Weird…

I haven’t been back to this blog in a while, but someone showed up to start a fight on an old post of mine, so I’ve been hashing it out with him for a few days. And it finally occurred to me to look at the site stats, and it seems that I’m still getting a surprising number of hits on this blog, to the tune of 3,500 a year. Now, that’s low enough to be largely explained by random robots and spammers, but it’s still a number that I find a little surprising in itself.

I’ve never been great at blogging in itself – the high volume of posting required to make it a worthwhile enterprise has always been something I’ve failed at. But maybe I can turn this into something more of an occasional-essay blog, and go from there. It seems to be worth thinking about …

Science is doing just fine, thank you very much.

Via Slashdot, I arrived at an editorial by Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal discussing science as being on the “credibility bubble”.  His argument seems to be that the “Climategate” nonsense has put the reputability of science in such a precarious position that any little push will render it completely irrelevant to the world around us. The article is fairly short, so I’m going to address it bit by bit.  Let’s start with the first three paragraphs.

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

Now, I can’t speak for all “serious men and women in the hard sciences”, but as someone trained in psychology and biology, I can tell you that I’ve never had anyone in either field wander up to me and say “Gee, those climatologists are sure dragging us down”.  Perhaps Henninger is right, and somewhere out there is a horde of reputable scientists who still believe that climate change is bunk.  This doesn’t matter in the slightest, of course, because science is based on evidence, and not the opinions of random scientists from other fields.

Now, apparently, science is at risk, or so Henninger tells us.  Firstly, “the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity”.  Huh.  If Henninger considers the claim that the Earth is experiencing an increase in average global temperatures to be a claim of “breathtaking complexity”, then he needs to stop writing editorials and head back to elementary school for some remedial education.  But let’s be charitable:  perhaps he was speaking of the evidence used to support those claims.  Indeed, the evidence for climate change is based on complex data, used by scientists who have trained most of their adult lives to properly collect, analyze, and interpret such data.  This is why we rely on a scientific consensus:  when many people, trained in the methodology of science, collect, analyze, and interpret climate change data and come up with the same answer, we call that strong evidence.  But hey, Henninger is just spouting the same easily spotted gibberish as most climate change deniers are:  the idea that hundreds of scientists across the globe have spent their entire careers laboriously faking terabytes of data, writing thousands of papers, and constantly battling deniers to maintain an elaborate fiction of climate change without a single one of them saying “To hell with all of this work, I’m going to sell my story to the tabloids and make millions” is far more plausible to these people than the idea that climate change is real. Secondly, we should fear that (or so Henninger says) “the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals”.  Well, I suppose that’s fair enough:  politics routinely tramples science in the mad dash to deny what it doesn’t wish to believe or deal with.  Science is routinely misused for all sorts of things, from quantum healing woo to “intelligent design” nonsense and everything in between.  But this is a failure of science communication, not the practice of science itself.

And lo, we should fear, for climate change is the face of science!  (This will be unwelcome news to just about every other scientific discipline, but let’s leave that aside).  Most people can’t name three other disciplines!  Well, I don’t have any data on that, though I am in serious doubt that people on the street couldn’t name three other disciplines if they have any idea what climate change is.  But even if he is right that the collective reputation of science hangs on the outcome of climate change, so what?  Climate change is a verifiable, demonstrable fact.  It’s not in doubt by anyone who has an informed opinion on the matter.  What we do about it, if we can even stop it, these are (as yet) unknowns.  But climate change has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen.  What the public believes cannot change that, it can only change what we do about it.  The strongest case that Henninger can make here is that “climategate” will hamper the efforts of sane and reasonable people to sit down and decide what to do about the crisis that faces us;  this is definitely a possibility, and as has been pointed out elsewhere, the timing of the CRU hack seems likely to have been timed in an effort to disrupt the Copenhagen talks.  This is a major problem of itself, but it confounds the first two issues that Henninger raised into one by confusing the process of science  (the “claims” of climate change in point one) with the communication of science (the trampling of science by politics in point two).

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously “unprovable” theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and “messy” as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

No, Daniel, you’re doing it wrong.  In fact, though the impacts on climate change discussion is entirely regrettable, the East Anglia affair is actually valuable for pointing out to lay people that science isn’t what you see in Hollywood.  It affords people a glimpse into the true world of science, which is messy and full of drama.  It works despite us, not because of us.  This was expressed best by an essay I read from Dr. Peter Watts:

Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?

There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity.

But that’s a myth too. The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can do— the best science can do— is make sure that at least, we get to choose among competing biases.

That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby. Every time you put out a paper, the guy you pissed off at last year’s Houston conference is gonna be laying in wait. Every time you think you’ve made a breakthrough, that asshole supervisor who told you you needed more data will be standing ready to shoot it down. You want to know how the Human Genome Project finished so far ahead of schedule? Because it was the Human Genome projects, two competing teams locked in bitter rivalry, one led by J. Craig Venter, one by Francis Collins — and from what I hear, those guys did not like each other at all.

This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time.

Read the essay in full:  it’s bloody brilliant.

Henninger’s accomplishment, if he’s achieved anything at all, is to point out that lay people need to be better informed about how the process of science really works as opposed to how it works on TV.  As my wife pointed out to me, anyone who thinks that there is a global conspiracy to push climate change on the public has never met a grad student or practicing scientist;  if we could climb over the smoldering corpses of our fellows with actual evidence against climate change in hand, there isn’t a scientist in the world who would hesitate to step all over the faces of anyone who got in his or her way.  The general public should know this, they should be brought into our world to see how it works, so that they can understand that anything which garners an approval as widespread as climate change has is the result of battles so epic that they would leave the bards speechless.  Henninger’s misunderstand of the process of science only deepens in the next two paragraphs:

The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State’s Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton’s Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Henninger seems desperate to live in a world where men and women in white coats stare down from the heavens and proclaim “The Truth”;  the world of uncertainty where we gather the best evidence we can and make decision on it seems to be his worst fear.  Because if Freeman Dyson says it ain’t so, than that’s good enough for Henninger.  Of course, this is just another logical fallacy, the argument from authority:

• Freeman Dyson is a brilliant scientist.
• Freeman Dyson says that climate change isn’t happening.
• Therefore climate change isn’t happening.

Note the complete lack of reference to the evidence in there.  Even Dyson himself has admitted that he knows little about the technical aspects of global warming (“My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.” source), and the fact that Dyson is a brilliant scientist in his field has nothing to do with the validity of his thoughts.  After all, people believed Linus Pauling about vitamin C because he was a brilliant scientist, even in the face of a complete lack of evidence to support his claims.  How many times does it have to be said:  this is a mistake.

I would spill more ink on the misuse of Gallileo as well, but surely you can see where I’m going with this by now.

I’ll deal with one more paragraph of Henninger’s editorial, and then the reader can disassemble the rest as an exercise:

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as “the precautionary principle.” As defined by one official version: “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The global-warming establishment says we know “enough” to impose new rules on the world’s use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science’s traditional standards of evidence.

Again, Daniel, you’re doing it wrong.  And again, you demand that lab coats from On High speak the Word of Truth, that there is no room for converging evidence and uncertainty.  The debate over climate change mirrors one that is closer to my heart, the debate over evolution, and the issues are the same.  The fact that climate change (evolution) has occurred is undeniable to even a cursory examination of the many lines of evidence that converge on the same answer.  The uncertainty over the exact mechanisms of climate change (evolution) and the changes needed to deal with it is not the same as saying that climate change is not real.  Both can be true:  we can be as certain as it is possible to be that climate change is happening, but still fight over how to fix it.

And so, Daniel, I implore you to learn a little bit more about what science is and how it actually works before you have the gall to instruct us on how to do it.  kthxbye.

Wikileaks obtains Kent Hovind’s Ph.D. “thesis”.

If you don’t know who Kent Hovind is, well, I count you among the fortunate people of this world.  So fortunate, in fact, that I recommend you navigate away from this page before I steal your innocence.

Are you gone?

…. Really?  You’re still here?

…. Okay, you get what you deserve, then.

Kent Hovind is a Young Earth creationist who has been railing against evolution for years;  he’s also famous for starting a creationist theme park in Florida called “Dinosaur Adventure Land”, and more recently, for going to jail for 10 years in 2006 for failing to pay years of taxes.  His theory was that he was a minister of God and because of that, everything he owned belonged to God and the US government had no right to tax him on money he received for doing God’s work.  The IRS, not surprisingly, was unamused by this.

I’ve never given Hovind too much thought, because let’s face it, he’s so nuts that other creationist organizations (like Answers in Genesis) have disavowed his antics.  But I’ve always been curious about his purported Ph.D in “Christian Education” from the Patriot University, which Hovind’s Wikipedia entry states is a non-accredited correspondence university.  And today, via Pharyngula, I learned that Wikileaks has obtained and published his “thesis”, which Hovind has refused to allow anyone to see up until this point.

Failing to share your Ph.D thesis is, at the least, a breach of scientific etiquette.  Common practice is to send a copy to anyone who asks for one;  usually, the university will have the thesis on file, or you can ask the person directly, but it’s bad form to withhold your thesis and doesn’t speak well of it.  However, having wasted about 10 minutes of my life reading the introduction and half of the first chapter, I can see why Hovind would be embarrassed to have anyone read it.  Putting aside his writing style, which reminds me of a high school student who has been socially promoted, the thesis is both breath-taking in its purported scope and inanity.  In the introduction, he claims that the ten chapters to follow will completely demolish evolution, and that’s not even the end of the thesis – it goes on for another six chapters after that.  How useful for creationists!  Sadly, the material seems to be a rehashing of arguments that were old even when he wrote this mess, but don’t let that stop you from amusing yourself for as long as you can stand it.

(Interestingly, he claims that the chapters of the thesis originate from his radio show, which I don’t know much about.  This is what passed for an original contribution to the scientific literature at Patriot University?)

I’ll leave you with a Hovind thesis quote:

While all of the evidence is not in yet, I feel it is still the best option to take God’s word at face value.  The Bible has never been proven wrong yet, and I believe it never will be.

Incompetent? Really?

CBC News – British Columbia – Jeweller who shot robber wants more gun rights.

The linked news article contains a story by the CBC about a jeweller named Dennis Galloway from Port Alberni, B.C. who used a 9-mm Beretta handgun when a robber and an accomplice entered his store, firing his entire magazine at the fleeing robber and hitting him five times in the shoulder and torso and eventually paralyzing him from the waist down.

But let’s leave aside the issue of gun rights, which is such a thorny problem that I really don’t want to end up in a discussion of it.  What I would like to discuss is the statements made by Galloway and others in the article about the gross incompetence of the police and the rampant crime in Canada.  Statements like:

“The police can’t control the crime anymore,” Dennis Galloway said. “The government isn’t controlling it anymore. We are relying on the politicians and the RCMP to take care of us — and we should all be responsible for our own safety and security.”

and some random bystander:

She agrees with Galloway on one point, however: the RCMP and the justice system in Canada are ineffective.

“Our law enforcement services are incompetent,” she said.

and Galloway again:

“I wish it had never come to this. The violence is escalating. In Canada, we don’t want that, but it’s here. And that’s scary. What do you do? Do you just lie down and let the criminals run the country?”

And here I thought that crime rates in Canada had been holding steady or declining for the last decade or so (at least).  Well, hey, I’m a scientist, and I like data.  Maybe I could find some?  But I’m sure that would be really difficult, and much harder than typing, say, “Canadian crime statistics” into Google… right?
Huh.  Will you look at that?  From Stats Canada, on the release of the 2008 Police-reported crime statistics figures (July 21st, 2009):

This was the fifth consecutive annual decline in police-reported crime. There were about 77,000 fewer reported crimes in 2008, including 28,000 fewer thefts of $5,000 and under, 22,000 fewer break-ins and 20,000 fewer motor vehicle thefts.

Crime severity was down in virtually all provinces. The largest decline was reported in Manitoba, where the Police-reported Crime Severity Index (PRCSI) was down 14%. The one notable exception was a 7% increase in the PRCSI in Prince Edward Island.

Note, of course, that this is the Police-Reported Crime Statistics.  This is important because criminologists are careful to point out that there is a “dark figure of crime”, which is the gap between the reported number of crimes and the actual number of crimes.

However, even if you believe that the PRCS figures are bunk, you would need an actual argument to back that up, and not just a “gee, the police are incompetent” blanket statement that tars the entire Canadian law enforcement community with a brush that they simply do not deserve.  Now, to be sure, the actual issue is more complex than even I’ve let on here.  For example, the statements by Galloway and bystanders might be more relevant if they were to complain about the local crime rate in Port Alberni, which does seem relatively high from the little information I could find on it with a casual search (e.g. this from UBC).  But I cannot abide sweeping statements that deride the police forces that (for better or for worse) try to keep us safe without even a shred of knowledge or effort behind them.

And the CBC’s response to these rants?  A single quote by the RCMP officer they interviewed by this story, stuck in as the last line:

Oumilouski said the force is working on the problem.

“And time is on our side. Our conviction rate is going up and our crime rates are going down.”

Really, truly, they are.

(Oh, and for a laugh, check out the comments).

One of the virtues of TV …

… is that it doesn’t go down when you try to refresh the site to get the latest election results.  Not like some sites I know … <cough>, <cough>CNN<cough>,<cough>.

Lisp – wow, that’s a weird feeling.

I’ve been holed up in my office lately, teaching myself Common Lisp for an upcoming part of my Ph.D, and I have to tell ya, it’s a weird feeling to write code in Lisp.  I read through Peter Seibel’s great online book Practical Common Lisp, which is an absolutely brilliant resource for first time Lispers, especially those coming from other languages.  (I will admit to a bit of irony, though:  I downloaded the book and wrote a Python script to HTMLize the footnotes into links so that I could jump back and forth without having to continually figure out where the hell I had been when I went to read that note).

In any case, I just finished my first “real” program in Lisp – real in that it was done entirely on my own and required more than 5 lines of code, though the problem I “solved” was an imaginary one.  It’s one of those throwaway efforts to acquaint yourself with a new way of thinking.  I went into it thinking that Lisp was overblown, one of those things that people looked back on fondly with rose-colored glasses while muttering about how “real programmers used to do it”, but by the time I was finished writing the thing, I found that I was actually enjoying myself.  I can’t even explain why, but by the end of writing the program, I was actively looking for new ways to extend the idea so that I could keep writing code!  And now, I find myself looking forward to my next program in Lisp, a far cry from where I started.

(If you’re wondering what I was writing, it’s kind of embarassing, but here it is:  I wrote a program to quantify the cost to typing words on a keyboard from the perspective of a single-finger, one-handed typist.  The “cost” is distance – i.e. how far would the finger have to travel – defined by adjacent keys, so that ‘T’ and ‘E’ are two units apart (‘T’ -> ‘R’ -> ‘E’).  I did this using cl-graph to map the keys onto a graph, and wrote an implementation of Djikstra’s algorithm to calculate the distances between key pairs.  I could then calculate the distance between each pair of letters in a word and sum the distances to get the total cost, which I then averaged over the length of the word so that the penalty for long words was minimized.  After that, it was a snap to write a couple of functions to do things like take in a word list and write out each word with its associated cost, or to get the total cost of a string.  See?  Told you it was trivial. 🙂 )

Scientific salaries.

And this is why you don’t go into academia for the money.

10% of our brains, eh?

I love Greg Dean’s webcomic, Real Life.  It has some moments of true hilarity in it, and I find the characters enjoyable enough that I’m thrilled to see each new comic pop up in my RSS feeds.  But today’s comic contains a howler which I just can’t let pass. If you don’t want to go read it, the fun is in the final panel where one of the characters says “Hey, it’s not like you were using the other 90% of your brain anyway.”

Now, if you’re literate about neuroscience in any way, this will immediately strike you as stupid;  the myth about human beings using only 10% of their brains is wrong, and that’s been known for decades.  But to be honest, I could have let this go and just read the comic, until I came across a posting in the Real Life Forums by Greg himself, as part of an exchange with another person who commented on this problem:

[BEGIN QUOTE]

Kovac wrote:gaghWhy would you contribute to the myth that humans only use 10% of our brains?

It is for the purpose of a joke, but it just isnt worth it

Allow me to quote Scientific American, so you foreigners can quit being such dicks about it. (Seriously, I’ve recieved another e-mail from someone else today telling us Americans to quit being so ignorant. Is this just a pet peeve of everyone on the other side of an ocean from us, or something?)Anyway, as I was saying:

Scientific American wrote:Another mystery hidden within our crinkled cortices is that out of all the brain’s cells, only 10 percent are neurons; the other 90 percent are glial cells, which encapsulate and support neurons, but whose function remains largely unknown. Ultimately, it’s not that we use 10 percent of our brains, merely that we only understand about 10 percent of how it functions.

NOW. While I will grant you that the concept that “we only use 10% of our brains” is silly, it’s also been used for DECADES as the basis for a lot of fun “what-if” style storytelling. Powder and Phenomenon are two excellent movies that come to mind which deal specifically with this idea. So, I think what I’m saying is, quit being such a fucktard about something so INSIGNIFICANTLY POINTLESS as this, and just try to enjoy the fucking comic.  I’m sorry if I’m getting a little on the offensive here, but this pedantic bullshit just pisses me off. Especially when it’s passed off in the guise of “Gee, you Americans sure are stupid.” (I know you didn’t do that specifically, but that was the tone of the other e-mail I recieved, and it stuck in my craw a little.)

[END QUOTE]

Uh, wow.

Here’s a couple of points in response, Greg:

• Really – you’re going to base your argument on the past usage of science in media?  Seen a lot of 50-foot tall women in the talkies lately?  How about books about a guy who goes to the moon by being shot out of a cannon?  Even Marvel is smart enough to keep up with advances in our knowledge, if you’ve seen the re-write of the Spider-man origin in the Ultimates universe (from a radioactive spider to a genetically altered one).
• To people who don’t know any better, you’re propagating the idea that there is some locked-away 90% of our brain that would turn us into magical super-heroes if we could only access it.  This is a lie, Greg, and it is part of a real issue;  scientific literacy in the United States, where you’re from, is shockingly low. This makes you part of the problem.

Scientists like me struggle every day to correct the misconceptions of science in the public’s view, so you’ll have to forgive us if hearing that we should just shut our yap – because you’re too lazy to come up with a plot point that doesn’t depend upon a thoroughly discredited idea from well over a century ago – is a problem for us.  And if it’s such an insignificant point (as you say to us ‘fucktards’), why can’t you just get it right?

Oh, and Greg, as for your quoting of the Scientific American article:  way to cherry-pick.  The “ultimately we only understand 10% of how it functions” bit is a rhetorical closing at the end of the article.  I prefer this quote from the middle of the piece:

Adding to that mystery is the contention that humans “only” employ 10 percent of their brain. If only regular folk could tap that other 90 percent, they too could become savants who remember π to the twenty-thousandth decimal place or perhaps even have telekinetic powers.

Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there’s no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” It’s also been associated with to Albert Einstein, who supposedly used it to explain his cosmic towering intellect.

Emphasis mine.  Or how about this one, from the same article?

Although it’s true that at any given moment all of the brain’s regions are not concurrently firing, brain researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body’s muscles, most are continually active over a 24-hour period. “Evidence would show over a day you use 100 percent of the brain,” says John Henley, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Even in sleep, areas such as the frontal cortex, which controls things like higher level thinking and self-awareness, or the somatosensory areas, which help people sense their surroundings, are active, Henley explains.

p.s. Greg, I’m Canadian, not American, so consider my pedantry  to be a message from your own side of the ocean.

Seminar Flow Chart

If I were inclined to say it in that special Intertubes way, I’d say:  OMG!!@!  Thiz is sooooo me!!1!1!

“Total Biology” comes to Canada…

The CBC is reporting on the spread of “total biology” to Canada;  this story is the first that I’ve heard of this tripe:

A new therapy that claims to cure cancer and other diseases but has been blamed for dozens of deaths in Europe is gaining popularity in Canada, according to a Radio-Canada investigation.

“Total biology” is a therapeutic approach that claims illness is caused by psychological conflicts in the brain.

The approach, also known as new medicine or bio-psycho-genealogy, professes to heal all disease, including AIDS and advanced forms of cancer.

The method is gaining traction in Quebec where patients are often told to ignore their cancer, or stop medical treatment altogether, according to an investigation by CBC’s French-language service.

Some European practitioners have been convicted for illegally practising medicine and another is being sued — but in Quebec, total biology’s proponents are active in more than 30 Quebec cities.

The founder of total biology, Dr. Claude Sabbah, claims that up to 90 per cent of all illnesses are caused by messages from the medical community.

He teaches his approach in six-day seminars offered in France and Canada. He tells students that cancer and other diseases are formed in the brain first, and must be deprogrammed.

During the investigation, Radio-Canada journalists went undercover with hidden cameras seeking medical advice about fictitious diseases.

One of the journalists claimed to have breast cancer. She visited several total biology practitioners who told her that her life was not in danger, and the lump in her breast was the result of a maternal conflict.

She was recommended to stop chemotherapy altogether. During another visit a practitioner told her to drink champagne and relax.

Wow.  It seems that people will believe just about anything.  I want to be angry at the people who are buying into this woo, but I really can’t;  I can only feel sorrow for them.  The drive to understand tragedy and gain control over an illness in your life is strong, and I understand how these sorts of snake-oil peddlers use that to their advantage, but it makes it even more important that we educate people on the basics of medicine and science so that they can protect themselves.