Homeopathy and Malaria, Still...

The 30 Second Skinny A study into a homeopathic preparation of the neem tree has been promoted as evidence that homeopathy can be used against malaria. However, the study raises many concerns. Results of the two year trial were being published after only six months, but no later version of the paper seems to exists. It also didn't compare the treatment against a placebo, and recruited people who had had malarial attacks in the last twelve months, making its six month reporting of little value. It is worrying that advocates of homeopathy deny clinical trials are capable of proving homeopathy works, yet at the same time use flawed trials in order to claim homeopathy has some robust evidence supporting it.

You're Ill! POW! You're Cured!

The 30 Second Skinny DITI is being increasingly offered as a method of early detection of breast cancer, despite little evidence that it is even as effective as traditional mammography. It is also marketed at women in low-risk groups, meaning a greater chance that clients will test positive for abnormalities when none are there. Research suggests it may only be useful in conjunction with mammography.

Dear ***********,

The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) received £900,000 of state funding in order to set up as a voluntary regulatory body for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

Their initial 2009 target for membership was 10,000. This was later reduced to 4,000. As it currently stands the Council have attracted little more than a quarter of this (1,029).
It seems that there is a deep philosophical conflict here. The main goal of the CNHC is to create a sense of respectability and legitimacy for alternative medicine. However this can only be achieved if the organisation puts in place a code of conduct that emphasises a level of honesty and openness about its medical claims, and the adoption of disciplinary procedures for practitioners guilty of misconduct.

Much of complementary and alternative medicine not only lacks an evidence base showing efficacy, but has a large body of evidence demonstrating a lack of efficacy. Practitioners are therefore unlikely to sign up to a a code of conduct that may forbid making unproven claims, facing up to the evidence that their treatments are ineffective, or encouraging patients to cease conventional treatments (there is a strong belief in CAM that conventional medicine is damaging). This seems to be borne out by the CNHC's figures, and it is no accident that the organisation has been most popular with massage therapists, a field that makes much more modest claims than chiropractors and acupuncturists.

It's also worth comparing CNHC to organisations such as the British Chiropractic Association. It too offers a veneer of respectability, but its code of practice chiefly concerns not bringing the BCA itself into disrepute; as this is the case, one must ask what the BCA is actualy for, and what it offers its members beyond the use of a logo.

I am writing to ask for some kind of assurance that, should the CNHC fail to meet their targets this year, it will be considered a sign that there is no market for a self-regulatory body for CAM, and that they will not be in a position to receive further funding.

Yours sincerely,

********

The Problem Just Goes Underground

A friend the other day accused me of seeking out things that annoy me. This was following me posting a link to the Twitter feed that is promoting the execrable piece of HIV denialism House of Numbers. No, not the idiots at Raindance; someone else. As I explained to said friend, I tend not to hunt these people out. The joy of Twitter is that these people find me, c/o dumb computers and Twitter bots.

It is equally true that, as a result of having to ride the underground, I routinely encounter ads that are just plain wrong. Mainly these are for Vitabiotics (with their tiny tiny "this product probably isn't for you" writing) but tonight's journey offered up the Zhai clinic. They use a holistic, traditional Chinese approach to fertility treatment, boast a 70% success rate, and speak of Dr Xiao-Ping Zhai, who does not appear to be on the GMC register.

Thank heavens for camera phones and the ASA website, what?

The ad stated the clinic, which employs traditional Chinese medicine, enjoyed a 70% success rate. It also made a reference to a Dr Xiao-Ping Zhai.

I would be curious to know whether they can substantiate the 70% claim, and whether or not Mr Zhai is medically qualified.

It transpires that Zhai Clinic is listed under the HFEA, the authority in charge of fertility clinics. They are a "satellite clinic" for the London Fertility Clinic, which means "[the] assessment of patients, drug therapy and monitoring may take place [there] but the egg collection, mixing of sperm and eggs, embryo culturing and embryo replacement are all carried out at the primary clinic". The Zhai ad talks about traditional Chinese medicine - it is "Where Conception Comes Naturally". The implication is that the 70% success rate claimed (the website makes a claim of "about 80%") is attached to this incorporation of TCM; both the ad and the website downplay the role of the rather unnatural IVF program. Either 70% of couples conceive naturally, without IVF, or they conceive unnaturally with, to quote Zhai's site "artificial, invasive fertility treatments", or the 70% figure, which is high even for IVF, has been plucked out of the sky.

The Beacon Writes NICE

Dear sirs/mesdames,

Peter Littlejohns was recently paraphrased by the BBC in an article about the recent and controversial decision to support complementary and alternative medicines such as acupuncture and chiropractic, despite there being no evidence that they work better than treatments mentioned in previous advice. Littlejohns stated that:

the costs to the NHS would be minimal - in the order of £77,000 - because they are offset by the savings in terms of reducing future disability and healthcare needs and moving away from treatments with little supportive evidence.

This seems to suggest that these treatments have some kind of long-term benefit that rest, exercise and painkillers do not. I was wondering what supportive evidence NICE has that these expensive CAM measures are a long-term solution to back pain? Littlejohns quotes a specific figure, so I am assuming that the evidence exists and is robust; I'd be very keen to see it.

--
Kind regards,

Beacon Schuler.

Switzerland Embraces Pretend Medicine

There has been som quite jaw-dropping news from Switzerland where they have incorporated woo such as homeopathy (which doesn't work), acupuncture (which doesn't work), and herbalism (that mostly doesn't work) into their national health insurance scheme. Before, people's premiums were going towards funding evidence based medicine, but now rational human beings must stump up for a range of ineffective treatments. If someone ever says to you "alright, so these treatments are a load of hogwash, but what real harm are they doing?" you need only point to Switzerland to see the threat of real damage that these people pose. It's not even that the wrong pockets are being lined, but EBM is being massively undermined.

“It shows that we are beginning to come out of the two camps – one for orthodox medicine and the other for alternative medicine. In the future, hopefully, it will mean that medical students will study complementary therapies as part of their medical training and be able to integrate some of them into their practice,” says [Alexander] Harbaugh.

This is CAM fantasy, to force medical doctors to learn homeopathy, chiropractic and other nonsense despite it being at odds with our understanding of how our bodies work. David Colquhoun has attacked at length and with good cause at the fake respectability that CAM has been creating for itself, the creation of Bachelors of Science [sic] degrees in homeopathy, NICE's recent approval of chiropractic, Switzerland may prove to be a clear example of what may happen if such moves go unchecked.

The only fly in CAM's snake oil is hinted at in the following quote

The current criteria requires that the therapy benefits the patient, that it is cost-effective and appropriate for the patient’s condition.

This hopefully will mean that alternative medicine will have to prove that it is benefitial to the patient. I think most of us could live with evidence-based alternative medicine being included in state-run health schemes.

Simon Singh's Bogus Journey

I was lucky enough to get along to the Simon Singh love in at Penderel's Oak last night. Simon, for the uninitiated, is a science journalist and co-author of Trick or Treatment, an excellent look at the evidence, or lack there-of, behind the claims of alternative medicince. Around the time this book was published, he wrote an article addressing some worrying claims being made about chiropractic and its use in the treatment of colic, along with feeding and sleeping problems. In it he suggested that the British Chiropractic Association promotes these "bogus treatments". The BCA felt such claims were damaging, and so decided, rather than to rebutt Singh's claims in the press, to simply silence Singh and other critics by bringing a libel suit against him.

The court case seemed, until recently, simple enough. The BCA simply cannot provide robust evidence for the claims made of chiropractic, and the court should note that Singh's article was correct inasmuch as he lays out exactly that claim in print. However, things took a rather unexpected turn when the Judge in the case, Sir David Eady, decided that what Singh had meant by "bogus" was that the BCA was knowingly and dishonestly promoting treatments that do not work. This placed Singh in a difficult position - if he were to continue with the trial it would be by defending a meaning he had not intended, and was much harder to prove, because it may well be that only the high-ups at the BCA really know their own mind when it comes to whether or not they believe in the powers of subluxation.

What the skeptic movement want to see happen is for Singh to appeal against Eady's ruling, to have the meaning returned to Singh's original sentiment, but, and quite rightly, this will only happen if Singh and his advisors feel that particular game is worth the candle. Last night's gathering was an opportunity for Singh to keep us posted as much as he is legally able, and for people following the trial to show their support.

Dave Gorman, TV humourist and professional geek, was the first to speak and rasied an interesting point, that in the eyes of the public Chiropractic isn't considered alternative medicine at all. It has taken people like Singh to bring to a wider audience the fact that Chiropractic has very little going for it in terms of evidence - some weak evidence that it may help with back pain; something slightly more intuitive than claims that it can cure deafness or heart disease.

And parallel to this, thanks to David Cohen's speech, it is becoming very clear to a widening audience that there is something dreadfully wrong with the English Libel laws. England's laws favour the plaintiff so much that we have become a destination for Libel tourism - where someone from Iceland sues someone from the Ukraine in an English court for something that was never even published in the English language.

It was clear from the mood in the room that there is a growing need for action, both against the pseudo-respectable claims made about Chiropractic and that drastic reforms are required for libel law in this country. What seems immediately clear is that the skeptic blogosphere is going to be scrutinising Chiropractic and Chiropractics very closely for the foreseeable future. I for my part will be writing to the BCA to ask if they have disciplined any bad advertisers and to request what evidence they had for the withdrawn pamphlet that Singh's article originated from. All in the interests of open discourse, of course.

Probably the best place to follow the Singh trial is the excellent legal blog Jack of Kent. And below is a post that, it seems, never made it to the Beacon proper, covering the origins of Chiropractic and some unusual parallels with a certain well known cult. During the seventies Chiropractics were considered ideal targets for recruitment for the Church.

Chiropractic was invented by D D Palmer, who believed that manipulation of the spine could cure all manner of ills, such as measles and deafness. Palmer believed that "innate intelligence" channeled through the spine and became blocked by misaligned vertebrae, and that reseating these vertebrae would bring the innate intelligence back into balance. Typical of much complimentary and alternative medicine, having had early initial successes in curing deafness in one individual and heart problems in another, Palmer went on to claim that Chiropractic could cure pretty much anything, despite seemingly never doing any proper research on it.

His "science" was so groundbreaking to him that he considered his discovery religious, likening himself to "Christ, Mohamed, Jo. Smith, Mrs Eddy, Martin Luther and other[s] who have founded religions." Palmer was repeatedly arrested for practicing medicine without a license, but this martyrdom only led to a strengthening of the cause of Chiropractic.

D D Palmer was killed after being run over by his son, B J Palmer, also a Chiropractor, and it is claimed that this may have been deliberate, as the two did not see eye to eye on a lot of things.

BJ went on to "invent," in 1924, a device called a neurocalometer that was said to be able to detect the blocks or "subluxations" in the innate intelligence. These devices were just thermocouples, a standard piece of lab equipment designed to detect temperature. That didn't stop BJ selling the devices for the price of a house.

As time went on, and as many earnest chiropractors became disillusioned with Palmer's initial claims for his treatment, the world of chiropractic became divided into the "straights" who stuck to Palmer's guns, and the "mixers" who recognised that chiropractic treatment could work towards easing back pain, but very little else. The straights accuse the mixers of never having been chiropractics to begin with. The mixers accuse the straights of being self-delusional.

So, a pseudo-scientific treatment offering medical claims with quasi-religious aspirations, an expensive device that is really just a simple bit of kit heavily overpriced, intergenerational rivalry leading to automobile-related death and a following fragmented into a body of fundementalists and a defamed bunch of open-minded and relatively more skeptical practitioners.

This, as a member of the Co€ pointed out to me in recent conversation, is true of many such organisations. What makes it moderately tastier, though, is that the e-meter's inventor, Volney Mathison, was a practicing chiropractor, and many chiropractors used e-meters in their treatments. This is conjecture, of course, but I can't help wonder as to whether or not Hubbard was familiar with Palmer's story as he set about creating Dianetics and Scientology.

Criminon worse than nothing!

I don't usually post in this manner, but thought I'd make an exception in this case. Many apologists and supporters of the Church of Scientology point to its drug and crime programs as evidence of the good that the Church does (confusingly, as a way of counterbalancing the bad that the Church does). Second Chance, offering Criminon in New Mexico, claims a 90% success rate, but appears to have a lower success rate than people not participating in the program.

The document mentioned can be found here.

The overall point of this is that many of the services that the Church of Scientology try to provide are services with measurable performance - Narconon, Crimonon, Scholastic Tech, the Purification Rundown. Because Scientology is always marketed as new and revolutionary (Dianetics is still "Modern Science" despite being over fifty years old. And not science.) they'll often get away with suggesting that the reason they don't have any research into efficacy is because they've not had the chance to do any yet. Leaving aside the fact that they are marketing techniques before establishing whether or not they work, they have had plenty of time, money and resources to put their theories to the test. When research has been carried out, the results have been hidden away or misrepresented.

Scientologists often claim that their religion is being victimised, that they should be free to believe in what they want. I agree that they should be free to. Emphasis on free. I also believe that where their organisation makes realworld, falsifiable claims, then those claims should be put to the test, and put to the test in an open and honest manner. If seeking out proof is unpalatable to Scientologists, then they ought only be offering their unproven services to other Scientologists, not trying to peddle it to all us spiritually-stunted, evidence-based fools in the Wog world.

Co$ and the Chemical Brain

The Church of Scientology, as any fule kno, thinks that all psychiatric drugs are bad. Quite where they draw the line on things like "what is a drug?" and "what is a psychiatric drug" is anyone's guess, but in the broad brushstrokes of their anti-psych rhetoric, they're all bad. As Juliette Lewis said recently, schizophrenics would be much better off forgoing their meds and getting themselves down to a petting zoo.

What amuses me is the reasons given. Invariably two simultaneous but contradictory positions are maintained. Firstly, they claim that psych drugs are based on "brain chemistry" and that this theory is flawed, that there is no evidence for it [sic]. Secondly, and here's the fun part, they claim that psych drugs have a detrimental effect on people. Drugs that operate on a person's brain chemistry can lead them to kill themselves, or shoot up their highschool. So in the first instance, brain chemistry does not exist, but in the second instance it does. Whenever you find yourself in a discussion about this with a Scientologist (flunk! You've let them derail the conversation!) ask them the all important question of how psych drugs effect behaviour.

Now I'm no fan of Big Pharma myself. It is true that mistakes happen, with varying degrees of culpability and intent - trials resulting in negative findings fail to get published, adverse reactions aren't picked up on, and so on. But Big Pharma is slowly getting better. Big Pharma creates self-regulatory bodies with real power to monitor the way that drugs are developed and marketed. There is an increasing momentum behind the ideas that are looking to address flaws in the clinical trial process (such as the trials that are registered but never published). Put simply, it is an evidence-based field, so anything that generates evidence will come out sooner or later, and there is a wealth of patients and practitioners out there who want the straight dope, pun intended, on their lotions and potions.

Big Pharma may not get it right all the time, but they stand a far better chance than the vitamin and dietary quacks who cling to their unmonitored products and wave massively flawed studies and even more flawed reasoning at media whorish enough to lend anyone with the remotest air of scientific authority fifteen minutes in which to flog their snake oil. One weak and yet to be repeated study into the effects of Omega 3 fish oils on kids suffering from ADHD becomes the foundation of sand on which is built an industry safe in the delusion that fish oil turns kids into placid brainiacs. One weak and yet to be repeated study into Narconon suggests that the rehab treatment aint that great, and so is buried away, far from the prying eyes of a public that have a genuine need to know.

But I digress. The cognitive dissonance at the heart of the Church's anti-psych stance stands as a crystalisation at the level of cognitive dissonance that exists throughout the organisation as a whole - the Orwellian double think that allows people to believe they are free, yet unquestioningly follow orders, write cheques, and fill out credit applications. And on the subject of the chemical brain, who says there's no evidence for it? It remains the strongest model we have of the way mood functions, and certainly a stronger model than the suggestion that we are controlled by memories lodged in each and every cell of our body. There is an excellent and balanced blog post on the subject here.

Evolution of CAM

The 30 Second Skinny Alternative Medicine often makes a great deal out of its longevity, but how does alternative medicine get started in the first place? How does it keep going in the absence of evidence? This article puts forward a number of stages that contemporary treatments go through. 

Making Asses

I do not personally believe that people claiming the ability to channel the dead have a genuine ability. I hope that some do. I would find comfort in proof of an after life. However, belief in such an ability is not, in my view, the most valuable and practical starting point. I view my scepticism not as an abject refusal to accept the existence of such ability – more that I have a high level of required proof.
I do not believe that all of those who claim such abilities are wilfully fraudulent. I believe that most are mistaken. I’m not talking here about the grandstanding psychics calling out to an audience of several thousand for a “Jonathan” who might be in this world or might have passed over; or who invite existing customers to their stage shows before picking them out and making them cry with knowledge already garnered. I want instead to discuss the jobbing mediums, the day-to-day, unassuming folk who may offer up their services gratis, or for some token payment, to friends or family or parishioners. These people in the main, I believe, are employing skills they themselves are not aware of but are nevertheless grounded in a real world model.
I spoke in a previous post about the possibility of someone cheating a personality test by answering on behalf of an imagined character. This is not a particularly difficult skill – we humans are a complex bunch, and so learning to interact with other humans ostensibly relies on conjuring up these humans in our mind, of attempting to model their behaviours mentally in order to establish boundaries of acceptable behaviour, or the best way to communicate with them, and so on. This sounds a little sinister but it is not; imagine, for instance, that you have heard a joke that you liked, and wish to share it with friends. Without even thinking too hard about it, you will probably be able to gauge which of your friends would appreciate the joke, and which would find it unfunny or even offensive (if it’s that kind of joke). By making these judgements you are recreating in your head the people in question. This is not a perfect process, of course, and some people will be much better at it than others, but it is an every-day skill that we use all the time without thinking about it.
Now consider this. You are a spiritualist. You believe in life after death. You believe it is possible for the dead to commune with the living. You have experienced people who claim to be able to do this, and have seen evidence which, to you, validates the process. You are interested in learning how to channel the dead. The key to learning how to channel the dead is to practice. And perhaps in your initial attempts, with friends and confidants, lead to quite poor responses. You are trying to garner meaningful messages from figures that appear to you in your mind’s eye and relate them to your sitter. Bearing in mind that you already are sold up to the notion that the figures are out there, and so validation of their existence is not paramount, how does this process begin? By relating information that comes “out of the blue” that seems to be attached to the figure or the sitter. And from within the belief system it remains good when you get a hit, and bad when you get a miss, but when you get a miss, it does not invalidate your belief, merely suggests that you have not yet become adept in the skill you are practicing. So you continue to practice. Occasionally you will get what appear to be astounding hits. At other times you will get miss after miss after miss. Perhaps you will couch such misses more carefully as you develop. You will still be alive to the possibility that it was just a miss, but you will see no reason to dismiss the possibility that the miss is only a miss because the sitter hasn’t made sense of it yet, or its significance may lie in the future. The point is, nothing you encounter will necessarily be enough to negate the validity of your core beliefs. You will see every hit and miss within your existing framework. Also, you will start getting better at it.
And here I finally reach my point, which is that the skills involved in cold-reading, based as it is on a real-world model (or known-world model, if you prefer something less loaded) are subtle ones. Cold-readers themselves are quite aware that it is not enough to read a book on the skill and suddenly be capable of doing it; without practice you will get nowhere, even through the hilarious “and/but” technique, perhaps the simplest form of cold reading ever devised, based as it is on using “and” to follow on from a hit with added detail, and “but” to follow on from a miss with a modified message. I don’t doubt for a second that our student psychic is more than capable of taking on cold-reading skills sub-consciously, and from within their own belief system.
An example of this would be the notion that if you can garner the rough age of the sitter and the gender (and neither ought to cause too many difficulties) then you can isolate with a fair amount of conviction a “question” that has been bothering them for some time. It is no stretch of the imagination for a medium to “feel” that this question is at the forefront of the person’s mind without necessarily understanding that they are just making a judgement based on sex and age.
I believe it is even possible for the very loose descriptions of visiting spirits that pass for hits amongst mediums to be arrived at by similar means. I once saw a psychic artist who I suspect was fraudulent in that she seemed, while the opening address of the church was in progress, to be sketching out variations of people sitting in the audience. The technique seemed simple enough – take an old man in the audience, and draw them as if they were a young girl. Switch the age and the sex and you can, with a certain degree of certainty, be able to come up with something with a passing resemblance to a dead relative. I believe that mental images of people can be arrived at again unconsciously by interpreting the sitter. An exercise for the reader might be to imagine what a friend’s father might have been like and see how far you get. Our putative medium would be in a position whereby they are imagining this fallen forebear but putting the source of that imagination down to the spirit world. This is not too outlandish a skill because, as already stated, our minds are quite used to generating models of real people; we’re doing it all the time.
An interesting analogy here is with the writer who talks of creating characters who, once formed, behave as they will; the author claims to have little or no power over them, and writing for these characters becomes something more akin to dictation.
The overarching point here is that we have a situation where a phenomenon has become attached to a belief system by way of an assumed mechanism. An individual can be trained to understand that if he presses a button, then a packet of food will drop down a chute, but without any full investigation he cannot ascertain what pressing a button has to do with food. It could be that some automated machine that is routinely supplied with food by an outside agency is at work. It could be that the button is monitored by a person who physically drops the food down the chute. It could be that pressing the button appeases a God who creates the food and drops it down the chute. The person is capable of interpreting his action and reward in any way that his belief system will allow, with the added kicker that every time the button is pressed and the food is delivered the belief system seems in some way validated, even though it serves no logical form of validation whatsoever.
To make matters worse for our thought experiment subject, the button may even be immaterial. If the subject only presses the button when he is hungry, then the food moving down the chute could be triggered not by the button at all, but by the hunger itself, or even an understanding by the creator of the experiment in the cycles of digestion the subject experiences. Yet in the mind of the subject it is the pressing of the button that causes the food to emerge.
And we can go a step further. If we place our subject in a room where there is a button and a chute, and at random send packets of food down the chute, if he is playing with the button he will in all likelihood associate the pressing of the button with the delivery of the food. He will assume, though, that he needs to press the button in a certain way in order to get the food, and will then try and fathom out that necessary method.
It is vital, therefore, that we learn to recognise and challenge our own belief systems, especially when dealing with causal relationships that we have long accepted. This takes us, kinda sorta, back to our well-meaning but mistaken cold reader. They need to isolate the phenomenon, look at its origins (either within them personally or from a historical perspective (see future posts on the history of spiritualism)), and seek out a mechanism that goes above and beyond the belief system. If the belief system itself is longstanding, then it is prudent also to look at the roots of the belief system itself. A fruitful example of this would be astrology, where in order to understand the supposed mechanism (even before we look at efficacy) we need to discover how the understanding came about, and refuse to accept at first glance any provision of a mechanism from outside current understanding, even once we have exhausted that current understanding. Even if we accept that the position of planets can have a subtle influence over our behaviour and life experiences, and this is simply not proven to begin with, how is it that we came to have such knowledge thousands of years ago – who did the research and how was the research carried out.
Assumed mechanisms and assumed correlations are not exclusive to the world of strange beliefs. It occurs in the button-down world of science too, although with an all important difference. In science, for instance, one might observe that chewing on the bark of a willow tree can alleviate headaches; one might go on to isolate what it is in the willow tree bark that alleviates headaches, possibly even synthesising it in a laboratory, but without necessary inquiry, the scientist can only guess at the mechanisms involved that link the bark derivative to the experience of pain. Where science wins over on this front, however, is that it is determined to establish the mechanism through evidence-based inquiry, and to give some CAM practitioners credit they too are determined to establish the mechanisms (although sometimes before they have established efficacy!).
Strange belief systems tend away from such inquiry. They assume a mechanism without such need for proof, and often end up defending this invented mechanism (attractive meme that it is) in the face of evidence to the contrary. This defence can even take the form of an attack on the notions of experimental proof in the first place. They will suggest that the mechanism shies away from laboratory conditions, for example, that something in the controlled environment dissipates whatever effect exists in the world at large. The belief becomes a full-stop, and no wider understanding can emerge.
What saddens me about this is that for many people who believe they have strange abilities, the abilities actually become secondary to the belief, and the belief gets in the way of any reasonable assessment of the ability. Take, for example, a recent Randi test on an individual who claimed that she could guess the sex of dead diary-keepers without even seeing the diaries themselves, merely the boxes containing them. Had this ability been framed without the mechanism she provided, then the ability she claimed to possess would have seemed, although still peculiar, much more amenable than her belief that she could determine the sex because the spirits of the dead gave her the information. It was doubtful that she had such an ability, but the fact that the ability was packaged up with the existence of an afterlife and the reality of necromancy, then had she somehow pulled off the feat, her belief system would have served as an obstacle to any inquiry as to how such an ability actually worked. What is more, the mechanism, rightly or wrongly (and I think wrongly) sometimes serves to inform the establishment of statistical significance.
To guess the sex of dead diary-keepers one would expect roughly a 50/50 split across a large number of attempts through chance alone, and the number of hits more (or in a perversion of probability less) to suggest something more than chance is at work is relatively low, but when the subject claims to be in communion with the dead diary-keepers themselves, one would expect a much higher hit rate. As the axiom has it “extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proofs”. But we have moved away from the ability and into the belief system that supports the ability – the claim itself hasn’t changed, and so the required level of proof ought not to have changed either.
This is an almost flippant example – sexing diary-keepers in the unlikely event of being unable to examine the diaries themselves is a fairly useless ability, about as useless as rendering cutlery inoperable. However, when one enters the realms of the miracle cure, the stakes become much higher. There is a reasonable amount of testimonial evidence concerning situations where someone is diagnosed with an illness, then prays, or wears a particular piece of jewellery, or visits a particular hallowed spot, only to find the illness miraculously cured. This is the belief system’s full-stop at its most wicked, because it could be that there is a physiological reason for the cure (though I suspect misdiagnosis figures highly in most genuine cases), it could be that useful information could come from such miracles. If there is, we will never know, because in the closed mind of the cured believer it was not physiological deliverance but Something Else and so such inquiry is pointless, unnecessary and possibly even churlish, and bugger the rest of us.