*Sorry for the random sound issues in the middle – apparently passing taxis were interfering with the radio mics. It was not – repeat NOT – any kind of nefarious hacking tactics from the tabloids…

Following the open meeting of March 10th to discuss proposals to cut homeopathy from the budget, the PEC collected their thoughts and formally presented them to the Wirral NHS Board. This meeting took place on the 22 March 2011, and unsurprisingly attracted the attention of the North West ‘Friends’ of Homeopathy, whose very vocal envoy John Cook persuaded the board to allow him to present his objections to their proposal. Readers of the previous blog or listeners to Skeptics with a K will know John well, and his forthright advocacy style.

Fortunately, a local councillor is a supporter and friend of the MSS, and he was able to equally persuade the board to allow an external voice of support into the meeting to counter the objections of the homeopathic lobby – which is why I found myself called upon to give a 5-minute speech in favour of disposing with the sugar pills once and for all.

The exact text of the speech is presented below, and my opportunity to present it came immediately after 5 minutes from the homeopaths, in which the main thrust of their argument was:

• The consultation process had not been as robust as one would hope (essentially attempting to get off on a technicality)
• Homeopathy does indeed work and there is science to prove it
• Homeopathy is used by 10% of the population (a somewhat spurious figure brilliantly put into context by the board, who pointed out that the 60 affected patients in the Wirral each year are in fact just 0.02% of the population)
• Those who seek to end funding for homeopathy are in fact attempting to ban it, with similar zeal to the calls to rid the world from smallpox.

I’ve no doubt that John will be able to offer a fuller clarification of these points below, and I welcome him doing so if he so wishes. Following this argument, I took to the rather official-looking table with it’s little microphone, the eyes of the board upon me, and began:

I was made aware of this meeting today by Councillor Darren Dodd, councillor for Liscard, because I represent a voluntary group with interests in promoting evidence-based, rational healthcare practices, who are very much in favour of the proposals to relieve NHS Wirral of the burden of funding homeopathy.

It was said in evidence submitted to the Science and Technology Report Evidence Check on homeopathy – the report which, I dare say, was very much the precursor to the proposals put forward to cease funding for homeopathy from the NHS Wirral budget – that efficacy is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to treatment modalities such as homeopathy. Here, I believe, we agree, given that patient choice and cost-effectiveness are also clear and important factors in deciding whether or not to fund any particular modality. However, cost-effectiveness and patient choice in isolation can’t provide a solid base for the provision of a certain treatment – fundamentally, and as a baseline, it’s vital that any proposed treatment works. Without proof a treatment works, cost-effectiveness becomes a moot point – how cost-effective can a clinically-ineffective treatment be?

Similarly, without reliable evidence that a treatment can work, the notion of patient choice is nonsensical. It is absurd to offer patients the choice of an intervention which is not known to effectively treat their condition. In fact, that the very offer of homeopathy is available is likely to be taken as an implicit endorsement of that intervention. Patients do not expect to be offered ineffective treatments by the NHS; the understandable assumption will be that if the NHS funds it, it must work. At best, this is misleading.

Despite claims from retailers of homeopathy, friends of homeopathy, and spokespersons for multinational homeopathic pharmaceutical companies (of which members of least one of those groups and possible all three we’ve heard from tonight), despite their claims that homeopathy is based on good science, the evidence from clinical studies is clear: homeopathy does not work above the placebo effect. This meeting, of course, is not the forum to debate the intricacies of individual studies into the efficacy or otherwise of homeopathic remedies, and I believe this has already taken place – not only in the aforementioned Science and Technology Report, but in a myriad of other clinical trials and assessments. However, a quick summary can be useful: looking at the literature, a pattern is clear – where studies are objectively and independently assessed as being the fairest tests with the best methodologies, the effect of homeopathy diminishes to zero. Were a pharmaceutical drug to have the history of shoddy research and weak evidence which homeopathic remedies thus far have shown, it wouldn’t be considered even for a moment to be funded on the NHS. Quite why homeopathy has enjoyed special privilege is very much an artefact not of its efficacy, but it’s antiquity – the founding body of the NHS happening to have included at the time a homeopath. The favouritism towards this particular modality over the myriad of other disproven techniques and systems is now reaching something of an end – with PCTs across the country shedding homeopathic contracts from their books. It’s encouraging in the extreme to see calls from NHS Wirral to follow suit.

This isn’t to say we seek to ban homeopathy entirely – in fact, if proponents of homeopathy were able to reliably demonstrate that their remedies have genuine effects, then they may be worth considering in the future. As yet, such proof hasn’t been forthcoming, nor does it look likely to appear any time in the future – particularly given that the giants of the multi-million pound homeopathy industry still spend around twenty times as much money advertising their products as they put into researching whether they actually work – a figure which makes even the horrendous excesses of the Pharmaceutical industry seem comparatively professional. We should absolutely keep an open mind, but we should be sure to temper it with a critical eye. The time for NHS Wirral to offer homeopathy is after it can be shown to have genuine, reliable and objectively measurable effects – not before.

It’s worth noting that we’re quite famously in an age of austerity, with budgetary pressures doubtless being felt throughout the NHS. Given that we know there are treatments which are proven to work, but lie unfortunately outside of the financial constraints of the health service at this time, now is the perfect time to remove funding for the treatments – such as homeopathy – which are at best unproven, and at worst comprehensively disproven.

I’ve since heard that the doctors in attendance were nodding in agreement throughout, which is great to hear.

Given all of the above, and more evidence from the doctors, it’s with great delight that  I can let you know that the PEC voted to scrap homeopathy from the NHS in the Wirral, with the dwindling numbers of existing patients able to see out the course of their treatment, but no new patients to be taken on. This, we have to consider, is a great victory for our campaign, and for common sense.

Don’t just take my word for it though – here’s a clip which gives you a taste of what it’ll be like:

I can’t wait to go myself, it looks really brilliant – something of a stirring, wonder-filled way of saying ‘this is the only planet we have, and we’d damn sure better look after it’.

The whole thing is being organised by a brilliant chap who goes along to the Greater Manchester Skeptics, who explained the show to me:

As Jacques Cousteau said, it’s easier to protect what we love. Polar is, first and foremost, a great night out. The rest is there for the audience to discover, if they so wish.

Tickets are still available if you move fast. I have mine already, and I really can’t wait.

However, there’s always room for more, and that’s where you come in. We’re interested in your ideas for skeptical events. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a brand new idea, it can be something you’ve just heard of and thought was a good idea. Either way, we want to hear your ideas.

So the Question of The Week is this: What new skeptical events can you come up with?

Maybe you’ve been nurturing the idea of starting up a Skeptics In The Sauna, or have an idea for the perfect skeptical holiday. It doesn’t have to be an event. Feel free to branch out. It’s common for skepticism to advertise itself in the form of podcasts – maybe you have an idea for a new skeptical outlet? Whatever it is, let us know. Then we can steal it and get all the credit…

Please leave your ideas in the comments field below.

The headline lecture was 2012 by Dr Bill Aitchison, a performance artist and researcher. I was lucky enough to be able to make this one, albeit fifteen minutes late, and found it a very interesting and entertaining, if strange, experience.

It’s difficult to give an overview of exactly what the lecture was about. It was technically about four or five mini-lectures spliced together. Aitchison would talk about one for a few minutes, and then at musical and visual cues from his laptop would react as if conditioned and switch to another thread. A lot of the content concerned various conspiracy theories, some well-known, some more obscure, some utterly absurd and possibly invented for the lecture itself. How much Aitchison believed any of them, if at all,  is difficult to tell. Some of the theories were obviously presented in a satirical manner, though as the whole thing was a performance piece no real grasp of Aichison’s own beliefs was possible. Not that it mattered overall. The entertainment of the talk was in entering the world of these theories and enjoying the wilful blending of fact and fiction.

The sheer range was exhilirating. Saddam Hussein turns out to have spent a lot of his time writing novels, which I was completely unaware of, and Aitchison even read out an extract from one of them. He even implied that a cover from one book, showing two tall buildings collapsing, was Hussein claiming responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. This was cross-referenced to Osama Bin Laden’s taped addresses to camera, with mention of the one where he claims responsibility for 9/11 being of particularly bad quality, with a left-handed, chubby Bin Laden instead of a right-handed, skinny one.

An actor? Who knows? The possible answers in the lecture just get weirder and weirder.

We also heard about I Ching predictions, and how China’s five mascots for the 2008 Olympics are supposed to have predicted world events, as well as a retread of Pavlov’s famous experiments with dogs (which links to Aitchison’s ‘conditioning’ schtick throughout the talk). We also had sections on the Tunguska event of 1908, and of course, the various conspiracies surrounding the supposed end of the world in 2012.

But this was nothing on the common conspiracy which Aitchison used to link all of these, which was psychic dogs. The idea is that radiation from the Tunguska explosion caused mutations in local dogs which gave them a shared psychic link, and that this link has been passed down genetically from generation to generation. As well as psychic, these dogs are also supposed to be intelligent, and not only that, but are apparently influencing world events.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this was the point in the talk where Dr Aitchison was quite clearly after laughs.

The evidence for these dogs’ Machievellian schemes? Numerous photos of world leaders with their pets: Vladimir Putin, with his trusty dog, Koni, who goes everywhere with him; Barack Obama, who suspiciously bought a new dog upon entering the White House; Clinton; even David Cameron, with his new puppy (no mention of cats, despite the fact that they always look like they know more than they’re letting on…). Of course, it’s all an evil scheme, and these dogs are part of a controlling cabal, quietly placing themselves in the homes of the movers and shakers of the world in order to influence world events. How could you deny it? All those pictures of presidents with their trusty companions sitting by their feet, hearing everything and passing it on to their psychic compadres the world over. It’s all preparation for the end of the world in 2012.

I found the talk very interesting and exhilirating, and in all honesty didn’t give a damn about whether any of the conspiracies stood up to examination. It was simply fun to immerse myself in this world of paranoia, random elements and even more random linkage. There was even a bit of new knowledge along the way (I still can’t imagine Saddam Hussein sitting down for several hours a day, churning out romantic adventure novels). It is easy to forget that skepticism for a lot of people comes out of this kind of interest. Skeptical thinking and the thought processes of conspiracy theorists are in some ways similar, in my view. Both involve trying to investigate and get to the bottom of the ‘truth’ behind things, looking for patterns and evidence. The difference is that most conspiracy theories are unintentionally blinkered. They usually miss one or more important facts, or let paranoia take it a little too far off the reality path. A lot of people who are interested in conspiracy theories end up becoming skeptics, because quite often that is where objective study of the theories will lead you. It seems like a natural progression to me. Skeptics don’t look down on conspiracy theories or silly beliefs. Quite often they’re as interested in them as the non-skeptics, it’s just that their standards for judgement have become more rigorous.

Sometimes, it seems like skepticism in the UK is mainly based around pseudoscientific or pseudomedicinal claims, rather than other areas of ‘woo’ like ghosts, UFOs or conspiracy theories. This is understandable, as it is in medicine and science that bad logic and sloppy thinking can become dangerous, so it makes sense to focus more on these areas. No-one gets hurt by someone’s belief in UFOs or who may have been on the grassy knoll (except maybe Kennedy), after all. But those less dangerous areas of woo are still part of skepticism, because they are interesting subjects in their own right. Skeptics would not go out of their way to examine extraordinary claims if they didn’t have an interest in the subject in the first place. It’s not necessarily about debunking, it’s just about getting your facts right. I would love it if reported UFO sightings turned out to be of real alien spacecraft, but unfortunately the evidence does not lean that way. Nevertheless, I keep my eye on the subject, not in order to keep seeing it debunked, but because if there is something in it, I want to know! The same applies to conspiracy theories.

There is another fact about conspiracy theories that keeps some of us skeptics coming back for more, too. They’re fun! It is great fun to enter these tapestries of fact and speculation, to examine and dissect them. It is great fun to imagine they may be true. I may not think that dogs are secretly running the world – in fact I definitely don’t – but I love the idea. It is worth remembering this sense of fun any time someone accuses you of being a killjoy or hating everything because you’re a skeptic. If anything defines a skeptic it’s enthusiasm and an interest in discovering the truth, not crushing people’s dreams. The negative stereotypes of skeptics don’t really hold up to scrutiny.

I hope anyone reading who went to the event at the Bluecoat enjoyed it as much as I did. If anyone missed it, we have a talk in May by journalist David Aaronovitch on conspiracy theories and their role in shaping modern history, which promises to be a superb evening out, so why not come along and enjoy some of that supposedly dry, ‘killjoy’ skepticism?

Hopefully see you then, if the dogs haven’t got to me…

One Year Anniversary Bonanza at The Vines

It’s hard to believe, but come the end of this Month, the Merseyside Skeptics Society will have been going for just over a year. In that space of time we have gone from not existing at all, to hosting regular social events in Liverpool City Centre (at Doctor Duncan’s pub, for those interested), hosting regular Skeptics In The Pub nights with speakers such as Ariane Sherine, Chris French and Simon Singh, and to masterminding the 10:23 campaign, which went from strength to strength, spreading from Liverpool to other cities across England, Wales and Scotland, and then to numerous countries across the world! Amid all this we’ve also somehow managed to produce two popular podcasts, Skeptics With a K and InKredulous, and get name-checked in everything from the Pod Delusion and The Skeptic Zone to The Independent and The Guardian. Not to mention you could hear Mike and Marsh’s dulcet tones gracing the airwaves on more than one occasion, arguing with UFO enthusiasts, psychics and homeopaths to name but a few. You can also hear Marsh on the podcast Righteous Indignation.

It’s been overwhelming. So overwhelming that we almost forgot it had been a year since we started. When we did notice, we realised we should do something to celebrate this personal milestone, and so we organised a special Liverpool Skeptics In The Pub: One Year Anniversary Bonanza!

Professor Chris French at The Crown

Allan Callister

Our first Liverpool Skeptics In The Pub speaker was the psychologist Chris French and the blog of the event can be found here. Several months later, older but just as sceptical, we found ourselves in a new and bigger venue with no less than four speakers, plucked from the fertile ranks of the MSS itself: Michael Marshall, Mike Hall, Tom Williamson and Allan Callister.

Allan was first up, with a talk about the Emotional Freedom Technique. You can read Allan’s blog-posts on this subject here and here. Allan took us on a humourous journey through this particular piece of woo, successfully persuading the audience to join in as he tapped himself repeatedly at various parts of his body while reciting the EFT chants of “Even though I have this feeling… this feeling…” He even managed to persuade Marsh to come up onto the stage to be cured of his ‘narcissism’, although considering that one of the main phrases of the Emotional Freedom Technique is “I completely love and accept myself”, maybe it was the wrong woo to use?

I should probably add that I can’t remember the exact order of speakers from this point, so I’m just going to make it up from now on. Bwahaha!

Michael Marshall

Next up was Marsh, talking about PR and The Media. This was a funny and informative lecture on how PR has gained control over journalism and its overworked denizens. Listeners to Skeptics With a K won’t be surprised to hear that the Daily Mail was touted as one of the worst offenders! Marsh skilfully pointed out how to spot when a news article was simply a regurgitated press release instead of actual news. More often than not, the fourth paragraph of the article is the giveaway!

Tom Williamson

Tom’s talk was on How Science Works: what is science, how do we do it and how do we know it works? It was essential listening for anyone with an interest in science and/or skepticism. If any of the audience had previously been unsure of the definitions of ‘hypothesis’, ‘theory’ or ‘law’, this talk will have cleared up any misconceptions. This was the bedrock of Skepticism. It was also great ammunition for arguing with Creationists, too.

Mike Hall

And finally, Mike was up, with his talk on Bad Logic, focusing particularly on the logical failures of religious apologetics. This talk successfully went through the shortcomings of logical arguments for God, showing up the errors in everything from the cosmological argument to Pascal’s wager, all emphasised by an impressive and entertaining powerpoint presentation, which went down very well with the audience.

It was a full program to say the least, but it wasn’t over yet! To conclude the evening we held a special first-ever live recording of Skeptics With a K, hosted by Mike Hall, with Michael Marshall and myself, Colin Harris. You can download this episode here, or on iTunes. As Mike admitted to the audience beforehand, this would either go really well or we’d bomb spectacularly! You can judge for yourself in the comfort of your own home! For my money, despite being full of adrenalin the entire time and therefore having no objective stance on this whatsoever, I think it went very well. All three of us enjoyed ourselves, and there was a pleasant atmosphere with lots of laughter at the hoped-for moments. The audience, too, were enthusiastic and participatory, and seemed to enjoy it, even though we over-ran last orders at the bar and broke all our pre-stated rules about profanity and off-colour humour live on stage!

Skeptics With a K in full flow

The entire night was fantastic, and not just because it was a special anniversary. The Liverpool Skeptics in The Pub nights are always great fun and thought-provoking in equal measure. I hope that anyone reading this who has been thinking about coming to one of our speaker events, but who has been worried about what to expect, will realise what great fun we always have. There is nothing to fear, and despite all the cliches, Skeptics do not hate everything! We have a wide range of interests as you can see from the lectures on this night, have a keen sense of fun and are very welcoming. We’ve all been first-timers at Skeptics in The Pub at some point. At the end of the day it’s all about having fun and rational conversation with like-minded people, so please come down to one of our future events, such as Daniela Rudloff in March, or come to our regular informal social on the first Thursday of every month at Doctor Duncan’s pub in Liverpool City Centre. It’s people like you who made the MSS what it is, and who are our reason for existing in the first place. You all help make the world a better, more rational place, and you have fun while you’re doing it!

I’m going to talk about football.

I know, I know, IknowIknowIknow. You guys, our lovely readers, are scientists, science fans, and generally science types. As am I. But when I’m not talking Cold Reading with psychics, organising mass non-suicide or generally being a good-for-nothing skeptic, there are few things I love more than settling down to a good match. The poetry of movement, the grit of teamwork, the drama, the excitement, the cliches.

Oh, and the batshit lunacy.

I’ve spoken elsewhere about the superstition rife in football (it was my handy hook to hang the story of Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie’s horse placenta treatment on, you may recall. If you can’t recall, please head over and have a read. Horse placentas. Lol. Etc.), but this time I’m bringing things back home. We are, after all, the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and no amount of International campaign-running (yes, I’m going to milk 10:23 for all of the kudos I can get, what of it?) will change that. Which is why when I was sent this article by a listener to our podcast, I just had to take a look at it.

A struggling football club has resorted to asking a priest to bless its pitch in a bid to stop a run of bad luck

Yep, this is 2010 and we’re still asking the clergy to bless this mess and give us good luck. So, what kind of demonic bad luck have the Marine boys been having? Did centre forward Liam Rushton get tripped over by a ghost when clean through on goal, without so much as an indirect free-kick? Did ‘keeper Tim Dittmer get distracted by a succubus during a crucial counter-attack? Did centre back Michael Jackson (no, not THAT Michael Jackson) turn green, rotate his head 306 degrees and do unspeakable things with a crucifix? Well, as the BBC puts it, not quite:

So far this season three Marine FC players have hobbled off the pitch with broken bones.

And during a game which Marine were winning 2-1 at their stadium in Crosby, Merseyside, the floodlights died – cancelling the match.

Ah, so it was pretty standard footballing fare, then. Still, having a priest come over and do his whole il nomine thingummy bit could only improve matters…

Father John Ealey, of St Aloysius in Roby, said a prayer and poured holy water on the turf on Tuesday… Chairman Paul Leary said if it took banishing demons to improve their season, he was willing to give it a go.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the Football Manager series, which strives at every turn to replicate every subtle nuance of the Beautiful Game (TM). I therefore can’t wait for the option in FM 2011 to invite a local priest over for a spot of chanting and splashing.

Manager Kevin Lynch spoke to the club’s website about the helping hand of God:

Our form has not been great at home and we have had an horrendous injury list – I just feel that there are a couple of demons out there we need to get rid of.

I have known Father Ealey a long time, and for me personally, I will feel better that the pitch has had the blessing of God. It makes me feel a lot better in terms of my own faith.

Since the blessing, Marine FC have suffered defeats at the hands of Retford United and Bradford Park Avenue. I guess God really is a Red around these parts.

Ghosts and the People Who Hunt Them

Trystan Swale

When: Thu, Dec 17, 2009 8:00 – 11:00 PM
Where: Crown Hotel, 43 Lime Street, Liverpool.

Summary

Who are the people that spend their weekends sat in haunted buildings hoping to capture evidence of an after life or a snapshot of a ghost? From academics to housewives, Trystan Swale blows the whistle on the profiles, methods, means, deception, poor research and bad science of the people who continue to shape popular culture and perception of ghosts.

Biography

Trystan Swale is a folklore hobbyist and between 2004 and 2009 was an active member of two paranormal investigation teams in southern England. He is a serving officer with educational charity ASSAP and has investigated a range of phenomena including ghosts, unidentified flying objects and out of place animals. When not busy pieceing together and co-hosting Righteous Indignation podcast, Trystan is a teacher by profession.

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Flyer for the Revival Fellowship. Click for big.

Last weekend I was handed a flyer on the street for something called the Revival Fellowship. Well, that’s not strictly true – it was actually a friend of my girlfriend’s who was given the flyer, with the specific reason that she knew it would annoy the hell out of me, and she was right. Because the Revival Fellowship is a ‘prayer heals’ kind of organisation, going so far as to make some extraordinarily outrageous claims. The flyer – which is a pretty well-made affair, I might add (you can view it right there on the right) – claims to be ‘Totally Different from anything you’ve heard before’. Bold claims. Turn the flyer over, and you’ll see the happy faces of various healees (it’s not a word, I know, but I like it). Beside the face of the first healee, the flyer proclaims:

“After prayer, Russell was healed from a severe food allergy and Autism. He now leads a completely normal life”

This struck my girlfriend as odd, and it definitely strikes me as odd. First of all, I like how the statement goes with the big claims first – namely that he was healed from a severe food allergy? Wow, that’s an amazing claim! Oh yeah, and he was healed from the hitherto-untreatable autism too, but that’s by the by… And that’s not the only extraordinary claim. Next up, we have the story of Granville:

“In 1984, Granville suffered another brain haemorrage and died 3 times. After prayer, he came alive. He still lives today”

Now here’s a bizarre claim. So Granville died three times, and then prayer brought him back to life? The question we need to ask ourselves, as skeptics and adherents to logic and reason, is what brought him back to life after the first and the second times he died? And specifically how dead was he that he could be brought back those two occasions without reverting to magic prayer?! Also, it’s interesting to note, there’s nothing to say that prayer itself brought him back to life – just that he came back to life after someone prayed. I got in my car after I had breakfast – my breakfast did not transport me to my car. Correlation causation, people. There’s also claims regarding a child who was ‘incompatible with life’ (with no scientific or medical definitions as to what that means or how it was solves) and healing from a broken heart, as well as the following health claim:

“A severe car accident had Don in agony for four years. He was instantly healed of a broken vertebrae upon baptism in water”

This is an amazing claim, genuinely! Fortunately they took X-Rays immediately before and after the baptism, showing the miraculous recovery. I mean, I presume they took X-Rays, or else how would they know it was the magic baptism water that was responsible? I thought I better check their website, in case there were some clues as to medical proof there… but disappointingly (if not surprisingly), there was nothing. It’s almost as if the claims were unsubstantiated… What the site did offer us is the following:

“When you read the following accounts, we want you to ask yourself if Jesus Christ is dead, how did these things happen? And, if He is alive, where does that leave you? What He did for these people yesterday, He can do for you today. The Bible offers you evidence. It’s an experience, not a theory.”

Taking these assertions in order, how did these things happen if Jesus Christ is dead? Erm, they most likely didn’t? Russell most likely wasn’t healed from Autism – he might have had a diagnosis that was low on the spectrum scale which then was redefined off the scale as he grew older. That’s one way, for example. Whatever brought Granville back from the dead the first couple of times – modern medicine, say – went on to manage it for a fourth time. Just an idea. The vertebrae that Dan was left with might not have been broken, or might not have been fixed – back pain is a notoriously tricky area to diagnose pain, and most susceptible to placebos and quack remedies. For example. None of these require Jesus to be involved, or for him to be real for that matter. I’m not saying absolutely that this is the story behind each of these miraculous claims – but these are possible solutions, that need to be addressed before the claims are used to convert.

The UK and Ireland are not the only places where the Revival Fellowship operates – indeed the organisation is part of a global network of local level sites, operating in many countries including Australia, Hungary, India and South Africa. I checked websites from those countries for similar claims, and again found anecdotes regarding all manner of healing miracles, with no manner of evidence. For example, the South African site had a story about a pregnant woman who contracted German Measles, and was told there was a chance her baby would be born deformed:

In 1995 I fell pregnant with my daughter Tracy, but in the 1st trimester I contracted German measles. The doctors told me that the effects on my unborn baby could be catastrophic – she could be born blind or deformed or badly retarded. I was strongly advised to terminate the pregnancy. I decided to trust God’s promises, and I knew that He could heal any problem that Tracy might have. When she was born, she was a perfect little girl. God had protected her completely.

What’s interesting here is that there wasn’t even a disease or affliction being healed – there was a chance the unborn child could have been adversely effected, admittedly severely, by the condition of the mother. A chance. Which means there was a chance that the child WOULDN’T be. I’m not saying for a moment that it isn’t a wonderful thing that Rowena’s baby was born without affliction – it is, it’s a truly beautiful thing. But even if the chances of deformation were as high as 99.9% (which they weren’t), that would still mean that 1 in 1000 babies born in similar circumstances would be unafflicted. If 1000 pregnant women with measles decided to turn to prayer over medical advice, statistically, on average, 999 of those mother’s prayers would not be answered.

There’s also an overall global site, and it’s here that the real impressive claims are kept. Headings under their ‘Healing’ section include Blindness, Coeliac Disease, Glaucoma, Leukaemia, Spine Degeneration, HIV AIDS and Death. Prayer heals AIDS? So we’re lead to believe – yet their evidence is, of course, a personal anecdote which runs along the lines of ‘Rebecca was diagnosed with AIDS, joined the fellowship, was baptised, spoke in tongues, and a year later blood tests showed she didn’t have AIDS’.

Now, if we take that as true, surely the whole thing could be easily explained as a false positive in the first test. There’s no mention of a second test which also proved positive, which is standard practice in the Western world when it comes to positive results in HIV test – but of course in Papua New Guinea I don’t think it’s a stretch to say repeating AIDS tests is not a priority, the priority instead would be to treat so as to minimise spread and infection. Notably there are no tales of prayer curing AIDS in the developed Western world, where there are the time and resources to re-test, and there are no medical proofs offered of any of these cases.

So, what’s the harm here? I think it’s clear – if you teach people that magical thinking will cure their serious and deadly diseases, they will turn their back on real medicine. Miraculous recoveries will happen – they’re statistically unlikely, but crucially it only takes one anomaly to make a great testimonial. For every miraculous recovery from a seemingly deadly disease, how many followers will die from an untreated illness? How many people will waste their last days in this life believing in magic water and speaking in tongues, when they could be getting real treatment? I don’t think for one moment that the Revival Fellowship is twisting the cases it presents in order to convert people – I’m sure they strongly believe the healing stories they tell and the anecdotes they put forward. But when it comes to illnesses, and the death of real people, it’s vital we look beyond anecdotes, and explore every Earthly possibility before we allow for a more mystical conclusion, lest real people will get hurt.