority logical fallacy) and cherry-picked studies to support his claims for acupuncture effectiveness in fertility. However, systematic reviews of the evidence are negative. Most recently, this review of acupuncture for fertility rates following IVF was completely negative. (A systematic review and meta-analysis of acupuncture in in vitro fertilisation. BJOG. 2008 Sep;115(10):1203-13. Epub 2008 Jul 23.)

In response to this study, Paul Robin, the chairman of the Acupuncture Society, said:

“I’m really surprised by these findings. I’ve been treating people for 20 years and in my experience treatment does seem to improve their chances of becoming pregnant. This study has shown that there’s no proof that acupuncture can help - so that suggests that there should be lots more studies to examine the question. I’m convinced it can help.”

Robin shows the closed-mindedness of dedicated proponents. He is perplexed that the scientific evidence does not support his personal anecdotal experience, and concludes that therefore we need more evidence. Rather he should conclude that anecdotal experience is unreliable – something the scientific community has learned long ago.

Bill concludes with the argument that because there is a great deal of research going on there must be something to acupuncture, but this is a flawed argument ad populi. The research reflects cultural interest and belief, not necessarily scientific validity. If you actually review that research, as many have, it is clearly negative.

Bill Reddy next launches into the tired argument that scientific medicine is dangerous and acupuncture is at least safe, writing:

In a Japanese survey of 55,291 acupuncture treatments given over five years by 73 acupuncturists, 99.8% of them were performed with no significant minor adverse effects and zero major adverse incidents (Hitoshi Yamashita, Bac, Hiroshi Tsukayama, BA, Yasuo Tanno, MD, PhD. Kazushi Nishijo, PhD, JAMA).

According to wikipedia “A recent study by Healthgrades found that an average of 195,000 hospital deaths in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 in the U.S. were due to potentially preventable medical errors.

This argument is yet another logical fallacy – a non sequitur. The state of modern science-based medicine says nothing about the purported mechanisms and effectiveness of acupuncture. You could use the same line of argument to falsely support any medical claim. The data cited, which is now a standard argument among proponents of dubious health claims, are also highly misleading. They only consider the risk of medical intervention, not the benefit. A proper assessment of any intervention should include risk vs benefit. This is the standard calculation of science-based medicine, and treatments are only considered justified if they can demonstrate benefit in excess of risk. Focusing only on risk is designed to create a misleading impression.Direct risk is generally a function of the invasiveness of any intervention. No one doubts the fact that less invasive interventions are less directly risky. But if only risk were considered then doing nothing would always be the best option – and it clearly isn’t. Acupuncture is certainly closer to doing nothing than many legitimate medical interventions, but even the small risk of acupuncture is not justified until there is compelling evidence of benefit – and there isn’t.

Further, indirect risk must also be considered. While direct harm from acupuncture is rare (but does occur) there is the potential for tremendous indirect harm, including the delay in proper medical assessment and treatment.

Bill concludes with a classic argument ad populi:

If you had a severe case of tennis elbow, and you went to see an oriental medicine practitioner and he stuck needles in you and you didn’t get better, would you ever go back to see him again? Probably not.

1.3 billion Chinese are hard to argue with. The system of healing would not last over 5000 years if it weren’t effective.

This is nothing more than an argument ad populi and appeal to anecdotal evidence. As I have already argued, blood letting survived for over 2,000 years as the standard accepted practice. The placebo effect is well documented, as well as a variety of psychological effects, such as confirmation bias. There are also statistical effects, such as regression to the mean (the tendency for any ailment to get better if one seeks treatment during an exacerbation). All of these combine to create the illusion that ineffective treatments have some effect.

The scientific method as applied to medicine evolved to address this potential for self-deception. Appealing to anecdotes is a decidedly unscientific approach to any medical question, and defies the well-documented history of medicine – which gives countless examples of treatments that were believed to work but failed to show any effect when properly studied.

Bill concludes with a discussion of the limitations of acupuncture:

Musculoskeletal pain, internal conditions, dermatological and neurological conditions all respond favorably to acupuncture. Where the modality falls short is in structural problems such as spinal stenosis (gradual narrowing of the spinal canal leading to nerve compression). All the needles in the world won’t remove the built-up calcifications to relieve the pressure on a nerve root.

I certainly agree with this point - acupuncture does not treat any anatomical or mechanical medical problem. However, this does not imply that it does treat non-mechanical problems, nor does it render any of the other arguments put forth for acupuncture more reasonable.

I would also point out that this is a common feature of dubious medical interventions - they do not treat anything which is objectively demonstrable. They thrive in the realm of subjective symptoms where anecdotes and placebo effects are strong and carefully controlled trials more difficult. They tend to thrive where the data is poor. Eventually, when well-controlled data is obtained, any alleged effects vanish.

Conclusion

I only gave representative quotes from Bill Reddy’s arguments here, not wanting to reprint the entire debate. Go to Oppossing Views to take a look at the full debate and even leave a comment if you wish.

Mediums and European Law

2008-09-11T15:04:00.001+08:00

Psychic crackdown on the cards - new laws for mediums and tarot readers | UK news | The Observer

Psychic crackdown on the cards
Mediums are fighting new EU rules designed to protect the public from dodgy traders, fearing that honest spiritualists could be targeted

* Caroline Davies
* The Observer,
* Sunday April 6 2008
* Article history

The evocative question 'Is there anybody there?' conjures up images of mediums summoning spirits in a darkened room. But now psychics must add a few riders before they invoke the voices of the dead, thanks to new consumer laws due to come into force. Breathless audiences are now likely to be asked: 'Is there anybody here... who is vulnerable, of nervous disposition, or likely to sue?'

Indeed, a whole list of disclaimers must be added to the spiritualists' spiel if they are to avoid an avalanche of writs following the repeal next month of the Fraudulent Mediums Act, to be replaced by the new Consumer Protection Regulations. Promises to raise the dead, secure good fortune or heal through the laying on of hands are all at risk of legal action from disgruntled customers. Spiritualists say they will be forced to issue disclaimers, such as 'this is a scientific experiment, the results of which cannot be guaranteed'. They claim the new regulations will leave them open to malicious civil action by sceptics.

The problem is that very little in the multi-million-pound psychic industry in Britain is for free, and anyone charging or accepting 'gifts' in exchange for a service is bound by the new regulations. There are charges for seances, Tarot, psychic readings and clairvoyance. Spiritualist church service-goers - and there are more than 300 spiritualist churches in Britain - are charged or asked for donations. Psychic mailings - letters promising spiritualist services in exchange for a cheque - are estimated to have cost Britons £40m in 2006-07, according to Office of Fair Trading research. Psychic services via telephone, online and satellite TV keep the tills ringing further.

For the past half-century, 'genuine' mediums have been protected by the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, under which prosecutors had to prove fraud and dishonest intent to secure a criminal conviction, which was difficult. There have been fewer than 10 convictions in the past 20 years. With that protection gone, there will now be nothing between the medium and the trading standards officer - and no need to prove fraud. Instead it will be up to the trader, in this case the medium, to prove they did not mislead, coerce or take advantage of any 'vulnerable' consumers.

Carole McEntee-Taylor, a spiritualist healer in Essex, said having to stand up and describe the invoking of spirits as an 'experiment' was forcing spiritualists to 'lie and deny our beliefs'. She added: 'No other religion has to do that. And how can you tell if someone is vulnerable? You would have to ask them if they felt vulnerable, or had mental health issues, or were of a nervous disposition.'

With her husband, David, a spiritualist minister, she has set up the Spiritualist Workers' Association, to help regulate the industry and offer guidance on the law. They will be presenting a petition to 10 Downing Street on 18 April. Their website warns: 'The changes in the legislation are a minefield... given Britain's litigation culture. We have to fight it. If not, we will go back to the Dark Ages, where we will be persecuted and prosecuted.'

The Fraudulent Mediums Act replaced the 1735 Witchcraft Act. The government is set to repeal it and many other laws alongside the introduction of the Consumer Protection Regulations. If they are approved by Parliament, as is likely - there are debates in the Lords on 23 April and in the Commons on 6 May - the regulations will come into force on 26 May. They will ban 31 types of unfair sales practice outright, including bogus closing-down sales, prize-draw scams and aggressive doorstep selling, and will for the first time establish a catch-all duty not to trade unfairly, closing loopholes that rogue traders have been able to exploit. But spiritualists say the measures fail to take account of their religion.

'It is taking a religion, a way of life, and making it a commercial transaction,' said David McEntee-Taylor. 'If we hold a service in a village hall, we have to charge or ask for a donation to cover the cost of hiring the hall. There are bad mediums out there, and we would like to regulate them. But this is unfair on genuine spiritualists. Some people are very nervous of entrapment.'

Emma-Louise Rhodes, a researcher for BadPsychics, which seeks to expose malpractice, said: 'Hopefully, the new regulations will bring to justice those who have cruelly sought to exploit the bereaved for personal financial gain.'

A legal specialist said: 'Now there is no difference between a psychic and a double-glazing salesman in law.'

Scientology on Trial

2008-09-09T18:33:00.001+08:00

Church of Scientology faces fraud trial in France | World news | The Guardian

* News
* World news
* France

Church of Scientology faces fraud trial in France

* Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday September 9 2008
* Article history

A French judge has ordered two branches of the Church of Scientology and seven of its leaders to stand trial for fraud, in the latest of a series of French legal battles against the organisation promoted by celebrities such as Tom Cruise.

Scientology, which offers self-improvement based on the writings of the science-fiction author L Ron Hubbard, is seen as controversial in France's secular republic. Although Scientology is registered as a religion in the US, French authorities treat it as a sect.

The latest case centres on a complaint made in 1998 by a 33-year-old woman who said she was approached by a group of people outside a Paris metro station who offered her a free personality test and a later meeting to interpret the results. Over the following months, she said she paid 140,000 francs (£17,000) to the Scientologists for courses, books, medication, and "purification packs".

Judge Jean-Christophe Hullin ruled that the Scientologists' operational centres in France, its "Celebrity Center" and its bookshop, along with seven church leaders should be tried for "organised fraud" and "illegally practising as pharmacists". He ignored the recommendation of the public prosecutor who had earlier said the case should be shelved.

The Church of Scientology denounced the case as "empty and concocted", and said the woman who filed the complaint had been reimbursed.

In 1995, the first French Church of Scientology association was dissolved for not paying taxes after it was refused special church status. The group claims to have thousands of French members, despite fraud convictions for officials in Lyon in 1997 and Marseille in 1999. In 2003, a Paris court fined the organisation for keeping personal information on its members.

Do All Languages have a common ancestor? Murray Gel Mann

2008-06-30T08:53:00.000+08:00

Another anti-evolution law in the United States - the disease is spreading!

2008-06-29T10:43:00.002+08:00

More insanity from the States.....yet again the nutters are trying to catch them early in schools and indoctrinate them in the madness of the Discovery Institute philosophy. The only real chance that they have of spreading this nonsensical irrationalist religious claptrap is if they try and stop people getting an education....so that's what they're trying to do.

Amazingly, the idea that Intelligent Design is actually a theory (rather than an embarassing joke) is starting to drip into the public consciousness, and it is getting frightening.

Here in HK, much of the heirarchy at HK University comes from the fundamentalist christian diaspora and despite world renowned evolutionary biology departments working on H5N1, students do not leave school with any understanding of evolution and consequently very few local students enter the department from the local school system.

I teach students who actually think there is evidence for ID and that the evidence for evolution is debatable!!!! These are nice students who have adults around them telling them lies, afraid that the whole basis for their belief system will crumble around them if they learn about one of the most clearly understood theories. This is almost criminal....certainly an intellectual crime. People actually exist who think we didn't evolve from other life forms..that we're somwhow special. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

The recent worldwide Darwin's Evolution week celebrating his life had to be renamed in HK to Darwin's Legacy as the Evolution title was considered by the 'Government' to be too controversial!!!!

Louisiana passes first antievolution "academic freedom" law

Louisiana passes first antievolution "academic freedom" law

By John Timmer | Published: June 27, 2008 - 02:13PM CT

As we noted last month, a number of states have been considering laws that, under the guise of "academic freedom," single out evolution for special criticism. Most of them haven't made it out of the state legislatures, and one that did was promptly vetoed. But the last of these bills under consideration, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), was enacted by the signature of Governor Bobby Jindal yesterday. The bill would allow local school boards to approve supplemental classroom materials specifically for the critique of scientific theories, allowing poorly-informed board members to stick their communities with Dover-sized legal fees.
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The text of the LSEA suggests that it's intended to foster critical thinking, calling on the state Board of Education to "assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories." Unfortunately, it's remarkably selective in its suggestion of topics that need critical thinking, as it cites scientific subjects "including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Oddly, the last item on the list is not the subject of any scientific theory; the remainder are notable for being topics that are the focus of frequent political controversies rather than scientific ones.
The opposition

The bill has been opposed by every scientific society that has voiced a position on it, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS CEO Alan Leshner warned that the bill would "unleash an assault against scientific integrity, leaving students confused about science and unprepared to excel in a modern workforce."

Jindal, who was a biology major during his time at Brown University, even received a veto plea from his former genetics professor. "Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn't make sense," Professor Arthur Landy wrote. "I hope he [Jindal] doesn't do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana's doctors."
Louisiana

Lining up to promote the bill were a coalition of religious organizations and Seattle's pro-Intelligent Design think tank, the Discovery Institute. According to the Louisiana Science Coalition, Discovery fellows helped write the bill and arranged for testimony in its favor in the legislature. The bill itself plays directly into Discovery's strategy, freeing local schools to "use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner."

Discovery, conveniently, has made just such a supplemental text available. As we noted in our earlier analysis, Discovery hopes to use these bills as a way to push its own textbook into the classroom. Having now read the text of the book, it is clear that our earlier analysis was correct; the book badly misrepresents the scientific community's understanding of evolution in order to suggest that the basics of the theory are questioned by biologists. In doing so, it ignores many of the specific questions about evolution that are actively debated by scientists.

Courts in Pennsylvania and Georgia have both ruled that laws which single out evolution serve no secular purpose and are evidence of unconstitutional religious motivations. Those precedents, however, do not apply to Louisiana, and it's possible that the LSEA will either be ruled constitutional or remain in force for years before a court rejects it. That will leave the use of supplemental scientific material to be determined by local school boards in the intervening years and, if boards in Florida are viewed as evidence, they are likely to be spectacularly incapable of judging scientific issues.

As such, most observers are expecting the passage of the LSEA by the state to unleash a series of Dover-style cases, as various local boards attempt to discover the edges of what's constitutionally allowable. The AAAS' Leshner suggested that the bill's passage would "provoke an expensive, divisive legal fight." In vetoing similar legislation in Oklahoma, Governor Brad Henry suggested it would end up "subjecting them [school officials] to an explosion of costly and protracted litigation that would have to be defended at taxpayers' expense." In essence, Jindal is inviting local school boards to partake in that explosion without committing the state to paying the inevitable costs.

In the meantime, the students of the state will be subjected to an "anything goes" approach to science—if it looks scientific to a school board, it can appear in the classroom.

The HK Ark

2008-06-27T10:18:00.002+08:00

Biblical structure: Noah’s Ark

There’s a hulking, brown colossus looming over Tung Wan Beach on Ma Wan (Park Island). It’s biblical in proportion. Seriously.

In 2004, Andrew Yuen Man-Fai and Pastor Boaz Li Chi-Kwong of evangelical Christian media organisation Media Evangelism climbed Mt Ararat in eastern Turkey and found what they claimed were the remnants of Noah’s Ark. Excited and inspired by their discovery – which they documented on blurry video that was unfortunately corrupted by a “mysterious force” – they returned to Hong Kong determined to build a replica of the famous life-raft.

Four years later, they’ve done just that, with the help of Sun Hung Kai.

Built to scale on government-owned land at Ma Wan Park according to the dimensions mentioned in the Bible, the ark is one-and-a-half football fields long, 22.5 metres wide, and four storeys tall. It will house a museum to educate and enlighten the public, a 3D movie theatre, 200 hotel rooms, and several restaurants. In and around the edifice, there’ll also be both live and model animals, including, curiously, some two-headed turtles that, according to Yuen, exhibit the genius of God’s intelligent design.

Yuen also wants the Ark to spread a message of love and unity – after all, he reasons, we’re all in the same boat. “We have witnessed many crises on earth – not only global warming but also animals going extinct, as well as natural disasters like the tsunami,” he explains. “We want to remind people to love the earth and love life.”

The Ark is expected to open to the public by Easter 2009. There are also plans for a smaller, floating replica (estimated cost: up to $40 million) that will ferry passengers direct from Central to Ma Wan. So far the landed Ark has cost $10 million, which has been funded by a flood of donations from well-wishing Christians. Media Evangelism hopes to raise another $18 million.

Wikipedia Expeditions to the Ark

Science Cannot Provide all the Answers

2008-06-12T13:41:00.001+08:00

How to make decisions

2008-06-09T13:47:00.000+08:00

Bias - Some of our problems with Bias

2008-06-09T13:46:00.000+08:00

Presentation Information, Ideas, Sheets

2008-06-04T12:55:00.001+08:00

ToK Reason Scheme of Work

2008-06-04T00:22:00.001+08:00

ToK Perception Scheme of Work

2008-06-04T00:20:00.001+08:00

ToK Language Scheme of Work

2008-06-04T00:19:00.000+08:00

ToK Emotion Scheme of Work

2008-06-04T00:17:00.002+08:00

Whole ToK Syllabus and Resources

2008-06-04T00:15:00.000+08:00

Natural Science Scheme of Work

2008-06-03T21:27:00.001+08:00

Brain Gym

2008-04-09T21:48:00.007+08:00

Here's a lovely little idea from California discussed on BBC TV:

Follow this link on YouTube for the second part of Newsnight where Paxman interviews the company founder.

Read Bad-Science about it. A really wonderful discovery from Mr Goldacre.

Knocking on doors

2008-01-15T08:17:00.001+08:00

Newspeak Website

2008-01-11T11:42:00.000+08:00

Language as a way of Knowing 2

2008-01-09T11:29:00.000+08:00

Language as a way of Knowing

2008-01-09T11:26:00.000+08:00

Knowledge claims study

2007-12-20T19:26:00.000+08:00

The end of Homeopathy?

2007-12-20T19:25:00.000+08:00

False hand trick

2007-12-20T17:59:00.000+08:00

We've been trying to work out the best way of doing this for a while....
We finally hit on this arrangement with a cardigan or jacket to make it easier to trick your brain.

Peter had his real hand under the board, while a false arm was placed on top. Whatever was done to the false hand was done to his real hand underneath the board (with two paint brushes). After a short time the brain transfers the sensation to the fake hand making you believe that its your own hand. It is a very unusual experience - it can even make some people feel sick (the fake hand we used was a Halloween arm covered in blood). When Peter saw the fork hitting the fake hand he reacted as though his own hand had been stabbed.

This seems to work with about 2/3 of the people who do it and relies on the ability of your sight to overcome your proprioception. It illustrates the point that what we think of as our hand consists of a mental map which exists in the brain that is normally mapped to the real physical hand on the end of our arm (full of nerve endings, but with no brain to create the sensation). No-one really feels anything in their body - all the feeling is done in the brain.

Some people can get the same sensation with just a piece of wood in front of them. Imagine believing that the wood was your hand!

The same ideas can be illustrated with the phemomenon of phantom limbs. Brain Story from the BBC is a great series that has some good film of this.

This clip was filmed on a mobile hence the shakey video

Propoganda parody

2007-12-15T12:32:00.000+08:00

New Scientist - The Science of Love

2007-12-15T11:13:00.000+08:00

Science of Love - BBC Site

2007-12-14T14:55:00.000+08:00

The Science of Love

2007-12-14T14:51:00.000+08:00

Beyond Belief - In place of God

2007-12-06T22:32:00.000+08:00

Beyond belief: In place of God

20 November 2006
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
Michael Brooks
Helen Phillips

It had all the fervour of a revivalist meeting. True, there were no hallelujahs, gospel songs or swooning, but there was plenty of preaching, mostly to the converted, and much spontaneous applause for exhortations to follow the path of righteousness. And right there at the forefront of everyone's thoughts was God.

Yet this was no religious gathering - quite the opposite. Some of the leading practitioners of modern science, many of them vocal atheists, were gathered last week in La Jolla, California, for a symposium entitled "Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival" hosted by the Science Network, a science-promoting coalition of scientists and media professionals convening at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They were there to address three questions. Should science do away with religion? What would science put in religion's place? And can we be good without God?

First up to address the initial question was cosmologist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin. His answer was an unequivocal yes. "The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion," Weinberg told the congregation. "Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilisation."

Those uncompromising words won Weinberg a rapturous response. Yet not long afterwards he was being excoriated for not being tough enough on religion, and admitting he would miss it once it was gone. Religion was, Weinberg had said, like "a crazy old aunt" who tells lies and stirs up mischief. "She was beautiful once," he suggested. "She's been with us a long time. When she's gone we may miss her." Science, he admitted, could not offer the "big truths" that religion claims to provide; all it can manage is a set of little truths about the universe.

Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford would have none of it. Weinberg, he said, was being inexplicably conciliatory, "scraping the barrel" to have something nice to say about religion. "I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion," Dawkins told the assembly.

He was soon joined by Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who had been charged with providing an answer for the second question: if not God, then what? Science, she said, could do at least as well as religion. "If anyone has a replacement for God, then scientists do." Porco said. "At the heart of scientific inquiry is a spiritual quest, to come to know the natural world by understanding it... Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is about as meaningful and awe-inspiring as it gets."

Astronomers in particular, she suggested, regularly confront the big questions of wonder. "The answers to these questions have produced the greatest story ever told and there isn't a religion that can offer anything better." Religious people, she claimed, use God to feel connected to something grander than they are, and find meaning and purpose through that connection. So why not show them their place in the universe and give them a sense of connectedness to the cosmos? The answers to why we are here, if they exist at all, will be found in astronomy and evolution, she said.

A secular icon

Science provides an aesthetic view of the cosmos that could replace that provided by religion - a view that could even be celebrated by its own iconography, Porco added. Images of the natural world and cosmos, such as the Cassini photograph of Earth taken from beyond Saturn, Apollo 8's historic Earthrise or the Hubble Deep Field image, could offer a similar solace to religious artwork or icons.

The big challenge, according to Porco, will be dealing with awareness of our own mortality. The God-concept brings a sense of immortality, something science can't offer. Instead, she suggested highlighting the fact that our atoms came from stardust and would return to the cosmos - as mass or energy - after we die. "We should teach people to find comfort in that thought. We can find comfort in knowing that everyone who has ever lived on the Earth will some day adorn the heavens."

“We can find comfort in knowing that everyone who has ever lived on the Earth will some day adorn the heavens”

Like many of the others at the meeting, Porco was preaching to the choir, and there was no more animated or passionate preacher than Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Tyson spoke with an evangelist's zeal, and he had the heretics in his sights. Referring to a recent poll of US National Academy of Sciences members which showed 85 per cent do not believe in a personal God, he suggested that the remaining 15 per cent were a problem that needs to be addressed. "How come the number isn't zero?" he asked. "That should be the subject of everybody's investigation. That's something that we can't just sweep under the rug."

This single statistic, he said, gave the lie to claims that patiently creating a scientifically literate public would get rid of religion. "How can [the public] do better than the scientists themselves? That's unrealistic."

DeGrasse Tyson clearly found it hard to swallow the idea that a scientist could be satisfied by revelation rather than investigation. "I don't want the religious person in the lab telling me that God is responsible for what it is they cannot discover," he said. "It's like saying no one else will ever discover how something works."

For others, the idea that it is somehow unacceptable for scientists to maintain a religious belief was going too far. "They're doing science, they're not a problem," said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist based at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Scientists are not a special class of humanity, he pointed out, so it is hardly surprising that a small number of academy members are also believers. "It would be amazing if that figure were zero," he said. "Scientists are people, and we all make up inventions so we can rationalise about who we are."

Krauss says he found the meeting at La Jolla a peculiar experience. He is a veteran of campaigns against religious incursion into science, and testified against the scientific credentials of "intelligent design" in the Dover school board trial in Pennsylvania last year. "I'm not usually the person who defends faith," he told New Scientist.

Krauss wasn't the only participant who seemed to think some of the more militant speakers were a tad over the top. Joan Roughgarden, a professor of geophysics and biology at Stanford University, California, described some of the statements being made as an "exaggerated and highly rose-coloured picture of the capabilities of science" while presenting a caricature of people of faith. Attempts by militant atheists to represent science as a substitute for religion would be a huge mistake, she said, and might even set back science's cause. "They are entitled as atheists to generate more activism within the atheist community," she told New Scientist. "But scientists are portraying themselves as the enlightened white knights while people of faith are portrayed as idiots who can't tell the difference between a [communion] wafer and a piece of meat." People of faith are being antagonised, and this is "a lose-lose proposition", she said.

She also suggested that science, like religion, had dogma and prophets of its own, citing as an example the "locker-room bravado" of many biologists in promoting the received wisdom regarding sexual selection. What's more, she said, science's ethics were open to being manipulated - notably by biotechnology companies - leading her to seriously doubt that a workable morality could be developed by the rationalist scientific community.

Biology rules

This was not a view shared by Patricia Churchland of the University of California, San Diego, who was charged with answering the question "can we be good without God?". Values, Churchland said, are set by what we care about, and as social animals we care about mates, kin and insider-outsider relationships. Every human social value and moral, she said, can be traced back to group dynamics and biochemistry; there is no need for a scriptural mandate. Thus the answer to the third question of the meeting became an overwhelming yes.

With three positive verdicts in the bag, the mood was clear: science can take on religion and win. "We've got to come out," urged chemist Harry Kroto of Florida State University, Tallahassee. Dawkins also used the same phrase, and compared the secular scientists' position to that of gay men in the late 1960s. If everyone was willing to stand up and be counted, they could change things, he said. "Yes I'm preaching to the choir," Dawkins admitted. "But it's a big choir and it's an enthusiastic choir."

Kroto certainly declared himself ready to fight the good fight. "We're in a McCarthy era against people who don't accept Christianity," he said. "We've got to do something about it." His answer is to launch a coordinated global effort at education, media outreach and campaigning on behalf of science. Such an effort worked against apartheid, he said, and the internet now provided a platform that could take science education programmes into every home without being subject to the ideological and commercial whims of network broadcasters. He has schools run by religious groups firmly in his sights too. "We must try to work against faith schooling," he said.

For all the evangelical fervour, some attendees suggested that a little more humility might be in order. "This is Alice in Wonderland, it's just a neo-Christian cult," Scott Atran of the CNRS in Paris told New Scientist. "The arguments being put forward here are extraordinarily blind and simplistic. The Soviets taught kids in schools about science - religiously - and it didn't work out too well. I just don't think scientists, when they step out of science, have any better insight than the ordinary schmuck on the street. It makes me embarrassed to be an atheist."

Krauss was similarly critical. "The presumption here was that any effort to respect the existence of faith is a bad thing," he told New Scientist. "Philosophically I'm in complete agreement, but it's not a scientific statement, and I've seen how offensive it is when scientists say 'I can tell you what you have to think'. They make people more afraid of science. It's inappropriate, and it's certainly not effective."

Dawkins, though, is ready to mobilise. The meeting, he says, achieved "probably a little" - but every little helps. "There's a certain sort of negativity you get from people who say 'I don't like religion but you can't do anything about it'. That's a real counsel of defeatism. We should roll our sleeves up and get on with it."

From issue 2578 of New Scientist magazine, 20 November 2006, page 8-11

Should science do away with religion?

"It is just as futile to get someone to give up using their ears, or love other children as much as their own... Religion fills very basic human needs."

Mel Konner, ecologist, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

"Religion is leading us to the edge of something terrible... Half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This kind of thinking provides people with no basis to make the hard decisions we have to make."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

"Religion allows billions of people to live a life that makes sense - they can put up with the difficulties of life, hunger and disease. I don't want to take that away from them."

Francisco Ayala, biologist and philosopher, University of California, Irvine

"No doubt there are many people who do need religion, and far be it from me to pull the rug from under their feet."

Richard Dawkins, biologist, University of Oxford

"Science can't provide a sense of magic about the world, or a community of fellow-believers. There's a religious mentality that yearns for that."

Steven Weinberg, physicist, University of Texas, Austin

"Science's success does not mean it encompasses the entirety of human intellectual experience."

Lawrence Krauss, physicist and astronomer, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

If not God then what?

"It is the job of science to present a fully positive account of how we can be happy in this world and reconciled to our circumstances."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

"Let me offer the universe to people. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. I don't know any deeper spiritual feeling that those thoughts."

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, Hayden Planetarium, New York

"Let's teach our children about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious and awesome and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture or God-concept that I know of."

Carolyn Porco, planetary scientist, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado

"I'm not one of those who would rhapsodically say all we need to do is understand the world, look at pictures of the Eagle nebula and it'll fill us with such joy we won't miss religion. We will miss religion."

Steven Weinberg, cosmologist, University of Texas, Austin

Can we be good without God?

"The axiom that values come from reason or religion is wrong... There are better ways of ensuring moral motivation than scaring the crap out of people."

Patricia Churchland, philosopher, University of California, San Diego

"What about the hundreds of millions of dollars raised just for Katrina by religions? Religions did way more than the government did, and there were no scientific groups rushing to help the victims of Katrina - that's not what science does."

Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief, Skeptic magazine

"It doesn't take away from love that we understand the biochemical basis of love."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

Derren Brown Change Blindness Examples

2007-11-23T07:59:00.000+08:00

Emotions

2007-10-24T09:54:00.001+08:00

Face Emotion

2007-10-24T09:52:00.000+08:00

Emotional Face Processing

2007-10-24T09:50:00.000+08:00

Change Blindness from the BBC

2007-10-22T20:35:00.000+08:00

A Cool Illusion

2007-10-17T22:28:00.000+08:00

Use the Back Button on your browser to navigate

Phantom Limb Treatment

2007-10-17T22:16:00.000+08:00

The McGurk Effect - La La La La La

2007-10-16T23:06:00.000+08:00

Visual Attention Lab

2007-10-16T22:59:00.000+08:00

Which way does water go down the plug-hole?

2007-10-16T22:13:00.000+08:00

Plugholes on either side of the equator from Simon Taylor on Vimeo.

Urban Legends Website

2007-10-16T13:26:00.000+08:00

What you would do for love?

2007-10-16T13:22:00.000+08:00

From: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_coffee_table.htm
Just when you think you have seen it all, there's always one more nut that didn't make it in the basket.

Jeff Green is a 32 year old American, in Arizona, whose wife passed away. Due to the great pain he suffered after her death, he did something totally out of character for a normal and sane person. He said, " I could no longer take the pain that my wife's death has caused me so I brought her back home." This is where Jeff's story takes a twisted turn. His wife, Lucy, was born with a heart condition that ended her life at the young age of 29.

Lucy's last words to Jeff were, " We will meet again in heaven." These words served of no consolation to Jeff's despair. At the funeral, in an act of desperation, Jeff decided that he would not let Lucy leave him. "I called the cemetery caretaker and explained my feelings."

"I spoke with the authorities and got special permission to take my wife home with me. They thought it strange, but I was allowed to take her with me. I'd rather have her at home than seven feet under ground. Lucy had a great sense of humor and I'm sure she would appreciate being my coffee table." Jeff ordered a special glass casing that eliminates the decomposition of a dead body. "It cost me about $6,000.00, but it was worth it." Some of his friends and relatives, filled with fear, stop visiting Jeff. His true friends respected his decision and continue visiting him. Some even comment that it is a nice piece of furniture.

Comments: False. Leaving aside the issue of why anyone would want to do such a thing in the first place, there are practical reasons why keeping the remains of one's dead spouse in a glass coffee table in one's living room is beyond the bounds of reality:

1. It's probably illegal. State and local laws generally require the burial or cremation of human remains within a specified time period after death occurs. Home burial is an option in many states -- including Arizona, where the "Jeff Green" of our email tale allegedly resides -- though subject to local zoning and sanitation laws. In any case, "burial" means burial, either under the ground or in a mausoleum.

2. The body would decompose. Even if the remains were embalmed, and even if, as the email claims was done in this case, they were placed in a "special glass casing" somehow designed to prevent decomposition, it will occur. If you're thinking all the air could be pumped out, creating a vacuum inside the case to prevent bacterial growth, think again. This would simply retard decomposition, not eliminate it (for comparison, vacuum-packed meats only have a shelf life of three years, and that's under refrigeration). Embalming, too, is only a temporary measure, meant to slow the decomposition process for the short period of time between death and entombment. Short of cryogenic preservation or plastination -- both very rare and expensive procedures -- nothing can be done to stop a dead body from eventually decomposing.

3. You would live a lonely life. Trust me, nobody wants to hang out with a corpse in the room. That's just human nature.

Crocodile Eats Golfer

2007-10-16T13:14:00.001+08:00

From: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blcroc.htm

You must read this and see the picture at the end. It is just crazy.... This is a true story from Palm Beach, Florida (the proof is at the end, but read the story first).

The first foursome of the day played together to the 5th hole where one impatient golfer went ahead of the group. The remaining three finished their round and headed for the nineteenth hole to meet their less-patient friend. However, he wasn't there...and was no where to be found. Since his car was still in the parking lot, the threesome waited two hours.

Thinking the impatient golfer might still be somewhere out on the course, they notified the clubhouse and the search was on. Of course, the impatient golfer was not located, but his clubs were found on the hole. Three days later, Ole Mose was spotted on the seventh hole and was an immediate suspect.

Ole Mose was an American crocodile that was an infrequent course visitor for over 20 years. Not too much concern was ever given Ole Mose, as he had always made a hasty retreat whenever he saw anyone coming. To make a long story even longer, after the course officials, SPCA, lawyers, citizens groups, the mayor, Palm Beach PD, and the American Crocodile Association of Southern Florida agreed, it was decided that, in order to put everyone's mind at ease, Ole Mose should be unzipped.

Take notice to what the man standing over Ole Moses is holding.

Zoologist and crocodile expert Adam "He Oughta Know" Britton tells us the email tale is fake but the photo is real. According to Britton, the incident captured on film couldn't have happened in Florida.

How does he know?

Because the particular species of crocodile in the image, Crocodylus porosus, is native to Indonesia. Plus, says Britton, there has never been a crocodile-caused fatality in Florida (alligator attacks are a different story).

The photograph was taken in Kalimantan (Borneo) in 1997. Nothing else is known about it. The email story was attached anonymously in July 1998 and the two have circulated together ever since.

For a clue as to how such a tasteless joke might have come about, look no further than the fact that alligators are not only plentiful in Florida, but are frequently sighted on golf courses. Tourists have even been bitten on occasion. Our email author was evidently aware of this, but made the mistake of confusing alligators with their cousins, the crocodiles -- of which there are only a few hundred left in Florida and none at all north of the Everglades.

Even so, the story rings true for enough many readers that a West Palm Beach hotel and golf course called the Breakers, whose name is mentioned in one popular version of the email, complains of receiving a steady stream of credulous phone calls from the day the story first appeared. "I compare this prank to tabloid journalism," a spokesperson for the resort complained to reporters. "When you're at the top of the heap, someone wants to knock you down."

The reputation of the endangered American crocodile hasn't exactly benefited from the hoax, either.

Is this website telling the truth?

2007-10-16T13:06:00.000+08:00

Made-up memories

2007-10-16T11:16:00.001+08:00

A FEW years ago, the actor Alan Alda visited a group of memory researchers at the University of California, Irvine, for a TV show he was making. During a picnic lunch, one of the scientists offered Alda a hard-boiled egg. He turned it down, explaining that as a child he had made himself sick eating too many eggs.

In fact, this had never happened, yet Alda believed it was real. How so? The egg incident was a false memory planted by one of UC Irvine's researchers, Elizabeth Loftus.

Before the visit, Loftus had sent Alda a questionnaire about his food preferences and personality. She later told him that a computer analysis of his answers had revealed some facts about his childhood, including that he once made himself sick eating too many eggs. There was no such analysis but it was enough to convince Alda.

Your memory may feel like a reliable record of the past, but it is not. Loftus has spent the past 30 years studying the ease with which we can form "memories" of nonexistent events. She has convinced countless people that they have seen or done things when they haven't - even quite extreme events such as being attacked by animals or almost drowning. Her work has revealed much about how our brains form and retain memories.

While we wouldn't want to plant a memory of a nonexistent childhood trauma in your own brain, there is a less dramatic demonstration of how easy it is to form a false memory called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Read the first two lists of words and pause for a few minutes. Then read list 3 and put a tick against the words that were in the first two. Now go back and check your answers...

List 1
apple
vegetable
orange
kiwi
citrus
ripe
pear
banana
berry
cherry
basket
juice
salad
bowl
cocktail

List 2

web
insect
bug
fright
fly
arachnid
crawl
tarantula
poison
bite
creepy
animal
ugly
feelers
small

(Now wait a few minutes and click Read More)

See how many of the following words were in the first two lists
List 3

happy
woman
winter
circus
spider
feather
citrus
ugly
robber
piano
goat
ground
cherry
bitter
insect
fruit
suburb
kiwi
quick
mouse
pile
fish

Further reading:

Mind Hacks: Tips and tools for using your brain, by Tom Stafford and Matt Web (O'Reilly, 2005)
From issue 2622 of New Scientist magazine, 19 September 2007, page 34-41

Pay attention!

2007-10-16T11:03:00.000+08:00

IMAGINE you are walking down the street and a passer-by asks you for directions. As you talk to him, two workmen rudely barge between you carrying a door. Then something weird happens: in the brief moment that the passer-by is behind the door, he switches places with one of the workmen. You are left giving directions to a different person who is taller, wearing different clothes and has a different voice. Do you think you would notice?

Of course you would, right? Wrong. When researchers at Harvard University played this trick on 15 unsuspecting people, eight of them failed to spot the change.

What this demonstrates is a phenomenon called "change blindness". It happens because of a chronic shortage of a crucial mental resource: attention. You are blithely unaware of most of what is going on around you, to the point where you can fail to notice "obvious" changes in your surroundings.

Attention is not well understood, but whatever it is, we have a limited amount. Of all the information entering or being generated by your brain at any one time - sights, sounds, memories, ideas and so on - only a tiny fraction enters your consciousness. Object-tracking studies suggest that the maximum number of items we can attend to at any one time is around five or six (see demos at http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/finstlab/demos.htm).

Scientists studying attention spend a lot of time playing with change blindness because it provides direct access to the attentional system. In the door experiment, the subjects fail to see the change because their attention is elsewhere and the door conceals what would otherwise be attention-grabbing motion.

You can experience the same thing by watching "flicker images". These consist of two consecutive images that differ only in one key feature - two cowboys who swap heads, say. If the images are flashed up in quick succession with a brief blank screen between them (which acts like the door), most people take an astonishingly long time to spot the difference (see demos at http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download, or try flicking your attention between the two images in the diagram below).

Similarly, we often fail to notice blatant continuity errors when films cut from one scene to another. We also usually fail to detect gradual changes to a static scene, such as the addition of a large building (see demos at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html and http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Slow%20changes%20bis/intro.html).

"Basically, the explanation is that attention is needed to see change," says psychologist Ronald Rensink of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "Attention is drawn automatically to the motion signals that accompany a change. But if these are swamped, then the observer can't rely on automatic control, but needs to hunt around with their attention."

A similar phenomenon is motion-induced blindness, in which concentrating on a moving pattern causes what should be very prominent static objects - such as bright yellow dots - to disappear (see demos at http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ebs265/demos/MIB-percScotoma.html). Motion-induced blindness was only discovered in 2001 and it is still unclear why it happens, but most researchers think it has something to do with attentional resources.

There is a related and even more counter-intuitive demonstration of our limited capacity for attention. If you are deliberately concentrating on something, it can render you oblivious to other events that you would normally have no trouble noticing. This "inattention blindness" is probably the reason why motorists sometimes collide with objects such as pedestrians and buses that they simply "didn't see".

The most famous demonstration of inattention blindness was staged in 1999 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It involves a game of basketball. Chances are you've seen it or read about it before. If not, have a look at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html. The task is to count the number of passes made by the team in white. You won't believe your brain.

A Brain of Two Halves

2007-10-16T10:59:00.000+08:00

WOULD you consider yourself to be logical and analytical or creative and empathic? According to popular psychology you're one or the other, and it's all down to which half of your brain you use the most: the rational and calculating left or the intuitive, artistic right.

It's a myth, of course, but like all good ones it contains a grain of truth. Your cerebral cortex - the outer layer of your brain that deals with higher functions - is indeed split into two halves. They are connected by a flat bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum, but work in subtly different ways - and these differences occasionally flicker into your conscious awareness.

The left-brain/right-brain myth arose from experiments done in the early 1970s on people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for epilepsy. These "split-brain" patients showed some strikingly odd responses to information that was preferentially sent to one side of the brain or the other by presenting it to the extreme left or right of their visual field. This works because the right visual field is monitored by the right eye, which routes straight into the left brain, and vice versa.

For example, when a word or picture is presented to their right brain, split-brain patients are often unable to read or recognise it. This and similar experiments led to the idea that the left side of the brain deals with logic and facts while the right side is more intuitive and interpretive. We now know that this dichotomy is too simplistic, but its essence holds true. The latest view is that the two hemispheres have subtly different styles of information processing: the left has a bias towards detail, the right a more holistic outlook. You can watch a video of a split-brain experiment:

Most people, of course, have a functional corpus callosum that shunts information between the hemispheres. Even so, subtle left-right differences exist. One task where the hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. When most of us see a face, our right cerebral hemisphere does the lion's share of the work recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right hemisphere is fed by the left visual field, that means we have a notable left-sided bias in our judgement of faces.

Look at this pair of faces (left). Which appears happier? Chances are you chose the bottom one. The two faces are, however, identical apart from being mirror images of one another. The picture is called a chimeric face and is made by taking two pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling, chopping the pictures in half and joining the two mismatched pieces. Our general bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as different even though they are essentially equivalent.

It isn't just visual processing that is lateralised. There is some evidence that emotion is too, with the right side of the brain more specialised for negative emotions and the left for positive ones. Amazingly, simply activating one or other hemisphere by moving parts of your body can noticeably change your emotional state.

You can experience this by repeating an experiment first done in 1989 by Bernard Schiff and Mary Lamon of the University of Toronto in Canada (Neuropsychologia, vol 27, p 923). They asked 12 volunteers to perform a "half smile", lifting one corner of their mouths and holding it for a minute. Left-smilers reported feeling sadder afterwards, while right-smilers felt more positive.

Other researchers have reproduced the effect simply by getting people to contract the muscles of their left or right hand a few times. More recent research has suggested that motivation is similarly affected: people who performed right-sided muscle contractions became more assertive and spent longer trying to crack an impossible maths puzzle.

Unsurprisingly, these claims are controversial, with some teams failing to replicate the results. Last year, however, Eddie Harmon-Jones of Texas A&M University in College Station used EEG to confirm that flexing the hand muscles produces changes in emotion, but only when it is preceded by activation of the opposite cortex (Psychophysiology, vol 43, p 598). The left-brain/right-brain legend, it appears, is alive and well.

This is not my nose

2007-10-16T10:56:00.000+08:00

YOU may know the crossed-hands illusion. Hold your arms out in front of you and cross them over, rotate your hands so your palms face each other, then mesh your fingers together. Now slowly rotate your hands up between your arms so you're staring at your knuckles. Ask someone to point to one of your index fingers, then attempt to move it. Did you move the wrong one?

If so, you've just experienced a minor failure of your body schema - your mental representation of the location, position and boundaries of your body. Your brain builds this up by drawing on data from vision, touch and a body-wide network of proprioceptive sensors that monitor position. Your body schema is a critical part of self-awareness, which is why it feels so odd when it goes wrong.

In the crossed-hands illusion, the schema fails because of a confusing visual input. You don't normally see your hands in this convoluted position; the finger you move is the one that is pointing in the direction that the correct one would be pointing if you had simply clasped your hands as if in prayer.

An even odder way of disturbing your body schema is an illusion that taps straight into your sense of body ownership. Known as the rubber-hand illusion, it fools you into thinking a rubber hand - or even a piece of wood, or a table - is part of your body.

To experience the illusion, get hold of a model hand (it doesn't have to be very realistic) and put it on the table in front of you. If it is a left hand, put your actual left hand somewhere you can't see it, in the same pose as the rubber hand. Now get someone to touch and stroke your unseen hand and the rubber hand with identical movements. If you concentrate on the rubber hand, you will probably get the uncanny feeling that it is your own. (See a video of the rubber hand illusion here)

What this illusion shows is that your sense of body ownership is less anchored in reality than you think. Your brain will happily override information from proprioception to conjure up an incorrect yet coherent body schema based on vision and touch.

In fact, your mental body map is an absolute sucker for visual information. This year Frank Durgin of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania set up the illusion as described above but instead of touching the rubber hand he merely "stroked" it with light from a laser pointer, leaving the unseen hand alone. Two-thirds of 220 subjects reported a sense of ownership of the rubber hand and said they had the sensation of heat and even touch from the laser pointer (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 152). "It's obvious the hand is rubber - no one is fooled at all," says Durgin. "But if your brain decides it's your hand, all the conscious awareness in the world won't change it."

If you can't get hold of a fake hand, there are other (though less reliable) ways to experience the illusion. Some people can be fooled into believing a piece of wood has replaced their hand. Around half of people can even be made to feel a table top is part of their body. Sit at a table and put your hand out of sight underneath. Get someone to tap and stroke this hand while doing exactly the same to the table top directly above. If you watch the table top, you may experience the illusion that the table has become part of your body.

Proprioception may be the junior partner to vision and touch in creating your body schema, but it still plays a key role. You can demonstrate this with an illusion that taps into proprioception alone. This Pinocchio illusion is hard to do without a specialist piece of equipment called a physiotherapy vibrator, but if you can get hold of one, try this. Close your eyes, touch the tip of your nose and then get somebody to apply the vibrator at about 100 hertz to skin at the very top of your bicep. This creates the strong sensation that you are straightening your elbow, and that your nose is simultaneously growing longer and longer, like Pinocchio's.

Vibrating the skin above a tendon excites stretch receptors in the muscle, creating a powerful sensation that the muscle is stretching and the joint is extending. This confuses your proprioceptors, which revise your body schema accordingly. The result is rather like having a phantom limb: the sensed position of your arm in space doesn't correspond to its actual position.

If you're touching your nose at the same time, this leads to a weird sensation that it is growing. Your brain integrates the touch sensation from your fingers with the "movement" of your arm and comes to the erroneous conclusion that your nose must be growing to fill the gap.

The Pinocchio illusion is an important tool for understanding how the brain calculates the size and shape of our bodies. This isn't just an academic question. When it goes wrong, such as in body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia and phantom limb, the results can be devastating (PLoS Biology, vol 3, p e412).

Audio Visual Speech Lab

2007-10-16T09:53:00.000+08:00

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Sine Wave Speech 2

2007-10-16T09:49:00.000+08:00

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Then go back to the SWS file

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The Brain recreates missing speech sounds

2007-10-16T09:12:00.000+08:00

In everyday life we encounter lots of situations that obscure or distort people's voices, yet most of the time we understand effortlessly. This is because our brain pastes in the missing sounds, a phenomenon called phonemic restoration. It is so effective that it is sometimes hard to tell that the missing sounds are not there.

A good demonstration of this effect was published last year by Makio Kashino of NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan. He recorded a voice saying "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" then removed short chunks and replaced them with silence. This made the sentence virtually unintelligible. But when he filled the gaps with loud white noise, the sentence miraculously becomes understandable (Acoustic Science and Technology, vol 27, p 318).

"The sounds we hear are not copies of physical sounds," Kashino says. "The brain fills in the gaps, based on the information in the remaining speech signal." The effect is so powerful that you can even record a sentence, chop it into 50-millisecond slices, reverse every single slice and play it back - and it is perfectly intelligible

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Seeing isn't believing

2007-10-16T09:09:00.000+08:00

TAKE a moment to observe the world around you. Scan the horizon with your eyes. Tilt your head back and listen. You're probably getting the impression that your senses are doing a fine job of capturing everything that is going on. Yet that is all it is: an impression.

Despite the fact that your visual system seems to provide you with a continuous widescreen movie, most of the time it is only gathering information from a tiny patch of the visual field. The rest of the time it isn't even doing that. Somehow from this sporadic input it conjures up a seamless visual experience.

What is going on? Bang in the middle of your retina is a small patch of densely crowded photoreceptors called the fovea. This is the retina's sweet spot, the only part of the eye capable of seeing with the rich detail and full colour we take for granted. This tiny spot - which covers an area of our visual field no bigger than the moon in the sky - feeds your visual system almost all of its raw information.

To build up a big picture, your eyes constantly dart about, fixating for a fraction of a second and then moving on. These jerky movements between fixations are called saccades, and we make about three per second, each lasting between 20 and 200 microseconds.

The curious thing about saccades is that while they are happening we are effectively blind. The brain doesn't bother to process information picked up during a saccade because the eyes move too rapidly to capture anything useful. All in all, your visual system works like a man blundering around in the dark waving around a flickering torch with a very narrow beam.

Despite the fact that you don't normally notice saccades, you can catch them in action. Look at your eyes close-up in the mirror and flick your focus back and forth from one pupil to another. However hard you try you cannot see your eyes move - even though somebody watching you can. That's because the motion is a saccade, and your brain isn't paying attention. Now pick two spots in the corners of your visual field and flick your gaze from one to the other and back again. If you're lucky you'll notice, just barely, a brief flash of darkness. This is your visual cortex clocking off.

So how does your brain weave such fragmentary information into a seamless movie? This remains something of a mystery. The best explanation, according to Andrew Hollingworth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, is that your short-term and long-term visual memories retain information from previous fixations and integrate them into a here-and-now visual experience (Visual Cognition, vol 14, p 781).

There is also some guesswork going on. You can get a feel for this from the frozen-time illusion - the sensation that you sometimes get when you look at a clock and the second hand appears to freeze momentarily before tick-tocking back into action.

This happens because of saccades. To compensate for the temporary shut-down of vision, your brain makes a guess at what it would have seen, but it does so retrospectively. So the 100 or so milliseconds of blindness gets back-filled with the image that appears after the saccade is over. If your eyes happen to alight on the clock just after the second hand has moved, your brain assumes that the hand was in that location for the duration of the saccade too. The "second" then lasts about 10 per cent longer than normal, which is enough for you to notice.

The weirdness isn't confined to vision. Your auditory system is also full of gaps and glitches that the brain cleans up so we can make sense of the world. This is especially true of speech.

In everyday life we encounter lots of situations that obscure or distort people's voices, yet most of the time we understand effortlessly. This is because our brain pastes in the missing sounds, a phenomenon called phonemic restoration. It is so effective that it is sometimes hard to tell that the missing sounds are not there.

A good demonstration of this effect was published last year by Makio Kashino of NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan. He recorded a voice saying "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" then removed short chunks and replaced them with silence. This made the sentence virtually unintelligible. But when he filled the gaps with loud white noise, the sentence miraculously becomes understandable (Acoustic Science and Technology, vol 27, p 318).

"The sounds we hear are not copies of physical sounds," Kashino says. "The brain fills in the gaps, based on the information in the remaining speech signal." The effect is so powerful that you can even record a sentence, chop it into 50-millisecond slices, reverse every single slice and play it back - and it is perfectly intelligible. You can listen to Kashino's sound files at http://asj.gr.jp/2006/data/kashi/index.html.

Another demonstration of the brain's ability to extract meaning from distorted signals is a form of synthesised speech called sine-wave speech. When you first hear a sentence in sine-wave speech it sounds alien and unintelligible, somewhat reminiscent of whistling or birdsong. But if you listen to the same sentence in normal speech and then return to the sine-wave version, it suddenly snaps into auditory focus. Try as you might, you cannot "unhear" the words that you didn't even realise were words the first time you heard them (listen to demos at http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/sine-wave-speech and http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Chris_Darwin/SWS).

According to Matt Davis of the UK Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, this happens because the brain has circuits that respond to speech, but doesn't switch them on unless it detects spoken language (Hearing Research, vol 229, p 132). Sine-wave speech isn't speech-like enough to trigger the circuits, but once you know it is speech they spring into action. "It's an example of top-down influence," says Davis. "What you know about what you're hearing changes the way you hear it."

Given the tricks that your visual and auditory systems play, it probably comes as no surprise that when they get together, fights can break out. A good demonstration of this is the McGurk effect, in which listening to a series of identical syllables such as "ba ba ba ba" while watching somebody mouth "ba da la va" makes you hear "ba da la va". Try it for yourself at www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/lab-index.html.

Until recently, psychologists believed that the visual system always trumps the other senses, but in 2000 a team of psychologists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena proved that this isn't the case. They showed volunteers a single flash on a computer screen. If they accompanied the flash with two very short beeps, the volunteers saw two flashes - in other words, this time the auditory system wins (Nature, vol 408, p 788). See the illusion at www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/soundInducedIllusoryFlash2/index.html.

Gradual Change

2007-10-16T08:16:00.000+08:00

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Change Blindness Videos

2007-10-16T08:12:00.000+08:00

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Sine Wave Speech

2007-10-16T08:08:00.000+08:00

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Change Blindness - How to use a door for a person change

2007-10-16T08:01:00.000+08:00

These videos show a subject witnessing a "person change" in studies reported by Simons and Levin (1998). In this clip, an experimenter approached a pedestrian to ask for directions. While the pedestrian was providing directions, two additional experimenters rudely passed between the initial experimenter and the pedestrian. During this brief interruption, the original experimenter was replaced by a different person. Even though the two experimenters looked quite different and had distinctly different voices, approximately 50 percent of the subjects failed to notice that they were talking to a different person after the door passed. Interestingly, those who noticed tended to be from the same social group (students) as the experimenters, and those who failed to notice tended to be older than the experimenters. To explore this in-group/out-group effect, we conducted a second experiment in which the same two experimenters were dressed as construction workers. By making the experimenters members of an outgroup for the younger subjects, we were able to reduce noticing from close to 100 percent to only 35 percent.

Video 1
Video 2

Rubber hand' illusion creates ghost sensations

2007-10-16T07:36:00.000+08:00

IF YOU and several other people have your arms resting on a table, how do you know which one is yours? It seems that when more than one sensory signal tells the same story, your brain believes it, even if the hand it thinks is yours is a rubber dummy.

This explanation for the so-called "rubber hand illusion" was suggested last year, but sceptics argued that the illusion depends solely on sight. Now the research team that published the original study has shown that people are deceived even when blindfolded.

Last year, Henrik Ehrsson at the Institute of Neurology in London and his colleagues asked volunteers to place one hand under a table while a rubber one was placed in view. Then researchers used two paintbrushes to simultaneously stroke the rubber hand, which subjects could see, and their hidden hand, which they could feel. Within about 10 seconds, everyone was under the strange illusion that the rubber arm was actually their own.

As the illusion set in, activity intensified in the brain's premotor cortex, a region known to process multisensory inputs. Ehrsson and his colleagues suggested that we consider a body part to be our own when multiple sensory signals - from sight and touch, for instance - are put together (Science, vol 305, p 875).
“When more than one sense tells you the same story your brain believes it. Even if the hand it thinks is yours is a dummy”

But critics suggested that knowing your own body part does not involve several senses and that the experiment instead showed how vision can override other senses. So Ehrsson's group has now set up a new experiment with blindfolded volunteers. Researchers placed a volunteer's real index finger against a rubber knuckle while they simultaneously touched the real knuckle on the other hand. Once again, within seconds, volunteers were convinced they were touching their own hand. In fact, when asked to point to their other hand, they pointed at the fake. "The brain compares two sensory signals to figure out this is me or not me," says Ehrsson.

From issue 2505 of New Scientist magazine, 25 June 2005, page 10

Buddhism & Neuroscience

2007-10-10T08:36:00.000+08:00

Emotion using software

2007-10-07T19:51:00.001+08:00

Robot with emotions

2007-10-07T19:49:00.000+08:00

The Mistakes of Evolution

2007-10-07T19:08:00.000+08:00

Help adding resources to a blog

2007-10-03T12:15:00.001+08:00

How to embed a website or add a slideshow

2007-10-03T11:51:00.000+08:00

Emotion - James-Lange Theory

2007-10-03T11:42:00.000+08:00

Website to test Emotional Intelligence

2007-10-03T11:41:00.000+08:00

Original Website Link

Perception Powerpoint

2007-10-03T11:38:00.000+08:00

Emotion Powerpoint for TOK

2007-10-03T11:37:00.000+08:00

Group emotional response

2007-10-03T11:34:00.000+08:00

Emotions - Lesson 1 - Plan

2007-10-03T11:33:00.001+08:00

Enemies of Reason Part 2

2007-09-02T10:31:00.001+08:00

Enemies of Reason Part 1

2007-09-02T10:29:00.000+08:00

Enemies of Reason - Interview

2007-09-02T09:04:00.000+08:00

Doris Collins & James Randi

2007-09-02T08:53:00.000+08:00

Cold Reading examples

2007-09-02T08:28:00.000+08:00

Mind Reading with Derren BRown

2007-09-02T08:27:00.000+08:00

Derren Brown - Cold Reading

2007-09-02T08:24:00.000+08:00

Change Blindness Videos

2007-08-27T18:39:00.000+08:00

Viewable/Downloadable Examples of Change Blindness

These demos can be viewed by any QuickTime viewer (version 3.0 or higher):

Airplane (529K)
Chopper & Truck (604K)
Dinner (584K)
Farm (583K)
Harborside (530K)
Market (551K)
Money (478K)
Sailboats (570K)
Street Corner (527K)
Tourists (585K)

To download: On the File menu, select "Save as", then select the "Text file" (or "Text") option.

Back to The Need for Attention to See Change

Change Blindness

2007-08-27T14:07:00.000+08:00

Inattention blindness

2007-08-27T13:37:00.000+08:00

Is this the trick that proves homeopathy isn't hokum?

2007-06-12T21:13:00.000+08:00

2001
IT'S a chance discovery so unexpected it defies belief and threatens to reignite debate about whether there is a scientific basis for thinking homeopathic medicines really work.

A team in South Korea has discovered a whole new dimension to just about the simplest chemical reaction in the book—what happens when you dissolve a substance in water and then add more water.

Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their neighbours, they got closer together.

The discovery has stunned chemists, and could provide the first scientific insight into how some homeopathic remedies work. Homeopaths repeatedly dilute medications, believing that the higher the dilution, the more potent the remedy becomes.

Some dilute to "infinity" until no molecules of the remedy remain. They believe that water holds a memory, or "imprint" of the active ingredient which is more potent than the ingredient itself. But others use less dilute solutions—often diluting a remedy six-fold. The Korean findings might at last go some way to reconciling the potency of these less dilute solutions with orthodox science.

German chemist Kurt Geckeler and his colleague Shashadhar Samal stumbled on the effect while investigating fullerenes at their lab in the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. They found that the football-shaped buckyball molecules kept forming untidy aggregates in solution, and Geckler asked Samal to look for ways to control how these clumps formed.

What he discovered was a phenomenon new to chemistry. "When he diluted the solution, the size of the fullerene particles increased," says Geckeler. "It was completely counterintuitive," he says.

Further work showed it was no fluke. To make the otherwise insoluble buckyball dissolve in water, the chemists had mixed it with a circular sugar-like molecule called a cyclodextrin. When they did the same experiments with just cyclodextrin molecules, they found they behaved the same way. So did the organic molecule sodium guanosine monophosphate, DNA and plain old sodium chloride.

Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates 5 to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth wasn't linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original. "The history of the solution is important. The more dilute it starts, the larger the aggregates," says Geckeler. Also, it only worked in polar solvents like water, in which one end of the molecule has a pronounced positive charge while the other end is negative.

But the finding may provide a mechanism for how some homeopathic medicines work—something that has defied scientific explanation till now. Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active.

It also echoes the controversial claims of French immunologist Jacques Benveniste. In 1988, Benveniste claimed in a Nature paper that a solution that had once contained antibodies still activated human white blood cells. Benveniste claimed the solution still worked because it contained ghostly "imprints" in the water structure where the antibodies had been.

Other researchers failed to reproduce Benveniste's experiments, but homeopaths still believe he may have been onto something. Benveniste himself doesn't think the new findings explain his results because the solutions weren't dilute enough. "This [phenomenon] cannot apply to high dilution," he says.

Fred Pearce of University College London, who tried to repeat Benveniste's experiments, agrees. But it could offer some clues as to why other less dilute homeopathic remedies work, he says. Large clusters and aggregates might interact more easily with biological tissue.

Chemist Jan Enberts of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands is more cautious. "It's still a totally open question," he says. "To say the phenomenon has biological significance is pure speculation." But he has no doubt Samal and Geckeler have discovered something new. "It's surprising and worrying," he says.

The two chemists were at pains to double-check their astonishing results. Initially they had used the scattering of a laser to reveal the size and distribution of the dissolved particles. To check, they used a scanning electron microscope to photograph films of the solutions spread over slides. This, too, showed that dissolved substances cluster together as dilution increased.

"It doesn't prove homeopathy, but it's congruent with what we think and is very encouraging," says Peter Fisher, director of medical research at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. "The whole idea of high-dilution homeopathy hangs on the idea that water has properties which are not understood," he says. "The fact that the new effect happens with a variety of substances suggests it's the solvent that's responsible. It's in line with what many homeopaths say, that you can only make homeopathic medicines in polar solvents."

Geckeler and Samal are now anxious that other researchers follow up their work. "We want people to repeat it," says Geckeler. "If it's confirmed it will be groundbreaking".

From issue 2316 of New Scientist magazine, 10 November 2001, page 4

Does a cat always land on it's feet?

2007-06-12T21:01:00.000+08:00

Does a Cat Always Land on Its Feet?

by Fiorella Gambale, Ph.D.
Institute for Feline Research
Milano, Italy

Cats have excellent balance, and are remarkably acrobatic. When turned upside down and dropped from a height, a cat generally has the ability to land on its feet. Until now, no one has systematically investigated the limits of this phenomenon. In this study, I dropped a cat upside down from various heights, and observed whether the cat landed on its feet.

Dropping a Cat Upside Down from a Height of 6 Feet
I dropped the cat from a height of six feet. I did this one hundred times. The cat always landed on its feet.
Dropping a Cat Upside Down from a Height of 5 Feet
I dropped the cat from a height of five feet. I did this one hundred times. The cat always landed on its feet.
Dropping a Cat Upside Down from a Height of 4 Feet
I dropped the cat from a height of four feet. I did this one hundred times. The cat always landed on its feet.
Dropping a Cat Upside Down from a Height of 3 Feet
I dropped the cat from a height of three feet. I did this one hundred times. The cat always landed on its feet.
Dropping a Cat Upside Down from a Height of 2 Feet
I dropped the cat from a height of two feet. I did this one hundred times. The cat always landed on its feet.
Dropping a Cat Upside Down from a Height of 1 Foot
I dropped the cat from a height of one foot. I did this one hundred times. The cat never landed on its feet.

Discussion
Popular belief is that "a cat will always land on its feet." My experiments show this to be true for drop heights ranging from six feet down to two feet. It is not true at a drop height of one foot.

Does a cat land on its feet when dropped from a height of less than one foot? This preliminary study indicates that the answer may be no. However, further experiments, preferably with the same cat, are needed to settle the question.

Acknowledgments
I want to thank the cat, "Esther," for her initial cooperation in this experiment. Thank you, also, to Esther's owner, M.R. Young. And special thanks to the organization PFTAR (People For the Tarring-and-Feathering of Animal Researchers), whose indiscriminate yacketing inspired this project.

Original article

Bayes Theorem - Lets Make a Deal

2007-06-08T15:08:00.000+08:00

The Let's Make a Deal Applet
As a motivating example behind the discussion of probability, an applet has been developed which allows students to investigate the Let's Make a Deal Paradox. This paradox is related to a popular television show in the 1970's. In the show, a contestant was given a choice of three doors of which one contained a prize. The other two doors contained gag gifts like a chicken or a donkey. After the contestant chose an initial door, the host of the show then revealed an empty door among the two unchosen doors, and asks the contestant if he or she would like to switch to the other unchosen door. The question is should the contestant switch. Do the odds of winning increase by switching to the remaining door?

The intuition of most students tells them that each of the doors, the chosen door and the unchosen door, are equally likely to contain the prize so that there is a 50-50 chance of winning with either selection. This, however, is not the case. The probability of winning by using the switching technique is 2/3 while the odds of winning by not switching is 1/3. The easiest way to explain this to students is as follows. The probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage of the game is 2/3. If the contestant picks the wrong door initially, the host must reveal the remaining empty door in the second stage of the game. Thus, if the contestant switches after picking the wrong door initially, the contestant will win the prize. The probability of winning by switching then reduces to the probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage which is clearly 2/3.

Despite a very clear explanation of this paradox, most students have a difficulty understanding the problem. It is very difficult to conquer the strong intuition which most students have in this case. As a challenge to students who don't believe the explanation, an instructor may ask the students to actually play the game a number of times by switching and by not switching and to keep track of the relative frequency of wins with each strategy. An applet has developed which allows students to repeatedly play the game and keep track of the results. The applet is given below.

APPLET LINK

Emotions - Cognitive Psychology & Science

2007-06-08T14:40:00.000+08:00

New Scientist vol 123 issue 1678 - 19 August 89

The importance of being emotional: Recent theories in cognitive psychology allow us to understand that emotions are not especially irrational. Rather, they are important in the management of our goals and actions

WE ARE ambivalent about our emotions. Sometimes they seem to make us think in a distorted way. To say that someone is being emotional is to be insulting. But on the other hand, we regard emotions as important to our humanity. To be without them would be less than human.

This ambivalence is depicted in science fiction. Mr Spock of Star Trek is superintelligent and without emotion. But he is a lonely figure - not the person to identify with as one boldly goes across the universe. So the question is, do emotions impede rationality? If we were fully rational, would we need them? Would an intelligent being from another planet have emotions? Would a robot? Are emotions an important part of being human? And if so, how? Perhaps science can help to answer such questions. Most important here has been the work of Charles Darwin. His book published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, touches on a fundamental dilemma about the nature of emotions, and the way we view them.

Darwin thought of emotional expressions as vestiges of patterns of action that once were useful, but are so no longer. Earlier studies of anatomical vestiges had provided evidence for evolution. We have, for instance, a row of vertebrae at the base of our spine which indicate that our ancestors had tails. Now that we are tail-less, these bones have no function. It is the same with emotional expressions, Darwin argued. He wrote that their study 'confirms to a certain limited extent the conclusion that man is derived from some lower animal form'.

With this theory, Darwin gave support, perhaps unintentionally, to an intuition already strong in Western culture, that emotions are subverters of reason, matters for infants and beasts, but scarcely to be approved of in adult humans.

At the same time, he admitted that emotional expressions are important for human welfare. He stopped short of saying that they have functions - that is, that they have evolved because they are adaptive in some way. To do so would have contradicted his observation that many emotional expressions are not functional in many circumstances. He collected evidence of activity that was superfluous to efficient action: tears that do not serve to lubricate the eyes, hair that stands on end, adding nothing to the skill of an attack, laughter that seems not to improve the execution of any task. He would have been fascinated by the expressions of people talking on the telephone.

So we are left with a problem: how can emotions be important, when their expressions can happen whether or not they serve any purpose, and sometimes seem irrational? Darwin, of course, was primarily interested in expressions of emotion as evidence for evolution. But the issues he explored point to another direction which helps to resolve the paradox. It is this: mammals and birds often find themselves in situations where they lack appropriate patterns of behaviour - when they are not fully adapted to an environment that has changed or when no habit or instinct fits a situation. Could emotions be important as part of the solution to the problem of what to do at these junctures? Could they be useful because they prompt us towards certain types of action when perhaps we should do something, but lack a well-adapted way of acting? Over the past 20 years or so, cognitive psychologists have begun to answer 'Yes' to such questions. They have studied phenomena of the kind that Darwin described, but perhaps because they no longer need to argue as staunchly as he did for the theory of evolution, they have come to a conclusion more appropriate to understanding emotions themselves. It is that emotions are not just vestiges of an infantile and bestial history. They are important now in our lives, in the everyday management of action.

The issue turns out to be a very general one. It would apply not just to us, but also to Martians, or to general-purpose robots. It would apply to any intelligent being that makes new goals and plans as it goes along, if that being had only imperfect knowledge and other limitations of its resources, if it had a number of goals that were not always mutually consistent, if it needed to cooperate with others.

Ronald de Sousa, in The Rationality of Emotion, puts the problem like this: we are neither completely determinate machines, nor angels with pure and rational wills. We are somewhere in between. Let me enlarge on this idea.

We can think of insects as being equipped with patterns of action shaped by natural selection for their particular form of life, and perhaps for particular patterns of interaction with other members of their species. Insects have so-called fixed action patterns that are triggered by stimuli, and this arrangement works well for them. An insect can be thought of as a little automaton, programmed by genetics. These action patterns can be directed in various ways, but the basic patterns are wired in. Where the insect does learn something - for instance, where an object is - it is mainly by a process in which the relevant information is inserted in slots that accept these data. Similarly, although we may think a swarm of bees seems 'angry', this may be an inappropriate assumption. More probably, the members of the swarm are displaying action patterns that have been triggered off. In general, insects do not have much need for emotions.

By a comparable argument, there is even less question of whether present types of robot have emotions. The reason is that a robot is an engineering means of achieving just one goal at a time. Like many such solutions, it requires the world to be simplified somewhat. The wheel was certainly a good idea, but to work properly it has needed parts of the Earth's surface to be made hard and flat. Similarly, robots work well, but only in the simplified situation for which they are designed, perhaps to assemble a part of a car. In their world, nothing unexpected happens. They can be programmed fully and rationally, precisely because they must fulfil one single function at a time, in a known and simplified environment.

We are not insects or robots - but neither are we gods. If we were, we would be all knowing, all seeing, omnipotent. For such beings, nothing unexpected could happen. Everything would be subordinated to a grand design, and a rational will. Instead, we are somewhere in between, neither automata nor omnipotent beings. We act with a degree of voluntariness and rationality, but because we are not all knowing our actions often have consequences we do not anticipate. Moreover, we have not one grand design, but many rather smaller goals, which are not always clear cut or compatible with each other. Sometimes when we act in pursuit of one of them, something happens that is relevant to another. And, rather than being like ants whose interactions with other ants are programmed, people make arrangements in the tasks that they share with others, and these may turn our differently from any one person's plans.

To understand emotions, we need to know when and where we tend to experience them. In fact, we tend to experience them at just the points that happen frequently to higher animals including humans, but hardly ever to automata or gods. They arise when something unexpected happens, a situation to which we are not fully adapted, an event at which two different concerns clash, or when someone else does something more or less than we expected.

So we need some mechanism that can do three things. First, it must be able to handle interruptions and potential interruptions. It must signal when something urgent happens, or something that makes it necessary to abandon a plan, or when we must respond to some person with whom we have joint interests. At the same time, if we are doing something important to us, this same mechanism should screen out events of lower priority, and help us to continue with what we are doing.

Secondly, when a potential interruption does arise, the mechanism must be able to change priorities, and manage the problem of whether and how we should make a transition from one activity to another.

Thirdly, because some events are both important and unanticipated, we might want to reprogram ourselves in the light of whatever new knowledge we have acquired as a result of these events. This would be learning of a kind that is not just taking on specific data, but which involves making new plans or modifying existing goals. The mechanism must allow us to concentrate on reprogramming ourselves, even though the urgency of the moment has passed.

These functions correspond rather closely to what happens with emotions. Emotions happen when certain events affect our goals. Here we need to distinguish between emotions and moods. Emotions arise suddenly, and they last for seconds or minutes. Moods are emotional states that may be more vague, and they last for hours or days. The distinction between emotions and moods is like that between two types of muscular activity: contractions, which change the position of a limb, and muscle tone, which maintains posture. Discrete emotions are concerned with changing something, and moods with maintaining something.

Emotions have five salient characteristics: first, they usually include an involuntary urge to act; secondly, there is often some bodily perturbation; thirdly, there is usually distinctive conscious feeling; fourthly, recognisable expressions of emotion, such as smiling or frowning, occur; and fifthly, thoughts may come to mind involuntarily and may reverberate for some time. We can explain these five characteristics by the idea that emotions manage transitions, or potential transitions, between different goals and plans.

Focusing on the first of these characteristics, most theorists now agree that emotion must be understood in relation to action. Emotions involve readiness and involuntary predispositions to act. Philip Johnson-Laird, of the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge, and I have devised a cognitive theory to explain some of these issues. We propose that all our various emotions are based on just a few distinctive mental states that go with readiness for action, and that each is set off when we evaluate an event in relation to our goals.

We suggest that events are evaluated, consciously or unconsciously, in terms of the following categories: the achievement of minor goals in solving problems as they arise; the loss of a goal; the frustration of a plan or goal by some person or circumstance; a conflict of goals including conflict with a goal of self-preservation; and the perception that something or someone is noxious. Each evaluation produces a mental state that is a basic emotion. The nearest English terms are happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust.

If we are happy, we are ready to keep going with what we were doing, and we may adopt expressions such as smiling. If sad, we become ready to do nothing for a while, perhaps hoping to be rescued, or hoping to change our plans. Perhaps we cry. If angry, we prepare to make redress of some kind. If frightened, we may freeze, or prepare to flee, or perhaps even to fight. If disgusted, or experiencing the interpersonal form of disgust known as hatred, we withdraw and may sneer and belittle the person concerned.

The mechanism is not that of the fixed action pattern - the stereotyped behaviours performed by some animals in some situation. In a changeable environment, we could not be properly programmed in advance. But neither do we depend solely on ordinary thinking, which is slow and prone to error - in any case, we seldom have the necessary knowledge to come to a rational conclusion. Instead, evolution seems to have provided us with an intermediate mechanism that involves being able, at each juncture, to make ready one of several small repertoires of action.

The mechanism must enable us to evaluate a situation, to interrupt what we are doing, and to move towards actions that are appropriate to a recurring type of juncture. The mechanism simplifies the choices available to us. Then, once the moment of what to do immediately is passed, the same mechanism may prolong the state into a mood - a period in which we may think consciously about what has happened, and plan what to do next.

Although there are just five basic emotions, there is an indefinite number of specific emotions, each made up of the basic emotions plus information about what caused it, or to whom it is directed. So being in love is a kind of happiness directed towards another person, with sexual implications. Jealousy, on the other hand, is based either on hatred or perhaps on anger, and caused by a possibility of being displaced from a love relationship by a third person. Johnson-Laird and I believe that the semantics of nearly 600 English words for emotions can be understood in this way.

We propose that it has been cognitively efficient for people to be ready to evaluate events in these five basic ways, and that evolution has selected for these states. When events evoke any one of the five, appropriate habits and any genetically programmed instincts are made ready.

Take, for example, the initiation of fear: let us say that we use 'fear' for a discrete emotion, and 'anxiety' when it is prolonged into a mood. Some part of the whole cognitive system - everything that enables us to perceive and think - detects a danger. There may be no single thing to do that is best, no fixed action pattern. But on the other hand there is usually neither the time nor knowledge to think through the best course of action. So evolution has equipped us with an intermediate mechanism based on an emotion. The recognition of a danger, in relation to the concerns about ourselves that we have, triggers a state of fear which summons, as it were, a small suite of action patterns derived from genes and habit.

As Jeffrey Gray of the Institute of Psychiatry in London has proposed, the actions that are prompted include stopping what we were doing when we become fearful or anxious. We become ready to freeze, to flee or perhaps to fight. We check what we have done carefully. We monitor the environment assiduously, and we perhaps call on any special training we may have for the situation in question. One thing is certain: in an emergency or a fight, there is not much time to think and almost no chance that we would arrive at the best, 'god's eye', solution anyway. So instead we have this set of more general promptings that have apparently been successful in evolution.

What about the second characteristic - that emotions are often accompanied by bodily perturbations? We can probably understand this best by thinking that, just as action patterns are loaded in readiness, so too are the physiological mechanisms necessary for their support. So, if we may need to fight or run, the heart starts to pump faster, and the body shifts resources away from activities that can be suspended, such as digestion, towards the muscles. This kind of process is the best we can propose at present, but it is not fully satisfactory. It makes a poor showing, for instance, in explaining why we blush when we are embarrassed and find ourselves the focus of unwelcome attention.

The third characteristic is that each emotion also has a distinctive conscious feeling. Johnson-Laird and I think of it in terms of the emotion signal reaching the topmost module of the cognitive system, where the results of some of the processes become conscious. The system then interprets the signal consciously in a particular way - as a feeling of happiness, sadness or anger, say. We believe that the signal indicates that emotions are a kind of communication. In our conscious awareness of them, they are communications to ourselves. The distinctiveness of each emotion means that we can recognise it and then talk about it with other people, so allowing us to reach understandings that our animal ancestors could not. Hence our fascination with cultural elaborations of ideas about emotions in conversation, in novels and in plays.

According to this theory, emotions depend on processes that monitor our goals all the time, to assess whether they are contributing to an ongoing plan. From these monitoring processes, simple signals are sent out whenever progress toward any goal changes substantially, for better or worse. Like an alarm bell, the signal indicates that something has happened that demands attention. It also tells us what kind of thing the event is. But in itself, the simple signal does not say what caused it, nor exactly what to do about it.

One clue suggesting that there are several distinct signals of emotion is that emotions and moods sometimes happen without there being any meaning attached to them. In other words, they may occur simply as 'feelings' without necessarily having any particular content. Although this happens rarely, it is very significant. For instance, someone might feel - in Wordsworth's words - 'surprised by joy': the emotion of happiness may arise for reasons that no one can describe. In the same way, people sometimes suffer from so-called free-floating anxiety, a sense of utter dread that is nameless. They are unable to say what it is that they fear. Moreover, certain drugs, including popular illegal ones as well as those used as tranquillisers and antidepressants, can alter moods without changing events in the outside world. Such drugs act to induce a basic mood state, or alter its intensity. They further indicate that these states are probably based on distinctive physiological mechanisms involving hormones, peptides and neural pathways.

The signal of an emotion is simple and, in evolutionary terms, old. Its detailed structure is of no meaningful significance to the system, because the signal merely switches some cognitive functions on and others off, producing its distinctive conscious feeling. We call such signals nonpropositional. Each induces one of the five basic states of emotion, and each can happen in a free-floating way.

Usually, however, the nonpropositional emotion signal is accompanied by what we call propositional information, and the feeling is closely bound to information about what caused it, or to whom it is directed, or what we might do about it. Some emotions - for instance, those that involve some evaluation of the self, such as guilt, remorse and envy - cannot happen in a free-floating way because some aspect of the reason why they occur must be conscious. So, although we may suffer free-floating anxiety, a basic emotion of fear, without knowing why, we cannot feel embarrassed without knowing something about why. Embarrassment is fear or anxiety that includes the knowledge that we are the focus of attention.

As to the fourth salient characteristic, as well as being communications to ourselves, emotions also communicate to others. Many animals, including humans, communicate happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust to each other principally by expressions and gestures. Vocal communications of fear even have a special name in the study of animal behaviour - alarm calls. We know, too, that human facial expressions of these five basic emotions are recognisable across all the cultures that have been studied, and recent research also indicates that each emotion produces a different constellation of physiological effects.

The shape of my eyebrows when I frown does not say what I am angry about, nor does a look of sadness indicate what has been lost. But when communicated, such signals may have the effect of propagating an emotion within the cognitive system of the person receiving it. In empathy, the emotion is the same as that of the sender. When the emotion expressed is anger, it may have a complementary effect on someone else, inducing fear, or an escalatory effect, making the other person angry too. So emotion signals between people, like their internal counterparts, are simple. They are like a police or ambulance siren: the siren does not tell you what has happened, but if you are driving, it prompts you towards a simple action, to make way for the vehicle to pass.

The fifth salient characteristic of emotions is that we may find thoughts coming to mind that are difficult to stop, especially when emotions are prolonged into moods. So, when we are in love, we think obsessively about the loved one. If sad, we may not be able to get what happened out of mind. If anxious, we find it hard to do anything else except worry about what may happen and how we could make ourselves safe. If angry, we may plot revenge - indeed, some people may shape large parts of their lives around such plans.

Such driven patterns of thought, with their conscious feelings of emotion, indicate that we may enter into a maintained mood after the rapid interruption by the emotion. Moods of this kind seem to concentrate the attention, to ensure that we think about making sense of what has happened, construct new plans about what to do about it, and perhaps modify our goals in relation to the new events.

So emotions are not just useless vestiges of our evolutionary past. They remain important in human thinking about the world because action is typically influenced by many simultaneous goals, is directed without complete mental models of the world and involves coordination with other people. Because the world is not fully predictable, and because conflicting goals cannot always be reconciled either with ourselves or between people, human action can hardly ever be perfectly rational. So to argue that emotions are irrational, as Plato did, for instance, misses an important point: rational solutions to problems of human action are rarely possible. Emotions help us to act in a world that can be only imperfectly known. Then, where something has not gone as expected, a change in readiness to act may be followed by a longer lasting mental preoccupation in which we can concentrate on reprogramming the way we think about our lives.

These properties of emotions are a biological and cognitive solution to the problems of managing goals and plans. Some solution to these problems would be necessary for any intelligent being capable of planning actions in an imperfectly knowable world.

Keith Oatley is professor of psychology at the University of Glasgow and currently president of the psychology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This article is adapted from a British Association Lecture he gave at the first Edinburgh Science Festival in April 1989.

Further reading Keith Oatley and Philip Johnson-Laird, 'Towards a cognitive theory of emotions', Cognition and Emotions, vol 1, p 29.

How to make up your mind

2007-06-07T22:23:00.000+08:00

This is a news article from the New Scientist magazine about the science behind making a decision. It includes information about the various bias's that we are prone to.

3D Pictures and the Stroop Effect

2007-06-07T10:29:00.000+08:00

You will need some 3D glasses, or a red and green filter to see all the images.

Magic Eye Pictures

2007-06-07T10:28:00.000+08:00

Stare straight through this image for as long as it takes.
Do not focus on it, try and focus behind it.

The Frankfurter Experiment

2007-06-07T09:20:00.000+08:00

The Famous Frankfurter Experiment
The Famous Frankfurter Experiment demonstrates exactly how the eyes are used during parallel-viewing (Magic Eye 3D viewing). If this experiment is successful, you'll see a miniature frankfurter floating in the air as pictured above. Wow.

* You need to look into the distance for this, so turn away from the computer monitor.
* Pick a specific object in the distance. Aim your eyes at that target.
* While looking at that distant target, bring your index fingers, tips touching, up in front of your eyes and into your line of sight.
* While still aiming your eyes at the distant target, calmly notice that a mini-frank has appeared between the tips of your fingers. Do not allow the awesome beauty of the mini-frank to distract you and cause you to aim your eyes directly at it. Continue to aim your eyes into the distance at your target.
* Pull the tips of your fingers apart slightly and observe the frankfurter floating in the air.
* Wiggle your fingers and watch the mini-frank dance.

Remember how your eyes feel while performing this depth-defying frankfurter feat and you can apply the same skills to 3D viewing.

Electrosmog

2007-06-07T06:20:00.000+08:00

My war on electrosmog: Julia Stephenson sets out to clear the airwaves
How one woman fought back after being diagnosed by her naturopath with overexposure to Wi-Fi and mobile phone frequencies

A few months ago I noticed I was feeling dog-tired and drained all the time. Usually a good sleeper, I’d suddenly begun waking up early in the morning and finding myself unable to go back to sleep.

It wasn’t only me that was drooping. My once-lush plants had lost their lustre too. Ridiculous, considering how well I look after myself - and my plants.

I am well-doctored, to put it mildly. I probably consult more doctors than Woody Allen, who has separate screenings of his movies for his doctors. Everyone is entitled to a hobby; mine just happens to be my health, and what a fascinating hobby it is.

When at a loss to explain my new malaise, I visited my naturopath. It may sound unorthodox, but if it works, who cares?

She insisted that my exhaustion was caused by electromagnetic “smog” in my flat. The problem, she explained, is that our dependence on office and communications equipment (especially mobile phones and the masts needed to power them, as well as microwaves, computers and electrical equipment), exposes us to frequencies that can have a detrimental effect on our wellbeing, especially if we are run-down, or if our immune system is compromised in some way.

This made sense, as my symptoms had begun soon after installing wireless technology in my sitting room. Wireless (Wi-Fi) technology allows you to access emails and the internet anywhere in your living space. It’s convenient but I could live without it if meant having more physical energy. So I immediately turned off my wireless network and replaced it with broadband.

My naturopath is not alone in her concern. There is growing evidence that Wi-Fi technology is harmful. When the Swedish town of Götene activated their new Wi-Fi system in May 2006, within hours the local hospital emergency services were receiving calls from residents complaining of a number of symptoms: difficulty breathing, blurry vision, headaches and even cases of heart arrhythmia. On 23 May 2006, Sweden’s STV followed up the story on their current affairs programme “Debatt”.

The worldwide centre of the mobile phone industry, Sweden is where much of the research on environmental illness has been carried out. It was the first country to recognise electromagnetic hypersensitivity as a valid medical condition, and has set up a federal body to assist sufferers of those affected (www.feb.se). There have been calls for the Swedish government to close down the nation’s Wi-Fi networks, pending further investigation.

Those concerned about possible side-effects believe that our unprecedented exposure to electrical equipment, mobile phones and Wi-Fi mean that we are surrounded by a soup of electromagnetic smog at all times. In effect, we live in an electro-dictatorship: even if you haven’t voted for this technology by say, owning a mobile phone, you may still suffer the same effects as those who have. For example, although I’ve turned off my wireless access I can still tap in to my neighbour’s Wi-Fi downstairs.

Research being carried out by industry, the Government and academics has so far failed to find a persuasive link between mobile phone masts and health problems. The Department of Health and the Mobile Operators Association insist that British masts conform to international safety standards. A research group commissioned by the government-funded Health Protection Agency reported: “Exposure levels from living near to mobile phone base stations are extremely low and the overall evidence indicates they are unlikely to pose a risk to health.” But it continued: “Research has limitations and the possibility remains open that there could be health effects from exposure - hence continued research is needed.”

Many doctors are now convinced that this powerful technology is storing up huge problems for our future health. To date, 1,200 physicians in Germany, and 2,000 worldwide, have signed the Freiburger Appeal, a petition for severe restrictions on wireless technology. The doctors say they are seeing a dramatic increase in certain diseases and symptoms in their patients.

“Any imbalance in our electromagnetic field creates a disturbance in cell structure and function, which can lead to illness in sensitive individuals,” says London-based complementary health practitioner Dr Nicole de Canha.

Even cordless hands-free home telephones - such a boon to multitaskers, enabling one to patiently listen to friends and family for hours while cleaning cupboards, re-potting house plants and reorganising the CD collection - are now off-limits. Their electrical force-field is nearly as powerful as that of a mobile phone. Since I’m now chained to a phone on a lead, my cupboards are filthy and my friends are neglected. But at least I’m less radioactive.

It’s much harder to avoid mobile phone masts, however. Over the past 10 years they have sprouted all over the country to power the mobile phones owned by over 95 per cent of the population. To find out how close you live to a mast go to www.sitefinder.radio.gov.uk. The results may shock you: there are now 35,000 mobile phone masts in the UK, and chances are that several are in your immediate vicinity. It’s supposed that you are never more than 10 feet away from a rat in London; you may find yourself even closer to a phone mast.

Despite being implicated in a number of health problems - something that alarms parents of the one in 10 schools located close to masts - these masts need no planning permission and are often disguised in trees, petrol stations, shop signs, even church steeples. For instance, the support pole for the golden angel weathervane on Guildford Cathedral is actually a mobile mast, supporting several antennas. In return for access to the coveted hilltop site, the golden angel was regilded. It seems that even God cannot offer protection from this insidious pollution.

Fortunately there are steps that concerned individuals can take to reduce the amount of “electro-smog” to which they are subject. Like many people, I’m mobile-dependent, but I now use a headset that delivers sound through an air-filled wireless tube similar to a doctor’s stethoscope (but much smaller, so you don’t look like you’re on call). Conventional headsets transmit sound to the earpiece through a wire, but as wire is an electrical conductor it may also deliver radiation directly to your head. Since I’ve started using the tube I no longer experience headaches or a slight ringing in my ears.

You could also try the Q-Link pendant, which employs “sympathetic resonance technology,” something that the makers declare “repairs and tunes your biofield”. Friends who wear a Q-Link report that they feel healthier and more energetic.

The homeopathic medicine company, New Vistas, and the Australian flower essence company, Bush Flower Remedies, both make drops that claim to reduce the amount of radiation stored in the body.

Also, for the past two months I’ve been using an electro-magnetic field protection unit plugged into a wall at home. The device was created by engineer and homeopath Gary Johnson. Disturbed with the increasing number of patients coming to him with skin problems, exhaustion, blurred vision, and symptoms similar to chronic fatigue syndrome, he suspected that they might be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation (EMR).

“The heart of the unit is a programmed microprocessor unit that produces a holograph field that is amplified through an internal aerial system. This protection field protects the human system from the negative effects of EMR,” says Johnson. He says he has had great success in alleviating patients’ symptoms, and claims the unit offers unlimited protection from any negative electromagnetic emissions in a 700-square metre radius.

Professor Leif Salford, of Sweden’s Lund University, has been researching the effects of phone masts for 15 years. He says that exposure to radiation emitted by mobile phones and masts can destroy cells in the parts of the brain responsible for memory, movement and learning, and calls mankind’s dependence on mobile phones “the world’s largest biological experiment ever”.

As yet, no one knows what price we will pay for our dependence on modern technology.

Additional research by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, USA (www.niehs.nih.gov) and the Office of Communications, the independent regulator for the UK communications industries (www.ofcom.org.uk)

How to block the rays

* Magnetic field protection boxes start at £235 and are available from www.subtlefieldtechnologies.com

* Q-Link pendants cost from £70 at www.qlinkworld.co.uk

* Anti-radiation mobile phone headsets are available at www.rf3now.com or the Sloane Health Shop, London SW3 (020 7730 7046)

* Australian Bush Flower Essences can be found at www.ausflowers.com.au

I should add that I feel it is unacceptable for anyone in the comments to be rude about people who suffer with symptoms; however this is a journalist writing in a newspaper, both should take responsibility for what they print, and so the science content of the article is very very much fair game.
environment.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/article2600308.ece

Mobile Phones & Electrosensitivity

2007-06-07T06:16:00.000+08:00

The Independent has put its green columnist Julia Stephenson on to Panorama's Wi-Fi scare story: a charming beef heiress living in Chelsea on a trust fund, who believes her symptoms of tiredness and headache are caused by electromagnetic radiation from phones and Wi-Fi.

The most important background for any "electrosensitivity" story is the issue of the "provocation studies". These are simple. Sufferers explain that they can tell when they are exposed to, say, a mast, a computer monitor, or a phone, because their symptoms get worse.

So in a provocation study, an electrosensitive person sits in a room with the source of electromagnetic waves hidden from view: they don't know whether it is switched on or not.

There have been 36 such studies published to date. This is very active work. This field has not been neglected. Thirty-three have shown that the subjects were unable to tell if the signal was present or absent, and the other three were flawed, as I have previously explained (references at badscience.net). Could the Independent and Panorama have deliberately ignored these, in the name of propagating their scare, and selling themselves? But the reality is clear. The symptoms of electrosensitivity are real, and deserve our compassion, but they seem not to be caused by electromagnetic signals.

Instead of this useful information (were the researchers wasting their time?) the Independent article was filled with ludicrous false information and claims. Since giving up her cordless phone, she has become "less radioactive".

Britain is full of masts because 95% of the population own a phone (including infants and pensioners?). "You are never more than 10 feet away from a rat in London; you may find yourself even closer to a phone mast."

Not with 35,000 masts in a country of almost 100,000 square miles. Masts are "disguised in trees". How cruel. I could go on.

But with the treatment options it really kicks off. First, she recommends the Q-link pendant from two weeks ago (the pseudo-electronic medical device flogged by vitamin pill entrepreneur Patrick Holford). Then she talks about claimed remedies to "reduce the amount of radiation stored in the body". Excellent news. And they're described as "detox" remedies, so presumably the "radiation" stored over the years in your body is suddenly expelled in one big dollop. Duck!

And lastly there is her "electro-magnetic field protection unit", created by engineer and homeopath Gary Johnson. "The heart of the unit is a programmed microprocessor unit that produces a holograph [sic] field that is amplified through an internal aerial system ... He claims the unit offers unlimited protection from any negative electromagnetic emissions in a 700 square metre [sic] radius."

If Gary really has found a way to cancel out any electromagnetic signal with a special beam then the military will be keen to talk to him, but since a "holograph" is a document written entirely in the handwriting of the person whose signature it bears, and a sphere cannot have a radius measured in "square metres", I'm not too sure Julia knows her arse from his elbow.

It's also hard to see how being emotionally positive or negative can be a property of a wave, and how his device could identify this. Perhaps the answer is to be found in an episode of He-man and the Masters of the Universe called The Revenge of Evil from 1986: "Something is wrong with the powers of Grayskull: there are strange negative energies that surround it and it looks as if it is burning! ... He-Man uses his sword and sucks the power back into himself, even transforming the negative energy into positive. The balance is restored, and the evil clone fades away."

People who believe their symptoms are related to exposure to electromagnetic fields are almost certainly mistaken - I would now say misled - about the cause, but they are very right about their symptoms.

Symptoms are real, they are subjective, some people experience them very severely, and this is real distress that deserves our compassion. Alternatively, you could cynically exploit them - and mislead them, and frighten them - to sell your quack products, your newspaper, your TV show, and your freelance articles.

I'm not judging. I'm simply laying out the alternatives.

Mobile Phones & Nocebo

2007-06-07T06:13:00.000+08:00

Short, and let's hope sweet: a new study in Norway double-blind tested 17 people who'd said that mobile phones affected them.

After 65 pairs of sham and real tests, the researchers concluded that

the study gave no evidence that RF fields from mobile phones may cause head pain or discomfort or influence physiological variables. The most likely reason for the symptoms is a nocebo effect.

"Nocebo" being the opposite of placebo: something harmless that you believe is harming you. Nocebo effects are real, as the symptoms of the sufferers are (as Bad Science's Ben Goldacre repeats whenever he deals with this). It's the cause of the symptoms that remains unidentified; this study makes a total of 37 "provocation" studies that have shown no effect apart from nocebo from mobile phones.

The study wasn't any quick'n'easy one either: each test took two hours, and participants were asked to note symptoms occurring up to seven hours afterwards.

And more fun:

The increase in severity [of symptoms] was slightly higher with sham exposure than with RF exposure for pain/discomfort as well as for headache and other symptoms. For no symptom was the difference statistically significant.

The present study demonstrates that exposure to RF fields from GSM 900 mobile phones does not cause pain or discomfort in the head or other symptoms, even in individuals carefully selected according to the criterion of a specific sensitivity to mobile phone use.

We'd like to think that this would help people ease off the scare stories, but our hopes have been repeatedly dashed on this one...
By Charles Arthur - The Guardian

Ali G on Science, Creationism & Evolution

2007-06-05T20:16:00.000+08:00

Creation Museum on Channel 4 News

2007-06-05T20:14:00.000+08:00

More Hitchens on Rev. Falwell

2007-06-05T20:07:00.000+08:00

Hitchens on the death of the Reverend Jerry Falwell

2007-06-05T19:54:00.000+08:00

Creation Museum on TV

2007-06-05T19:38:00.000+08:00

Creation Museum Home Page

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

2007-05-30T19:41:00.000+08:00

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

I consider myself a rational person. When I have a question, I turn to science and logic to find the answer. Regarding the origins of life,...

I consider myself a rational person. When I have a question, I turn to science and logic to find the answer. Regarding the origins of life, science tells us that humans evolved from single-celled organisms to our current form through a process of natural selection that took billions of years.

This much is clear to anyone with any background in modern thinking. We can look at the fossil record and trace many of our genetic traits back to ancient species. In fact, scientific reasoning can explain nearly every stage of life from the Big Bang to the present day. I say "nearly" because the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those religious nut cases who denies that evolution is real. Of course evolution is real, just not during the "Triassic period."

This so-called Triassic period saw the formation of scleractinian corals and a slight changeover from warm-blooded therapsids to cold-blooded archosauromorphs. Clearly, such breathtakingly subtle modifications could only have been achieved by an active intelligence.

The secular Triassicists would have you believe that these changes were just the result of millions of years of nature favoring certain genes over others in order to adapt, the same way evolution worked prior to the Triassic. Obviously, that doesn't make any sense. Think about it: I'm supposed to believe that the same process that we know slowly changed us from simple bacteria into highly advanced reptiles over the course of the Paleozoic era is also responsible for turning us into highly advanced reptiles with different body lengths? Do these people ever pause to think how ridiculous they sound as they advance these theories?

For a half-dozen million years, life advanced from prokaryotes to primitive fish to mammal-like reptiles via natural selection, and we're supposed to believe that that just continued happening? I don't think so. Isn't it much more likely that a formless, invisible deity intervened, temporarily stopped the course of evolution, and shaped each and every trilobite over a period of six days? Of course it is, at least to any objective observer.

So, if you follow my reasoning to its logical end, the only sound conclusion is that, at some point, God paused evolution and stepped in, made a few modifications, and boom! Pterosaurs. There is simply no way evolution alone could be responsible for the giant leap between archosaurs and other, different archosaurs with better developed hip joints and slightly differently shaped teeth.

Everything about the Triassic period points to divine involvement. Let me ask you this: Could some kind of random genetic chance make the population of shelled cephalopods grow significantly? No, of course not. So the only logical explanation is that there was an infinite and all-knowing cephalopod creator who modified their mollusk foot into a muscular hydrostat that eventually, on the sixth day, became a tentacle.

So, when I tell you that after the Paleozoic era, Ceratodon lungfish became relatively common, it naturally follows that someone created that lungfish by hand and then took out one of its lungfish ribs and combined it with the dust of the Earth to create a female lungfish.

In the beginning, there were a few billion years of speciation and gene drift. And then nothing. And then, God made the lungfish and the trilobites, the ichthyosaurs and ammonoids with more complex suture patterns. He also made a couple new ferns.

And the Lord saw that these slight modifications were good, and allowed evolution to resume as normal in the Jurassic period and on up to the present day.

Now that I've inarguably proven the truth, we need to take a stand against these pseudoscientists who are misrepresenting 300-million-year-old fossils as 230-million-year-old fossils and claiming the Earth is 44 million years and 51 weeks older than it really is.

We need to get the Triassic period expunged from our public schools' evolutionary textbooks. I don't want my children to be exposed to this blasphemous Triassic garbage, and I assume you don't want your children to be, either. They need to know that God is watching over them always, and that he has a plan for each and every one of them—a nonlinear, probabilistic plan he set in motion more than three billion years ago with single-celled organisms, ended with a group of small, lizard-like herbivores, infused with a bunch of miracles, and then restarted.

We can no longer ignore the empirical evidence.

Perspective tricks at the Science Museum in HK

2007-05-29T06:40:00.000+08:00