Hypnosis and Acupuncture to quit smoking?

How do you quit smoking? Luckily I’ve never had to deal with this myself, but I’ve seen family and friends struggle with it, and others shrug the habit off with barely a second thought. For those who struggle, there is often a sense of desperation and defeat involved in their fight against this crippling, deadly addiction.

It was with interest that I received an email today, from Natural Practitioner Magazine, which briefly mentioned the possible effectiveness of hypnosis and acupuncture in smoking cessation. You know I was interested!

As it turns out, the email was rehashing a Reuters article, Want to quit smoking?

The bottom line is that the American Journal of Medicine published a meta-analysis of 14 trials looking at non-pharmaceutical methods of smoking cessation, and that there is some evidence that hypnosis and acupuncture are effective.

What the Natural Practitioner Magazine left out is that the meta-analyses included trials of aversive smoking, that the results are mixed (some trials show positive results while others show negative or non-specific results), that aversive smoking seems more effective than either hypnosis or acupuncture and that none of these three non-pharmaceutical methods has evidence showing that it is more effective than pharmacotherapies (like nicotine patches).

Furthermore, the meta-analysis points out that people should try nicotine replacement, medication and behaviour counselling BEFORE using these alternative therapies.

Aversive smoking is where the smoker crams so many cancer-sticks down his or her throat that they form a negative association with the habit (they smoke so much it makes them sick). This is a risky method and is unpopular for obvious reasons. Don’t try this without consulting with your doctor, nicotine overdose can be fatal.

Both hypnotherapy and acupuncture are psychological methods of trying to control your behaviour. Yes, acupuncture is psychological because it has no physical effect on your body, apart from causing a localised reaction to being poked with a needle. They might be more effective than not doing anything, but they are less effective than the front-line treatments mentioned above, like any placebo.

What I hope you take from this is the fact that people who have a vested interest in natural, alternative medicines are not necessarily going to give you all the information upfront, and if you aren’t prepared to do some digging you are not going to get the full story from a biased source. Always question what you are told.

I am a biased source because I want you to quit smoking, but I have no interest in taking money out of your pocket to help you do so.

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As an aside, the best anecdote I ever heard about someone who quit smoking was on the (superb) Radiolab podcast, by WNYC. Her name is Zelda and she smoked for thirty years. Smoking defined who she was. She smoked while she was pregnant.

Eventually, after 30 years of smoking and a few run-ins with her best friend (Mary), Zelda made a pronouncement – that she would give $5000 to the KKK if she ever smoked a cigarette again.

She never did. Because her disgust at the idea of giving so much money to such a filthy organisation burned hotter than her desire to smoke.

Awesome.

Jenny Shone, Pet Psychic gets my dander up

Yesterday afternoon I almost phoned a talk radio station to hurl insults at someone. As I got into my car to head home after a long day, I heard an interview of a woman named Jenny Shone who claims to be a pet psychic. That is, she alleges that she can communicate telepathically with animals.

Normally, the Jenny Crwys-Williams show (weekdays from 1pm to 4pm on 702 – a Johannesburg radio station) is dominated by Jenny’s rational, intelligent, personality but yesterday she was not hosting the show, and the task fell to Leigh Bennie. Leigh injected her own dose of credulous brainlessness by lapping up every word that spilled from the pet psychic’s mouth.

Jenny Shone was taking calls from the general public and dispensing animal handling advice based on the stories she was being told. I’m only going to give a few examples here, I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

The first caller who I heard mentioned that he had owned a cat (that is now deceased) and, when it was alive, the animal wouldn’t really come to him unless it was feeling ill. Apparently when Felix (not his real name) was feeling sick he would prefer the caller’s lap over that of the man’s wife.

Shone spewed the usual mumbo-jumbo about being a connected person and how the cat was picking up on the caller’s energy and blah, blah, bolloks. But then she dropped a bombshell and said that perhaps the cat was coming to him because he had some kind of underlying health problem and he should see if the cat favoured him the next time he was ill.

But he’d already told her that the cat was dead! Great psychic ability there Jenny. Can you tell me why my pet rock has been feeling a bit unhappy lately?

The second call I’d like to tell you about was from a woman whose dogs had been poisoned, a terrible thing. One had died and the other had survived but was grumpy and had a bit of a bad temper since the incident.

Jenny said that the dog was obviously pining after it’s dead companion and recommended that the caller get a REIKI healer to look at the animal, to cleanse the toxins from it’s body. And she gave the caller a mantra to say for a minimum of ten days while stroking the dog’s back soothingly.

Finally, a caller told Jenny that her pet cat had gone missing and asked what the chances were that Jenny could use her psychic abilities to help find the lost pet. Shone and Leigh Bennie had mentioned, on numerous occasions during the interview, that finding lost pets was a speciality of Shones, and she didn’t disappoint (me). She said that they could always make telepathic contact with an animal but couldn’t always find it. She assured the caller that they would come to her home and do a reading and give her landmarks of where to look for the missing feline.

You may tell me that I am being uncharitable here, that my tone suggests I have pre-judged Jenny Shone without first experiencing her abilities for myself and that I should not be so closed-minded. I would tell you to put your brain back in your head.

The majority of Jenny Shone’s advice was reasonably sound and would not fall far outside of the kinds of things I would tell someone who, for example, had been adopted by a stray cat (“He’s hanging around because you are feeding him.”), but Shone dresses this sound advice up in the trappings of mysticism and then heaps on mountains of new age mumbo jumbo.

First of all, if Jenny could communicate telepathically with animals we could test her claimed abilities and she could win a million dollars and, possibly, the Nobel Prize. You see, any blinded and successfully repeatable demonstration of psychic ability would be an amazing breakthrough that would revolutionise science and blow more than a few minds right out of their heads. The James Randi Educational Foundation has $1 million to give to someone who can prove these kinds of abilities under mutually agreed, scientifically sound testing. It hasn’t happened yet, although many people have tried. But that doesn’t mean that it will never happen and the challenge stands.

My second issue with Shone is the fact that she is dispensing medical advice to people and animals based on her alleged psychic abilities. This is unethical and dangerous. Jenny is neither a doctor nor a vet and she should keep her mouth shut in this regard. Jenny’s website points out that the “healing therapies” they use most often are reiki, crystal healing and pendulum work.

News flash Jenny, these aren’t healing therapies, they are made-up bullshit popularised by people who don’t know the difference between a placebo and a panado and would happily try treating cancer with homeopathy.

Ok, I’m generalising here and I shouldn’t.

Reiki is a form of psychic energy healing used by people who think that illness is caused by a disruption in the bodies essential life force. It works (as well as any placebo) by convincing you that it has a medicinal effect when it does not. There are not enough reliable studies for a healing effect to be claimed for reiki.

Crystal healing rode in on a greased pig and should ride out the same way. It is based on bullshit, superstition and wishful thinking. There is no scientific evidence that crystals have any healing properties, they are rocks for crying out loud.

Pendulum work… File this under ‘greased pig’ for the same reason as the crystals. No evidence. No mechanism. No basis in reality.

Finally, being able to give people landmarks after visiting their houses hardly counts as making a psychic connection. A lost pet is unlikely to wander dozens of miles from home, so local landmarks are surely a good, high-probability hit (as we like to call these things in the skeptical trade). And when you get it wrong… oh well, you did build in that little caveat about not always finding strays.

Jenny Shone is making a living off of people’s gullibility by feeding them lies about her ability to treat or find their animals telepathically. She is misleading people. Probably because nobody will pay for reasonable advice dispensed by some random person unless they wrap streamers of bullshit around it and slap its ass.

Want to prove me wrong Jenny? Let the Gauteng Skeptics test your claimed psychic abilities.

If you feel like subjecting yourself to cruel and unusual punishment, you can download a podcast of this interview from 702s online archive.

Ann Coulter is Full of Shit

Today I stumbled across the following quote by Ann Coulter:

(Incidentally, this was posted to Facebook by the same friend who sparked my Athiest, why don’t you just shut up? post)

Is it just me or is that statement by Ms Coulter as insulting as it is absurd?

This is a single-sentence lesson in how to create a giant straw man. Coulter obviously wants to make liberal-minded people seem evil and she does this by concocting a ludicrous position (that abortion is less upsetting than chopping down trees) and then unilaterally ascribes this position to a large and diverse group of people.

Why does Coulter try and sell such an obvious straw man as a legitimate liberal position? Because she is ignorant and likes getting attention for saying outrageous things, I imagine.

I consider myself to be liberal, I’m not sure how liberal I am because I don’t really spend a lot of time trying to fit my thoughts into a narrow definition.

I don’t have a moral or philosophical position on chopping down trees. Sometimes you need to and sometimes it can be avoided and I’d like to see chopped-down trees replaced by newly-planted ones. I understand the ecological impact of logging and am appalled by the damage that is being done to the rainforests.

I do have a moral and philosophical position on abortion. In my opinion it is wrong. When I fell pregnant with my first child I was very young, unmarried and unemployed and I considered abortion. I didn’t consider it for very long, however, and decided that I could not terminate a life to cover up my mistakes. That was the best decision I have ever made and I would never undo it for anything.

Does that mean that my decision would work for every woman who falls pregnant? No.

I have a very supportive family, am well educated and have never had trouble finding employment. I knew that I would be able to cope. But many women are not as fortunate as I am.

I don’t think that what I decide to do with my uterus is anybody’s business but my own. By extension, I don’t think that anybody should ever be allowed to tell any woman what to do with her body, especially when the consequences are bearing a child. That is too big a responsibility to be forced into by anybody.

In my opinion, the people trying to force women to have children against their will are the conservative, religious sectors of society. This is supported by the actions and statements of the religious, condemning women and killing doctors for exercising their rights to do with their bodies as they see fit. And I think it is deeply perverted to try and exercise that kind of power against anyone.

And I’m sure that for every “liberal” out there, there will be another opinion. Some may agree with me, some may differ, and some may not give a damn either way. But I think that Ann Coulter should be more careful about her public statements in the future. Saying demonstrably false, stupid, ignorant things might make her feel all controversial and edgy, but it makes her look stupid and ignorant.

Evolution, a Definition

That is all.

(Thanks to the I fucking love science group on Facebook for this one)

Killer Homeopath Doesn’t Understand the Streisand Effect

Homeopathy - it's just water

Have you ever noticed how trying to keep something quiet sometimes has the opposite effect? That’s called the Streisand Effect and it is one of the most powerful tools in the modern skeptic’s toolbelt. It’s like trying to put out an electrical fire with water; you only make things worse.

That’s what I hope will happen to Francine Scrayen, an Australian homeopath whose incompetent treatment of a seriously ill patient led to a woman dying a terribly painful, prolonged, and possibly avoidable death.

Dan Buzzard, an Australian skeptic, first wrote about this terrible incident in February 2011  in an article in which he highlighted the findings of a Coroner’s report into the death of Penelope Dingle. Here is a highlight of that report:

In my view the deceased’s rectal cancer was present and causing bleeding and other symptoms from at least 31 October 2001.  During the period 31 October 2001 until at least the end of November 2002, the deceased regularly described the symptoms of her rectal cancer to a homeopath, Francine Scrayen.  It was not until November 2002 that Mrs Scrayen and the deceased discussed the possibility of reporting her rectal bleeding to a medical practitioner and it was not until 5 December 2002 that she first reported those problems to a doctor.

I accept that Mrs Scrayen  believed that the deceased had suffered from haemorrhoids years earlier and the bleeding and pain was “an old symptom coming back”, but a competent health professional would have been alarmed by the developing symptoms and would have strongly advised that appropriate medical investigations be conducted without delay.

Mrs Scrayen was not a competent health professional. I accept that Mrs Scrayen had minimal understanding of relevant health issues, unfortunately that did not prevent her from treating the deceased as a patient.

That is pretty damning. And it turns out that Scrayen is now being sued by the victim’s family as a result of the pain and suffering she caused, not only to Penelope, but to her family as well.

I agree with Dan in his contention that Scrayen should face criminal charges for the death of her patient through her own negligence. She was clearly NOT suitably qualified to deal with Penelope’s illness. What is even worse is that she was too ignorant to realise her own inadequacy in the situation.

Scrayen has now issued Dan with a Cease & Desist notice, demanding that he remove his criticism of her from his blog on the grounds that it is factually incorrect, and that he publish a retraction immediately.

While Scrayen has not faced criminal charges, and she was not the only person influencing Penelope to refuse science-based medicine, the Coroner’s report makes it clear that she bears the greatest burden of responsibility for the failure to seek proper medical care that led to Penelope dying in the way that she did.

And her attempt to gag Dan is absolutely deplorable. Is she still peddling her snake oil to unsuspecting people? Is she still making guarantees of the curative power of homeopathic treatments for potentially fatal illnesses such as fucking rectal cancer? I think we should send her a Cease & Desist notice and demand that she stop being such a callous, ignorant fuck-wit.

If you have any way of spreading the word about this, please do. The only way that we, as skeptics, can put a stop to the concealment of information through bullying is by making it too damn expensive for people to even try it.