Monthly Archives: October 2009

Energy, chiropractic, and pseudo-science

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I dislike many of the colloquial uses of the word “energy.” Some expressions such as “he’s low on energy” are fine, but others, like “the energy in the room” or “the energy she emanates,” are on thin ice, metaphors that stretch the precise physical and physiological definitions of the term. And then there’s “positive” and “negative” energies, red flags that we’ve entered pseudo-scientific territory where words obscure rather than clarify. These terms are usually meant to convey concepts of optimism and wholesomeness or pessimism and dysfunction, respectively—perfectly valid concepts but for the mystical trappings that come by vaguely misappropriating the scientific term “energy.”

The expression that I viscerally loathe, though, is “life energy.” What the hell is that? It is vague and slippery, and just when I can convince myself that a given use of it is metaphorical, I find out that it is taken quite literally and used as though it were a physical reality. Yet nowhere have I seen it defined, much less measured objectively and explained.

These were the thoughts running through my head as I sat through a presentation for patients and their partners on the benefits of chiropractic. The event was supposed to get me on board with the program used to treat Knox’s recent aches, but it accomplished just the opposite: incensed by the pseudo-science, I did some cursory research and came to the conclusion that chiropractic is overpriced physical therapy at best, and snake oil at worst.

I’ll be brief in my rant. Here are some of the elements of the talk that disturbed me:

  • The scare tactics and cynicism. The practitioner claimed that the leading cause of death in America is medical error (this is plausibly true, i.e. not immediately falsifiable on the web), and, oh, by the way, these errors kill more people daily than 9/11 (appeal to emotion). Hospitals don’t want to prevent disease (no proof given) because that would drive business down 28% (whereas of course you’re much better off committing to an expensive chiropractor instead).

  • The attempts to get the audience agreeing to the cynicism and facile criticism of the status quo. “Why do you think more people are dying of cancer now than they were fifty years ago?,” he asked us. He didn’t seem to appreciate my reply: “Uhm, because they’re not dying of other things earlier?”

  • The lines of “life energy” flowing through your nervous system and being constricted if you are misaligned. “Could you function at 40% energy?”

  • The brain as the battery from which all “life energy” flows.

  • The assertion that organs degenerate if their supply of “life energy” is obstructed. Conveniently ignored are the people in comas or with spinal cord injuries, whose other organs are just fine, thank you very much, except perhaps for atrophy from lack of use.

I realize different practitioners might emphasize these points to different degrees, or not at all, but this whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth (and I felt embarrassed to be giving my implicit endorsement by my presence—hence this expiating blog entry). And let me emphasize: his use of “life energy” was very clearly meant to be literal and not metaphorical. Politeness, and a desire not to waste more of my time, prevented me from asking him to define the term precisely.

The Wikipedia entry for chiropractic reveals that its origins were based on dogma rather than empiricism (arguably, so were ancient medicine’s, but it’s advanced beyond that and the original chiropractors should have known better by then), and that there is a schism among practitioners between the “straights” (the more mystical) and the “mixers” (supposedly more open to mainstream medicine, though if my experience is representative, not enough).

Anyway, I’m open to the possibility that chiropractic might have some benefits, but not for the pseudo-scientific reasons they conjure. The benefits would be due to just having physical therapy stretch your muscles and improve your skeletal alignment in the right(?) ways, and possibly due to the placebo effect. Hey, if you’re emotionally and financially invested in the alternative therapy, you’re going to want it to work, right?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and thus far I have seen nothing to convince me that chiropractic has an understanding of physiology that even threatens that of mainstream medicine.

UPDATE (2009.10.21): eSkeptic further debunks chiropractic.

The Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes

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Formerly an old mining railway, the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes makes for leisurely, scenic biking. So leisurely, in fact, that while on the trail itself I actually biked without a helmet! Try that on the Burke-Gilman, let alone city streets!

The one catch is that the the ground underneath and around the trail is, uhm, heavily polluted with the heavy metals and other poisons used to extract silver from the mines. No wandering off the trail and certainly no eating picked apples!

At the end of this trail, we got on the Northern Pacific Trail and biked all the way to Montana and back. Upon finishing this multi-day bike tour and getting back to our starting point, Plummer, we drove back to Spokane to spend time at our favorite fire lookout.

Picture coming soon…


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The Drunkard’s Walk

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We’ve been discussing more and more in my office the idea that secondary education ought to require a course in probability and statistics more urgently than a course in calculus. Yes, calculus is fascinating and elegant, a true achievement of the human mind, but unless students continue pursuing science or engineering, they probably won’t use it again. I’m a big proponent of philosophia, learning for learning’s sake, but just as basic survival comes before luxuries, so too ought basic intellectual skills to come before broader learning. And what could be more basic than critical thinking to correctly interpret, analyze, and debunk the constant stream of marketing claims, political half-truths, and plain old misinformation that are presented with the veneer of scientific and mathematical certainty?

For example, say that, absent any risk factors, you take an HIV test that comes back positive. Your doctor tells you there are 999 chances out of 1000 that you will be dead within a decade, based on the 1/1000 false positive rate. What do you do? Most people might panic. If you are Leonard Mlodinow, though, you learn from the CDC that the a priori infection rate in your cohort is 1/10000, and correctly recalculate the odds that you really are infected after the test to be 1/11. (Do you see how?) Big difference!

These are the types of anecdotes that abound in Mlodinow’s acclaimed book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. The book’s approach is narrative, focusing on the various historical figures and events that led to advances in probability and statistics, and explaining some interesting probabilistic brain teasers, such as the Monty Hall problem. The final chapter touches on the role of chance and perseverance in personal success (à la Outliers).

Mlodinow explains a few concepts, such as sample spaces and Pascal’s triangle, and talks about (but does not explain in any technical depth) others, such as combinatorics and Bayesian statistics. In this regard, I found the book a bit lacking, but I am probably not the target demographic, being mathematically savvy, having studied some of these concepts before, and going through a wannabe-amateur-statistician phase.

Where the book excels is in illustrating why an understanding of probability and statistics is so important. If it leads to more students choosing or being required to learn about these fields, it will have done its job.