Morgellons was invented (it would not be accurate to say diagnosed) in 2001, by a mom whose toddler son developed an unremarkable raw patch on his chin. When the scab collected fibers — almost certainly from the environment — she believed that they were being extruded from his skin. She took him to doctor after doctor, looking for one who would confirm her belief, but none would. A consensus rose among the doctors that she suffered from Munchausen by Proxy, in which an individual thrives on attention from doctors through presenting a family member as an extraordinary medical case. Reports are that she tried eight different doctors, and when none agreed with her claim, she coined the term Morgellons disease. An active community of Morgellons sufferers has grown worldwide ever since.

The general feeling among the medical profession (and with which I agree, based on my research) is that most of the patients who have self-diagnosed with Morgellons are suffering from acute stress or other psychiatric conditions. Among the many possible physical manifestations of acute stress is skin sores. The sufferer scratches, causing scabs. Environmental fibers become caught in the scab. Combined with other highly uncomfortable symptoms, and a bit of Internet research, the fibers convince the sufferer that Morgellons is the cause. It is noteworthy that prior to Morgellons’ appearance on the Internet in 2001, there were no reports of a strange disease in which the body extrudes colorful plastic fibers.

In accordance with public pressure to investigate Morgellons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated a large-scale investigation of the reports, to determine whether a new medical condition had indeed been discovered. As noted in my Skeptoid episode, the CDC’s latest news was reported on a special web page, http://www.cdc.gov/unexplaineddermopathy/. Sufferers were able to keep up on the latest research.

And now, on January 25, 2012, the CDC has released its results. In short, they found no physiological cause, and that nearly all sufferers also reported other conditions considered to be psychogenic. An accurate summary of their findings is that the patients who believe their body is extruding fibers are wrong, the fibers come from elsewhere (cotton was the most common composition detected), and the condition is delusional (my words, not the CDC’s). The study, reported in PLoS ONE, concluded:

To our knowledge, this represents the most comprehensive, and the first population-based, study of persons who have symptoms consistent with the unexplained dermopathy referred to as Morgellons. We were not able to conclude based on this study whether this unexplained dermopathy represents a new condition, as has been proposed by those who use the term Morgellons, or wider recognition of an existing condition such as delusional infestation, with which it shares a number of clinical and epidemiologic features. We found little on biopsy that was treatable, suggesting that the diagnostic yield of skin biopsy, without other supporting clinical evidence, may be low. However, we did find among our study population co-existing conditions for which there are currently available therapies (drug use, somatization). These data should assist clinicians in tailoring their diagnostic and treatment approaches to patients who may be affected. In the absence of an established cause or treatment, patients with this unexplained dermopathy may benefit from receipt of standard therapies for co-existing medical conditions and/or those recommended for similar conditions such delusions infestation.

How will this news be received by the Morgellons community? Predictably, the findings will be rejected, in favor of their desired theory that an actual disease agent is present. There will most likely be claims of a Big Pharma conspiracy, or charges that doctors are afraid of discovering new conditions that “rock the boat” or conflict with “mainstream dogma”.

But the true problem is that many such patients will continue to go untreated, due to their hostility toward a psychiatric diagnosis which (in my experience) they misinterpret as “calling them crazy”. After all — they reason — the fibers are there, real, and physical; how could it just be psychological? Acute stress and other psychiatric conditions can be highly disabling and can cause physiological symptoms. No one is “calling them crazy”; it’s simply a different diagnosis than the one they prefer.

Even assuming the CDC’s findings are correct, they will likely have very little impact helping the sufferers. And that’s the real tragedy of Morgellons.

In this recent incarnation, Senator Tom Coburn (R.-OK) is castigating studies funded by the National Science Foundation which seem silly or frivolous to outsiders to bolster his cred as an anti-waste, anti-tax crusader. He has repeated called for the elimination of the NSF altogether, although he has no idea where American scientists would get their funding if he did so. In past years, the charge was led by Rep. John Dingell (D.-MI), who has served in the House since 1955, the longest serving member of the current Congress. A generation ago, it was Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who replaced Joe McCarthy in the Senate and served for 44 years. Proxmire created the famous “Golden Fleece” awards, which publicize what he regards as useless research. Or take a recent quote from that paragon of education and science, Sarah Palin, is in the same vein: “Some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good, things like fruit fly research.”

The Palin quote, however, reveals the problem with the whole issue of outsiders criticizing science funding: ignorance of scientific research and its context. Anyone who has had any real exposure to biology (as Palin obviously has not) knows that for over a century, the fruit fly has been the model organism of genetics, since it is easy to study and breed, and its genes work wonderfully for research. Fruit flies have taught us more about genetics and evolution than studies on just about any other animal. The same problem permeates all these debates: many areas of science seem obscure to the layman, and don’t seem worthwhile, but in the context of a particular research discipline, they are important or significant.

As the article goes on to point out:

But there’s more to duh research than meets the eye. Experts say they have to prove the obvious — and prove it again and again — to influence perceptions and policy.

“Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,” said Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. “There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.”

Indeed, people are still arguing about cigarettes almost 50 years after the U.S. surgeon general first linked their use to cancer and lung disease. In a recent issue of the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, a detailed analysis painstakingly laid out a notion that most take for granted: that secondhand smoke in cars is bad for children.

Duh.

Or consider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job.

This seems painfully clear. But getting the medical establishment to start believing it — much less change the rules governing doctors’ working hours — has taken Czeisler the better part of three decades. Long shifts for interns and residents are a staple of hospital culture.

When Czeisler presented evidence that workers on rotating shifts at a chemical plant suffered on disrupted sleep, the medical establishment said that doctors were different. When he published results showing that physicians’ 24-hour-plus shifts contributed to car accidents and attention lapses at work, some acknowledged it might be true — but not for them.

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we’ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

In 2008, the Institute of Medicine issued guidelines calling for limiting interns’ and residents’ shifts to 16 consecutive hours. Last year, authorities did cut back to 16 hours — but only for interns. Why? In part because that’s who Czeisler had studied.

“I was astonished,” said Czeisler, who is now researching whether residents’ performance also is affected by lack of sleep. “I can’t believe we have to do this extra study.”

There’s another reason why studies tend to confirm notions that are already widely held, said Daniele Fanelli, an expert on bias at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Instead of trying to find something new, “people want to draw attention to problems,” especially when policy decisions hang in the balance, he said.

In addition, studies that seem to be confirming the obvious are not so trivial as the media and politicians portray them. Many ideas which we consider everyday wisdom turn out to be wrong—and it takes studies like these to demonstrate the falsity of commonly-held beliefs. Or just to test the hypothesis in the first place, so even if it is confirmed, it is has at least been tested, and it’s not just folk wisdom. Ideally, science should be testing any and all ideas, whether they seem to be common sense or not, because in many cases what we think is common sense turns out to be wrong once scientists have worked on it. After all, your common sense tells you that the sun moves around the earth, that the earth is flat, and that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects—all ideas which have proven false when scientists examined them. Much of science (whether relativity or quantum mechanics or molecular biology or cosmology) is so specialized and hard to explain to the lay man that they are almost impossible to render on commonsensical layman’s explanations without grossly oversimplifying.

Commonly, you will hear politicians and the media criticizing science that just seems obscure to them, often with cries for restricting funding just to practical research that can be made immediately useful to humans. But again, the layperson is in no position to judge what is good research in nuclear physics or in molecular biology, since they know little or nothing about it. Most of the time, the critics of science don’t even try to critique research in highly specialized fields like nuclear physics or molecular biology—yet they feel expert enough in fields like psychology and sociology to critique those kinds of research, even though such research is vetted just as rigorously by the peer review process as research in fields laymen have no clue about.

That’s the crucial point: unless you are qualified by specialized professional training to criticize a particular type of research, you cannot render a useful judgment over what’s good science and what’s bad science. That is the job of the scientific community itself, which polices itself using peer review to fund only the research that meets the highest standards of a given specialty. Peer review isn’t perfect, and not everything that is funded is great science, but it is the best device we have to screen out less important and worthwhile research in the judgment of scientific experts qualified in a given field. And I know from personal experience that most funding is not frivolously thrown away. In my career, I’ve gotten funding consistently from the NSF, and even flown to D.C. to be on panels that screen out the proposals and the mountains of reviews that were generated. It’s brutal. In my branch, at best about 20% of the proposals get funded. That means that 80% of the proposals (many of which are outstanding research, proposed by well-regarded scientists) get turned down just because the competition is so stiff and the funds for scientific research are so scarce. In the last cycle of Sedimentary Geology and Paleontology (my branch) only 10% were funded; 90% were turned down no matter how good they were simply because the funds were so limited. Would you want to waste months of your time and effort to write a pre-proposal, wait for the OK,  and then send in proposal, knowing that the odds are only 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 that it will be funded? That’s the dilemma that faces many scientists, and yet they are under continual pressure to keep the grant funding coming, and maintain their research careers in this highly competitive atmosphere.

So keep these things in mind when you hear yet another superficial story in the media or from a politician or  reporter who doesn’t really understand how science works.

Wallace’s scientific heresy was first delivered in the April, 1869 issue of The Quarterly Review, in which he outlined what he saw as the failure of natural selection to explain the enlarged human brain (compared to apes), as well as the organs of speech, the hand, and the external form of the body:

In the brain of the lowest savages and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ…little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types…. But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very little above those of many animals. How then was an organ developed far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural Selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.

(Please note the language that, were we to judge the man solely by his descriptors for indigenous peoples, would lead us to label Wallace a racist even though he was in his own time what we would today call a progressive liberal.)

Since natural selection was the only law of nature Wallace knew of to explain the development of these structures, and since he determined that it could not adequately do so, he concluded that “an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.”

Natural selection is not prescient—it does not select for needs in the future. Nature did not know we would one day need a big brain in order to contemplate the heavens or compute complex mathematical problems; she merely selected amongst our ancestors those who were best able to survive and leave behind offspring. But since we are capable of such sublime and lofty mental functions, Wallace deduced, clearly natural selection could not have been the originator of a brain big enough to handle them. Thus the need to invoke an “Overruling Intelligence” for this apparent gap in the theory.

Why did Wallace retreat from his own theory of natural selection when it came to the human mind? The answer, in a word, is hyper-selectionism (or adaptationism), in which the current adaptive purpose of a structure or function must be explained by natural selection applied to the past. Birds presently use wings to fly, so if we cannot conceive of how natural selection could incrementally select for fractional wings that were fully functional at each partial stage (called “the problem of incipient stages”) then some other force must have been at work. Darwin answered this criticism by demonstrating how present structures serve a purpose different from the one for which they were originally selected. Partial wings, for example, were not poorly designed flying structures but well designed thermoregulators. Stephen Jay Gould calls this process “exaptation” (ex-adaptation) and uses the Panda’s thumb as his type specimen: it is not a poorly designed thumb but a radial sesamoid (wrist) bone modified by natural selection for stripping leaves off bamboo shoots.

Wallace’s hyperselectionism and adaptationism were outlined more formally in an 1870 paper, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” in which he admitted up front the danger of proffering a force that is beyond those known to science: “I must confess that this theory has the disadvantage of requiring the intervention of some distinct individual intelligence…. It therefore implies that the great laws which govern the material universe were insufficient for this production, unless we consider…that the controlling action of such higher intelligences is a necessary part of those laws….”

After an extensive analysis of brain size differences between humans and non-human primates, Wallace then considers such abstractions as law, government, science, and even such games as chess (a favorite pastime of his), noting that “savages” lack all such advances. Even more, “Any considerable development of these would, in fact, be useless or even hurtful to him, since they would to some extent interfere with the supremacy of those perceptive and animal faculties on which his very existence often depends, in the severe struggle he has to carry on against nature and his fellow-man. Yet the rudiments of all these powers and feelings undoubtedly exist in him, since one or other of them frequently manifest themselves in exceptional cases, or when some special circumstances call them forth.”

Therefore, he concludes, “the general, moral, and intellectual development of the savage is not less removed from that of civilised man than has been shown to be the case in the one department of mathematics; and from the fact that all the moral and intellectual faculties do occasionally manifest themselves, we may fairly conclude that they are always latent, and that the large brain of the savage man is much beyond his actual requirements in the savage state.” Thus, “A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed for the limited mental development of the savage; and we must therefore admit that the large brain he actually possesses could never have been solely developed by any of those laws of evolution…. The brain of prehistoric and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of some power distinct from that which has guided the development of the lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.”

The middle sections of this lengthy paper review additional human features that Wallace could not conceive of being evolved by natural selection: the distribution of body hair, naked skin, feet and hands, the voice box and speech, the ability to sing, artistic notions of form, color, and composition, mathematical reasoning and geometrical spatial abilities, morality and ethical systems, and especially such concepts as space and time, eternity and infinity. “How were all or any of these faculties first developed, when they could have been of no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism? How could natural selection, or survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, at all favour the development of mental powers so entirely removed from the material necessities of savage men, and which even now, with our comparatively high civilisation, are, in their farthest developments, in advance of the age, and appear to have relation rather to the future of the race than to its actual status?”

Modern Intelligent Design creationists generally (with few exceptions) believe that the designer is God. Nowhere in this paper does Wallace invoke God as the overarching intelligence. In a footnote in the second edition of the volume in which this paper was published, in fact, Wallace upbraids those who accused him of such speculations:

Some of my critics seem quite to have misunderstood my meaning in this part of the argument. They have accused me of unnecessarily and unphilosophically appealing to “first causes” in order to get over a difficulty—of believing that “our brains are made by God and our lungs by natural selection;” and that, in point of fact, “man is God’s domestic animal.” … Now, in referring to the origin of man, and its possible determining causes, I have used the words “some other power”—“some intelligent power”—“a superior intelligence”—“a controlling intelligence,” and only in reference to the origin of universal forces and laws have I spoken of the will or power of “one Supreme Intelligence.” These are the only expressions I have used in alluding to the power which I believe has acted in the case of man, and they were purposely chosen to show that I reject the hypothesis of “first causes” for any and every special effect in the universe, except in the same sense that the action of man or of any other intelligent being is a first cause. In using such terms I wished to show plainly that I contemplated the possibility that the development of the essentially human portions of man’s structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing influence of some higher intelligent beings, acting through natural and universal laws.

Clearly Wallace’s heresy had nothing to do with God or any other supernatural force, as these “natural and universal laws” could be fully incorporated into the type of empirical science he practiced. It was not spiritualism, but scientism at work in Wallace’s world-view: “These speculations are usually held to be far beyond the bounds of science; but they appear to me to be more legitimate deductions from the facts of science than those which consist in reducing the whole universe…to matter conceived and defined so as to be philosophically inconceivable.”

In Wallace’s science there is no supernatural. There is only the natural and unexplained phenomenon yet to be incorporated into the natural sciences. That he left no room in his evolutionary theory for exaptations of early structures for later use is no reflection on his ambitions and abilities as a scientist. It was, in fact, one of Wallace’s career goals to be the scientist who brought more of the apparent supernatural into the realm of the natural, and the remainder of his life was devoted to fleshing out the details of a scientism that encompassed so many different issues and controversies that made him a heretic-scientist.

If modern Intelligent Design theorists restricted their visage to only natural causes they would, perchance, be taken more seriously by the scientific community, who at present (myself included) sees this movement as nothing more than another species of the genus Homo creationopithicus.

Autism is a brain disorder. Neuroscientists are learning more and more about what is different about autistic brains from more typical brains. One feature seems to be reduced communication among neurons in the brain. Autism is diagnosed clinically. It is usually first recognized by the parents, who then bring their child to medical attention and after an evaluation the diagnosis is made. At present there are no supporting laboratory tests – we don’t diagnose autism by an MRI scan, EEG, or blood test. It is diagnosed by clinical observation and some standardized questionnaires and cognitive tests. At the more subtle end of the spectrum the diagnosis may not be made right away, not until the child is a bit older and can be more thoroughly evaluated.

The median age at diagnosis was 4.4 years in 1992. This has steadily decreased, to less than 3.4 years by 2001. This effect is greater in higher socioeconomic status (SES) groups. Low SES children are diagnosed later than higher SES children, and this gap has widened in the last 20 years. There has also been a linear increase in the number of autism diagnoses since 1992, aggregating in birth cohorts, with a greater effect for higher functioning children with autism. This suggests that more diagnoses are being made at the milder end of the autism spectrum, and at a younger age, with a strong social influence.

The current dominant interpretation among experts (I’m not sure it’s robust enough to call it a consensus) is that the increase in autism diagnoses over the last 20 years is due to increased surveillance, widening the definition, diagnosing children at younger ages, and diagnosing milder cases. A number of studies have also looked for signs of autism at younger and younger ages, with several showing differences between children who will go on to be clinically diagnosed on the autism spectrum from other children as early at 6 months of age.

Now another study has been published also demonstrating these results. Researchers looked at infants aged 6-10 months old and showed them pictures of faces with the eyes either looking toward or away from the infant. The researchers recorded brain wave activity with EEG, looking for differences in brain response between these two stimuli. A typical child should respond differently to the two images, as a human face looking toward the infant should evoke more of a response.

They found that there was indeed a difference in brain response between the two stimuli, but in those children who would later be confirmed to have autism the response was generally diminished compared to children who were not later diagnosed (at 36 months). The effect was robust, but not with sufficient sensitivity and specificity to be very useful clinically. This is an important distinction to make. The results were statistically significant, meaning that there is very likely a real effect here.

In other words, even as early as 6 months the brains of children with autism respond differently than children without autism in a way that one might predict from the symptoms of autism (diminished social responsiveness). But there were still false positives and false negatives, limiting such a test’s usefulness when applied to an individual child. The false positives and negatives may be due to the heterogeneity of autism as a spectrum of disorders, or to limitations of the diagnostic technique itself. Probably this technique (in addition to being refined) will have to be combined with other methods of early diagnosis before application to the individual will be practical.

There are several implications of this research worth discussing. The first is that early diagnosis of autism will improve early access to intervention, which seems to make a difference in outcome. Laboratory confirmation can help to reduce doubt or confusion as to the proper diagnosis, and lead more quickly to services for young children. There are also implications for our understanding of autism as a brain disorder. What, exactly, is happening in the brain of children with autism? This study has indirect implications for this question, but still adds to our pathophysiological knowledge of autism as a disorder.

Finally, there are implications from this research regarding the ongoing social (but not scientific) controversy of the role of vaccines and other environmental factors in autism. If the signs of autism are present at 6 months of age, then vaccines that are given after 6 months cannot be implicated as a cause of autism. This unavoidable implication, however, is unlikely to move the anti-vaccine community.

As with any single study, this new study is not definitive. Follow up research is required, and it seems that this technique will likely have to be combined with other techniques to be clinically useful. It adds to existing research, however, increasingly pointing to the detection of differences in the brains of children with autism as early as 6 months of age.

This also fits with the dominant view that autism is likely a complex set of genetic disorders. Environmental factors cannot be entirely ruled out, but genes seem to be playing a dominant role in autism. If this is true it may be theoretically possible to push early detection of autism to even younger ages. Then again, perhaps not – perhaps the brain has to develop to a certain point before the differences in brain function are there. Six months, so far, seems to be the point of earliest detection, and this new study supports that (although they did not study younger children).

It would be interesting to apply these techniques to 2-6 month olds to see if the differences continue to show. In any case – this and other studies like it are pointing the way toward much earlier diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders.

It happens with disgusting regularity. You will flip through the various basic cable channels which are nominally “science oriented” (often grouped together on the dial if they feature scientific topics) and come up with nothing but junk, pseudoscience, and worse. “Reality shows” about subjects with little or no science content, tons of paranormal and pseudoscientific shows promoting ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and creationism—all fill the airwaves for channels like Discovery, The  Learning Channel, History Channel, and even the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel. We watch a few minutes of these with complaints to anyone within earshot, then (usually) move on—or occasionally we get sucked in to watch the whole thing, like gawkers at a car crash. The cartoon at the top (from the great website PhdComics) says it all: four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated  by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have  buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time.

I’ve seen it from both sides. I’ve appeared in prehistoric animal documentaries that have aired on all four channels (and keep re-appearing years after I made them, so I feel like Dorian Gray, with my younger self perpetually preserved in documentary limbo). Almost all these documentaries are made by small independent film outfits that are searching for any sexy topic that they can sell to the major cable networks, so they are under great pressure to come up with something flashy, noisy, scary, and/or mysterious. If I  have any chance to review the script, I try my best to tone down the excessive hyperbole, but they usually ignore me. As I film segments with them, I try to be as dynamic and entertaining as a “talking head” can be, but they are always pushing me to oversimplify and exaggerate to make the spiel more colorful (but less scientifically accurate). And then when I see the final product, most of what I did ends up on the cutting room floor, with only a few seconds left of many hours of filming. Even worse, I’ve put in many  hours on projects that never got picked up at all. Documentary filmmaking is a high-risk, low-reward proposition—you have better odds of making big money in Vegas.

So we all complain about the changes in our basic cable channels, and wonder why such dreck can make it on the air, but seldom think hard about the process. But the excellent website TVTropes does a very nice job analyzing what happens to TV networks over time. To no one’s surprise, it comes down to one simple factor: ratings (and therefore money from advertisers), largely driven by the effort to woo those big-spending trend-setting 18-31 male viewers who already dictate the movie industry’s bottom line (although movies aim even lower to reach teenage boys, the biggest-spending and most loyal movie audience). As TVTropes points out (and those of us old enough to remember can attest to), it wasn’t always this bad on cable TV. When the laws changed and the opportunity to create hundreds of basic cable channels first emerged in the 1980s, the channels were initially set up to fill specific programming niches, from the Golf Channel to the Game Show Network and so on. In the early 1980s, all these new niche-driven cable channels were very distinct and more or less true to their niche description. But since these are commercial channels that must sell ads based on numbers of viewers, the same factors that affect every other commercial enterprise came into play: keep tweaking it and give the customer whatever sells the most. (This dynamic does not apply to non-commercial stations like PBS in the U.S., or the BBC in Britain, which can program what they feel is in the public interest).

As TVTropes documents, nearly all these niche-defined networks have undergone “network decay” since they were founded in the 1980s, as their programming shifts to find hit shows. Because they are nearly all chasing nearly the same demographic of 18-31 year old males, they end up programming a lot of the same kinds of things (or even the same shows). Their original mission and distinctive programming is lost in a sea of reality shows and junk that keeps you in your seat, whether it be explosions or dangerous occupations or whatever. Another factor has been the expansion of media conglomerates, so that these multiple cable channels are owned by just a few corporations, and the CEO of each channel must answer to corporate bosses who are only interested in their profitability, not any abstract “mission” to air certain types of programming. So much for the high-minded idealism that drove the deregulation of the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s, with the intent of offering us dozens of distinct choices. Instead, they all “decay” to a lowest-common-denominator of “if it bleeds, it leads” bottom-line mentality, negating whatever real advantages that dozens of distinctive niche cable channels once offered. As TVTropes points out, the decisions are made by network execs worried only about their ratings and bottom lines, not any high-minded ideal like “quality television” that PBS brags so loudly about. They could (and did) notice that professional “wrestling” is popular with their 18-31 male demographic, and see no problem with programming the WWE next to a show about science.

TVTropes offers as a classic example the pioneering channel MTV, which single-handedly changed the music business in the early 1980s and made telegenic pop artists into big stars (e.g., Michael Jackson, Madonna) while ending the careers of less telegenic musicians (e.g., Christopher Cross). But soon MTV found it was more profitable to offer reality shows, cartoons, game shows, and many other kinds of programming until the original music videos that it pioneered have vanished altogether.  TVTropes analyzed the decay of the cable channels in various categories. Under “Total Abandonment” (of their original mission) they list not only MTV, A&E, G4, CMT, Biography, and The Learning Channel (TLC). In their words:

TLC, originally focusing around science and nature documentaries in the style of the Discovery Channel, drifted toward almost nothing but “home makeover”-style reality shows. In a somewhat confusing (in these days of internet porn) play at grabbing the all-important 18-30 male demographic, TLC acquired the rights to air the Miss America pageant. After sufficient decay, one would never guess that TLC used to be called The Learning Channel and was once co-owned by NASA.

One need only check here to see how far TLC has drifted away from “learning” and into the realm of bizarre sensationalism, or this hilarious send-up of their programming.

Under the category “Slipped”, we find The History Channel. As TVTrope comments:

[Their] programming now consists of roughneck-focused reality shows (Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men) and conspiracy theory “documentaries” about UFOs, the Bible Code, ghosts, Atlantis, Nostradamus, and the end of the world, earning the network the derisive nickname “The Hysterical Channel”. Heck, at least the “Hitler Channel,” as they used to be known (back when everything was about either World War II, Nazis or The American Civil War), was actual history.

Their analysis of Discovery Channel is even more hilarious:

The Discovery Channel still shows plenty of actual documentary material, despite having been decaying for almost as long as MTV has. In the late 80s the lineup was mostly serious documentaries, the most famous of which was Wings (no relation to the sitcom except for a focus on aircraft) but which also included classy repackaged BBC imports like Making of a Continent — and once a year there was Shark Week, which was just what you’d expect. By the mid-1990s, they showed an obscene amount of home improvement shows and cooking shows aimed at stay-at-home moms (enough to spawn the spin-off Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, now Planet Green) and Wings had proven so popular it had been farmed out to its own spin-off, Discovery Wings Channel (now Military Channel). Now, they’re being swamped with “guys building and/or blowing things up” shows in the vein of Mythbusters and Monster Garage. And about four different shows about credulous idiots with no critical thinking skills ghost hunters. In 2005, Discovery debuted Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in the back of a cab, leaving one unsure whether it even has a theme beyond “non-fiction”. It gets weird when you realize that they’re knocking some of their own shows off, especially Mythbusters into Smash Lab (with a focus on safety measures) and How It’s Made into Some Assembly Required. The latter has almost only done products featured in the former (though How It’s Made has been on for just about ten years, so it’s hard to find something they haven’t done). The Discovery Channel also used to contain a lot of nature, which is where the now-classic Shark Week (which they still air regularly) originated from. But it seems that explosions have taken the place of tigers ripping stuff to pieces. Most of the nature shows have since been relegated to Animal Planet.

Finally, the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel are the only two that still run mostly science documentaries with little junk, yet National Geographic still has “The Bounty Hunter,” “Is it Real?”, and “The Dog Whisperer.”  Science Channel has begun airing sci-fi programming, including “Firefly” and “Dark Matters: Twisted but True,” so they are running pop-pseudoscience garbage that now pollutes The History Channel.

Frankly, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel. As long as these are commercial TV channels, they are driven by ratings and lowest-common-denominator programming aimed at 18-31 men. Only PBS and other non-commercial stations can escape this “network decay”—but then they compensate by annoying pledge drives that rerun old shows with sentimental value so that viewers will tune in and hopefully donate. Maybe the BBC, with its government support of top-quality science and drama programming (which the U.S. market then borrows or rips off) seems immune, although there are BBC channels that are lowbr0w as well. After all, Benny Hill reruns have done well on American TV for years….

Clancy’s area of primary interest is not skeptical investigation of paranormal claims, but false memory. To perform an ”honest broker” service as thorough and reliable guides to the evidence on paranormal topics, skeptical investigators are ethically obliged to seriously consider the (unlikely) possibility of paranormal phenomena. In her own work with abductees, Clancy’s obligations were different. She felt justified in taking it pretty much for granted that her subjects had not been kidnapped by space aliens. Abductees were, for Clancy, a proxy group to allow her to examine questions related to a separate population’s “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Research into abuse is of course very complicated—and ethically fraught. It is surrounded by tension and the potential for harm for the simple reason that abuse really happens. By contrast, Clancy wrote,

…alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred. A major problem with my research on false-memory creation by victims of alleged sexual abuse was the fact that it was almost impossible to determine whether they had, in fact, been abused. I needed to repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had ‘recovered’ false memories. Alien abductions seemed to fit the bill.¹

I won’t comment on Clancy’s research in regard to sexual abuse—it is not my area of expertise, and I have not read Clancy’s book on that topic—but I was very struck by her sympathy for abductees.

Throughout the book, she took pains to emphasize that alien abductees have ordinary mental health (with “little evidence that this was a particularly psychopathological group”²) and that their beliefs are fundamentally understandable—given the information they have to work with.

The disconnect between these experiencers and their critics is that only one group has access to what appears to abductees to be the key information in their own cases: the overwhelming subjective reality of their personal, visceral experiences. So real are abduction memories to those who hold them, in fact, that this subjective reality can in some sense be quantified.

And we don’t have to accept only the abductees’ word for it when they say they feel powerful emotions as they remember their abductions. Laboratory data confirm it. My colleagues and I…recorded the heart rate, sweating, breathing, and muscle tone of abductees while they recalled their abduction memories. Not only were the physiological reactions of abductees similar to those of documented trauma victims, such as combat vets and rape victims; in some cases, they were even more extreme.³

Think about that one for a moment.

However, abductees do not start with such overwhelmingly persuasive memories. As Clancy explained, “coming to believe one has been abducted by aliens doesn’t happen overnight. It progresses in fits and starts, through many stages, in which the possibility comes to seem more and more believable.”⁴ Victims first have an experience or series of experiences they find odd or difficult to explain; then they begin to assemble this strange data into a pattern, using the best explanatory framework available to them; eventually they may wind up in the hands of a hypnotherapist specializing in recovered memories of alien abduction; and then, finally, abduction memories emerge under the influence of hypnosis.

Recovered memory is a murky, complex area—too murky to explore in detail in a blog post. For today, I would like to focus on the period in an abductee’s development before vivid abduction memories are recovered—the period before they become part of a therapy relationship or support structure that may generate traumatic memories. In this early period, “abducted by aliens” is not a permanently cemented subjective reality for an abductee, but a suspicion or inference. Once one can literally remember being abducted, belief is essentially guaranteed. But how do people come to suspect that they might have been abducted? That is, for skeptics, a more interesting and fruitful question.

Everybody I spoke with had one thing in common: they’d begun to wonder if they’d been abducted only after they experienced things they felt were anomalous—weird, abnormal, unusual things. The experiences varied from person to person. They ranged from specific events (“I’ve wondered why my pajamas were on the floor when I woke up”) to symptoms (“I’ve been having so many nosebleeds—I never have nosebleeds”) to marks on the body (“I wondered where I got the coin-shaped bruises on my back”) to more or less fixed personality traits (“I feel different from other people, a loner—like I’m always on the outside looking in”). Sometimes they included all of the above. Though widely varied, the experiences resulted in the same general question: “What could be the cause?” In short, it appears that coming to believe you’ve been abducted by aliens is part of an attribution process. Alien-abduction beliefs reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences.⁵ 

In many cases the original seed for later, hypnosis-recovered memories may be well-understood but frightening natural phenomena such as sleep paralysis (a sleep disruption in which awareness of surroundings returns before the dreaming and immobility of sleep are complete). According to Clancy, abductees with recovered memories find the sleep paralysis explanation “stunningly unpersuasive. After all, they’re the ones who were abducted—the ones who experienced the fear and the horror. And when you pit the cold, remote virtues of scientific data against the immediacy of personal experience, science is bound to lose.”⁶ 

At earlier stages, however, abductees have no such certainty. What they have are increasingly troubling questions that they need answered.

Consider an experiencer of sleep paralysis—any of countless millions. Paralyzed, hallucinating, terrified, perhaps sensing or seeing a presence in the room. How do people cope with the aftermath of such an unexpected and seemingly inexplicable experience? Well, they’re humans. They’re smart. They try on a range of explanations, and try to reason it out. But here’s the problem: everybody knows about ghosts and demons and aliens and gods, but only a few people know about the normal brain functioning that can mimic those phenomena. As Clancy put it,

When you are looking for the cause of an anomalous experience, your search is limited to the set of explanations you’ve actually heard of. For most of us, the set of possible explanations is far from complete. We’re unaware of the prevalence of sleep paralysis, sexual dysfunction, anxiety disorders, perceptual aberrations, chemical imbalances, memory lapses, and psychosomatic pain. But our set of possible explanations does include alien abduction, because everyone knows about aliens and their modus operandi (they come in the night, fill you with terror, kidnap you and erase your memories).⁷ 

Once people begin to try out the culturally available scripts (“Was it a ghost?” perhaps, or “Could I have been abducted?”) they find more and more pieces that seem to fit. The reason abductees endorse abduction, Clancy discovered, “is actually quite scientific: it is the best fit for their data—their personal experiences.”⁸  It is exactly their reasoning powers, their human legacy as puzzle-solvers, that leads them into that trap. And belief is a trap: once you start on that path, it’s very difficult to turn back.

But what might they do with more complete information—with an alternate explanatory framework—at an earlier point in their investigations? My personal, anecdotal experience is that this is one of the most powerful interventions that skeptics ever get the chance to perform: simply telling puzzled people that sleep paralysis (for example) is a thing. It’s a conversation I’ve had many times as people have described their sense of a ghostly presence at the foot of the bed, their terror at the blankets pulled back through supernatural influence, or other frightening classic experiences. “Well, I don’t know what happened to you. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t share your experience. But have you heard of something called ‘sleep paralysis’? It’s a normal event that can create experiences similar to the one you describe.” I’ve had strangers latch onto that like a drowning person grabs a rope, because, no, they hadn’t heard of that. They hadn’t heard any viable explanation except “I was attacked by a ghost” or “I am a lunatic.”

So the question I’ll leave you with today is this: what can skeptics do to ensure that our forums and media and comment threads and public presentations are welcoming to those people who most need reliable information about paranormal topics? What can we do to make the skeptics movement a safe place for vulnerable people who need our help—a safe place for people who (for example) think they were probably abducted by aliens?

Unfortunately most academics and health care professionals are simply naive to the situation (so-called “shruggies”) and too easily accept these assurances without checking out the facts themselves. Their initial reaction to those of us who are calmly but insistently pointing out that the CAM emperor has no clothes is to assume that we must be overreacting, because CAM can’t truly be as bad as we say. Homeopathy can’t really be made of nothing, can it? But it’s a large industry, with entire hospitals in the UK. How can it be as nonsensical as the skeptics are saying?

This naivete extends, unfortunately, to many university administrators, who are used to being egalitarian and accommodating. Proponents of CAM are sincere, and know how to play the game, so they put their best academic foot forward (often lubricated with grants from ideologically dedicated organizations like the Bravewell collaboration) and work their way into academia. They are persistent, and good at dismissing their critics as closed-minded, unfair, or having an axe to grind.

Perhaps the best tool we have in countering this infiltration of abject nonsense into the halls of academia is to simply point out exactly what they are buying. This strategy has had a great deal of success in the UK, and some limited success in the US. Now, defenders of science and reason in Australia are gearing up for their own fight. A new group called the Friends of Science in Medicine has formed to oppose the watering-down of science in academic medicine and the practice of medicine in Australia. A recent article about the group states:

 A new group called “Friends of Science in Medicine” comprising of more than 350 of Australias top scientists, including basic and clinical scientists, medical practitioners, clinical academics and consumer advocates have formed to address what they consider the “diminishing of the standards applied to the teaching of science in our universities”. The group is concerned about the increased teaching of, what they call, ”pseudoscience” in Australian universities and its application within our health care system.

Their aims are in line with other groups, like the Institute for Science in Medicine (an international group of which I am Chairman). And of course we tackle this issue frequently at Science-Based Medicine.

Our collective strategy is basically two-fold. The first is to establish what the scientific standard should be. The second is to shine light onto the claims and practices of so-called CAM, to expose the fact that they do not meet this standard. Proponents are coy on the first question, and deceptive (either naively self-deceptive or deliberately so) on the second.

We need to affirm the necessity of having a transparent objective scientific standard for medicine. Otherwise, there is no standard of care. There would be no way of determining which treatments were legitimate and which were not. This question has many practical implications – which professions should be licensed, which treatments covered by insurance, which practices allowed under the scope of practice of each profession, what should be taught in medical, nursing, and other health-related curricula, and which practices constitute malpractice. Without a science-based standard, there are no answers to these questions.

That, of course, is what CAM proponents want. How else can you practice homeopathy, get covered for it, have it be included within your scope of practice, and not be sued blind.

Further – we can’t have a double-standard. Within medicine there is a pretty clear consensus as to what the scientific standard is. It is slowly evolving, if anything becoming more stringent as we root out more and more subtle ways of subverting best scientific practice. CAM as a category exists to weaken this standard, or to create a double standard for themselves so that practices that are not science-based can be taught, used, and covered. But (I hope) CAM is starting to be the victim of their own success, in that as they have successfully promoted CAM it is necessarily coming more and more into the light. As it does it is getting easier to expose CAM for the utter nonsense that most of it is.

Groups like those mentioned above are starting to form – comprised of health care professionals who have bothered to look and see what is happening.

Obviously this is an English language blog written by primarily American authors, so we cannot extrapolate this data to indicate the relative popularity of skepticism in general in each country. But there are two surprises.

The first surprise is that the United States is not the country where we’re most popular. We’re most appreciated in Canada. Either this means that our lone Canadian blogger, Daniel Loxton, is more popular than the rest of us put together; or that Canadians generally appreciate this content more than Americans. There are all kinds of demographic reasons that this may be true. Without surveying our readers for their demographic information and comparing that to the population at large, we can only speculate what some of these are. The United States has higher religiosity than Canada, and the population is generally less educated. But far be it from me to assert that only an educated public would appreciate this blog; it’s all speculation.

Similarly, New Zealand takes second place, relegating the United States down to third. What are the reasons that New Zealanders visit SkepticBlog more often than Americans?

The second surprise is that a block of three non-English speaking countries, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have snuck in there higher than Ireland and the United Kingdom. Much of their population is bilingual and reads English without a problem, but it’s still their second language; we’d typically tend to expect more readers from the UK on an English language blog than from Scandinavia.

Scandinavia has a reputation for having low religiosity and low poverty, so perhaps this shouldn’t be so much of a surprise. My personal experience with attendees at skepticism conferences and talks that I give on the road has been that all socioeconomic levels appear to be well represented, but that’s my own informal observation only, and could well be wrong.

The Amaz!ng Meeting has had two conferences in London and one in Australia. Maybe it’s time the JREF threw one in Sweden?

If you drive up the bumpy road, you will find a few sheds, trails with railings, and pits in the ground, and on weekends, maybe a volunteer or two. There is a dedicated support group with its own website, and the BLM maintains the site as if were a legitimate scientific discovery. Even the Wikipedia entry seems to be written by a true believer, with only minimal mention of what the professional archeological community thinks about the site. But in the anthropological profession, the “Calico Early Man” site is a running joke which became a blemish on the career of the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey—yet the loyal amateur acolytes still promote it.

The Calico “site” was first discovered by amateur archeologist Ruth DeEtte “Dee” Simpson. It is located on the eastern side of the Calico Mountains northeast of Barstow, California, high on the steep slopes of gravel that come off the mountains during floods. The Calico site is on the edge of Ice Age Lake Manix, which flooded the Mojave Desert in this region for the last 500,000 years, and produces a wide variety of late Ice Age mammal, bird, reptile, fish, and invertebrate fossils. The “artifacts” are largely of cobbles and pebbles; no other commonly found artifacts, such as animal bones, human bones, wood fragments, charcoal, or non-tool artifacts, occur there. The “tools” themselves are very crude, consisting mostly of cobbles that have one or two surfaces flaked away to make a crude “choppers” or “hand axes”, supposedly like the crude tools of the Oldowan culture of Africa found from deposits formed about 2 million years ago. As the “Friends of the Calico Site” webpage confesses:

It is easy to scoff at the Calico “tools” the first time one sees them. They are far from the familiar beautifully-crafted arrowheads and spear points we find in surface and near-surface Indian/PaleoIndian sites across North America.

And that’s exactly what most professional archeologists thought when they saw the specimens. They have mostly been skeptical of their human origins because there are so many other ways to cause rocks to flake and fracture, especially in the high-energy setting of cobbles bashing against each other in an alluvial fan during flooding. Archeologists have been fooled and embarrassed many times in the past over-interpreting naturally broken and flaked stones, so now the criteria for an artifact are very strict. In the case of the Calico site, several analyses have been conducted (Haynes, 1973; Duvall and Venner, 1979; Payen, 1982), and they have all demonstrated that there is no conclusive evidence for human production for most of the “artifacts.”

In addition to the “artifacts,” amateur enthusiasts have pointed to “fire rings” in the gravel as proof that humans were once there. Of course, in any surface with a random covering of large cobbles, there will be by chance some that form a “ring” if they are sparsely scattered. It’s a classic case of pareidolia—seeing patterns in clouds or tea leaves or stones that aren’t real, since humans minds are programmed to “see” patterns even when they aren’t there. The crucial test of this “fire ring” model occurred in 1985-1986, when Caltech undergraduate Janet Boley, working in my friend Joe Kirschvink’s lab at Caltech, did a decisive experiment. Out at Calico, they built a “control” bonfire which burned for seven  hours. Then Janet drilled paleomagnetic sample cores of both the inner side of the control ring cobbles (which were heated enough to remagnetize the rocks in a new direction) and the outer side. The outer side of the fire ring cobbles were not heated as much, so the rocks retained their random magnetic directions. Then she took drill cores of the oriented “prehistoric fire ring” stones and measured them. Their magnetic directions were all randomly distributed, with no evidence they had ever been heated enough to remagnetize or have been part of a fire pit. Although she was cautious in her conclusions, it could not have been a more convincing test of the “fire ring” model—and it failed the test.

Thus, there are whole list of reasons to doubt the Calico “early man site”. First, there is no conclusive evidence that the “artifacts” are made by humans, and the “fire rings” are also natural consequences of pareidolia of randomly scattered rocks, not artifactual. Second, it is suspicious because there are only large broken cobbles that could be produced naturally, without a single human or animal bone fragment (nearly always found in legitimate archeological sites), piece of wood or charcoal, or non-tool artifact. In addition, the story is even more improbable since there are about 60,000 “choppers” or “hand axes”, far more than any normal archeological site (no matter how long it was occupied).

But the reason the site is so controversial is the age of the “artifacts”: according to thermoluminescence and uranium-thorium dating, some of the “artifacts” are 135,000 to 200,000 years old (Bischoff et al., 1981; Debenham, 1998). If true, this would radically change all of North American archeology. These dates contradict the huge number of sites which show that humans reached North America sometime after 15,000 years ago (possibly as early as 30,000 years ago, if a few controversial sites are to be believed). This makes the site at least 20 times as old as any New World site, and suggests that peoples with an Oldowan culture found around 2 million years ago in Africa were still lingering in Asia 200,000 years ago (where we have good evidence that the humans had a much more advanced culture), then migrated to North America—without leaving any evidence from any other site in any other part of the New World. As Carl Sagan put it, “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,” yet the evidence for this claim which flies in the face of nearly everything we know about human prehistory is extremely shaky and easily attributed to non-human causes. [This does not apply to the Rock Wren biface, a real artifact found in a younger deposit dated by thermoluminescence at 14,400 +/- 2,200 years ago, within the range of the conventional dates of appearance of humans in the New World].

The saddest part of the story was the involvement of the legendary anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey. He was one of the most famous scientists in the world at that time, with the earth-shaking discoveries of million-year-old  hominids in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in the 1950s. During the last part of his life, he was a scientific celebrity, with a gigantic following. Huge crowds attended  his dynamic lectures, and the National Geographic Society funded his research which ended up in the pages of their magazine. But according to Morell (1995, p.. 366-368) and many other sources, Louis was a better publicist and fund-raiser than he was a scientist. His second wife Mary Nicol Leakey actually found the famous “Nutcracker Man” (named by Louis as Zinjanthropus boisei) that made Louis’ reputation. She also did the careful work on the archeology of Olduvai that proved that very ancient humans made Olduwan tools.

In 1959, Louis Leakey was at the British Museum in London when Dee Simpson brought  him some Calico “artifacts.” Familiar with the genuine tools from Olduvai, Louis was convinced (although Mary, who knew the tools better, was not). Louis was motivated not only by the urge to find another spectacular discovery that would enhance his reputation, but also by  his pet theory that Native American languages were too divergent to  have formed only in 11,000 to 15,000 years after humans immigrated here from Asia. By 1963, he had funds from the National Geographic Society for Calico, and the excavations began in earnest.

Nevertheless, most other professional archeologists found the evidence unconvincing, especially given the enormous burden of proof that this unconventional hypothesis had to meet. By the late 1960s, Louis and Mary had separated because (according to Morell) she thought he had gone off the deep end with the Calico site, but also because she was now receiving  recognition as the real scientist of the group (and she was tired of Louis’ constant philandering). Nevertheless, Louis organized a conference of archeologists to come visit the site in 1970, including such luminaries of African anthropology as Desmond Clark and Glynn Isaac. But Leakey was profoundly disappointed when they came away unconvinced (even though they wanted to believe such a prominent member of their profession, and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt). Louis died in 1972, heartbroken over his failure at Calico and suffering from a number of ailments. Leakey’s story is much like some of the other famous scientists who became known for embarrassing mistakes late in life (discussed in my “Linus Pauling effect” column of last spring).

Nevertheless, the Calico site continues to have a loyal amateur following who refuse to listen to professional archeologists or consider the problems with the site or the evidence against it. I’ve found they  have an almost cult-like dedication to this lost cause, just like the amateur cryptozoologists who persist in tramping through the woods to find Bigfoot, no matter how poor the evidence is. And as long as the BLM and some local museums continue to refer to it as an archeological site, and the loyal followers keep working there, no amount of evidence or arguments by professional archeologists with much more training and experience will ever dissuade them. And, of course, it doesn’t help the situation that the BLM and other government bodies treat it as a legitimate site and not a monumental waste of time and money.

And so, as you drive I-15 between Barstow and Vegas some day, note the “Calico Early Man Site” road sign—and remember, even highway signs can be wrong…

A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting with television producers at a Pasadena, California hotel when I ran into a man named Richard Greene whom I had met last year at the debate that Leonard Mlodinow and I did with Deepak Chopra and others at Chapman University. With him was a woman named Dr. Marja Pronk, whom Greene introduced as someone who can heal burn patients from a distance by phone, and that she learned this skill under the tutelage of one Dr. Philippe Sauvage. Greene was interested in having me test Dr. Pronk while she was in town, but we ran out of time and the protocols and ethical considerations of intentionally burning either people or animals were prohibitive (in my view) and so at present we are still working on how this claim might be tested under controlled conditions. If you have any suggestions on how we might do this while also meeting the ethical requirements of an Institutional Review Board or Ethical Review Board that overseas the ethical treatment of human and animal subjects in experiments, please let me know.

First, I will provide you the background I was provided followed by my own thoughts on what it would take to test such a claim, along with my thoughts in between on Philippe Sauvage, which as you shall see is making extraordinary claims that go far beyond healing burn patients.

Richard Greene sent me this background material:

As we discussed, the claims made by Breton “healer” Dr. Philippe Sauvage and his co-workers, including medical Dr. Marja Pronk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshO4IrvJzI and www.sosburn.info) are astounding and challenge almost every belief we have in Western science. To date there have been approximately 500 who have benefited from this technology in 29 countries (including 46 states in the US). Here, for example, is a video of 22 year old Chris Fleming from Ontario, CA. and some press clippings from Africa:

• Newspaper Tanzania
• Newspaper Ghana

The protocol is, as we discussed, for those who receive 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th degree burns to simply call the designated free healing hotline within 30 minutes of the burn. As you will see in the videos, the claim, remarkably, is that 100% of those who do this have their pain removed and ALL skin damage reversed within hours or a few days at most. Here is the most dramatic example—a Ghanan girl that Dr. Marja Pronk treated using Dr. Sauvage’s method. Her burns, as you can see, were 3rd and 4th degree and she was expected to die…

Because her father made contact with Dr. Pronk’s team, this beautiful young girl made a full recovery. Here are the after photos. There were no grafts or other surgical procedures performed.

Mr. Greene did qualify his own observations:

I do not have direct experience of these examples or claims. What I do know is that Dr. Sauvage is one of the most intelligent, genuine and unique men I have ever met and that he looks at the world in a very different way. Based on my time with him and Dr. Pronk and Alison McDermott, the highly articulate nurse who coordinates the efforts here in the US, I (even the lawyer side of me) am highly inclined to believe that his healings are real and represent the most repeatable, verifiable and significant scientific breakthroughs in centuries, if not all history.

Thank you for keeping an open mind.

I found Mr. Greene to be a very intelligent and thoughtful man who genuinely believes that Sauvage can do what he claims. However, a little background search on Sauvage turned up some disturbing aspects to the man. For example, I noted that this doesn’t look too good.

I asked Mr. Greene if he believes these things that Sauvage claims about himself:

At the end of “Druidism,” there would be born a single male child [to] the only surviving matriarchal lineage of ancient Armorican spirituality. Androgynous, with the sacred powers of both female and male combined for the only time in Druidic history, this male child would be called the last Strobineller, the paradigmatic shiftmaster, assigned with the task of reconciling Man and Nature before humankind destroyed, forever, planet Earth, or vice versa. Born on December 30, 1953 in the Celtic nation now called Brittany, Philip Savage was this male child.

This, I noted, is the classic messiah complex, single male child of matriarchal lineage, healing the sick…come here to save mankind…he’s the new Jesus and Marja Pronk is his Mary Magdalene.

I asked Mr. Greene what he thought of all this, and he responded thoughtfully:

1) Dr. Pronk is 100% solid with impeccable integrity and the testimonials—as a professional in non-verbal communication and body language who gets as much as $25,000 per day to teach businesses same—are overwhelmingly solid and believable in my professional opinion.

2) I have spent about 30 hours—1 on 1—with Phillip and have experienced a level of knowledge, perspective and answers to questions that I have never experienced before. He is not normal and is, indeed, exceptional in every way—even in his eccentricities. How many con men do you know that speak 17 languages, play at least as many instruments and have 3 advanced degrees.

3) I have never seen anything to indicate that the medical cases are not 100% real.

4) I have never seen anything to indicate that the burn cases are not 100% real. As we discussed, Michael, he could be an alien, the worst human around or even a figment of one’s imagination…but if this shit works, it is a phenomenal story and one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in human history.

All of the above is irrelevant, though, Michael, as you know better than anyone. Let’s do the testing.

Fair enough. The proof is in the pudding. But I did write to Richard the following concerns that I have about Sauvage (sometimes rendered online as Savage):

I appreciate your frankness. I must tell you that the more I read about Philip Savage the louder my baloney detection alarm sounds. I’m sure you must understand why. Even in LaLa land here in So. California, with egos bigger than Mt. Everest and loonies claiming every nutty thing under the sun, Savage towers above them all in both audacity and unbelievability. My experience after three decades of investigating such claims is no one to date who has ever made such claims has turned out to be the real thing. Not one. Not even close. They are either delusional or psychopathic con artists. So…the chances of Savage being able to do what he claims, in my view, is extremely low, very improbable.

Still, as you say, the proof is in the pudding, so let’s put him to the test: not by advertising a phone number and hope people call with a burn accident; but by a controlled test in a laboratory under conditions that he (or Marja) could attempt to alter cells or heal them or whatever—some objective measurable effect that can be documented and recorded. The problem with subjective pain readings (on a 1-10 scale, for example), is that all sorts of things can effect it, including acupuncture, acupressure, meditation, just thinking about the pain scale, etc.

Please ask Marja if she can do something along the lines of altering cells or healing burns or injuries in a controlled setting such as a lab. I do not want to participate in a program that involves giving out a phone number because gullible people may naively start calling it in the belief that their cancer, AIDS, etc. will be cured, giving them false hopes, possibly draining their bank accounts (if such a thing is going on), etc. That would make me party to a scam and so I can’t take that risk. And in any case, as I said, that’s not an ideal test. We need controlled conditions in a lab or a hospital. I don’t see why, if burn pain is a product of the brain and thought, that Marja can’t go to the UCLA medical center and find someone who is in agony, and just heal them right there, reduce their pain level through her and Savage’s method. If you want a dramatic demonstration that could be filmed, that would certainly do it!

In a follow-up email I added:

More to the point, we need to establish some sort of definitive test in which we can clearly see results (or not). Remember, medical conditions are rarely stable—they are constantly changing, so we need to have in place a way to tell if the change is due to natural processes of the body healing itself, interventions by traditional medical treatments, or through Savage’s method. Anecdotes won’t help us. “I felt better after Dr. Pronk treated me” doesn’t mean anything. Maybe that patient feels better after a good night’s sleep, or after the doctor visits, or after taking his meds, etc. Most important is that we are very clear about what exactly is being claimed so that we can test that. Big generic things like “feeling better” or “getting better” won’t cut it in science. Specifics, such as burned skin healing 50% faster with the Pronk treatment versus the traditional medical treatment would be an example because then we’d have a time frame that can be quantified.

Then, out of the blue, I received an email from another Sauvage acolyte named Alison McDermott:

Through researching you, there seems to be pervading humanitarian integrity, a steadfast scientific mind who loves the simple truth of the matter, as well as a remarkably in common, “list of Loathsomes” with Dr Savage and myself. Religions, “New Age bozos” to coin his phrase, (these two top of the list), so-called “psychics”, “mystics”, most definitely “healers”, prophets, “goddesses”, fakirs, so-called “alternative practitioner’s” and all the other self-deluded of which you can find just about everywhere, busy claiming to do what they cannot do…. If I may presume some understanding of your “gurus”? Facts, solid proof, science and the scientific methodology. Also know as “The experiment”, and the findings thereof. (None of which you have ever found demonstrable by the list above throughout your 30 year investigative career, if I am correct?)

The “salt” of any good skeptic you’ll probably agree would be, “We want to see the diligent establishment of these “facts, results and proofs”, else expect, (quite rightly) to be “thrown to the lions”?? The skeptic with integrity that is, not the “dime a dozen”, wanna-be de-bunkers of subjective “mere opinions”, educated or otherwise, “ruin them without testing them”—“witch-hunt” tacticians (“paid for slander” as deployed by the BBC) etc etc, amateurs which are as “virally prolific” as are those on the list of deceivers above your mission is to “expose”.

Dr Savage can do what he claims…and can prove it to you.

There has long existed the perfect logistic to execute this “experiment” meeting all scientific standards required, not shared with you in any contact with Dr Marja Pronk and Richard Greene. Simply put, it is this:

This “right person” is PERSONALLY (friends) connected to a TV News Network DECISION MAKER, (CNN, FOX NEWS, APTV have journalists in every major city) who, with a simple phone call, can quietly and privately mobilise a posse of his journalists on location ALREADY, eg in major cities or war zones etc, to send in burn cases, and film the results. (they are called to fires, explosions, bombings all the time…their “runners” are on the scene in minutes.) Proofs start coming in…where upon, the “decision maker” now KNOWS it’s true!!! Then, he has ALL his worldwide journalists alerted to send in burns…and the start pouring in thick and fast, 100’s or more per day…

The “carrot” for this network decision maker is that they get to “break” the news AND the exclusive interview rights with the man behind the results…(ratings ratings ratings!!)

Would you agree that observable, repeatable and recordable results, documentable over and over by independent scientist’s/doctors around the world, nothing whatsoever to do with YOU or US, each other or any party involved, (except as an emergency admission burn victim to their ER) is as scientific and objective as it gets?

I am permitted to officially “throw down the gauntlet” directly on behalf of Dr Savage himself for you to…”Expose the famous Breton healer” scientifically, once and for all.

I responded:

Hi Alison, thanks for the thoughtful note.

There’s no gauntlet to throw down or anything like that. We’re just trying to figure out a way to test Dr. Savage’s and Dr. Pronk’s claims of being able to heal burn patients. The problem with what you suggest about getting journalists to call the number in the event of an accident or fire that results in burned people is that this would not be a controlled experiment. People vary greatly in their ability to heal from various disorders and there are dozens of reasons why. The hard part about doing science is isolating the variable that actually matters from the variables that do not, and then controlling all the variables for the placebo effect as well. Take age, for example. Older people heal much slower than younger people, from most diseases and accidents, so you have to control for age. That is, take age into account in a statistical analysis of group differences in whatever you are measuring. Socioeconomic status also matters, since poor people typically have poorer diets, exercise less, smoke and drink more, engage in riskier sex and do drugs more, have poorer health care, see doctors and dentists less often, and so on, and all these things also influence health and healing, so these too must be controlled for. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Anecdotes about this or that person who got healed by Dr. Savage (or any one of hundreds of other alternative medical treatments available on the Internet and other alternative sources outside mainstream medicine) are completely meaningless from a scientific perspective because of the problem I’ve described above.

What needs to be done to properly test Dr. Savage and Dr. Pronk would be to, say, have a sample size of 75 people, all of whom are burned in precisely the same manner, with the same technique (e.g., cigarette burn), at the same temperature, in the same place on the body, etc., then treat 25 of them with Dr. Savage’s technique, 25 with standard medical treatment, and 25 get no treatment whatsoever. Then see if there are any measurable differences between the three groups. Studies such as this, which typically involve much larger sample sizes (usually in the hundreds or thousands) take many months—sometimes years—to complete. It can’t be done in one setting. That’s the only way to know if something works or not.

So, although I can certainly sense in your passion that you believe Dr. Savage can heal burn patients, there’s really only one way to know for sure and that is to conduct a test such as what I’ve outlined above (although there are others I could propose as well). But for both legal and ethical reasons that I’ve communicated to Richard Greene, it is very unlikely we could ever get permission to conduct any such test on humans, and even animals might be difficult to get approval for such a burn test that would inflict harm and damage. I don’t personally feel comfortable burning rats or any other animal for such a test. I’m not a member of PETA, and I don’t in principle object to animal testing, but I personally wouldn’t do it myself and I would prefer that medical research make more efforts to avoid it where possible using, say, computer models for testing.

What would be helpful to me is if someone can tell me exactly what it is that Dr. Savage and Dr. Pronk can do. We need very specific definitions of what constitutes a “healing” and over what time frame. Wounds naturally heal anyway. Let’s say a cigarette burn normally heals in 10 days. What is it that Dr. Savage and Dr. Pronk can do? Can they heal it in 9 days? 8? 1? Five minutes? And what does this healing look like? Does the skin just magically grow over the wound such that you can’t even see any scarring? And over what time frame? Again, the problem is that people vary a lot in such conditions. For example, one person perhaps heals from a cigarette burn in 6 days, someone else in 15 days, with a general population average of 10 days. So what if the person Dr. Savage happened to heal was one of those who heals in 6 days, and he then claims to have done the healing in 6 days when in fact he did not. Does that make sense? You see the problem here, right?

Finally, although, again, I can sense in the passion of your words that you believe the claims of Dr. Savage, please be aware that there are thousands of people just like him all over the world making equally bold claims about healing cancer, AIDS, paralysis, weight loss, depression, and the like. Not one has ever been able to prove their claims under controlled conditions such as those I’ve outlined above. Not one. Ever. So what’s more likely? That Dr. Savage is the first person in history to actually be the real deal, or that he’s just like the thousands of others making such claims? For those who know him, such as yourself, the answer is likely to be “yes, he’s the one, the only one, ever, and how fortunate that we get to live at the same time as him and know him.” But to the rest of us on the outside who don’t know him, his claims are indistinguishable from the thousands of others just like him making similarly extraordinary claims.

If anyone reading this blog has an idea of how we can test Dr. Pronk and Dr. Savage in some controlled manner beyond what I’ve described herewith and that would not violate ethical standards outlined by ethics committees that regulate the ethical treatment of experimental subjects I would be appreciative of your thoughts on the matter.