Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 22390

A colleague in California recently contacted me about a card she had received. It was addressed to me, care of her home address. We assumed it was a congratulations card, as I had just been married a week before. I forgot about the card until it arrived in the mail a few weeks later. I opened the pink envelope and slid out the card, expecting to see a typical image of a bride and groom kissing, or clinking champagne glasses. Instead, I was stunned to see the words “With Sympathy” printed across an inspirational landscape. Upon reading the disturbing message in a handwriting style that looked affected, I realized that I had received a death threat, in an ominous sympathy card.

The card contained an anonymous threat in response to an article I had written about Theresa Caputo for Swift. Caputo is the boisterous “psychic medium” on TLC’s the Long Island Medium. In this article I discuss the show, her cold reading methods, and the possibility that she also uses hot reading techniques. The article isn’t the most inflammatory one I’ve ever written. However, it somehow prompted the author of the card to threaten my life in protection of Caputo’s purported psychic abilities.

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 14303

juicerossJuice diets seem to be all the rage right now; not a day of Internet browsing passes without seeing an ad for some new juice system with numbered bottles and hefty prices. These products go by a number of names: juice cleanses, juice diets, juice fasts, juice detox, juicing (not to be confused with steroid use) – all alternative titles for the same thing. It’s just what it sounds like – you pick a span of time, anywhere from days to weeks, in which you forsake eating solid food in order to consume large quantities of juice. It was time to try this out for myself, and I figured I could survive for three days.

I like juice, you say. But what kind of juice? While it depends on which system you follow, generally your beverage is going to consist of vegetables and fruits that have been squeezed of all their liquid content. There’s heavy emphasis on vegetable representation: celery, kale, spinach, beets, carrots – nothing most of us would deem particularly tasty. The plus side is that you’re not completely starving yourself with this fast; the downside is that the taste will take some getting used to.

Juice systems are marketed for various goals: weight loss, health management, and even “detoxification”, but I wasn’t motivated by any of those incentives. I co-host the podcast Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, where Carrie Poppy and I put ourselves in awkward situations and test various alternative medicines (among other extraordinary claims) in the name of curiosity and entertainment. Carrie had already tried the Master Cleanse diet at the same time that I had an uncomfortable-to-say-the-least new experience with colon hydrotherapy. All we learned from those experiments was that they made us feel crappy (literally) and that alternative medicine practitioners will stare at you and blink if you ask them to define what toxins are. But no, this wasn't even a podcast-related investigation.

Instead, my friend Jennifer wanted to try out a juice diet for herself to see how it agreed with her system. She figured it would be easier to accomplish with an accountability partner, and knew I was up for any crazy old thing. In the end, my motivations were a blend of curiosity and moral support. Plus, I could stand to lose a few pounds if this thing panned out.

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 23480

The following is a contribution to the JREF’s ongoing blog series on skepticism and education. If you are an educator and would like to contribute to this series, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

In an effort to shake up my teaching schedule, I volunteered to lead a colloquium for the Honors department this semester. This is a small class that meets twice a week for an hour. Titled “Science versus Pseudoscience: Do you know what you think you know?”, the class covers subjects from Bigfoot to health scams. One major goal of this course is to teach critical examination of evidence, both scientific and popular.

For the health & medicine portion of the class, I chose to address the two types of evidence separately. My students are upper-level science majors, and have learned to read primary literature in other classes. We started with Greenberg et al.’s Rainy days for the society of pediatric anesthesia (2012). This is an excellent, tongue-in-cheek example of the correlation-causation heuristic. The paper positively correlates meteorological data with meeting dates of the Society, ending with the suggestion that umbrellas should be sold at meetings. The students, who were used to using primary literature in summary or lab reports, were initially baffled by the paper. Were they serious? Why would someone publish something like this? I asked the students some questions: Did this meeting cause it to rain? What would be the mechanism? Why would you come to that conclusion based on that evidence? The students saw the need for more than a correlation in the data, and we talked about the importance of prior probability analysis.

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 7493

Here is a rundown of the top stories in oddities and paranormal news from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.

This big news this week was another exposure of the Burzynski cancer treatment claims. First, we got news that the FDA sent a letter to the Burzynski clinic in Texas warning them of language they used in promotion of the clinic. It turns out they were hyping the claims they were supposed to be testing, "safe and effective", for their antineoplastons treatment. More came later this week as it became more and more clear that there is a difference between conventional trials for new drugs and those claims from unconventional clinics that charge patients and sell potential false hope.

Details
Category: Swift
Hits: 6568

Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo in medicine.  

The Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy: Equivocal as Predicted (Kimball Atwood) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-trial-to-assess-chelation-therapy-equivocal-as-predicted/ The NIH-sponsored chelation trial confusingly reported a slight overall advantage but no advantage for death, heart attack, stroke, coronary revascularization surgery, or hospitalization for angina. The benefit was limited to diabetic subjects. The results were marred by incomplete data and other serious flaws. The researchers themselves said it did not constitute evidence to recommend chelation treatment. The study was unethical, and publishing it would violate international medical journal requirements that honor the Helsinki Declaration.  

  1. Skeptical Africa: Witchcraft and African Development
  2. New Videos from The Amaz!ng Meeting 2012: Paranormal Investigation and Sean Faircloth
  3. Inoculated Against Illusion: Skeptics and Face-Pareidolia
  4. Teaching the Philosophy of (Pseudo) Science