Tag Archives: pseudo-science

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 Power of Now

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One of my pursuits these days is the cultivation of mindfulness. Life is rich and helter-skelter. Only by living in each fleeting now, it seems, is there hope of appreciating a journey that is already accelerating to its eventual conclusion. Existential crisis? Perhaps, but fairly benign as those go.

It was with some anticipation, then, that I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s acclaimed The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment. I tried to slog through it, really I did, but there was too little psychological wheat to be salvaged from all the pseudo-scientific chaff that pervades the book.

What am I talking about? Vague references to “vibrational frequencies” that, when elevated by mindfulness, allow one to not be affected by “negativity.” Ok, I can bend over backwards and internally translate this as a metaphor of psychological states one can reach and imagery that can take one there. But then he also rails against “thought” and “mind” trapping us and being the obstacles from which we must seek liberation. I don’t buy it; it is ego and anxiety and fixation on the past and future that bind us, and careful thought can often be a liberating tool. We probably do need to take a break from being analytical all the time—but the blanket statment that rationality is an obstacle to enlightenment hardly follows from that in my book, and that is a distinctinion Tolle makes hapharzadly at best. Sloppy language, in fact, pervades the book: Tolle’s statements that past and present don’t really exist certainly are phrased to explicitly mean that physical time is illusory, but then he inconsistently backtracks from this solipsism by occasionally making reasonable distinctions between “wall” and “psychological” time.

What else? The kicker is his use of pseudoscientific jargon in ways that are clearly not meant to be taken metaphorically (or if they are, they constitute a reckless indulgence in the fallacy of equivocation): “As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular structure actually becomes less dense.” As a scientist, engineer, and humanist, I cannot just let that slide.

What is left after ignoring, sighing, or eye-rolling through the pseudo-science is nothing that I haven’t encountered elsewhere: One must get beyond ego. While there’s no need to be passive, one must accept what is. Wherever you are, be there. I was hoping perhaps there would be some concrete practical guides to mindfulness practice, but no. It’s just your standard breathing practice and everyday presence, and more description of what mindfulness is rather than how to get it.

I’ve found better mindfulness books that are practical, focused, and secular. Jon Kabat Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are is one; Mindfulness in Plain English is another. They seem mostly (but certainly not exclusively) focused on sitting practice, for which I struggle and fail to set aside time. I seem to be leaning more towards “everyday mindfulness,” re-focusing on the wide-eyed wonder and joy that I felt not that long ago when everyday life was (or just seemed) less hectic.