[BPSDB] My requests for the scientific basis for the claims made for the University of Westminster’s qigong tuina course have so far remained unanswered. What a surprise. Not.

On 23rd November I emailed the course leader as described here. A week later, I had received no reply, not even an acknowledgement so I emailed the Dean of the School of Life Sciences, Professor Jane Lewis, with the same request. I hoped that a proper scientist as opposed to a CAM therapist would understand the nature of evidence and the need for the scrutiny of scientific claims. In this I have so far been disappointed as Professor Lewis has also failed to reply.

I am reminded of my attempts to discover the reasoning that lead to Durham County Council going ahead with their farcical fish-oil ‘trial’ (see numerous posts passim) and the stonewalling that greeted my attempts to obtain this information. There is one difference though; staff at Durham at least had the courtesy to reply to emails. Even if Professor Lewis and her staff think I am not entitled to the information (something I dispute since, as a taxpayer, I am subsidising their course) sending a polite refusal would be the courteous thing to do.

This refusal to engage suggests a certain amount of embarrasment. If, as a CAM critic, I was wrong in my suspicion that there is no evidence for the claims, I am sure Westminster would be quick to say so. If there is no evidence for the claims, one wonders why the University of Westminster School of Life Science chose to offer such a course. The discussion documents, committee reports, minutes and emails relating to it might make for very interesting reading. Time to FOIA them, I think.

Via the very helpful whatdotheyknow website I have sent the following request:

Dear University of Westminster,

I would like to see copies of the research papers or other documents that support the following claims made for the qigong tuina diploma course offered by the School of Life Sciences:

1. When combined with qi gong (the study of qi or vital energy) these techniques give a deep and effective means of diagnosing and
understanding illness on many levels.

and

2. Case taking, diagnostic skills and treatment techniques are enhanced by the practice of qigong, which gives the practitioner
the ability to understand both their own and the patients qi.

Yours sincerely

John Hawcock

[BPSDB]It would appear that the University of Westminster have learned nothing from the intellectual mauling they received from Professor David Colquhoun over their homeopathy degree.

I happenned to be looking at their website today when I noticed that they are offering an undergraduate diploma in qigong tuina. I had never heard of this so clicked the link to have a closer look.

Oh dear. Lots of stuff about qi energy, including claims that the understanding of this nebulous concept will improve diagnosis and treatment. However, a contact email address for Rosey Grandage, the diploma course leader, is conveniently given so I emailed the following:

Dear Ms Grandage

As a science blogger I was intrigued by the fact that the University of Westminster School of Life Sciences offers the above diploma. I was particularly interested in the assertions that:

1. When combined with qi gong (the study of qi or vital energy) these techniques give a deep and effective means of diagnosing and understanding illness on many levels.

and

2. Case taking, diagnostic skills and treatment techniques are enhanced by the practice of qigong, which gives the practitioner the ability to understand both their own and the patients qi

I would be grateful if you could let me have a link to the research which supports the claims that diagnosis and treatment are improved by an understanding of qi.

Yours sincerely

John Hawcock

If I get any sort of reply to the above, I will let you know.

Meanwhile, I learn that:

The course assumes a thorough working knowledge of western anatomy, physiology, and pathology.

I do wonder what they mean by “western” in this context. Does the University of Westminster School of Life Sciences think that human biology is different in the East? Are skeletons structured differently there? Do organs have a different function? Does the germ theory of disease not apply?

One would have thought that somebody who knows how the human body actually works would not be much attracted to mysticism, so what sort of people are Westminster trying to attract to this course?

Successful applicants will normally be members of a professional organisation such as the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, the General Council of Osteopaths, the Royal College of Nursing or the Shiatsu Society.

I am not at all surprised to see Shiatsu among that list, since Shiatsu is another school of ancient eastern thought that nobody ever heard of before the twentieth century. Osteopathy is a little disturbing as it is supposed to be the respectable end of muscular-skeletal manipulation, unlike the woo-ful British Chiropractic Association.

It seriously worries me to see The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and the Royal College listed as sources of recruits to this course. I do not know how many CSP or RCN members sign up for this course but if any at all do then we are left with the disturbing thought that there are people who are qualified physiotherapists and nurses who cannot distinguish between evidence and magical thinking.

[BPSDB]Waterloo Road, the eponymous school in BBC 1’s drama/soap opera, with its disaster-prone staff and unruly students, seems to have managed until now without a science department. This changed with the Wednesday 11 November episode, which featured helpings of bad science and bad education.

Plot summary. A student nicks some laboratory alcohol and uses it to spike bottles of soft drinks, then sells the resultant cocktail to his fellow students. One drinks rather a lot of it and is hospitalised. This is not the bad science as it is pretty much what you’d expect. The bad science is the Executive Head Teacher saying “Selling alcohol would be bad enough but this is ethanol”. Ethanol, FKA ethyl alcohol, is the alcohol found in alcoholic drinks. The reason why spiking drinks with laboratory alcohol is a really bad idea is that it is industrial methylated spirits (IMS) which is 5% methanol – which is extremely toxic. Furthermore, IMS bottles are labelled as harmful, and while the character doing the spiking has previously been portrayed as somewhat dim one would assume that even he would pause at considering a “harmful” liquid to be drinkable.

I am aware that schools are allowed to hold small quantities of pure ethanol for experiments which require it, drinking something spiked with it would have only the usual effects associated with overdoing the sauce ie inebriation followed by a hangover. However, the school would have to be licensed by Customs and Excise to hold the stuff and its use would have to be carefully monitored precisely because it is drinkable.

This leads neatly into the bad education. At Waterloo Road, IMS is kept in an unlocked wooden cupboard in the laboratory allowing students to gain access. In reality, IMS being both harmful and inflammable would be kept in a locked metal cabinet in a separate store room – which would also be kept locked.

Unlike some of the teachers in my department, I actually like this programme. I just think it would not hurt to get some basic background facts right.

[BPSDB]Much to my surprise, Mike Adams the so-called ‘Health Ranger’ has almost managed to say something sensible when he condemns a dodgy nutritional claim by Kelloggs.

The claim made is that Cocoa Krispies (TM) “enhance immunity” because they have been fortified with vitamins. Now I would be the first to agree that adding vitamins to the average sugary breakfast cereal is the nutritional equivilent of polishing a turd but I would also point out that no evidence is offered that vitamin supplementation enhances the immune system and indeed that an over-enhanced immune system is very bad for your health.

Adams cannot say this of course because he makes exactly the same claim for the vitamins he pushes. Instead he says that the vitamins Kelloggs use are not proper natural “holistic” vitamins but something synthetic out of a factory. I am curious to know what a “holistic” vitamin is and where Adams imagines they come from. Does he think they grow on trees?

All vitamin pills come out of factories. They can be either synthesised from simpler substances or extracted from foodstuffs. A pure vitamin produced by either route has exactly the same chemical properties and thus exactly the same effects on the human body. Calling the former “synthetic” and the latter “holistic” does not change this. In fact, surely extracting vitamins from foodstuffs (other than by digestion!) is also a factory process and incredibly wasteful of food into the bargain. Only someone from the overfed West could possibly think this is a good idea.

The ironic thing about this situation is that people like Adams and other nutrinistas have themselves laid the groundwork for Kelloggs to make their nonsense claim. Over the decades, the vitamin sellers have peddled their reductionist mantra that megadoses of this vitamin or that will have wonderful beneficial effects on our health, so the idea has sunk deep into our cultural conciousness that vitamin supplementation is automatically a good thing. Consequently, Kelloggs can make their claim and have it swallowed hook, line and sinker.

Adams is right to call “foul” on Kelloggs’ turd-polishing exercise but since their claims are no worse than ones he himself makes, how much of his wrath is motivated by a need to defend his turf?

[BPSDB]This programme was a rerun of Jane Elliot’s famous experiment that demonstrated that “superiority” and “inferiority” of different groups is a social construct.

In brief: forty years ago, Elliot divided her class of (entirely white) schoolchildren into two groups based on eyecolour and then told them that blue-eyed children were inferior in every way to brown-eyed children. The children went along with this: the brown-eyed began looking down on the blue-eyed and, more significantly, the blue-eyed began doing less well in their schoolwork. Elliot did not set up a control group where the brown-eyed were deemed inferior. A pity, because if she had, and the brown-eyed in that group had begun to slide academically, this would have increased the strength of the thesis that the worth of a person cannot be deduced from a physical attribute and that any differences that do manifest are social constructs. Such an experiment will not be done now as it is rather unlikely that any ethics committee would pass it.

Nevertheless, Elliot made a valid point: the discrimination on the basis of eye-colour was purely arbitrary yet acting on it caused real problems for the blue-eyed. The obvious inference from this is that the arbitrary division of society by skin colour is going to result in the group deemed inferior not achieving as much and that this difference also is a social construct.

The experiment as shown on Channel 4 used 21st century British adults, not 1960s American schoolchildren. One might expect that this would have some effect on the way the victims experimental subjects reacted to the scenario but regretably, this does not seem to have occurred to Elliot, who was plainly thrown whenever anybody departed from the script she carried in her head.

She had a very aggressive attitude to the subjects (who, until the experiment started, had no idea what was going to happen; they had merely been told that it was a “social experiment”), particulary the blue-eyed. At first I assumed that she was merely acting her part but in the post “experiment” interview, she continued to exhibit the same attitude. Nastiness is obviously her default setting. When the groups were separated at the start, she explained to the brown-eyed how they were going to be the superior group. At this point, one young man stated that he had no wish to be an aggressor and requested to be transferred to the other group. To my mind, this suggested that modern adults are less likely to accept arbitrary authority than 1960s schoolchildren but it would appear that Elliot did not want to consider this. She had him thrown out of the study.

It became increasingly plain that Elliot had a preconceived notion: “whites are racist”. She kept banging on about whites needing to be shown what being on the receiving end of discrimination was like. Now I will admit that, as a white male in a white-majority society that is run by whites, I have no direct experience of discrimination and the same can be said of the white subjects. However, this is a long way from saying we are racist.

Ironically, Elliot appeared to be so focussed on ‘white equals racist’ that she missed evidence that supported the idea that priveleging one group arbitrarily can lead to discriminatory behaviour; possibly because the person exhibiting the behaviour was black.

Pearl, the black woman in question, said that whites “needed to be taught a lesson” – plainly feeling that the blue-eyed were responsible for racism she had experienced simply because they were white. Guilt by association. Blood guilt even. I’m so glad she’s not my boss.

At the end of the experiment, all subjects were given an intelligence test. Elliot plainly wanted to demonstrate that a priveleged group holding the levers of power will rig things to look like they deserve their priveleges. However, she did this very crudely by giving the brown-eyed the answers in advance. A woman in this group kicked up at this and pointed out that the results were meaningless as Elliot had cheated.

At this point Elliot truely demonstrated that she was no scientist. The objector was an experimental subject so her reactions were an outcome of the experiment. Elliot did not see it and castigated her for “preventing the group from learning anything”.

The conclusions I draw from the programme (which was no doubt carefully editted) was that if you privelege any group members of that group are going to oppress the non-priveleged (yes, Pearl, I am looking at you now) and that some people will object to injustice – even if they are beneficiaries of the injustice. Society has moved on at least a little in the last four decades. Elliot plainly has not.

[BPSDB]I previously wrote here on the Times OnLine’s slightly inaccurate description of the effect of ‘Health & Safety’ on school science practicals and illustrated my point with examples of supposedly banned experiments still performed at my school. One commenter pointed out that this was really just anecdotal evidence and countered with an anecdote of her own to the effect that practical work had decreased at the school attended by her daughters.

This is a very fair point. While it is a fact that a short discussion with a CLEAPSS or Health and Safety Executive staffer will confirm that the supposedly banned experiments are in fact perfectly legal, it is quite possible that some teachers have a misconceived idea as to what they are allowed to do (probably from reading shite articles in the press and on line). What the Times article does not tell us if this is how widespread the problem is – assuming it is in fact the case.

I emailed Professors John Holman and David Phillips to ask what evidence they had to say that practical work was being restricted. Phillips never bothered to reply but I did get a courteous reply from John Holman which, however, did not add to what had appeared in the article.

I emailed again, requesting a link to any evidence that he had and stated explicitly that I am a blogger and intended to blog on the matter. As yet, he has not replied. Draw your own conclusions as to why.

[BPSDB]As far as I can tell, David Herzog is an independeant evangelist but his methods seem to be taken from the same book as those of the UCKG.

Take the article which appeared in the Friday 16 October issue of the Evening Standard for instance. They quote an attendee at one of his events as saying “He put two big baskets at the altar to put money into, so you would have to walk to the front where everyone would see who gave and who didn’t.” Similarly, the UCKG require their faithful to place their “sacrifice” (preferably of a monetary nature) on the altar.

The attendee also quotes Herzog as saying that the more they gave the more God would deliver. Reminds me of the UCKG’s magazine “Faith in Action” which, as I have noted previously, pretty much says that if you hold out on God not only will miracles not be forthcoming but he will arrange for bad things to happen to you as well.

Lest either the UCKG or Herzog be deciding at this point to resort to Britain’s notoriously oppressive libel laws, let me repeat that I do not believe that there is any connection between them. I merely observe that the similarity in their methods offers an interesting insight ino the evangelist mindset.

Where the UCKG have their ‘demon summonings’, Herzog has instant miracles. At an event in Singapore, for example, one man claimed that he had just found a gold tooth in his mouth. We have only his word that it was not there before. Forgive me if I have my doubts. A woman claimed that she had just lost weight and held out her loose waistband as ‘proof’. We have no independant evidence that a large woman entered wearing her clothes as opposed to, say, a slim woman wearing oversized clothes.

A testimony on Herzog’s own website appears to condone dishonesty:-

Dear David and Stephanie Herzog,
Last year in 2008, you came to minister at a church in Wisconsin. A few of us rented a car to drive from Chicago to see you. Well, I had calculated how much money I had to save for the car rental and for gas. Just before going inside of the church, I had decided to give no more than $20.00. My first thought was to give $5.00 but all of that changed after the offering was being lifted. During this time a voice told me to give $50.00 out of all the money I had in my pocket, just $50.00. So when I took it out you said,” when you give, throw it up in the air and say I expect it to return double”. I did just that. About 2 weeks had gone by maybe a little longer, by then I had forgotten all about giving the $50.00. Well, I happened to be in a Walgreen’s store waiting in a somewhat long line. During this time waiting I was looking on the floor (something I always do). Nothing was on the floor at the time. I looked up because it was my turn to check out. Just as the person before me left I noticed under the counter on the floor what looked like a dollar. I was hopping nobody else saw it. As soon as I got closer I picked it up and saw it was $50.00 folded so I put it in my pocket. I said thank you JESUS. When I went to my car I took the money out of my pocket in folded the $50.00 bill and saw there was another $50.00 bill. (they were new bills) I sat there in shock and thanking GOD because I had newer found that much money before. Then I remembered the offering I was told to give and what you said to say while giving it. I thanked JESUS even more.

Be Blessed
Melita Warren

I am not sure what the legal position is in the States but in Britain Melita Warren would be guilty of “theft by finding”. Whatever the legal postion, it does not seem to occur to her that somebody in front of her in the queue dropped the money and now the poor sod is short of $100.

These dubious ‘miracles’ have the same purpose as the UCKG’s faux summonnings and exorcisms – to convince the faithful that the evangelist has God’s favour. One thing nobody seems to ask these people is where in the Bible does it say that God performs miracles in exchange for cash? Mine fails to mention it.

[BPSDB]Sometimes I think that the Press and I live in parallel universes. What else can explain the fact that they publish stuff as news that I know to be false? They even claim that stuff I do on a regular basis as part of my job as a school lab technician never actually happens.

Take this, the claim that interesting science experiments no longer happen in school laboratories because of misplaced health and safety fears:-

“The fear of burns, spillages and volatile reactions means that even mundane procedures such as distillation are often viewed online rather than performed in the laboratory. Professor John Holman, the Government’s chief adviser on science in schools, and Professor David Phillips, incoming president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, told The Times that it was vital for pupils to learn how to handle hazardous substances and to experiment.

The first sentence in the above paragraph is a fabrication. Distillation is done in the lab not viewed online at the school where I work and I have never heard of any school that does things differently. The Times does not place it in quotes which suggests that no-one other than the writer has used those exact words but note how it is immediately followed by naming Professor John Holman and Professor David Phillips and so implying it is they who have said it. Note to self. Find contact details for the Professors and ask them what they actually said.

Professor Holman, who is also director of the National Science Learning Centre, said trainee teachers spent too little time preparing exciting practicals. “There is much less practical work now because of a huge focus on exams,” he said. “Schools are so aware of health and safety — they will say, ‘That’s too dangerous’.

My own experience is that there is not less practical work. However I am aware that a sample size of 1 does not tell a great deal about the state of science education in the country as a whole. It is a pity Professor Holman does not supply any evidence at all for his assertion. And this from the Director of the National Science Learning Centre and the Government Chief Advisor on Science in Schools too. The statement that “schools are so aware of health and safety — they will say, ‘That’s too dangerous.’”, is, I am afraid to say, excrement of the male bovine. First, I do not see the problem with being aware of health and safety issues. Second, schools will rarely, if ever, say “that’s too dangerous” – they will say “Have you done a risk assessment and have you provided adequate personal protective equipment?”

The article then gives us some experiments the writer thinks are going to disappear:-

“Experiments at risk

Ammonium dichromate volcano Make a pile of ammonium dichromate and set the tip alight using a magnesium fuse. The result is a tiny volcano, complete with ash, steam and nitrogen gas

The thermite reaction Mix metal powder with metal-oxide to create thermite and set it alight. The mix will burn at an exceptionally high temperature

Potassium in water The classic school experiment. Drop potassium into water and it reacts violently, making hydrogen, which then ignites in a small fireball”

I’ve never set up the first of the above three but the other two are regulars in our department. I have never had any indications from CLEAPSS (the school science safety advisory service) that there is any suggestion that these experiments be banned.

Teachers still devise their own demonstrations too. Our head of chemistry has come up with an excellent one that presumably does not happen in the Times’s parallel universe. A small candle is placed in a copper calorimeter and heated over a bunsen burner. The wax melts and starts burning. You then tape a small beaker to the end of a metre rule, half fill it with water then, holding the other end of the metre rule, tip the water into the burning wax. The result is a jet of flame that reaches the ceiling. An excelent demonstration as to why trying to put out chip-pan fires with water is a really bad idea. Figuring out what has happened is a good excercise for the students, too.

I left a comment on the Times article on Tuesday evening saying briefly that school science still includes interesting experiments and perhaps they should talk to people who work in science education before they publish stories such as this. Strangely, it has not yet appeared. They have allowed plenty of comments slagging off Labour/Liberals/bureaucrats/socialists however and saying how terrible excessive regulation is.

Clearly, this excessive regulation of school science is a figment of the Murdoch Empire’s imagination but it fits into the meme of “Health & Safety gone mad” which is so beloved by the Tories. By convincing the electorate that health and safety regulations are far more restrictive than is actually the case and they will be more accepting in cuts in real safety legislation on the grounds of “making a bonfire of red tape” or “allowing Britain to be competitive”. Light touch regulation of the finance sector for competitive reasons used to be a mantra too. Need I remind you how well that turned out?

[BPSDB]
This post also appears on Lay Science.

Lord Drayson seems convinced that the media has learned the relevent lessons over the MMR debacle. At a conference of science journalists on 1 July he told delegates that lessons had been learned since MMR and repeats the assertion during a debate with Ben Goldacre here. Is he right to be so confident?

First off, he is praising science journalists and as Ben points out both in this debate and elsewhere, most of the serious scaremongering was not written by specialist science and health journalists but by general reporters.

Second, less than a week after the conference , we have this story in the Daily Express which continues to stoke fears of the MMR vaccine.

The headline reads:

Doctor’s MMR Fears”

and the first sentence informs us that there are “Fresh fears for the safety of MMR vaccinations”. And this is by the Express’s Health reporter, Lucy Johnston.

We also have another way of testing Drayson’s hypothesis. Over recent months the NHS has rolled out the HPV vaccine. The HP virus causes 70% of cervical cancers. Cervical cancer, despite screening, kills about one thousand women per year, its most famous victim this year was ‘reality’ star Jade Goody. This vaccine could thus save about 700 women per year. How have the press greeted this?

With scare-mongering. As I pointed out here, the Mail bigged up minor side effects and referred to the vaccine as the ‘promiscuity jab’. The HP virus is sexually transmitted and social conservatives, such as the readers and writers of the Mail, believe that removing the fear of disease and death will encourage teenagers to have sex. There is not a shred of evidence to support this notion and since teenagers have been having illicit sex since time immemorial it is clear that the prospect of disease and death does not discourage them. Teenagers believe that they are immortal and that bad shit happens to other people. As anyone who has a teenager knows, they rarely think about consequences at all. In other words, if they are contemplating sex then the HPV vaccination status of the girl concerned will not enter ino their thinking.

And of course when Natalie Morton died a few hours after receiving the vaccination they went to town and published a scare-mongering rant which relied heavily on quotes from Jackie Fletcher of JABS. When the post-mortem revealed that Natalie had in fact died of a chest tumour the on-line version of this article was extensively rewritten but the Mail did not formally retract their previous statements or indeed acknowledge their rewriting of history. One is reminded of the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith rewrites archives to remove stories that the powers that be find inconvenient.

Furthermore, they still quote Richard Halvorsen here saying that her death calls into question the vaccination program even though her death is not vaccine related.

The Express is even worse: in one headline it refers to the “cancer jab horror”, see here. Martin Robbins refers to this in a twitter exchange with Drayson:

mjrobbins:Is this what Lord Drayson meant by lessons learned? “PARENTS’ REVOLT AFTER GIRL DIES IN CANCER JAB HORROR”

lorddrayson:Frankly? Yes. It says “most unlikely that the HPV vaccine is the cause of death”

In today’s Sunday Express Lucy Johnston claims that the vaccine is as deadly as the cancer it is intended to prevent. Really? Deaths that will be prevented by the vaccine = 700 per year; deaths caused by the vaccine so far = 0. Johnston’s claim is totally without foundation.

Drayson seems to think that a reference to the Government/NHS “insisting” that the vaccine is safe makes stories such as these ok. I find this attitude surprisingly naive for any adult, let alone one who has been a businessman and is now a Government Minister. Whenever the tabloids refer to this government “insistance” they never give the reasons for it. When this “insistance” is referred to after references to alleged side-effects of the vaccine, “insists” becomes a very emotionally-loaded term. What it means in this context is “keeps repeating despite our evidence”. This is doubtless intentional because it suits these nespapers’ real agenda which is to bash the Government.

Lest you think that I am exaggerating here, let me remind you of Martin Robbins’ discovery that the Irish edition of the Daily Mail is attacking the Irish Government for not rolling out the HPV vaccine. Clearly they do not believe what they are writing. If they want to knock the Government, that is their choice in a free society. It should not be open to them to achieve this aim by telling lies that, if believed, will kill hundreds of people per year.

Lessons learned? Regrettably, I think not.

[BPSDB]I have previously covered the Daily Mail’s attempts to whip up fear over the HPV vaccine. When Natalie Morton tragically died shortly after receiving this vaccine, certain elements in the antivaxx movement must have thought Christmas had come early.

The Daily Mail led the charge with an appalling piece by David Martin which linked the vaccine and her death and gave huge prominence to Jackie Fletcher of JABS.

It turns out that Natalie Morton had a chest tumour and it would appear that it was this that killed her. Have the Daily Mail issued a retraction? Of course not. Instead they have quietly edited the article, Ministry of Truth style, to remove the extensive rehash of the JABS line and generally pretend they never said what they said – the current incarnation is here.

They follow up with this which continues to scare-monger by claiming the vaccine is a “mass experiment”. It prominently links to another of their articles in which Richard Halvorsen says:-

“the sudden death of Coventry schoolgirl Natalie Morton after a jab against cervical cancer highlights the reality that the vaccination programmes are not without their risks.”

So the Mail continues to give the impression that Natalie Morton’s death was caused by the vaccine despite the fact that it is becoming clear that she died of other causes? Why?

A clue might be found in the fact that the Mail frequently refers to the vaccine as the “promiscuity jab” – claiming that by eliminating one of the risks associated with sexual activity, teenage girls will be encouraged to have sex. The Mail disapproves of sex outside marriage and evidently wish it to potentially carry the death penalty. According to Halvorsen “only” 911 women per year die of cervical cancer. This vaccine would prevent 70% of them: 638 deaths per year. If the Mail get ther way and succeed in getting this vaccine banned, over a human lifetime they will be resposible for close to 50,000 needless deaths. Not something I’d want on my conscience.