Pseudo science

They're all over this board.

Most of the food supplements, dietary supplements, and "health food store" contents.

Defense of my statement.

The currently accepted model is called the "scientific method". It is rigid, repeatable, and generally straight forward as long as honesty is maintained. I'll build it from the ground up, acknowledging that today most folks start somewhere in the middle, because the initial work is already in place.

In the beginnig... (Never having been one to shy away from pagarism.) folks notice that when they do something, eat something, or a specific thing happens; something else happens which seems to happen all the time. Consider folks noticing the need to find the outhouse rapidly after eating green apples. Or releasing an apple from their hand and noticing that it always seems to go immediately toward the ground.

The scientific method says, lets make sure we really understand what is going on, and that it really does happen because of just that reason.

One example I remember from years ago was the belief in spontaneous generation of life. The "proof" was to leave a piece of raw meat out for a couple of days. Seemingly magically maggots would appear, thus supporting the idea of spontaneous generation of life. But someone came along and suggested that perhaps everything was not being observed. They took a very fresh piece of meat and wrapped it in something which excluded access to the meat by just about everything. As the experiment was expained to me someone used "Saran Wrap" which is a very clear plastic wrap which clings to itself. After the usual amount of time, no maggots appeared. They waited longer, and no maggots appeared.

Well now, you say, the Saran Wrap killed the maggots. Or, since Saran Wrap was advertised to keep out the air, the lack of air killed the maggots. We need some more experiments.

One experiment we allow flies to land on the meat for awhile, and then wrap it up, and wait.

Another experiment, we take the fresh meat, put it it a big container so there is lots of air, wrap up the container, and wait.

Exeperimental sample one produces maggots after the expected amount of time. Experiment two still doesn't produce maggots.

Hmm, could it be that the flys have something to do with things.

Well we watch where the flys land on another piece of meat and then examine that area under a microscope and discover that there are small white things in that area, but not in areas where the fly didn't land.

Next step of the fly landing experiment, take those white things and put them on a piece of meat, which flys have not had a chance to land on, and seal it up. In the expected amount of time maggots appear.

Well maybe the maggots are due to the flies and not due to spontaneous generation of life.

That is a trivial example, although it does describe a set of experiments that have been repeated several times using different wraps, different kinds of meat, and different climatic conditions. All results come to the same conclusion, no maggots unless a fly puts in an appearance and lands on the meat.

Pseudo science is just about anything but the scientific process. It is usually characterised as relying upon testemonials and things witnessed by interested bystanders. But the arguments are not supported by a rigourous, time consuming, and generally expensive process to eliminate other possiblities and to define the parameters where it works more often than chace would predict.

Politics aside, which is an important part in other aspects of this example, this is why it takes so long to get new medicines to market. Some one notices that they feel better when they chew the bark of a particular plant. (Feel free to guess where I'm going.) The scientists hear about it and decide to investigate. They look around to see if anyone else feels better when chewing that particular bark. They also ask to find out if the bark work on everything, or only on a small range of complaints. For this particular bark almost everyone who has any pain finds they get some relief from chewing the bark.

Now the scientists take some bark back to the lab and try to figure out what part of the bark gives the result. They break it up, cook it down, boil it out, burn it up, and everything else they can think of to seperate the components of the bark from each other. Then they give people who have some pain various straight samples of only one component of the bark. Some folks feel better no matter what you give them. Some folks aren't helped at all no matter what their complaint is. For other folks some folks feel much better with one particular component, but none of the other components seem to have much, if any effect, and some components might acutally make people worse off.

So now the scientists have isolated a white powder from the bark, and they can "prove" that it works better than straight bark, works on more people and more pains than suguar does. They then go to market with a "tested" product. I've been describing the distillation of the original asprin compounds.

My condemnation of the health food supplements and their ilk, come from the fact that few, if any, of the things you find in health food stores have been subjected to that kind of testing. Sometimes the stuff is just found not to kill too many people more than would be expected to die on a daily basis anyway and they package it up and sell it as a cure all for what ails you. Some things are found to make people feel better, for awhile anyway, and after getting several people to write out how it makes them feel better, those testimonial are put in the advertising and the product is sold to whomever will buy it, although a cup of coffee would have the same effect because the stuff, with its secret ingredants, is nothing more than caffeine.

Legitimate medicines make it relatively easy to find out what is in them. Package inserts might be in very small type and the words are never shorter than ten sylables, but if you take the time to learn the vocabulary, and use a dictionary to translate some of the words you can learn what is in them, at least the defined active ingredients. It might take a letter from your doctor to the drug company to find out what the fillers and binders are, but that can be done if you are suffering an alergic reaction and your doctor suspects something in the medicine. (This is not an uncommon problem with generic drugs which change the fillers and binders to comply with trademark requirements.)

The food supplements and additive stuff it is generally very hard to find out what is really supposed to be in the container, and then there is no law that says they have to have in the container what it says on the outside of the container, or that any particular doseage is in the pills, or that the pills all have the same doseage. (Actually there is a law which prohibits the FDA and the FTC from looking into what is in the containers and enforcing the "Truth in Labeling" requirements on "food supplements" that is required of everything else sold in this country. Or to verify the purity and effectiveness of the stuff.)

That is picking on just one, huge, example of pseudo science. There are others, but my son did a science project on one of them last year and embarassed most of the judges of the science fair contest. He first offered them a chance to outlaw H2O based on the contentions, all true by the way, that H2O is found in all cancers, it interferes with the braking action of automobiles, is involved in 99.999999% of drownings, causes erosion of public building edifices, and is a major component of acid rain. Most of the judges said it sounded like a good idea to get rid of H2O if it is that bad. Really bad, and pseudo, science at work. The judges didn't like being taken in. After all wouldn't a tall glass of cold WATER tast good right about now? Unless you're in Florida, Cuba, or New Orleans.

Kelly

http://www.flat-earth.org/

Do you have a lot of experience with the food supplement industry? What research did you do before making this assertion?

It is superficially obvious that many exaggerated claims are made, but what I know from having read dozens of books on this topic over the last few decades is that there are numerous supplements that have firm scientific and experimental bases. Let me pick just one as an example, since I cannot describe all several hundred. As an exmple, I will pick the supplement, alpha lipoic acid.

Alpha lipoic acid is a very versatile antioxidant. It "quenches" the oxygen singlet, hydroxyl, and superoxide radicals, while its reduced form, dihydrolipoic acid, stabilizes the peroxyl and peroxynitrate radicals. It is also a coenzyme in reactions that occur in the Krebs cycle, the metabolic process that creates most of the energy used to power the body. In addition, it is useful in some conditions related to diabetes, such as diabetic neuropathy.

There are numerous food supplements the effectiveness of which is highly apocryphl, but hundreds the effectiveness of which have a massive experimental foundation.

Thanks for the benefit of your research, Brandon.

You're welcome. It's been an area of interest of mine since I was 13 years old.

I've been a vegetarian since I was twenty. I'm about to turn fifty six and I feel fine, and can do things that my meat eating counterparts can't, like standing on my head for long enough to get benefits.

Rather than worrying about nutcases who go to Health food stores to burn out pumping iron or going on crash diets using organic "speed" - I'd be more concerned about factory farming, the introduction of steroids and antibiotics into the meat supply - much less mad cow etcetera which is one of many things wrong with meat, including the fat content.

Health food vs. meat. Meat wins as the major menace and cause of heart disease and cancer. We each have our pet peave.

It funny how some people can't see the forest for the trees. Even if you insist on being a meat eater - and I'd refer you to the Harvard and Unicef studies on global hunger as well as the fact of the unhealthiness wastefulness and immorality of it - a little quality control and variety in your diet would be wise.

At least buy the range fed meat.

I used to spit out my meat at ten. . .

I'm just wondering what Pseudo-science is..

Here's one for KellyS

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/quacksell.html

And this may not all be pseudo science, but it's definitely funny:

The Annals of Improbable Research (the IgNoble Awards)

Selling Quackery also sells. Where I take issue with those who attack the organic food industry is that wonder who there intended audience might be.

It would have to be people who never grew a vegetable garden or nurtured a compost heap.

Ignorance is bliss, but you can't beat a homegrown tomato unless you're willing to pay four dollars a pound for them. Such a tomato would have to be organic - and there's no substitute.

The sword of accusations of bunko cuts two ways. That article made me feel a faint frustration that I missed the farmers market this morning in the center of my burg.

There you neither pay more nor do you find any "larval types" ridiculing the gardening methods of those people who kindly avoid the middle man and will sell you the best tasting and doubtless least adulterated vegetable available.

You can get them at the market, too. And the will be more expensive.

Insist that all this organic gardening methodology is hype - there is one conclusion for you: you don' t know what you're missing.

Bon appetit.

You have me impassioned to point of typos.
You mistake the GNC for the organic garden.

I wonder of the anti quackery witch hunters, who their intended audience is?

People who like gazpacho in the summer?

Extrapolating the viability of a drug that will be used on a human has from an animal model often has proved to be "pseudo science."

Thalidomide was tested on various animals and when actually used on pregnant women caused birth defects like dwarfism and flipper like appendages rather than arms and legs on the children of the poor women who were given this essentially untested pain reliever.

And yet our insurance industries insist on the animal model where it is often invalid but will give a drug the go ahead for malpractice insurance issues that might ensue as if the calculated risk of using pseudo science to play dice with people's lives was meaningful.

We have come so far in terms of our ability to look at in vivo phenomena - and we will torture animals while we censure advanced research on stem cells.

One gets the impression that your willing to dissect something is more important than focusing on curing cancers or other still incurable diseases by working with modern methods rather than creating academic pecking order by making student cross a useless threshhold of intestinal fortitude.

We bicker about dietary choices, when the scientific studies are already in on heart disease cancer etcetera, and yet we are often in some corners more concerned about stopping stem cell research than ending global starvation and improving our health by changing our attitudes about animal husbandry, water and land use, green house gases and loose toxics all over the place.

They're all related.

All these bases are covered by real science. And yet politicians underfund solutions already on the drawing boards and make political hay of maintaining the status quo. And Sinclair Lewis is still correct that the venal are those who dominate research and they can both kill you and cure you and don't care which as long as they make money. That is pseudo science.

The ultimate pseudo science is politics, and particularly the politics that make the definition of pure science: "anything that can't get funding."

Support your local pure scientist.

Throw in an artist or a poet while you're at it.

Economics is pseudo science. Psychology is pseudo science especially the rat running end of it. Sociology is pseudo science.

Cybernetics is real science. Astrology is pseudo science, but astro physics and geology are real sciences. Astronomy is real science and it still uses astrological names for the constellations. Would that make observing the planetary motions and predicting the motion of an asteroid from Sagittarius somehow bunk?

What's you're pseudo sign? And is it pseudo adjusted for the pseudo precession of the pseudo equinox?

Don't step on my blue p-suedo shoes~

Nope.

I like the Flat Earth link. I find that page very scientific.

It comes down to objectivity. Asian people consider metaphysics to be science not pseudo science. And pseudointellectuals no all about science and the rational mind and very little of metaphysics.

Is logic part of science, philosopy or both?

Forgive me if I sound pseudo intellectual.

There are various definitions and examples of pseudo science. I like the idea of remaining open minded, which is to say I am unsure of any examples of pseudo science. Of course we make tentative decisions that somethings are correct, others close enough for most purposes and the rest mostly junk. I'm tentatively assuming that government is not our friend, the rich and powerful are not our friends and the mainstream media typically is giving us false and misleading inferences if not blatant lies. Neil

I agree that a home-grown tomato is great. But a home-grown tomato doesn't have to be "organic," just vine-ripened. This is why produce at farmers' markets tastes so good, not the growing method.

To my way of thinking, pseudo-science is driven by ideology rather than critical thinking. Companies bury research that does not provide the proper results. Governments cherry pick among scientific reports to support pet projects.

Re: Pseudo science


Global warming

Witchcraft

The theory of evolution...


Technically the term "pseudoscience" means something which is not susceptable to accurate investigation or disproof in any way. That is not the same thing as bad science or "junk science".

Re: Pseudo science


Actually, I should have mentioned, you might want to obtain a copy of Daniel Flynn's "Intellectual Morons":

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Flynn20040921.shtml

The author has a lot to say about various forms of junk science.

Basically,pseudo science is a load of twaddle.