Weekly homeopathetic whackiness (14/11/2009)

It seems that each week brings a new example of the insanity of homeopathy. Here is the complete text of some instructions on how to use a homeopathic "remedy", written by someone who not only practises the fraud but teaches it as well. The writer is a native English speaker but appears here to be writing in a foreign language. Perhaps it makes sense to a homeopath.

Administering Homeopathic Remedies
Administering Remedies

put your dry pillule, tablet, in water to administer - see below

Best not to take them dry. The VF does better if you put them in water and then raise the potency a little each time. The VF doesn't do as well with the same potency over and over and that is the way you would do it if you used them dry
Sheri

MAY NEED TO REPEAT MORE FREQUENTLY IN ACUTES IF USING 30c

MISC: Administering Remedies

PRINT this out and keep handy with your remedies.

Administering Remedies

Generally I suggest you use 30C if you have not completed the course with me

30c for minor acute and first aid - do NOT use for recurring things that seem acute but are part of a chronic state or for anything else chronic

Do not treat for chronic or recurring things on your own or with 30C.

DO NOT go by what is on the bottle (heaven only knows why fda or whatever makes them say that stuff)

A. You can give just a dry pillule, but it appears to work better to give in water (aqueous solution) and be able to succuss it between doses - but in a pinch, give as dry. (for an infant crush if possible or just put in a little water in a cup and let melt and then give.)

B. BEST to give as an aqueous solution - one pillule in water

1. Put ONE pillule or tablet in 6 oz of water (use purified, filtered water if possible) in a water bottle used only for this
2. Let dissolve or sit for at least 5 minutes (the remedy coats the pillule which is sucrose or the tablet which is lactose)
3. Shake just a little
4. Take one teaspoon out of water bottle and give to the person. Have person hold in their mouth for a few seconds if possible.
   
   Wait. Use a plastic spoon (if you use a metal spoon boil it in water for 5 minutes before it is washed and used for other things)
5. You basically give 1 dose of 1 remedy and wait........
1. If improvement, don't give anymore
2. If improvement and then same symptoms come back - give another dose of same
1.  to give another dose, take the water bottle you have and succuss it - this is strong downward thrusts from about 2 feet up - like a judge hitting a gavel do this 10 times on a book or something (you are succussing to slight raise the potency of what you have started with - it seems that the VF does better with a little higher potency each time, than the same potency
2.  give another teaspoon out of this
3.  if using a cup and not a water bottle - better to use water bottle though - stir briskly 10 times and give one teaspon
3.  If improvement and new symptoms that are really a problem and body can't deal with itself - research and find what the new remedy should be (will sometimes use one remedy and shift things and then need a different to finish up)
4. If no improvement on one dose of 30c in water, repeat it in 20-30 minutes; can do this 2 or 3 times with 200C or 30C if no improvement after that probably wrong remedy
   
   Improvement you may see first is in mental/emotional symptoms, or sleep, or general well being, or thirst or appetite - then the physical symptoms may improve later If you are using 6X or something, may have to repeat oftener than a 30 C asthe energy 'gets used up' in a way.
6. If you get near the end of the bottle, keep at least one teaspoon in there and add 6 ozs more of water to keep it going, as you have been raising the potency each time and don't want to start over. Mostly you will never get to this point as you will only be repeating 3 or 4 times. Don't need to refrigerate unless keeping overnight and usually this will not be the case.
7. Throw all away at the end.

I am tempted to suggest that all of the steps up to 6 could be discarded and Step 7 modified to read "Throw all away at the beginning", but that would be churlish of me so I will make some constructive comments. The first is that Step 6 reminds me of this for some reason:

See more cartoons by Prasad Golla at the North Texas Skeptics site.

The other point refers to "pillules". To non-homeopaths these appear identical to those tiny balls of sugar (called "hundreds and thousands" or "non-pareils", depending on where you live) that you find on the tops of cakes at children's parties. In fact, that is exactly what they are, and I know this because I was sent a bottle of them once by a homeopath so that I could demonstrate to myself the efficacy of the magic. (You can see the result here.)

People sometimes tell me that alternative medicine practitioners are well-intentioned folk who just want to help others. I found some of these pillules in a (sadly, real) pharmacy with suggestions that they could be used to treat a wide variety of medical conditions. They were selling for $12.95 for a bottle of 125 pillules, or just over 10 cents per sugar ball. About five minutes with Google gave me a catering wholesaler who will sell me 8 pounds of the pillules for $US20 (plus delivery). Now tell me that the people selling these things aren't aware of the fraud that they are committing.

Blogging onwards (14/11/2009)

The latest edition of my Yahoo!7 blog is about Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. For some reason or other the proponents of magical thinking preferred to respond by attacking me in the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative rather than by making comments on the Yahoo!7 site. They did this once before, so perhaps they still think I own Yahoo! (yes, someone did actually say that he would not click on a link I provided to Yahoo! because he didn't go to sites owned by pharmanuts).

Anti-vaxxer misrepresents the truth. So what's new? (14/11/2009)

I was wrong about something! There, I've said it. Her Majesty told me that there was a letter by not-a-medical-Dr Veira Scheibner in the local paper and I said that there would be five lies in it. I was very wrong, because there were more than five. For those who might not have met Dr Scheibner, she is not a medical doctor although people reading a letter from her in the paper might come to this misapprehension when she uses the honorific "Dr" while commenting on medical matters. Her doctorate is in micropaleontology, and while tiny fossils are very interesting things, knowledge of them doesn't qualify someone to claim that vaccines cause SIDS or Shaken Baby Syndrome. Dr Scheibner was the very first winner of a Millenium Anus Maximus Award, and you can see some more about her here.

I need to assemble some facts before I write to the paper in response, so I have sent the following email to the editor of Australian Doctor. With luck, I will have an update to this story next week.

In a letter to my local paper anti-vaccination campaigner not-a-medical-Dr Veira Scheibner made the following claim:

"An online poll on Australian Doctor website (September 4, 2009) disclosed that 46 percent of GPs will not take the swine flu vaccine themselves, 25 percent were unsure and only 29 percent agreed to get it, the reasons given being prior exposure to the virus, concerns about side effects, and the use of multi-dose vials".

I'm preparing a response to the letter and I would like to confirm what not-a-medical-Dr Scheibner said. There are several other "inaccuracies" in the letter and I would like to establish whether her reporting of the Australian Doctor poll is more accurate that some of her citings that I have seen in the past.

Thank you.

Tough week at the Australian Vaccination Network (14/11/2009)

Everyone at AVN has been busy this week, misrepresenting government statements, repeating old lies about the Vatican and vaccines and annoying charity workers and advertisers.

First, remember how AVN had been reported to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission. The official line from AVN, as expressed on their Wikipedia page (before edits were closed off):

The commission agreed to look into the complaint, but a spokesperson admitted that they "did not have power to shut down or gag the Australian Vaccination Network."

He left open the possibility of pursing action against individual members of the AVN or making a public statement against the group's activities. As of November 2009, no official action had been taken.

Here is what the HCCC actually said (you can see the full letter here):

Following preliminary gathering of information, on 23 September 2009, the Commission, has determined that your complaint should be investigated as it raises significant questions of public health and safety.

The purpose of the investigation is to obtain further information in order to determine, what, if any, further action is required. The possible outcomes of an investigation into a health service could include making comments and / or recommendations to the Australian Vaccination Network or terminating the investigation with no further action.

Given that Ms Dorey is not a registered health practitioner, in accordance with section 39 of the Health Care Complaints Act, 1993 (the Act), at the conclusion of the Commission's investigation, the possible outcomes of this investigation are:

• making comments to Ms Dorey;
• taking action under section 41 A of the Act;
• referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions;
•  or terminating the investigation.

The Commission is currently seeking information. You will be advised of progress with the investigation and you may also be contacted to provide further information if it is required .

Next, that old lie about how the Vatican had ruled that Catholics shouldn't vaccinate their children because of the aborted foetuses in vaccines was rolled out again. You can see where I pointed out the truth in 2005 here. I posted a correction on the AVN blog, but I very much doubt that it will ever pass moderation and be released so that sensible people can read it.

According to the Internet Archive, the web page at http://www.avn.org.au/donation.html has contained the following words since at least February 2007:

As a volunteer run charity organisation the AVN relies on the support of others. No matter how small the contribution it all adds up to help keep us in operation.

What your donation will go towards-

• Lobbying Federal Parliment for changes to legislation, taking away the need for parents to see doctors in order to register as conscientious objectors to vaccination.
• Ability to offer our services and our magazine in the Bounty Bag which is given to every woman who births in hospital.

Yes, the misspelling of "Parliament" has been there since 2007, but that is not the real problem. First, as AVN's public accounts show salaries, wages and consultants' fees it is stretching things a bit to say that it is "a volunteer run charity organisation", not to mention the fact that for a large part of the last two years AVN has been operating without the benefit of registration as a charitable organisation.

The second thing is the soliciting of donations for the purpose of "offer[ing] our services and our magazine in the Bounty Bag". Remember that this has been on the AVN site since the start of 2007. The people who run the Bounty Bag program have never heard of the Australian Vaccination Network and have stated categorically that they would in no circumstances allow anti-vaccination literature to be included in the bags. So where have those donations been going?

The next people to be alienated were the folks at Baby BeeHinds, who distribute those things our mothers told us about - recyclable, washable nappies (or even diapers, for you non-Australians). They had been encouraged to advertise in the AVN's magazine which is called Living Wisdom this week (the name changes frequently for no apparent reason). There was no mention in the media kit or advertising rate card of the AVN's anti-vaccination activities and the people at Baby BeeHind were appalled when they found out that their name had been associated with activities that they wonderfully described as "deranged".

So let's sum up the week. AVN misreported the progress of the HCCC inquiry, repeated something that they had been told was a lie in 2007, used the name of Bounty Bags to solicit donations which never reached the intended target and annoyed an advertiser by hiding the truth. All in all, a very good week.

And speaking of hiding the truth, AVN is very shy about who can and can't communicate with them. I have been told that someone who is a member of their Yahoo! mailing list was refused permission to join the AVN Facebook page. He had only been using Facebook for a couple, of weeks and the reason given for blocking his access to the group was that his Facebook profile didn't show enough friends. In a beautiful confluence of irony and hypocrisy, the person who refused his permission has a completely private Facebook profile and reveals nothing except her name (and maybe not even that is real).

Dogged determination (14/11/2009)

Like all good atheist canines, Cody The Religion Hating Dog has his own Facebook page. Here is something he asked me to share with you.

A bit of fun (14/11/2009)

200C idiocy continues (7/11/2009)

The weather has been miserable this week, but I was cheered up by a legal threat related to last week's unhinged lunatic homeopath. Here is what the threat said:

Dr Charlene Werner

Hi Peter,

I thought I would let you know that you will be contacted by Dr Werner's Attorney shortly. I suggest you delete this video as it is in violation of copyright laws.

Jayson Perreault

I loved the formality of "Hi Peter". Notice how, yet again, quacks cannot respond with facts but instead hide inside the intellectual property cave. (I know, using the word "intellectual" in any context involving the gibbering Dr Werner can look like an oxymoron.) I carefully considered removing the video from YouTube and finally decided that my response would be:

Tim's new love (7/11/2009)

I didn't take long for Tim Bolen, spokeswhore for quackery, to forget his very best friend Hulda Clark and find someone else to follow. Here is a newsflash from his newsletter to "millions of health freedom fighters":

Will Suzanne Somers New Book on Alternative Cancer Therapies Start the Cancer Revolt?...

October 19th, 2009 - Watch Larry King Friday night, October 23, 2009.  He's interviewing Suzanne Somers about her new book "Knockout," which talks about REAL treatments, ones that actually work, for cancer.

This was an obvious opportunity to contact Tim and ask him for clarification, so I sent him the following Kind and Gentle email:

Hello Tim,

I see from your newsletter and web site that you now believe that Suzanne Somers has revealed "REAL treatments, ones that actually work, for cancer". Does this mean that you have finally woken up to the fact that your best friend Hulda Clark didn't really have "The Cure For All Cancers" or does it mean that you are just opportunistically jumping on the next bandwagon to come along? Still, seven weeks was long enough to grieve over Hulda's death before moving on, and with her gone you need another trough to feed at.

I have a couple more questions for you while I have the emailer out.

Was it difficult getting approval from the authorities for the release of toxic waste so that the charred remains of the dead Hulda could be dumped into the ocean?

How is your lawsuit against Google, Webring and Wikipedia going? It's coming up to two years now (708 days, actually) since you told me that I was to be engulfed in the legal tsunami involving these organisations and the quackbuster conspiracy. The head of the RatbagsDotCom legal support team at Farr, Gough and Dye has been nagging me about this because she needs to work on budgeting and staffing for next year.

Guest author (7/11/2009)

It's time to bring in another guest author to take some of the load off me. This week it's Robert Ingersoll and his paper Why I am an Agnostic. Here is an extract:

This God must be, if he exists, a person -- a conscious being. Who can imagine an infinite personality? This God must have force, and we cannot conceive of force apart from matter. This God must be material. He must have the means by which he changes force to what we call thought. When he thinks he uses force, force that must be replaced. Yet we are told that he is infinitely wise. If he is, he does not think. Thought is a ladder -- a process by which we reach a conclusion. He who knows all conclusions cannot think. He cannot hope or fear. When knowledge is perfect there can be no passion, no emotion. If God is infinite he does not want. He has all. He who does not want does not act. The infinite must dwell in eternal calm.

It is as impossible to conceive of such a being as to imagine a square triangle, or to think of a circle without a diameter.

Yet we are told that it is our duty to love this God. Can we love the unknown, the inconceivable? Can it be our duty to love anybody? It is our duty to act justly, honestly, but it cannot be our duty to love. We cannot be under obligation to admire a painting -- to be charmed with a poem -- or thrilled with music. Admiration cannot be controlled. Taste and love are not the servants of the will. Love is, and must be free. It rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

You can read the entire article here.

MindBody$pirit Festival (7/11/2009)

The sacrifices I make for you! This week I took myself off to the Sydney MindBodySpirit Festival, the semiannual celebration of everything woowoo, paranormal and nonsensical.

Spirit

A lot of the stuff at these fairs pretends to have something to do with spirituality. This is inevitable, given the Newage origins of the event, and all the usual suspects were there - clairvoyants, psychics, astrologers, aura photographers, spirit guide artists, channelers, talkers-to-the-dead, Native American/Australian/Various medicine men (some with gongs and feathers and magic artefacts) and various forms of religion, some of them even recognisable. My favourite religious effort went under the confusing name "Happy Science" and had this news for Christians in their pamphlet:

Who is El Cantare? He is the Supreme God whose name means, The Beautiful Land of Light, Earth. He is the God of Love who is the source of all life and embraces humanity and life on earth.

El Cantare is the Supreme God of the terrestrial spirit group. He is born on earth when a new civilization is to be created, and to lead humanity to happiness.

El Cantare is from the 9th dimensional heavenly realm. His light is too big to enter a human form, so, usually only a portion of his light descends to earth.

El Cantare is the being whom Jesus called, "my father". El Cantare is the God of Love. It was Hermes' teachings of love that guided Jesus on earth.

Wow! Just in case you want to meet the current incarnation of El Cantare, he lives in Japan and goes by the name of Ryuho Okawa.

Of course no festival of Newage spirituality can get too far away from crystals. I bought myself a citrine pendant. As everyone knows, citrine has the following properties:

• Increases self confidence and creativity.
• Strengthens intellect and memory.
• Efficient with anything connected to education, business and relationships with others.
• Therefore also known as the wealth or abundance stone.
• This is one of the crystals that never needs cleansing.

Apparently it doesn't improve manufacturing quality, because the clasp on the neck thong fell apart as I took it out of the packaging. This is probably not a real problem, however, as the "wealth stone" should mean that I will soon be able to afford to buy a new string.

Body

There are three aspects to body - dressing and presenting the body, feeding the body and healing the body. I have no problem with the first of these and I even bought a wonderfully comfortable shirt made from bamboo fibre. As well as clothes there were people selling jewellery, scented soaps and body lotions and other harmless diversions. Sure, this stuff is all a bit more colourful and esoteric than the range at Target or K-Mart but that is part of the fun of the MBS festival. I go there to get things that are hard to find elsewhere.

Feeding the body is again not much of a problem, provide you ignore the religiosity of some of the vegetarians (no, Jesus was not a vegetarian). The food on offer is usually tasty and relatively healthy, although I had to draw the line at the pumpkin and tofu curry. The number of stands selling foods seemed to be down this year and I certainly missed my usual opportunity to replenish my stocks of fiery chilli sauces, but the herbal teas were refreshing, the popcorn was nice and the Mayan coffee beans could be kept fresh beyond 2012.

The real downside of these festivals is the quack medicine (and I include the "foods" sold through pyramids such as goji and acai berries in this category). This has been reducing over the years but there is still too much of it. There were no homeopaths this time and I only saw a couple of chiropractors, but a proportion of the "spiritual" exhibitors come perilously close to claims of faith healing and there appeared to be an abundance of Asian people waving their hands over prone subjects. Of course the reflexologists, kinesiologists and reiki hand flappers were there, but mercifully absent this time were ear candlers, the clown with the $140 allergy tests and Dr Trademark (whose name I can't mention because she hates publicity). Unfortunately, nobody had an immediate cure for diabetes so I will have to keep up the finger-pricking, restricted diet, exercise and medication for another six months. (Dr Trademark has a book telling how to cure diabetes but as I said, she wasn't there.)

Mind

The main mind related issue at any MBS festival is ensuring that your mind is not so open that your brains fall out. The two big woowoo magazines, Nexus and New Dawn, weren't at this show but their absence was balanced by a couple of free weekly magazines of such consummate awfulness that the big names were not really missed. One plus was that the missing Nexus stand was usually the place selling the more absurd quackery and anti-vaccination books and the bookshops that were represented were mainly stocked with Newage drivel where the only health risk is generally brain explosion from nonsense overload. There were NLP practitioners, of course, and many stands offering stress relief to cope with the problems of life (including the Scientologists), but the main effect on the mind from festivals like these is overexposure to nonsense leading to fatigue, desensitisation and eventual brain death. The upside to this outcome is that this would qualify you to work on stands at the MBS festival, particularly those where you have to answer questions such as "What is the science that makes this work?" or "Did Jesus really say that?".

Opportunism

Yes, I know this isn't in the name of the festival, but where else would you put the pyramid scheme promoters, the stands offering tooth whitening, the health insurance company, the stand with the shoes worn by the Masai tribe (yes, really!), etc. It could be that some of the Newage and healing sites fit here because they were at the festival simply to make a dollar from the gullible and the stall owners didn't believe a word of what they were saying, but as I am not a mind reader this can only be a suspicion.

Summary

I always enjoy a MindBodySpirit Festival as the fun parts usually manage to outweigh the badness, although I would never oppose a reduction in badness. My favourite stand at this show had to be Happy High Herbs, a stand unashamedly devoted to the promotion of amusing irresponsibility. (One of their products is called "Stop Pot Mix" and is apparently useful for people who want to give up smoking marijuana. Potential for the discussion of the pros and cons of weed with the stall operator was limited as I couldn't do it in front of my daughter and Belinda couldn't do it in front of me.) I bought a packet of Guarana Lime sweets which I could safely assume were suitable for diabetics as, by weight, they contained more caffeine and guarana than sugar. The only problem with them is that if you eat more than two you might need surgical intervention to close your eyes. I reserve the right to unfavourite Happy High Herbs if they come to the next MBS with the ear candles and other crap that is mentioned on their web site.

My least favourite stand was a dead heat between the Scientologists and all the pyramid scheme promoters. I don't care what product is being used as a stage prop for the scheme, all multi-level marketing is fraud and the promoters know that.

Of course everyone is asking whether my natural skepticism was influenced by the heavy fog of weirdness and woowoo. Two incidents suggest that it was not. The first was that the very first words said to me by the hippie on the Happy High Herbs stand was "There's some weird stuff around here". I don't know how he identified me as someone who thought that the venue contained weirdness, but perhaps my aura was looking a bit tattered. The second was when a lady in a very woowooish bookshop asked me to select a card from the fan in her hand to determine my fortune. The card appears below and I offer it without further comment.

Get your money out (20/6/2009)

The 2009 Australian Skeptics Convention will be held in Brisbane in November. Full details will be here and on the Queensland Skeptics site shortly, but all that fans of The Millenium Project need to know is that I will be speaking at the convention on the topic of the psychology of risk assessment. Get out your diaries and pencil in November 27 to 29. You can get a form to register for the convention here.