Taking up the story from CBS:

“Six-year-old Ivan Stoiljkovic appears to be able to attract metal to his chest – including silverware, coins and even a frying pan.

His family says Ivan possesses extraordinary strength and even healing powers.”

“It started as a joke,” said his grandmother. “I said, let’s try this and things just stuck to him. The heavier things actually stuck more strongly to him.”

In total, his family says Ivan can carry up to 55 pounds of metal on his torso.

His upper body appears to be more magnetic and his family says his wounds heal very quickly and leave no scars.

Family members told Reuters that Ivan also has “healing hands” with which he alleviates his grandfather’s stomach pains and has soothed the pain of a neighbor who hurt his leg in a tractor accident.”

The story comes complete with a video of Ivan demonstrating his talents:

Avid magnetic-child-watchers may have heard this tale before, and indeed this isn’t the first time a child from Eastern Europe has been heralded as possessing extraordinary magnetic powers. In fact, just this February a seven year old Serbian boy called Bogdan was filmed demonstrating his own extraordinary skills.

Tellingly, both videos of Bogdan and Ivan are very similar – a topless, slightly-podgy child with items precariously stuck to their torso. Most interestingly, however, Bogdan’s tale gives away a little more about what might really be going on. Because while both Ivan and Bogdan are shown with cutlery in place, Bogdan’s family go one further than Ivan’s with their demonstrations of magical skills. Ivan may well be able to hold up coins, frying pans and more, but Bogdan can use his magnetic skills to suspend plates on his chest. Ceramic plates. Ceramic, non-metallic, non-magnetic plates, suspended on his slightly podgy, entirely smooth and slightly leant-back torso…

…Aaaaaand therein lies the secret. These feats aren’t feats of magnetic skill, but of simple physics and friction – a slightly clammy, smooth skin offers just enough grip that objects can be held in place, especially if the wonderkid is leaning just slightly backwards to allow the bulk of the weight to rest upon the chest, rather than to be magically attracted to their bodies. If they were truly magnetic, they’d be able to stand up straight or even lean forwards, and keep the objects in place.

Essentially, this is a balancing act.

Or, to put it as the Discovery blog amazingly titled it – “Magnetic” Boy Is Probably Just “Plump-and-Sticky” Boy. And if that’s not the greatest headline of all time, I’m not sure what is.

One thing that interests me is that these stories seem to be coming out of a cluster of countries. Alongside Ivan in Croatia, there’s also both Bogdan and Jelena from Serbia. This might well be another case of those culturally-bound phenomenons – like heavy leg syndrome is bound within France, and the fear in South Korea that indoor fans left on overnight will cause asphyxiation. Which is the only interesting thing about this story, really.

This article is an adaptation of an item on episode 92 of the Righteous Indignation podcast. Get this, and other episodes, by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes. It’s good, honestly.

Don’t worry, that’s not a wild assertion made to martyr myself as the next cause célèbre of the libel reform campaign (although that’s not a bad idea – I mean who’d heard of the Simon Singh fella before he pointed out the happily bogus claims of the BCA? That’s right: nobody. And now look at him – front page of the BBC, on every skeptical podcast going, and standingly-ovated every time he leaves the house. I think the only way, therefore, to get big in the world of skepticism is now libel martyrdom. Fuck it – Dereck Acorah eats babies and Rupert Murdoch is a first-class cunt).

Anyway, as I was saying, scientologists ARE criminals. Or, at least, some of them are – according to the cult themselves. In fact, more scientologists are criminals than we previously thought, if the cult is to be believed (which, of course, it probably isn’t – because lots of scientologists are criminals, as I say).

I’ll explain, or rather, I’ll let the Telegraph explain:

Scientology ‘has branch in every English prison’

Scientology has obtained a foothold in every prison in England and Wales, a spokesman for the religion claims, despite official figures which show only three prisoners acknowledge following the religion.

Essentially, the crazy cult (who were convicted of activities listed as ‘fraud in an organised gang’ in France last year) have been targeting prisoners across England and Wales, in an attempt to help them see the error of their ways, go straight, expunge their thetons, audit their woes and generally do all that fun scientological stuff that keeps Tom Cruise bouncing on couches and keeps the creepy, sinister smile on Tommy Davis’ face. You see, their organisation has an entire programme dedicated to the rehabilitation of lags (does anybody other than The Sun use the word lag? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used. Other than, you know, jet lag – but I think that’s a different context. Is someone who gets jailed for hijacking planes is known as a jet lag? I’d like to think so).

And what’s this fantastic programme called? Bearing in mind this is meant to be the legitimate, socially-responsible, respectable wing of the weird space-cult?

Criminon.

Really, criminon.

CRIMINON!

Scientologist explain their prisoner rehab scheme

Which, to me, sounds less like a rehab scheme and more like the name of a robot in a sci-fi future – one of those ones that’s meant to be the butler and do all the menial tasks in a friendly and people-loving way, but entirely unpredictably breaks it’s programming and goes on a rampage, wiping out as much of the human population as it can, in a way that nobody could have ever possibly foresaw when they decided to call it the Criminon 3000. Or something.

Still, enough of the bizarre and evil science fiction – we’ve got scientology to talk about.

A spokesman for CRIMINON claim they’re working with every prison in England and Wales – 139 in all – to get their scheme rolled out. Of course, unsurprisingly, the numbers don’t reflect that – with just 3 prisoners in the country admitting to following Big LRon’s delusions. That actually puts the vast majority of prisoners in the UK in an intellectual class about Criminon’s celebrity advocates – like Kirsie Alley, Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson).

Unsurprisingly, there’s been a lot of criticism of Criminon – and it actually extends somewhat beyond the fact that the name’s really shit: the course is based not on peer-reviewed studies, but instead it’s based around the 1981 L Ron Hubbard booklet ‘The Way to Happiness‘; the course is, characteristically and predictably, incredibly disparaging of psychiatrists – something of a theme throughout the crazy and paranoid Hubbard’s work, for some reason; and the course has strong links to Narconon - the Scientological course for drug rehabilitation.

I swear I’m not making these names up (he was a poor science fiction writer, after all).

Both Criminon and Narconon involve the practice of ridding the body of substances via the Purification Rundown – a cleansing ritual involving B3 mega-doses and hyper-extended saunas, which have been linked to a number of injuries and deaths caused by Scientology. The Criminon website itself even hints towards this approach:

This course teaches the student exactly what drugs are and the effects they have on the body and mind. It explains how and why one becomes addicted to drugs in the first place and then details an exact regimen – which involves the use of vitamins and exercise – for freeing a person from the grip of addiction, and all without medical substitutes.

Criminon is an entirely volunteer organisaiton (although, of course, this is the Scientology version of volunteering – which is currently being debated in the courts as ex-Scientologists sue the cult for back pay, having been made to work over 100-hour weeks for almost no pay for years). Digging around the Criminon literature, the volunteer criteria has some interesting highlights:

1. Fund-raising. (Examples could be a sponsored run, setting up a Charity E-Bay account, a sports game where people paid to play or contacting local businesses to get donations). Criminon UK will pay 10% commission on monies raised.

Interesting notion of fund-raising there – collect for us, and we’ll let you keep part of the donations: sounds legally dubious. If I’m wrong there, I’ll happily retract.

The following attributes are essential for becoming a Criminon Tutor.

• You have a minimum of three hours a week to give to Criminon.
• You find it easy to write/type a personal letter.
• You are persistent on a given course of action and are willing to continue to write to offenders even if they don’t reply for a while.

Ah, there’s the scientology we know and love – persistently hassling people even when they don’t reply. Leopards and spots.

Still, it makes a change to see the cult taking criminals, and turning them into Scientologists; we’re used to see it happen the other way around, after all.

All this is well-known, and can be found in greater detail elsewhere on the web, so I won’t bore you by re-hashing the details. However, there is something I can add to the story – we here at the MSS were recently contacted by a journalist wanting to know a little more about the device, specifically if it’s still on sale. Always happy to oblige, I got to doing a bit of digging, and having found – unsurprisingly – the ATSC’s website down ‘for repair’ (I can only assume it’s the company’s morals that are undergoing repair), I was kindly pointed in the direction of the online trade outlet ecplaza, and specifically the page for the ATSC ADE 651.

Well, what better way to find out if this disgraced and disproven device is still on sale, than to call up the manufacturers directly? Luckily enough, ecplaza lists the phone number for the sales department of WooBombDetectorsRUs as +44 207 681 2036… which is a number out of service. Presumably, the phone lines are also down for repair. Still, on the page there’s this lovely, shiny, inviting orange box titled ‘Inquire Now’… so I did. Presumably, I thought, if the website is down and the CEO under investigation for fraud, then the email enquiries would either bounce back an auto-reply saying ‘this device is no longer on sale’ (or word to that effect), or it would simply disappear into a black hole.

As it turns out, I was wrong – a few days later, the following reply dropped into my inbox:

Subject: RE: ADE 651

From: ATSCLLC, ATSC (UK) Ltd, United Kingdom

Phone: 44-207-681-2036,

Email: info@atscltd.com

Homepage : http://ATSCLLC.en.ecplaza.net

Date: Mar 22, 2010 16:54:37 GMT

Message:
Dear Mr Marshall.

Many thanks for your enquiry. However, before we disclose any further information, could you please advise as to the nature of your, or your companies enquiry. This is asked as generally, information is only provided to those prospective clients that have a specific need in the ability to detect either explosive or narcotic ‘signatures’ and for a specific ‘end-user’ Country.

Any additional information you could provide at this time would also be very useful.

As you can see, conspicuously absent in the above is any indication that the ADE 651 has been banned from sale, discontinued or withdrawn pending review. I have, naturally, responded in order to obtain further information – thus far to no avail.

If the ADE 651 is indeed still for sale, it represents the ongoing endangerment of lives the world over. It’s also not alone, in that respect…

The GT200 from Global Technical Ltd- cost: £22,000 per unit

The GT200 is an near-identical device to the ADE 651. Personally, I find interesting to note the sheer lack of any kind of technical information, specifications, studies, research and data available on their site, even when referring to valid criticisms:

Conflicting documents

We have read conflicting media reports of the outcome of the latest tests on the GT200 carried out by the Thai government.

You will appreciate that it is difficult to comment on the latest test report until we have seen it and had the opportunity to study it and, in particular, to understand the testing methodology employed. We can say that previous tests carried out by independent bodies, and the experience of the large number of users of this product all over the world, confirms that the GT200 is effective and because of this, we would ask that you treat with caution any reports to the contrary.

Essentially, they’re saying: “Don’t listen to what the bad men say, our device works because we say so”. Hardly particularly convincing. The GT200 was part of the investigation by BBC Newsnight in January, and was found to be as ineffective as the ADE 651. What’s more, the BBC found that the device:

“…consists of an aerial on a handle connected to a black box into which you are supposed to insert substance detection cards.

The head of Global Technical, Gary Bolton, told Newsnight:

“There are no electronic parts required in the handle.”

Explosives expert Sidney Alford took apart the “black box” of the GT200, which is supposed to receive signals from the detection cards. He was surprised at what he found.

“Speaking as a professional, I would say that is an empty plastic case,” he told us.

Mr Alford also took apart a “detection card” and found there was nothing in it other than card and paper.

Gary Bolton from Global Technical told the BBC that the lack of electronic parts “does not mean it does not operate to the specification”.

The Amega Wand - not a sex toy

As we all know, there are few things more scientifically-robust than a good ‘It cured me!’ anecdote. They’re well known to be ineffable when it comes to such amazing healing modalities as homeopathy, chiropractic, reiki, transcendental meditation, ear candles, colonic irrigation and all that other good stuff. They’re like the gold standard, when it comes to woo. Which is why my eyes lit up when one of our Skeptics in the Pub attendees alerted me to this story in his local paper:

Great Sankey couple invite people to try wand in bid to cure aches and pains

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and no – they don’t mean THAT kind of wand. Get your mind out of the gutters, we have skepticism to do.

A FORMER snooker champion believes his rheumatism from years of bending down over tables has been cured after his son introduced him to a wand which has been growing in popularity across America.

Robert Quinn, originally of Stockton Heath but now retired and living in North Wales, suffered rheumatism pain for 30 years and shingles for three years but since using the Amega product says that he has not felt any sort of ache.

Robert, aged 77, said: “I will try anything so when my son said about giving it a go to see if it would help I thought ‘why not?’ “We had a successful snooker and billiards team but I’ve been in a lot of pain since then.

“My wife is much more sceptical than me but it cured the pain in her arm which has been troubling her for years.”

There we go – not one anecdote, but two. This wand must be super good. I for one always like to take at face value testimony of a 77 year old man who admits he’ll try anything. Wait, we might be heading back to THAT kind of wand again. Move on!

The Great Sankey couple decided to buy one and after ‘wanding’ a number of people have been so impressed with the results they want to create an open house for other people to try it – for free.

OK, now we have this aged couple offering to have strangers come around their house for a good wanding, at no extra cost. I fail to see how this could get any more euphemistic.

Ann said: “We were a bit sceptical ourselves at first, as most people are, but seeing is believing. We have had so much pleasure seeing people relieved of their pain that we want to give more people the chance to try it.”

I stand corrected. However, I’d like to point out that the ‘seeing is believing’ line is only true when it comes to an aging couple getting pleasure from wanding strangers. It’s certainly not true for, say, health claims. Especially health claims that involve a magic wand called ‘The Amega Wand’ (no, don’t confuse it for this, this or that).

The Amega wand is a titanium pen made of fused crystals and minerals and works by using ‘AMized Fusion Technology’ and zero point energy.

Bullshit! Sorry, rude of me to interrupt, carry on…

Ann added: “We’re not saying that it’s some sort of miracle magic wand, it’s the body that heals itself. Over time cells get clogged up with all the stuff we’ve eaten, inhaled and drunk so the wand helps the cells clear out the gunk that’s been blocking them up and reminds the body of its own powers.

Right, finished? Sure? OK – Bullshit! Top of my head stuff here – crystal healing is bunkum, AMized Fusion Technology is largely likely meaningless, zero point energy is largely unrelated, cells don’t get clogged up with what we’ve eaten and drunk, and the wand does dick all to unblock said imaginary gunk, nor does it remind the body of anything (unless you mean THAT wand, which I’m sure will have some effect on your body, or your money back).

Still, good skepticism isn’t conducted off the top of the head, so let’s take a look at what Amega say about their wand, and some of the other claims they’ve made.

Stress is the major cause of all sicknesses and diseases. In today’s lifestyle and the environment we live in, stress is inevitable. However, one can prevent from getting sick and live a healty life if they were to take a Wellness care approach.

Amega Global’s products, backed by over 25 years of R&D supports Wellness Care which is a must in Today’s world. Amega’s products are an offshoot of Ancient natural therapeutic wisdom and applying Futuristic Technology in the Area of Quantum Physics to support Individuals with Natural Energies to eliminate stress and increase their immunity.

I suddenly feel like I just got a full house in Bollocks Bingo. Can you spot the deliberate mistakes there? Stress isn’t the main cause of all sickness and disease, in fact there is no one main cause (despite what Innersound Qi, chiropractic or a million other quacks will have you believe). Wellness Care is a meaningless, tautological term. Ancient natural therapeutic wisdom? Blimey. Futuristic Technology? That one I like – I presume it’s all sleek and rounded edges, futuristic stuff always is. Come to think of it, sounds like this… Quantum Physics? Really? Also, a little tip – never take advice on being healthy from a company that can’t spell the word ‘healthy’. Trust me, that one’s a banker.

This, ladies in gentlemen, is a Grade A Jargon Storm. Which brings us very neatly to their AMazing-sounding AMized Fusion Technology:

None of this is true

Amized® Fusion Technology is a resonance technology developed over a period of 15 years of research, applying the principles of Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics.

As in the Homeostatis condition (relatively stable condition), our body’s Bio-energy field can automatically access the Zero-Point Life Force Energy from the environment and restore the deficiency bringing all aspects of our life into harmony (mental, emotional, physical and spiritual).

Your body’s own natural intelligence knows best where to channel how much life force energy. When administered for a period of time, it aids cell rejuvination, enhancing our inner vitality. It aids immunity by cleansing, charging and rejuvenating our body cells. This way, it aids in age reversal, promotes healthy cells and expels diseases.

Joyous, rapturous, mind-bogglingous levels of pseudoscientific bullshit – great work, Amega. It’s hard to even know where to begin, there. Let’s just leave it at ‘none of the above is true, and around 50% of the words used are a) meaningless or b) meaninglessly thrown together with other words. Oh, and age reversal? Really?’

Again, none of this is true

What else do Amega do? They help you make money, that’s what. As their website merrily exclaims, listed as ‘Opportunities’:

Buy a product: As a preferred customer when you purchase a product* as an Amega Customer Distributor, you are entitled for a Business Account (BA) and referral income.

Share the benefits: Refer Amega products to your friends, families and associates, and recommend them to purchase just like you.

Help others purchase: Facilitate them by being the sponsor to purchase a product from the company and we will reward you with a referral commission for your efforts.

Earn residual income: When you and the person sponsored continue to facilitate others to purchase, you would create a residual income potential from the referral commission.

Can you say ‘Pyramid Scheme’? I can. And I’m fairly sure former snooker champion Robert Quinn can too. Remember that open house offer, where he and his wife would wand you for free? And the penny drops.

As for any of you thinking, skeptics that you are, that any positive effect felt by our erstwhile snooker player and his wand-loving wife must be due to the placebo effect, well stick this in your wand and apply it – it works on dogs, too:

There – so it CAN’T be placebo effect. Obviously. I mean, the dog was lying down, and it got up and walked away. Even though we’d been told in that blue screen of text that the dog had some kind of problem or other, which presumably would have meant walking away would be TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE or something. Proof, people – Proof.

Personally, I think if you’re looking to buy a wand that will make you feel better about your health and make you forget about your aches and pains for a while, the Amega wand is the wrong one to buy. That’s all I’m saying.

The youth of Japan are apparently currently obsessed with a new selection of ringtones created by a company called the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory. This isn’t another ‘Crazy Frog’ though.  If it was, I would have shot myself rather than write this post. No, it’s something altogether more interesting, although just as moronic. These ringtones are “therapeutic ringtones”. Yes, forget acupuncture, hypnotherapy or the pleasures of a good sit down: simply play the ringtone on your phone and all your cares and health troubles will float away down the winding river of easy cures, along with your wallet and your self respect. Only in Japan. Well, for now.

The Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory has good credentials. Its head, Matsumi Suzuki, used to work for the National Research Institute of Police Science, where he made award-winning advances in the field of voiceprints. He also developed the now well-known synthetic mosquito noise that is inaudible to the over-60s but apparently annoys the hell out of local good-for-nothing kids who like to hang around outside off-licenses. Incidentally, this can also be found on mobile phones around the world, usually played by good-for-nothing kids who like to hang around outside off-licenses, and playing with their mobile phones.

Suzuki followed up this sterling work by becoming head of the aformentioned Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, and producing stupid novelty ringtones. Perfectly logical career step, I think you’ll agree.

So what are these “therapeutic ringtones”? Put simply, they’re just ringtones, but with an added (and made-up) therapeutic twist. We’re going way beyond soothing pan-pipes and whale-song here, though. There’s no shortage of conditions and problems they can’t combat. Here’s a brief selection of what they can do:

- Cure a hangover.

- Induce sleep.

- Prevent sleep.

- Scare away crows (apparently Tokyo has a big problem with crows attacking bin bags in the early hours).

- Inspire sluggardly housewives into doing housework (sexism not mine!).

- Improve your skin tone using alpha waves (maybe it’s just the glow from the screen?).

- Alleviate hayfever.

The ringtone for alleviating hayfever is my favourite. It is called the Ohana Sukkuri melody, and it is basically a series of sounds emitted at different frequencies so that, in the company’s words: “people can choose the sound that resonates most to their sinus and causes pollen lodged there to fall from the nasal cavity”.

I love the image of Japanese teenagers holding their chirping mobile phones against their noses in the middle of summer in the hope that pollen will somehow vibrate out of their nasal cavity. Couldn’t they just blow their nose? Jeez, next we’ll be brushing our tongues with our toothbrushes! Ah, no wait..

The ringtone for improving skin tone is apparently a bit of electro-Schubert mixed with woodland noises, while the one intended to rouse bored housewives is a high-energy rhythm. The ringtone intended to induce sleep is basically a lullaby, while its opposite is a dance track. A lot of thought has gone into this, I’m sure. Maybe there’s one which plays Coldplay-style dirges to calm down people who suffer from mania? Or you could have the sound of the Pope’s head being cut off with a rough plank to wake up fainting victims. The variations are endless!

As I’m sure you all guessed long ago, these ringtones are complete tat, and quite frankly I think even the kids buying them know this. It’s just a bit of fun, and harmless I suppose, but I’m feeling in an evil Skeptic mood today, so have no problem deriding this nonsense loudly in an aggressive manner in order to get cheap laughs. Both the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory and Index, the content provider which sells the tones, fully admit there is no scientific evidence for any of them, yet still throw out euphemistic lines to reel people in: for example, while there is no evidence of the hayfever ringtone’s pollen-shaking power, it is apparently “generally understood” that it will work. That’s ok, then. Yes, let’s bite the bit of made-up anecdotal evidence and run, run like the wind! Therapeutic ringtones worked for me!

We also have Index’s comment that “the number of downloads suggests the ringtones must be working to a certain extent”, as well as authoritative scientific statements such as the one about how the hangover-cure “pulse melodies” are attuned to our bodies’ “medical rhythms”.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Made-up science follows the same patterns the world over, kind of like the way bullshit smells the same no matter what country you live in.

Of course, as I said before, it’s just a fad. Come next year the youth of Japan will have a new distraction, and no-one will have been hurt or damaged by the flash-flood of woo they’ve just experienced, but that doesn’t stop it being as annoying as a fat, naked frog riding a motorbike and making stupid noises. Plus, there’s one important thing you’ve got to remember: it might only be Japan now, but it’s only a matter of time before it makes its way to these shores.

Don’t worry, you could just relax with your new ringtone.

The oral hearings take the form of witnesses with relevant backgrounds being quizzed by committee members.  Witnesses for the first of these sessions included the legendary Ben Goldacre, Edzard Ernst from the University of Exeter, and Tracey Brown from the charity Sense About Science.  Speakers in favour of homeopathy included Paul Bennett from Boots, Peter Fisher from the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, and Robert Wilson from the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers.

The big thing that came out of this hearing, from a rhetorical point of view, was the admission by Paul Bennett that Boots did not believe homeopathy to be effective – but they sell it anyway because of consumer demand.  This lead to us here at Merseyside Skeptics drafting An Open Letter to Alliance Boots, calling upon them to withdraw the product.  If you haven’t done so already, or even if you have, please check out the letter.  Digg it, tweet it, repost it, write about it.  Help up make some noise!

Ahem.

The pro-homeopathy witnesses, when challenged, mentioned a number of studies which they claimed supported the idea that homeopathy has strong effects beyond placebo.  So I thought I’d look up a few of the studies mentioned and see what those studies actually say.

The first study mentioned in the oral evidence was what Robert Wilson referred to as the “Witt Trial”.  When challenged to give a single homeopathic product for which there is good evidence to support efficacy, Wilson said:

Arnica, which is for bruising, and is extremely useful in post-operative care. There was a major trial done on arnica and, indeed, there is one that has just been published, the Witt Trial, which was done by the Charity Hospital in Berlin. It was a large trial - 3,700 patients involved - and that has shown clearly that there is a strong benefit in homeopathic use to these patients with long-term chronic conditions. One of the subjects of that trial was arnica.

For a kick off, the so-called Witt Trial is not a clinical trial.  It was a cohort study, published in December 2008, in the journal BMC Public Health.  3709 consecutive patients who were referred to a predefined selection of homeopaths for a consultation were recorded. Eight years later, they went back to the same 3709 and people. And guess what had happened?

Some of them had got better. Therefore, homeopathy works.  Makes sense to me!

On top of that, their criteria for “better” was based upon asking the patient “do you feel better?”, rather than any objective measure.  It was actually more standardised than that (please rate your condition today on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 means you are 100% better, etc) but ultimately that’s what it came down to.

There was no control over what else the patients did in that time.  Many of them could have, and likely did, take other medicinal products during that time, be they complementary or evidence-based.  This lead to the study’s authors commenting:

As patients were allowed to use conventional therapies and other complementary therapies during the study period, the observed improvements cannot be attributed to homeopathic treatment alone.

There is no mention in the study, that I could see, of arnica, which is what Wilson claimed that the study showed effectiveness for.  There is no mention of any specific treatments actually, so although Arnica may well have been studied, I have no idea what for.

At the end of the eight year study, only 33% of the patients were still taking homeopathy.  29% had stopped taking homeopathy because they had recovered and 26% stopped taking homeopathy because they thought it wasn’t working.  Interestingly, twice as many children than adults had stopped treatment because they thought their condition had improved.  Adults were more likely to have stopped because they thought the treatment was ineffective.

The same patients were also quizzed two years after their visit to the homeopath.  The study says that there was practically no difference between the figures after two years and after eight years; and that in children, no relevant difference was found between those who stopped homeopathy and those who continued.

the differences in the outcome between those patients who stopped treatment and those who still continued were small

This seems to have been taken as a sign that the effects of homeopathy are long-lasting, rather than the arguably more sensible view that they’re non-existant.

I don’t claim to have any special expertise in reading clinical trials.  At best, I have a layman’s understanding.  Perhaps the data presented here is actually very interesting and relevant for a hundred different reasons.  But what this study certainly doesn’t do is provide strong support for the efficacy of homeopathic arnica, which is how Robert Wilson presented it in his evidence.  On the contrary, the study actually says:

The aim of this study […] was not to test the effectiveness of homeopathic drug treatment

The next study Wilson mentions was referred to as the Möllinger Trial.  This was published in the German journal “Research in Complementary Medicine”, edited by the psychologist Harald Walach.  This is some cause for concern, as Walach is also listed as co-author of the study.  That’s doesn’t have to be a reason to suspect foul play, but it is a red flag.

I couldn’t find the full text of this trial freely available online so there is a limit to what I can talk about, but I was fortunate enough to find some skeptical commentary from people who have read the full study; and of course we have the abstract.

This was described as a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial.  Which is a good start.  The participants – all healthy individuals – were divided into three treatment groups and studied over four days.

The first group was given 30C Arsenicum Album (which is the fancy-shmancy homeopathy way of saying Arsenic); the second group was given 30C Natrum muriaticum (a fancier-shmancier way to say table salt).  A third group was given placebo.

The idea is that, if homeopathy is true, because the patients are all healthy, then those in the Arsenic group should develop the same symptoms that homeopathic arsenic is used to treat.  Similarly, the patients in the salt group should develop the symptoms that homeopathic salt is used to treat.  And the people in the placebo group wouldn’t develop anything at all, or at least what they do develop would be unrelated.

There is another name for this type of study: a homeopathic proving.  Back to Robert Wilson for a moment:

a homeopathic proving is a technical term for when homeopathic medicines are assessed. It is not a way of doing a trial.

Sorry – why are you citing this paper then?  Arguably, citing provings only makes sense if the mechanism of action for homeopathy was plausible. Which is it not.  Leaving that aside for a moment, let’s look at the data.

The data seems very clear cut… perhaps too clear cut.  What about the trial’s methodology?  The number of participants is very important because, as Robert Wilson said in his evidence:

Any sample of fewer than 500 is not going to be statistically relevant.

If Wilson believes this, when why is he citing the Möllinger trial?  This trial included – wait for it – no fewer than twenty-five patients.  I’ll give that to you again – twenty five patients only.  By Wilson’s own flawed view of statistics, this trial is not statistically relevant.  I say flawed view because, as Evan Harris MP pointed out Wilson during the hearing:

whether the sample size is statistically significant depends on the frequency of the outcome you are measuring

And after the hearing, Ben Goldacre made a similar comment on his blog:

if you have a pill that cures everyone from an incurable condition then 40 people is fine, hell, a dozen would do

Another red flag is that all twenty-five subjects were actually trainee homeopaths, not that that has to make a difference.  As I say, just another red flag.  Though there does seem to be an increasing number of them!

Looking at the data itself – no non-specific symptoms in the two homeopathy groups, but eleven in placebo?  Surely you would expect to get similar numbers of non-specific symptoms across all groups?  This being the very point of the control group.  Absolutely no non-specific symptoms in the homeopathy groups? That is very suspicious.

Worse than that, they don’t just say an average of zero symptoms.  They say 0±2.  How can you get a deviation of ±2 without at least one patient having a negative symptom?  I don’t understand.  Genuinely!  Have I missed some subtle feature of statistics?  Answers on a postcard, please.

Next up is the randomisation code for this study.  This is the secret code used to blind the patients and clinicians from knowing which group is which.  The code for this trial was created by Rainer Schneider, though worryingly Scheider is also the person who did the analysis of the data, even though he knows (because he wrote the code) what the codes refer to.  This represents a flaw in the blinding.  I’m not accusing Schneider of deliberately introducing bias, but it’s another red flag to add to the list.

The results of this study do seem to be too good to be true.  One co-author is the editor of the journal which published the study, another co-author generated the blinding codes then performed supposedly-blind analysis of the data.  The result set itself doesn’t make any sense, with its ±2 symptoms and zero non-specific symptoms on the homeopathic groups.  It all seems very fishy.

Even if it were all above board, the study would still need to be repeated, with tighter protocols and more participants before it can overturn the mountain of evidence which suggests homeopathy doesn’t work.  Moreover, as mentioned earlier, this was never a test of efficacy, but a homeopathic proving!

The last paper I’m going to look at was referred to by Peter Fisher, who talked about an Italian trial done comparing homeopathy for the prevention of flu against placebo for the prevention of flu. He says:

quite a lot of people who actually got the homeopathic medicine got flu-like symptoms but did not actually get flu.

This was cited as a situation where homeopathy was known to have side effects.  If homeopathy was merely a placebo, then you wouldn’t expect to find side effects, says Fisher.

Except that’s bullshit.

I wasn’t able to locate this paper.  I did find a paper called “A randomized trial in the prevention of influenza-like syndromes by homeopathic management“, which was published in France, but the lead author was Italian.  This may or may not have been the paper to which Fisher was referring, but as I can’t find even an abstract for this paper online, there really isn’t much I can say about it.

What I can do, however, is query Fisher’s assertion that placebos do not have side effects.  Placebos can have side effects as much as they can have effects – it’s all down to the patients expectations.  If they expect a tablet to make them nauseous, then there is a good chance they will feel nauseous!

After the hearing, Ben Goldacre posted a note up on his website, which I think very accurately summarises the hearing.  Over to you, Ben:

One thing that will never get old for the homeopaths, it seems, is the old practise of pulling out a single trial and saying “ah, but look, pish to your meta-analyses, here is a trial where homeopathy works”. No matter how many times you point out why this is foolish and wrong, they will always think you’re just being picky, and that is why they will always give us joy.

Regular readers, and regular listeners of me on various podcasts or just ranting tipsily in a pub in fact, will be familiar with Joe Power – he was the Liverpudlian supposed-psychic I met at a book signing way back in June. The meeting, as I’ve spoken about before, was somewhat surreal in it’s content – especially when Joe decided to go on a random and pretty vehement rant whereby he likened skeptics (and specifically my good self) to paedophiles. He’s wrong of course, which I guess shows in that particular case his psychic powers were proven to be bullshit. It was actually that very conversation that led to my becoming a host of a podcast, so I suppose I should thank Joe for that. Cheers, Joe. If anyone wants to read a full account of the encounter, they can check it out elsewhere on the blog – or simply Google Joe Power’s name followed by the word ‘skeptic’ or ‘paedophile’ (I’ll let you guys choose which, but I know which I’d prefer. There’s something satisfying about the idea of a load of people typing ‘Joe Power Paedophile’ into Google. A GoogleBomb, I think it’s called…)  Indeed typing ‘Joe Power’ into Google is a pretty popular way of finding this site – looking at the key words for accessing it, Joe-related phrases come in both 3rd and 5th. So again, cheers Joe.

So, with Joe proving himself to be a distasteful, angry and pretty disgusting man on a personal level (ask him anything about his powers and you’ll see what I mean), it’s a real surprise and a real shame the BBC and other news outlets took him fully at his word on his ability to solve crimes. In an article published on the BBC Online on the 22nd November, it was reported:

Joe Power is a psychic medium who has worked with several UK forces trying to solve tough cases. When asked if he has helped the police solve murders, there is no hesitation: “without a shadow of a doubt,” he says.

What’s more, the BBC report goes on to clarify one of the cases Joe was involved in:

Joe Power says that he was contacted by the Metropolitan Police, asking for assistance on a very high profile murder investigation.

“I got an e-mail from the Met police asking for assistance,” Joe Power insists, “I gave them some information that was coming through the murder victim and people on the other side. Without a doubt they followed up on it.”

In an initial statement, the Metropolitan Police denied Joe had any involvement in the case. However, the Donal MacIntyre programme has seen an e-mail which Mr Power claims was sent to his partner by an officer working on the case.

The officer writes, “can Joe or the victim assist with any landmarks that would assist in narrowing the search down?” Joe is also asked “what sort of vehicle does the killer use, is it a car or a bike? Can the victim be more specific to Joe as to what happened at 2.10?”

When approached for a second time about Joe Power’s involvement with the case, the Metropolitan Police issued a new statement, authorised by the senior investigating officer.

So, this is the email Joe talked about to me, I take it – the email he said proves the police wanted his help, but the email he feels he doesn’t have to show anyone in order to prove it’s real. The BBC article makes a real point of the Met initially denying his involvement until shown the email, and then coming clean that he was involved to a degree – they make it out like this is some kind of cover up, that the police don’t want to give the psychics any credit. But how about this for an alternative reading of the initial denial: the Met police didn’t know, they didn’t endorse it and they didn’t condone it. Instead – as Joe all but admitted to me in person and as his email seems to prove – he was contacted by an individual, not acting on behalf of the police, but who happened to be a police officer. Which is why the Met wouldn’t have known about it, and which is why Joe has been so reluctant to share the email and thus show it’s unofficial capacity.

Even if this email has indeed come from someone pretty senior (as Joe would like us to believe) that doesn’t mean it’s from an infallible source – if the case of Alan Power doesn’t illustrate that point (a police trainer sacked for teaching his belief in communicating with the dead as part of investigations) then the fact that the US Government employed soldiers to stare at goats in an attempt to kill them with their minds should. People are fallible; police are people.

What’s more, Joe has only shared the email from the police asking for help – so what? Where’s the email Joe replied with, answering the officer’s questions accurately? Where’s the evidence that Joe’s actions were not only picked up on, but were correct? Unsurprisingly, nothing is put forward in either case – a point the BBC and the Daily Telegraph apparently failed to see the importance of. Instead, the angle to the story is the scandal that the police are using psychics at all – the very fact that it IS a scandal should give Joe and other mediums a fairly good indication of the amount of stock people put in their word, but the mere oxygen of publicity is enough for people like Power. The Telegraph does, however, give us an indication of Joe’s amazing abilities:

In 2006, during the manhunt for the killer of Miss Bowman, who was stabbed to death near her home in Croydon, south London, Mr Power said he had been “visited” by the victim. In a newspaper interview he said he had a possible name for the killer of Stephan or Stephen White, and said that he could have been a delivery driver aged between 24 and 26. The Met would again not discuss whether or not Mr Power’s tips had been followed up. The killer was eventually caught through his DNA – Mark Dixie, 38, a chef, was found guilty of Miss Bowman’s murder last year.

I see – so that would be a complete fail then, Joe? Still, he was ‘helping’ the police by offering this insight. This completely 100% wild-goose-chase wrong insight. Some help.

Fortunately, in all this nonsense and confusion, there are still voices getting through with rational messages – the Donal McIntrye show interviews good old Richard Wiseman for his take on it, and his take was both clear and devastating to psychics. Essentially, he proposed we have to go down one of two routes:

1. Allow police to follow up on psychic leads, waste as much time and resources as they like asking psychics for help. To do this, they have to allow anyone with any kind of magical theory on how to find criminals – including (Richard’s example) people who hear voices from magic pixies. I prefer goat entrail reading myself, but each to their own really.
2. Only allow proven techniques that are scientifically valid, thus cutting out pixies, psychics, goat entrails and wasting police time.

I know which I favour. Still, Joe doesn’t agree, and sees omens of things to come in the future, as the BBC reports:

But Joe Power is in no doubt that he and others will continue to play a role in solving crime: “I predict that in the next 30 to 40 years you will actually get people like me who will find bodies, where there’s no question about it. The psychic world is moving on very fast and it’s getting more accurate with the information all the time.”

Well, Joe, it’s a good thing we know your predictions aren’t worth a dime.

Noel Edmonds. Love him or hate him, or dream about setting about him with a claw hammer; one thing you can’t deny is that he has a beard. An immaculate beard. Let’s be honest, it’s a prize-winner. As could you be if you were to appear on his daily quiz show woo spectacular that is Deal or No Deal.

The format is probably familiar to a lot of people by now – the game starts with twenty two contestants, each with a sealed box in front of them containing an amount ranging between 1p and £250,000 that is unknown to them, or indeed anyone bar the independent adjudicator. Each box is clearly numbered on its exterior from 1 to 22 to identify them. A contestant is chosen to start the game, they bring their box to the front of the stage, give a synopsis of their life story to Noel, who nods and emotes in all the right places and then its seatbelts on and we’re off.

The chosen contestant then proceeds to nominate a box number and the contestant behind the box tells the contestant how much they respect/admire/love/”will always be friends with” them and then opens their box to reveal the amount inside and thus eliminating it from the game. The individual cash amounts involved are known by everyone and projected onto a continually updated display at the centre of the set. This is repeated, and at various pre-set intervals a phone on the contestant’s table rings and a shadowy figure known as ‘The Banker’ (who doesn’t actually exist, he is just a conceit to add character to the show, yet somehow all the contestants still think he is real) then offers the contestant a cash amount to stop playing, else they continue opening boxes. Rinse and repeat until there are only two boxes left.

The only skill in this game is calculating the expected value of the game, and measuring the offer made by ‘The Banker’ against this figure whilst factoring in the utility (what the cash offer means to your financial position in the real world) of the Banker’s offer. The expected value in this game is the total of the cash amounts left divided by the number of boxes left in the game, a relatively simple averaging sum.

That’s it. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if your ‘lucky’ number is 11, or you had a dream about a potato running a marathon that had a number 17 painted on it, or your dead dog was called 19. The numbers on the exterior of the boxes are to make it possible to easily identify the box that the contestant is choosing to open, yet the vast majority of the contestants think it makes a difference to the contents of the box. I think it would be instructive to turn the boxes round during the game, mix them up and instead put pictures of animals on them to be used as a way of identifying them, the contestants would then hopefully have a ‘light-bulb’ moment and realise that whatever method is being used to identify the boxes is irrelevant. Yet, never have I seen a contestant point this out. Instead, they are encouraged by each other and Edmonds to pursue all manner of cruddy ideas about strategies about choosing certain boxes to open:

• “If you feel it’s a small amount in that box, you should go with it”
• “I had a big amount in my box yesterday, if that helps”
• “Don’t choose box 22, that’s the death box”
• “Do you think you’ve got a big amount in your box?”

I do wonder if Edmonds’ brain has become completely addled with all that cosmic ordering, and it has delegated all his thinking to his liver. He once made the memorable statement, without a hint of satire in his voice, that the record number of red boxes (i.e. high cash amounts) eliminated consecutively was by ‘Psychic Sarah’. Not that psychic then was she, Noel?

I once saw an episode which had a white witch as a contestant, who pointed a wand at each box before deciding whether to choose it or not. When it ‘worked’, the crowd whooped and hollered and she accepted the kudos. When it didn’t, she said the wand was not to blame; she had misinterpreted the wand’s vibrations. Is anyone else’s brain hurting? Even when the witch and wand dream-team eliminated the biggest cash amount, the crowd continued to believe. Ultimately, she accepted ‘The Banker’s’ offer which was a five-figure sum and was deemed to be a success by everyone in the studio. At the end, Woo-finder General Edmonds turned to the camera and said that the show had demonstrated that you don’t have to believe other people’s beliefs, but you do have to respect them. Git.

What is scary is that these are just normal members of the public; some are in positions of responsibility making decisions every day that affect not only their own, but other people’s lives. They are displaying the kind of reasoning power that was used in an era when we burnt witches in the street and they’re using it to help with a huge financial decision.

My reason for this article is not to mock the people on the show; it depresses me to see people so poorly let down by the education system. Is it so hard to teach people simple reasoning and critical thinking?

I wonder how that potato did in the marathon.

The Heart-Shaped Dog Patch. Apparently

Sometimes you come across a story so wildy, stupendously, Earth-shatteringly stupid you wonder what actually passes for journalism in the modern media. I tend to have at least three of those moments a week. But this latest is a real humdinger. I’ll give it to you slow:

“MYSTIFIED medics are trying to get to the bottom of how a dog saved her owner from a heart attack – with her rear end” – Source: The Sunday Express

Already, I can tell you’re interested. The ‘doctors-baffled’ angle is always a winner; the ‘dog saves owner’ format is tried and tested; and then pow! – dog’s arse. Right there, sentence one. If any one of you saw that coming, you should get on the phone to Randi immediately.

To continue:

Stricken Piotr Wagner, 50, collapsed with agonising chest pains as he watched telly at home in Kazimierza Biskupiego, Poland. But when his pooch Pearl – a two-year-old Jack Russell cross – turned a heart-shaped patch on her flanks towards her master, he told doctors he felt the pain melt away.

Medics are baffled by the dog’s apparent healing powers, as reported by the Austrian Times. ”He certainly had a heart attack but it seems to have suddenly stopped and he is now healthy and back to normal,” said one.

Piotr said: “I want everyone to know about my big-hearted dog.”

Now, this story is quite clearly ridiculous, so I won’t waste your time with a full, wordy, lengthy debunk. Suffice it so say there’s a couple of reasons this is a) utter nonsense and b) completely un-newsworthy:

• The dog’s patch isn’t really THAT heart-shaped. It sort of is, if you turn your head to the side and really look for the shape of a heart. But show the photo of the dog to anyone, and I’d be surprised they’d pick out a heart shaped patch.
• A heart-shaped-ish patch isn’t particularly rare on an animal. If it were a patch in the shape of the word’s ‘This Patch Is Hart Shaped’ I’d be impressed, not least that it’d even gone so far as to mis-spell heart.
• Even if the patch were completely heart-shaped, and even if that were completely rare, it wouldn’t imbue the dog with magical healing powers, nor would any powers effect just organs shaped like patches of colour on the dog.
• The patch isn’t on the dog’s arse, at all. That was just done for effect by the reporter in question – as are a lot of the details in this non-story I presume.
• There’s nothing at all to say the dog’s turning of it’s arse to the owner was in any way responsible for the upturn in the owner’s health. It’s correlation/causation, pure and simple. Presumably, it was a non-serious heart attack. Which the dog had nothing to do with.

On top of all of these, I actually googled the phrase ‘heart attack – with her rear end!’ and found exactly, word for word, the same story on thousands of

other news sites and sources. Which means the Sunday Express simply ran a shockingly poor story unchecked or unchanged. Which makes them the real arses of the story.

Or so the report tells us.

Upon closer inspection, it seems the miraculous breakthrough might not be so amazing at all – a fact which James Randi picked up for the JREF site in a post he titled ‘This Cruel Farce Has To Stop‘. Having studied the video evidence, Randi is convinced Rom’s communications mount to little more than standard ‘facilitated communications‘ – in essence, that his helper is in fact the one doing the typing, and poor Rom is merely a helpless puppet. Writing on the JREF blog, Randi said:

I cannot understand how anyone, professional medical person or layman, can continue to believe that the farce known as “Facilitated Communication” [FC] represents anything other than a fantasy that was begun back in 1977, when an Australian woman named Rosemary Crossley came up with the idea that autistic persons could express their thoughts via a keyboard when their hand was “supported” by what she called a “facilitator.”

For readers who aren’t aware of FC, it effectively is another example of the same ideomotor movement that fools people into believing in dowsing rods and ouija boards. The facilitator, so tuned in to the idea of getting messages from the sufferer, is victim of their own subconscious – spelling out messages based not on movements from their subject but on their own expectation. Watching videos of Rom and his helper, it’s hard not to see Randi’s point – indeed each video looks very clearly like it’s the helper who’s actually guiding Rom’s hand, and in one video (as Randi rightly pointed out) Rom’s eyes are even closed. Impressive, then, for an almost-completely paralysed man to accurately hit buttons on a keyboard of his own accord with his eyes shut – that’s something I can barely do with open eyes and full physical movement. That’s before you take into account the apparent poetic nature of the messages conveyed, which is again impressive for a man who has spent 23 years in complete intellectual isolation – a state known to be incredibly dangerous to psychological welfare.

I can fully understand the need for Rom’s mother and friends to re-connect with the man they lost 23 years ago, and can see why they might jump at any hope that he can still get through to them. However, it’s important to be rational, and to be clear as to the source of the communications – if it’s Rom, that’s great; if it’s not, then they must have the courage and the strength to accept that. There’s a number of very simple, very quick test to find out for sure – for example:

1. Take the facilitator aside
2. Show Rom a card with a word or picture on it
3. Show the facilitator a card with a different word or picture on it, but don’t let her know it’s a different word or picture – she must think they’re seeing the same one
4. Have ‘Rom’ type the word or name of the object in the picture he saw
5. If Rom’s word comes through, he truly is typing and FC works. If the facilitator’s word is typed in, then clearly it’s the intent (even subconsciously) of the facilitator that’s causing the messages to appear

Doubtlessly people will be wondering – what’s the harm here? If the mother thinks she has her son back, and Rom’s getting attention in his life, surely that’s a win-win situation? For me, the harm is clear – this poor man spent 23 years completely unable to communicate, despite being mentally in tact. That would be almost utterly unbearable. The only thing that could top it would be being unable to communicate what I wanted to, yet having someone put words into my mouth that weren’t mine. It’s one thing to be trapped in a silent shell; it’s another thing to be silently trapped as a puppet in your own body, and have your loved ones not even realise anything was wrong. Honestly, I can’t think of a worse kind of Hell.