Archive for category Skepticism
‘Psychic’ Nurse Sacked For Data Misuse
Posted by Marsh in Psychics, Skepticism on September 5, 2011
With the issue of data security and information privacy very much in the news here in the UK with the ongoing public airing of a decade of dirty, dirty News International laundry, it’s almost too convenient that another case of information intrusion is currently being investigated over in America – and though it may be a lot less high-profile, there’s a neat little pseudoscience element too it.
Lori Neill is a former occupational nurse in Colorado Springs, who recently resigned from her job. She is also, she believes, psychic. And she believes those two facts are related, and I’m inclined to agree, though doubtlessly for very different reasons.
Lori’s story is that her psychic abilities made her supervisors uncomfortable, and that on the occasion she had told her supervisor he might be suffering from a life-threatening illness, and that he should seek medical help, he was so angered that he made up allegations about her, to force her out of work.
Officials at the hospital and city, however, tell a different story. They have accused Lori of accessing the medical records of around 2,500 patients. Given that Lori worked not for the hospital but for the city, they argue she had no medical need to look at those records. Especially given that most of the accessing happened outside of work hours. Their implication is that Lori is not actually psychic, or able to spiritually intuit the illnesses of people by tuning into the other side (where diagnosticians are ten a penny, I’d presume). They claim instead that the reason she was able to accurately tell people what ailments had befallen them, was that she’d read their medical records. Read the rest of this entry »
The Daily Express and The Wife-Taming Wonder-Spray!
Posted by Marsh in Bad PR, Herbal Medicine, Pseudomedicine, Skepticism on July 10, 2011
As a result of a little digging around the papers last week, as-ever on the trawl for nonsense, I stumbled across the following in the Daily Express:
HERBAL REMEDY’S NAGGING RELIEF TO THE HENPECKED
BATTLING couples could have found the cure for their marital bust-ups – a herbal remedy which claims it can tame the nastiest of nags.
A miracle cure you say? To get rid of nagging? With a slight hint of a putting-your-woman-in-place angle? Thanks very much, Diana-mourning, Maddie-sleuthing Daily Express. The article was written by Nathan Rao, who I feel is worth calling out because frankly I suspect he contributed barely a word to it, as you may well come to suspect too I’m sure. The article continues:
The world’s first anti-nagging medicine hit the shelves yesterday.
Two sentences in, and we’re suddenly claiming not only a world’s first, but that this herbal product is classifiable as medicine, and all that that entails. In short, if the Express, Nathan Rao or whoever wrote this piece wants to call this herbal remedy a medicine, that’s fine – so long as it’s a licensed product, licensed by the MHRA. If it’s not, then labelling it a ‘medicine’ is… well, let’s call it naughty. And complaint-worthy. And potentially pretty serious. So, a nice start then! Let’s continue Read the rest of this entry »
Circumcision: Genital Mutilation Under Another Name
Posted by Marsh in Circumcision, Pseudoscience, Sexism, Skepticism on July 1, 2011
Today, I want to outline something of a thought experiment – imagine for a moment a society where a baby is born, discovered to be a girl, and because of its gender and the traditions passed down for centuries, the baby is branded with a hot iron leaving a scar that lasts for life.
Now go a step further, and imagine that instead of branded, the baby has the end of her ear lobe cut off, again something this imaginary society only does to females.
It’d be a pretty horrific idea, and anyone suggesting we take on such practices and follow such rituals would be rightly thought not only to be utterly wrong, but entirely deranged, and no law would ever pass which would allow such a mass mutilation to take place.
But, for a moment, imagine that the affected children were instead male, and the part of the body to take a knife to at birth was not the earlobe but the penis… and you’ll find yourself not in some dystopian fantasy but in modern day America, and in parts of the UK and other countries too.
Each year, around 1.2 million male babies in the US are circumcised in medically-unnecessary procedures – and that’s discounting the cases where there is a genuine medical reason to do so, which I have absolutely no problem with. As an analogy, I can accept people having to have limbs amputated should injury or diabetes or gangrene warrant, but I’d advise against it becoming the first thing we do after cutting the umbilical cord.
Right now in San Francisco the issue of circumcision is very much in the news, after local anti-circumcision activist Lloyd Schofield collected enough signatures – more than 12,000 – to put a measure to the city ballot in November 2011, seeking to ban the practice of circumcision. Read the rest of this entry »
A List of Skeptical Things…
People are always asking me what skepticism is. As this is a notoriously difficult question to answer accurately in a few words, I tend to mumble something incoherent and run away. The same goes for questions about what happens at Skeptics in The Pub events. Trying to dispel the notion that we simply get together for a few drinks and slag things off is difficult to do in casual conversation. Especially as Skeptics in The Pub does occasionally fit that description. I would rather never have to answer these sorts of questions at all. The problem is that at the same time, I do want to convey to people outside of our strange little world what it is exactly that we do, and why it interests me. Why do I go to skeptical events at all? What first grabbed me and pulled me into this world that so many of my friends and family think is some kind of science cult for the culturally depressed? Read the rest of this entry »
Creatures, cavegirls and kids
Posted by Mike in Dinosaurs, Skepticism on May 25, 2011
In a fit of nostalgia, I recently decided to hunt down copies of a particular TV show I remember from when I was a kid.
Those of you who know me will not be surprised by this. I am, at the age of 32, just as much of a Doctor Who nut as I was 29 years previously. I also have every episode of the Children’s ITV gameshow Knightmare on VHS. Nostalgia and the completist, collectors instinct are a dangerous pairing.
My latest whim is the 1982 animated version of The Incredible Hulk. No, not the dreadful Bill Bixby series of the same name, which it seems everyone but me remembers fondly. I’m so bored of hearing producers talk about how the Hulk movies are failing because they lack a resemblance to the TV show. I’m sometimes not wholly convinced that these people realise the Hulk is actually a comic book character. Bill Bixby has, I fear, doomed all subsequent live action versions of the Hulk to emulate his version of the character, instead of Stan Lee’s.
But I digress.
One episode of The Incredible Hulk, titled The Creature and the Cavegirl, features Bruce Banner attempting to use a “time projector” to go back in time and prevent the gamma ray explosion which first turned him into the Hulk. As you might expect, things go awry and the Hulk ends up travelling “a million years back in time”, where he rescues a woman – the eponymous cavegirl – from a bear-like monster and a marauding dinosaur.
This is the point at which I started getting frustrated. Dinosaurs and humans living together? Who died and made Ken Ham the script editor? Modern humans living one million years ago? Seriously? Come to that – dinosaurs living one million years ago! Really?! You’re going to put that in a kids TV show? Irresponsible much?
Then I took a step back.
Sure, this show is telling kids (albeit indirectly) that humans and dinosaurs lived together a million years ago. But it is also telling kids that getting caught in a nuclear blast with turn you into a green, quasi-Jekyll-and-Hyde monster in magic elastic pants. And that it is possible to traverse the fourth dimension via a device called a time projector.
These things are just as crazy, but I don’t find them in the least bit objectionable.
Why not?
Are you a selfish bastard?
Posted by Mike in Activism, Skepticism on April 4, 2011
There are plenty of people who are critical of skepticism, both from within and without the skeptical community. We’re accused of being closed-minded, grumpy, bearded doubters and nay-sayers. We’re accused of armchair skepticism, of ivory tower skepticism, of ‘scientism’, and of being in the pocket of a mysterious large farmer.
Some people think we aren’t pro-active enough. Some people say we should let people believe what they like. We’re accused of preaching to the choir, of living in an echo chamber, of not meaningfully engaging with the other side of the debate. We’re accused of being dicks, or of not being dickish enough. We’re accused of both accommodationalism and fundamentalism.
Some of these criticisms are valid, some are bogus. Some seem to assume that there is only one way you should behave if you’re a skeptic, when really – it takes all sorts.
So here is something positive we can all do. It doesn’t get in anyone’s face, it isn’t dickish, it isn’t fundamentalist or accommodationalist. And I’d actually be pretty surprised if any skeptic had a serious objection to it:
It’s easy. It’s free. You won’t get anything out of it until after you’re dead, except perhaps a smug sense of self-satisfaction. But if you don’t do it, you’re probably just being selfish. Your kidneys are no good to you after you’ve wrapped a car around a lamp-post, but they may just save the life of one of the four people who die in the UK every day because of a lack of suitable organs.
So get on with it… register as an organ donor now. No ifs, no buts. Chop chop.
(With thanks to the Prof for suggesting we champion this.)
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