Tag: pseudoscience

Top five ‘uses’ for crystals

I’ve been involved in skepticism for the last seven years. I’ve been one of the organisers for the Merseyside Skeptics Society for five years and a co-host of Skeptics with a K for three years. In this time of actively researching some of the more ridiculous pseudoscientific claims, one of the things I enjoy coming back to time and time again are the use of crystals.

Crystals epitomise many of the ‘appeals’ of pseudoscience. They’re natural, they’re ancient, they’re beautiful, they’re accessible and they’re easy. Speak to anyone who endorses the use of crystals as a way of healing and supporting your body and they’ll tell you that different crystals have different properties and can be used for different purposes. They’re a quick fix for your anxiety problems, they’ll bring you good luck for that job interview, they’ll even cleanse your chakras…

So here are my top five ‘uses’ for crystals.

  • The Jade Egg

This item hit headlines worldwide last year when Gwyneth Paltrow herself endorsed the use of jade eggs through her popular ‘wellness’ website, GOOP. The jade egg is a small piece of jade, shaped like an egg, that proponents recommend people who have a vagina should hold inside of their vagina. This ancient practice is recommended for supporting and training the pelvic floor or Kegel muscles. Jade is said to have properties which allow it to cleanse negative energy from the centre of “intuition, power, and wisdom” – the vagina. It should be said that not only is the use of jade for this is completely unsupported by the scientific evidence. It might also be actively detrimental for users. According to Dr Jen Gunter, gynaecologist and all-round gem (pun intended…) jade is particularly porous and therefore carrying a crystal inside the body can lead to bacterial infections developing in the vagina. Not to mention that over-enthusiastic Kegel training can actually cause pelvic pain for some women.

Claim: “Jade eggs can help cultivate sexual energy, clear chi pathways in the body, intensify femininity, and invigorate our life force. To name a few!”

Cost: A jade egg from GOOP will set you back $66

Why not? –  at worst it might lead to vaginal infections and pelvic pain at best, you’ve wasted your money on something that doesn’t work

  • Crystal Bed Therapy

At a New York City Wellness Centre called Modrn Sanctuary, you can immerse yourself in a crystal and energy bath using their Sensory 7 Energy Bath. For this experience you lay on an infrared biomat (whatever one of those is) with 17 layers of healing and immune system enhancing materials (apparently) and experience some ‘sound therapy’ from the sound system around the bed, ‘vibration therapy’ from the biomat, chromotherapy (which basically just means they will use coloured LED lighting to ‘adjust the vibrational frequencies in the body’) while zapping you with ‘frequencies’ and magnets to provide quantum magnetic pulses and frequency harmonising. Yes, it really is a bed combining all of the pseudoscience. In addition to all of this there are seven Vogel-cut quartz crystals which will apparently combine frequencies from the frequency generator, UV laser energy from the infrared biomat and the magnetic energy which apparently cancel each other out to leave TESLA ENERGY. Which is focused through the crystals into your chakras.

 

woman lying on a mat with a metal arm holding seven crystals above her. The crystals are lit and coloured red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue and pink and are positioned down the centre of the body in a line from head to toe with even spacing
The Sensory 7 Energy Bath in use – image from Modrn Sanctuary.

Claim: Health! Wellness! Magic Tesla Energy…

Cost: $150 for one 60-minute session

Why not? – it shouldn’t do you any real harm, but you’ll be $150 and an hour of time down

  • Crystal Facial Roller

Facial rolling particularly with jade or rose quartz rollers is becoming increasingly popular in the beauty world. The premise is simple – you massage your face with a crystal roller. There are two suggested benefits from this. Firstly, believers claim that the massage of the face is good for reducing puffiness, preventing wrinkles and enhancing the skin. Secondly, some people believe that different crystals are imbued with different properties. So, jade is claimed to be a particularly cleansing stone and rose quartz apparently opens up the heart chakra bringing you love. There is, of course, no evidence that a) crystals have these properties, b) the body has any way, by chakras or any other means, of responding to these types of energy or c) that crystals have any ability to heal the body.

It seems slightly more plausible that massage of the skin might have some benefit in smoothing the skin however research shows that any benefit from facial massage is only subjective. A study of 142 women who received facial massage at beauty parlours showed that one third of patients had some negative effects including skin reddening, swelling or flare ups of dermatitis or acne following facial massage treatments.

Claim: facial rolling will reduce puffiness of skin and prevent wrinkles

Cost: you can get a jade roller for around £18

Why not? – it probably won’t cause any harm and it might feel soothing on the skin, but for some people it might trigger skin problem flare ups. The best way to protect your skin is to not smoke and to use a good sunscreen.

  • Crystal Butt Plugs

Yes, there are places on the internet where you can buy chunks of crystal to stick up your behind. Which would be completely fine if it weren’t for all the weird claims about chakras. According to Nymph NYC “black obsidian is definitely one of the strongest soul-cleansing stones” which “resonates with the root chakra”. According to Hindu tantrism the root chakra or Muladhara chakra resides below the coccyx which is why this company recommends the use of a butt plug in order to cleanse it. It shouldn’t need to be said that there is no evidence of the existence of chakra, no evidence that they need any sort of cleansing and no evidence that crystals can cleanse them.

Screen_Shot_2017-05-25_at_7.36.20_PM_1024x1024@2x
A black crystal butt plug on a pink background with iridescent glitter. Image from Nymph NYC.

Claim: “ORIGIN works energetically by bringing positive and nourishing energy to the root chakra at the buttocks while soaking up years of stagnant and settled negativity”

Cost: $135

Why not? – some crystals, such as jade, can be porous. It’s probably not a good idea to stick crystals in your anus. The rectum does not produce any natural lubrication and has very thin skin prone to tearing. Any insertion into this area should be gradual, with the use of a good quality lubricant to prevent damage.

  • Crystal Yoga

A common theme here is that many of these ideas combine pseudosciences. Now, I’m not saying that yoga doesn’t have its benefits. I practice yoga for my strength, flexibility and mental health. But the practice of yoga has its origins in the spiritual and some western yogis make some interesting health claims including that it can help with infertility despite no evidence to support these claims.

But some people claim that you can use crystals to ‘power up’ your yoga practice by lining them along or around your yoga mat. Do You Yoga claim that amethyst will help create serenity and stabilise emotions while moonstone will increase your wisdom. What’s more “If there is a specific stone that you’re attracted to or needing right now, carry it around somehow (pocket, locket, etc.), wear it as a pendant or even as a mala.” And don’t forget to ‘cleanse’ your crystal else it might hold onto negative energy.

Claim: ‘boost’ your yoga using crystals to “bring a new world of intentions, energies and powers into your life”

Cost: the cost of a crystal – this can range hugely from a few pounds to several thousand pounds.

Why not? – it probably won’t do you any harm, unless you fall or stand on a crystal during your practice!

 

What’s the most bizarre claim you’ve seen for crystals? Do you know anyone who carries crystals with them for luck? Let me know in the comments.

 

Kitchen cupboard “cures” – number one: turmeric

Wouldn’t it be great if we could cure all our ills with ingredients we can find in our kitchen cupboard? Plenty of people claim that it can be done and with the popularity of ‘natural’ medicines it’s not just your Nana who recommends it because that’s what her Nana taught her.

Kitchen cupboard remedies have become so mainstream that they become potentially dangerous when recommended for life-threatening diseases such as cancer. In fact, just a few months ago the Express asked “Can turmeric really cure cancer? Woman says benefits of golden spice ‘cured’ her disease”.

the express
Headline from the Express: “Can turmeric really cure cancer? Woman say benefits of golden spice ‘cured’ her disease”

But sometimes we wonder, if so many people believe it, maybe there’s really something in it?

In this series I will cover kitchen cupboard “cures” to investigate the claims made, and what the science really says. The series begins with the tasty Indian spice turmeric.

Turmeric

Turmeric is often reported as some sort of wonder spice. People who promote its use claim turmeric is anti-inflammatory, reduces cholesterol, treats diabetes, prevents Alzheimer’s disease and both prevents and cures cancer.

glass jar of orange coloured ground turmeric on a tea towel with a wooden spoon on the worktop next to it and turmeric on the spoon and counter

But actually, while this seems like a bizarre old wives’ tale, there is evidence supporting some of the claims for turmeric. The active ingredient in turmeric is curcumin or diferuloyl methane. Experiments in the lab show that curcumin alters the expression of genes in cells and some of these genes are related to specific pathways. For example, curcumin alters the expression of proteins related to inflammation in rat liver cells in a petri-dish and also alters the production of cholesterol in cells. Curcumin supplementation might also help manage some of the side effects of diabetes but only in conjunction with standard therapy. There is even some early evidence from mice with Alzheimer’s disease that curcumin can slow cognitive decline.

However, the science is also quite complicated. When it comes to cancer there is some evidence that curcumin can slow the growth of cancer cells in the lab but plenty of things slow cancer growth in the lab and never go on to prove useful therapies. Having said that, some clinical trials have shown that curcumin might one day prove useful as an adjunct to some cancer treatments in some cancer patients with some types of cancer.

The Express article above did discuss a case of a woman with myeloma, a type of blood cancer. This article was based on a single case published in British Medical Journal Reports in which a patient who had been on conventional treatment for many years suffered a relapse and was advised that there was nothing else doctors could do to help treat her cancer. The patient decided to take 8g chemical curcumin in tablet form per day in the hope it would treat her cancer. Her cancer has subsequently stabilised. This is a potentially interesting case – however it is only one single case that has been observed. Subsequent studies have not been done to investigate why this patient stabilised and there is insufficient evidence that it was the turmeric that was responsible. In fact, there are rare cases in which cancers such as myeloma can go into spontaneous remission without treatment and doctors believe this might be due to the patient’s own immune system targeting the cancer cells.

Important caveats

It would seem that the early research is fairly promising, however there are some very important caveats to remember here. So far, these studies are largely done in cells in a petri-dish or animals like mice or rats. We are not yet able to translate the findings to humans and we’re a long way from finding useful therapies using this compound.

Importantly, the studies use chemical curcumin rather than dietary turmeric and usually have specific measured doses. If curcumin becomes a useful therapy, the dose will change between different diseases and different patients. There is no evidence supporting the use of turmeric in isolation to treat disease. In all studies it is used as a supplement to standard therapy.

Clear capsules with orange powder inside

Medical treatments should always be managed by a medical professional. Any ‘herbal’ remedy has the risk of interacting with conventional drugs. In the case of curcumin research has shown that the chemical can inhibit some cancer treatments so it is important we understand the role curcumin plays in reacting with other medications before using this to treat patients.

It is because of this risk of interaction with other medications that it is really important patients taking any herbal remedy supplements speak to their doctors about whether these supplements might harm themselves or the efficacy of their treatments. It is important to note that many supplements are not fully regulated and therefore may contain ingredients that cause harm. For example, some curcumin supplements have been shown to contain anti-inflammatory drugs which can cause liver damage if taken in excess.

Summary: while there is some early evidence the active ingredient of turmeric might one day prove a useful supplement to conventional therapy we’re a long way from this being clinically useful. We need much more research to confirm the efficacy of curcumin and to establish which compounds work best and at which doses.

Next week I’ll be writing about Rosemary. If you have any specific requests for a Kitchen Cupboard “Cure” for me to cover, please leave a comment or send me a tweet @AliceEmmaLouise.

For more information on turmeric and cancer you can see CRUK’s review.

Sources:

 

 

 

Trends in Pseudoscience: Raw Water

Trend:

Water consciousness movement/raw water

What is it?

The water consciousness movement is a trend towards eschewing tap or bottled water for drinking and instead turning to unfiltered, unpasteurised, unsterilised spring water.

But why?

Proponents and, indeed, suppliers of this trend say that tap water in the US has been filtered – removing bacteria and minerals that they believe benefit the body. One supplier of ‘raw’ or ‘live’ water, Live Water, claims that “you can attempt to remineralize filtered water, but those minerals will never be bio-available like in fresh living spring water”. The bacteria content in ‘live’ water is lauded with Live Water announcing “there could be countless other beneficial microbes present, scientists just haven’t discovered yet”. They claim that beneficial bacteria, which they refer to as probiotics, are crucial for the proper digestion of food and the promotion of good health. Not only that but some raw water proponents are fearful of fluoride present in tap water. The founder of Live Water, Mukhande Singh, told The New York Times “Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.”

And why not?

The filtering process applied to US tap water is and important step in making water that is safe to drink. It removes bacteria which can include organisms like E.coli but also parasites and viruses. A telling indication of the microorganisms present in ‘raw’ water comes from Mukhande Singh who told The New York Times of his company’s ‘live’ water: “If it sits around too long, it’ll turn green. People don’t even realize that because all their water’s dead, so they never see it turn green”. Water going green over time is a sure sign that something is growing in it. The water is alive, just not in the way that Mr Singh claims. Water borne diseases are not a problem for many Americans, these days, because we solved the problem with the availability of clean drinking water. The blight of the 1800s, cholera, a disease caused by water contaminated with a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae taught us a lot about the dangers of drinking unsanitary water. Sufferers of the ‘blue death’ often succumbed to a rapid death caused by severe dehydration, a consequence of incessant diarrhoea and vomiting.

Cholera_bacteria_SEM
Scanning electron micrograph of the rod shaped cholera bacteria (Vibrio cholerae). Source: http://remf.dartmouth.edu/imagesindex.html

US tap water is carefully regulated to ensure safe levels of microorganisms. US tap water is fluoridated which is scientifically proven to improve dental health. But there’s another benefit to drinking water that is regulated to prioritise health and safety. These regulations are subject to changes based on the evidence as our scientific understanding of certain contaminants develops. For instance, arsenic naturally occurs in water. Since the 1960s the regulations sustained arsenic below 50ug/L but by 2006 all drinking water in the US was required to have a level of 10ug/L or less. Studies show that this reduction in the regulated level in US drinking water has resulted in a reduction in the diagnosis of lung, bladder and skin cancer each year.

‘Raw’ water, is not regulated in the same way. The contamination of each ‘batch’ of water might not even be monitored. Not only might customers be drinking dangerous contaminants – they have no idea of which contaminants and at what level might be present in the ‘raw’ water they consume.

Report: Attendance at a Pseudoscience Lecture on Gerson Therapy

On Tuesday the 15th of August at a Holiday Inn conference room in Liverpool two of my colleagues from the Merseyside Skeptics Society and I attended a talk entitled “Censored for Curing Cancer”. Also in attendance were around 70 members of the public – some of whom were cancer patients.

The talk had been promoted as a tell-all in spite of censoring and was open to any member of the public through Eventbright ticketing for £20 in advance or for a cost of £30 on the door. The speaker, Patrick Vickers runs the Northern Baja Gerson Centre clinic in Mexico where, as Patrick described it, “we’re treating advance terminal diseases. Not just cancer but virtually every single disease we’re successfully treating, and we’re doing it with Gerson Therapy”.

I heard about the talk through social media, the poster was shared around by alternative medicine proponents with promises of an “epic story of Hope and Truth” about an “effective alternative therapy for advanced degenerative diseases including “terminal” cancer”. This is quite a bold – and scientifically testable – claim about a therapy that, despite the therapy having been around since the 1930s has no sound scientific evidence to support its efficacy.

Lvpool3
Image taken from the Northern Baja Gerson Centre website – a photo taken of the room during the talk in Liverpool on August 15th 2017.

What is Gerson Therapy?

Gerson Therapy is an alternative therapy pioneered by Max Gerson in the early 1900s based on an intense regimen of 13 organic juices, taken precisely on the hour, every hour, and following a strict protocol and a minimum of 5 daily coffee enemas. In addition to this demanding regime, patients must take a huge list of supplements including doses so high of potassium that (again quoting Vickers) “if a medical doctor learned how much potassium we give patients every day they’d be frantic” due to the risk of cardiac arrest.

The Gerson diet is specifically devoid of any salt other than that found in the juices and the patients must take castor oil – four tablespoons every other day in the first month, with a tapered reduction over the first months – in order to ‘detox’ from supposed toxins. The patients also take supplements of pancreatic enzymes and stomach enzymes as well as crude liver extract and niacin.

If all of that weren’t bad enough, Vickers’ clinic in Mexico offers a range of “adjuvant” therapies including rectal ozone, hydrotherapy in which they supplement heated water with hydrogen peroxide (bleach) and laetrile (made from apricot kernels and containing cyanide). All of this first takes place at the clinic during a minimum 2 week stay but Vickers’ goes to some length to stress that most people decide to stay for 3 weeks. This costs patients $5800 (over £4000) per week plus travel to Mexico. Not to mention the hundreds of pounds they will spend every month to continue the protocol for up to three years (or indefinitely) after they have left the clinic.

It is important to categorically state that there is no good evidence that the Gerson Therapy will cure cancer. However one foundation of our medical system is the right to informed consent – it protects the right of any individual patient of the age of consent to make a decision on the treatment path they follow; it protects the rights of any patient to follow alternative therapies should they so choose. But the most important element of that right is the informed part. The content of Patrick Vickers talk was fundamentally against adequate information provided to patients.

Encouraging a distrust in medical professionals

Even before beginning his talk, Vickers seeded distrust in medical professionals: he prefaced his 90 minute lecture with:

“I promise you, by the time you leave here today you will know more about cancer and reversing advanced degenerative disease than any medical doctor on the planet”.

To say this is hubristic is an understatement: a trained oncologist in the UK must undergo many years of training before they earn their specialism and must keep on top of the most up to date research in order to treat their patients to the standards expected by the NHS. This is not something that can be taught during a three hour public presentation. Even my own expertise in cancer research has taken five years to cultivate and I don’t have any responsibility to individual patients.

Compared to his later comments, Patrick’s insinuation that he can convey a complete understanding of one of the our most complicated range of diseases in the space of a single lecture might actually be one his more relatively mild transgressions – elsewhere in his presentation he advised a breast cancer patient to come off her Tamoxifen, told a set of parents that they should not take part in the immunotherapy trial they’d been offered, and told a blood cancer patient that she needed to be weaned off any medication she was taking if she were to undertake Gerson Therapy because it is “incompatible”. All of this “advice” was given with absolutely no understanding of the circumstances of those patient’s cases, since they were simply patients asking questions in the Q&A session after the talk, and the extensive patient history a medical professional with a duty of care would have needed before offering any advice was not be forthcoming in that setting.

Local media coverage

There was (at least) one patient in the room who might have been well known to Pat Vickers, however. Sean Walsh, a singer from Liverpool is a patient of the Northern Baja Gerson Centre clinic who has recently returned to Merseyside following his stay in Mexico. I first became aware of Sean when his story was hailed in the local media as an uplifting success because he survived longer than the 8 months his team of haematologists had predicted despite, eschewing their advice for his treatment and instead undergoing Gerson Therapy. The Liverpool Echo published a story about Sean headlined “Man with cancer beats 8 month prognosis despite shunning hospital treatment”.

At the time, I and my colleagues at the Merseyside Skeptics Society, along with a dozen cancer researchers from the University of Liverpool and North West Cancer Research, responded with a letter to the paper asking that they acknowledge their responsibility to not publish potentially dangerous information as though it were true despite the lack of evidence. The letter was published in the print edition of the Liverpool Echo.

LiverpoolEcho-Letters-20170227

What’s the harm?

According to Vickers’ seminar, should a patient decide to attend the Northern Baja Gerson Centre they would be taken off any conventional treatment they are already taking and weaned off any medication. He told the audience that it takes 3-6 months before a patient is ready to go on the full protocol due to an apparent risk of “chemotoxicity”, and then a further 6-12 months for the tumour to be “destroyed”.

He also recommend that patients on the treatment ought to have no scans in the first 6 months – a staggeringly dangerous message when a patient is stopping all conventional therapy and will have absolutely no indication of what the potentially lethal effect on their cancer during this crucial time period.

In my opinion, the danger of this lecture is threefold. Firstly, Vickers is directly claiming that Gerson Therapy will cure cancer. He says so categorically, and frequently. Not only is this dangerously untrue, but it almost certainly breaks the 1939 Cancer Act, which prohibits an “offer to treat any person for cancer, or to prescribe any remedy therefor, or to give any advice in connection with the treatment thereof”. The Act serves to protect the basis of informed consent fundamental to our medical system.

In addition to this, Vickers claimed that the media, the government and all of the medical professionals are lying about cancer treatment, stating, “It is important to know who is lying to you, how they’re lying to you, why they’re lying to you and when they’re lying to you”. He is promoting a potentially deadly distrust in the scientific consensus on effective cancer treatment, and what’s worse is that he makes these claims at a time when cancer treatment success has more than doubled in the UK in the last forty years. Scientific progress is huge in this area and promoting this distrust could have disastrous consequences for patients.

Thirdly, he is telling patients that the “only” way to cure cancer is the Gerson Therapy, and the only way to do this successfully is to spend thousands of pounds on a clinic stay, organic produce, juicing equipment, coffee enemas and supplements. Not only are some of these treatments dangerous in themselves, but the crippling costs can make the last few months of a patient’s life intolerably difficult, and the complicated and specific regime can make those last few months of a life unbearably miserable. To subject patients to that, on top of insisting that they have a three week stay in Vickers’ expensive clinic, often away from their family at a crucial time in their disease progression, is astonishingly irresponsible.

As a cancer researcher, I find it galling that this lecture can be hosted in a UK hotel with very little criticism. My concern is that information like this is at the very best, unethical and at the very worst leads to the unnecessary death of cancer patients in the region.