Paranormal and Pseudoscience Readings
Famous Paranormal Hoaxes: Crop Circles, Loch Ness, and Bigfoot
Many people believe that we are surrounded by paranormal, supernatural, mysterious, and unexplained phenomena.
29% of Americans think they have been in contact with someone who has died.
20% think they have seen a ghost.
50 % of Americans claim to have had a mystical experience.
24% believe in reincarnation.
26% believe in spiritual energy in mountains, trees or crystals.
25% believe in astrology.
38% believe in evil spirit possession.
16% believe in the “evil eye” or hexes.
In a recent poll in England, over 4% report believing in werewolves.
We often hear in the news, on television, or elsewhere that a group of church goers have witnessed an apparition of the blessed virgin Mary, that a local house is haunted, that someone was saved from a horrible accident by the providence of a guardian angel, or that someone possesses psychic abilities. In Elk Grove in 2005, members of a local church found what appeared to be blood dripping from the eyes of a stature of the Virgin Mary. The tears reappeared for several days. Many enthusiastic and faithful believers flocked to the site, placing flowers and observing religious rituals in deference to the event. The prevalence, popularity, and frequency of these stories about paranormal events seem to lend some credibility to them; how or why would so many people be lying about such a thing? And when so many normal people believe with such conviction it is difficult to see how they could be mistaken or deceived.
What we often do not hear about in these paranormal cases is what is revealed in the follow up or additional investigation of the phenomena. Finding out that one of these spectacular stories is in fact a hoax does not capture the hearts or minds of viewers and readers, and the media have much less interest in reporting that there was actually nothing exciting, unusual, or inexplicable about a phenomena that was alleged to be extraordinary.
But in fact, a number of the most famous cases of alleged paranormal or supernatural events have been demonstrated to be hoaxes, and we can learn some valuable lessons from the follow up on those stories. As appealing as stories of the paranormal are, there is a natural explanation to be found for those with clear, careful minds.
In the 1970 and 1980s, farmers around Southhampton, England began to find enormous, complicated patterns stamped down in their wheat fields.
The patterns were remarkably regular and striking to the eye, particularly from the air. The wheat was bent over in neat, even waves to form nearly perfect circles, lines, and other shapes. The local news stations, citizens, amateur paranormal investigators, and many other people became very excited about the phenomena. People argued that the patterns had been formed by formerly unknown weather vortices, landing alien space ships, gravity field fluctuations, unusual tornadoes, and a host of other extraordinary phenomena. Over the years, patterns of increasing complexity and beauty continued to appear in fields in the region.
In 1991, two men from Southhamption, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, publicly announced that they were in fact responsible for the crop circles that had been occurring for 15 years. While drinking glasses of stout in a local pub and discussing UFO reports which they thought were fabrications and mistakes, they dreamed up a method for making the crop circles using ropes and a board with a loop of rope for a handle. Their goal was to illustrate just how gullible people are and how eager they are to believe in paranormal phenomena.
To stamp out a circle, one of them would hold the rope at a center point while the other one held the other end and rotated in a circle. By stepping carefully, and working outward from the center, they were able to create swirling patterns that hid their tracks and seemed to be beyond any human abilities. They attached a small wire sighting gauge like a gun sight to the brim of their baseball hats and by spotting a distant landmark such as a barn or tree, they could stamp out remarkably straight lines to compliment their circles. As the years progressed, their skills improved, their patterns got more complicated. Doug and Dave were delighted when numerous paranormal researchers insisted that the patterns were far too regular, large, and elaborate to have been created by any humans. The craze caught on and people all over the world began imitating Doug and Dave’s nocturnal art projects. There is now even an annual competition in England to see who can construct the best crop circle pattern. Despite Doug and Dave’s confession, believers have still insisted that there are too many crop circles, in too many places, and that many of them are beyond human ability. The enthusiasts are reluctant to admit it, and many people still insist that the phenomena is paranormal, but it would appear that crop circles are a hoax.
The persistence of belief in many people in the paranormal explanation is significant; even after Bower and Chorley confessed and publicly demonstrated how they made crop circles, lots of believers invested a great deal of time and effort into arguing that the crop circles still must have a paranormal explanation. Going to such lengths to salvage the paranormal explanation over the natural one indicates that the desire to believe in spooky, supernatural, unusual, or extreme causes is often more powerful than our ability to reason clearly.
Consider another case. In 1933, a surgeon and colonel, Robert Wilson, was visiting a remote loch in the Scottish highlands when he took a now famous picture of a mysterious shape on the lake.
When enlarged, the picture seemed to reveal a creature’s head rearing up from the cold, dark waters of the deep lake. In the years that followed, this pictured spurred a flurry of activity in Loch Ness, stimulating expeditions, sonar surveys, film projects, scuba investigations, and countless visits to the lake in search of the Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie as it became known. Wilson's picture seemed to spawn a host of other sightings of nessie. More blurry photos came to light. Lots of visitors began testifying that they too had seen the monster. In fact, many people went to Loch Ness with the sole purpose in mind of seeing the monster. They arrived at the lake excited and primed with powerful expectations that there was a monster lurking in the waters, and not surprisingly many of them went away claiming to have experiences that fulfilled those expectations.
In 1993, two Loch Ness researchers, David Martin and Alastair Boyd tracked down a lead on the picture to Christian Spurling, who was now 90 years old and dying. Spurling admitted that he had collaborated with Duke Wetherall 60 years earlier to construct a plastic and wood head over the body of a toy submarine. Wetherall was pursuing a vendetta to embarrass the British newspaper, The Daily Mail. The neck on the toy monster was a mere 8 inches long, even though other Nessie investigators had insisted that it must be over three feet long. They also discovered that Wetherall was responsible for stamping fake Nessie foot prints in the mud on the bank of the Loch with a baby hippo foot that was probably part of an umbrella stand. One of the most celebrated and allegedly sound pieces of evidence for the existence of the Loch Ness Monster was also a hoax.
Consider another case: In 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin went into the northern California woods of Bluff Creek, armed with film equipment and planning to gathering photographic evidence for the existence of Bigfoot, a legendary 7 feet tall hairy biped that was alleged to live in the woods of the Pacific northwest. Their expedition appeared to be a success when they returned with film footage of the creature walking across an open glade. In the jumpy and brief piece of film shot from about 100 yards, the creature takes several large strides away from the camera, pauses to look back, and then disappears into the woods. Again, paranormal enthusiasts and Bigfoot researchers embraced the film, proclaiming it to be definitive authentic evidence that Bigfoot exists. Sightings of Bigfoot soared as did the flagging sales of Patterson’s previously published book on Bigfoot. A few doubters suggested that it was a man in a monkey suit. Patterson died 5 years later of cancer. In March of 1992, Bob Gimlin admitted that he might have been fooled. He said it was possible that Roger concocted the whole thing and Bob was an unknowing eyewitness to an elaborate hoax. Another rumor that has circulated for years, and been corroborated by John Landis, the famous movie director, was that a special effects man named John Chambers, of the Planet of the Apes movies fame, designed the suit for the hoax.
Another man, Harry Kemball, has come forward and confessed that he was present in the film editing room when Patterson and his friends put together the Bigfoot film. Kemball says, “they all laughed and joked about the rental of the gorilla costume and the construction of the bigfeet. One of his extra tall buddies played the role of Bigfoot. They carefully chose muddy ground so that the footprints would expand.” Kemball says that they shook the camera, filmed out of focus, and subjected the film to processing that would add to the mystery and deception of the hoax.
In 1999, the Associated Press reported that a Yakima, Washington man claimed to be the one who wore the fur suit in Patterson-Gimlin movie of the sasquatch. Fearing legal reprisals from the owners of the film or others because of the hoax, the man remained anonymous and spoke through a lawyer, Barry M. Woodard, to the Yakima Herald-Republic. The 58-year-old man contacted the lawyer and passed a polygraph test to verify his story.
While none of these testimonials are decisive, they are highly suggestive that the famed Patterson Bigfoot film, which has been the cornerstone of the case for Bigfoot’s existence, is also a hoax.
A brighter light has also been directed at another famous part of the evidence surrounding Bigfoot. In August, 1958 in Humboldt County, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew found prints of huge bare feet in the mud surrounding his bulldozer. Crew worked for Wallace Construction. The local newspaper, The Humboldt Times in Eureka, California ran a sensational story about the discovery and came up with the name, "Bigfoot."
Contrary to popular mythology, there had been no stories about a giant ape-like creature lurking in the woods of the Pacific northwest until this story ran. After that report, just like the Loch Ness case, similar stories began to pop up everywhere. Other people found prints in the mud, saw Bigfoot, heard Bigfoot, took pictures (always blurry and indistinct) of Bigfoot, and even filmed the hairy monster. In 2002 when Ray Wallace, the owner of Wallace Construction, died, his family came out with a shocking revelation. Wallace had faked the original footprints with huge fake feet that strapped onto his boots. And after the story took off and became a popular urban myth, Wallace would go regularly to make more prints. Taking great pleasure in the hoax, he even offered huge cash rewards for a captured Bigfoot. His family had known about the hoax for all those years, but had remained silent and enjoyed the flurry of paranormal "investigations" that surrounded the lie. And apparently, Wallace's hoax caught on, just like crop circles. In 1982, a retired Washington State logger, Rant Mullens, claimed he contributed to the legend of the Bigfoot of Mt. St. Helens by walking in the woods with huge wooden feet strapped to his shoes to leave large footprints.
After the Wallace family revealed their secret, enthusiastic believers were quick to argue their case. Like the crop circles, they argued that no human could have made the prints, there were too many footprints, the features of the prints couldn't have been faked by a person, and so on. Again, enormous effort was devoted to rejecting the natural, simple, and non-sensational explanation in order to salvage the more exciting paranormal explanation. Again, the desire to believe in the paranormal eclipsed people's capacity to reason clearly and objectively. The paranormal has a powerful influence on our hearts and minds; we are reluctant to give one of these beliefs up, even when the truth is obvious. So when there is a case of something unexplained and we do not yet have a simple, obvious natural explanation it is not surprising that the urge to believe that something supernatural has occurred is overwhelming. If we are willing to insist on a paranormal explanation even when an obvious natural explanation is available, imagine how strong our convictions in the exotic explanation are when we don't yet understand the phenomena.
The fact that we hear so many reports of strange, frightening creatures suggests at least a couple of explanations.
Either there Loch Ness type monsters and other cryptozoological beasts abound in our forests and lakes, or the tendency to believe in such things proliferates in the human cognitive system. Surely it is the latter. The map of monsters above says more about the people who report them than any mysterious denizens of nature.
It's not entirely clear why, but humans clearly have a strong propensity to find meaning, or patterns, or important events where there are none. The urge to believe in the supernatural is so strong in us that we find miracles in a bag of pretzels. In 2005, a 12 year old girl, Crysta Naylor found this pretzel in a bag of snacks while watching television. A casino paid the family over $10,000 for the pretzel because of the notoriety, excitement, and interest that it generated.
A grilled cheese sandwich with burn marks that resemble Jesus caused similar excitement, as did a Jesus fish stick.
In some cases, the phenomena is not a deliberate hoax, but a simple mistake. From time to time, reports of statues "drinking" surface. Recently, in India, millions of the faithful rushed to Hindu temples to see statues of the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha drink milk. Huge crowds formed as people held spoonfuls of milk up to the trunk of the statue and watched the milk disappear. The phenomena was widely accepted as a miracle. Scientists examined the case and concluded that the milk was being siphoned down the surface of the statue in a thin film that wasn't easily visible. As more people made offerings, pools of milk formed at the base of the statues. The Press Trust of India wrote, "the phenomenon of idols "drinking" milk could be explained scientifically by the theory of capillary action or the movement of liquids within spaces of porous surfaces due to surface tension, adhesion and cohesion." Once again, believers denied that there could any explanation besides the miraculous one. Similar stories appear from time to time in the west surrounding statues of the Virgin Mary. Different types of porous stones that are used to make the statues have the capacity to absorb and wick a great deal of fluid.
What lessons can we learn from these famous cases? First, people have a powerful desire to believe in the paranormal. Natural explanations are boring, they rarely make the front page, they aren't worthy of being repeated over the water cooler, and they don't excite our interest or our memory. You won't remember hearing about the Wallace family confessing to Ray Wallace's career of faking foot prints all over the Pacific northwest because it's not on the front page, and it's just not as fun or entertaining to believe as the possibility that there is a giant hairy ape creature that embodies so much mystery, fear, excitement, and imagination. Second, these cases strongly suggest that once an urban myth gets started by a hoax, it takes on a life of its own. And the power of suggestion, expectation, and the desire to believe spawn many more comparable stories from people who think that they saw it too. Are these additional stories lies? Some are, some are not. Sometimes copycat hoaxers pick up on the gag and they help the sightings and stories to proliferate. In other cases, people may genuinely believe that they experienced something, but in fact they were primed, influenced, suggested, and otherwise carried away by an exciting story. Psychologists have demonstrated that people will readily confabulate elaborate stories when prompted in the right ways and the will insist with all sincerity that what they are saying is the truth. So it would seem that it takes very little to start the ball rolling, and very soon we all have what looks like a huge body of evidence--hundreds of Bigfoot sightings, for instance--supporting a phenomena that is a complete mistake. Third, these are only a few of the 1,000s of testimonials, pictures, stories, and other items that have been presented as evidence for paranormal phenomena. And these three fakes do not show conclusively that all of the other cases are deceptions, mistakes, or the products of over active imaginations. But these fakes strongly suggest that many, many other paranormal phenomena that are part of our cultural lore are also mistakes. People are highly suggestible. After these famous pieces of “evidence” were produced, the number of crop circles, and Nessie and Bigfoot sightings soared. And people’s urge to believe in paranormal phenomena is so strong that they will often refuse to abandon their beliefs even in the face of powerful counter-evidence. Stories of paranormal phenomena are entertaining and popular. The news about the original sightings in the cases were picked up by major new services and spread rapidly. But news about their refutations is much less entertaining and interesting; the hoax confessions described above were scarcely reported, and when they were, they were relegated to the back page or to a much more obscure source than the original news. It seems likely that many more confessions and hoaxes have been made public, but we have not been exposed to them. People have a variety of motives for perpetrating hoaxes, and when they do, they are remarkably creative in pulling them off, making them seem that much more believable. It should also be clear that when we are faced with allegations that something supernatural, extraordinary, or paranormal has occurred, even if we cannot immediately find a natural or alternative explanation, we should be very reluctant to conclude that there is no natural or non-paranormal explanation for it. And finally, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We should approach such claims with a degree of skepticism that is proportional to how much they defy common sense and what we know about biology, physics, history, and human nature.
We might ask, "What's the harm in believing in these stories?" No one is hurt by them. We all find them entertaining and exciting. And after all, it would be better to be open-minded to the possibilities than to be skeptical and cynical.
These are good points. We should be open minded. Some of the most important discoveries in history came from people who were willing to consider absurd or outlandish possibilities that turned out to be true. But the purpose of being open-minded is not simply to avoid being skeptical, it's to better facilitate our finding the truth. We need to know what's true in the world and what's not. Our survival, our health, and our futures depend upon our being able to accurately and reasonably assess the facts in front of us. When we tolerate or propagate paranormal stories we foster an environment of sloppy, supernatural, and spooky thinking. We implicitly or explicitly endorse people's forming false beliefs on sketchy evidence. And that kind of attitude about truth and evidence leads to our being sloppy about other more important things. Superstitions proliferate about spirits, supernatural forces, demons, and a host of other non-natural phenomena. Our worldview gets filled with all sorts of mysterious and medieval entities. And the inroads that we have made with hundreds of years of the growth of science get lost in an environment of fear, superstition, and fuzzy thinking. The urge to believe in the paranormal is so powerful that it takes constant vigilance to keep ourselves from slipping into a backward, dark age.
References:
Sagan, Carl. "Crop Circles and Aliens: What's The Evidence?" by Carl Sagan. Parade Magazine (The Baltimore Sun); Sunday, December 3, 1995. pp. 10-12, 17.
Skeptic. “Patterson Bigfoot Hoax” Vol. 4, No. 2. p. 19.
Krystek, Lee. “The Surgeon's Hoax,” http://www.unmuseum.org/nesshoax.htm.
Further Reading:
Frazier, Kendrick, ed. The Hundredth Monkey and other Paradigms of the Paranormal. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991.
Gilovich, Thomas. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. The Free Press, 1991.
Hines, Terence. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988.
Randi, James. Flim-Flam! Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1982.
Sagan, Carl. The Demon Haunted World. New York: Random House, 1995.
Schick, Theodore and Lewis Vaughn. How To Think About Strange Things. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1995.
Study Of Children's Deaths Finds Faith Healing to Blame
When children die because their parents refuse to seek medical care for religious reasons, the vast majority of them could have been saved. A recent study from the University of California, San Diego, has examined the records of 172 children who died when their parents chose faith healing for them instead of medical treatment. Researchers found that of those 172, 140 of them had conditions that have a 90% survival rate with medical treatment. 18 more of the children would have had a survival rate of better than 50% if they had received medical treatment. "In most cases, the symptoms were obvious and prolonged, or in the case of infants, suffered from conditions that could have been prevented with routine postnatal care," the lead author of the study, Dr. Seth Asser said. He went on to say that we do not know how many such cases there are in the country, but we have reason to believe that the ones in the study were just a small fraction of them. A climate that encourages religious sensitivity and tolerance has made it difficult for doctors to even acknowledge cases like these. It can also be difficult for those doctors to advise patients and their children when their religious convictions present obstacles to treatment. Extreme religious beliefs have an uneasy relationship with the medical system. Doctors want to acknowledge the spiritual aspects of their patients' care, but those spiritual convictions can actually be the source of medical problems.
On a related issue, courts have had conflicts with parents in recent years over the healthcare of their children. The Church of Christian Science encourages its members to refuse many medical treatments on religious grounds. The material world is a deceptive illusion; we should seek spiritual, faith based solutions to our ailments, not physical medical treatments. In a number of cases, children of Christian Scientists have been suffering illnesses that are readily treated with conventional medicine. Oftentimes, those treatments involved blood transfusions. But the parents have refused the treatment on religious grounds. The courts have had to intervene and order the parents to seek out minimal levels of care for the children in order to assure their safety. The courts have had to strike a balance between legal entitlements to freedom of religion for the parents and legal entitlements for the children to receive life-saving medical treatments. It has become clear that there must be some boundaries to religious tolerance.
Religious parents with suspicions about conventional medicine and ones who fear interference from the court system will avoid attention for their sick children. So there are good reasons to think that for every one of these cases that becomes public there will be many more that slip by the attention of the media, the courts, and the medical system. The problem, therefore, of religious beliefs contributing to suffering and death will be much more widespread than these cases.
What these cases make clear is a paradox in our cultural attitudes about religious beliefs. We have a strong sentiment in favor of religious tolerance. People should be able to pursue the religion of their choice, they should be able to endorse whatever religious principles they choose, and they are free to act according to those principles. But that concern for freedom has morphed into the view that we cannot or should not offer any doubts, objections, or questions about the role of religion in people's lives. "Everyone has religious freedom," has been interpreted to mean that we cannot ask for reasons for religious beliefs, we cannot challenge them, and we cannot interfere with any religious practices. But religious beliefs can become extreme, harmful, and intolerant under this shelter from questions and when they are hidden from the light of criticism. The best remedy is to tolerate people's pursuit of religion to a point, but we should also be willing to subject all of our religious beliefs to constructive criticism. Religious freedom, like all other freedoms, cannot be completely unfettered. The point of religious freedom is to promote human flourishing. That freedom is abused when it becomes destructive to our welfare.
Human Psychology, Evidence, and Alternative Medicine
Alternative, fringe medical therapies are huge business. In a given year, Americans will spend as much as $50 million on complementary and alternative medical therapies. These include medications like echinacea, ginseng, glucosomine, and medical treatments like prayer groups, meditations, massage, yoga, chiropractic, and acupuncture. That's more money than Americans will spend in a given year on regular medical therapies and medications. Given that we are all spending so much money on them it is important to consider the sorts of evidence we have to support or reject the claims concerning their efficacy. Do these treatments work, and do we have good reasons for thinking that they do? Evidently, people believe that they do work, or they wouldn't be spending so much money on them. But what exactly is the typical person's reasons for buying into one of these alternatives?
When someone says something like, "Echinacea works, I took some last week when I felt a cold coming on and I felt better immediately," what sort of argument are they making? Typically, someone they trust told them that the supplement works. Your mother or your cousin, or a friend said, "you should try echinacea, it cures colds." So looking for relief, you gave it a try. Then you felt better. Or maybe you didn't. So you gave it some more time, maybe you took a few more pills, and then you started to feel better. So for the typical person, their evidence for the claim, "Echinacea works," is 1) people I trust said that it works, 2) the label says that it works, and the label can't outright lie about something like that, and 3) I took it and then I felt better.
Let's consider the last category of evidence. Here's the vital question to ask about a case like this where we think that X is true and we have some experience that seems to be consistent with X: Have I considered the class of evidence that could possibly disprove X? Did I consider what would have happened to my cold if I hadn't taken the echinacea? If my cold would have gotten better anyway, at the same rate, with or without the medication, then we should conclude that the medication doesn't work. But how would I know whether it would have gotten better without the drug? I can't know for sure about a particular cold of mine. What we can do is look at a larger data set. And that is what clinical trials do. A clinical trial of a drug will look at the regular course of a disease in a control group. And they will consider the impact of the placebo effect on test subjects. And they will compare those two results with the course of the disease among test subject who took echinacea. If on the whole the echinacea group got better faster, or had less severe colds than the control group and the placebo group, then we could have evidence that echinacea actually works to reduce the length or severity of colds. But when I reason from my own case of one or two colds that I had and then I got better after taking echinacea, I do not have the sort of evidence I need to figure out whether or not echinacea works. My feeling better is consistent both with its working and with its not working from my perspective. It might be that it was the full night's rest that I got that made me feel better. It might be the placebo effect making me feel better. It might be that I would have felt better anyway, even if I hadn't taken the drug. Or it might be that the drug actually did work and made me feel better. But unless I can control for those other factors and compare to a data set where no drug was taken, my evidence is incomplete. My own experience and a few stories from friends and family just aren't enough to establish one way or another whether one of these therapies works. But since we think that this weaker body of evidence is sufficient to prove the claim, we spend our money--millions of dollars--on the drugs, making the manufacturers rich on the basis of fallacious reasoning.
For the most part, the claims made by manufacturers about the effectiveness of alternative medications such as echinacea have not been tested. Typically, there are no careful, double-blind, randomized clinical trials to support the therapeutic claims associated with these medications. The FDA has a number of regulations that manufacturers have managed to cleverly circumvent. Any specific claims that a manufacturer wants to make about a supplement's improving a person's health have to be reviewed and approved by the FDA. So before calcium companies could claim that calcium lowers the risk of osteoporosis, for example, the FDA had to review the scientific evidence concerning the claim and determine that the claim had been proven in clinical trials. There is a huge market for dietary supplements, so when clinical studies do not support the disease claims, what can the manufacturer legally put on the label? What they have discovered is that more general claims that do not name any specific disease are not prohibited by the FDA regulations. The clinical studies of the effects on echinacea, for instance, have not found any significant effects on the length or intensity of colds beyond the placebo effect. So rather than put, "reduces the length and severity of colds!!" on the label, which would be prohibited, manufacturers will make claims like, "Helps your body's immune system to keep you active," or "Boosts your immune system," or even vaguer, "Helps your immune system." These claims, manufacturers have discovered, are not prohibited by FDA regulations and will be tolerated, at least for the time being. So the unwary consumer hears what friends and family had said about echinacea, reads the label, and spends the money to try some.
Here's another phenomena that plays into our beliefs that these drugs work. When you feel sick, you go ahead and take the medication. If you feel better shortly thereafter, you credit that improvement to the drug. After all, that’s what you were expecting and hoping for, and a friend said you would feel better, and the label says that it works. So even if you would have gotten better around that time anyway, you give the credit for that improvement to the drug. And at what point are you most likely to take something for your cold? When you have had it for several days, and when it has progressed to what feels like its worst state. So given the normal trajectory of a cold, you had hit the worst of it and your immune system was catching up and getting ready to conquer it anyway. But since you just took the pills, you chalk the improvement up to them.
Now what happens if you take the pills and you don't feel better right away? If you have the expectation that the pills should work, then a couple of different things go through your mind: "Maybe I should wait a while longer to give it some time to kick in." or "Maybe I didn't take enough--it will start to work once I take some more." So now you wait, or maybe you take some more 4 hours later. Then when you feel better shortly thereafter, you conclude that the drug was working, it just took a little longer than expected. Or "the drug was working, I just needed to get more of it into my system." So now, once again, you conclude that the drug must be what made you feel better. So no matter what the outcome after we take a medication that we think is going to work, we conclude that the drug works. We just weren't considering the category of evidence that might have disproven the claim. As a result, people have enthusiastic and entrenched convictions about the effectiveness of these treatments. And given that all the evidence that they considered seems to support the belief, those convictions seem warranted. But once we take a broader view of the phenomena, we realize that our data was skewed, we had strong expectations, and we didn't consider a whole category of evidence that is essential for supporting the belief.
What do the scientific studies say about some of these treatments? Echinacea use has no significant effect on the length or severity of colds. Zinc lozenges do reduce the length and severity of colds. Testing has not supported the claim that Airborne, a vitamin mixture, cures or prevents colds.
Besides possibly wasting one's money, what is the harm in trying or believing in alternative medical treatments? Someone might argue that if nothing else, one derives the placebo effect from a medication that has no other effect. And that is worth something, especially if it makes my cold feel better.
But there are several other more serious harms that could result from untested medical therapies. First, these remedies are not cheap. You're not just wasting a little money when a treatment doesn't actually work, you may have had to spend $50, or $100 or more on it. In a recent case in Sacramento, a woman with chronic pain had paid over $3,000 for a questionable "pain reduction" machine. Thieves stole the machine from her office. People in the community offered their support after her story was on the news and bought her another one. What was portrayed as an example of human charity and compassion at work on the news was actually a $6,000 waste of money. Second, many of these diet supplements and alternative treatments have not been thoroughly tested by the FDA or clinicians for safety. We do not know the long term effects of the drugs, we do not fully understand their side effects, we do not have reliable data about safe or effective dosages, we do not know how they may interact with other drugs, we don't know what's really in the pills because they are not as closely regulated, and people often do not tell their doctors that they are taking them. The manufacturers have proven themselves to be unscrupulous, and the FDA is not able to do careful monitoring of contents. So you are taking significant risks with your own health and safety. And you may be endangering others. Health food stores often sell a variety of herbal remedies that they recommend to pregnant women for morning sickness, pregnancy discomforts, cramps, or sleeplessness. There are even herbal remedies that are suggested by advocates for the overdue mother-to-be to induce or accelerate labor. The danger is that we do not have good information about the possible effects of such drugs on a fetus, and the development of the fetus, especially during the first trimester, is extremely sensitive and vulnerable. So taking alternative medical therapies is not as cheap or harmless as one might think.
Can We Heal with Touch? 9 Year old Girl Refutes Healing Touch Claims with Article in Journal of American Medical Association.
More than 40,000 nurses and caregivers practice something called "healing touch" in medical care situations. Nursing schools teach the technique. Journal articles are devoted to the practice. And thousands attest to its success. The modern treatment is related to the ancient "laying on of hands." Practitioners claim that they can promote healing in patients by holding or moving their hands a few inches above the patient's body so they can "realign the energy fields" that have been compromised by illness. Purportedly, healing touch can decrease pain, strengthen the immune system, and even help with cancer care.
These claims have been cast into doubt by a 9 year old girl named Emily Rosa and her fourth grade science project. The results of Emily's study of healing touch are being published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Emily's test was simple. Healing touch advocates claim to be able to detect a patient's "energy fields." Emily gathered together 21 practitioners of healing touch. She had them place their arms on a table, palms up, and then she blocked their view of their hands with a cardboard screen with holes cut for the arms. Based on a flip of a coin, Emily place one of her hands a few inches over one of the practitioner's hands and asked them to say which hand sensed her energy field. Their answers were correct about 44% of the time, which is less than would be expected from just guessing. Emily concluded that they could not detect any energy fields. They came up with excuses, Emily said, "One said that the room was too cold. Another complained that the air conditioning blew the force field away."
In response to the study, Dr. George Lundt, the editor of JAMA, said that patients should, "save their money and refuse to pay for this procedure until or unless additional honest experimentation demonstrates an actual effect."
Despite Emily's results, many people still claim to have been benefited by healing touch. But those benefits, according to critics, arise from the wishful thinking of the patients, the placebo effect, or other benefits derived from the care provided by the practitioners. "The placebo effect is well-documented," said one critic, "and it is not surprising that if a professional caregiver comes into your hospital room and attends to your needs, assures you that this treatment is effective, and shows concern for your illness, you start feeling at least somewhat better. But attributing that feeling to the healing touch treatment, charging for healing touch treatment, and claiming that the patient has some mysterious energy fields that need to be repaired is dishonest, and unsupported by any reliable scientific evidence."
References: "Healing touch? Girl, 9, debunks idea in study," Terence Monmaney and Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Rosa
"A Close Look At Therapeutic Touch," Rosa, et al. JAMA, 1998; 279; 1005-1010.