"All that glitters is not gold" is both a very apt descriptive phrase and caveat when it comes to many of the diagnostic methods, treatments, therapies and remedies that enjoy great popularity in what I like to call "Alt Med Land" or "CAMville." This particular landscape has been dotted down through the decades by all manner of faddish, scientifically untenable and even preposterous diets, "cure all" herbal products, "miracle" cancer treatments and a host of others that would take me hours just to list in part! Sometimes though a particular practice or belief is actually amusing. Back during the late 1980s, while helping the owner of one of the largest health food stores in Dallas (Texas) sort through product offerings in an effort to zero in on solidly scientifically validated ones, I ran across a lady who was walking around the supplement section with a bottle of pills in one hand, over which she had suspended a pendulum bearing a crystal that she grasped in the other hand. After watching her go from bottle to bottle employing the pendulum, I approached her and asked what she was doing exactly (I knew, but wanted to have her tell me.) She replied, "Oh, my spirit guides act through the pendulum and let me know what supplements to take." She then demonstrated how when the pendulum went in circles clockwise the supplement in-hand was "just right" for her, and when it circled counter clockwise it was not. I asked, "What about relying on published studies to help inform your choices?" According to her these were less reliable than her method of divining what to choose. If only her method was so reliable - think of the millions scientists would save in lab equipment, salaries and such! But the fact is there is a very natural and prosaic reason her pendulum "worked": The ideomotor effect. I then asked the lady if I could try her pendulum and then went on to have it do exactly what it had done for her with product after product -- with not on scintilla of visible movement in the hand I employed. She was actually astounded and declared "You are powerfully connected with the spirit world." I explained what I had actually done, but she was adamant that no matter what I thought was going on -- spirit guides had worked the pendulum. This was even "scientific" to her -- owed to some interaction of her "body's quantum field with the crystals piezoelectric lattice" (This explanation is scientifically bankrupt, but it became clear she was not really interested in knowing why this was so.) She was what famed social writer Eric Hoffer termed a "true believer."
I, of course, have no problem with people's spiritual or religious beliefs. As an American Indian I am not unfamiliar with shamanism. But if a particular belief, practice or remedy contradicts a well established principle or law of physics or chemistry or has failed to produce statistically significant results when put to the test in formal scientific studies, to call it "scientific" does injury to the term. And yes, some claims in the religious world can be tested using the tools of science, while others cannot not be. Science cannot, for instance, determine what (if anything) lies beyond the grave for people or animals. So if a person believes spirit guides speak to their heart, the scientific enterprise cannot be invoked to prove this (albeit the armamentarium of science can be utilized to look at what's going on in a believer's brain via fMRI, CT, PET and other scans and noninvasive instrumentation.) Such a conviction or belief lies in the realm of faith (Though some might argue delusion.) So long as the proponent of that particular belief does not call it "scientifically proved" or "validated," I generally take no issue with it.
As I see it, it is not so much the spiritual leanings and practices of people with respect to "Alt Med" that are troublesome, but the fact they are often ill equipped to actually interpret the science that is often shoved in front of them by well meaning health food store clerks and CAM practitioners. And those clerks and clinicians (I've observed firsthand doing this) in many instances lack the training needed to accurately evaluate a given study or studies or else have this but for whatever reason fail to invoke it; or possess the background and knowledge but have actually abandoned using it (beyond give nodding "lip service" to it), all the while glossing over or ignoring problems with what they are telling their client or patient.
Thankfully, a statistician named by Dr. R. Barker Bausell took many CAM practices and remedies and such and formally evaluated how they stack up in terms of the published science, and then wrote up everything he found in a delightfully easy to read and follow book titled "Snake Oil Science." I heartily recommend it.
EXAMINER readers might also enjoy this article of mine on my own "trip through the CAM looking glass."
Mind you, dear reader, I am emphatically not here to tell you what to believe. I would, however, like to put some tools in your hands that might help you better evaluate what you believe or have read or been told is sound or valid in the scientific sense-of-the-word. I believe this can't help but make you less likely to be scammed, "had" or bamboozled by those who knowingly or unknowingly promote things as "scientific" that are anything but.
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