by Deborah Hyde

When: Thursday, July 21st, 2011 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Head of Steam, 7 Lime Street, Liverpool

Deborah Hyde will tell us about cultural aspects of the religious and superstitious experience. This evening we will discuss and answer such questions as:

• Why do the dead chew in their graves?
• Why do vampires strike in autumn?
• Why do ghosts live in electric clocks?

A gory talk full of the unexpected, it’s a round-up of the folklore of the macabre.

About Deborah

Deborah has been writing about the supernatural for nearly two decades. She blogs on ‘Superstition, Religion and Being Human’ as ‘Jourdemayne’ but often suffers from mission creep.

She’s also one of the organisers of Westminster Skeptics and is Editor-in-Chief of the Skeptic Magazine. Her daytime, grown-up job is a makeup effects coordinator in the film industry – more vampires and zombies, then.

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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.

The paper concludes that the lack of evidence on efficacy and cost-effectiveness of homeopathic therapies means that it should not be a high priority for the PCT at this time. It is recommended that NHS Wirral does not commission homeopathictherapies.

The key risk is that NHS Wirral fails to maintain its reputation as an evidence-based commissioning PCT.

Excellent stuff. Still, it seems we weren’t the only ones made aware of the open meeting – also invited were patients currently or formerly using homeopathy, and the ‘North West Friends of Homeopathy‘. This latter group are most interesting, and I’ll come back to them a little later in more detail, but first it’s worth pointing out that I appeared on local radio with a member of the group on Monday morning, in an exchange that might amuse, and will certainly give a far better impression of who John Cook is than I could ever do justice with words. UK-based readers can listen here, it starts around the 2hour 13minute mark and lasts about 10 minutes. I’ll wait.

For those not able, willing or interested in listening, what we have from John is a charming ability to hog a conversation, and the maniacal insistence that the date of the meeting was aired. Clearly, John wanted his supporters to arrive mob-handed. Fair enough, he probably feels he has a strong case. As it was, when I arrived with a couple of other MSS members there were maybe 40 or so people present, a number which I presume to be in excess of the general norm for these meetings.

John, having lobbied for inclusion, was amongst the speakers, joined by Dr. Hugh Neilsen BA MA BM BCh MRCP FFHom (it’s worth pointing out that his name is actually Hugh Nielsen, and the NWFoH’s own website, while painstaking in it’s detail of Hugh’s many qualifications, mispells the name of their own president), and the panel was completed by two local GPs who were involved in making the recommendation, and who spent the evening ranging between bemused, compassionate and at times startled. Startled, not least, by the quite spectacular opening by John, the homeopath’s friend (which I imagine is rather like a Fisherman’s Friend, but lacking in clout), in which he directed a quite flattering string of insults at me directly, and at the Merseyside Skeptics Society. A typo on our website (proclaiming the meeting to be on the 6th not the 9th) drew from John the hilarious gag:

Perhaps you’re the Merseyside Dyslexics Society, although you’ve somehow managed to make it here on the right night so perhaps you can get by. (*from memory, not verbatim*)

Clearly the friends of homeopathy are no friends of dyslexics, I suppose. Either that or he had a range of tinctures in his impressively boxy briefcase, and was merely touting for business. Who knows. Still, it was a harmless enough jape (unless you are actually dyslexic, in which case I’m sure it was infuriatingly insulting), but I assume not the standard practice for such meetings as the Chair looked quite surprised. John’s epic 10-minute rant (he moved to stand behind the Chair so everybody could see him in full), whilst including a few more rib-ticklers at my expense (I was merely an audience member at this point, bear in mind), also included a number of utterly wonderful assertions, which he’d taken the time to print for us (with such adherence to spelling and grammar as to paint his dyslexic wisecrack in immensely ironic light) and which I can reproduce here verbatim from the copy I took away with me.

North West Friends – Small Registered Charity supporting Patients.

This is interesting to me, given that the Charities Comission has NWFoH listed as being for:

THE RELIEF OF SICKNESS BY HOMOEOPATHIC MEDICINE. THE EDUCATION OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC IN THE BRANCH OF MEDICINE KNOWN AS HOMOEOPATHIC MEDICINE AND TO ASSIST IN RESEARCH OF HOMOEOPATHIC MEDICINE, THE RESULTS OF SUCH RESEARCH BEING DISSEMINATED TO THE PUBLIC AT LARGE.

Am I splitting hairs there? I think not – the NWFoH are very much designed to support homeopathy as a system, to further its usage and to promote homeopathy wherever possible. Clearly this is not the same thing as supporting patients – it’s supporting homeopathy. They’re not the North West Friends of Patients, after all, and were the interests of homeopathy to be in conflict with those of patients (like, say, when over 200 trials show homeopathy to be ineffective for patient use and a local PCT recommend, for increased patient care, the cessation of homeopathy funding), it’s easy to see where John and the rest of the NWFoH’s chips would fall.

10% each year of the UK population use homeopathy

This struck me as grossly exaggerated, but as one of John’s ill-judged and smug barbs pointed out ‘this includes the many skeptics who were seen debauchedly gulping entire bottles of homeopathy outside of Boots’. On this point, I agreed with him (we did), although the 10% still looks over-inflated to me. Small point, though, there’s better to come.

John also went on to claim that the Government rejected the Science and Technology Comittee’s recommendation to cease funding for homeopathy (implying that for a PCT to do so, citing the Evidence Check, would be out of line). This, as I pointed out to John when given the chance to retort from my seat in the audience, was highly disingenuous and misleading – the Government actually said that any decision should be made not by them but by local PCTs after local consulation. And we were sat in that local consultation at that very minute. Bewildering.

In perhaps John’s coup de grace, he stated defiantly:

Despite the Department of Health’s rejection of the conclusion of the Evidence Check Report, Wirral PEC’s recommendation says ‘there is no evidence that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect; which is another way of saying there is no evidence of efficacy (RTCs) – which is wrong, because there is.

Brilliant. Let’s take this point by point:

• The Department of Health did not reject the conclusion of the Evidence Check Report, as covered above. Furthermore they agreed that the evidence was in fact lacking, they merely disagreed that there should be top-down cessation of funding.
• I’ve no idea what an RTC is – a typo is a petty thing to pick up on, admittedly, but given John’s smug gloating over the supposed date error on our own website, I couldn’t resist. An RCT is a Random Controlled Trial – that John can’t get those words in the right order speaks volumes about the NWFoH’s understanding of evidence standards.
• Finally, the best bit – ‘which is wrong, because there is’. Now, you doubtlessly expect the next paragraph to explain this bold assertion. Who am I kidding, no you don’t – you rightly suspect John threw it out there nakedly and expected us to buy it without anything at all to actually back it up, as if merely saying something is enough to make it sound so. Which is right, because he did.

That summed up the thrust of John’s ‘arguments’, aside from another couple of swipes at the very fact that skeptics exist and personal digs at me and the MSS in general, and it was at this point that the Chair, out of keeping with the planned structure of the evening but slightly perplexed by John’s use of his time in attacking a hitherto-silent audience member, allowed me a moment to rebut. Fortunately, I had my rebuttal somewhat planned, and it ran along the lines of these very simple, demonstrable facts:

1. The Merseyside Skeptics Society is a volunteer organisation with no commercial vested interests clouding our objectivity.
2. The North West Friends of Homeopathy are headed up by John Cook (who appears to have been at one point the Chairman of the British Homeopathic Association, although I’m lacking citation for that and may be mistaken by an identically-named homeopath) and President Hugh Nielsen, who is also Clinical Lead of Old Swan Homeopathic Clinic, Liverpool
3. The North West Friends of Homeopathy state on their website that their homeopathy supplier is Weleda Ltd
4. Weleda Ltd is a large multi-national corporation operating in 53 countries with an annual turnover of around $300m
5. Weleda Ltd produce homeopathic products, and also the non-homeopathic Iscador (made from mistletoe, and often lumped in with homeopathy for reasons too complicated to go into here).
6. Welada Ltd currently supply Iscador and homeopathic products to… Old Swan Homeopathic Clinic, where Hugh Nielsen – President of NWFoH is Clinical Lead.

These facts, which I’ve seen nothing to suggest are incorrect, do not of course show any solid financial incentive behind the supposedly-grassroots, ‘supporting the patients’ activities of the NWFoH, however they do make it hard not to wonder that objectivity may be compromised – homeopaths spontaneously campaigning to have preserved a contract that their supplier benefits from financially.

The rest of the evening was genuinely fascinating – clearly many of the people who had turned up (those not part of John’s own group, of which there seemed to be several)  had done so out of genuine belief that homeopathy was an effective treatment. Each shared their own tale – terminal cancers held back by homeopathic products, ADHD abated without the need for drugs, breast cancer completely cured by homeopathy. Interestingly, there was an overwhelming preponderance of cancer patients present, and I think this reflects the intentional muddying of the lines between homeopathy, Iscador, and homeopathic Iscador. As the Chair was quick to point out, any case relating to Iscador was fundamentally not one the session was set up to consult on, and still the entirely-sincere and doubtlessly-genuine cancer cases came in. This made me wonder, especially as Monday’s radio phone in seemed curiously skewed towards Iscador stories too, whether there wasn’t an intentional drive to get such patients to come along, with their deeply-emotive – though irrelevant to the subject at hand – cases. If I were an astroturf organisation shilling for an Iscador manufacturer, I’d imagine that’s the kind of situation I’d try and promote.

Still, I felt nothing but empathy for the majority of the cases in the room (by which I mean the ones who weren’t nakedly hostile to the very notion of a skeptic, which formed a minority I imagine). Most of the people there were genuine in their concerns, and really wanted clarity and answers – they were just missing the objectivity that comes with not being in the centre of the storm. It is incredibly hard to accept such counter-intuitive notions as regression to the mean, confirmation bias and spontaneous recovery when you’re the one involved – as human beings we’re built to fit our lives into some kind of understandable narrative and see pattern and structure where there is, sometimes, chaos and randomness, and we’re all susceptible to this. It really did reinforce to me the need to be compassionate and considerate when dealing with people who have been convinced by a particular pseudoscience – even the most vociferous of proponents can themselves be victims, and frequently this is the case.

Amongst the stories told, the recurring theme which became apparent to me was of people who, when desperate, had been convinced to try homeopathy – perhaps by reputation, perhaps by recommendation from a well-meaning or otherwise practitioner. Also recurring, too, were stories of dismissal of the treatments by medical practitioners, and it did make me wonder just how many people would put their faith in homeopathy if explained clearly and gently why those little pills have no clinical effect, and how the placebo effect really works, rather than simply dismissed out of hand (admittedly by doubtlessly busy doctors who have real and pressing issues to deal with – a situation which will only increase now GPs are left holding the purse strings). I wonder if a moment’s pause and patience at the point of first experience might keep many more patients from falling for the weasel-wording of Dr Nielsen (who visibly squirmed when fellow skeptic Tom Williamson pressed him on Nielsen’s own explanation of how homeopathic substances get more effective once the initial substance has been diluted out of them) and the sneering and bullish hyperbole of John Cook.

Ultimately, however, I don’t really believe the discussions this evening will have affected the decision to be made over homeopathic funding, partly because I don’t think it really was – or was even pretending to be – a discussion. ‘Have your say’ invited the website – and plenty of people did. However, there is a significant difference between having your say, and having a vote, and I strongly think in this instance the evidence will outweigh the few passionate-but-sincerely-misguided opinions of the homeopathy users, and the smug point-scoring of the North West Friends of Homeopathy (Manufacturers). I, for one, eagerly await the outcome on March 22nd.

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…

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.

The 10:23 Campaign

Cross-posted from the JREF Swift blog.

Generally speaking, when homeopathy hits the headlines here in the UK skeptics have cause to wince – whether it’s B-list celebrities advocating homeopathic malaria prevention, newspaper lifestyle columns promoting the benefits of the long-discredited pseudomedical practice or simply major pharmacies out to make an easy profit, there are very seldom many good days for succussion-skeptics.

Saturday, 30th January 2010, however, was different. At precisely 10:23am that morning, over 400 protesters took to the streets of cities around the UK as part of the 10:23 campaign – aiming to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathic pills. Gathering in a dozen town centres the length and breadth of the land, activists bravely took their lives into their hands by ‘overdosing’ on entire bottles homeopathic remedies.

Unsurprisingly, no skeptics were harmed in the making of this protest – for, as we know, there’s nothing in homeopathy. Zip. Zilch. Nil. What’s more, the event didn’t go unnoticed – with prominent press coverage from the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph and even the Huffington Post, amongst many, many other sources. Radio stations had phone-ins on the the story. It made the TV news. All in all, this wasn’t a day for skeptics to wince.

The whole event had a particularly surreal quality for me – four months earlier we at the Merseyside Skeptics Society hatched the ludicruously-ambitious plan to have hundreds of people join us in a mass ‘overdose’. The idea was simple: if we could show that it was possible for hundreds of people to take a whole tube of homeopathic pills and suffer no effects (positive or negative), then it would help get people interested in what homeopathy is, and why it can’t possibly work. We had no budget, no experience and no right to expect it to work – all we had to rely on was the energy and passion of the skeptical community, and the hard work of those involved. Fortunately, come the day of the event came, the skeptical community didn’t disappoint…

In London, over 100 people gathered in Red Lion Square in what was the most high-profile event of the day. Sporting the stylish-yet-practical-yet-obligatory 10:23 T Shirts, the crowd heard speeches from Simon Singh and Dr Evan Harris MP – the latter recounting comic highlights from the Parliamentary Science and Technology Sub-Committee’s homeopathy evidence check session in November last year. Counting down to the ‘overdose’ was comedian and author Dave Gorman, who learnt about the protest during an appearance on a TV chat show. Meanwhile, back in campaign headquarters in Liverpool 40 of us took to the steps of the iconic St George’s Hall to overdose on a variety of Boots-brand 30c remedies, before promptly heading to the pub to await reports from around the country (those wanting to see a real overdose might have wished to witness the levels of merriment in the bar).

Elsewhere around the country, events were successfully taking place outside branches of Boots pharmacy in Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton. What’s more, the UK weren’t alone in hitting the streets with their sugar pills – following suit were groups in Sydney (lead by Richard Saunders) and Perth (with Kylie Sturgess), as well as Madrid, Spain – and even a charming family affair in Tampa, Florida. Other events were planned in Ohio, US and Vancouver, Canada. In short, the level participation across the country – and indeed the world – was staggering.

Besides the level of participation and the attention of the press, what impressed me most about the day was the spirit and atmosphere of the events – this wasn’t the grumpy, nay-saying, self-righteous skeptic we see so often in the media. Instead, the protests were peaceful and jocular, the onus very much on raising awareness and having fun. Personally, I’m delighted at what we’ve managed to achieve with the 10:23 campaign so far – and with further actions planned for the coming weeks and months, I hope we’re able to build on this fantastic momentum to help reach even more people with the message – Homeopathy: There’s Nothing In It.

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.

Well, today the Daily Mail have released an update, in which they interview the Muslim woman involved, Ericka Tazi. She is a recent convert to Islam, being brought up a ‘staunch Catholic’ until a year ago (maybe one day she’ll settle on something sensible). The odd thing about the Mail’s approach is how they desperate they seem to be to separate her religion from any ‘foreign’ connotations. They quote her saying:

I only took up the Muslim faith a year ago. And it had nothing to do with my husband. Although he was born into the Muslim faith, he is as English as I am. He goes around in jeans and T-shirts and has even got a season ticket for Everton

Wow! He’s got a season ticket for Everton! He’s more English than me! The Mail seems, as always, utterly confused. “He may be Muslim, but he’s not foreign!” How bizarre (yet, of course, expected) that the Mail isn’t worried about the oddness of a person’s beliefs, just as long as they make sure they are thoroughly English.

Of herself, Ms Tazi says:

I am a Warrington girl through and through. I loved The Beatles and all the things an ordinary English girl enjoys. I used to go to the Cavern Club. I was brought up a staunch Catholic and only turned to Islam about a year ago.

Yup – ‘the Beatles and all the things an ordinary English girl enjoys’. She was even a Catholic. We’re used to Catholics round here in England. My mother was one (she’s Irish, and doesn’t like the Beatles though, so she’s on thin ice). Don’t worry about Ms Tazi being a Muslim, she’s not foreign – not even Irish!

With its readers assured that being a Muslim doesn’t mean that this woman is at all foreign (and nor is her husband), the Mail article discusses her perspective of the alleged event, and how comforting and not-at-all foreign her religion is.

I have embraced the religion and always try to wear the hijab. It gives me peace and satisfies me spiritually.

Ah. ‘Spiritually’. Anything that satisfies one’s ‘spiritual’ side must be good.

At first, during her stay in the Bounty House Hotel, Ms Tazi didn’t wear her hijab because she ‘didn’t want to stand out’ (she’s not at all foreign), but during her treatment she decided to ‘follow her beliefs’ (isn’t the point of being religious to try to do that all the time?). She then wore her hijab to breakfast but was:

…utterly shocked by the reaction of the hotel owners. They became nasty and all but called me a terrorist.

I don’t think it’s a matter for police involvement (unless she was threatened), but if she is telling the truth (the hotel owners, Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang, deny implying that she was a terrorist), I have no sympathy for either party. This is vicious, petty religious squabbling – both parties are, as far as I’m concerned, crazy. It is ridiculous that the police have become involved, and shows how easily people can use their religion to both cause arguments, and to get unjustified support when offended.

The Daily Mail fails to see that it is not the nationality or skin colour of a person that is to be feared, but the beliefs and attitudes they carry – it is not reassuring that somebody is Muslim (or Hindu, Christian, Jew, etc) but they are English. Being English doesn’t say a jot about your mental stability. I’d much rather somebody came from anywhere at all in the world but were free from any religion – or at least had an approach to religion that didn’t result in scuffles like this, and didn’t demand to be protected from criticism by the long arm of the law.

After her story became public, Ms Tazi says she is afraid to go out, due to comments on right-wing websites, and is considering wearing the full burka when she attends court. It is horrible that the issue of why the police are getting involved in the first place is getting lost amid thuggish abuse. As the Daily Mail was so keen to point out, she is no different from many, many others. She simply has a crazy belief system. So to do the hotel owners. Why the police became involved in their bickering I do not know – hopefully, the case will be quickly dropped and fogotten about.

Hopefully then the Vogelenzangs will be free to run their hotel in peace – though they may want to remain more polite in the future, and keep religion to themselves, and hopefelly Ericka Tazi will be free to wear the hijab, burka, or whatever else she wants – though she may want to remember that it is as free to be criticised as the shoes she chooses to wear with it.

Certainly! I’d be delighted to fill that role! Fetch the decanter and I’ll start right away!

For the audience here who are not eccentric millionaires looking to keep me in exquisite comfort for the rest of their lives, let me explain…

At the last Sceptics in the Pub (on Thursday) I offered to try and write a blog post each week in time for Sunday. However, I wasn’t counting on the rather panicky Friday I would have, and the worry that would lurk at the back of my mind for the rest of the weekend.

So I found myself today, trying to think of a suitable blogging topic last-minute, but with no success. There are dozens of sceptical topics out there to choose from (why, you may ask, am I not writing about the new Catholic pre-sex prayer, which could have spawned me a thousand ‘missionary position’ jokes? Or why not just link you to the Daily Mail health page (“I was in agony – so they sawed off my ankles and gave me new ones”, “Surgeons used a drill to clean out my arteries – and the noise was horrendous!”, “My husband’s snoring could rattle the bed. Now he’s been cured by radio waves”)?

Well, to be quite honest, I am far too distracted by the events of Friday, and so have plumped to write about them. You see, oh gracious audience, I may have lost my job. And not because of any of this namby-pamby ‘recession’ malarkey, either. It may be a real old-fashioned dismissal.

Now, it may not be a strictly ‘sceptical’ topic, nor one that is to do with science or one of the many pseudosciences, as we normally have on this site (in fact, perhaps it is an example of the self-centred wittering that blogs are so often lampooned for, though I hope not), but I am hoping that the circumstances for my potential dismissal are ones that will still be of interest to those who are concerned with education.

I work in a school, you see, as a media-chap – the idea being that I produce things such as posters and films, so that the school has something flashy to show parents and the outside world. Unfortunately, as you may know, I have green hair, and have had a variety of unusual colours for the duration of my adult life and my previous two years at this job. For Spring 2009, however, the school has had a change of management and now has a more conservative dress code prohibiting ‘extreme dress, clothes or behaviour’. I found out on Friday that my hair breaches that code, and must be removed. Well, perhaps not removed. But at least bleached, or dyed a less controversial colour.

Drat.

This has come as a bit of a shock, and I must say that my hair is very important to me. Part of me thinks that being so protective of my hair is a bit silly, but at the same time, it forms an important part of my identity – would many people drastically alter their hair if it were requested by their job? It has not been a problem for the previous two years, even through interviews for the new term, and it doesn’t affect my work, so it begs the question: how damaging is my having green hair to the school, and to the pupils?

Of course I don’t think it is damaging. But what about you? Does my hair negatively affect the school? Does it positively affect the school? Does having a plethora of hair colours in  a school lead to an increase in bullying, or of tolerance? Is there some other reason why I should or should not be allowed to have it green? And, of course, are you an eccentric millionaire looking for an heir to your millions?

As a delightful postscript to the events of Friday, on the bus home that afternoon, I was faced with a torrent of abuse from a gang of yoofs, who yelled a barrage green-hair-based insults (but not even one I’ve not heard before) and thew balls of paper at me.

Perhaps bleaching my hair would be the easiest way to avoid incidents like these.  But is it necessarily the best?

But as it happens, the Merseyside UFOs weren’t aliens, after all.  I’ll let you have a moment to stop reeling from that shock revelation.  Done?  Good.  They were countermeasure flares deployed in a navy training routine.  Even the woo-tastic Telegraph is happy to go with this explanation, so it must really hold water – give those guys half an inch of wiggle room and it seems they’re the first ones to don their tin-foil hats and hum the theme tune to the X-Files.  And the BBC are not much better – ‘Do-Dee-Derr-Derrr…Do-Dee-Do-Derr-Derr-Derr…‘   As it happens, I was half-way through an ‘it’s probably something straightforward’ type post when it emerged that it was, in fact, something straightforward.  ’Oh,’ thought I, ‘that’s that then.  No need to write on UFOs, it’ll be ages before another one of those comes up.’  But UFOs, like buses and clichés, rarely come along one at a time…

So what’s this latest story then?  As the Telegraph reports:

“Campers in the Lake District were treated to a spectacular light show from a string of glowing orbs which flew in formation across the night sky.

It is the latest in a series of sightings which has baffled onlookers and excited UFO spotters across the UK” – Source: Telegraph

I for one appreciate the Telegraph taking a fine, unbiased opinion on this.  ’It’s the latest in a series of sightings’ – there’s a half-truth for you: It’s the latest in a series of pretty lame sightings.  People who believe in UFOs are described as excited; people who had no belief in UFOs were baffled – clearly stacking the deck early on in the report to favour an ‘Aliens!!!!!’ interpretation.  Let’s read on… and as Darlington-born (good lad!) Paul Haigh explains:

“[The lights] weaved in and out of one another and appeared to fade and then light up again as they soared through a clear sky…

“The lights were amazing and seemed to fly in formation, they were darting around, fading an lighting up again.

“There was never more than six in the sky at any one time, but as one faded another lit up, it was a really weird spectacle”

Lights fading or flickering?  Flying in formation?  Sounds like Chinese Lanterns/Sky Lanterns to me – mini hot-air balloons that fly up to a mile in height, for around 20 minutes or so.  They’re party decorations, like an alternative to fireworks.  Pretty, and pretty cool too.  And at £15 for 5 – pretty reasonably priced.  (Note: The Merseyside Skeptics Society does not endorse a particular brand of Chinese Lantern.  We will never become a shill for damn ‘Big Lantern’).  It’s a shame nobody in the lakes that night knew about these things during the sighting…

“There were various theories as to what they were, someone said Chinese lanterns, but they seemed much too big and moving too fast.”

Oops, my bad again.   But they couldn’t have been Chinese lanterns, because they were too big.  And the speed they were moving!  For something so big they must have been going so fast!  Or, of course, they weren’t big.  They were just closer.  And therefore slower.  Like, say, a Chinese lantern.

“They looked as though they were being propelled under their own power rather than being blown by the wind, it was a still night.”

Lucy Gray, 26, of Leeds, said: “They seemed to be dancing around in the sky, not just racing straight across it like clouds.

“They were moving in formation, keeping a regular distance apart and they’d all shift around at the same time”

Propelled under their own power?  Sure – the power of their tiny flame, just enough to carry it’s tiny hot air balloon up.  It was a still night?  Sure – at ground level.  But at one mile up, there was clearly plenty of wind – Lucy tells us that herself when she mentions the clouds ‘racing straight across’ the sky.  Dancing around?  Sure – they’re light, and they’re buffeted by air currents.  Keeping a regular distance apart?  Sure – they could have been tied together.

“It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t explain it, unless they were aircraft on a training exercise.”

Or, Lucy, unless they were £15-worth of paper, candles and cheap fuel, tied with a string, one mile up (give or take), buffeted on the wind.

For me, the worst part of the article is still to come.  I can forgive Paul and Lucy – excited onlookers to some unusual-looking lights, giving quotes to a journalist, having a bit of a giggle. It’s all such a lark, aliens and all that.  But the journalist decides to end the whole account with the following:

“Similar lights in recent weeks have been found to be Chinese lanterns, often released during Summer weddings.”

Yes. Silmilar lights HAVE been found to be Chinese lanterns.  Pretty much identical lights, in fact, have been found to be Chinese lanterns. Pretty much identical lights, as described in the Telegraph as UFOs, have been later found to be Chinese lanterns.  So it’s really rather dishonest journalism to tack this simple explanation to the bottom of the last para, the token note of scepticism, when there are perfectly simple explanations already to hand.  Especially in a newspaper that has run 13 – THIRTEEN – UFO stories in 3 months.  That to me is an unnaturally high number, smacking of a little bit of manufacturing.

One sighting that, somehow, the UFO-obsessed Telegraph missed was the tale of the definitely-not-a-Chinese-lantern sighting over Muswell Hill in London.

This was actually something else that sat in my ‘too-silly-to-write-about’ pile for a while – struggling, bit-part and entirely-unheard-of actor Sam Lathem sighted what he described as  ’a large cube-shaped “ship” with orange lights erratically making its way across the sky’ late last month.  Sam was so spooked and amazed by what he saw that he took the time to draw a sketch.  A sketch.  He drew it.  In this day an age, when every phone has a camera and cctv cameras line the streets, he decided to sketch it.  Fishy.  In my head, he then tried to sell the sketch to the UFO, like a caricature artist in a tourist hotspot, but the UFO politely declined in broken English.  That bit’s just in my head though.

And this UFO is just in Sam’s head, I’d say.

In Sam’s own words:

“It was really strange because there was no noise and you would have thought at that distance it would have woken up everybody on the street. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Yep, it doesn’t.  But the suggestion that there was no UFO, that an actor of Sam’s standing (actually, he really looks spookily like a fat Arnold Rimmer/Chris Barrie) might benefit from a bit of niche publicity – to me that makes a whole lot more sense than an entire city failing to look up and see a cube the size of a truck hovering silently above their heads (yes, in exactly the same way a brick doesn’t).

So it’s silly season on the UFO stories, it seems.  OK.  I mean, I largely got into this scepticism lark to expose the psychics, tarot-readers and other such scoundrels who prey on the bereaved and vulnerable.  Or to help put an end to the quack practicioners of bogus treatments which erode faith in real medicine and damage the health of those who fall for the woo.  But as long as UFOs are so prominent, and tabloids cheaply sell-off their own journalistic dignity for a quick story, without second thought for the leg-up it gives to fuzzy, magical thinking – they’re back on the list.  Now, I’m off to draft-up a ‘there’s probably a very simple explanation for those lights… they’re probably Chinese lanterns… etc’ post, ready for the next sighting…