Alternative medicine, impact threats, abrupt climate change, and efficient energy - Second World Skeptics Congress

World Skeptics Congress Convenes with Participants from Five Continents

Here is a brief review of several of the sessions at the World Skeptics Congress. More reports will appear in future issues.

At Heidelberg University, on the bank of the Neckar River, some 300 skeptics, scientists, experts, and academics from North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and South America convened to discuss and critically evaluate the latest claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience and consider some crucial issues in real science.

Opening the World Skeptics Congress, Paul Kurtz, professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and founding chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), declared: "Skeptics want to focus on inquiry, not doubt. We simply insist that there be sufficient evidence, rational coherence, or replicable experimental confirmation of claims and that hypotheses introduced undergo rigorous peer review and corroboration before they are accepted."

Leading medical researchers' comments on the perceived growth of alternative medicine in North America and Europe highlighted half-day plenary sessions on topics that included millennial doomsday predictions and a workshop on critical thinking.

Alternative Medicine Studies Flawed, Politicized

North American and European medical experts emphasized a serious problem: the public is not getting scientifically valid information on alternative therapies. From poor or biased experimental design to "absolute fakery," Wallace Sampson, M.D., clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University and editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, outlined reasons why many studies allegedly proving alternative therapies are flawed. "The best-quality papers and studies on such popular alternative therapies as homeopathy and acupuncture show little effectiveness, while the worst-quality papers and studies show the most effects."

Sampson pointed out that promoters of alternative medicine and the media often misquote and misreport the findings of the latest studies. As examples, Sampson said that, contrary to popular claims, alternative therapy has not increased in popularity over the last two decades. He refuted the notion that many alternative therapies are more cost-effective than proven scientific treatments. He pointed to insurance-industry studies that show chiropractic care - often cited as the "most effective treatment for back pain" - is the second-most expensive category of care provider, next to neurosurgery.

Willem Betz, professor of medicine at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, echoed Sampson's comments when he discussed the state of alternative medicine in Europe. Betz, a member of the European Committee of Science and Technology, said the evaluation of alternative medicine on the continent "is not science, but politics." The alternative medicine industry uses biased polling results to push alternative medicine acceptance. "Their figures are suspect in promoting alternative therapies, but their math is conventional when billing their patients." Betz described the alternative medicine industry as now actively focusing on Eastern European markets.

Psychologist Barry Beyerstein (of Simon Fraser University) reviewed the reasons people believe in bogus therapies. Beyerstein says that alternative medicine's enduring popularity stems from widespread public scientific illiteracy, aggressive alternative medicine-industry marketing, New Age faddishness, inadequate media criticism, a growing distrust of authority that includes the scientific and medical establishment, and an anti-doctor backlash. "Natural is considered safe. Though I like to remind people that tobacco is a naturally occurring substance," Beyerstein told the audience.

Ways in which purveyors of alternative therapies fool themselves include the human will to believe, the ubiquitous placebo effect, erroneous equations of correlation with causation, overemphasis of anecdotal evidence, naturally occurring self-healing, misdiagnosis, and the post hoc fallacy of automatically assuming that treatments or nostrums triggered subsequent recovery. "Many of these are confounding effects, examples of the classic 'disease of the week' misdiagnosis, and the failings of human logic."

The medical experts emphasized that the evaluation and eventual acceptance of alternative therapies necessitate adequate sample size, random assignment of patients, placebo-controlled trials, proper statistical treatment of data, long-term follow-up, and multiple replication of studies.

Astronomer Says Cosmic Impact Threat Likely

The recent Hollywood films Deep Impact and Armageddon have highlighted the threat from cosmic collisions, but the findings of science emphasize the need for increased funding for identifying near-Earth objects (NEOs), said James McGaha, retired USAF Major and director of the Grasslands Observatory of Arizona. "The threat from cosmic impact is real and hazardously dismissed by the public and decision-makers," said McGaha.