Journal of Homeopathy: wheat

According to ScienceDaily, the journal Homeopathy has published a 2-part special issue on the biological models of homeopathy. Being the obsessive quirk that I am, I decided to get ahold of this 2-part special issue of Homeopathy to see what all the fuss is about.

ScienceDaily says that:

The special issue makes an important contribution to this debate, by reviewing laboratory experiments with high dilutions. It includes reviews and new findings in biosystems, ranging from whole animal behavioral, intoxication and inflammation models through diseased and healthy plant models, to test tube experiments using isolated cells, cell cultures or enzymes.

The editor in chief concludes that -

"Throughout its 200 year history claims that homeopathy has 'real' (as opposed to placebo) effects have been hotly contested. Our special issue brings together a wide range of scientific work in biological systems, where there can be no placebo effect, showing that there are now several biological experiments which yield consistently positive results with homeopathic dilutions."

One of the first articles I looked at was an article on the effect of arsenic on wheat seedlings [1]. This article was a review of an experiment on wheat seedlings that had been replicated 17 times among 2 research groups. The experiment was like this: To test potentiated arsenic as a cure for arsenic poisoning, researchers first exposed wheat seedlings to a 1%, 1.2%, or 1.6% solution of arsenic. Then, they had three outcome groups: 1 treated with water, 1 treated with 45X potentized water, and one treated with a 45X potentation of 1% Arsenic. Then, they measured wheat shoot length as an outcome after 7 days.

So, here's what happened with the two research groups. The first lab group conducted the experiment, and said experiment resulted in a 24% increase in shoot growth as compared to the placebo. This was the expected outcome, as homeopathic arsenic is taken to be a remedy for arsenic poisoning. A different research team later replicated the experiment, only to find the opposite – they found that the arsenic group had a reduction in hoot length by -3%. Curious about this discrepancy, they performed the experiments again. They found no statistically significant effect. So, they performed a meta analysis of all of the seed data and found a 3.2% reduction in seed growth and an (apparently nonsignificant) trend in reduction of germination rates.

The authors report that these findings are puzzling, but the fact that there was any effect at all shows that homeopathy does something. Their conclusion is that treatment of arsenic poisoned wheat seeds with homeopathic arsenic leads to statistically significant, yet contrary, effects. Without going into huge amounts of detail, I can say that the authors did a fairly good job of eliminating other factors that might have contributed to their results. Regardless, the meta-analysis certainly did not show that homeopathic arsenic is an effective treatment for arsenic poisoning in wheat.

I think that the experiment producing both positive, negative, and no effects does not point to homeopathy having some kind of effect, but rather it illustrates that science is messy and inexact. A 3.2% difference in wheat shoot growth is barely noticeable. Their mean growth rate was between 29 and 65mm. When a meta analysis reveals a 3.2% difference between treatment groups, we're talking about a difference in wheat shoot measurements of 1-2mm.

Surprisingly, the researchers in this paper talked about effect size. Effect size, simply is a measure of the strength of the relationship between two variables. In scientific experiments, it is often useful to know not only whether an experiment has a statistically significant effect, but also the size of any observed effects. In other words, if we look at a group of 20 people in a treatment group and 20 people in a placebo group, there might be significant differences, even when those differences are essentially meaningless. What is really important is how much these groups are different or how big the differences are. It is always possible to show that there is significant difference between two groups, unless they are 100% Identical. The important part is to what degree groups are different. For this, you need to know the effect size. In this case, the effect size of a 3% difference between their wheat groups amounts to 0.04. Effect size for Cohen's d an effect size of 0.2 to 0.3 might be a "small" effect, around 0.5 a "medium" effect and 0.8 to infinity, a "large" effect. If a small effect is from 0.2-0.3, and the effect size of the experimenter's wheat growth is 0.04, then I would chalk up the differences to experimental noise. This difference in groups is immensely tiny.

I have to wonder why the experimenters chose only 7 days of germination instead of taking measurements at 14 days, and then at 28 days. I don't know if a 1-2mm difference in shoot length among groups will actually translate into any measureable effects of plant size as the plants grow, but since the authors of this paper did not comment on further growth after the 7 day period, one cannot make any claims either way. There are also about a million factors that can influence early seed growth. I admit only rudimentary knowledge of horticulture, but even if seeds are placed side by side in rows in a pan, there could be enough of a difference in lighting, soil temperature, air temperature, and carbon dioxide distribution to account for the small differences seen among groups, even if the groups are dispersed. One thing the experimenters did do was to look for statistically significant differences among shoot growth of 2 pans of seeds where the seeds were placed side-by side and subjected to otherwise identical growing situations. They didn't find any differences. Here is how they arranged the seeds:

The 90 envelopes of each cardboard box were grouped in 9 groups of ten seeds each. The 9 groups of each box were randomly allocated to 3 3 treatment groups with the aid of a computer generated randomization list. The list was prepared newly for each box and each experiment. Thus, in one box, ten seeds of the first group were followed by ten seeds of the second group, and so on (corresponding to the order in which they were planted).

There are other research papers on homeopathy for treatment of arsenic poisoning. One was a study conducted on mice [2] which produced positive results, but it was unblinded. There have been other studies conducted on humans, but I'll just say that the guys over at NESS tore those studies apart. I am unconvinced that this minute difference among plant seedlings will translate into a clinically meaningful effect with regard to using homeopathy as a treatment for disease (also noting that the tiny effect the researchers found in their meta-analysis was contrary to homeopathy, stunting shoot growth rather than increasing it) and the standards for validity of non-homeopathic remedies are much higher. Given all of the other research published on homeopathy which has shown that its effects are equivalent to placebo in humans, I have to wonder why researchers are backtracking into preliminary studies and then saying, "See? High dilutions do something… even if what it does is barely measurable and contrary to the law of similar" when we already have ample evidence that homeopathy is of little clinical use.

1. Lahnstein L, Binder M, Thurneysen T, Frei-Erb M, Betti L, Peruzzi M, Heusser P, Baumgartner S. Isopathic treatment effects of Arsenicum album 45x on wheat seedling growth – further reproduction trials. Homeopathy (2009) 98:198-207
   
2. Mallick P, Chakrabarti (Mallick) J, Bibhas G, Khuda-Bukhsh AR. Ameliorating Effect of Microdoses of a Potentized Homeopathic Drug, Arsencium Album, on Arsenic-Induced Toxicity in Mice. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, (2003)3:7

Acupuncture affecting regulation of pain

A new acupuncture vs. placebo acupuncture study has been making headlines such as "Chinese acupuncture affects brain's ability to regulate pain, study shows" due to results of a study suggesting that there may be a difference in opioid receptor response in acupuncture vs. placebo acupuncture.

Several large-scale studies [1-3] have been released showing that acupuncture and various forms of placebo acupuncture have clinically insignificant differences in the reduction of pain, proponents of acupuncture are now looking at brain-imaging to explore the mechanisms of acupuncture and placebo acupuncture to determine if acupuncture and placebo acupuncture operate via different mechanisms.

In this study [4], researchers hypothesized that long term acupuncture therapy may result in increased opioid receptor availability and that these effects would not be observed in a placebo acupuncture group. Their subjects consisted of 20 women randomly divided into 2 groups of 10 subjects. One group received traditional acupuncture treatment while another group received non-invasive, placebo acupuncture. Results from PET scans using contrast material were taken during a 90-minute period, during which acupuncture treatment or sham acupuncture treatment was administered during the 45-90 minute timeframe. A period followed in which subjects received 7 acupuncture or sham acupuncture treatments, and then the PET scan procedure was repeated, for a total of 9 treatments. Results indicate acupuncture therapy evoked short-term increases in MOR binding potential, in multiple pain and sensory processing regions including the cingulate (dorsal and subgenual), insula, caudate, thalamus, and amygdala. Acupuncture therapy also evoked long-term increases in MOR binding potential in some of the same structures including the cingulate (dorsal and perigenual), caudate, and amygdala. These short- and long-term effects were absent in the sham group where small reductions were observed, an effect more consistent with previous placebo PET studies.

There are several pieces of information regarding this study that were left out of news headlines an abstracts, so I will attempt to summarize them here and then offer my own analysis of the results. However, it should be clear that I am not a neurologist, and thus my knowledge of neurology is somewhat limited.

Subjects were blinded to which treatment group they were in, and they were also asked to guess which treatment group they thought they were assigned to after the first PET scan. There was no significant difference between groups, and thus it can be assumed that the subjects remained adequately blinded, though the study does not mention any blinding of the researchers, making it quite likely that the researchers were unblinded, which could have an effect on the study results.

During the acupuncture treatment, needles were left in during PET scan acupuncture treatment measurement during the 45-90 minute timeframe, while no needles were retained during the sham acupuncture group given that no needle penetration occurred during sham acupuncture. Clearly then, PET scans during that 45-90 minute period involve one group receiving an active treatment (given that needles were in their skin) while the sham group received inactive treatment (given that no needles were present). It seems obvious to me that there will be neurobiological differences between a group of people being measured while needles are inserted into them and a group of people who do not have needles in them, so their results are not surprising. Additionally, even though subjects may have not know which group they were in (they had to have had no prior acupuncture experience to participate), they quite likely were aware of whether or not needles remained in place during the PET scans, especially given the fact that both treatment groups involved placement on the head and ear. This knowledge could provide an explanation for the differences in treatment groups and is not addressed in the study. As such, even though the subjects were ignorant of whether or not they were receiving placebo treatment or not, the same cannot be said of their ignorance of the presence of needles placed in their body during PET scans.

What I find especially interesting about this study is the discussion of opponents of acupuncture in the introduction. The researchers wrote:

“Recent controversy in the field of acupuncture research was generated when several large scale randomized controlled trials in chronic pain patients failed to show superiority of acupuncture over sham acupuncture methods. This has led opponents of acupuncture therapy to suggest that it is no more effective than a placebo intervention.”

I fail to see why one needs to be an opponent of acupuncture therapy to suggest exactly what the large scale randomized controlled trials are suggesting – that acupuncture therapy is not superior to placebo intervention. This sentence seems to indicate potential bias on the part of the researchers in this study. The data from these studies are very clear.

If the clinical results between acupuncture and placebo acupuncture are the same, it seems to me that potential side-effects are far more important than the fact that acupuncture and placebo acupuncture potentially operate via different mechanisms. This difference in mechanisms is irrelevant, or at least far less relevant than clinical results or side effects. It could be argued that different types of placebo acupuncture have different neurochemical mechanisms of action as well, but thus far no study has documented these potential differences. This study is weak in that it only compares two different treatments. If the study had used acupuncture and two different types of placebo acupuncture that had already been established through trials to have similar clinical results, and then shown that the mechanism of action for the placebo acupuncture was the same while the acupuncture group had a different mechanism, then the results would be more convincing.

The researchers indicated that previous studies indicated that the neurobiological response to acupuncture was distinct from pain and sham acupuncture, but one of the articles [5] I read in support of this claim (there were three total, and all appeared to be from the same group of people as evidenced by common authors. I read the newest one.) failed to blind subjects to which treatment they were receiving and thus is poor evidence to support their claim. Instead, this seems to support evidence that there is a different neurobiological response in individuals who know they are receiving acupuncture or a placebo, which is to be expected.

Regardless, it seems fairly obvious to me that measuring neurobiological responses in a PET scan while some subjects have needles inserted during the scan and others do not is measuring a neurobiological response to needles being in the skin versus not in the skin.  Sticking needles in subjects would likely provoke a different neurochemical response in subjects when compared to placebo acupuncture, which involved no needle insertion. So, if you do two different physical things to people, this provokes different neurochemical responses. Didn’t we already know this? At least this study does not argue that acupuncture and placebo acupuncture have different effects. Instead, it argues that acupuncture and placebo acupuncture have different mechanisms. My less than dignified response is, “So what?”


1. Brinkhaus B., Witt CM, Jena S, Linde K, Streng A, Wagenpfeil S, Irnich D, Walther HU, Melchart D, Willich SN. Acupuncture in patients with chronic low back pain: a randomized controlled trial. Arch. Intern. Med. 2006;166:450–457.


2. Linde K, Streng A, Jurgens S, Hoppe A, Brinkhaus B, Witt C, Wagenpfeil S, Pfaffenrath V, Hammes MG, Weidenhammer W, Willich SN, Melchart D. Acupuncture for patients with migraine: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA 2005;293:2118–2125.

3. Melchart D, Streng A, Hoppe A, Brinkhaus B, Witt C,Wagenpfeil S, Pfaffenrath V, Hammes M, Hummelsberger J, Irnich D, Weidenhammer W, Willich SN, Linde K. Acupuncture in patients with tension-type headache: randomized controlled trial. BMJ 2005;331:376–382.

4. Harris RE, Zubieta JK, Scott DJ, Napadow V, Gracely RH, Clauw DJ. Traditional Chinese acupuncture and placebo (sham) acupuncture are differentiated by their effects on μ-opioid receptors (MORs) NeuroImage 2009;47:1077-1085

5. Napadow V, Kettner N, Liu J, Li M, Kwong KK, Vangel M, Makris N, Audette J, Hui KK.  Hypothalamus and amygdala response to acupuncture stimuli in carpal tunnel syndrome. Pain 2007;130: 254–266.

In case you didn't notice: We're happy!

Finally!

I've been saying that studies on the mental and physical health of religious believers which conclude that religious people are happier than nonreligious people should include a group of self-identified atheists as a control. This is because "nonbelievers" is not homogeneous enough and not enough studies have looked at the emotional well-being of atheists.

CFI, bless their deliciously scientific hearts, have conducted such a study. I suggest you click this link and read an article on the results now. The study suggests that atheists are similarly happy to believers and happier than "spiritual" people or those who are unsure about their religious beliefs.

CRI Presuppositions

I don’t know why, but on Twitter I follow the Christian Research Institute. I think this is because I like being given opposing viewpoints to dissect in the middle of the afternoon.

This afternoon, CRI Twittered a link to an article written by a Ph.d candidate in philosophy, the central message of which is that atheism is presumptuous.

The irony of this is that the author himself bases his analysis of atheism as “presumptuous” based on… presumptuousness. Observe:

“Atheist Antony Flew has said that the "onus of proof must lie upon the theist."1 Unless compelling reasons for God’s existence can be given, there is the "presumption of atheism." Another atheist, Michael Scriven, considers the lack of evidence for God’s existence and the lack of evidence for Santa Claus on the same level.2 However, the presumption of atheism actually turns out to be presumptuousness. The Christian must remember that the atheist also shares the burden of proof, which I will attempt to demonstrate below.

“First, even if the theist could not muster good arguments for God’s existence, atheism still would not be shown to be true.3 The outspoken atheist Kai Nielsen recognizes this: "To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false.... All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists."4

Nielsen is absolutely correct. Doing this (concluding that the conclusion of an argument is false because the argument is invalid or unsound) is what is known as an argumentum ad logicam. Just because an argument is invalid does not mean that the conclusion of the argument is false. For example:

P: All dogs have four legs

1.Poseidon (a pet of mine) has four legs

C: Poseidon is a dog.

In fact, Poseidon is a dog. This argument is invalid, but the conclusion of this argument is still true.

But, here lies the problem. What exactly does the author mean by “atheism”? I take atheism to mean something like, “Coming to the conclusion that the evidence for god is insufficient” or “lack of theism” or, “lack of belief in god”.

In this way, “atheism” is the position that “there are no good arguments for god’s existence”. “arguments”, I hope,  refers not only to philosophical arguments but arguments based around empirical evidence as well.

It is true that god may exist, even though there is no evidence for god and the arguments for god’s existence fail. I doubt it, and that is my position as an atheist. The author of this piece seems to be defining atheism as the hard position that gods do not exist. This is not a viewpoint that most atheists share.

“Second, the "presumption of atheism" demonstrates a rigging of the rules of philosophical debate in order to play into the hands of the atheist, who himself makes a truth claim. Alvin Plantinga correctly argues that the atheist does not treat the statements "God exists" and "God does not exist" in the same manner.5 The atheist assumes that if one has no evidence for God’s existence, then one is obligated to believe that God does not exist — whether or not one has evidence against God’s existence. What the atheist fails to see is that atheism is just as much a claim to know something ("God does not exist") as theism ("God exists"). Therefore, the atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.

Plantinga does not correctly argue this. Some atheists might not treat the claims “god exists” and “god does not exist” in the same manner, but of all of the atheist literature I have read (I’ve read Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, Hitchins, Carrier, and more. I’ve listened to countless atheist podcasts and have read countless arguments, blog posts and had countless conversations with atheists) no one has ever made the claim that “god does not exist” is NOT a truth claim. Plantinga and the author of this piece are creating a straw man atheist and then knocking him swiftly down.

“God does not exist” is a truth claim, and one that needs to be substantiated with evidence. Of course, this is pretty difficult given that most theists use unfalsifiable claims to prove that their god exists. Using only falsifiable claims, proving that there is no god is easy. In an argument about the truth of a proposition, we can safely ignore unfalsifiable claims, as they cannot contribute to evidence. The problem is that theist generally must rely on unfalsifiable claims to prove the existence of their god, unless their god is a doorknob.

Most of the atheists I know have a problem with the truth claims of religion. Not because they are religious claims, but because they are truth claims that are made without substantiation or proof. The atheists I know assume that if there is no evidence for god, then there is no evidence for god.

“Third, in the absence of evidence for God’s existence, agnosticism, not atheism, is the logical presumption. Even if arguments for God’s existence do not persuade, atheism should not be presumed because atheism is not neutral; pure agnosticism is. Atheism is justified only if there is sufficient evidence against God’s existence.

This depends on how you define agnosticism and atheism. These two terms need to be defined clearly before we can make claims such as the one above, and I don’t think I agree with the definitions the author seems to be implying. It would be dishonest of me to make up a definition of Christianity that 99% of Christians disagreed with.

Let’s assume that I make the claim that clover cures lung cancer. The proper position with regard to this claim is lack of belief that clover cures lung cancer. That is, “I do not believe clover cures lung cancer.” The author claims that this is illogical, and that the logical position is, “I don’t know if clover cures lung cancer”. Which, I suppose is fair, assuming this is the first time anyone has proposed that clover cures lung cancer and no experiments or observations have thus far taken place.

Let’s say we perform experiment after experiment trying to prove that clover cures lung cancer. Over and over - no matter how many people we use, no matter which formula of clover we use, no matter if it is ingested, infused, smoked, snorted, or bathed in – we show through experimentation that clover has no effect on lung cancer whatsoever, and in some cases (such as when it was smoked), clover makes lung cancer worse. Let’s say we perform these experiments for 100 years, in city after city, using billions of research dollars.

After all of that, is the proper position, “I don’t know if clover cures lung cancer”? No. The proper position is, “there is no evidence that clover cures lung cancer”.  Even, “clover does not cure lung cancer” is not a far stretch. According to the authors, “clover does not cure lung cancer” is illogical. Acloverists are presumptuous. Acloverists are making a positive claim.
“Fourth, to place belief in Santa Claus or mermaids and belief in God on the same level is mistaken. The issue is not that we have no good evidence for these mythical entities; rather, we have strong evidence that they do not exist. Absence of evidence is not at all the same as evidence of absence, which some atheists fail to see.

What strong evidence against Santa and mermaids might this be, exactly? If I were having a conversation with this author, I’d really like to hear his reasons for denying Santa and mermaids. Is it because… Santa is impossible? Is it because we’ve never observed a mermaid? Because there is… an absence… of… evidence?

Absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence (See my friend Saint Gasoline's recent post on this. He presents a very well-rounded argument that is too long for me to reprint here). Once again, think of the clover example above. Is it right to say that absence of evidence that clover cures lung cancer is not evidence that clover does not cure lung cancer?

“Moreover, the theist can muster credible reasons for belief in God. For example, one can argue that the contingency of the universe — in light of Big Bang cosmology, the expanding universe, and the second law of thermodynamics (which implies that the universe has been "wound up" and will eventually die a heat death) — demonstrates that the cosmos has not always been here. It could not have popped into existence uncaused, out of absolutely nothing, because we know that whatever begins to exist has a cause. A powerful First Cause like the God of theism plausibly answers the question of the universe’s origin. Also, the fine-tunedness of the universe — with complexly balanced conditions that seem tailored for life — points to the existence of an intelligent Designer.

These are not credible reasons. I’ve covered these in previous posts so I won’t rehash them again, but suffice to say that these arguments come from a oversimplification or misunderstanding about the nature of the universe. Even if the First Cause argument were credible, the huge leap to Christianity (as the author expects) does not follow.

“The existence of objective morality provides further evidence for belief in God. If widow-burning or genocide is really wrong and not just cultural, then it is difficult to account for this universally binding morality, with its sense of "oughtness," on strictly naturalistic terms. (Most people can be convinced that the difference between Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa is not simply cultural.) These and other reasons demonstrate that the believer is being quite rational — not presumptuous — in embracing belief in God.

The moral argument is one of the weakest arguments around. Populations survive based on a balance between behavior that increases survival and behaviors that decrease survival. If murder or selfishness were a culturally accepted standard of behavior, then what would happen to a population that embraced that behavior? Morality is objective (as in, it is not a product of mere internal opinion but is something outside of the individual and informed by reason) and not just cultural. It is easy to account for “oughtness” using naturalistic terms. Saying that morality is “either objective, universal and given to us by god” or “cultural” and then moving on to disprove that it is cultural does not prove that morality was handed to us by god because this is a false dichotomy.

Funny how you can prove position A is presumptuous by being presumptuous in strawmanning position A into a presumptuous position, isn't it?

College attendance and religiosity

Recently I read here that a study [1] had been conducted which looks at the trends between the study of certain subjects in college and religious observance. The study concluded that very religious high school students are more likely than less religious high school students to attend college.

This may surprise the skeptical world. I’ve heard many times that people with high levels of religiosity tend to be less educated and less intelligent whereas people with low religiosity tend to be more educated and more intelligent. Typically people cite an article published in nature as evidence for this phenomenon [2], if they cite an article at all. So why is this study saying that people who are more religious are more likely to attend college?

The authors first rightfully point out that there is a pressure in the United States toward being religious, yet despite this pressure (especially from families), religiosity is remaining more or less steady and even swinging downward as the years go by. One common culprit blamed on this is college, given that college tends to be the first time people are separated from their families for an extended period of time.

The goal of the study was to look at how contents of college curriculum affect student values and to distinguish these effects from patterns of selection based on already-held values. The study hypothesizes that college students are confronted (in varying degrees) to three streams of thought in college that have certain negative attitudes toward religion, and that these streams of thought may have an effect on religiosity. Those streams of thought are:

Science – consisting of a commitment to truth, the scientific method and open-mindedness toward evidence. Natural science fields have a strong scientist content.

Developmentalism – consisting of a commitment to freedom and progress. Economics and business have a strong developmentalist content.

Postmodernism – consisting of a commitment to relativism of truth and morality and the idea that truth and morality are determined by those who are most powerful. The humanities and social sciences have a strong postmodernist content.

The article delves much deeper into exactly what these three streams of thought are and how they come into conflict with religiosity (in a refreshingly impartial manner), but for the purposes of this article I will leave them simply defined.  If on accepts that different majors are tied to different streams of thought, it is possible to test whether any of these three streams of thought contribute to reduced religiosity by looking at initial choices of major and changes of major over time in concordance with any changes in religiosity. They specifically examined the changes in religiosity from high school and into college, using a sample size of literally thousands of students in Michigan from high school and through college.

Here are some of their findings:

-compared to business majors, social sciences and humanities have a statistically significant negative effect on both attendance of religious services and the rating of the importance of religion.
-education majors were more religious than other majors and their religiosity increased over time.
-religiosity increases over time for business majors
-religious attendance decreased for students who are undecided about college major.
-religious attendance decreased for respondents who did not go to college.
-students in science and engineering have less trust in god than people who have not gone to college or business majors (as measured by asking the respondents, “if we just leave things to god, they will turn out for the best [disagree, mostly disagree, neither agree nor disagree, mostly agree, agree]”).

-students who were social science, humanities or engineering tended to think religious organizations should have less of an effect on society, whereas subjects who had not gone to college thought religious organizations should have more influence on society.

The study was fairly well-designed, so I was quite surprised to find that students who were more religious were more likely to attend college, given that it seems to contradict other studies (such as the one reported on in Michael Shermer’s How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God [3]) which indicate that atheism increases with education level.  Religiosity was rated on a 1-4 scale (“how often to you attend religious services? [1=never, 2=rarely 3=once or twice a month 4=about once a week or more]”), and each point on the scale corresponded with a 14% increases in the likelihood of going to college. A change in the rated importance of religion by one point amounted to an 8% increase in the likelihood of going to college.

I think that a weakness in the study lies in the fact that they did not take into account the different denominations of college attendees, and rather used “religious attendance” and “importance of religion” as their measures of religiosity. As such, the study ignored the positive or negative impacts of particular denominations or religious schools of thought, especially Sectarianism (the belief that religious rewards will be given exclusively to the adherents of a particular faith) and fundamentalism (finding value in sacred texts, especially the belief in the inerrancy of biblical texts).  Studies have shown that sectarianism and fundamentalism in particular has a negative impact on educational attainment [4], and especially the educational attainment of women [5]. Sectarian and fundamentalist individuals are also more likely to choose a religious college.

One other interesting thing to note is that the reported amount of time people spend at religious services does not seem to correlate with actual religious service attendance – studies show the actual number is about half of what people report – suggesting that many people overestimate (or lie about?) how often they attend [6]. The best this study can say with regard to religious service attendance is that the people who likely overestimate how often they attend are more likely to go to college.

1. Kimball MS, Mitchell CM, Thornton AD, Young-Demarco LC. Empirics on the Origins of Preferences: The Case of College Major and religiosity. NBER (2009) Working Paper No. 15182

2. Larson EJ, Witham L. Leading scientists still reject god. Nature 1998:394;313

3. Shermer, M. How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. New York: William H Freeman. 1999:76–79. ISBN 071673561X.

4. Sherkat DE. Religion and higher education: the good, the bad, and the ugly. 2007: Online at http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Sherkat.pdf

5. Sherkat, DE, Darnell A. The Effect of Parents' Fundamentalism on Children's
Educational Attainment: Examining Differences by Gender and Children's Fundamentalism Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1999:38;23-35.

6. Hadaway CK, Marler L, Chaves M. what the polls don’t show: a closer look at U.S. church attendance. American Sociological Review 1993:58;741-752

Organic food = bullshit

That's right. I said it.

There are no health benefits of choosing organic food over typical food.

I've had an inkling that there is no evidence to support the idea that organic foods are healthier than their inorganic counterparts. Now I have the evidence to back it up, along with an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit to offer a colorful media rebuttal.
From BBC news:

There is little difference in nutritional value and no evidence of any extra health benefits from eating organic produce, UK researchers found.

The Food Standards Agency who commissioned the report said the findings would help people make an "informed choice".

But the Soil Association criticised the study and called for better research.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looked at all the evidence on nutrition and health benefits from the past 50 years.
   
Among the 55 of 162 studies that were included in the final analysis, there were a small number of differences in nutrition between organic and conventionally produced food but not large enough to be of any public health relevance, said study leader Dr Alan Dangour.

Overall the report, which is published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found no differences in most nutrients in organically or conventionally grown crops, including in vitamin C, calcium, and iron.

The same was true for studies looking at meat, dairy and eggs.

Differences that were detected, for example in levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, were most likely to be due to differences in fertilizer use and ripeness at harvest and are unlikely to provide any health benefit, the report concluded.

Gill Fine, FSA director of consumer choice and dietary health, said: "Ensuring people have accurate information is absolutely essential in allowing us all to make informed choices about the food we eat.

"This study does not mean that people should not eat organic food.

"What it shows is that there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food."

She added that the FSA was neither pro nor anti organic food and recognised there were many reasons why people choose to eat organic, including animal welfare or environmental concerns.

Dr Dangour, said: "Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."

He added that better quality studies were needed.

Peter Melchett, policy director at the Soil Association said they were disappointed with the conclusions.

"The review rejected almost all of the existing studies of comparisons between organic and non-organic nutritional differences.

"Although the researchers say that the differences between organic and non-organic food are not 'important', due to the relatively few studies, they report in their analysis that there are higher levels of beneficial nutrients in organic compared to non-organic foods.

"Without large-scale, longitudinal research it is difficult to come to far-reaching clear conclusions on this, which was acknowledged by the authors of the FSA review.
"Also, there is not sufficient research on the long-term effects of pesticides on human health," he added.

 I'll be locating this article and offering my own opinions as to whether the criticisms offered in this news report are justified. You'll see my thoughts soon!

Chinese Herbal Medicine for Endometriosis

Media outlets are reporting that Chinese herbs may relieve symptoms of endometriosis, using a Cochrane review of 2 research articles. Headlines read “Chinese herbs show early promise for endometriosis”  and  “Chinese Herbs May Relieve Endometriosis Symptoms, Review Finds”  .

Endometriosis is a medical condition in which some of the endometrial cells (typically found in the uterus under the fluctuating influence of female hormones) are found outside of the uterine cavity. Symptoms include many nonspecific complaints such as pelvic pain, infertility, nausea, unusual menstruation, chronic fatigue, mood swings, back pain, ovarian cysts, constipation, urinary tract infections, diarrhea, anemia, etc. Appropriate diagnosis is by laparoscopic biopsy – a doctor will use a laparoscopic instrument to remove suspected extrauterine endometrial cells and examine them.  Treatments vary and can include hormonal treatments or surgery to remove the cells. In China, treatment of this disorder with Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) is routine.

Both of the media reports linked to above say that the Cochrane reviewers found some evidence that CHM has comparable benefits to conventional drug therapy after laparoscopic surgery for people with endometriosis but that the review has limitations. The primary author of the study is quoted as saying “"I think the positive message is that Chinese herbal medicine may offer equivalent benefits to conventional medicine but with fewer side effects.”

I found the Cochrane review [1] and noted that reviewers collected 110 studies for review and graded them based on methodological criteria. They dropped all but two of the 110 studies due to excluding trials with poor methodology, unconfirmed randomization procedures or ones diagnosing endometriosis without an appropriate laparoscopic biopsy.

Did the two retained articles feature research with superior methodology? First, let’s look at what those two articles were, and what the author concluded from this review:

The first article [2] had two treatment arms: women treated with CHM orally (2x/day) and via enema (1x/day) after laparoscopic surgery versus women treated with gestrinone (2x/wk) after laparoscopic surgery for 3 months. The results showed no difference between rates of symptom relief or pregnancy in either group.

The second article [3] had three treatment arms: women treated with CHM orally(2x/day), women who treated with CHM orally and via enema(1x/day), and women treated with danazol(1x/day) for 3 months. These women did not undergo laparoscopic surgery, but instead were only biopsied for diagnostic purposes.  Women obtained greater symptomatic relief with oral and oral plus enema CHM versus danazol, oral plus enema CHM shower a greater reduction in dysmenorrhoea pain scores than danazol and shrinkage of adenexal masses. There were no differences for other factors (lumbrosacral pain, rectal discomfort, vaginal nodules).

The author concluded that post-surgical administration of CHM may have comparable benefits to gestrinone but with fewer side effects, that oral CHM may be better for treatment than danazol and may be more effective at relieving dysmenorrheal and shrinking adnexal masses when used with a CHM enema.

So, what are our weaknesses?

1.    No placebo control: There was no arm of the first study which looked at women receiving laparoscopic surgery alone without CHM or danazol, and no arm of the second study which looked at women receiving no treatment or a placebo pill treatment.

2.    Poor blinding: I should not have to point out that if you enroll in a study that has a pill treatment arm and an enema treatment arm, it is impossible for the participants to be blinded to which treatment group they are in. And enema, as you probably know, is a procedure in which liquids are forced into the rectum through the anus. It might be possible to blind participants to whether or not they are getting CHM versus the other medications, but I bet most people can tell the difference between a Chinese medicine pill and the other pills in the study. The researchers were also not blinded as to which treatment group women were in, though the paper indicates the assessors were blinded to which treatment group the women were in.

3.    Inadequate comparison treatments: Danazol is no longer commonly used as a treatment for endometriosis, and gestrinone is not available in the USA. These studies would have been much more robust had they compared it to typical drug treatments for endometriosis. In the world of conventional treatments for endometriosis, these two drugs can hardly be called conventional.

4.    Poor outcome measures: In both of the studies, a clinical outcome of “no effect” was recorded if there were no change in symptoms or if the symptoms became worse. Recording worsening symptoms as “no effect” biases the data toward a positive outcome.


I think that the most appropriate take home message or finding of the study is this: the massive stockpile of clinical trials that explore CHM for treating endometriosis have serious methodological shortcomings. 

The author’s main conclusion (and the conclusion parroted by the press), that CHM may work to alleviate symptoms of endometriosis, seems spurious in light of this. Additionally, it appears that researchers used a specific mixture of herbs (Nei Yi) in the two studies, which raises the question: why the author did not title his paper “Nei Yi for endometriosis”?  Perhaps he wanted his readers to focus on the fact that this was a Chinese herbal medicine versus a “conventional” medicine.

Lastly, it is worth noting that although the authors of the review state that there is no conflict of interest in the publication of this review, the primary author is an acupuncture and Chinese medicine practitioner at a center for Chinese medicine in the UK.

References:

[1] Flower A, Liu JP, Chen S, Lewith G, Little P. Chinese herbal medicine for endometriosis. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD006568. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006568.pub2.

[2] Wu SZ,Chen XL,Chen WZ, Li SY.Clinical analysis of the treatment of endometriosis using Nei Yi pills and Nei Yi enema. Journal of Liaoning University of TCM 2006;8(7):5–6.

[3] Wu SZ, Chen XL, Chen WZ. Clinical observation of Nei Yi pills combined with Nei Yi enema in the treatment of endometriosis. Chinese Archives of TCM 2006;24(3):431–3.

bone marrow transplant = adult stem cells

Here is another article, courtesy of the Christian Research Institute's Twitter feed. (I am a glutton for punishment)

Scientists at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, are discovering a potential cure for leukemia and sickle-cell disease. How? By using blood stem cells from the placentas of women who have had Caesarian deliveries.

But researchers at the hospital are frustrated. State agencies have made multi-million-dollar grants available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for its ethically sound counterpart, adult stem cell research.

Really? Not according to CNN. Please provide evidence that embryonic stem cells are ethically unsound.

In the Contra Costa Times, lead Children’s Hospital researcher Frans Kuypers says, “No one has been cured by an embryonic stem cell. We are able to cure folks with [adult] stem cells.”

Normally I don’t dive into ad hominem attacks, but this is pure insanity and betrays either a misunderstanding of the differences and similarities between adult and embryonic stem cells or a deliberate deception. Allow me, a complete layman when it comes to stem cells, to explain:

There are two classes of stem cells: multipotent and pluripotent. Pluripotent stem cells can give rise to any type of cell in the body except those needed to support and develop a fetus in the womb. Multipotent stem cells can give rise to a limited number of different types of cells.
Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent. Adult stem cells are multipotent. What this means is that while adult stem cell X may only be able to give rise to blood cells, an embryonic stem cell can give rise to blood and any other type of cell.

Adult stem cells have been being used for over four decades to cure disease in the form of bone marrow transplants. So of course people have been cured with adult stem cells. They’ve been researched for far longer than embryonic stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells have vastly more potential than adult-derived stem cells because they are pluripotent. What has been done for adult derived stem cells could potentially be done for embryonic stem cells, but on a much larger scale. Unfortunately, scientists have only been researching embryonic stem cells since 1998, all under heavy legal restrictions. Comparing the gains made by adult stem cells to the gains made by embryonic stem cells is akin to comparing the advanced problem-solving abilities of a two year old to that of a thirty year old.

 So why isn’t adult stem cell research receiving more funding? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, says “What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There's no middleman . . . and there's no drug company that's going to get rich as a result of it.”

Why would a treatment with embryonic stem cells be less “patient-specific” than treatment with adult stem cells? Can the author provide evidence of the lack of funding of adult stem cell research as I have provided evidence showing that adult stem cell research received lots of funding?

If by “middleman” he means the companies who currently own the stem cell lines, then opening up embryonic stem cell research funding would eliminate or reduce this middleman, as those companies who have grandfathered in stem cell lines from before federal funding was banned would no longer be the sole holders of stem cell lines, as other companies could receive funding to develop new lines.

As far as the “get rich” comment… if no one has been cured using embryonic stem cells, how can a company “get rich” from them?

But, she explains, a lot of the pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that they can sell, as opposed to a treatment they can do to cure you.

Evidence please.  So what the author is saying is that embryonic stem cells don’t cure people and aren’t patient-specific, but drug companies think they can get rich off of them by marketing a product that sells rather than cures, due (in part) to this mysterious middleman. Got it. Provide evidence for this assertion.

Quintavalle is just one of many experts from both sides of the debate interviewed in the new documentary, Lines that Divide, produced by the Center for Bioethics and Culture. http://www.cbc-network.org/

Ah ha! Here is one point of this article – buy or see this documentary. I’ve e-mailed them and asked for a review copy.

In the documentary you’ll hear first-hand testimonies from people whose lives have been saved through adult stem cell research. Like Barry Goudy, who suffered with multiple sclerosis. Since undergoing adult stem cell replacement therapy, he’s been free from MS for five years.

“adult stem cell replacement therapy” - AKA a bone marrow transplant – has been conducted in uncontrolled trials for people with MS. No controlled trials have been completed, though there are some underway. Here is how it works: MS is an autoimmune disease in which an individual’s immune system attacks the myelin sheath surrounding their nerves. This causes symptoms as nerves do not function properly when the myelin is destroyed or damaged. Bone marrow is extracted from a participant with MS. The participant’s immune system is destroyed with chemotherapy. Then, the participant’s own bone marrow cells are put back in, effectively letting the participant with MS grow a new immune system. There is no proof that it works.

They reboot your immune system,” he explains. “I live a normal life. I coach hockey, I play racquetball, I golf.” Without the adult stem cell transplant, Goudy would probably be in a wheelchair.

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data (Thanks quackcast). Also, it really annoys me when writers say things like, “if X did not happen, he’d be in a wheelchair’. Being in a wheelchair is better than being stuck in bed without a wheelchair.

Twenty-two-year-old Corrina Archuleta also shares her dramatic recovery from a flesh-eating auto-immune disorder. Her family was making her funeral arrangements before adult stem cell therapy saved her life.

So… she had a bone marrow transplant? I wonder why the authors don’t mention that bone marrow transplants can cure leukemia and other autoimmune disorders. A blood marrow transplant is a transplant of stem cells. Why don’t the authors of this article or the writers of this documentary call it a “bone marrow transplant”? Most people understand what that is. My guess is that if they stop calling it “bone marrow transplant” and call it “adult stem cell transplants” then they can politicize it.

The film also covers why even traditionally pro-choice advocates are speaking out against embryo-destructive stem cell research. In order to extract enough eggs for embryonic stem cell research, a woman’s ovaries are hyper-stimulated so that she will produce a dozen or more eggs at a time.

But doctors know that ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome and the drugs themselves have caused blood clotting, stroke, and even death. The former chief medical officer of the FDA warms that potential egg donors “need to be aware that this is not a procedure that is without risk.” Even the risk of death.

Bone marrow transplants are not without risk, either.

The vast majority of embryonic stem cells are leftovers from thousands of unused embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics. A simple solution to this problem might be to limit the ability of women to donate eggs to a stem cell clinic unless they are part of a fertility procedure. This is not an argument against stem cell research but an argument against fertility procedures.

That’s not what you are seeing in the media. What you do see, however, are celebrities and politicians gushing over the potential for embryo-destructive stem cell research. Even while lives are being saved today by adult stem cell therapy.

Well yes, because embryonic stem cell research does have lots of potential, whereas the potential of adult stem cells has been realized (at least in part) for 40+ years.

We need to be informed in order to help shape the public debate-and encourage our leaders to fund proven, morally unproblematic adult stem cell research.

That’s why I urge you to get a hold of the film Lines that Divide.

Wait, what was that about profits? I don't want scientists to research procedures that have already been proven effective. I want research to fund potentially effective treatments using science-based methodology.

CRI on stem-cells

Here we go with another article from the Christian Research Institute, this time on Stem Cells:

Some of America's hottest celebrities have been delivering emotional performances, designed to strike a resonant chord with their audience. They're pleading with Congress to endorse government-sponsored research involving the use of human embryos.

Why would Hollywood celebrities enter the world of congressional hearings? Because fetal tissue research — especially research on embryonic stem cells — is being trumpeted as a great scientific breakthrough and a biomedical revolution. This revolution, they say, could lead to cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, AIDS, and more.

Consider for a moment why someone at CRI might write a piece on stem cells in which the article threads together the connection of “America’s hottest celebrities” to stem cell research. My guess is that typical readers of CRI are deeply Christian and thus may have a tendency to see celebrities as living in a world of failed values, sin and moral depravity. As such, mentioning celebrities in a piece (especially in this vague sense) is a tactic to get the reader to identify with anti-celebrity rhetoric. We “know” that the Average American® will listen to the advice of a celebrity regardless of said celebrity’s credentials. As such, this is likely to appeal to the intellect of the reader, I.E. “don’t be like the Average American® who gets advice from celebrities. Think for yourself!”

 They're campaigning because they want to see taxpayer dollars go for research programs that may alleviate suffering. That's all well and good, but the real problem is that fetal tissue research requires scientists to engage in unethical and immoral experimentation.

Please back up your assertion that embryonic stem cell fetal tissue research is unethical and immoral.

Some may ask how anyone with a heart could oppose such well-meaning research.

When they ask that, they are approaching the question from the wrong angle. Clearly, that kind of argument is meant to demonize opponents of stem-cell research. Of course we should not want human babies to die in order to help out other sick people. The question then becomes whether or not a collection of several hundred cells in a petri dish is a human baby.

The converse is true when stem cell opponents say that stem cell supporters are supporting mass genocide. By demonizing and misrepresenting your opponent’s argument, you lose credibility and your potential to make others understand your point of view diminishes.

The answer is that stem cell research requires the destruction of living human beings.

Please provide some evidence to back up that statement. Stem cell research does require the destruction of embryos, but I would argue that an embryo is distinct from a living human being. Also, once the embryos are destroyed, stem cells can be propagated almost infinitely.

Only human beings produce the precious stem cells that scientists desire; so, to get enough of them for research purposes, babies, even eight-weeks-old embryos in the womb, must be aborted and die.

Please back up your assertion that 8-week old embryos “must be aborted and die”.  Last I checked (which was right now) most stem cells are originally developed from embryos that are a few days old. Those embryos are grown in the lab rather than aborted from a womb.  Scientists have no problem “getting enough for research purposes”. The problem scientists have with embryonic stem cell research are people like the folks at CRI, who do not understand how stem cell research works and actively misconstrue information. The author of this piece makes it sound like scientists will need to go on fetus harvesting sprees to get the stem cells they need. No such thing needs to occur. The problem is not acquiring the stem cells – the problem is politics.

This is what NIH has to say:

“There are several sources of stem cells. Pluripotent stem cells can be isolated from human embryos that are a few days old. Cells from these embryos can be used to create pluripotent stem cell "lines" —cell cultures that can be grown indefinitely in the laboratory. Pluripotent stem cell lines have also been developed from fetal tissue (older than 8 weeks of development).

“Non-embryonic, or "adult" stem cells have been identified in many organs and tissues. Typically there is a very small number of multipotent stem cells in each tissue, and these cells have a limited capacity for proliferation, thus making it difficult to generate large quantities of these cells in the laboratory. Stem cells are thought to reside in a specific area of each tissue (called a "stem cell niche") where they may remain quiescent (non-dividing) for many years until they are activated by a normal need for more cells, or by disease or tissue injury. These cells are also called somatic stem cells.

Once a stem cell line is established from a cell in the body, it is essentially immortal, no matter how it was derived. That is, the researcher using the line will not have to go through the rigorous procedure necessary to isolate stem cells again. Once established, a cell line can be grown in the laboratory indefinitely and cells may be frozen for storage or distribution to other researchers.

Back to CRI...

Such researchers are willing to overlook these troublesome facts for the so-called "greater good of society," an argument straight out of Dr. Mengele's Nazi laboratories.

Some CRI writers are very fond of the Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy, aren’t they?

Barring that, the author of this piece is once again misrepresenting the position of his opponent. We do not want mass genocide of babies in order to save people from disease. 

From the Hippocratic Oath of the fourth century before Christ to modern-day documents, medical ethics explicitly prohibit the harming of human life. "First, do no harm" has been the solemn oath of generations of physicians, but advocates of stem cell research would have us believe it's not a problem.

Belief has nothing to do with it. We swear not to harm human life, but it is more complicated than this simple proclamation. There are many gray areas in which one must use reason and critical thinking to determine if one’s actions are or are not harming human life. We are not trying to convince people that “harming human life” is okay. We’re convincing people that what we are doing isn’t “harming human life”.

 Some go further, saying that refusing to conduct such experiments is unethical! What's the basis for their assertion? It’s the possibility that the therapies derived from stem cell research could potentially alleviate the suffering of millions. The argument, however, is logically insupportable. Destroying life in order to save life is irrational and wrong, and it cannot be construed as an ethical act.

Maybe. Once again, the author simplifies a complicated issue into a soundbyte. We destroy life to save life every single day, simply by being alive ourselves. Humans sacrifice themselves in order to save others. We kill animals for food. We cut tumors out of people. We kill primates for research. Virtually all of medical science has destroyed life to alleviate suffering. Be more specific. If stem cells can be studied without killing people, then stem cells should be studied. Once again, stem cell supporters are not saying that they want to kill babies to save other people.  "destroying life to save life is irrational" just doesn't cut it as an argument. The author needs to specifically argue that destroying an embryo is unethical in order to have strong logical footing.

Furthermore, government-sanctioned destruction of human embryos isn't just unethical, it violates existing law. Federal funds may not be used for research in which embryos are destroyed. Some have tried to circumvent the law, but if Congress succumbs to the pressure to compromise, they'll be setting dangerous precedents for how human life is valued in the twenty-first century.

I am confused by this argument that stem cell research “isn’t just unethical, it violates existing law”. People would not be pleading with congress to lift the ban on government finding of stem cell research if government funding of stem cell research were allowed.This is like saying it is wrong for people to support the legalization of marijuana because marijuana is illegal.

The author seems to be claiming that human life will be devalued in the 21st century if the ban on federal funding for stem cell research is lifted. This is interesting. What kind of effects might we see from this devaluation? I guess we will see more destruction of blastocycsts and the potential to cure some of humanity’s most miserable ailments. This does not seem like a devaluation of human life to me.

Thankfully, several members of Congress are fighting for the unborn; and you can help them. Contact your representatives and let them know how you feel. Urge them to stay the course and make sure federally funded stem cell research remains illegal — regardless of what Hollywood superstars may say.

You should do what you believe think is right, regardless of what Hollywood superstars may say - that’s certainly true. You can also contact your representatives and urge them to lift the ban on federal funding for stem cell research.

acupuncture versus electro-acupuncture: Occam's Razor

It irks me when I see headlines like, “For Women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, Acupuncture and Exercise May Bring Relief, Reduce Risks”, as seen here in this article.

When you click the article, you’re greeted with, “Exercise and electro-acupuncture treatments can reduce sympathetic nerve activity in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), according to a new study.”

Electro-acupuncture and acupuncture are two entirely different things. There are countless studies documenting the positive effects of applying electric currents to bodily tissues. The mechanism of action in this study is the “electro” part, rather than the “acupuncture” part. But, people may read the headline of the study or even the article itself and come to the conclusion that acupuncture may be effective. In the article, they interchange the words “electro-acupuncture” with “acupuncture” freely, using the word “electro-acupuncture” and “acupuncture” 8 times each.

If electrical therapy (given via a TENS unit or other non-invasive modality) is equally as effective and an electro-acupuncture therapy, then electro-acupuncture therapy is unethical, as it puts a participant at unnecessary risk of complications. I did an Article First, Pubmed and Academic Search Primer search for studies comparing electro-acupuncture therapy to some type of non-invasive electrical therapy.

I found no comparisons.

I think Occam's Razor applies here. If 1 + 1 = 2, and 1 + 1 + X = 2, where X has potential side effects (such as punctured lungs, paraplegia, subarachnoid hemorrhage, infection, endocarditis, and so on), then applying X to participants is unethical and unnecessary.

One of the arguments against "western medicine" is that people often are "forced to undergo expensive and unnecessary procedures". Clearly, that argument can be turned around and aimed at alternative medicine practitioners just as easily.

Homeopathy and the curse of the scientific method Pt1

I really wish I could find a free version of this journal article so that I could share it with you all - it is single the best piece of writing I have ever seen concerning homeopathy and the placebo effect.

Buried in the pages of The Veterinary Journal is an absolute treasure known as Overall (2009). In this article the authors first outline something very important: how to understand the role of bias in selecting populations for use in drug or medication trials. If a researcher approaches an individual to ask them to take part in a trial of a homeopathic medication, there are three main types of people a researcher can encounter, with respect to belief about the efficacy of homeopathy:

1. People who believe homeopathy is effective.
2. People who are unsure.
3. People who believe homeopathy is ineffective.

Of these three people, type 1 is the most likely type to agree to participate in a trial, especially one that is time consuming or involves a lot of work or effort on the part of the participant. When randomizing such a pool, it is highly unlikely that individuals in each respective pool will think (in this case) that homeopathy is ineffective. They are much more likely to believe homeopathy is effective. If they do not know much about homeopathy, they may assume that since this is not a trial to see if homeopathy works, but a trial to see if a particular homeopathic medication works, that homeopathy is therefore evidence based, and researchers are trying to prove that a particular remedy is effective. Either way, most people will be hoping and looking for positive results.

In animal trials in which owners are taking part in the evaluation of the behaviors of their own pets, they are likely to be quite biased or report different results based on their belief in the efficacy of the treatment. This is especially true if the changes in animal behavior are more subjective rather than objective. An owner who believes that a remedy is working may notice things like panting, drooling, or pacing less than an owner who has no such belief.

People often say that animals do not suffer from a placebo effect – that is, if you treat an animal with a medication it does not really know you are giving it something that should make it feel better. If the animal is in pain, it is not likely to feel less pain if you give it a sugar pill. This is basically true, but completely irrelevant, especially when observations of changes in animal behavior (indicative of an effect on the animal) are reported by people not trained in objectivity.

There is a problem in medical literature known as inter-rater reliability. Inter-rater reliability is the measure of different observers’ ability to report similar findings using the same measurement tool. A measurement tool is said to have good inter-rater reliability when several different individuals report very similar results. Inter-rater reliability relies on training in how to use the measurement tool and how to report findings objectively.

For example, several individuals grading a true or false quiz would have very high inter-rater reliability; that is several individuals, if given a key with the answers, will very likely give the same person the same grade. Inter-rater reliability may be reduced if the graders aren’t given an answer key and have to decide if the answers are correct based on their own knowledge. Inter-rater reliability could be extremely low if the tests are given to graders who have no answer key and varying levels of knowledge of the test material.

Similarly, trained investigators using a measure to observe the behaviors of animals may have high inter-rater reliability, whereas a trained investigator observing little Rover’s behaviors versus Mrs. MyDogIsMyChild observing Rover’s behaviors may have very low inter-rater reliability.

So, this is why we must use double blind placebo controlled testing for animals. The owners of animals are very likely to report their findings based on how much they believe the remedy will work. Just think about all of the times a dog owner reported that their dog “looked depressed because daddy went on a business trip”, or “pooped on the floor out of spite”. We’re very good at projecting emotions onto our animals that are not there.

The pet may not know that they are participating in an experiment, but the pet owner knows, and the pet owner is the one reporting perceived effects of treatment. This is why placebo-controls in veterinary medicine are as essential as they are in human medicine.

A placebo is pretty well defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “A drug, medicine, therapy, etc., prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient of being given treatment than for any direct physiological effect; esp. one with no specific therapeutic effect on a patient's condition, but believed by the patient to be therapeutic (and sometimes therefore effective). Also: a substance with no therapeutic effect used as a control in testing new drugs, etc.; a blank sample in a test”

Obviously, since the placebo effect can be so powerful, especially with respect to pain, anxiety, and other subjective issues, placebo trials must be conducted in order to separate remedies or medicines which affect physiology directly from remedies or medications which affect someone psychologically – it does mot matter if the pill is a sugar pill, a starch pill, a lactose pill or – dare I say – a homeopathic pill chemically identical to a sugar pill – the individual took a pill, and their belief that the pill will relieve their symptoms causes their symptoms to be relived. That’s a placebo.

Now, if a homeopathic, herbal, or X-type of medicine remedy has the same effects as a sugar pill, one can reasonably conclude that the remedy is inert physiologically. That is, it has no effect beyond the same effects seen in a sugar pill.

So, when companies market their remedies as being “80% effective”, but don’t tell you that the placebo arm of their study was also “80% effective”, people are being misled. Yet this is what homeopathic practitioners often do. In conventional medicine, if there is no difference between the effects of a placebo and the effects of a new type of medicine, then that medicine is discarded in favor of medicines in which there is an actual effect beyond the placebo effect. Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, on the other hand, seems to absolutely rely on the placebo effect to the point at which we may as well rename it to, “Complementary and Alternative Placebos” save for the fact that their effect will be diminished if people are aware they are being treated with placebo medicine.

Tomorrow, we discuss the importance of effect size!

Overall, K., Dunham, A., Homeopathy and the curse of the scientific method. The Veterinary Journal(2009)  180: 141-148
Online abstract

Journal: Third force therapy for atheists

Today I stumbled upon this journal article[1], in which the author treats three atheist clients who are experiencing mental illnesses (manic-depression and panic attacks), encourages them to “renew their connection to God” using “third force therapy”, and reports that his clients were “fully recovered within a period of 6 months”.

This article is actually one of a scant few research articles specifically looking at self-identified atheists as the intervention group, so naturally I was interested in reading it. I find it quite telling that the only peer-reviewed journal articles I can find that study atheists as a group from a psychological, sociological, or health perspective are ones like this one.

“Third force therapy” in psychology is typically referred to in the context of humanist psychology, in which the “forces” are behaviorism, psychoanalysis and humanism, with humanism being the third force.

Humanism in psychology focuses more on subjective experiences and interpretations of life events and in many ways is not considered science as its interpretations are nonfalsifiable. Categories of psychology that fall under the scope of humanism in psychology include sensitivity training, family therapies, self-help, co-counseling, etc.

This journal article seeks to define the “third force” not as humanism but as a god. In other words, there are three forces in the room: the client, the counselor, and a god.

The author introduces his work by stating that psychotherapy in the west is based on the objective and exclusive presence of a client and a therapist and in doing so loses the close bonding of clients to their god. He says that this bonding is reaches via various belief systems that are part of the natural connection between man and his god.

Obviously, the assumption made here is that there is a god, it is the god the author expects him to be, the connection with said god is good, and westerners, being the objective god-denying idiots they are, are doing their clients a disservice by ignoring the obvious (nonobjective...) reality of said god.

Moving on, the author states that many people are almost embarrassed to admit that they believe in a god, in this age of science and reason. Because we face “rampant materialism” a “disintegrating family system” and “international discord” and claims that developing a closer relationship with his god in order to rely on his god’s will “would seem more than necessary”.

It’s clear from the author’s choice of words that materialism is not good, disintegration of family systems and international discord are not good, and society would be better off turning to his god to cope with these things. I am not sure what the author means by “materialism” in this context – the tendency for people to love material goods? Or scientific materialism, which holds that the events in the universe have purely material causes?

He moves on to say that because humans are always searching for some god, we’re not wrong to assume that they are searching for something which exists and which they have a connection with. I would argue that the search for a god does not mean that there is a god; rather the search for a god is a way for humans to cope with the inability to control or explain certain aspects of the world around them. So yes, it is wrong to assume that because humans search for a god that they must have a connection with the thing they are searching for.

The author posits that intellectualization and the “scientific” desire for clear answers may block the natural connection we have with his god, and that this blocked connection may manifest itself in psychological symptoms, alienation, or an interference in the ability to experience joy. Moreover, the struggle between believing that one must turn to oneself for control and support may cause individuals to turn against oneself, if they find they are insufficient at controlling their lives in a productive manner. As such, submitting to the author’s god is a reflection of inner strength

I have to disagree. Science does not search for clear cut answers – clear cut answers are the answers religion claims to have.  Intellectualization cannot block connections with something that does not exist. I have no reason to assume that the author’s god exists, and the only evidence he gives for the existence of his god is that humans have a history of searching for it. I might also add that the author is making all of these substantial claims without any reference to other articles or evidence to back them up – his claims are purely speculative and clearly coming from an individual whose worldview is rooted in his religion.

The author mentions an experiment in which two monkeys were placed in a cage and given shocks to their feet every 20 seconds. One monkey was given a switch and taught to prevent shocks by flicking a switch. The second monkey was at the mercy of the first monkey’s switch tapping ability. The first monkey (the one in control) died after 28 days, while the 2nd monkey relying on the will and ability of the first) was fine. This is taken as evidence that trusting the will of a god will have beneficial health effects.

I think this experiment is less about the health benefits of someone who gives up control of someone else and more about the fact that the first monkey was under constant stress to flick a switch every 20 seconds, while the 2nd monkey could, for example, sleep or eat fairly peacefully. This also says nothing about any god.

I have read plenty of studies suggesting that religious belief can aid individuals in coping with mental illness and I would not deny that this is helpful for people, but I do deny that the help one gets from believing they are close to a god is due to the influence of an actual, existing god.

Regarding methods, therapy took place by unobtrusively encouraging the atheists to make or renew their connection with a god by removing blockages. He goes so far as to say that “Without belief in God there is no hope, without the rituals of religion there is no direction to hope; together they result in a strength that cannot be defeated by life.” The therapist (the author) is trained to restore these missing connections. The author reported that he applied this therapy to 3 atheists (both aged 25), two of which belonged to a “leftist/atheist group”. The last was an 18 year old addicted to marijuana and was abused and abusive. The author reports that he found religion to be a conflict in the lives of all 3 men, so he used third force therapy. He reports success after 6 months, with each individual’s symptoms degreasing in direct proportion to their new relationship with their god. All three clients became asymptomatic Muslims.

Of course, the author offers no objective measure of the severity of the symptoms to begin with, no pre- or post-tests, and nothing to measure. The reader is forced to rely entirely on his subjective opinion of the curative nature of his therapy. The reader is also encouraged by the author to conclude that third force therapy is designed to clear the path to a god so that said god in his mercy will cure psychological symptoms as well as have a protective effect against future symptoms.

I can only conclude from my examination thus far of the research literature on self-identified atheists that there is a lack of scholarship, rigor and objectivity that is present in robust research. There is no objective measure affirming the hypothesis that psychological symptoms are due to some kind of undefined “blockage” to a god.

[1]  Jahangir, S. Third Force Therapy and Its Impact on Treatment Outcome. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (1995) 5(2) 125-129.
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Ray on Occasional Days: 8.2

For today's decimation of Ray Comfort's book, we're going to look at a little story Ray tells his readers. He tells the story of a friend of his who is going overseas to visit New Zealand, but New Zealand officials deny him entry into the country because he has a previous jail record. The guy is nice, a "Genuine Christian" but the rules of the country bar entry to former criminals. He says that even though he was angry at this New Zealand has the right to make rules about who can and cannot enter their country.

Heaven apparently is a lot like this. Lawbreakers are not allowed in, but if you believe in Jesus and become a Christian, your criminal record is erased and you become a new person.

I'm glad the justice system we have does not work like this - people should pay equally for their crimes. I hate to be crude but I completely understand why so many criminals in prison convert to Christianity - they may not have their crimes washed away in this life, but they can have them washed away in the afterlife.

It is interesting that Ray shrugs his shoulders and says, "well, that's okay. NZ has the right to have rules". What if the rule was that if you were a criminal NZ officials locked you up on a floating cage and let seagulls consume your flesh until your body fed the fishies in addition to not allowing you into the country? Would Comfort shrug then? I hope that illustrates how much this analogy doesn't apply.

Moving on, Ray makes one more unfalsifiable appeal: he says that becoming a Christian is like this:

If I look at a heater and believe the heater is hot,  I have an intellectual belief. But if I say to myself, "I wonder if it really is hot" and reach out and grip the bar, the second my flesh burns, I stop believing it's hot. I now know it's hot. I have moved out of the realm of belief into the realm of experience.

That's what happens the moment you are born again (when you become a Christian). You will move out of the realm of "belief" into the realm of "personal experience." A Christian is not someone who has a "belief," but someone who has a relationship with the living God. You come to know him.

(P.S. you can read this text for yourself here.)

This would be a great analogy if there were independent, objective verification of the phenomenon known as the Christian god. What if we were to add to this analogy that other people touched the heater and were not burned - in fact they felt no heat at all? How about if we had a group of people who once were burned by the heater, but could now put their hands all over it without feeling any heat? What if instruments used to measure heat registered the heat of the heater as being right around room temperature, while true believers in the heater continued to burn their hands while simultaneously receiving no actual, physical burns?

We would think that the people with burning hands but no evidence of burning were insane.

Unless they insisted that they respect the fact that they were experiencing terrible burns, or got angry at us for denying their experience. In that case we'd be forced to say it gently, "we think there is the chance there could be another explanation..."

I know this may be hard to understand but experience by itself does not equal knowing. If you believe something will happen but have not experienced it and then you experience it, you've moved from belief with non-experience to belief accompanied by experience.  One might consider this a form of knowledge, but said knowledge should still be subject to revision. If you hear voices in the room, but no one else hears those same voices, you might be right to conclude that they are a product of your own neurons and not due to actual voices.

Ray's analogy can once again be used to prove just about any supernatural belief one wants to prove. If belief+experience = knowing, then I know that the universe is entirely materialistic and guided by natural, rather than supernatural processes. A crystal healer knows that crystals balance the qi and heal cancer. A UFO abductee knows he's been abducted by aliens and somehow infused with alien sperm. These people don't have beliefs - they know.

The best part about learning to deconstruct arguments is that one can learn how to argue by learning how not to argue.

Journal: Religion, well-being and anxiety

I’ve been thinking that I would like to use my doctoral degree in occupational therapy for something a little “out there” – there are nearly countless studies exploring the relationship between religion or religiosity and different aspects of health – but there are essentially no studies exploring the relationship between atheism and different aspects of health. Many of the religion studies use “non-believers” as a subgroup or control, but they don’t use people who identify specifically as atheist.

I’ve been perusing journal articles on religion, so I may as well document my findings publicly. My readers can get a sense of the kind of research being done or the kind of research I might do, I can get a sense of what kinds of things people (or at least my small group of commenters) find interesting.

The journal article[1] for today was a survey designed to examine if there were any differences between a group of Christians, Muslims, and non-believers with regard to five personality factors (dominance, liveliness, warmth, apprehension , and sensitivity), general well-being, and death anxiety.  As such, researchers used a demographic survey and several scales: a personality test designed to test the factors above, a well-being test, and a question about death anxiety rated using a Likert scale (a numerical scale ranging from 0-7, where 0 represents “low” and 7 represents “high”)

The study used 63 Christians, 18 Muslims, and 54 non-religious subjects.

The results indicated no statistical differences for the five personality factors and a significant difference between reported well-being of Christian verses non-religious participants. Regarding death anxiety, there was no significant difference between death anxiety of Christians and non-religious participants, but Muslims scores significantly higher on death anxiety. On the 0-7 scale, Christians scored 2.16, the non-religious group scored 2.94, and Muslims scored 4.5.

I am really interested in knowing about this non-religious group, as non-religious is (to me) a very vague term. The study does not say now they located the non-religious participants, but given that many fundamentalist Christians insist that they are “not religious” because they instead have a “personal relationship” with their god, “non-religious” could range all the way from hard atheist to hard fundamentalist. Even ignoring this, there seem to be some differences between people who self-identify as atheist, versus people who self-identify as agnostic, secular, apathist, etc.


These differences between different types of non-believer need to be studied much in the same way that much of the research on religion studies separate groups of Abrahamic theists. It would be very interesting, for example,  to repeat this study with a group of atheists, agnostics, and believers in “some kind of universal life force” and see if there are significant differences between those groups.

Non-believers, Muslims and Christians were compared, but given that Muslims and Christians are both monotheistic religions, they could in some ways belong to the same group. Using a group of atheists, a group of polytheists, and a group of monotheists would have been more effective at creating distinct groups.

This study and others suggest that strong religious faith is correlated with greater life-satisfaction, sense of well-being, and happiness, but I wonder if this has less to do with strong religious faith and more to do with relative certainty about how the universe works. I am relatively certain that the universe operates according to natural, material processes without supernatural guidance, and this have essentially zero religious belief. I think that this relative certainty contributes to my happiness, rather than uncertainty, apathy, or ambiguity. Non-believers who do not label themselves as atheist may have more uncertainty about how the universe operates which could correlate with a lower sense of well-being. There are no studies looking at well-being scores of atheists.

Regarding death anxiety, it is interesting that the scores were so similar for Christians and non-believers, but again, I want to know more about this non-believer group. Lots of people claim to be non-believers, but (in my experience) when you press them on the issue of life and death, many of them believe in some sort of afterlife or have some kind of non-conventional religious belief that simply isn’t important enough to them for them to label themselves. Many people will say that they aren’t religious, but they believe in a god. I can imagine that there could be significant differences on the scales used in this study between “non-religious but believes in a god” individuals and “atheist” individuals.

I also wonder if a non-believer might come to religion to cope with death anxiety, find their coping strategy in their religion, and then thus identify with their religion instead of as non-religious. In other words, if a non-believer is faced with increasing anxiety over death, that individual may cease to be a non-believer as a coping strategy for that anxiety.  Then, they are no longer part of the non-believer sample and their death anxiety is reduced by their newfound religion at the same time.

This study did show that Muslims had a higher death anxiety than non-believers or Christians, but other studies mentioned in the discussion of this study found otherwise, so It think the results in this case are rather ambiguous.

[1] Morris, G., McAdie, T. Are personality, well-being and death anxiety related to religious affiliation? Mental Health, Religion and Culture (2009) 12:2 115-120
Online Abstract