This one is for all of us who are frustrated at being unable to go to a pantomime this year and shout ‘BEHIND YOU’ at the tops of our voices. Pantomime favourite ‘Aladdin’ features a genie or ‘djinn’ who lives in a vessel – a lamp.
The fisherman inadvertently rubs the lamp he has found, and is amazed by the apparition of the djinn (genie).
While people are made of the clay or the earth, the Djinn are spirits made of smokeless flame. Like us they have free will and, although they are long-lived, they are not immortal. They are mentioned in the Koran many times, but they predate it and come from pagan Arabic belief. In this respect, their endurance reflects Islam’s ability to adapt to its environment. Many strands of major religions contain elements of their pagan predecessors which have blended in a process often referred to as ‘syncrasy’. Djinn are hard to characterise as simply either good or evil – they can be both. The notion that spirits could be contained by bottling is thought to have originated with the legend of King Solomon, another example of a pre-Islamic theme which survived.
1219 – William Marshall, “guardian of the king and kingdom” and arguably the most powerful man in England, dies peacefully in his bed aged around 72.
1189 – William chooses to spare the life of the future King Richard I in battle, killing only his horse instead.
1152 – King Stephen of England decides not to execute his six-year-old hostage, William Marshall, after the boy’s father betrays him.
1168 – Eleanor of Aquitaine pays William’s ransom after he is captured while defending her from an ambush.
1216 – William pledges to protect King Henry III, aged 9, even if every other knight abandons him.
Take a moment to think about what happened when you read the sentences above. Did it bother you that the events aren’t in chronological order? Did you put them in order to make sense of them, or look for connections between events? Maybe you picked out some things which could be possibly be labelled as causes or consequences, or found a theme running through the whole. You might have found in these facts a story about the rewards of chivalry and mercy, or perhaps you saw only how dangerous life was for children (and horses) in this period.
Did you fill in some gaps with information you already had, or wonder what was left out? In other words, how did you start to process this raw data and what processing instincts were you following? If you did anything at all other than ignore that list of events then you, dear reader, have been making history.
I said in my last column that the popular images we have of the home front in World War Two and the notion of Blitz Spirit exist because they have been shaped into those forms. In fact, for all aspects of history the most widespread and enduring images persist not because they are the most accurate but because they have been the most useful. This holds true whether history is being written by academics and other experts or by anyone else conveying these stories and images of the past, even people sharing memories and opinions on local history Facebook groups. The things that stick in our minds, which spark connections and ideas, and the fate and reach of the resulting narratives are influenced by a variety of secondary concerns, in large and small ways.
Even if the information is completely accurate, the overall picture can easily become warped. It has to become warped in order for us to make sense of it. It isn’t possible to have a 100% faithful account of the past because the past and history are two distinct things. There is always a trade-off between making a history comprehensive, accurate and useful, as there is with any method of representing reality.
As Howard Zinn put it in A People’s History of the United States: “It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographical information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.” To think of it another way, a time machine or perfect simulation of events wouldn’t grant us perfect understanding of every aspect of the past, as we would still have to make sense of that information. We can only make it useful by asking specific questions of this data, which means following an agenda.
There is an objective reality that once existed, in that people had lives, they moved and they communicated, they interacted with their environment and caused things to happen. But all we have afterwards are patchy remains and distorted echoes. There is no completely objective history which can be written from these flawed pieces. There are only judgement calls, some better than others, made in good or bad faith. All of this makes unhelpfully skewed histories difficult to debunk. We can nit-pick details but that can be a distraction from more significant problems of misuse, of misapplied lessons, of the shape of the story as a whole being a comforting lie, which aren’t a “neutral” matter of facts but are nonetheless essential to discuss openly.
Should museums and educators not trust their audiences more rather than lecturing or spoon-feeding them by interpreting objects and events? Is it even fair to judge the past with modern eyes and modern ideas of morality? Could we stick to “just the facts” and have a neutral, accurate history; the equivalent of an aerial photograph instead of a drawn map, at least as a starting point for individual enquiry? Unfortunately, humans are great at spotting patterns even in random data, and at filling in gaps in line with our existing biases and expectations, however little information we have to work with.
We saw with this year’s US election results how even raw numbers, revealed in a particular order within a certain context, can gather extra significance and become woven into a story.
Even the barest historical data, just the “what happened” can lead us to see misleading patterns, partly due to the narrative conventions we’re used to. The story of someone who lost a fortune and then regained it feels different than the story of someone who gained a fortune and then lost it, even though the timeline contains the same basic components. We saw with this year’s US election results how even raw numbers, revealed in a particular order within a certain context, can gather extra significance and become woven into a story.
It would be irresponsible to purport to be presenting neutral information while making no attempt to compensate for the biases that already exist out in the world and the framing devices which are most commonly shared by one’s audience. There is no such thing as agenda-free history, only agendas that we’re so used to that they pass without notice, and new ones which we can either learn from or reject.
To take the example of the recent arguments over the role of the National Trust or last year’s debates over statues in public places: none of these objects speak for themselves without the help of contextual clues and our own understanding of what these things are. A large house filled with beautiful artwork and furnishings transmits messages about the success and respectable social standing of its past owners and this feeds into wider messages about what it means to be successful, to command respect, and to leave one’s mark on history.
We also know from example the difference between a statue celebrating the life, achievements and by extension the positive qualities of an individual, and a memorial to the victims of an injustice. The former cannot work as the latter without significant and jarring alteration or re-contextualisation (and placing it underwater could, for example, be one effective step towards achieving this).
An artefact presented neutrally, with no agenda, will amplify the most dominant messages around it, which serves the status quo just fine but does not help us to enquire, inform, or progress towards a better, fuller understanding.
When the staggering proportions of the challenges brought by the current pandemic became clear, some saw a potential silver lining: perhaps now science, the only sure way to find our road back to safety and health without a massive loss of life, would be taken seriously into account by policy makers and lawmakers all around the world. Alas, it was too much to hope for: indeed, while the trappings, symbols and even the language of science were duly lionized by would-be leaders and other political figures, the content was, quite often, conspicuously absent. Here in Brazil, there have been some notable examples in the last month alone.
The Houses of the Brazilian Congress, lit up green for homeopathy awareness
One of the greatest classics of Brazilian literature is a short novel from the 1800s called “The Alienist”, by Machado de Assis. It’s a delicious satire of pseudoscientific pretension and quackery. The novel’s “hero”, if one can call him that, the eponymous Alienist, is in charge of an asylum called “The Green House”. So, when both Houses of the Brazilian Congress agreed, during the last week of November, to bathe its walls in green light to celebrate homeopathy, the connection, unintended as it may well have been, was inevitable.
November 21st is officially recognized here in Brazil as National Homeopathy Day. It was on this date, in the year 1840, that a French homeopath – the first apostle of homeopathy’s founder Samuel Hahnemann to Brazil – set foot in Rio de Janeiro.
The first homeopathy pharmacy in Brazil, which was gifted to Brazil’s national museum
This particular flavour of pseudoscience has a colorful history in the tropics: it was embraced by both the spiritualist movement (spirit guides would dictate homeopathic prescriptions through entranced mediums) and the military.
As a matter of fact, it was during the military dictatorship of 1964-1985 that homeopathy was accepted by the Federal Board of Medicine as a bona fide “medical practice”, on a par with, say, cardiology or obstetrics. It was a curious historical convergence of right-wing imposition by the so-called “homeopathic generals”, and a pervasive New Age feeling among young left-wing doctors, formed during the “crazy” 1970s.
Brazil’s first homeopathy pharmacy has been full replicated in Brazil’s national museum
Usually, the celebration of November 21st is left to the Ministry of Health. This year, however, the Brazilian Medical Homeopathic Association (AMHB) reached out to Congress leaders, perhaps in an attempt to eschew any association with Jair Bolsonaro’s government. The campaign launched by the greening of the Houses had as its slogan “Treat Yourself with Homeopathy”. It did not say for what conditions, but one can hardly ignore that right now there is a single disease that is on everyone’s mind.
It is probably not a coincidence that the Homeopathy campaign and the Congress lighting up green happened right after the launch of the “Counter-dossier on Homeopathic Evidence”, by the Institute Question of Science (IQC). The Counter-dossier was written as a reply to the AMHB’s report that claims to present “scientific evidence for homeopathy”, offering several “scientific articles” to prove it. IQC, together with a team of collaborators which includes Prof Edzard Ernst (University of Exeter, UK), the world’s leading international authority on alternative medicine, published a counter-dossier, in which the authors took apart homeopathic claims one by one, pointing out all methodological flaws and fallacies used in the original work.
It is also rather curious that, while the Congress turns green to promote homeopathy, it has never done so to promote environmental policies, or to promote awareness on the protection of the Amazon Forest and the Wetlands, recently seriously damaged by fire.
In the Executive branch, the Ministry of Health has been working hard to promote false information about COVID-19 to the Brazilian population – even if it means erasing sound advice.
In the middle of November, the official Ministry Twitter account replied to a citizen’s question about what to do when you have symptoms – surprisingly, offering the right information!
The reply stated that there was no vaccine or specific medication, and that the best tools were social distancing, avoiding crowds and wearing a mask. The tweet went viral, but just as Brazilians began to see a glimmer of hope, the Ministry deleted the tweet, apologized for giving “wrong” information, and replaced the scientific information with their customary nonsense: go as quickly as possible to the nearest healthcare unit, and get your Covid medication kit. The Covid medication kit consists of our old friend hydroxychloroquine, plus azithromycin, ivermectin, vitamin D, vitamin C and zync. The “corrected” tweet made no mention of masks, nor of social distancing.
Finally, to cap off a superb month of action – or rather omission – from the Ministry of Health, several national newspapers have published pieces about the substantial rise in the number of cases and hospitalizations over the past weeks, leading scientists to worry about a potential healthcare crisis after the holidays, if nothing is done to raise awareness of the population about the dangers of Christmas and New Year’s family gatherings and parties. While the press has been interviewing scientists and science communicators, there has been no official statement from the Ministry. There are also no clear guidelines for self-isolation and quarantine measures. Meanwhile, President Jair Bolsonaro stated that he is not getting a COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available, that vaccination is not to be mandatory, and that wearing a mask is useless.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when pseudoscience is institutionalized in the Federal Government. In Brazil, we are worried that it is not the pandemic that is going to kill us – instead, we fear we are more likely to die from a combination of arrogance and stupidity. And sadly, as we do, the 40% of Brazilians who still support Bolsonaro will applaud.
Between ignorance and vanity-fuelled wishful thinking, our authorities seem to have all the answers – unfortunately, it’s all the wrong ones.
You may have noticed The Secret: Dare to Dream in the UK top ten on Netflix as 2020 draws to a close. Perhaps you’ve even considered watching it: desperate times, plus a 6.4 on IMdB, and it does have that nice Katie Holmes in it… Don’t we all want to dream of a nice romance somewhere near New Orleans with – well, with that guy perhaps best-known for playing one of Patrick Bateman’s appalling colleagues in American Psycho – but, let’s just say with some charming stranger who smiles a lot and makes mysterious claims about how the universe wants you to be happy. That sounds nice, right?
The problem with The Secret: Dare to Dream is that in addition to being formulaic and bland, with unsympathetic and unconvincing characters spouting laughably on-the nose dialogue and made-up Einstein quotes, it’s a spin-off movie of The Secret. (Yes, the clue was in the title.)
The Secret is a best-selling book by Rhonda Byrne, based on the concept of the Law of Attraction; that what you think will manifest itself in your life. According to The Secret, if you want something, you ask for it, you believe it and broadcast it to the universe, and you – if you are ready to receive it – will get what you want.
The principle, as Byrne herself admits, is not new. The concept appears everywhere from one of the oldest texts around – “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” (Matthew 21:22) – through to adherents of New Thought groups, who tend to emphasize the role of belief and thoughts in everything from wealth and success to physical illness.
This all might sound far-fetched, and of course it is, but 30 million people worldwide have bought the book and all manner of celebrities and motivational speakers believe in the power of this not-so-secret method.
Still, what’s the harm? If people want to believe that good things will come to them, and then perhaps they work hard at getting those things, that’s a good thing, right?
I’d argue these ideas can have negative implications. For one, The Secret – and indeed this movie – implies that you don’t necessarily need to work hard to accomplish the things you want; they will happen simply because of your belief, with cheques arriving unexpectedly in the post, or takeaway pizza arriving to feed a hungry family, just because you properly visualised and believed they would.
The flipside of this is that The Secret isn’t therefore only about attracting the positive things. The principle also espouses the idea that disease, death and other bad things also happen because of the way you think.
Starving to death in a famine? All those negative thoughts you’re having from hunger will only attract more famine. Being murdered in a genocide? Your fault.
I wish I was making this up, but when Bob Proctor, one of the featured thinkers from Byrne’s book, was asked in an interview on ABC Nightline whether children in Darfur had attracted the starvation to themselves, he answered: “I think the country probably has.”
The Law of Attraction teaches that those who have died in the most appalling ways, including natural disasters and wars, were having thoughts that “matched the frequency of the event”, and that their thoughts led to them being “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, which seems like a mild way of describing being murdered by a spree killer or terrorists or a genocidal war machine. The concept is truly abhorrent, and such thinking is only a hop and a skip away from taking a criminally laissez faire approach to solving the real problems that exist in the world.
On a more personal level, The Secret teaches that “Illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts.” This victim-blaming nonsense has a very real harm – people who believe in the Law of Attraction while suffering from terminal cancer may also believe that their inability to cure themselves is, quite literally, their fault. I can think of very few more disgusting philosophies.
So it is a relief that The Secret: Dare to Dream is such a lousy film, with only a brief and unintentionally hilarious confrontation at a teenager’s birthday party in its favour. Although it has hovered for a short while in the UK Netflix top ten, its limp plot, flaccid ending and inability to stick even to its own rules seems unlikely to make many new converts.
As I took our labrador, Ted, for a walk this morning, I was listening to James O’Brien’s How Not to be Wrong on Audible and vaguely wondering what to write about in my next piece for The Skeptic. As many of you will already know, James O’Brien hosts a phone-in programme on radio station LBC where he often delights in publicly displaying the faulty reasoning of some of his callers – especially those with racist, misogynistic, or homophobic views. He has a knack of allowing them to reveal the internal contradictions and unacceptable consequences of their opinions by asking them a series of perfectly reasonable questions.
As his views on most topics coincide with my own (apart from his religious beliefs), I cannot deny that I enjoy listening to these verbal demolition jobs. If you want to hear a collection of some of James’ greatest hits (and I’m using the word “hits” in the sense a gangster would use it), you should check out James’ previous book, the modestly titled How to be Right. In his latest book, How Not to be Wrong, he is doing something completely different. He is looking back over his career to examine occasions where he has personally changed his mind on various issues and his reasons for doing so. I have nothing but respect for anyone who is willing to admit that they were wrong on an issue having previously publicly stated the opposite view. Also, thank you, James, for the inspiration for this piece.
I genuinely believe that an important part of proper scepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you might be mistaken in your beliefs. You may hold the views that you do on a particular topic because the currently available evidence, as you interpret it, seems to support that view but you must always be open to the possibility that new evidence may be produced in the future that contradicts your current position. If that happens you should be prepared to revise your opinion accordingly.
Of course, in practice that is not always easy. It is perfectly reasonable to initially attempt to defend one’s original position by looking for weaknesses in the evidence that appears to contradict it or in the arguments being used to refute it. It would always be unwise, for example, to reject one’s previously held belief on the basis of a single published scientific study. Science, by its very nature, is always provisional in its claims upon truth – but if numerous studies by independent investigators produce robust and replicable evidence that contradicts one’s belief, the right thing to do is to accept that you were wrong and move on. Of course, the opposite holds true as well. If numerous well-controlled attempts to replicate an effect that you thought was real fail to produce evidence in support of that effect, you should accept that it probably was not a real effect in the first place.
As I have described elsewhere, as a young man I used to believe in quite a wide range of paranormal phenomena. In my defence, the coverage of paranormal topics in the media back in those days was even less critical than it is today. It was not until I read James Alcock’s book Parapsychology: Science or Magic? in the early 1980s that I really appreciated that there were plausible non-paranormal accounts for such claims. Rarely has a single book, with the possible exceptions of the Bible, the Quran, and The God Delusion, had such a profound impact on the course of someone’s life. This one book opened the door for me to the wonderful world of scepticism. It was an exciting time. I got hold of and read book after book by well informed sceptics on all things paranormal, as well as subscribing to the Skeptical Inquirer. However, some of the views I formed as a result of all that reading I no longer hold.
This is how I summarised those now-rejected views elsewhere (French, 2018, pp. 379-380):
With regard to believers in the paranormal, I viewed them as irrational (and probably less intelligent) compared to skeptics. I assumed that all forms of paranormal belief were dangerous and served no positive psychological functions. I viewed most psychic claimants as either being deliberate frauds, out to make as much profit as they could by exploiting the vulnerable, or perhaps as suffering from some sort of serious psychopathology. I was very confident that there existed no good evidence in support of paranormal claims and that most parapsychologists were incompetent when it came to experimental design and data analysis. Finally, […] I was convinced that parapsychology was nothing more and nothing less than a pseudoscience.
Note that I am not saying that the books I read at that time explicitly put forward such extreme views but that certainly was my interpretation of some of them. A full discussion of my reasons for rejecting such views is beyond the scope of this short article but, in general, it was because I actually looked at the available evidence (see, e.g., Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience by myself and Anna Stone).
I intend to return to the topic of being wrong in future articles, including my reasons for holding what I think is very much a minority view amongst sceptics – that is, that parapsychology is a true science not a pseudoscience. Watch this space.
On November 30th science journalists were abuzz with news from the latest results from Deepmind, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet (FKA Google).
Deepmind had released their results from the latest round of CASP, the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction. CASP is a biennial academic exercise where developers of protein structure prediction algorithms compete to produce the best model of a panel of proteins that experimentalists had that year, but crucially, hadn’t been released into the public domain. Deepmind’s Alphafold2 program won CASP14 (2020) and had done better than any program had done before, prompting some to proclaim that “the protein folding problem was solved”.
So, what is this problem, what have Deepmind done, and why you should approach the claims with some skepticism?
Proteins do almost everything inside you. As you read this article, light from the screen enters your eye. This light is focused by your retina – a lens, the shape of which is supported and altered by proteins. The light then interacts with proteins in the back of your eye. These proteins change shape in response to the light, and a signal is sent along your optic nerve where it is interpreted in your brain. The eyebrow you just raised after reading those sentences is made of and controlled by proteins.
DNA is the blueprint for proteins. The DNA sequence of a gene determines a protein’s sequence. The sequence of the protein determines its fold. The fold of the protein determines what it does and how it does it. The human genome encodes for at least 20,000 proteins (estimates vary depending upon your definition) and those proteins do much of the chemistry that makes you, you.
Proteins are assembled from a chemical alphabet of 20 amino acids. These amino acids have different properties and together will determine the fold and function of the protein. Glycine, for example is small and flexible – it will often be found in surface loops and flexible parts of the protein. Phenylalanine is large and hydrophobic (water-hating) and is often found in the core of a protein, hidden away from surrounding water. Glutamate is acidic, Arginine is basic, and so and so on.
How proteins fold and what they look like is a subject of intense study. We can solve the structure of proteins using a range of biophysical techniques – the most prolific of which is X-ray crystallography. Other techniques such as cryo-electron microscopy (currently undergoing a massive “resolution revolution”) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) have different strengths that can be employed to solve different protein structures. These endeavors can be time consuming and expensive (my personal best is 4 weeks from “clone to structure” but typically a structural biology campaign lasts months or years), but to my mind there is no technique other than genetics that has contributed as much to our understanding of how life works than structural biology. Most protein structures determined are made publicly available, open to all in the protein data bank (PDB).
Image credit: DeepMind
Structural biology is used not only to find out “how stuff works” but also “why stuff goes wrong” in the cases of diseases, and “can we fix the stuff that went wrong” in the fields of drug and therapeutic design. Pharmaceutical companies direct a significant amount of time, money, and effort into solving the structures of medically relevant proteins so that they can design drugs to treat various diseases, from cancers to microbial infection.
Protein structure prediction is what Alphafold is designed to do. The basic idea is that you feed the protein sequence (derived from information from the human genome project, for example) in at one end, and the structure pops out at the other. This isn’t new, but it is difficult. In 1969, Cyrus Levinthal presented a paper regarding a thought experiment about protein folding. If one considers a small, 100 amino acid protein, it will have 99 peptide bonds (bonds linking adjacent amino acids) and each of those bonds has 2 different angles and each angle has (roughly) 3 favourable conformations. Therefore the 100 amino acid protein would have 3198 different potential conformations. If the protein were to sequentially explore these conformations, even on a picosecond timescale, an individual protein molecule would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to sample them all. Your proteins routinely fold within microseconds or milliseconds of being produced. This disconnect is known as Levinthal’s paradox.
So, on the surface of it, this is a hugely promising development. Being able to accurately predict the structure of every protein would be transformative for both basic biology, but also biomedical research and potentially drug design. Why should we be skeptical? That Alphafold2 has obtained excellent results is not in question – the results have not been written up yet (but almost certainly will be), so all we have to go on right now is Deepmind’s CASP14 blog post and a couple of paragraphs in the CASP14 abstract book (PDF – Alphafold2 is on page 22), and they indeed suggest that Alphafold2 had achieved unparalleled accuracy. Conversations with colleagues associated with CASP suggest that Alphafold2 has obtained the best set of results yet – “often unimprovable” was one colleague’s assessment. However, it seems that the technique has still not reached the accuracy needed for drug design, or detailed analysis of enzyme mechanisms.
The potential problems around Alphafold2 stem from the problems met with Alphafold. Alphafold is not open source. There is no server that I can send my protein sequence to. There is no Github repository from where I can download the source code (There is a Github repository to rerun exactly what they did in CASP13, but crucially it is hobbled so that it may only work on the CASP13 targets, the experimentally determined structures for which are now freely available). There are reverse-engineered implementations such as ProSPr, which are similar but not identical.
There are two reasons I find this troubling: Firstly, is that Alphafold is closed, and yet it is built upon open databases (Uniprot, PDB) and uses academic open-source software (HHBlits, JackHmmr, OpenMM and the Amber forcefield for molecular modelling).
Secondly, we know that science moves fastest when methods, data, and information are shared. Open science means that everyone can peer-review everything. If we are granted a look behind the curtain, we can see how everything is put together. Those who are inclined can tinker with the nuts and bolts of Alphafold2 and maybe break it. Maybe make it better, or faster. Make it do a thing that no-one has envisaged would be do-able, or even useful. Maybe someone from an unrelated field will be inspired to take a piece of Alphafold2 and re-tool it for another task.
Unfortunately, Deepmind has form in the ‘keeping their toys to themselves’ game. AlphaGo was a program designed to play the strategy game, Go. It is the only program to beat a professional Dan-9 Go master. Despite widespread interest at the time, the source code was never released. Again, enthusiasts have had to reverse engineer the code from Deepmind’s descriptions. Keeping the knowledge behind winning at Go is one thing, but if Alphafold2 is as transformative as they claim, not releasing it is, to my mind, troubling and immoral. Medical advances could be made if this technology is as good as they claim. Lives could be saved or improved by information gleaned from the models that Alphafold2 produces.
I’d like to end this piece with a plea: if by any chance people from Deepmind/Alphafold are reading this, please make it open source or make a server where we can submit our sequences. I would think that the structural biology community would be extremely excited to try your new methods on our problems. Until you make your methods accessible and available, we will not be able to figure out how transformative your advances really are.
“Root canals spread toxic bacteria and are linked to cancer”. Or so says a widelyrepeated claim from the godfather of pseudoscience Joseph Mercola.
Dentists usually carry out root canal treatment (RCT) when decay penetrates through the enamel and dentine of a tooth and into the pulp, which contains the blood and nerve supply to the teeth. This can be incredibly painful, and the only way to remove the pain is either to remove the tooth in its entirety, or to remove the pulp by carrying out RCT. Here the dentist cleans out the canals in the tooth, the area where the pulp sits in the roots, shapes the inside of the canals, and disinfects the inside of the tooth. An inert substance, usually gutta-percha, is then used to fill the canals.
In making claims for the danger of RCTs, Mercola cites the work of the ‘Worlds Greatest Dentist’, Weston A. Price. Practicing at the turn of the 20th Century, Price is generally considered to be the father of the ‘holistic’ dental movement (more on this in the future, I’m sure).
Price spent a quarter of a century researching root-treated teeth, and eventually concluded that general systemic conditions often occurred due to root canal treatment, and that instead of treating the root, dentists should remove the tooth. His work was ultimately discredited and forgotten over time, until the likes of Mercola resurrected it.
Mercola makes many claims about RCT, including that dentists aren’t taught about accessory canals in teeth (we are – they can be a pain), and that it’s impossible to remove all the bacteria from the tooth through root treatment. This latter claim is actually true, but it is mitigated somewhat by the material used to seal the gutta-percha in the tooth. In theory, this sealant mummifies the remaining bacteria, rendering them inert.
Despite this, RCTs are somewhat unpredictable, with a failure rate of up to 10% in general practice (although the failure rate is lower if a specialist carries out the procedure). The relatively high failure rate is partly due to it being bloody difficult: it’s the dental equivalent of trying to thread a needle with your eyes closed while wearing a pair of oven gloves.
Mercola also reports on the work of a Dr Robert Jones, of Quantum Cancer Management. Jones found that in his study of 300 people with breast cancer, 93% of the women studied had RCTs, and that tumours ‘in the majority of cases, occurred on the same side of the body as the root canal(s) or other oral pathology.’ But there appears to be no sign of this study in the PubMed database of healthcare research, and the Quantum Cancer Management website, linked to by Mercola, now seems to be dead.
Just for a minute, let’s pretend this research is believable. Would preventing breast cancer be as simple as removing a few teeth? Of course not. Because, although there’s no evidence to show this, Mercola and a host of ‘biological’ dentists claim removing a tooth ‘incorrectly’ can allegedly lead to a NICO. These are areas of Neuralgia-Inducing Cavitational Osteonecrosis, more commonly known as cavitations.
Cavitations occur, it is claimed, due to avascular necrosis – a lack of blood supply to the bone marrow of the jaw, which causes the death of surrounding tissue. Despite first being described in the 1920s, there is little-to-no good quality research into NICOs, and the majority of dentists question whether they exist at all (spoiler alert: they probably don’t). The theory is that if your dentist doesn’t remove the periodontal ligament when extracting the tooth, the socket won’t fully heal, leaving an area of chronic infection, the cavitation, behind.
What research does exist is often carried out by the likes of Hal Huggins and Thomas Levy, who between them have written several books on the perceived dangers of dental treatment. Huggins ran the US Based Huggins Diagnostics Center until 1995, when it was closed following a series of lawsuits and negligence claims. The Center provided several holistic treatments including ‘safe’ amalgam removal, using the Huggins designed ‘Amalgameter’ to detect apparently toxic levels of mercury being released from silver fillings. Huggins himself had his licence to practice stripped in 1996 after being found to be diagnosing mercury toxicity in all of his patents, including some without any amalgam fillings. Although he died in 2014, his thoughts and teaching live on in the practice of a multitude of ‘holistic’ and ‘biological’ dentists who claim to specialise in treating issues such as cavitations.
One particular feature of cavitations is their general elusiveness and ability to avoid detection. Until recently, the only definite way of detecting cavitations was by the use of a specific device, the Cavitat. This imaging device was developed by a former pilot, Bob Jones, who claims that his infected teeth nearly killed him in the late 1980s. Jones claims that his health was restored following the removal of the infected teeth.
Now, I can’t make a definite link between the Bob Jones, inventor of the Cavitat, and the Robert Jones who produced the research linking breast cancer to RCTs, but it does seem to be at best a huge coincidence. Of course, it may not be Bob, but it might be his son Robert who helped train Cavitat users. Thanks to some legal wrangling, the Cavitat machine is no longer available. Still, various other treatment modalities have taken its place, including similar devices and the use of CT scans to help dentists uncover the sites of the mythical cavitations.
Treatment of cavitations usually involves painful – and unnecessary – debridement of the area, which is often followed up by ozone therapy and other low evidence interventions—all of this coming at a high cost to the patient, rarely covered by insurance schemes. Patients are, in many cases, left with ongoing pain from the surgery sites, and with no improvement of their initial symptoms, which leads them onto further, more drastic treatment.
So here we have a story of debunked century-old research, picked up on by unscrupulous dentists claiming to act holistically or in a ‘natural’ manner (nothing we do is particularly natural), being exploited for clicks by one of the ringleaders of pseudoscience. Add in a magic machine that can detect the dental equivalent of unicorns, and you have a perfect way of extracting money from genuinely unwell people.
