A Skeptic's Dilemma

I often find myself wondering why I do things like tell people that acupuncture, chiropractic and homeopathy are pure bullshit. I’m usually telling this to someone who has perceived some benefit from it and thus believes that these scams actually work. They’ve probably heard the criticisms before, too, and claim that the “so-called experts” are wrong all the time. They might even have an expert of their own to back up their story. So if it “works”, why bother debunking it? If it makes them happy, why try to shake that up? Sounds like a dick move, right? Like stomping through a little girl’s tea party and screaming, “none of your friends are real!” Well, the difference is that we’re adults, not little children. Because of this, we’re not pouring invisible tea out of an empty pot. There are lives and money involved. There is law, taxes, education and culture all caught up in the crossfire between scientific truth and wishful superstition. It’s important that we all get it right.

First, let me say that we’re supposed to be better than this by now. People are smarter, they go to school longer, they have instant access to a wealth of information, and the benefits of the system that got us here, science, are readily available for all to appreciate. There is no reason to not trust science as a reliable and proven method of finding truth. Furthermore, we should all be versed in the lessons of critical thinking that escaped the generations before us. Remember when people thought that gods were needed to drag the sun across the sky? Remember when people actually thought that blowing tobacco smoke up someone’s ass could save them from drowning? We don’t think like that anymore because we know how to test our assumptions to find the real cause or cure.

And because we’ve learned how to test things properly, we can now state quite confidently that homeopathy, vitamin therapy, acupuncture, crystal healing, chiropractic and other crazy alternative medicines do not work as they are claimed to by their practitioners. “But it worked for me!” one might claim. Yes, and why do you think people once danced for rain? Because it worked for them, too. Then, if the alternative medicine wasn’t the cure, what really worked? The answer can be complicated, which is exactly why people would rather claim that the correlation was the cause.

A girl once talked about a friend of hers to me. “She is a very negative person, is bi-polar and always has health problems. If you’re not positive about life, your health will suffer because your mind and body are linked.” Really, now? Could it not be the other way around? Couldn’t constant health problems somehow cause someone to be a chronic sourpuss? Or how about this novel idea: maybe her bi-polar disorder and her health problems are two different issues happening at the same time? The truth isn’t difficult, but sometimes people go out of their way to avoid it in favor of something conventional and compact. Because the truth is not elegantly structured with the traditional cause/effect that we look for, we make up our own without much care for reality.

Let’s look at her claim through another pair of goggles. If your mind and body are linked, how come there are happy people with shitty health and unhappy people with good health? Doesn’t it smack of a confirmation bias to look at an anecdotal example and draw a conclusion from that?

The placebo effect is the driving force behind nearly all alternative medicine. I recently found myself in a debate across a table from two fairly intelligent women. They wholeheartedly believed in the power of acupuncture and the effective ingredient, they claimed, was the participant’s belief that it would work. “But don’t you see that you are just describing the placebo effect?” I asked. These smart women might have thought the placebo effect was relegated to just sugar pills and that the world of traditional Chinese medicine was somehow something else. The placebo effect covers any perceived effect of a treatment that is otherwise ineffective. Did you know there is such a thing has placebo surgery? Tiny needles aint got shit on a scalpel.

The good news is that the placebo effect still works even when you know it is a placebo. A recent scientific study can be thanked for that one. This means that even when a grumpy ol’ skeptic completely debunks your claim that Echinacea helps you recover from a cold faster, it’ll still have whatever positive effect it might have had before you ever doubted it.

“Oh, I definitely think there is something more to reality that science can’t detect.”

I love this statement because it is incredibly revealing. It shows how little people have bothered to look into how the world around them works. Listen, if the world as it appears to your naked eyes is not enough to satisfy you, look at it through a microscope or a telescope. Don’t make up some unfalisifiable bullshit about there being “something more” when you haven’t even started to grasp the boundaries of what there actually is.

So back to the dilemma of bursting someone’s bubble when they’re happy in their own little world. This isn’t about getting off while pissing on someone’s parade. There is a lot at stake when it comes to what people regard as worthwhile medicine. Consider two treatments for a hypothetical deadly condition; one is painful to experience, but certain to help while the other is soothing and enjoyable, but no more effective than a placebo. Would you take the hard road to a recovery or would you risk your life and hope that your happy thoughts are enough to do the job? I don’t mean to discredit the happy thoughts, but it should be noted that people do get better on their own without treatment regardless of their state of mind. However, when it comes to providing a choice to people who do want to fight their condition, that softball option is often touted as being just as effective, if not more, than the harder, better method. This will inevitably lead someone to make the wrong choice because they were misled.

Now, before you start to defend the actions of the quacks who “merely want to help people,” realize that there is a lot of money to be made from bullshit. Think about the latest craze in footwear; shoes that tone your muscles as you walk. These things sell fast, but there is not an ounce of research to support their claims. That’s exactly why New Balance is being sued and other lawsuits are to follow. Nobody looks for proof; they just look for promise.

Another fine example can be found around the wrists and necks of athletes. Titanium, copper and holograms! All thought to have magical strengthening, cleansing, and balancing powers! Everyone who wears them swears by it, but not a single shred of scientific evidence can be found to back it up. Now, even if you think science can’t measure everything, surely you can understand how it is the perfect tool to judge such a remarkable claim as this. All we’d need is a study to measure the physical strength of a population of individuals before and after wearing these pieces of jewelry. Mix in a control where the bracelet is made out of aluminum or something et voila! Well, don’t even bother because instead of performing those studies, the companies that sell that shit wont bother either. Instead, they hide behind the effects of their own deception, stating, “our proof is with the millions of happy customers who swear by our products.”

Bullshit should be an illicit business, but too many people accept it as is. The people who peddle it don’t care if it really works, they care only that the people who buy it think it does. That much is easy because once people pick a pony, they’ll ride it to the finish. At the end, nobody will have learned anything because skepticism isn’t sexy and it won’t make you feel great while losing weight. So why do I feel the need to tell you you’re wrong? Because I can’t stand it when good people give away their money to swindlers. If you buy into one scam, you’ll buy into another. That’s why the highest correlate to trusting homeopathy is being anti-vaccine. The fewer people who believe in that crap, the more reasonable everything else will be. The sooner people plug into reality, the more we can invest in proven methods of research, the better it will be for all of us.