Weird Science II: Paying for blisters

November 19, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

Intelligent Design advocates aren’t the only ones out there advocating scientific illiteracy these days. The loopy New Age crowd continues to hold up its end.

Exhibit A: Vacuous celebrities paying people to burn their flesh with glass cups.

Yes, you too can be like Gwyneth Paltrow and pay someone big bucks to sear your back with a hot glass. Why would you do this? According to the New Agers, this process, known as “cupping,” helps balance the “chi” in your body.

A recent article in a D.C.-area paper called the Express (a freebie published by The Washington Post in desperate attempt to get people under 30 to read a newspaper), quoted Dr. Sen Huang who said, “Cupping generates negative pressure which removes the blockages of chi.”

I should note a few problems with Huang’s claim: New Age quacks are prone to say that just about everything either reverses, unblocks or frees up the chi. Magnets are good for this, as are metal bands and even “therapeutic touch,” a procedure whereby a healer waves hands over your body, without actually touching you, and magically adjusts your chi.

The more important factor is this: There is no such thing as chi. This energy force that allegedly moves through our bodies cannot be measured, captured, photographed or shown to exist using any conventional standard. That’s convenient for the New Agers because it keeps chi out of the realm of testability, but it also ought to be grounds for skepticism.

In this same article, the Express also got taken in by ear-candling, a quack treatment that supposedly can remove excessive ear wax. The practitioner puts a 12-inch hollow candle in the mark’s ear canal and lets it burn down for 20 or 30 minutes. This somehow supposedly creates a vacuum that sucks out the earwax.

An Express reporter noted that 1/8 of a teaspoon of “yellow powder” came out of her ear. There’s only one problem: Real doctors have studied this residue and determined it be wax from the candle, not your ear.

Furthermore, candling does not create a vacuum — and you would not want it to. A vacuum strong enough to pull sticky wax out of your ear would also rupture your eardrum. Yet for this procedure, the Express reporter paid $95. (See more here)

Silly celebrities believe “traditional Chinese medicine” is superior to modern Western medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine really is centuries old, which explains why it’s useless. It comes from a pre-scientific age when people did not understand the natural world, the human body or the nature of illness. That’s why it consists mainly of people waving sticks.

Modern practitioners of the art employ a lot of mumbo-jumbo and meaningless New Age verbiage. Some of them wear lab coats. They would be better off wearing tuxedoes and top hats, because at the end of the day what they are doing isn’t medicine; it’s a magic show — an expensive and not particularly entertaining one at that.

say what you want. i am currently treating a chronic illness with accupuncture and it is giving me more relief than anything else I have tried… in 18 years. so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

have you tried cupping? or are you just speaking as a social critic?

  • A friend was very big on ear candles, and pointed out all the stuff in the ear-end of the candle when it was finally put out. I took one candle and just burned it, not in my ear, and pointed out that the same stuff was in the bottom of the candle. That convinced her that she had been wasting money.

    Acupuncture has been investigated with scientific tests, and it has been found to have an effect. More work is being done to determine just how it works. But acupuncture is not mentioned in Morbo’s post.

    The junk stuff cycles endlessly: crystals, pyramids, astrology, etc.

  • Actually, traditional Chinese medicine has much to recommend it – they did, after all, come up with accupuncture, which this 21st Century American is glad to credit with the fact I am not running around in a wheelchair after being thrown against the wall repeatedly in my young childhood when the bones of my lower back and hips were still forming.

    “Cupping” has nothing to do with traditional Chinese medicine and everything to do with traditional European “medicine”, which was largely responsible for mostly killing its patients prior to the medical revolution of the late 19th century. If you want to see an example of “cupping”, go rent “The Madness of King George.” It was a very popular procedure in 18th Century English “medicine.”

    What’s next, bring back “bleeding”???

  • Hello Morbo,

    As I understand it, the scientific attitude towards things judged to be not scientific came about as a result of the English revolution, during the years 1640-60. During this time censorship lapsed & all manner of not quite kosher books got printed, including some of the finest astrology books in the English language. Astrology & astrologers played a major part in military campaigns, as well as with public opinion generally. It was used by commanders on both sides, including King James himself. This was summarized in True As the Stars Above, Adventures in Modern Astrology, by Neil Spencer (Victor Gollancz, London, 2000).

    When the monarchy was restored there was a general revulsion against the laxity & permissiveness of the revolutionary era, sort of like our opinion of the 1960’s. This was exploited by a certain group of no-nothings to suppress everything they didn’t like or (in the broader sense) understand. To wit, that which

    cannot be measured, captured, photographed or shown to exist using any conventional standard.

    And at that point, they closed & sealed the book & for more than 300 years, have never looked back. You would think that what cannot be measured (etc.) would be a challenge. True science sees the unknown (ie, the unmeasurable) as puzzles to be solved, not rubbish to be thrown out.

    Now what is happening is that we are – I am, myself – resurrecting the great astrological classics & making them available for the first time since the 17th century. Others are doing the same for their areas of expertise. This is only getting underway. It will continue, it can do nothing but. (It was precisely this point in Benson Bobrick’s recent book that so heartened me.)

    Using astrological techniques perfected by the Greeks & passed back from the Arabs to western Europe during the Renaissance, Robert Zoller, a year in advance, predicted 9-11, to the month. Writing in the September, 2000 issue of Nuntius, he wrote,

    I again draw attention to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism and that it will be felt on the US mainland. The greatest period of danger is in September 2001…. I am looking at Islamic terrorism that is rooted in Islamic fundamentalism and directed at everyday citizens going about their daily business in our own cities. The destruction and loss of life will shock us all. I repeat my warning now for the third time that unless the US remains vigilant it will be caught unprepared and we will be rocked to our very core. It will be an act of war but unlike any other in our history. Our culture and way of life and lives are at risk. (as quoted in The Fated Sky, Astrology in History, by Benson Bobrick, page 299. Published by Simon & Schuster, 2005)

    So far as I can tell, Zoller was the only astrologer to make the prediction, using techniques that were practically unknown even a few years ago. They have become much better known since. Since the mid 1990’s, the astrological revival has been rapid & far-reaching. Zoller is one of the leading figures.

    (I should mention that I’ve had email exchanges with Mr. Bobrick, going back four years, and that I once knew a woman who knew Mr. Zoller, this going back nearly 20 years. I would do better, but that Mr. Zoller, an American who lives in the UK, is a recluse.)

    Using Indian astrological techniques going back at least 2000 years, B.V. Raman’s grandfather, B.S. Rao, predicted the first World War, in far away Europe, more than a year in advance. In 1938, the young Raman predicted the outbreak of WWII. Around 1990, the elderly Raman (died, 1998) predicted WWIII (his term, by the way), predicted it would start around the year 2000 & that it would be a contest between Christianity & Islam. He published it in the pages of The Astrology Magazine, which he edited. Along with it he published the opinions of a number of other Vedic astrologers. His daughter, Gayatri Devi Vasudev, collected & published the various essays as Planets and the Next World War, in 1994 (UBSPD, New Delhi). I have a copy on my desk. I’ve stocked it in my bookstore since February 7, 1997.

    Astrological forecasts for the next ten years are, frankly, ghastly, but I won’t bore you with Bobrick’s survey, nor with the opinions of the financial astrologer, Bill Meridian (Planetary Economic Forecasting, Cycles Research Publications, 2002), nor with Zoller’s further ruminations (go Google). Suffice to say that, having studied the matter for some years, I am taking steps to protect myself & my family. I hope they will not be needed.

    It is, in short, no longer sufficient to blithely condemn what one does not like. The old science, (the real science) is making a comeback, for better or worse. Sure, you – or I – can easily blow away Intelligent Design, at least in its current crude incarnation. But what is driving it is not the fundamentalists. This is the most important point of all. It is nothing less than the wholesale resurrection of the “prescientific” world, which is far more substantial than the “scientific” crowd dares imagine. I am at the center of a good part of it.

    For what is being resurrected, there are consequences. There are things we may like, there are things we may not like so much. What we desperately need is not a contuation of abject condemnation, but a breath of fresh air. Open discussion. George W. Bush’s current trials, for example were easily forecast using astrology. (It’s his second Saturn return, a positive no-brainer. Will happen to every one who lives so long. The time frame can be foreseen to the week, from the very day of birth itself. Those who have spent their lives cheating the system usually get nailed.)

    In India, thanks to the work of a handful of people, traditional astrological techniques, passed orally from father to son for centuries, or stranded in books written in provincial languages (or in Sanskrit, about as accessible to most Indians as Latin is to us), are, for the first time in history, being compiled & published in the common language of the sub-continent, English. These books are also being distributed & studied in the US, and not only by Indian expatriots. In this regard, Shri K.N. Rao, whom I once saw lecture, is playing a key role.

    As for Hollywood stars using Chinese medicine: I’ve had Chinese medicine. I’ve never seen sticks (shaken or stirred), and needles are only a minor part of it. I’ve had western medicine, I’ve sat in the clinics, I’ve taken the pills. The difference is night & day. Western medicine is quackery by comparison. See for yourself. If you’re in New York, have a look at Kamwo Herb & Tea, at 209 Grand in Chinatown. And any medicine without astrology is foolishness. Consider this:

    Hollywood stars have the income to make informed choices. They do not go begging for the affordable HMO, rationing out scarce health dollars. They’re rich. They can buy whatever they like. They are, therefore, more likely to be informed consumers than the average person, sick or not. Consider that pre-existing conditions affect them as much as the rest of us, so their choices may not only be better informed than average, they must still be judicious overall. (Chinese medicine, by the way, is not only more effective, but often lots cheaper, too, but I digress.)

    Dear Morbo, your post was unsatisfactory on so many levels. In this note, I’ve tried to indicate that the tide has turned. Fueled – for better or worse – by the fundamentalists, it will shortly become overwhelming. Since this an area of interest to you, I am hoping you will take the opportunity and the time to better educate yourself. There are, in fact, many things about the “new age” that give me the creeps, but, like them or not, they’re here & not going away. There are also a great many things that, while claiming to be “new” and “good” are in fact phony & sometimes even dangerous. We need intelligent analysis, not blanket rejection. Education, research, knowledge, can help us distinguish among the many possibilities.

    The past is not to be condemned merely because it is old & quaint, any more than the elderly are to be thrown away as useless discards. Strong opinion, coupled with lack of knowledge, is a poor basis for intelligent discussion. It is also the essence of unscientific. I am hopeful you can do better in future.

  • Dear Rege,

    I am delighted to inform that the letters B.S. of B.S. Rao’s name stand for:

    Bangalore Suryanarian Rao

    Bangalore is the name of a city in India. This particular family of Raos & Ramans (two rather common family names) hail from there. Bangalore Venkata Raman lived most of his life there.

  • I don’t speak Hindi but I was sure it stood for the excrement of the sacred beast. Thanks for straightening me out.

  • Cupping is a massage technique used in China, I’ve never tried it but people seem to like the results.

    Don’t get so worked up about “New Age” – it’s just marketing.

  • Dear Rege,

    That’s kind of what I thought you thought. Aren’t you glad now to know better?

    Among Hindus, the excrement of the sacred beast is, in fact, cremated, somehow scented with jasmine (I think) and turned into vibhuti, which some gurus sprinkle on their devotees as a blessing. I myself have seen a good deal of it.

    The world is a big, exciting place. You should get out more.

  • look, i think new age stuff is bullshit, personally. there’s a handful of things that can be taken from ayurvedic or traditional chinese medicine, homeopathy, etc, and integrated into western, but even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.

    that said, i wish you would stick to politics and not social commentary. that’s what i read this blog for. celebrities? are you fucking kidding me? where is the broad-based support or lobbying for teaching acupuncture in our schools? nowhere, you say? then stfu about it.

  • DRoel, your Ghandi like passive resistance is admirable. However, you ideas aren’t.

    As I understand it, the scientific attitude towards things judged to be not scientific came about as a result of the English revolution, during the years 1640-60. During this time censorship lapsed & all manner of not quite kosher books got printed, including some of the finest astrology books in the English language…..

    When the monarchy was restored there was a general revulsion against the laxity & permissiveness of the revolutionary era, sort of like our opinion of the 1960’s. This was exploited by a certain group of no-nothings to suppress everything they didn’t like or (in the broader sense) understand. To wit, that which

    cannot be measured, captured, photographed or shown to exist using any conventional standard.

    And at that point, they closed & sealed the book & for more than 300 years, have never looked back

    Photography wasn’t invented until the 19th century. Perhaps the court astrologer foresaw its invention.

    Now, I’m going to take your advice and go out and enjoy this late fall day.

  • droel: the gold standard for the hard sciences is Popper’s concept of “falsifiability.”

    look it up.

  • Dear Rigel,

    You can be hard, you can be soft. It’s personal choice. Who do you trust? Me or your lying eyes? Science has a place. Life has a larger one. Science that crushes life is not science.

    One of the fancier things I’ve seen done with “chi” (we termed it prana, but it’s the same thing) had to do with nicotine addiction.

    Circa 1996, in front of a dozen of us would-be students, the teacher, Steven Co (South Pasadena, CA) asked for a smoker who didn’t want to be one anymore. A woman volunteered. He had her come forward. Though there was no smoking in the class, nor in the building as a whole, and though he initially had to coax her to do it, he had her take out a cigarette & put it in her mouth. He made her savor the feel of it, the taste. He taunted her how much she would like a smoke, how much she needed a smoke, right here, right now, and then frustrated her by reminding her that she could not. In short, he drove her mad for a smoke (we had all been sitting there for two-ish hours without break). The lighter was in her hand. Finally Co relented. She had the lighter going in a fraction of a second but still he stopped her from lighting up. For all you smokers out there, you know what that kind of denial feels like.

    For the next half hour, he proceeded to wave his hands in front of her. Never once touched her. We knew what he was doing, more or less, as he had spent the better part of the day instructing us. Hand-waving wasn’t really what was going on, it had to do with mental concentration. No words were spoken, by anyone, at any time.

    When he had finished, he told her to get out the cigarette again. She refused. He told her to put it in her mouth. She complained. He insisted. He insisted she light up. She gagged. As if she had never smoked before. Thirty minutes. I witnessed this.

    A few months later in another class, I saw him do the same procedure on another woman, with the same result. These were expensive classes, by the way.

    Victoria, the woman I was living with at the time, was one of his better students. I wasn’t half bad myself. One day we were visiting Violet, a friend. For some reason it came up that we should do this to her. So I set to work.

    I wasn’t as powerful as Stephen Ko, I never got the practice, and I’m not in practice any more. So it took me an hour. It was a lot of work. Left to myself, I would have given up in fifteen minutes & called it good enough, but I was guided by Victoria. She saw where the dirty areas were so that my hand-waving was not in vain.

    At the end of it, Violet no longer craved cigarettes, as expected. Additionally, she could not drink nor do drugs, which surprised us. This happened in Ventura, CA, not so many years ago. Unlike Co’s subjects, we were able to observe Violet’s progress over the subsequent days & weeks.

    And oddly enough, after about a week of living the clean life, Violet felt compelled to go back to her old habits. She made herself learn to smoke again, made herself learn to tolerate alcohol, made herself take drugs. The excuse was that if she didn’t, she would go from anorexic & desirable, to fat & pudgy like her mother. I suspected more subtle problems, ones that further hand-waving might well have solved, but readers of this thread will have little enough idea of what I am talking about.

    Other than to say that if you believe that science, as you know & understand it, has answers for all that goes on in the world, you are living a sheltered life. I would be happy if those who think they know it all would get out of the way so that I might live.

    Or, in other words, to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams, there seems to be an unlimited number of really great parties out there & you’re missing them. Why?

  • Hello Rege,

    Remember that free is what you paid for it.

    Many, many people want to be deaf, dumb & blind and this is their right. They have the company of all the others who want to be deaf, dumb & blind.

    Every now & then, someone who had been deaf, dumb & blind becomes unhappy with his condition & searches for something new. This is his right, as is the right not to be called names because of it. Only Republicans & fundamentalists have that right, and they can keep it. Or it it that we are all intolerant bigots? Please tell me.

  • And I thought this would be an interesting
    post. Might as well go read some right
    wing or fundamentalist crap.

  • I agree. The anti-scientific mindset is certainly not a creation of hippie new-agers, but that’s who legitimised anti-science in modern times. The right-wing Christian whackos just drove their trucks through a hole we created.

    Same with “political corrrectness”: we came up with a facile idea that every opinion is of equal value, and they picked it up and carried the “alternative oppressed miniority viewpoint” of “intelligent design” over the finish line.

  • The anti-scientific mindset is certainly not a creation of hippie new-agers…

    That’s true. The anti-science mindset arose as a result of the imposition of quasi-science (what you think of as the good stuff) back 300 years ago. It intensified in the late 19th century & has been with us ever since.

    It surprises people to know that Isaac Newton wrote over one million words on alchemy. It upsets them to know that Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Copernicus, Ben Franklin & many, many others, were accomplished astrologers. That Theodore Roosevelt knew his way around his own natal chart. Sure, he was as much a flake as Nancy Reagan, we all know that.

    None of the “old science” was ever disproved, for the very simple reason that it is real & nothing real can be disproved. Try though you might. For example, over the centuries there have been any number of people who sought to disprove astrology. These researchers fall into two groups: Ones who set superficial traps, the others who made serious, scientific efforts. Without exception, the first group proved themselves fools. Without exception, the second group, however skeptical, all became astrologers. Michel Gauquelin was one of the later. The Psicops were of the former, the celebrated “Mars Effect” was the battleground, the time was the late 1970’s.

    The outcome: Unable to disprove Gauquelin’s thesis, that the placement of the planet Mars in the horoscopes of professional athletes (on the eastern horizon, or directly overhead) was much higher than any statistical analysis could explain, the Psicops resorted to outright deception. This lead to splits in the Psicops & generally discredited them among responsible scientists, which continues to this day. Please don’t think the Psicops didn’t really try. The did. They tried everything they could think of, and a good deal more. Every test they tried merely reinforced Gauquelin’s original findings (and remember, his original goal was the same as theirs: to discredit the discipline).

    In the end, they cheated. The story was written in Fate Magzine, with the title, sTarBaby, the author, Dennis Rawlins, was a former Psicop, kicked out for refusal to go along with the fraud. This is of interest to Morbo, as the Psicops are associated with Michael Kurtz, of the Humanists, an ideologically based group that condemns everything they cannot (or will not) understand. Also associated with Kurtz, the Humanists & the Psicops, is the publishing house, Prometheus Press. They publish anti-religion, anti-astrology, anti-this, anti-that diatribes. Since only true believers will buy that stuff, to make money they also publish “where to find the best porno” guides. Hey, I’m in the book biz. They’ve been sending me catalogs for years.

    Gauquelin’s was not the only scientific analysis of astrology that failed to disprove it. A slightly different take: When J.H. Nelson, a radio engineer working for RCA/NBC in the ’40’s & ’50’s, discovered that the position of the planets, including the outer planets, affected shortwave radio transmission, he was promptly drummed out of all of his professional organizations. He had unwittingly proved the existence of astrological aspects, which is a prohibited activity. He thought he was simply doing his job, which was to advise his employer of exact times of disruptions to their radio signals. His work was published, I presume it’s still used by shortwave broadcasters (VOA, BBC among them), as it’s essential to their broadcasts.

    So here’s my challenge: If you’re a scientist, if you know your way around a lab, if you want to take on, say, astrology & make the definitive – or even provisional – proof that it doesn’t really exist, please do so.

    If you’re in medicine, do your own, first-hand comparison of western medicine vs: TCH: Traditional Chinese Medicine, which was inspired by Chairman Mao himself. Don’t rush yourself. Give it 3-5 years. (Be aware that China has better health standards than we do.)

    Many have gone this way before, these are well-trodden paths. You might be the one who finds success.

    I have been down some of these paths. I have had my own experiences, I have reached my own conclusions. If you have done so, if you have first-hand experience, then tell us about them.

    If not, then as an earlier poster said, S.T.F.U.

  • nice sarcastic, sweeeping indictment of alternative medicine. it’s obvious you know nothing about the subject matter. stick to politics — where it’s acceptable to have nonsensical opinions.

  • Through diligent perusal of my natal chart, I have divined that I should be FAR wealthier than I actually am. I have further discovered that this apparent lack is an effect caused in no small part by a pranic ‘rupture’ in the rearmost parts of the kundalini chakra. I have since discovered a wonderful remedy, the secret to which I will part with for a niggardly $19.95, (Australian). Needless to say, it contains the feces of the sacred animal, known in the ignorant Western culture as Macropodidae, a goodly helping of orgone energy, topped off with a rich lather of magnetic monopoles. This “Pranic Plug” I intend to market under the trademark, “Fundaplug”
    For an extra $12.75, I will include 666 grams of the aforementioned pranic leakage, which, as I mentioned I gathered from my nether regions.
    Awaiting your order…

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