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Have you ever been going to an event and hoped that a favourite topic of yours will be covered in the programme, only to have your hopes cruelly dashed upon arrival at the appointed place and the anointed hour? In every event schedule there are one or two items that truly stand out for you, and it’s a great let down if they’re set up in a way that’s perhaps easier on the organizers, but less of what you really want to see.

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With the coming of a very low-key, very gentle pro-atheism awareness campaign on facebook in ‘A’ week (http://www.aweekonfacebook.com/, Facebook event, #aweek Twittertag ), I’ve been reminded of the hesitation that many atheists feel towards the promotion of atheism in any way. Talking about any type of promotion or advocacy in favour of atheism as annoying because “this is the sort of thing that X-, Y- or Z-ians/-ists/ers do” may not be exactly how the majority of atheists feel, but I’d say, and only from my own feeling (not very skeptical, but still), that a large majority of atheists either couldn’t care less in trying to spread ideas and grow our mostly merry, but sometimes quite grumpy band of disbelievers, or are very uncomfortable with the thought of trying to actively or passively win people over to the idea that, maybe, they should give up the idea of an invisible Daddy In The Sky who grants wishes a little less frequently than you see the evil evidence of His Divine, or more humanly – if not humanely – divined, Will

But when you see the damage that religion does, and the toxic effect that a supreme, unquestionable authority and unquestioned afterlife can bring – from the banality and stupidity of the penny candle, crap wine and drain-filtering devices (pieces of The Christ’s Holy, suspiciously bread-like, Flesh must be saved from the insult of the sewers) of Catholicism (though after 2000 years on a bread and wine diet, I’m certain Jesus could make excellent use of modern facilities) to the horrendous tradition of wife-burning in Hindu ‘Sati’, thankfully both illegal and much reduced in modern India, or the unholy union of extreme Christianity in demonising a contraceptive layer of latex that could do so much to help the AIDS crisis – doesn’t this, shouldn’t this drive anyone with a rational bent and compassion for humanity towards doing what we can to reduce the influence of The Beast, even to simply kick the giant’s toe?

I can understand that being an atheist-in-practise and technical agnostic in a theist or desperately-wanting-to-believe world soaked in a steady stream of pap-filled, infuriating pamphlets, preaching and priests can be a frustrating existence, but to turn around from this and in that frustration deny to rationalism in general, or your rationalism in particular, the weapons of the battleground of ideas, the modern tools of marketing and persuasion, and give all the ground to fight for over to theists is to stop kicking the giant’s toe and take a gun to your own.

The argument that people should be left alone to find their own path, free to decide without coercion is, firstly, to deny that massive pro-theist coercion is out there, all day every day, not to fight against that tide is to resign the game. Secondly, it strikes of a high-handedness that’s quite prevalent in Buddhism, in my opinion, but without the necessary element in Buddhism of what is called ‘skilful means’, the art of manipulation over the long-term…

It’s with this in mind that I offer you, gentle reader, this parody of a pretty famous anecdote in the world of Zen:

A: Tell me, B, of this Atheism, this acceptance of the overwhelming probability that there is no supreme creator, no divinely-ordained purpose to the existence of every particle and person, no will to bend our souls to…

B: I know not of this Atheism. I cannot breathe of what I accept as truth, for this will inevitably influence your biases towards what would be your own internal outcomes… Yay, I decry the Dawkins and the Sagans of this world for their petty, insolent meddling in the minds of others. There should be those things left to monks and priests and dress-wearing men of every shade or stripe, every colour and complexion. We, WE have a very, VERY high horse upon which we sit and cannot be seen to enter into the arena of ideas with those of such trivial notions of idealistic fancy. Truly, it is a shame we cannot live without air and alimentation, for the foul believers indulge in these earthly, despoiling pursuits also.

A: But B! I’ve seen you chuckle at the Holy Men! I’ve seen you! You mock them! You do not go to the temples as other men, you prefer to sit with Dostoevsky, or a little light Kafka splayed upon your lap! Tell me! Show me the way that you take!

B: I cannot behave as the priests do. They take your hunger and feed you themselves… I leave you to feast upon yourself. Let your chips fall where they may.

A: Please! I beseech you! In the name of Pedagogy!

B: No.

A: An idea! A sign! A Symbol! Anything!!!

B: Have you finished your porridge?

A: I have. I HAVE!

B: Then wash your bowl.

–

Easter is based on a beautiful, empirical, scientific scheme – The first Sunday after the full moon (The Paschal Moon) following the Vernal Equinox – and is a picture of the lack of divine influence in the universe. Why not take this event, this year as the chance to express to the people who know you, the people who may be vulnerable at the moment, to say to the people who may be tempted (link NSFW: Swearing) to celebrate the death and resurrection of a Jewish Carpenter by telling children that a giant bunny left chocolate eggs in the night, to tell the people who will be influenced to even a tiny degree by your choices that you choose reason, you choose a life without a manic-depressive divinity pouring over every detail of you life – especially your sex life and pig-eating habits – and that you openly, unashamedly, staunchly reject giant bunny rabbits with the lock-picking skills of a cat burglar bringing chocolate eggs to the bedrooms of our children in the night.

Don’t get me started on Santa.

Come on!

Go get the A.

Upload and set it to your profile picture.

Post a status update: “rejects giant bunny rabbits with the lock-picking skills of a cat burglar bringing chocolate eggs to the bedrooms of our children in the night.” (or something similar)

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Enter our hero of the hour, Ms/iss/rs(?) Beverley Turner, and her little excursion into something one or two of you will recognise…

“Even though I have this feeling, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

Got it yet?

*Taps Karate Chop Point 7 times*

“This Feeling” – including this wonderful comment by helloish123:

“Thank You…. This really works… I did this tapping today, $1200 cash all in $100 bills came to me unexpectedly. I had others ask to borrow money from me and I paid them both cash of what they asked me for and SOLD a house as well… I focused on releasing blockage of money flow. This works….enjoy jamie”

Yes, that’s it…  I can see the wide-eyed look of incredulity spreading like across your face like warm butter across hot toast:  The one and only – the 100% totally not “woo-woo or anything new-agey like that”, oh no – Emotional Freedom Technique and its merry entailment of gobshitery, insanity (“It could be long line in the fast food restaurant (sic) and I would feel like ripping slow people’s heads off – straight to EFT I go.”) and outrageous claims of efficacy over anything ranging from feeling a bit under the weather, to a lack of mathematical ability, to headaches, to short-sightedness (with added, extra quantum-woo) and, of course, the big one that they have to be able to claim:  Cancer.

Yes, this article – no relation to “This Feeling” – published in the Telegraph-ing horseshit to the masses – and penned by that presenter off of ‘Taste’, apparently, on Sky3 (does that channel really exist, or is it a barely noticed apparition in our collective subconscious?), is married to an Olympic gold medal winner, apparently, and now, apparently, qualified to flood the national psyche with healthcare advice which, in her own words, makes you “feel a bit of a wally” undertaking it.  I know, Bev, you must have felt a bit of a wally picking up that cheque as well…

Still.. It’s only about a bit of tapping, giggling and sticking it to The Man and his pesky Treatments-That-Actually-Work-But-I-Don’t-Understand in London’s LaLaLand of  well-monied, but missing-a-screw-or-two set, isn’t it?  No harm done, eh?  Of course not.

Apart from the harm you’re doing in directing people towards a nonsense non-treatment that, with a laugh and a joke, a nod and a wink, tells the credulous mass who have been conditioned to taking all manner of advice from ‘celebrities’, even homeopathic celebrities (almost certainly no celeb…  you see where I’m going), that they can stop taking their medication, because “…it (EFT) may may (sic) substantially reduce or eliminate diabetes symptoms….”

This insane article doesn’t, in itself, promote the use of EFT for severe physical conditions, but it does recommend this treatment for severe psychological trauma, with nothing but scant, ridiculously biased and credulous anecdotes as ‘evidence’.  The person doing this promotion has absolutely no right, no qualification and no hard facts to fall back on in defence of this piece.  It reeks of advertising dressed up as journalism, written with the force of semi-celebrity behind it, and immediately creditable via its publication in a broadsheet with a circulation close to 1.9 million readers per day.

Beverley Turner writes silly, trite books about her terrible time in the really, terribly machismo, anti-feminist world of F1 (dog bites man, news at 11); presents a terribly pro-feminist, err, middle-class TV cookery show and comments on healthcare that a good portion of almost 2,000,000 readers/day will ingest uncritically.  This person has a dream-like life, apparently untouched by the heinous tragedies that she then uses as pseudo-evidence for this PR piece, or to give it the old-fashioned name ’propaganda’, for people who want to sell 21^st Century Snake-Oil-as-Talk-Therapy to the masses.

I wonder if she’s happy to Telegraph credibility towards EFT for diabetes as promoted by its founder, Mr Gary – Slugbrows – Craig?

She, and the Telegraph are living in fantasyland, but not everyone can join them.  Most of us are stuck in the real world.

And what is it to have your middle-class, fashionable food fantasies brought, nodding and winking into the real world?

As most of our attempts at recreating Delia will testify:  A Nightmare.

The “I Believe in…” series that is currently playing out on BBC Three at the audience-friendly time of ‘midnight-ish’ is, by far, the most incredulous, poorly thought-out, nonsense-laden idiot-fest seen on British TV since, well…  *cough* erm…  Jeremy Kyle is on every day…  and The Wright Stuff…  and then there’s almost all of Channel 5’s output…  Satellite channels…  (has anyone ever watched anything of Conspiracy TV?  *giggles*)

OK, so there’s stiff competition out there in the time-rich and thought-poor facets of British media, and anything that comes with short sentences, a couple of nice locations and a pretty face or two is likely to get up there on the box at some point, no matter how inane the subject material, or how utterly bonkers the take on said substrate may be.  This is where Danny Dyer, Jodie Kidd and “I Believe in…” come in.

Danny Dyer’s effort, “I Believe in UFO’s”, deserves its own lengthy analysis, but I’ll just relay one little element that really made me chuckle…  Loveable, credulous, silly old Danny has just been out in a crop field with a ‘Crop Circle Expert’, who is in fact just some random dude with a VW campervan and an IQ problem, calmly explaining how crop circles must be produced by aliens, because the ‘knees’ of the stalks on the crops can only be bent over in this way by high temperatures of some sort, and thus ‘steam’ in the joint and…  WHOOM…  down go the grasses into this week’s pattern picked out of ‘Flying Saucer Crop Patterns Lightyearly’ (WHSmith will get it in if you ask nicely, have two green heads and 6 limbs (but don’t tell Danny!)) by our Alien UberSturmFuhrer on duty to watch over us puny Earthlings and molest cattle on that particular night.  Our hero, swollen with ‘knowledge’, goes into the local pub to meet some thoroughly delightful chaps at the pool table – very casual.  These delightful chaps then go on to tell him that it’s all a load of bollocks.  It’s them!  They go into the crop circles at night, mob-handed, and proceed to inflict criminal damage on a lot of innocent arable crops and the brains of gullible, half-witted townies…  without actually admitting it of course – the local constabulary might be watching.  Cue Danny’s almost weepy lament pouring out of his drizzle-stricken grid.  For everything else there may well be credit cards, but these moments which warm the heart…  Priceless.

Now that Danny’s eventually alien-broken heart has been served up for starters, we can move on to the main event:  The intellectual heavyweight champion of her navel, the cokestess with the mostess, the leanest, skeletelest, the South-East belt-holder for “least able to ponder” at atom-weight for the last 12 years running and now, dear and gentle readers, the southern-spoken swinger for all things supernatural…  Ms Jodie Kidd.

Jodie – it is ok if I call you Jodie, isn’t it Jodie? Thanks, Jodie.  You’re a star. (D-List, natch.  You do crap like this) – believes in miracle healing.  She believes that the material universe isn’t the only thing that exists and that we can be in touch with a secret part of the cosmos that scientists, doctors and the NHS clearly don’t want us to know about…  She knows this, because she was definitely, definitely, definitely healed by crystals.

So you got that, right?  ‘Healers’ tell us that ‘bad stuff’ (I’m not sure, but I think that’s the technical term.  It might be worth checking with your local ‘Nonsense Dealer’, err, sorry, ‘Healer’.  Right…) comes pouring out of our mobile phones and computers.  Crystals can help us by tuning into the electromagnetic charge frequencies of our bodies and rebalancing them.

What?  You don’t believe me/Jodie?

She’s got a NASA Scientist to explain it all.  Honest!

This Bear Walker dude, and he says everything is based on frequencies.

NASA.

HE MUST be right, AMIRITE?

Funny, though…  Bear doesn’t mention anything about his NASA credentials on his website, but other places talk lots about all the lovely energy, breathwork, healing, hypnotherapy and Ancient Native American Wisdom that Bear can teach us all.  I’m sure his uber-science NASA credentials are out there somewhere.  In space?  Maybe he lost them out there.  While he was with NASA, training them about how we can use crystals to rebalance our electric charge frequencies. That’ll be it I’m sure.

So, Jodie’s there giving us the skinny on her terrible trouble with anxiety and panic attacks, which are very serious conditions that I most certainly won’t have anything said against.  No, I won’t immediately go on to mention her relationship with cocaine, either.  That would be like drawing a parallel, making a direct relationship between one and the other…  and I wouldn’t want to do that.  Cocaine doesn’t, in any way, make you feel anxious and lead to panic attacks.

I’m sure Jodie’s right though…  It’s a deep psychological problem based on her relationship to the universe and the ‘bad stuff’ from her ‘Dealer’ that comes via her mobile phone or computer.

I’m not sure I jotted that down right…  Hang on…

…

Yeah.  Bang on.  Except for those who don’t follow the link, then YES.  LENGTHY COCAINE MISUSE CAN LEAD TO PARANOIA, ANXIETY AND PANIC ATTACKS.

Jodie then goes around her house showing us how many crystals of different types she has all around her home, and telling us all about how utterly terrible her life would be without both them, and her trips to the mystic lights and crystal-milking machine on Harley St. that she probably sneezes out – better than coughs up in the circumstances – 500 quid’s worth a go for.  If you haven’t watched the crystals bit yet, then…  GO WATCH IT.

Ok, this is 1000 words, and we’re already beyond coffee-and-a-biscuit length for the average reader, so I’ll stretch this out to another post later in the week.  It’s worth it.  There are Shamans, Faith Healers, Mystic Biologists, Magic Love-Horses, Autism, More Energies, The Big C and even a cameo from Chris French!  But this is enough nonsense for you to digest in one go…

And remember!  Stay clear of the ‘bad stuff’ that you can get via your mobile phone and computer.  Listen to your ‘D/Healer’ at all times.

Be crystalline, and stay frosty out there.

(At least in the morning…  Brrrr….)

Particles everywhere.  Quarks strangely up the continuum, where they can be postulated without arbitrary precision to flow among the hadronic mesons and baryons; Leptons down the scale of posited particulates, where electrons roll neutrally, defiled among the 105.7 MeV/c² of muons and the apathetically gyrating tauons of a great (and probabilistically determined) Quanta.  Sleptons in the supersymmetric marshes, Higgsinos on the hypothetical heights.  Quarks creeping into the collider-beams; Gluons lying out on the fields, and hovering in the rigging of the august atom; Higgs bosons drooping on the W, Z bosons and the massless photons.  Higgs field like molasses in the eyes and throats of ancient university professors, wheezing lyrical over their lecterns at their wards; Protons and plumbons in the spoon and bowl of the afternoon muesli of the wrathful scientist, leucous in their locked labs;  Uncertainty principles cruelly pinching the lobes and hippocampus of their equivocating little ‘search babe in the back.  Chance people on the galleyways peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of particles, with particles all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.*

Oooh…  Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?  If you’d believe anything, and I don’t,  didn’t know anything, and I don’t, then you’d swear I knew of what I was on about, and I don’t.  Still, it is rather lovely, isn’t it? Me and Dickens… aside from 150 years and light years of ability in the sphere of stylistics, we’re like this: *crosses fingers*

So what is that?  That, my great and only friends, is a cacophony of sumptuous, semiotic manifestations that garners much to appearances, and less to substance. In other words, it’s word soup.  Bullshit.  Beautiful bullshit, perhaps a load that the bull in question felt a sudden, artistic need to shape and sculpt into transcendent forms, but, still, finally, when all is silkily said and finally done, and aside from the rose delicately balanced in its crescendo, it is still a steaming pile of moderately meaningless gibberish.

Beautiful, big words alone or juxtaposed do not a great point make.

So where am I going with this?  Let’s take The Great theme of our time, The 1023 Campaign, keep the foolishness of our homeopathic foes in mind and then turn our minds back to the riffed theme at the top of the article:  Particles stuff and Quantum Mechanics stuff.  I say ‘stuff’ because I really don’t have anything but the slightest knowledge of what that lark is all about.  I’m a budding linguist, and the days when my journey through the xylem and phloem of the tree of knowledge may have led me to unfurl as a physicist in full flower have long since leaved.  Yes.  Leaved.  Enjoy.

Quantum Physics is a discipline steeped in strange, counter-intuitive hypotheses, models and theories.  Homeopathy is a pseudo-science steeped in strange, counter-factual claims, nonsense and woo.  Take one unintelligible discipline to the layman, add one irrational field of bullshittery and blend into a smooth paste of fantastic claims with accents of soaring rhetoric and serve it all up in a bed of self-reinforcing believers.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the majestic poppycock that is:

Quantum Homeopathy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_y4-z-kDqQ

You may remember this lady, Dr Charlene Werner, being ripped apart a little while ago all over the interwebs with her unorthodox take on relativity, quantum theory and spelling/pronunciation.  Yes, Stephen HawinGs and Einstein tell us that e=mc sq and all of matter is little vibrating strings that we can ignore because it all comes down to one tiny little ball, like a bowling ball, and that means that the photo receptors in our eyes are incredibly important and science should have fallen into Hahneman’s Homeopathy camp (Maybe the rates were too high, or the redcoats were a little too fond of fraternising with your wife while you were off taking care of the nippers?) 200 years ago, oh, and our ears too, they’re very important for picking up the vibrations from the strings because we’re so well designed.  Einstein proved it.

See, I’m going to credit her a little bit here, and say she’s actually read a little bit of our stricken science-meister’s books, specifically “Universe in a Nutshell”, and didn’t understand a single word, but can remember a few items of vocabulary and madlib them together into something that people who believe in fairies, trolls, ghosts, EFT or Homeopathy would nod at sagely, chew on their organic, wholemeal tofu treats, and take as a seriously scholarly interpretation of the most up-to-date discoveries in the physical sciences that fit in perfectly with homeopathy and the only reason that medicine doesn’t take it seriously is because of all those nasty Big Pharma companies that only want to poison absolutely everyone so that they can have all the money and rule the world, but then have to do all the menial chores and build everything because they don’t think everything through thoroughly and unbiasedly like us homeopaths. *breathes* Ee gads! The mad, bad, power-mad and something-ad fools!

Now, that’s the completely insane version from our cousins across the ocean, those benighted souls who must labour on without divine guidance from Her Britannic Majesty and dreary direction from Gordon Brown… but I digress.  The point to follow from here is that there’s another type of Quantum Homeopath, a more insidious sort who, if the lay-sciencey-interested person didn’t know homeopathy was total tripe, might be taken in by the somewhat artful rhetoric, the impressive list of qualifications on offer, and the lack of understanding that’s out there in the world surrounding Quantum Mechanics generally.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a very British, professorial variety of howling crankery: The one and only, the inimitable, the great and wondrous Lionel Milgrom BSc, MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC, MARH, MRHom and his epic article…*clears throat*

“Journeys in The Country of The Blind: Entanglement Theory and The Effects of Blinding on Trials of Homeopathy and Homeopathic Provings”

To save you time, I’ll bring the abstract here:

“The idea of quantum entanglement is borrowed from physics and developed into an algebraic argument to explain how double-blinding randomized controlled trials could lead to failure to provide unequivocal evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy, and inability to distinguish proving and placebo groups in homeopathic pathogenic trials. By analogy with the famous double-slit experiment of quantum physics, and more modern notions of quantum information processing, these failings are understood as blinding causing information loss resulting from a kind of quantum superposition between the remedy and placebo.”

The article ‘proper’ then starts off by talking about Nelson.  No, that’s not the one from The Simpsons, philistines, but Trafalgar-Nelson, monocularly-sighted-Nelson, “I see no ships”-Nelson.  Yeah, that one.  One-eyed.  Blinding.  See where he’s going there?  Lovely rhetorical device.

See all of those lovely big words?  See how he’s lovingly managed to stitch them into something that resembles a lovely, coherent structure of lovely sentences?  He even uses, lovingly, props that look remarkably like lovely equations! Well done that lovely man.  Clearly, that PhD has left its mark… and it looks lovely.

Now, I’m not going to be debunking this chap again, that’s been done to excess here, here, here and here for starters, but the argument goes like this:  Quantum physics is really weird, and the act of looking at something in the domains where quantum phenomena are observable can completely change what is happening, therefore homeopathy must be a quantum phenomenon, because we all know it works when you don’t examine it, obviously, but as soon as you start to really look it at, it’s absolutely crystal clear that it doesn’t work.  At all.  Not even a little bit.  So there we are, homeopathy is a quantum effect and you can’t examine it at all, in any way, ever, or it won’t work, but it does, because it just does.  Don’t mind this bloke behind the curtain…

Personally, I think he just wanted to write about Young Slits, and there are different genres for that, Lionel Milgrom BSc, MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC, MARH, MRHom, oh yes.  Very different genres.

If you want to howl with laughter, read his interview here.

“And because one is suddenly asked to review one’s life as a sequence of apparently connected events – when as far as I can tell they represent moments when I may have been more or less conscious or aware (consciousness/awareness, you understand, being something that fluctuates – lawfully – from moment to moment) – then the effort to ‘join up the dots’ into something ‘rational’ can produce a certain kind of inner vertigo like looking down the wrong end of a telescope….Well, I am digressing, and we haven’t even started yet!”

Nice use of ‘rational’ there, then “life as a sequence of apparently connected events”, and he’d already managed to squeeze in a dig at skeptics in the first sentence of that, his first answer…  it gets much better the further you go.  If you fancy a laugh over lunch, then give it a go.

Unconscious self-parody doesn’t get better than this.

The final thought on weird physics and homeopathy.  If we leap over from the world of the quantum to thinking about multiple universes, won’t there be a universe somewhere in the great inter-cosmological superpositional play where we all die on the 30th?  Possibly. Won’t there be a universe where women find me irresistible?  You’re in it, baby. *smoothes eyebrow*  Won’t there be a universe somewhere where water has a memory and homeopathy works?

Come on, now you’re just being silly.

*Please.  Don’t.  It’s rhetorical.

I was so overcome with joy when I discovered what I am about to tell you that I am now writing with my eyes full of salty tears, warm and wet with emotion… Friends! I come to you with Good News!

Are you – a beautiful, delicate human soul – suffering from some sort of emotional pain, or physical ailment? Do your unique thoughts blossom as the daisies in the meadow, but often gravitate onto grave issues that induce effects from the mild melancholic to chronic, debilitating depression, perhaps interfering with your mathematical abilities? Do intrusive, perhaps obsessive thoughts on your disruptive encounters with precious friends or beloved family trouble you in your daily life, causing a phobia of lifts or dyslexia? Are the ongoing effects of war and rape pushing up your golf handicap, troubling your urination or just leaving you with an untidy room?

• Would you like to completely overcome all of these problems and many more in just minutes?
• Would you like to harness the completely unverifiable, but incredibly powerful meridian and chakra knowledge of the ancient Chinese? Then…

*shudders* For a minute there, I felt like a Chopra.

Where was I?

Ah yes! What we all really want in these twisted, perverted modern times is the ability to have all of our guilty pleasures without any of the guilt, take heart from our healthy pleasures without spending time on them, in short to have our horseshit without the pressing need for a horse. Sugar-free sweets, fat-free butter, exertion-free exercise, arsenic-free arsenic solution, cure-free cures and, of course, needle-free acupuncture.

Those deliciously died brows, like a pair of slugs engaged in a fireside chat over a light ale, hang upon the gentle brow of the ‘genius’ that is the inventor of our needle-free future, Gary Craig. Gary has brought us the impossible dream, a therapy so advanced that it will literally solve all of humankind’s emotional and physical problems, while leaving those blessed beings touched by this healing only with the lingering effects of being tapped. Yes! Gary – who isn’t the love child of Richard Dawkins and Jackie Stewart, despite those glorious brows – screams at us, though really I’m sure his tapping has calmed him to the point where he barely whispers his message, that the Emotional Freedom Technique (emofree.com – yes. Emofree. And?) is “a powerful new discovery that combines two well-established sciences”. What are these two well-established sciences? Well I’m glad you asked, and so is Gary. Here’s the list:

Mind Body Medicine.

Acupuncture (without needles).

At this point I started to wonder which dictionary this chap uses when he throws around a term like ‘science’ in relation to ‘acupuncture’ (which is surely just ‘acu’ if the puncturing is dropped, no?), leaving aside ‘Mind Body Medicine’ which is as empty and fatuous a term as anyone who spends a few minutes digging around in google is likely to find. Why would anyone think acupuncture is a science?

Well, there are scientific studies that find some benefit from acupuncture, so it might be reasonable to accept that and go along with the wisdom of the ancient Chinese. … Unless you look at the scientific studies that show acupuncture is ineffective, or look to the studies that show sham acupuncture as at least, sometimes more effective than ‘proper’ acupuncture. Acupuncture works by convincing people, through ritual, authority and the fairly scary procedure involved, that it will be effective, producing a classic conditioned response. More salivating dog than salvation from dog-eaters.

So how does it work then? Well, for an ‘authoritative’ guide there’s a free e-book or two floating around and a suite of videos on that there youtube to bring you well up to speed, like this one from tapping.org – that’s right…tapping.org.

What?

Anyway, the video:

It does ask you to suspend your disbelief for a while… perhaps the rest of your life, in fact. The soothing music certainly helps in that regard, but for those of you who are unwilling or unable to invest yourselves in 19 minutes of pure, unadulterated comedy, then here’s your brief, very brief, overview:

1. Cultivate the feeling you wish to work on.
2. Tap on a point on your body (The karate chop point on your hand is mentioned in that video)
3. Repeat a mantra of deeply-meaningful, meaningless nonsense. (“Even though I have this feeling, I deeply and completely accept myself.”)
4. Repeat

Then you need to ‘clear your nerve channels’ – I know that sounds ridiculously new-agey, and of course we wouldn’t want to be spouting anything ridiculously new-agey or “woo-woo” this is just a standing wave in a specific part of your nervous system that needs to be unblocked. No, really. They say this. With a straight face. Standing waves of negative energy blocking your nervous system.

Genius… Right, err… Clearing the nerve channel. Here we are:

1. Tap the bridge of your nose with two fingers and say “This feeling”.
2. Tap the side of your eye and say “This feeling”.
3. Repeat for under your eye, under the nose, on your chin while saying “This feeling”
4. With the flat of your hand, tap your collar bone and say, guess what?… “This feeling”
5. Back to tapping with your fingers, this time on your fingers and thumb, except for the ring finger (Which can be different in each culture. Strange to skip that… almost as though there’s nothing to this but bs… anyway… ) and, of course… “This feeling”

That’s it! And you don’t have to worry about getting it exactly right in exactly the right spot… it’s all connected and it all works…

So there we are with a debunked list of ‘well-established sciences’, a bizarre ritual and EFT (acu?) is standing proudly, chest puffed, atop the twin pillars of Empty Verbiage and Placebo – the foundations of woo are strong in this one. What mighty, intractable problems of modern life could possibly resist it?

Clearly, this isn’t a medical procedure, we want to make that quite clear from the off… You know, they’d get in trouble for saying that, and Gary goes out of his way to cover his arse on the front page:

“Nothing contained herein should be considered a medical claim or medical advice. For more, read our EFT Info and Disclaimer Document…”

Which is fair and right and just, we wouldn’t want people to think they could skip some of their pills, lotions, scans, samples, biopsies, injections, special dietary requirements, sessions or radiotherapy would we Gary? Of course we wouldn’t Gary. Well said, Gaz.

Hold on, Gary… What the fuck is this?

“…we urge you to bring these procedures to the attention of your physician(s) as they may reduce the need for drugs, surgeries, radiation and the like.”

So come on, what do you reckon this works for Gary?

Weight loss

OCD

ASTHMA

Abuse

Allergies

Bulimia

Smoking

Addictions

ADHD

Depression

Anorexia

DIABETES

PTSD

Phobias

Dyslexia

Detoxing

BLOOD PRESSURE

Headaches

Short/Long

Sightedness

Really, Gary? The root problem with Diabetes, Asthma and Blood Pressure is ‘emotional’? All we need to do to rid ourselves of these modern, killer plagues is tap away on our karate chop point? Is that it? Ahh… but we should remember, shouldn’t we, that you ‘urge’ people to go to their GP as they ’may’ be able to reduce their reliance on medicine that has unequivocal benefits based on the ‘benefits’ of this utter nonsense you’re peddling. These sensible, everyday people who are taking their advice on healthcare from the internet…

…and Short/Long sightedness? Are we supposed to believe that the changing shape of our eyes over time is in part or in whole due to emotional problems? What’s this about…

“At the end of each session, I give the client a one page EFT instruction sheet. I ask her to read it to ensure that the instructions match what we did in our session and I give her the instructions to use on her own. She picked up the sheet and said in astonishment, “I can read it without my glasses; I didn’t realize I was so angry it affected my vision.”

About a week later she gave me this testimonial. “I found that EFT relaxed me enough that my vision improved doing training and has remained as a lasting benefit.”

Rich Block” - Source: Emo Free

Rich Block. Richard Block.

Richard, or ‘Dick’.

Block, or ‘Head’.

This whole thing reads like a wind-up, and the videos seem like a really contrived comedy routine. The great and lasting sadness to all of this, for me, is that there are pharmacies who are involved in pushing this in our midst, there’s one about 100m from my door.

This woo factory: Orrell Park Therapy, is owned by its neighbour: Orrell Park Pharmacy, with Diana Cheung, as the trained pharmacist owner offering such ‘complimentary’ delights (in the medicine, rather than the free mint sense, one presumes):

Acupuncture

Reflexology

Aromatherapy

Hopi [Ear] Candles

Lymphatic Drainage Massage

Alexander Technique Reiki

And….

Emotional Freedom Technique

That’s right folks, you too can indulge yourself with a treatment of tapping karate points around your body while muttering nonsense for JUST 40 of your hard-earned, or ill-gotten, depending on your disposition, pounds.

I leave you with the words of what appears to be a fully qualified MD who pushes EFT. Eric Robins:

“…I’m not really a miracle worker at all, you just get used to seeing patients having really miraculous healings…”

Thanks, Mr Miracleworkerman. Pure. Comedy. Gold.

…and just to let you know, the temptation to misspell dyslexia up at the top was almost overpowering. Almost.