Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

would one expect about their scores the second time around? First, it would be pretty surprising if both students got exactly the same scores the second time, so we can be pretty sure that there will be some change. The question is, in what direction will the changes be? It would certainly be surprising if Student 1 did any worse (unless, I suppose, a safe had fallen on his head in the interim); there is really only room for him to improve. So his score will be, in all likelihood, greater than 225. Probably not much greater, but it will be greater and thus it will be closer to the mean. What about Student 2? He doesn’t have very much room to improve (and we can question his judgment about taking the test a second time), so it is most likely that, on the second testing, his score will go down—again, moving closer to the mean score of 500.

Regression to the mean is a nasty little statistical gremlin that can seriously cloud the interpretation of many scientific studies. But, in the present context, it can also lead to incorrect beliefs about whether or not a treatment works. A good example is the fad of using copper bracelets to treat arthritis pain. The pain in arthritis, like the pain in many other pain-causing disorders, waxes and wanes. Sometimes it’s worse; sometimes it’s better. When is it most likely that one will resort to some sort of treatment for arthritis pain? Obviously, when the pain is greater or above average. People are much more likely to use a copper bracelet when they are in greater pain than when they have little pain at all. Thus, over the next few days, by regression to the mean, the arthritis pain is very likely to reduce, for reasons having nothing to do with the copper bracelet. Of course, the placebo effect is also involved in situations like this, as there is a well-known placebo effect for pain (Watkins and Mayer 1986).

Readers should note that people will selectively take legitimate treatments for arthritis, such as aspirin, when the pain is greatest. Does this mean that aspirin effects are just due to regression to the mean? No. Certainly, part of the aspirin effect is due to regression, and part is due to placebo effects—but properly controlled studies have shown that aspirin does actually reduce pain (for example, Berole and Sethna 2002).

All the factors noted above combine to make it very difficult—I would say impossible—for even the brightest, best-intentioned therapist to determine without the aid of procedures like double-blind, placebo-controlled studies whether a therapy really works. There are other factors as well, and for a fine discussion of them, as well as a lengthier consideration of those mentioned here, Beyerstein (2000) is an excellent source. In any event, the complexity of the task of evaluating therapeutic effectiveness should put the lie to the “alternative” medicine claim that one can simply rely on subjective judgments to do the job. In fact, my own view is that it is highly unethical to rely on such judgments. In any area of therapy, one is dealing with very important—sometimes life-and-death- personal issues. To promote a therapy as being effective without being as certain as one can be that it is effective risks the well-being and maybe even the life of the patient. We will see examples of this in the sections below.

Another characteristic of “alternative” medicine is a heavy use of scientific-sounding terms and language, usually involving “energy fields,” “human auras,” and the like. However, the precise meanings of these terms are never specified. That is, the physical characteristics of the fields (i.e., frequency, amplitude, etc.) are not given. An excellent example is given by Raskin (2000) in his discussion of the nursing theory of Martha Rogers. In Rogers’s theory, “a unitary human being is an irreducible, indivisible energy field and a unitary one…. In fact human beings do not have energy fields; they are energy fields. They are open for exchange and extend to infinity” (p. 32, emphasis in original). Further, “[e]nergy fields are identifiable through dynamic-nonstatic wave patterns and organization that changes from ‘lower frequency, longer wave pattern to high frequency shorter wave pattern’ based on the principle of resonancy.” Sounds pretty scientific, right? From that description, a reader would naturally think that someone, perhaps Rogers herself as the main proponent of the theory, would have gone out and measured the frequencies of these wave patterns. To find out if this was the case, Raskin sent inquiries to several Rogerian nursing theorists and asked simply what the frequencies were and how the frequency measurements had been done. None of the theorists was able to say. In contrast, inquiries to physics teachers about the well-known Millikan experiment showing that charge is quantized were all answered by a description of the famous oil drop experiment. In a directly medicine-related area, it is well known that brain cells operate, in part, through electrical impulses. Even an introductory level text in neuroscience will contain a description of exactly how one measures the frequency (as well as other characteristics) of these impulses.

Andrew Weil, the “alternative” medicine guru mentioned earlier, is right in the mainstream of “alternative” medicine in his use of scientific-sounding jargon. He even invokes quantum physics in the support of his view that the mind can, by itself, cure diseases. Quantum physics (or quantum mechanics) is a branch of physics dealing with interactions at subatomic levels. To be sure, there are a number of phenomena in quantum physics that are very strange and, to say the least, counterintuitive. This “weirdness” has allowed writers in a number of fringe areas to invoke quantum mechanics as a way of providing an explanation and seeming scientific support for the reality of phenomena they have been otherwise unable to demonstrate. The general argument seems to be that “well, there’s all this really weird stuff going on in quantum mechanics, so why can’t the really weird stuff that I’m pushing (ESP, mind cures for cancer, etc.) be real as well?” The fundamental difference is that the admittedly really weird stuff that goes on at the quantum level goes on in highly predictable and reproducible ways. These phenomena are produced regularly and predicted with high precision every day in physics laboratories around the world. Such is certainly not the case for psychic phenomena and mind cures of cancer! Thus, in the total absence of actual supporting evidence, the existence of weirdness at the quantum level does not, in any way, support the claims of alternative medicine.

Readers interested in more about the misuse of modern physics to support various paranormal claims will enjoy Stenger’s (1990) “Physics and Psychics.” For a nontechnical description of quantum mechanics and why it is “strange but not as strange as you think,” Lindley’s Where Does the Weirdness Go? (1996) is excellent. Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985) nicely describes some of the strange phenomena in one area of quantum physics.

HOMEOPATHY

Until the last ten or fifteen years, homeopathy or homeopathic medicine was essentially a European phenomenon very little seen on this side of the Atlantic. But with the recent explosion of interest in “alternative” medicine, homeopathy has gained a strong following in the United States. Homeopathy was developed in the eighteenth century by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. It became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an “alternative” to what was then considered traditional medicine. The basic idea behind homeopathic medicine is straightforward: A patient can be cured of what ails him by giving him extraordinarily diluted solutions of a drug or substance that would, if given in higher doses, cause the symptoms from which the patient is suffering. Thus, if a patient is having seizures, the homeopathic treatment would be to give a very, very, very diluted solution of a substance that induces seizures. If this seems implausible, it is. But when homeopathy was developed, such treatments had a great advantage over the treatments administered by nonhomeopathic physicians: They didn’t do any real harm. Such could not be said of some of the most common nonhomeopathic treatments, which included bleeding, in which varying quantities of blood were removed from the patient, and the administration of drugs that contained high levels of the poison arsenic. Homeopathically treated patients were basically given water to drink and otherwise left alone so that their immune systems and other natural restorative mechanisms could fight off their maladies. Had anyone at the time thought to do a controlled study of the survival rates of patients treated homeopathically versus those treated with nonhomeopathic methods, it is very likely that the former would have shown a higher survival rate.

As scientific medicine progressed in the twentieth century, it became possible to do more than simple leave the patient alone to heal himself. One could directly target the disease progress, or pathology, thus greatly increasing the rate of cure of hundreds of diseases. In this context, the “do-nothing” approach of homeopathy made less and less sense. And yet, as noted, homeopathy has become more and more popular recently. This is certainly due to the factors noted above that convince people that ineffective treatments really work.

Proponents of homeopathy, of course, argue that their approach really does work. As was noted above, the active substance is diluted, usually in water or alcohol. It is often diluted to such an extent that there is not a single molecule of the original substance left in the solution that the patient actually takes. How, then, is the original substance supposed to have any effect? According to homeopaths, as the dilution process progresses, the water (or alcohol) “remembers” the properties of the original substance which is being diluted. It is this “memory” that