What is the best way to regulate practitioners of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM)? When tackling this thorny issue, we first need to ask: what is the main purpose of regulation in healthcare? Practitioners of SCAM often lobby for regulation because they feel it might give them a better recognition (and income). But that is most certainly not what regulation should be about. Any effective regulation must foremost be for protecting the public.
Protecting against what?
I have no doubt that most SCAM practitioners are full of good intentions and only wish the best for their patients. But many are not adequately educated and trained to be medically and ethically competent. And yet, under the self-regulation (that currently governs most types of SCAM practitioners in the UK) they happily diagnose, treat, and advise patients, even those with serious conditions. This overt mismatch of professional competence on the one side and clinical responsibility on the other side must inevitably put patients in danger. Therefore, self-regulation cannot possibly be the best way forward.
The other solution would be regulation by statute (as is currently the case for chiropractors and osteopaths in the UK). The statutes would need to ensure that practitioners abide by the fundamental rules of medical ethics and treat their patients according to the best evidence currently available. But this creates two rather awkward problems:
In case this sounds a bit harsh, a simple example might explain. Imagine that a patient suffering from abdominal pain consults an osteopath. The practitioner wants to use spinal manipulations but, in order to comply with informed consent, she would need to tell the patient that:
this treatment has not been shown to be effective for the condition in question,
it is not free of risks, and
it lacks plausibility.
In addition, the osteopath would be obliged to inform the patient that she cannot be sure about the cause of the pain which might even be a cancer, and that a proper doctor would be in a far better position to make a full diagnosis and determine the most effective therapy. Does anyone really think that the average osteopath is going to do all this, and lose their patient and fee in the course of it?
Even such a simple example shows how problematic any truly adequate regulation of SCAM practitioners is. Governments across the globe have struggled with this conundrum and have implemented compromises of various types. Without exception, they have one major disadvantage: they create a double standard in healthcare, where strict rules are applied for conventional and more liberal ones for SCAM practitioners. But double standards are far from desirable.
So, is there a solution?
If it was up to me, I would insist on one single standard across the board. This means that sound evidence has to come before regulation. If SCAM practitioners can produce convincing evidence that a particular SCAM, say spinal manipulation, does more good that harm for a defined condition, they should be allowed to use it in the management of that specific problem. If, however, the evidence is absent or unconvincing, the regulation must prevent them from using it.
I am fully aware that this would put many SCAM practitioners out of business – but, as mentioned above, regulation must be for protecting the public and not for boosting the ego or the income of practitioners.
Weight loss is just about calories in and calories out, right? We’ve all heard this a lot, and after all it’s simple physics. You take calories into your body, and you use them in the course of daily living and exercise. If there’s a surplus you store it, if there’s a deficit you lose weight. Simple. And trivially, it’s even true. But it’s actually a lot more complicated that, to the point where such a simplistic maxim can be cruelly misleading.
Calories in
Surely this bit’s easy. There are calorie labels on everything. A calorie is a specific, unchanging, amount of energy. The energy in any food can be precisely calculated, so calories in must be cut and dried? Obviously not or we’d not be discussing it. We can leave aside the inevitable errors made because ingredient composition and portion sizes vary, even in standard meals. Although these variations can be quite high, they are obvious, and a deviation most people are happy to accept. What is more important, and more subtle, is the format of the food.
Many people have noticed that eating a certain number of calories from some foods impacts weight loss differently from the same number of calories from different foods. One reason for this is the bioavailability of what’s in the food, given how it has been prepared. Tree nuts, for example have significantly fewer calories when consumed whole as opposed to when ground. This is because the food matrix is disrupted, increasing the bioavailablity of the energy in the nuts. The same is true of smoothies, compared with their unblitzed ingredients.
There is a similar story for ultra-processed foods. Processing food has a long history. Many methods maintain, or even improve, the nutritional value of the food. The levels of processing vary from simple mashing, canning and freezing, through to smoking, curing and fermenting.
Ultra-processed foods, in contrast, have ingredients (often in the form of various chemicals) added during commercial processing. Skeptics have often scoffed at the idea that if you haven’t heard of it, or can’t pronounce it, then you ought to be wary. Everything is, after all, a chemical, and that the chemical terms for well-known foods may be unpronounceable is also a truism. But foods aren’t known by their chemical names.
One way to think about this is to list the ingredients you may use to bake a cake, then read the ingredients on a commercially produced cake, and ask yourself what the additions are. Their purpose is simple: to improve the taste, colour, mouthfeel, longevity or stability of the cake. But their addition makes the food ultra-processed, and we now know that this ultra-processing can have negative consequences in terms of diet quality, gut flora and calorie density.
So although the calories on the label may be identical to, or even less than, a similar meal you have made yourself, they will have different effects on your short and long term health and weight. Alternatively, you may discover, after the fact, that you just ate a great deal more, in terms of excess energy, than it had appeared.
Calories out
Our calorie expenditure is just as tricksy as our intake. Many of us have watched the calories ticking up on the treadmill, or have read just how far we have to walk to burn off 100 calories. As you may suspect, this is worse than guesswork, and is more akin to wishful thinking, calculated as if we were machines, rather than the complex biological beings we are.
There are two main ways this complexity manifests. Firstly, in our exercise response. When we start a new form of exercise, we may indeed burn a fair amount of energy, but as we become more practiced, we have biological adaptations which kick in. Our muscles become more efficient, requiring fewer calories for the same effort.
Secondly, if we try to lose weight by limiting our intake, we have biological adaptations for that too. Before our current over-abundance of food, in some parts of the world, we were subject to repeated famine. Those most able to survive these famines are those who passed on their genes. We have been gifted, in this way, with a complex famine response which has a number of effects. We become hungry, often with a desire to binge on energy dense foods, we become cold and lose our libido, we fidget less. All with the result that our energy requirements go down, and the same intake no longer leads to weight loss
Other factors
People’s appetites – not something under a great deal of control – come in for close, often unkind, scrutiny from other people. Resisting food is pretty easy if you feel satiated, but it can feel impossibly difficult if you’re hungry. Some people are simply hungrier than others. People who wouldn’t dream of accusing a heroin addict or an alcoholic of lack of will power often happily level the same accusation at the hungry. The hormones which regulate our appetite are currently a major area of research, but we do know that they interact with, and contribute to, our psychological attitude towards food, and in fact the first appetite hormones available in drug form are just appearing on the market.
Our gut microbiome is another major area of research at the moment. We are discovering that it has a significant effect on many aspects of health, and it is encouraging that we can affect this by what we eat. Keeping it well-fed and diverse looks likely to have a big effect on our weight and general health.
And the much vaunted willpower? In brief it’s unreliable, ineffective and we are inordinately good at weaselling our way round it. Decision fatigue, although more complex that we originally thought, is real. What we all know from experience is that it takes one brief craving too much, combined with a brief loss of focus, to render hours of willpower irrelevant.
So, in summary, calories in/calories out is a physics-based truism which makes for a simple slogan, and a nice stick to beat unsuccessful dieters with, but reality is far more complicated than that.
Does that mean that healthy weight loss is impossible? Not necessarily, and there are times when someone may have a specific reason for needing to lose weight. Calorie restriction, however, very rarely leads to long term weight loss, and overall health is more important than weight. It is easy, with our current UK diet, to both become unhealthy and to gain weight, so cultivating a good relationship with food is sensible. A good first step might be to keep ultra-processed food to a minimum, feed your gut bacteria, don’t starve, and exercise. And the next time some smug know-it-all tells you that energy balance is a simple matter of physics, you’ll know that they are simply wrong,
Thirty years ago today, on April 19th, 1993, the standoff that David Koresh and the Branch Davidians held against the US government came to an end. Ultimately eighty-six people were killed. Those tragic events in Waco, Texas, are now revisited in Netflix’s Waco: American Apocalypse. The documentary is informative to the extent that it features survivors, and presents footage and soundbites of Koresh’s interactions with the FBI’s negotiators. But it largely leaves apocalyptic beliefs out of the picture, preferring to present Koresh as a psychopathic opportunist who merely used religion to advance his own personal carnal and material goals.
There are strong reasons to believe that Koresh was actually sincere in his apocalyptic endeavor. A much more accurate approach to Koresh and the Branch Davidians is presented by Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in his recently published book, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End. Ehrman explains that
as the story unfolded over the next few days, it became clear that the besieged group of Davidians were following what they understood to be divine principles laid out in the book of Revelation.
Conspicuously absent from the Netflix documentary is James Tabor, a scholar who volunteered to engage with Koresh in matters of apocalyptic interpretation, so as to persuade him to lay down arms, using his own eschatological worldview. The FBI dismissed all of that as “Bible babble,” opting to deal with Koresh as if he were a conventional criminal – the same way that they deal with, say, a bank robber holding hostages. It did not end well.
Ehrman’s book is a testament to the oft quoted saying, “ideas have consequences.” The tragic story of Koresh was triggered by his fascination with the book of Revelation. In the late first Century, a mysterious author by the name of John on the island of Patmos – most likely a different person than John the apostle, or the author of the fourth gospel – wrote letters to seven churches and put in writing a series of visions about the end of the world. In the midst of perceived oppression – both real and imagined – John foresaw a time when God would violently set things right, turn the tables against the oppressor, and vindicate the oppressed. When would it happen? Ehrman insists that:
John certainly believes that what he has described in this mysterious narrative is to happen soon.
The opening of the seven seals, the deeds of the whore of Babylon, and the invasion of Gog and Magog, were supposed to be right around the corner.
Of course, nothing of the kind has come to pass. But two thousand years later, readers of this bizarre book are still mystified by John’s announcements and refuse to come to terms with the fact that he was just plain wrong. When so much hope is invested in some apocalyptic event, believers are likely to somehow reinterpret the original failed prophecies as if they had a different meaning, so as to keep believing in them. Psychologists call this process “cognitive dissonance.” One of the most dangerous of such cognitive dissonances is found amongst current enthusiasts who interpret the book of Revelation, not as a series of failed prophecies and bizarre visions in the context of the 1st Century, but rather, as a blueprint for things that are yet to come in our times.
John is yet another failed apocalyptic prophet, one of the first in the long list of doomsayers that have colored the history of Christianity. It is easy for liberal Christians to distance themselves from such apocalyptic enthusiasts, and Ehrman narrates at some length how in the history of the formation of the New Testament canon, not everyone was convinced that the book of Revelation should have been included.
But liberal Christians cannot simply let go of Jesus, so they transform him into something far removed from the real historical person. Their Jesus is akin to some modern-day hippie who preaches love and tolerance and has nothing to do with apocalyptic firebrands. In this book, Ehrman is not greatly concerned with Jesus or his teachings, but he has made a career debunking the rosy view of Jesus, and instead, has profiled him as a fiery apocalyptic preacher. Not unlike John, Jesus announces terrible things to come — as in Revelation, in some of Jesus’ speeches there is the expectation that God would violently intervene so as to set things right— and insists that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” As with all apocalyptic preachers of his time, Jesus announced the imminence of such events. He was wrong.
This raises an interesting question: if Jesus was no twentieth century university liberal campus activist, was he more similar to the likes of David Koresh? Nowadays, it is all too easy for people to say that Branch Davidians are a “cult,” whereas Christianity is a “religion.” But what exactly is the difference between both concepts? In my view, it is a very arbitrary distinction; a cult is simply a religion one does not like.
Jesus and Koresh were both charismatic young men who were consumed by apocalyptic fantasies. Admittedly, there are important differences between the two. We now know that Koresh sexually abused children, whereas there is no indication that Jesus ever did such horrible things. While Jesus expected God alone to intervene, he likely did not seek to carry out the violence himself; in contrast, Koresh took a dramatically more active approach to apocalyptic violence.
But both men were driven by grievances, and we know that such circumstances are fertile grounds for apocalyptic enthusiasm. Jesus lived the harsh reality of Roman occupation. In contrast, it is easy to think that Koresh — a white American male in 20th Century America— underwent no oppression. But on a personal level he struggled with many things — including dyslexia and social alienation — and the way he met his end raises questions about how benevolent the US government was. The Netflix documentary aptly presents many of the shortcomings in the way the US government handled the situation, and this eventually played into the narrative of terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh.
Can something good ever come out of apocalyptic frenzies? I doubt it. But in the case of Jesus and the book of Revelation — and to a certain extent Koresh— one can understand that such fantasies convey a message of desperation. Disturbingly, that is not the way current apocalyptic enthusiasm works. While grassroot apocalypticism persists in many places, its most dangerous variant is manufactured from above. Cynical politicians and businesspeople have noticed that they can profit from pandering to regular people’s apocalyptic expectations, and doomsday mongering has become an industry in and of itself. While John wrote from exile in Patmos in adverse circumstances, Left Behind is a multimillion-dollar franchise.
David Koresh is largely abhorred for all the havoc he wreaked. But he was a little fish. We should be more worried about the big fish. Those are the lobbyists who influence the highest echelons of power, so as to carry out what, in their view, are the necessary events to accelerate Jesus’ second coming. They are the ones who are eager to fume the flames of conflict in the Middle East, and who water their mouths every time a catastrophic event happens, all in alleged fulfillment of a script written by a strange visionary mystic on the island of Patmos two millennia ago.
There are a few things these cults have in common – but one of them is that they all are or were based in the US. It’s very easy to get the impression that cults just can’t really happen over here in Britain. Maybe you think we’re just too cynical a bunch to fall for some charismatic leader’s claims of peace and love changing the world? But Catrin Nye would disagree with that impression. Because she’s spent the best part of two years researching a potential cult on our very own shores.
The podcast follows the story of Jeff who, when he joined a reading group online, was picked up by the book club leader, Jai. According to the show, Jeff became Jai’s mentee, and would go on to spend £10,000 for a mentoring course to improve his discipline; Jeff wanted to hike to the South Pole, something that would require a remarkable amount of discipline.
Two years later, Jeff says he had given £131,000 to Lighthouse. He’d sold his house, become a ‘Lighthouse Associate Elect’ and was spending five to six hours a day from 5am on long calls, where Lighthouse leader Paul Waugh would talk at length about ‘toxic families’ and the ‘four levels’ of person you could be. Only Paul had reached the top level of ascension, level four; other members of Lighthouse were at lowly level one, but he could help them ascend. Each of these calls were recorded, transcribed and stored to make sure not a single word spoken by Paul was lost.
Jeff still hadn’t made it to the South Pole. In fact, none of the people Catrin spoke to over the course of the show apparently ever really achieved any of their goals, but they did spend day after day on hours and hours of calls, sometimes in houses shared with other Lighthouse members (one property owner believes eight people shared the six-bedroom house she rented to Lighthouse).
What A Very British Cult does remarkably well is to humanise these stories. We can all be guilty of finding stories about cults a little too salacious – we focus on the most horrific stories until we become so desensitised that jokes about “drinking the Kool-Aid” are completely divorced from their gruesome context. But it’s easy to forget that the people caught up in cults can be completely ordinary people, people with dreams and aspirations and goals.
Erin (not her real name), an ex-Lighthouse member Catrin spoke to, had experienced incredible trauma in her childhood, and had recently gone through a divorce, whereas Jeff had a relatively happy upbringing, and was in a relatively happy relationship. Nevertheless, their time in Lighthouse alienated them both from their families and loved ones to some degree, fostering a reliance on the safety and support of Lighthouse itself. Erin wanted to set up a business; Jeff wanted to hike to the South Pole – goals and aspirations that they were told Lighthouse could help with.
Catrin’s skill is in asking the difficult questions that get to the core of how and why each of the ex-members she spoke to believed in Lighthouse enough to give them tens of thousands of pounds of money they often didn’t have. She deftly exposes the depth of the damage that has been done to them, and the ways in which she believes this ‘life coaching company’ is arguably a cult.
What A Very British Cult exposes is something very real, very raw and very relatable. The podcast shows step by step how people are drawn in, gradually, slowly over time, in a way that any ordinary person might if they were exposed to these encounters. When Catrin explains that Lighthouse might have looked for people who were recently made redundant when a travel agent went out of business, I thought of family members who lost their jobs around the pandemic and how vulnerable they might have been in a similar situation.
When members try to leave Lighthouse, the podcast describes how leader Paul Waugh would switch from compassionate and supportive life coach to aggressive… and back again, several times. We hear audio of Paul telling Erin that she’s “so fucked up”. When Jai thought about leaving, he explains that Paul “loved him through it”, and we hear audio of Paul claiming he “tucked Jai away for six years” in which he “never talked to anyone” outside of Lighthouse. Jai, as the BBC found in their investigation, has CCJs for £20,000 worth of debt; Paul, by contrast, has no debt, and lives in a very large house.
Ultimately, the BBC weren’t the only ones investigating Lighthouse and the company was wound down by the courts for business failings just last month – in fact, the day before A Very British Cult launched. The details of the court case and a hostile conversation between Catrin and Paul are aired in the final episode of the show.
The podcast is a gripping listen, it delves deep into how Lighthouse works and comprehensively makes the case that this organisation is a cult. It describes the very deep harm its ex-members have suffered, and touches on the experiences of family members of those still inside the group. It also shows the humanity and bravery of the ex-members highlighted, it shows compassion for those Lighthouse members still inside the group, and it does it all while being engaging, and very listenable.
In early April 1954, car owners in Bellingham, a sleepy dormitory town lying between Seattle and the Canadian border, noticed small, almost imperceptible dents, chips and pitting on their car windscreens. The search for the cause of this phenomena would frustrate authorities so much it caused alarms to be rung in Washington D.C.; and fear and panic to spread across several states.
The residents of Bellingham concluded that local teenage hoodlums were to blame so reported the vandalism to authorities. The police agreed that BB guns or buckshot fired by kids was the likely cause, despite no windscreen-hating teenagers getting caught in the act.
The story was picked up by local radio stations and newspapers. Within hours, residents in towns stretching out south along the I-5 Interstate to Seattle began reporting similar damage.
In the morning of 13th April, car owners on an island community in the Puget Sound checked their vehicles and found their windscreens damaged. State troopers and other law enforcement quickly blocked the bridge linking the town to the mainland and conducted searches hoping to catch the culprits, but still nothing was found that could account for the damage.
Further south, nearer Seattle, at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, 75 US Marines locked-down their base and conducted extensive, but fruitless, searches after discovering several cars in the car park with damaged windscreens.
The state Auto club offered $500 reward in the hunt for whoever or whatever was causing this mysterious damage.
On Whidbey Island itself, after extensive investigation the police chief concluded that “no human agency” could be the cause, instead blaming the recent H-Bomb tests in the Pacific – even running Geiger counters over the scarred windscreens, but with negative results.
At this stage authorities realised two things: this was clearly too big to be the work of a few destructive teenagers; and that whatever was causing it, it was headed for Seattle.
Fear spreads
Two days after the first reports had started in Bellingham, Seattle newspapers and radio stations reported widely on the phenomena approaching their city. The authorities braced for impact. Within hours police were receiving reports of dented windscreens: three cars in a parking lot at 6th Avenue; a windscreen pitted at N 82nd Street; and even damaged police cars parked in front of several precinct buildings across the county. Before long motorists were flagging down police cars to file reports.
The King County sheriff (the county that covers most of Seattle) and his deputies examined 15,000 vehicles and, like the Whidbey Island sheriff, blaming non-human causes, adding that ordinary road use could not account for the scarring.
By the end of April 15th, over 3000 reports had been filed, and still no one knew what to do or what was causing such widespread and sudden damage.
The following day was the peak of the outbreak. The Associated Press reported that the sole topic of conversation in nearby Tacoma was the fact that “thousands of automobiles have windshields marred in some manner by some unknown force”. The Tacoma Police Chief called out the army reserves for a “Round the clock vigil” after his department had received reports of damage to hundreds of cars.
Workers parked at huge Boeing Aircraft factory covered their cars’ windshields with blankets, cardboard, rugs and even shopping bags to protect their pride and joy.
What appeared to be a localized outbreak of vandalism in damaged auto windshields and windows in the northern part of Washington State has now spread throughout the Puget Sound area. Chemical analysis of mysterious powder adhering to damaged windshields and windows indicates the material may simply be spread by wind and not a police matter at all. Urge appropriate federal (and state) agencies be instructed to cooperate with local authorities on emergency basis.
In the suburb of Anacortes, police officials had placed a sheet of glass on the roof of the station and for two days it remained unblemished. Then miraculously, on the third day, it had two distinct pits. According to Police Chief L. B. Goff, the glass (now marked as exhibit ‘A’) was left to see what developed next.
Science (nearly) intervenes
Authorities were completely baffled. One common trait seemed to be an accumulation of dark particulate matter often embedded in the glass or around the damaged area.
Using the latest scientific techniques, one amateur scientist reported:
I touched a hole with a toothpick and nothing happened. But when I touched it with a lead pencil the particulates around the pockmark jumped away!
Another blamed road salt used the recent bad weather somehow combining with hydrogen to form hydrofluoric acid.
Further weird and outlandish hypotheses were being blamed, including:
Cosmic rays from the sun.
A nearby 1 million-watt radio transmitter owned by the Navy.
A mysterious and previously unknown weather event.
Sand-flea eggs. Some people swore blind they had seen the glass bubble and scar in front of their very eyes!
Secret Communist Russian experiments on freedom loving ‘Mericans.
It seemed the whole of Puget Sound was caught in some sort of strange and weird phenomena which damaged their car windscreens. The authorities feared panic.
Science Actually Intervenes
Eventually, scientists at the University of Washington were asked to investigate by the state governor. They quickly discovered the particulate matter was in fact coal dust – something that was in the air in most urban areas in the 1950’s. Larger particles were found to be bitumen, likely thrown up from the road surface itself.
The boffins inspected cars in the university car park and found what they could describe as pitting and scarring on many vehicles, but concluded that the damage was “overly emphasized,” and that it was most likely “the result of normal driving conditions in which small objects [such as bitumen and airborne coal dust] strike the windshields of cars.”
The fact that most of the damage occurred in the front windscreen and much more often on older cars, along with the identification of airborne coal dust, lent credence to this simple explanation. This was in the days before the toughened safety glass we have today.
Essentially, because of the media reports, people had started looking at their windscreens instead of through them, and noticed for the first time the damage that had simply built up over normal use.
With a couple of days, the reports stopped as quickly as they had started.
The scare – which happened over just a few days in April 1954 – is a classic tale of mass panic, and is often quoted in psychology texts. As an example, it shows how news and media can create and amplify fears where no legitimate cause exists.
Once the media reported on a few people who had mislabelled normal windscreen wear as something unknown and mysterious, the public began to notice this new and worrisome phenomenon, without stopping to consider if this really was something new. It was easier and more exciting to run with the mystery narrative, rather than stop to look for a much more prosaic and ordinary solution.
If you ever yearn for a healthy diet of Science and critical thinking then you can always make a pilgrimage to a conference like QED, or find a local Skeptics in the Pub group. There’s also plenty of great content to be consumed online, with fascinating documentaries, excellent YouTube channels, and even some Science-friendly TikTok-ers doing their best to stem the tide of misinformation on the fledgling platform.
As satisfying as all of this is, there’s nothing quite like a random encounter with Skepticism in regular broadcasting. The heart-warming feeling that there’s a writer or performer out there who shares some common values, mixed with the hope that people outside of the choir we normally preach to might be compelled to think more critically forms an exquisite synaptic cocktail.
As with most cocktails though, one never seems quite enough (or is that just me?), so I’d like to invite you to come binge drinking with me as we take a journey through ten tastebud-tingling samples of Skepticism in the wild. Before you imbibe though, please note the rules of my metaphorical drinking game which may have prevented some of your favourite content from making my list: we’re looking at genuine cases where Skepticism has cropped up (at least somewhat) organically here, so shows that are already science-heavy, or run regularly along themes of reason and critical thinking don’t make the cut.
That means no place for the likes of Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Simpsons (although you can get a good Lisa Simpson chaser courtesy of The Skeptic’s own Trevour Sloughter), and skeptics’ favourite kids show Scooby Doo, which regularly ends with the unmasking of a very much alive (and usually greedy) human behind a supposed paranormal threat. We’re also steering clear of the X-Files, and the heated debate about whether Scully qualifies as being a skeptic, due to her continued disbelief in alien visitation and other supernatural phenomena despite multiple direct encounters by the end of the second season.
Ok, so hopefully the preamble above has lined your stomach. Here goes:
10. Parks & Recreation S6E8: Fluoride
With the prospect of access to a neighbouring town’s reservoir, Pawnee is on the cusp of having fluoridated water for the first time in its history. Considering the ongoing controversy over what should be a no-brainer (and minimal-cavity) public health measure such as water fluoridation, it’s refreshing for both the mental and dental health of skeptics to see a positive stance on the show. Of course, being Parks and Recreation, shenanigans ensue: the dark opposing forces of Big-Dentist leverage chemophobia and the naturalistic fallacy (plus our first mention of Jenny McCarthy of the evening) to foment discontent. The response is a masterful piece of re-branding, which we could perhaps consider for the real world (albeit with a little refinement).
9. Jackie Kashian: Empaths
Always witty, but never offensive, Jackie Kashian has been in the stand-up comedy business for over twenty years. A compelling storyteller, her content ranges from day-to-day family and relationship tales, to thornier topics such as sexual harassment and police brutality. In her latest special there are plenty of offenders who catch her critical eye, including some very astute observations about people who believe in ghosts, but the closest she comes to ire is her razor-sharp takedown of so-called ‘empaths’.
8. The West Wing S1E2: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Back in the days when portraying the US President as competent and knowledgeable didn’t stretch credulity too far, The West Wing ran for seven seasons, picking up a slew of awards along the way. Skeptic Points are already on the board for naming the entire episode after a logical fallacy, and it doesn’t disappoint as President Bartlet (played to perfection by Martin Sheen) gives his advisors a lesson about faulty thinking.
7. South Park S6 E15: The Biggest Douche in the Universe
At the time of writing, South Park has just celebrated its 25th birthday. First aired in March of 1998 they’ve taken a scattergun approach to plotlines, frequently picking up the talking point du jour and roasting it mercilessly, for better or worse. Occasionally insightful, but not often enough to result in missing the cut in the same way as the Simpsons, their skewering of John Edward is a near-perfect takedown of the celebrity psychic phenomenon.
6. Asterix and the Soothsayer
Many skeptics may be somewhat surprised to see the diminutive Gaul making it on to this list. Not only is there frequent consumption of a ‘magic potion’ which gives his tribe super strength, but there’s also an occasion in Britain of all places when they run out of the aforementioned potion and druid Getafix prepares a fake batch which still appears to work due to the placebo effect (presumably just to annoy Mike Hall).
That being said, Asterix is generally portrayed as a critical thinker who uses brain rather than chemically and/or psychologically enhanced brawn, so when a traveller arrives in the village claiming to be able to see the future, our eponymous hero is the only one not to be taken in by the fakery. Happily, the story does not end well for the Soothsayer, who predictably never saw it coming. There’s even a fittingly brief and satisfyingly unflattering mention of a character called Homeopathix along the way for bonus Skeptic Points.
5. Orange is the new Black S6E4: I’m the Talking Ass
There are many pitfalls to be had when mixing comedy and drama. Firstly, your programme may be described using the horrific portmanteau ‘dramedy’, but more broadly the risk of being accused of trivialising other peoples’ struggles with humour is a constant danger. It does however mean that the juxtaposition between the highs and the lows can be considerably more pronounced, and OITNB was able to tread that line admirably for seven seasons, winning multiple awards and critical acclaim along the way. Set in a women’s prison (in the US), it has helped give a voice to many marginalised demographics in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and socio-economic status, and highlighted issues such as drug use, sexual violence, and mental illness to name but a few.
All of this contributes towards the ‘Skeptic Factor’ of the program of course, but this particular episode tracks (amongst other plotlines) the continued difficulty of Aleida to make ends meet after her release. Drawing attention to the US Justice system’s focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation, Aleida struggles to find gainful employment due to her criminal record. This results in her falling for a multi-level marketing scheme by the name of ‘Nutri Herbal’, which is different enough from real-life company Herbalife to avoid legal consequences, but close enough for obvious comparisons. The scene showing the back of her car loaded with products which she has had to pay for up front is a telling warning to all.
4. My Little Pony S2E15: The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000
If a news story of a nazi problem in My Little Pony fandom cropped up before 2016 it would have been instantly flagged as satire. Nowadays though that’s sadly not the case. Such are the risks with a kids’ show that’s written in a way to appeal to adults as well, but thankfully the Bronies community is largely benign, and frequently a force for good. A prime example of the clever writing of the show is the introduction of Flim and Flam the salesponies with a dangerously catchy song and dance routine.
Without a doubt the younger viewers will have no idea of the origins of the word Flim-Flam, or the book of the same name from skeptical favourite James Randi, but those of us in the know will love the tip of the hat to the obvious comparisons to travelling Snake-Oil Salesmen. Recurring appearances from the salesponies throughout subsequent seasons all bring fresh attempts to push new but equally useless products to the unsuspecting magical equines.
3. Jim Jefferies: Vaccination
With a career built primarily on themes of misogyny, alcohol consumption, comedic sexual escapades, drug use, and such-like, it has been refreshing to see Jim Jefferies to steer towards more rational topics in recent times. His gun control routine shot him in front of a new audience (although 50% of them didn’t see the funny side), and his tip of the hat to scientists was much appreciated (even though it was very much at the expense of the religious community). The Skeptic Points though are awarded to his routine about getting his son vaccinated, with a bonus takedown of the aforementioned Jenny McCarthy along the way.
2. Time team S8E3: Llygadwy, Wales
The irony of a show presented by Tony Robinson helping to uncover the incompetence of a Baldrick-esque cunning plan to turn some farmland into an archeological wonderland is reason enough to get this on the list, but more notably though, the deviation of format for a long running and successful television show in order to systematically debunk an attempted fraud is a joy to watch. Of course, it’s so British that they softball the confrontation with the landowner’s spokesperson (his son-in-law) at the end of the show, but the damage has already been done by that point. Check out Paul Duncan McGarrity’s excellent article for a blow by blow account of proceedings.
1. Mitchell and Webb: Homeopathic A&E
No real surprise that this hits the list since David Mitchell is currently working his way through a long-term contract to appear as the indignant voice of reason in every single panel show the UK has to offer. The Mitchell and Webb sketch show was notoriously hit and miss, to the point that they parodied it themselves, but there’s no denying the quality when they’re at their best. There’s plenty of Skeptic-friendly material in their work, but the undiluted brilliance of Homeopathic A&E makes it the cream of the crop, and ensures that it rears its head in the comments area any time we broach the subject of the air-guitar of medicine.
This isn’t a ‘top ten’, and even if it was it’s probably not in the right order, so no need to come after me on social media for my omissions and oversights. Please add to the conversation in the comments though as I’m sure there’s plenty more great material out there! Thanks to my friends in the Skeptic community who helped me crowdsource my list. If your suggestion didn’t make it on to my list, it’s not you, it’s me.
On a rainy evening in Liverpool this winter I was handed a leaflet by an earnest middle-aged activist, warning me of the dangers of a cashless society.
I followed the links and found that led to the websites of the anti-vax, climate change denying former London mayoral candidate, Piers Corbyn. Piers, who according to his website homepage has 16 Covid arrests (like this one), could be the subject of an article to himself, but I was intrigued by his focus on using cash in this leaflet.
Conspiracy theorists have a long-standing interest in banking, bank notes, fiat currencies and the gold standard. This fixation is currently best embodied by the worries about Central Bank Digital Currencies, which have – like any truly popular conspiracy theory – found their way onto graffiti on motorway bridges in the UK.
A Central Bank Digital Currency – commonly shortened to CBDC – is “a digital currency issued by a central bank, rather than by a commercial bank”, though it should be noted that the concept, as the Wikipedia article quoted above notes, is not well-defined. CBDCs are in use or set to be launched in five territories, including the giant economies of India and Nigeria. A further 80 central banks, including the Bank of England, are considering such a move in the near future.
Without getting too bogged down in the minutiae, much of what seems to worry people about CBDCs is pretty-well summed up in the above flyer. But what are the actual risks of digital currencies and a cashless society, and are people right to be worried?
First up – are we, as the leaflet says, headed for a cashless society, whether via CBDCs or otherwise? Sweden has famously been highlighted as heading in that direction for more than a decade, though it has not needed CBDCs to get there, nor has it yet actually become cashless, despite breathless articles claiming that the nation will be cashless by as early as this year. Articles which confusingly note that “consumer payments with cash are less than 20 percent of total transactions.” Twenty percent is, rather famously, a whole lot more than zero.
Nonetheless, it is the case that cash transactions are increasingly rare in Sweden, and many shops and services in Sweden require the use of mobile apps or plastic. For example, it is somewhere between very hard and practically impossible to pay for public transport with cash in Sweden. Clearly a cashless society presents a threat of exclusion for groups such as homeless people, for whom there are significant barriers to opening a bank account.
A cashless society would therefore clearly need to ensure payment services were available to everyone, including the most marginalised groups. While Sweden is touted as heading in that direction – though clearly it is not there yet – might the UK go cashless? No, at least according to the Bank of England:
We know being able to use cash is important for many people. That’s why we will continue to issue it for as long as people want to keep using it.
What of the other worries in this leaflet? Sweden once again acts as an example with regard to small gifts for children: transfers to children (or between any individuals) can be made by Swish, an almost ubiquitous mobile payment app in Sweden.
As for tipping, we need not look any further than the UK for this; many dining establishments already offer tipping via card, or when paying remotely using the restaurant’s mobile app. Have Piers and his mates been to a restaurant recently?
It is true that digital money is vulnerable to electricity outages and cyber-attacks… but this is already true of our current system, and it has been for a very long time. In the UK, we may only have seen cash fall behind debit cards in terms of transaction volumes relatively recently, in 2017, but how many decades has it been since the average pay cheque was an envelope containing an actual cheque or hard cash, rather than a bank transfer? How many people buy high-value items like white goods or electronics with cash, never mind a car or a house?
We have been vulnerable to cataclysmic cyber-attacks and technology failure for years, so unless Piers Corbyn is advocating bundling a large percentage of your money under your mattress, you’re unlikely to have enough cash to make a difference if the banking system does go down. And if the banking system goes down quite that comprehensively and permanently, we are probably in a sufficiently apocalyptic situation that we will have a lot more to worry about than paper money, which is also – lest our cash advocates forget – just an agreed-upon means of exchange with no inherent worth. Unless the authors of this leaflet think we all have enough wealth to store bags of Krugerrands under our floorboards, and, presumably, the means to defend our hoard when this digitally-enabled apocalypse arrives.
Regarding their concerns that bank accounts will be linked with digital ID and vaccine passports, my first reaction is surprise that there are still people banging on about vaccine passports. Very few countries still require vaccination for entry, and the few that do are now thinking again. The requirement for UK residents to verify their vaccination status to access services has also effectively vanished. Why do conspiracy theorists think they got this right?
While the UK government is apparently looking at digital ID – and the UK has historically gone a very different route from most developed countries on identity cards – the idea that your identity doesn’t already need to be verified to access banking is absurd. Here in the UK, in order to deter money laundering, banks are required by law to verify a potential customers’ identity, in order to comply with Know your Customer (KYC) regulations. This is to make sure that terrorists and criminals cannot use financial services to move around money and make it harder to trace.
This is not new in the UK: I can find references on know-your-customer rules for banks going back at least as far as the Money Laundering Regulations 1993.
Most of us are against money laundering to fund criminal activity, but what about the claims that the state could cut off our money, and that all of our transactions could be being monitored and controlled by the state?
The leaflet’s reference to Canada is presumably referring to the freezing of donations to support anti-vax truckers in Canada in the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests in early 2022. The Canadian government did indeed freeze funds donated to protestors, and even the accounts of donors, which is obviously a pretty sinister move, and probably crosses a line even for those of us who disagree vehemently with the anti-vax protestors. However, this was done by court order and the Emergency Powers Act, so was all possible with any standard bank account linked into modern payment and transactions systems. The only option cash would have given is if the geographically-dispersed donors had stuffed notes into envelopes and sent it to the protestors in the post, which has not been a recommended way to send money… ever, as far as I’m aware.
As for the state monitoring and controlling our finances more generally, this comes back to concerns around Central Bank Digital Currencies. While there are many claimed benefits to CBDCs – financial inclusion by allowing all citizens a bank account; reducing or eliminating transaction fees; combating tax evasion and crime – there are several risks around privacy and surveillance that could cause concern.
In theory, a digital currency could make population surveillance more straightforward, and it has been suggested that citizens who do undesirable things could find their accounts cut off, and that certain behaviour – such as purchasing alcohol or pornography, or donating to an anti-government NGO or opposition political party – could be banned or lead to other state-imposed sanctions on your personal freedoms or finances.
Advocates suggest that CBDCs actually offer better protection for users, as China’s digital RMB – for example – will offer near-field transactions for lower-value amounts that do not involve an internet connection at all. Other nations are already looking at data protection and privacy for digital currency, including the USA and the UK.
We may not give governments much credence for such claimed protections, and it is not hard to imagine the authorities using the features of digital currencies for insidious purposes. However, so much of what is feared is already possible without digital currency: Russia closed down the bank accounts of anti-government opposition figures years ago; Sweden, Finland and Norway all restrict the sale of high-alcohol drinks through government-run monopolies; religious groups are already successfully campaigning to stop financial providers working with sex-related businesses.
If you’re in a country where the law already requires warrants or other legal authorisation for the state to go snooping on your private information such as your financial transactions, that’s likely to be the case with digital currency, whatever form it takes. Some have argued that the individual protections from such surveillance are not strong enough in countries like the UK, where examples of overreach range from exposing journalists’ sources to the use of powers to investigate petty matters like fly-tipping, but again these are already a problem under current legislation.
Central Bank Digital Currencies are a tool. What matters are the political decisions taken in their implementation, and the drafting of hopefully sensible laws to govern their use. Whether our politicians and suchlaws are up to the task is of course up for debate.
While CBDCs could absolutely be used for oppressive purposes, so can (and are) the regular financial and legal systems we’ve been part of for decades. Declining to tip on your debit card and insisting on leaving a sweaty pile of coins on the table in the restaurant isn’t going to change that, but diligent electoral scrutiny can potentially moderate it.
In a previous article for the Skeptic, I referred to the fact that I sometimes act as an expert witness in cases where allegations of non-recent sexual abuse may potentially be based upon false memories. This is a very small minority of sexual abuse cases and, even then, in about half of the cases that I have dealt with I have concluded that there were no obvious indications in the evidence that I had seen to indicate a heightened probability that this was indeed the case. Every case is different and sometimes a case will raise questions that I cannot answer without a deep dive into the scientific literature. In this article, I want to discuss one such case.
Without going into details, suffice it to say that the complainant, whom I shall refer to as C, alleged at the age of 40 that he had been sexually abused in various ways by the accused, whom I shall refer to as A, when C was between the ages of 8 and 16 years. As an adult, C had recurrent dreams of being sexually abused as a child. The evidence suggested that he had then recovered memories of being so abused at the hands of the accused. The evidence suggested that C believed his nightmares about being sexually abused as a child indicated that he had actually been thus abused, and had repressed those traumatic memories. The idea that repressed traumatic memories might surface in dreams is a common one and one that often features in works of fiction. But is it true?
Much has been written regarding the relationship between memory and dreams, and a comprehensive review of the topic is not possible in this short article. Instead, I will focus upon what I felt were the central questions to be addressed. To start with, I wanted to know: are details of everyday real-life events sometimes replayed during dreams?
There is strong evidence for the idea that details from recent events in waking life are sometimes incorporated into our dreams, indicating that dreams may in some way be involved in consolidation of memories. This effect is strongest two nights after the events in question with a second peak 5-7 days after the events. It should be noted that we are referring here to recent events in the dreamer’s life, not to events from decades earlier. Furthermore, the dreams are not accurate replays of whole episodes. Instead, they simply incorporate elements from the individual’s waking life. For example, Fosse and colleagues (2003) reported that 65% of 299 dream reports from 29 people over a period of a fortnight incorporated some details from recent waking life but only 1-2% preserved the original characters, actions, objects, and setting of the original scene.
Some theorists claim that memory for trauma involves different psychological and neuropsychological mechanisms than memory for non-traumatic events. For example, it is claimed that those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) really do experience accurate replays of the trauma they experienced in both their recurrent nightmares and their waking “flashbacks”. Van der Kolk and colleagues (1984) reported that eleven of fifteen Vietnam veterans with PTSD reported dreams that were exact replays of the trauma they had experienced during combat. Schrueder, Kleijn, and Rooijmans (2000) reported that 42% of 102 World War II survivors reported accurate replays, albeit that 35% reported experiencing distorted versions of the original trauma. A major limitation of these studies is that they were based upon nothing more than self-report, without asking sufferers to prospectively record their dreams.
However, even studies using an improved methodology that involved getting PTSD sufferers to keep dream diaries for a period and to then assess their entries supported the claim that a minority of PTSD sufferers do indeed report nightmares that they believe replicate actual traumatic events. For example, Mellman and colleagues (2001) had 60 patients, hospitalised as a result of assault or life-threatening accidents, record their dreams during their initial stay in hospital. Eighteen patients reported a total of 21 dreams, of which ten were trauma-related; six were reported as exact replays, four as distorted versions.
It is worth pausing at this point to reflect upon what would be required if PTSD nightmares and flashbacks really were an accurate and exact replaying of the original trauma. This would require that memory worked like a video camera, accurately recording every detail of an experience so that they could be “replayed” later. Although this view of memory is held by a very large proportion of the general public, it is totally incorrect. We typically remember the gist and central details of experiences, and forget the vast majority of the specific details. Thus, it is simply impossible for any nightmares or flashbacks to really be exact replays even though the sufferer may sincerely believe that they are. When a person compares their memory of the original event to their memory of a dream of that event, they are inevitably comparing one unreliable reconstruction with another.
With respect to this specific case, it should also be noted that PTSD sufferers do not, in the absence of physical brain injury, experience any period of amnesia for the events that caused the PTSD. On the contrary, they have great difficulty in keeping the traumatic memories out of consciousness. This observation is itself evidence against the classical psychoanalytic notion of repression; that is, the idea that traumatic memories will tend to be automatically pushed into a non-conscious part of the mind, from whence they could not be retrieved no matter how strong the memory cue. In fact, as discussed in a previous article, there is little, if any, evidence to support the existence of repression, despite it being an idea that is widely accepted by both members of the general public and a range of relevant professional groups.
There is more than one way in which dreams may result in false memories. The most obvious and direct route is that which involves a person mistaking the events that they experienced within a dream for events that took place in objective reality. This would be an example of what psychologists refer to as a reality monitoringerror. Reality monitoring refers to the psychological processes that allow us to distinguish between events taking place in objective reality and those taking place solely within our minds, such as dreams, fantasy, and hallucinations. Rassin and colleagues (2001) collected data from two samples of respondents (N = 85 and 255, respectively) and found that,
a nontrivial minority of respondents (11.8% and 25.9%, respectively) reported that they had had the experience of not being able to discriminate between dream and reality.
Page 478
However, in this particular case it was clear that A was always aware when he awoke from his nightmares that he had indeed been dreaming. He subsequently correctly recalled such dreams as being dreams. How then could he have ended up “recovering” detailed false memories of actually being abused? One plausible route is that of imagination inflation. When people repeatedly imagine events which they initially believe they have never actually experienced, this can lead them to subsequently believe that they did indeed experience those events. In some cases, they may also end up with detailed false memories of the events.
This is again an example of a reality monitoring error. In this case, they are confusing events that they have merely imagined with events that have really taken place. Given that C assumed that his dreams of being abused as a child were a possible indication that he really had been, it is natural that he may have imagined various scenarios in which such abuse might have occurred, potentially ultimately resulting in false memories of such abuse.
In this case, as in all such cases, in the absence of independent evidence we cannot know for sure if C’s allegations are true, deliberate lies, or sincere but mistaken. In our adversarial legal system, justice requires that members of a jury make their decision regarding guilt or innocence in the context of a full understanding of relevant factors that can affect human memory.
