I went dowsing last week – and wrote it up for New Scientist here . Sadly, I didn’t have much space, so couldn’t explore the nuances, but I’m fairly convinced the balance of the piece is right: dowsing is incredibly convincing when you're into it, but that doesn’t make the cut in a scientific appraisal. As James Randi has put it, “these are persons who are genuinely, thoroughly, self-deceived.”

That’s not to say people who believe dowsing taps into something beyond our senses are definitely wrong. Science isn’t powerful enough to make that assertion (which is why, I think, homeopathy survives for now). But I’m not convinced there’s any evidence to back up their claims. It’s all anecdotal. Yes, they are pretty powerful anecdotes – but then they wouldn’t make great stories if they weren’t.

To expand on the article, I’m going to add a couple of things. First, it was all much more plausible when John Baker (not pictured), my dowsing demonstrator was just “finding” stuff. It just got too woo-woo for me when he started asking questions of the rods. Here’s how the story continues beyond what’s in the New Scientist piece:

He asks the rods when the building was first constructed, and the rods respond as he counts through the centuries, then the decades. In 1445, the rods say. It was an agricultural building, and in use until 1520 or so, they say.

“So it’s like a Ouija board?” I say.

 “Don’t go there,” Baker says, frowning. “It’s not like that.”

But it seems like a fair question to me. Talking about “energies” is one thing. Talking about something that knows the meaning of “centuries” and “AD or BC?” is quite another. I can tell Baker is slightly annoyed by this observation, but he admits it must be some kind of human intelligence. The rods channel energies left behind by the collective human intelligence, but the point is that our brains, our subconscious minds, are all connected together in a vast web for which the passage of time is no barrier. If Baker can divine the position of a window on this site six centuries ago, that’s because human minds once registered the window’s presence.

Not that he cares that much about the explanation. It doesn’t really matter how it works, he says. And it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t even surprise him – that dowsing does not work in scientific tests. James Randi has been offering a million dollars to anyone who can show that dowsing works, and it remains unclaimed. “Of course it doesn’t work in scientific tests,” Baker says. “It only works when it’s done for the right reasons. When dowsers get together and hide things in a room, none of them can find anything.”

So, dowsing puts itself beyond scientific scrutiny. How you feel about that depends on your prior belief. Personally, it just makes it pointless to go any further. Just as I don’t have any need or desire to use homeopathy, and so can’t be bothered to try to pin it down, dowsing will remain one of those things I think is “probably rubbish, but what do I care if other people don’t agree?” Let them spend/charge money on/for it. It’s not my problem.

Am I wrong?

Very gratifying to have a piece doing so well on the Times website. It’s a little taster of each of the 13 Things, and was the “most-read” over the weekend (or so the people at Profile Books told me this morning).

The original piece on the New Scientist website (which has a slightly different set of Things) was extraordinarily popular, becoming the sixth most circulated article on the internet in 2005. People keep asking me what the draw is: why is it so appealing to examine what we don’t know?

My answer is, essentially, answers take the fun out of life: speculation is more interesting. I’m convinced that, while mysteries are appealing to everyone, solutions appeal only to some.

No doubt this is the root of those staples of the news agenda: conspiracy theories, UFO reports and weird spookiness. So maybe 13 Things reinforces that innate sense, which I’ve written about here, that there’s more to the world than we can perceive.
 

I went on the George Lamb show on BBC Radio 6 Music today, which was great fun (you can listen at the site - I was on about 2 hrs 15 minutes in). They are running a typically bizarre experiment, following the moldification (if that’s a word) of two tubs of cooked rice (you can see a YouTube video on the BBC site). One has “negative” words written on its container – hate, disgust, evil, that kind of thing. The other has “positive” words: love, peace, gratitude, and so on. The idea is to leave it 3 weeks or so, and see which one gets more mouldy. Obviously, the hope is that the negative words will create more mould, thus proving that we should fill the world with positive vibes.

I’m sure I don’t need to say there are SO many issues with this, scientifically speaking. But here’s one to start with. What’s wrong with mould?

Why should mould thrive on negative vibes, when it can so clearly be a force for good? In fact, many of us have a mould to thank for our good health: penicillium – known  across the world as penicillin – is a vital part of global healthcare.

A quick Googling will tell you how Penicillin saved countless lives in World War II. Plus:

It has lowered the death rate of staphylococcal infections by 86%, is the most effective drug for the treatment of hemolytic streptococcus, is the most powerful therapeutic agent against gonorrhea and syphilis, is a very affective antibiotic for wounds and burns, is helpful in the treatment of gangrene, and is the best treatment existing for bacterial endocarditis, empyema, lung abscess, brochietasis, acute osteomyelitis, chronic osteomyelitis, and anthrax; and yet, penicillin is nontoxic.

Anyway, back to the rice. In 13 Things, in the chapter on homeopathy, I mention some of the strange things people believe about positive and negative vibes, or intentions. The thing is, there are one or two quite eminent scientists among them.

Rustum Roy, for example, has a long list of emeritus professorships, and an even longer list of publications in respected journals. He has received a research award from the Emperor of Japan; he’s even had a mineral – Rustumite – named after him. Roy advocates using silver as an antibiotic, something that has repeatedly separated fools and their money – including those selling the silver, who have been fined by the FDA for promoting and profiting from a treatment that can result in actual bodily harm.  He also thinks – and advocates in this paper – that the conscious will of a healer such as a Chinese Qigong Grand Master can change the structure of water.

Then there’s William Tiller, a former Department Chair of Materials at Stanford University, has published claims that weak magnetic fields can alter biological materials and the pH of water, and that human intention can also change pH, affect electrical circuits, and alter the properties of space.

I don’t buy any of it. I promised I’d try the rice experiment – and I will – but unless I do it a few hundred times, double blinded, randomised, in fully sterilised containers, I don’t think I’ll read too much into it.

(Yes, I know it's meant to be a bit of harmless fun. And if it weren't for the likes of Roy and Tiller, it might be...) 

Ben Goldacre has outdone himself – I’d be tempted to call this column his best to date.

It’s too easy to snipe at homeopaths or purveyors of crystal healing: science has its own issues, and really ought to put its own house in order over some things. Like someone once said, when there’s a plank in your eye, it’s hard to see other people’s faults clearly. Or something.

Anyway, Ben’s column is about an anomaly in science publishing, and one that urgently needs attention. He highlights the fact that research studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry are “massively more likely to get into the bigger, more respected journals.”

There is, Ben points out, no explanation for this other than pharmaceutical companies having undue influence over the most prestigious journals.

Journals are businesses, run by huge international corporations, and they rely on advertising revenue from industry, but also on the phenomenal profits generated by selling glossy “reprints” of studies, and nicely presented translations, which drug reps around the world can then use.

There is a possible solution:

In an ideal world, all drugs research would be commercially separate from from manufacturing and retail, and all journals would be open and free. But until then, since academics are obliged to declare all significant drug company funding on all academic articles, it might not be too much to ask that once a year, since their decisions are so hugely influential, all editors and publishers should post all their sources of income, and all the money related to the running of their journal. Because at the moment, the funny thing is, we just don’t know how they work.

It's a very good call. And if this leaves you thinking that Big Pharma are the root of all evil, please read this Guardian story about GlaxoSmithkline rewriting the Big Pharma Book of Evil. They are changing the way they work in order to provide medicines for the world’s poor, and are going to start sharing information that might help speed up drug development. Read it and weep. I have rarely had the cockles of my heart so warmed.
 

A little more homeopathic stuff. I blogged on the Guardian’s science pages about homeopathy and the NHS yesterday. Go and read it, but basically, I suggested that homeopathy is most probably a placebo, and one that is potentially useful to physicians looking for an easy placebo treatment – which is not the same as doing nothing.

The entry provoked a lot of thoughtful comments. Here’s a taster from one, written by Le Canard Noir:

Homeopathic retailers sell their customers sugar pills to protect themselves against malaria and Fellows of the Society of Homeopaths try to conduct AIDS trials in Africa using magic water….If placebos are ever ethically justified then deluded people are not the best set of people to be dishing them out.

I completely agree, but I’m not talking about the way I would set the system up. I’m talking about what we’ve got to work with now. To quote 13 Things:

According to the World Health Organisation, it now forms an integral part of the national health care systems of a huge swathe of countries including Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Mexico. London’s Royal Homeopathic Hospital, part of the UK’s national health service, employs a staggering 6,000 staff. Forty per cent of French physicians use homeopathy, as do 40 per cent of Dutch, 37 per cent of British and 20 per cent of German physicians. In 1999 a survey revealed that 6 million Americans had used homeopathic treatments in the previous 12 months.

I think it would be wrong to impose a ban on something that so many people have faith in. That carries the risk of pushing people further away from sensible healthcare.

Of course there are dangers from the extremes, but I’m not talking about doctors referring HIV prevention, cancer treatment or malaria prophylaxis to homeopaths. That would be ridiculous. The people who already go straight to homeopaths for this kind of thing will continue to do so, no matter what the system does or doesn’t endorse. There’s nothing you can do about that, just as you can’t stop people believing in horoscopes, or the power of psychics. People make life-threatening decisions on the basis of these hokum ideas too. People are human. What are you going to do?

Since this is Darwin Year, and 13 Things… comes out in the UK this week, I had a thought about blogging Darwin’s experience with homeopathy. The big H, after all, is the one that most people (including me, and almost certainly Darwin) would like to see removed from the list.

As it turned out, Le Canard Noir has done a fantastic job of this already, and encountered the weirdness of debating the efficacy of homeopathy with homeopaths. You can never win, they can never convince you…it’s the very definition of the word impasse.

So why re-invent the wheel? My advice is, read to the end of the official entry, but don’t get drawn too far into the comments. You may never get out alive…

 

...I took part in a debate on “What Science Can’t Tell Us” last night at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was chaired by the “fabulous” (my friends’ word) Vivienne Parry, and there's a review of the event at Spoonfed.

Almost inevitably, we ended up discussing Rupert’s experiments with dogs that allegedly know when their owners are coming home. When I made the point that no other scientists agreed that the experiments were conclusive proof a psychic ability in pets, he said that the skeptic Richard Wiseman had gotten exactly the same results. But then, in public, Wiseman denied it, Sheldrake says.

That’s just not true: the truth is, Wiseman and Sheldrake interpreted the same experimental results very differently. Here’s an extract of what Wiseman has to say (you can download the pdf this is taken from here). RS=Rupert Sheldrake; RW=Richard Wiseman

We do not believe that RS’s re-analysis of our data provides compelling evidence for the notion that Jaytee [the dog] could psychically detect when PS [the owner] was returning home.
 
First, it appears that RS's observed patterns could easily arise if Jaytee did very little for some time after PS left home and then began to visit the porch more often, and for longer periods, the longer she stayed away.  This pattern of behaviour would make sense for a dog waiting for its owner's return and would result in Jaytee being at the window most often when PS is returning, as her journey home will always constitute the final time period in each experiment.  It is therefore possible that the pattern that RS describes is not evidence of some inexplicable power of Jaytee to detect PS's return but an artefact of an easily explicable pattern in Jaytee's natural waiting behaviour.

And later…

we feel that the description of our experiments in RS’s book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, is misleading. RS has presented the results of our work in the main text of this book.  However, instead of stating that we had concluded that our experiments did not support the existence of Jaytee’s claimed abilities, he described our data as follows:
 
The pattern was very similar to that in my own experiments, and confirmed that Jaytee anticipated Pam’s arrival even when she was returning at a randomly chosen time in an unfamiliar vehicle. (Sheldrake, 1999b, p. 46).
 
RS only described our actual conclusions (i.e., that we believe that our experiments do not support claims about Jaytee’s psychic abilities) in an endnote, published in a very small font, at the very back of the book (Footnote 1).
 
In short, we strongly disagree with the arguments presented in RS’s commentary.  We believe that our experiments were properly designed and that the results did not support the notion that Jaytee could psychically detect when PS was returning home.

Rupert’s claims that the world is permeated by special (almost magical, in that they lie outside the ken of science) fields still lacks the extraordinary evidence it needs for me to be convinced.

Not that I care a great deal: I think that many dog and cat owners have beliefs about their pets’ abilities/preferences, and there’s no harm in it. It’s no different to believing in God, really: some people do, some people don’t and some say they just don’t know. And most of the time, as long as we live and let live, that works fine. It’s not like there’s much you can do to change people’s fundamental beliefs.

Rupert, for instance, thinks he can probe the canine telepathy best by studying the dogs that do it best. It seems obvious to me that this route starts with a founding assumption: that the effect is real. It’s going to be far more instructive to take animals that “can” and animals that “can’t”, and compare and contrast. The trouble is, that approach runs the risk of seeing the effect evaporate…

I actually think  - and I didn’t get to say this last night – science benefits from the work of people like Rupert Sheldrake. They are an irritation that keeps scientists on their toes and hones their critical faculties. It would be terrible to get complacent, after all.

 

Dan Ariely of Duke University in North Carolina won an Ig Nobel prize last week for showing that expensive placebos work much better than cheap ones. People who believed that the pills they were given cost $2.50 each reported feeling less pain from a series of electric shocks than people who thought their pills had been discounted to 10 cents each.
 
The Ig Nobels are traditionally meant to celebrate humorous but essentially pointless science – other winners this year included researchers who had proved that Coca-Cola douches do not provide effective contraception and University of New Mexico psychologists who proved that lapdancers make more tips when in the most fertile periods of their menstrual cycle.
 
However, the placebo research is far from pointless. It illustrates a point that leading researchers are only just beginning to acknowledge, and could have implications for clinical practice, the regulation of complementary medicines and the way we conduct clinical trials of pharmaceuticals.
 
We have long known that belief and expectation play a powerful role in the biochemistry of the human body, but the placebo effect is a much more powerful and mysterious phenomenon than we have been led to believe.
 
As I outlined in 13 Things…placebo researchers have learned, for instance, that diazepam doesn't reduce anxiety in patients after an operation unless they know they are taking it (it's not yet clear if this is also true of diazepam's other effects). National Institutes of Health researchers have shown that cocaine abusers who know they are receiving the drug can get by on half the amount required by those given a covert dose. If you don't tell people that they are getting an injection of morphine, you have to inject at least 12 milligrams to get a painkilling effect, whereas if you tell them, far lower doses can make a difference. This has obvious implications for the way we run clinical trials.
 
It turns out that Ariely  (check out his web page here – it’s crazy and intelligent stuff) may not even have needed to deceive his subjects into thinking they were getting a medicine at all, whether cheap or costly. It is possible to bypass common sense with the placebo effect. When, as part of research for 13 Things… I asked researchers to elicit a placebo response in me, they had no trouble doing it. Even though I knew I was being tricked, the placebo conditioning procedure still allowed me – like Ariely’s subjects – to experience a series of electric shocks as nothing more than a light touch on the arm. (I blogged about this for New Scientist here.)
This is a potentially useful discovery, allowing doctors to bypass the ethical problems of deceiving patients. Researchers at the University of North Carolina have shown, for instance, that ADHD-affected children can manage on reduced stimulant medication – reducing side-effects – when given a placebo. The twist is, the children, the doctors and the parents all knew they were using something with no active ingredient, but it worked anyway. Such “open-label” use of placebos holds great potential for improving health care, the researchers say.
 
Ariely’s findings could help lay to rest one of the great arguments of modern science: whether homeopathic remedies and other complementary medicines have any medical benefit above placebo. Science has struggled with the question because there are indications in the literature that these interventions do have some effect beyond what the placebo effect can explain. But now that we are beginning to understand that placebo response depends on previously unexplored factors like perceived cost of the medicine (and homeopathic medicines are certainly not cheap), perhaps we can find a way out of this quagmire.
 
Add in the idea that some chemicals are only efficacious when in contact with the chemicals our bodies produce when we have our hopes raised, and we start to see that we have some seriously murky waters to explore before we can claim to understand how and why many medical interventions work – or don’t. The placebo effect is not at all as we have imagined. And it is certainly not that funny.