Category Archives: Science in society

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 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.

Why People Believe Weird Things

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Humanist. Agnostic. Atheist. I always stumble a bit when asked about how I view the world, generally preferring to appear matter-of-fact than antagonistic. Perhaps the best moniker to capture my desired view of the world is “skeptic.”

What makes a skeptic? An outlook on the world based on the scientific method: the accumulation of empirical evidence and the continuous testing, retesting, rejection, and modification of hypotheses in light of that evidence. Scientists are human, too, and may be led astray by their own biases and quirks, but science is a long-term progressive process aimed at pruning away these false starts and tangents and leaving a coherent, predictive interpretation on matters of fact.

More skepticism would make our society better, I believe. As readers of this blog know, one of my major irritations is the sway that pseudoscience continues to hold. I am a staunch believer in freedom of conscience, so I don’t much care, for example, if people choose to be theists. What I mind is the use of superstition as a substitute for facts and rationality in areas where it matters, like public policy. You want to believe God created the universe in seven days? Fine by me. You want to pass that off as science in the schools? Unacceptable.

It was with delight, then, that I just finished reading Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. Shermer is the director of the Skeptics Society, a group dedicated precisely to debunking anti- and pseudo-scientific thinking, particularly in the public sphere (see this TED talk, for example). His book is a good analysis of the distinctions between science and pseudoscience and brief overview of some of the major battle lines in this front of the culture wars: the paranormal, near-death experiences, alien encounters, witch crazes, cults, creationism, and Holocaust denial.

In Chapter 3, Shermer talks about “how thinking goes wrong” for both scientists and lay folk alike, and how legitimate science attempts to self-correct in the face of these errors. Here’s his list, with my own annotations:

  1. Theory influences observations
  2. The observer changes the observed
  3. Equipment constructs results
  4. Anecdotes do not make a science. And yet so many people cite them as the bais for their beliefs.
  5. Scientific language does not make a science. This is a major pet peeve of mine, people invoking the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality to justify all sorts of mumbo-jumbo.
  6. Bold statements do not make claims true
  7. Heresy does not equal correctness
  8. Burden of proof [is on the outsider seeking to overturn the accepted and proven scientific paradigm]
  9. Rumors do not equal reality
  10. Unexplained is no inexplicable. This is what really gets me about so-called Intelligent Design: I can’t think of how this complex structure could possibly have evolved, therefore it couldn’t have evolved, therefore there’s a designer.
  11. Failures are rationalized. Failures advance science, but tend to be ignored in pseudoscience.
  12. After the fact reasoning. *Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”
  13. Coincidence. “Synchronicity” my ass. It’s simple probability.
  14. Representativeness. The human tendency to remember hits and ignore misses keeps psychic hotlines in business.
  15. Emotive words and false analogies
  16. Ad ignorantiam. “If you can’t disprove it, it is proven”— the complete opposite of science. Applies to God , psychics, etc.
  17. Ad hominem and tu quoque
  18. Hasty generalization
  19. Overreliance on authorities
  20. Either-or. “If your theory is wrong, then mine must be right.” Is it supported by facts? What about alternatives?
  21. Circular reasoning
  22. Reductio as absurdum and slippery slope
  23. Effort inadequacies and the need for certainty, control, and simplicity. Critical thinking requires training and work.
  24. Problem-solving inadequacies. We tend to seek supporting rather than contrary evidence for our views.
  25. Ideological immunity, or the Planck problem. As the old school dies out, new practitioners are better able to evaluate and embrace what were once revolutionary ideas.

[Shermer also has a chapter at the end on "Why smart people believe weird things," where he cites intellectual attribution bias ("my choices are rational, but your choices are swayed by irrational beliefs") and confirmation bias ("I block out contrary evidence.")]

I highly recommend this book as a skeptic’s manifesto and a reminder that we are not alone in fighting and bemoaning the ignorance around us. I will leave you with an inspirational quote from chapter 15 attributed to Alfred Kinsey (of sex research fame). This is a quote that I found a bit tangential to the points in the book, but which I like for the (perhaps unjustified) hope that with more skepticism perhaps we can make society more supportive of human dignity and differences:

Prescriptions are merely public confessions of prescriptionists. What is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life. The range of individual variation, in any particular case, is usually much greater than what is generally understood…. And yet social forms and moral codes are prescribed as though all individuals were identical; and we pass judgements, make awards, and heap penalties without regard to the diverse difficulties involved when such different people face uniform demands.

Gay Genetics

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You can look up studies on the genetics of homosexuality using the OMIM website. What jumps out of this collection of studies is that, for males, the genetic link appears to come through the mother (X chromosome) and that boys with older siblings are more likely to be gay. Interesting.

I learned about this through the NY Times Tierney lab. As seems to be the case every time I bother to look (is it sampling bias?), reader comments on newspaper blogs degenerate into the tangential, irrelevant, and specious. Sigh.

Terra: Self-destruct sequence activated

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Remember Jim Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? He was the one that the Bush administration tried to silence after he gave a public warning that the current rate of fossil fuel use will make the earth into “a different planet.”

Hansen’s work is the subject of an article in Technology Review that explains how danegrously close we are to the point of no return. Look at this graph. It appears that every 100,000 years, small oscillations in the earth’s orbit cause minute changes in the amount of, and larger changes in the distribution of, sunlight on the earth. These changes caused natural fluctuactions in carbon dioxide levels, which in turn led to temperature fluctuations on the order of 5°C, enough to change ocean levels by 100 meters. It appears we are in the middle of such a natural fluctuation right now.

Now look at the very right edge of the graph. Carbon dioxide levels have skyrocketed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is clearly not part of any natural cycle– and is a harbinger of dire consequences:

Owing to greenhouse changes we have already incurred, Hansen told his audience in San Francisco, Earth’s temperature will rise about 0.5 ºC in the next 50 years even if we stop burning fossil fuels today. We’re on a slippery slope: we could cross a threshold that leads to a drastically different planet, half a century before knowing that we’ve done so. Hansen believes we are horrifyingly close to such a threshold, and that we will cross it if we don’t change our greenhouse ways within the next few years.

Earth is now passing upward through the highest temperatures of the past 12,000 years, and the half a degree that is already in the pipeline will bring temperatures within half a degree of the high points they have reached only a few times in the past two million years. During a warm period about 120,000 years ago, for example, sea levels were probably five or six meters higher than they are today.

Running future emissions scenarios on a GISS computer model, Hansen finds that if we remain on the path he calls “business as usual,” temperatures will rise between two and three degrees this century, making Earth as warm as it was about three million years ago, when the seas were between 15 and 35 meters higher than they are today. There go many major cities and the dwellings of about half a billion people.

The current issue of Technology Review is dedicated to the climate crisis and how the technologies exist to slow down human-induced climate change: time is running out, but it’s not too late yet.

Finally, to the skeptics who refuse to accept these conclusions and are happy to proceed with business as usual, I offer this: No one debates that modern technological advances, and in particular industrialization, change the environment (think strip mining, deforestation) and pollute the atmosphere (think smokestacks) and the oceans (think chemical effluvia). Surely all those byproducts will have some sort of effect, don’t you think? It’s not impossible that the scientists who have spent countless careers studying these phenomena could be wrong, but are you willing to take the chance that maybe, just maybe, they’re right? If we as a species clean up after ourselves and leave the natural world no worse than we found it, then, and only then, can we rest assured that climate fluctuations are not due to our activities.