Latitude granted to homeopathy infuriates medical establishment

Alok Jha, science correspondent
The Guardian

New regulations allowing homeopathic remedies to put therapeutic claims on labels must be annulled, says the medical establishment. Lord Taverne, chairman of the charity Sense About Science, tabled a debate yesterday in the Lords on the rules, which he described as "disgraceful".

The rules allow remedies to be licensed based on observed symptoms and to be labelled to indicate what ailments they purport to treat. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said the rules could improve consumer information. But hundreds of scientists, doctors and scientific societies have expressed concern. "It has come as a shock to the medical and scientific world," said Lord Taverne: "What is at issue here is the notion of trust between the public and drug regulation."

Catherine Collins, chief dietitian at St George's hospital, London, said the rules gave homeopathic products a legitimacy they did not deserve. "The only plausible explanation for any objectively determined benefit of homeopathy is a placebo effect. I assume the regulations would, therefore, legitimately be extended to cover Smarties used for similar treatment' purposes?"

Adrian Newland, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, said he did not oppose homeopathic remedies it if there was no evidence of detriment. "There is a special concern, however, that the endorsement of such therapies without appropriate pre-clinical tests and clinical trials and without rigorous safety and efficacy data may encourage patients to use them as an alternative to conventional treatments."

The British Homeopathic Association said it regretted Lord Taverne's debate. "The public will benefit by being able to read simple indications on the packaging for remedies for minor acute, self-limiting ailments such as nausea, headache, the common cold, skin conditions, digestive complaints, etc, based on bibliographic evidence accumulated over 200 years. Other preparations such as cough mixtures and expectorants are available over the counter without clinical trial evidence," it said in a statement.

Et encore, les Smarties, il y a du chocolat dedans. Rien ne permet de dire qu'elles n'ont pas une action thérapeutique, à ce titre !

Les animaux homosexuels font leur "coming out" dans une exposition à Oslo

OSLO (AFP) - Deux girafes qui s'acoquinent ici. Là, ce sont deux baleines qui s'accouplent. Plus loin, deux libellules qui se butinent. A priori familières, ces scènes de tendresse choquent pourtant certains esprits. Leur particularité: elles mettent toutes en scène des animaux... du même sexe.
Bousculant préjugés et tabous, le musée d'Histoire naturelle d'Oslo présente actuellement une exposition sur l'homosexualité animale, la première au monde consacrée à ce sujet, assurent ses concepteurs.

"Les personnes homosexuelles étant souvent confrontées à l'argument selon lequel leur mode de vie va à l'encontre des principes de la nature, nous avons pensé qu'en tant qu'institution scientifique, nous pouvions montrer que ce n'est pas le cas", explique à l'AFP Geir Soeli, l'organisateur de l'exposition.

"On peut penser ce qu'on veut des homosexuels mais on ne peut pas utiliser cet argument parce que l'homosexualité est très naturelle et très répandue dans le royaume des animaux", ajoute-t-il.

Du scarabée au cygne en passant par des animaux à l'image plutôt "macho", tels le lion ou le cachalot, des cas de comportements homosexuels ont été détectés au sein de quelque 1.500 espèces.

Intitulée "Contre nature?", l'exposition en présente quelques exemples à partir de photos et de reconstitutions.

Sur un cliché, deux bonobos adultes et femelles batifolent, stimulées par un jeune mâle.

Ces primates pacifiques --les plus proches de l'homme avec qui ils partagent environ 99% du patrimoine génétique-- utilisent le sexe comme un moyen de réduire l'agressivité au-delà des barrières d'âge et de genre.

Isolée, épisodique ou régulière, l'homosexualité ou la bisexualité animale sert différentes fins.

Un mouflon mâle peut être exclu du troupeau s'il se refuse à d'autres mâles. "Il lui faut donc s'accoupler avec ses petits camarades pour être accepté. Et en étant accepté, il se construit un réseau social très important qui lui donnera un plus large accès aux femelles ultérieurement", affirme Geir Soeli.

Chez les cygnes et les flamands, il arrive que deux femelles vivent en concubinage. "L'une des deux peut avoir une petite aventure avec un mâle qui fertilise ses oeufs et puis les deux femelles éduquent ensemble leurs oisillons. Comme une famille", ajoute le chercheur.

Dans le cas de certains oiseaux, des mâles, qui disposent d'un plus grand territoire que les femelles, s'installent parfois en couple pour contrôler une aire géographique élargie, ce qui a aussi pour effet d'accroître leur attrait aux yeux des femelles.

Les premières observations écrites d'homosexualité animale remontent à Aristote, le philosophe grec qui, plus de trois siècles avant Jésus-Christ, avait été intrigué par l'attitude équivoque de hyènes mâles entre elles.

Le sujet a ensuite été ignoré pendant de longs siècles, les cas d'accouplements homosexuels étant en général pudiquement considérés comme des rituels de combat entre mâles.

"Ils n'étaient pas décrits comme une activité homosexuelle en tant que telle, comme une pulsion de désir", commente Geir Soeli.

"Mais les animaux ont des instincts très forts (...) Peut-être s'accouplent-ils tout simplement parce que c'est agréable", ajoute-t-il.

Si les enfants des écoles traversent sans broncher la salle du musée d'Histoire naturelle, l'exposition a revanche fait froncer des sourcils dans les milieux chrétiens conservateurs.

Un pasteur de l'Eglise luthérienne a souhaité à ses concepteurs de "brûler en enfer". Un autre de l'Eglise pentecôtiste a estimé que l'argent des contribuables aurait été plus utile à aider les animaux à corriger "leurs perversions et leurs déviances".

Où certains réactionnaires apprennent que l'homosexualité n'est pas plus un choix que d'être gaucher.

The Shady Science of Ghost Hunting

By Benjamin Radford

Ghosts are big business. For entities that may or may not exist, they seem to be everywhere, especially during Halloween.

They are in books and on television shows, such as CBS's "The Ghost Whisperer" and NBC's "Medium." Dozens of "ghost hunter" organizations exist across North America, small groups of self-styled ghost buffs who lurk around reputedly haunted places, hoping to glimpse or photograph a spirit.

The most famous ghost hunters are two plumbers who moonlight as paranormal investigators, seen in the popular Sci-Fi Channel reality show/soap opera series "Ghost Hunters." They go to haunted places and find "evidence" of ghosts such as cold spots, photographic anomalies called orbs, and other such spookiness.

The two featured investigators, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, are proudly blue-collar workers, not egghead Ph.D. scientists, which adds to their strong "regular guy" appeal.

Where are the ghosts?

While one doesn't need to be a scientist to search for ghosts, the pair (like most ghost hunters) could benefit greatly from a little critical thinking. They claim to be skeptics but are very credulous and seem to have no real understanding of scientific methods or real investigation. (Audiences don't seem to wonder why these "expert" ghost hunters always fail: Even after two seasons and over ten years of research, they still have yet to prove that ghosts exist!)

Though most ghost investigators' worst crime is wasting time, sometimes they make nuisances of themselves and even break the law.

In October 2005, three ghost hunters in Salem, Massachusetts, were arrested for trespassing on private property in search of ghosts. They had entered an abandoned hospital reputed to be haunted. The group was so busy looking for spirits they failed to notice the police station across the street; all three were arrested, fined, and sent home. Trespassing or vandalizing ghost hunters have also been arrested in cemeteries in Illinois, Connecticut, and other states.

Ghost detectors

When it comes to searching for ghosts, you'd think that only the most reliable methods would be used in an attempt to get solid evidence for something as mysterious and elusive as a spirit. Yet in ghost hunting, often the less scientific the methods and equipment, the more likely a researcher is to find "evidence" for ghosts.

Ghost hunters use a variety of creative—and dubious—methods to detect their quarry's presence, including psychics. Psychics not only claim to locate ghosts but also to communicate with the spirits, who unfortunately don't provide any useful or verifiable information from the afterlife [see a séance].

Virtually all ghost hunter groups claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, and infrared cameras [and sensitive microphones]. Yet the equipment is only as scientific as the person using it; you may own the world's most sophisticated thermometer, but if you are using it as a barometer, your measurements are worthless.

Just as using a calculator doesn't make you a mathematician, using a scientific instrument doesn't make you a scientist.

Devices that don't work

In 2003, while I was investigating a haunted house in Buffalo, New York, the owner of the house asked me what equipment I planned to use. He had glanced in my duffel bag, which contained two cameras, a tape recorder, notebooks, a tape measure, a flashlight, and a few other items. Perhaps he was expecting to see a Negative Ionizer Ghost Containment backpack like the kind Bill Murray wore in Ghostbusters.

An EMF meter is among the most common devices used by ghost hunters today. I spoke to Tom Cook, of TomsGadgets.com, a British purveyor of "scientific" paranormal kits for the enterprising (and gullible) investigator. Starter kits begin at £105 (US$180) and reach up to £500 (US$850) for a custom ghost-hunting kit. (Negative Ionizer Ghost Containment packs were not listed.)

I asked Cook what, exactly, the scientific rationale was behind the equipment he sold.

"At a haunted location," Cook said, "strong, erratic fluctuating EMFs are commonly found. It seems these energy fields have some definite connection to the presence of ghosts. The exact nature of that connection is still a mystery. However, the anomalous fields are easy to find. Whenever you locate one, a ghost might be present.... any erratic EMF fluctuations you may detect may indicate ghostly activity."

In the final analysis, Cook admitted, "there exists no device that can conclusively detect ghosts."

Uncomfortable reality

The uncomfortable reality that ghost hunters carefully avoid—the elephant in the tiny, haunted room—is of course that no one has ever shown that any of this equipment actually detects ghosts.

The supposed links between ghosts and electromagnetic fields, low temperatures, radiation, odd photographic images, and so on are based on nothing more than guesses, unproven theories, and wild conjecture. If a device could reliably determine the presence or absence of ghosts, then by definition, ghosts would be proven to exist. I own an EMF meter, but since it's useless for ghost investigations—it finds not spirits but red herrings—I use it in my lectures and seminars as an example of pseudoscience. The most important tools in this or any investigation are a questioning mind and a solid understanding of scientific principles.

The ghost hunters' anti-scientific illogic is clear: if one area of a home is colder than another, that may indicate a ghost; if an EMF meter detects a field, that too may be a ghost; if dowsing rods cross, that might be a ghost. Just about any "anomaly," anything that anyone considers odd for any reason, from an undetermined sound to a "bad feeling" to a blurry photo, can be (and has been) considered evidence of ghosts.

I was even at one investigation where a ghost supposedly caused a person's mild headache. Because the standard of evidence is so low, it's little wonder that ghost hunters often find "evidence" (but never proof) of ghosts.

Reality check

The whole idea of ghosts runs into trouble as soon as a little logic is applied.

There's not even agreement on what ghosts are—or might be. A common claim is that ghosts are spirits of the dead who have been wronged or murdered. Let's inject some real-world statistics into that assumption and see what we get.

If murder victims whose killings remains unsolved are truly destined to walk the earth and haunt the living, then we should expect to encounter ghosts nearly everywhere. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly a quarter of all homicides remains unsolved each year. (In fact, fewer homicides are solved now than in the past; in 1976, 79 percent of homicides were cleared, down to 64 percent in 2002.) There are about 30,000 homicides in America each year.

Using the most recent numbers, that's about 11,000 unsolved murders per year, and 110,000 over the course of only ten years, and probably well over million over the course of the twentieth century in America alone.

Where are all the ghosts?

And why aren't they helping to bring their killers to justice, with so many crimes unsolved? Why would they hang out in scary mansions instead of directing police to evidence that would avenge their murders?

For that matter, why are ghosts seen wearing clothing? It's one thing to suggest that a person's spirit has a soul that can be seen after death; but do shoes, coats, hats, and belts also have souls? Logically, ghosts should appear naked. The fact that they don't suggests that people's ideas of what ghosts are—and what they look like—are strongly influenced by social and cultural expectations. (For an excellent discussion of this, see Richard Finucane's book "Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead & Cultural Transformation.")

If ghosts exist, why are we no closer to finding out what they really are, after so much research?

The evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a year ago, a decade ago, or a century ago. Ultimately, ghost hunting is not about the evidence (if it was, the search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it's about having fun with friends, telling ghost stories, and the enjoyment of pretending you are searching the edge of the unknown. (It's also about making money selling "Ghost Hunters" T-shirts, books, and videos.) Ghost hunters may be spinning their wheels, but at least they are enjoying the ride.

Benjamin Radford, of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, has investigated ghosts and the paranormal for over a decade; you can read one of his haunted house investigations here.