Brazilian scientist and activist Dr Natalia Pasternak has today been named the 2020 recipient of the Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism. Dr Pasternak, who is president of Brazil’s Instituto Questão de Ciência (IQC), was given the award for her work fighting health misinformation in Brazil, as part an online ceremony that took place during Thursday’s Skeptics in the Pub Online event.
TheSkeptic Editor Michael Marshall said: “Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, Dr Pasternak has become an near-constant fixture on Brazilian television and in the wider media, where millions of people have heard her countering misleading health advice and pseudoscientific conspiracy theories, and urging the public to trust in science and public health messaging.
“The IQC, of which she is co-founder and President, has been a shining beacon of reason and critical thinking at a time when those things have been in short supply, and their work has reached people not just in Brazil, but across South America and across the world – an impressive accomplishment for an organisation which was only founded in 2018”.
The Skeptic also handed out their Editor’s Choice award to the Skeptics in the Pub Online initiative, for their outstanding work supporting the UK’s critical thinking community throughout the COVID-19 lockdown.
Michael Marshall said: “Ordinarily, the UK has a thriving scene of dozens of independent Skeptics in the Pub groups, each hosting monthly events in their respective cities. When COVID-19 hit, events across the country shut down, but those groups of volunteers – in their own free time and without financial reward – very quickly came together to organise weekly online events that run to a standard many professional event organisers would look upon with envy.
“These weekly events have attracted thousands of viewers, and have provided a regular point of contact for people throughout the uncertainty of the pandemic. They also serve to demonstrate the positive, supportive and collaborative skeptical community that exists in the UK.”
The French microbiologist Didier Raoult has today been named the 2020 recipient of the “Rusty Razor” award, the prize given by TheSkeptic to the year’s worst promoters of pseudoscience.
The scientist made headlines around the world earlier this year for his study promoting the use of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. The study, which claimed that hydroxychloroquine reduced the viral load in patients with COVID-19 and that this effect was enhanced with azithromycin co-treatment, was presented to the media via press conference in March 2020, before being published in the journal International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
Subsequent analysis of Raoult’s data found that his sample size was incredibly small, with only 6 patients given the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination. The study was also found to be improperly controlled, and data was excluded for a number of patients whose condition worsened as they were either transferred to intensive care, or died. Subsequent studies have shown no clinical benefit for the use of hydroxychloroquine in patients with COVID-19.
After Raoult’s study inspired a surge of interest in the use of hydroxychloroquine, US President Donald Trump endorsed the drug, tweeting to promote it dozens of times. Tellingly, when Trump himself inevitably contracted COVID-19, he did not take hydroxychloroquine – however the same cannot be said for Brazilian President and fellow hydroxychloroquine-fan Jair Bolsanaro, who was said to have been given the drug while he was recovering from the virus.
TheSkeptic Editor Michael Marshall said: “We received a lot of nominations this year for world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro, for promoting pseudoscientific COVID-19 cures – and in each case, their most prominent ineffective ‘cure’ was hydroxychloroquine, as a direct consequence of Raoult’s study.
“It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.”
“For his promotion of hydroxychloroquine, and the flawed science that formed the basis of that promotion, Raoult is a worthy winner of the 2020 Rusty Razor award for pseudoscience”.
Since around 2010, I’ve been researching, writing and lecturing about the way in which advertising and PR intersect with and infect the media, to a point where you often can’t readily tell what’s genuine news and what’s PR originated nonsense, unless you learn how to spot certain signs.
Some signs are clearer than others – for instance, if you see a company name mentioned somewhat out of the blue in an article that isn’t about that company, there’s a reasonable chance that company paid somebody along the way for that story to appear. The goal is to smuggle the name of your product into your customer’s newspaper of choice, buried just far enough into an article that it looks like a plausible inclusion in the news story – around the fourth paragraph is the sweet spot, high enough to escape the editor’s cut, but not so high as to be conspicuous. That’s because one of the main goals of a certain type of commercial PR is to win the awareness battle: to make sure that when people are thinking about their needs or looking for something to solve a problem they have, they think of your product name first. With the article you’ve paid to place you can introduce that problem with the main hook of the story, and then explain that your product solves it, once the reader is a few paragraphs in and are invested in the article.
But despite the Mail Online publishing up to 300 stories online every day, space in the mainstream news is actually at something of a premium; more to the point, space in the inboxes and the attention spans of journalists is also limited. So how does a company get its message in front of potential buyers when the media middleman is swamped and won’t play ball?
For a while, the answer was Search Engine Marketing and Keyword Marketing. If you weren’t going to be able to catch your buyer at the point where you’re introducing a problem to them, you could wait until they’ve come across the problem but try to make sure that when they go searching, it’s your solution that comes up. Sometimes that could be through a paid ad, but there was often a lot of competition to buy up the top advertising space, and the return was minimal, as people don’t typically pay attention to adverts in their search results. So people looked for other ways to ensure their website was high enough ranked that it essentially owned the search term.
An industry sprung up to offer Search Engine Optimisation, making false promises to guarantee a business would appear on the first page of Google – though their claims were often hugely misleading, and the techniques they employed were either ineffective or they were a short term exploitation of a loophole that Google soon adapted to fix.
As SEO proved to be ineffective, people tried to push their products up the ranking by building backlinks: if another website linked to yours, Google figured yours was a reasonable site, and nudged you up the list. The more times you were referred, the higher up you’d be nudged. People exploited this by creating link farms – vast pages of nothing but links – so Google tweaked their system again: the more reputable the website that referred to you, the higher up you’d be nudged. What constituted a “reputable” website was, as with all of Google’s algorithmic changes, a black box – but it ruled out websites that were nothing but a page of links, and it seemed to reward sites that seemed legit.
This is where Affiliate Marketing took off, and with it platforms like More Niche. When I first encountered it in 2011, More Niche was an affiliate marketing hub designed to push people to market specific products. People would sign up as an affiliate marketer, and when a company wanted to push their product, More Niche would alert their army of affiliate marketers and assign them each an affiliate code, along with some basic product copy and some product images. Typically in 2011 it was products like weightloss pills, goji berry juices, and later things like cryptocurrencies; things that almost certainly would have struggled to get any traction through mainstream media or PR.
Affiliate marketers were typically web developers who knew how to quickly set up sites, populate them with claims and content, and start trying to push them up the Google ranking by whatever means they felt might work – if it was a short term loophole exploit, that doesn’t matter because they were only looking to promote their site for a while, during the push for this particular product.
Multiple affiliates would sign up to products, and they’d all be given their own affiliate code – this tracked which affiliate had referred the traffic, so if a customer visited an affiliate site and then clicked through to make a purchase, More Niche could give the affiliate a small commission. The more users you persuaded to make a purchase, the more your commission would build up.
It was a tactic that worked, especially for those looking to game the Google system as it was at the time. Product owners could quickly access an army of developers who would compete to be the best salesperson possible for your product, in a way where you neither had to tell them what they could and couldn’t say, nor were you responsible for what they were saying. After all, you just needed to have a page where people could buy the product, and if someone else had a totally separate site that you had nothing to do with who was making all sorts of misleading claims about how wonderful your weight loss product was or how great the returns were on your investment scheme, you can’t be held accountable for any of that, can you?
As for the developers who were the affiliate marketers, they weren’t particularly bothered in the realities of the product, it was just the latest product to push – they’d throw up boilerplate one-page websites, buy up a load of domain names, and get competing to be the most successful marketer of that product. If one of their sites crossed the line – or, more accurately, if one of their many sites which crossed the line was spotted and reported – then it could just be taken down, and two more could be put up within minutes. It was a Hydra-like operation: cut off one referral site, and two more would take its place. There were leaderboards for who had been the top referrer for a particular product. It was competitive, and deliberately so.
This produced some interesting, and possibly predictable, effects: because you had a bank of tech-savvy people looking to outscore each other and treating this as a game as much as a money-making hobby. And they’d be searching for interesting ways to get an edge over each other. As affiliate marketers would unleash their suite of websites – each site slightly different, but often using similar copy, similar claims, similar images, and always their unique affiliate tracking code – some obvious trends would emerge. If the product was a weight loss supplement like Meratol, you’d see lots of sites appear called things like “buymeratolnow.com” and “meratolweightloss.com” and “meratolreviews.com” – all of which would tell you how great Meratol was as a weight loss pill.
But those selective pressures would kick in, and people would look for an edge. And so you’d then start to see other sites emerge, like “ismeratolascam.com” or “meratolfakedietpills.com” – sites which would explicitly insinuate that the product was a con, that it was ineffective and that you should be wary. When you clicked on the sites, they’d open with really big writing explaining why people think this wonderous new weightloss pill is actually a scam.
And these sites would be run by the affiliate marketers, too. You’d get halfway or further down the page, and at the end of explanations around why people think it might be a scam, it would explain that it’s actually legit, and worth a try, and actually you can buy the product for a really reasonable price if you clicked through on this link…
This, to me, was fascinating: that affiliate marketers would intentionally put out what looks like a negative exposé of the product they’re pushing. But fundamentally, it makes a lot of sense, because if you’re selling a scam product, and you think people might have their doubts about it, you know that they’re going to turn to Google with those doubts – and if you can own the space where they’re looking for information about their fears, you can herd them back to your fold rather than risk them coming across information that might make them question their purchase.
Now, MoreNiche claim to have updated their policies so that no false claims are allowed, and users will be suspended if they make any. How seriously do they take that commitment? I honestly can’t say. But this whole history, I think, can serve as a warning about how pseudoscientific arguments often thrive and spread by being savvy about their communication.
It’s partly why the Flat Earth movement grew so quickly on YouTube – they hit on how to describe what they’re objecting to in the language of the other side. I think of it when I look at how men’s rights activists and anti-feminists came to own the search terms on YouTube for things like gender pay gap, skewing the results to denialism videos so that when people might go looking for information on the issue, what they find is almost exclusively material explaining why the gender pay gap isn’t an issue, and ridiculing those who think it might be.
This is something that we should be particularly aware of right now, as we stand on the precipice of a potentially huge swell in the anti-vaccine movement, the closer we get to a viable Covid-19 vaccine. If, or when, a vaccine does become available, we’re going to find out very quickly that those people calling for Bill Gates to be tried for crimes against humanity, and the people who were burning down 5G masts, and the people gathering in city centres to decry the ‘illegal lockdown’ are actually most significantly anti-vaccine activists, and they’ve been laying the groundwork throughout this whole pandemic for a push against vaccines.
When you don’t have the truth as a foundation to build on, your whole idea has to rely on its ability to pass from person to person, to reach people and to convince them.
The thing that I am particularly concerned about is that these conspiracy theories excel at speaking in the language of the worried audience, of recognising their fears and concerns and finding out how to abate them – in a similar way to how those fake-exposé sites would spring up to anticipate the negative reactions of a section of the affiliate marketing audience, and to target them specifically. These conspiracy theories excel at that, in part, because they have to: when you don’t have the truth as a foundation to build on, your whole idea has to rely on its ability to pass from person to person, to reach people and to convince them.
Those selective pressures exist when it comes to the conveying of conspiracy theories, and sometimes those pressures hone their arguments – not to make them more true, but to make them more convincing, more engaging and more viral. If we’re not matching them on all those things, I worry that we’ll see the anti-vaccine movement make serious strides over the coming year.
“…within less than a minute, my anxiety went away. I felt a sense within my body of a physical release of tension and…an emotional high…I had never in my life experienced anything like this.” (Pignotti, 2005, p. 395)
If not for the title of this article, one might interpret the above extract as describing an orgasm. Actually, it’s describing a miraculous experience of Thought Field Therapy (TFT), a controversial energy psychotherapy that claims to cure mental health issues in minutes (Callahan & Trubo, 2001). Developed in 1985 by psychologist Roger Callahan, TFT supposes that disturbances of the body’s “energy field” underlie physical and mental health problems (Callahan & Stancliffe, 1985). This is grounded in energy psychology and Chinese philosophy, rather than medical science – though, when examining the evidence, it becomes clear that TFT is simply pseudoscience.
So, how does this miracle cure work? Callahan and Callahan (2000) theorised that, when picturing an event, individuals construct a field of energy (the ‘thought field’) around them. Consideration of specifically traumatic events disturb this field, causing negative emotions. These points of disturbance (“perturbations”) are said to coincide with physical meridian points, which reduce the perturbations when tapped. The TF therapist taps these points in specific sequences (“algorithms”) whilst the client envisions past trauma, to ultimately reduce the associated negative reactions. Callahan and Trubo (2001) explain that this tapping method works by balancing the flow of qi, the life force energy underpinning principles of alternative Chinese medicine (Frantzis, 2008). TFT is fully administered in a single session lasting approximately 15 minutes, though Callahan has argued that it can cure symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in just 5 minutes (Callahan & Stancliffe, 1985).
There are several issues with Callahan’s theory. For one, research reviews have reported no evidence of thought fields (Bakker, 2013; Bausell, 2007). Notice these are not meta-analytic combinations of studies, owing to the lack of scientific research on thought fields and energy psychology. The same applies to qi (Lee, Pittler & Ernst, 2008). In fact, attempts to confirm or deny the existence of qi have explained its effects in terms of other observable/measurable phenomena (e.g., the result of training and skill rather than balance of energy; Carroll, 2003). In any case, given their invisible and immeasurable nature, both the thought field and qi are unfalsifiable, rendering them untestable by Popper’s (1959) definition of science. The theory behind TFT is, in this way, theoretically and empirically pseudoscientific.
In a not-so-systematic literature review, Feinstein (2008) devised an alternative theory of TFT. He outlined that tapping meridian points during TFT reduces activity in the amygdala and associated brain areas, lowering hyperarousal. Interestingly, Feinstein did not include references to back up his argument; this pattern of claims has continued 10 years later (Feinstein, 2019). This is largely representative of Callahan’s initial theorising on TFT, but attempts to be based on biopsychology without empirical support. The available evidence on the biopsychology of acupressure (such as that applied during TFT) has shown that activation patterns in the amygdala mirror those observed following exposure therapy (Schienle et al., 2007). This suggests that any neurobiological effect of TFT may be attributable to the recall of trauma during therapy, acting as exposure. Thus, the available data disconfirm Feinstein’s hypotheses.
Perhaps the lack of evidence for TFT theory could be excused if the approach significantly reduced human suffering. Indeed, this would be cause for research in the area. However, most “research” into TFT consists of anecdotal evidence and uncontrolled studies, some of which don’t even employ tests of statistical significance (Bakker, 2013). Some efficacious evidence of TFT has been published. For instance, Irgens et al. (2012) conducted a randomised controlled trial (RCT) showing that TFT significantly reduced anxiety scores, and this was upheld post-treatment. Superficially, this would seem to support the efficacy of TFT in treating anxiety. However, this was in comparison to a wait-list group, making it unclear how these effects would have compared to an established treatment (e.g., cognitive behavioural therapy [CBT]). Plus, there was no control condition, making it unclear whether the results are due to placebo effects. Some participants were even in receipt of additional pharmacological- and psychotherapies, making it difficult to rule out whether the observed effects were due to these ongoing treatments. These factors make this study’s conclusions questionable.
To resolve these limitations, Irgens et al. (2017) ran another RCT showing that TFT performed comparably to CBT in reducing symptoms of agoraphobia, relative to a wait-list group. This was sustained 12 months’ post-treatment, suggesting that TFT is a viable alternative to CBT in treating this disorder. Yet, again, there was no placebo condition, so results could be due to non-specific treatment effects (e.g., expecting the treatment to work, therapist enthusiasm; Kazdin, 1979). As above, any effect may be due to exposure. Indeed, Elverum (2011) reported that the introduction of TFT tapping made no further reductions to post-traumatic stress than imagined exposure. Thus, effects of TFT may be attributed to the envisioning of past trauma. Such methodological issues are rife within the TFT literature, and rarely warrant the grand conclusions its authors draw.
Consistent with this critique, well-designed experimental studies on TFT have proven incongruent with its assumptions. Pignotti (2005), for example, conducted an RCT comparing “legitimate” TFT tapping sequences to randomised tapping. No significant differences in changes to emotional distress between conditions were found post-treatment, suggesting that the tapping element of TFT serves little purpose. Accordingly, meta-analytic and systematic reviews of TFT studies generally show an overarching ineffective trend (Pignotti & Thyer, 2009; McCaslin, 2009; Gurda, 2015). Empirically, TFT is continually disproven to work; this is unsurprising, given its lack of evidence-based theory.
The results of Pignotti (2005) illustrate the importance of placebo conditions in psychotherapeutic research. An unwavering problem with TFT research is the lack of a placebo condition (perhaps Pignotti’s research explains the hesitation). It has been argued that it is impossible to create a placebo condition, as tapping anywhere on the body alters the energy field, explaining away placebo effects (Wells et al., 2003). It has also been posited that:
“Strict adherence to the original tapping protocols is considered by most practitioners to be unnecessary,”(Feinstein, 2009, p. 263)
Which means that random tapping could be authentic. The resistance of TFT’s proponents to account for placebo effects could be interpreted as attempts to avoid scientific scrutiny. Callahan himself has argued that TFT effects cannot be due to placebo, since clients doubt its efficacy at face value (Hooke, 1998). This demonstrates a misinterpretation of placebo: the effect persists whether the client believes in a treatment or not (Dodes, 1997; Bootzin, 1985). This tendency among TFT practitioners to evade clinical testing lends itself to pseudoscientific practice.
Another cause for concern is the secretive nature of TFT training. Though open science is yet to be the norm, there is an overwhelming shift to this ideal – this is not the case with TFT. McCaslin (2009) reports that full TFT training costs more than $102,000, with trainees sworn to secrecy regarding TFT algorithms. Furthermore, in his review, Feinstein (2008) did not declare any conflicts of interest, though he and his wife have written several books on TFT (Feinstein, Eden & Craig, 2005). This contrasts empirically-based psychotherapies like CBT, where the underlying principles and practices are readily available in various textbooks and scientific journals. This cult-like nature of TFT training thickens the mystery surrounding its theory and practice.
So, if TFT has been discredited by scientific research, why do clients access it, and clinicians practice it? It may be that these questions have similar answers: TFT is advertised as a rapid cure for most, if not all, mental health problems for all ages (Callahan & Trubo, 2001). This offers clients a remedy for their suffering and clinicians a one-for-all treatment for their clients. This might explain the initial access of TFT, but the question remains: why do individuals believe in TFT? Given TFT’s premise that thoughts affect energy fields, belief therein satisfies Vyse’s (1997) definition of magical thinking. As such, individuals with this cognitive style might be likely to believe in TFT. Several factors contribute to this belief (French & Stone, 2014), although research in this area would be essential to confirm this hypothesis.
Carroll (2003) defined pseudoscience as unscientific theories presented scientifically, or as science – this contrast is important, as not all pseudoscientific theories involve intentional deception. Pignotti (2007) notes from her personal relationship with Callahan that he truly believes in the science of TFT; this is left at the reader’s discretion. Overall, it seems irrefutably clear that TFT constitutes pseudoscience, given its lack of empiricism in theory, research and practice.
References
Bakker, G. M. (2013) The current status of energy psychology: Extraordinary claims with less than ordinary evidence. Clinical Psychologist, 17(2013), 91-99.
Bausell, R. B. (2007) Snake oil science: The truth about complementary and alternative medicine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bootzin, R. R. (1985) The role of expectancy in behavior change. In L. White, B. Tursky, and G. Schwartz (Eds.), Placebo: Theory, Research, and Mechanisms (pp. 196-210). New York, NY: Guilford.
Callahan, R., and Callahan, J. M. (2000) Stop the Nightmares of Trauma: Thought Field Therapy, the Power Therapy for the 21st Century. Professional Press.
Callahan, R., and Stancliffe, R. J. (1985). Five minute phobia cure: Dr Callahan’s treatment for fears, phobias and self-sabotage. Wilmington, DE: Enterprise.
Callahan, R., and Trubo, R. (2001) Tapping the healer within: using thought field therapy to instantly conquer your fears, anxieties and emotional distress. London, UK: Judy Piatkus Ltd.
Carroll, R. T. (2003) The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A collection of strange beliefs, amusing deceptions and dangerous delusions. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Dodes, J. E. (1997) The mysterious placebo. Skeptical Inquirer, 21(1), 44-46.
Elverum, T. (2011) Does acupressure potentiate the effect of imaginary exposure on posttraumatic stress disorder? (Doctoral thesis). University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
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Feinstein, D. (2009) Facts, paradigms, and anomalies in the acceptance of energy psychology: A rejoinder to McCaslin’s (2009) and Pignotti and Thyer’s (2009) comments on Feinstein (2008a). Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 46(2), 262–269.
Feinstein D. (2019) Energy psychology: Efficacy, speed, mechanisms. Explore (New York, N.Y.), 15(5), 340–351
Feinstein, D., Eden, D., and Craig, G. (2005) The promise of energy psychology: Revolutionary tools for dramatic personal change. New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher
Frantzis, B. (2008) The Chi Revolution: Harnessing the Healing Power of Your Life Force. Berkeley, California: Blue Snake Books.
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Gurda, K. (2015) Emerging Trauma Therapies: Critical Analysis and Discussion of Three Novel Approaches. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 24(7), 773-793.
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Irgens, A. C., Hoffart, A., Nysæter, T. E., Haaland, V. Ø., Borge, F-M. Pripp, A. H., Martinsen, E. W., and Dammen, T. (2017) Thought Field Therapy compared to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and wait-list for Agoraphobia: A randomized, controlled study with a 12-month follow-up. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(1027), 1-14.
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Lee, M. S., Pittler, M. H., and Ernst, E. (2008) Effects of reiki in clinical practice: a systematic review of randomised clinical trials. International Journal of Clinical Practice, 62(6), 947-954.
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Schienle, A., Schäfer, A., Hermann, A., Rohrmann, S., and Vaitl, D. (2007). Symptom provocation and reduction in patients suffering from spider phobia: An fMRI study on exposure therapy. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 257(8), 486 – 493.
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Apple recently announced their latest shiny new expensive toys, now with added 5G connectivity. I’m assuming we won’t see Piers Corbyn or David Icke sleeping outside their local Apple store to grab one, but they will no doubt prove as popular with the fanbois as all the previous versions.
In truth, Apple are a little late to the 5G party. The big Korean and Chinese manufacturers have had 5G phones out for over a year, and UK networks started rolling out the infrastructure in the summer of 2019. Long before this, anti-5G campaigners used 4G phones to broadcast their fears. In April 2018, on his podcast Be Reasonable, Michael Marshall interviewed Mark Steele. Mark had been the farce of UK activism with his crusade to remove (what he claimed were) 5G enabled street lights in Gateshead in the north east of England (spoiler: they weren’t).
But as 5G enters the mainstream, despite vociferous and sometimes destructive activism against it, perhaps it is useful to outline what 5G actually is.
Analogue cellular mobile phones first appeared in the early 80’s, and were subsequently replaced with the digital network in the 90’s. The new millennium saw the advent of 3G and data transfers; and in 2010 4G, now with usable data speeds, was rolled out. Like its predecessors, the 5th Generation of mobile phone technology is as much about marketing as it is about specific technological leaps forward. The mobile industry bets a lot of money you will buy their new kit every few years, and a tech reboot every 10 years is a good way to do it.
Each ‘G’ – from 3G on – is essentially an agreed set of minimum standards set by the ITU – The body tasked by the UN to manage the shared use of radio spectrum around the world. Manufacturers and networks work within those standards, regularly creating new technology and innovations.
The result has been a mish-mash of competing technologies and protocols with more acronyms than an average episode of Line of Duty: GPRS, EDGE, LTE, LTE+, WAP, CDMA, WiMAX, HSUPA, UMTS, and on and on…
Radio Ga Ga
All this technology is limited by the physical properties of radio waves. There is a basic immutable fact of radio communication: for a given power output, the higher the frequency, the more information it can carry, and the lower the frequency, the further it can travel. It is a coverage versus capacity trade-off.
The frequency of waves is measured in Hertz. Imagine the waves on a beach caressing your sunburnt feet at a rate of one every second. These would have a frequency of one Hertz: one cycle per second.
Electro-Magnetic radiation waves move at the speed of light and therefore their frequencies are usually measured in multiples of Hertz; from Kilohertz (a thousand per second) upwards in multiples of a thousand (106 Hz = Megahertz, 109 Hz = Gigahertz etc). Once around 1015 (Petahertz) – just past visible light – the radiation has sufficient energy to cause electrons to break away from an atom. This is called ionizing radiation; you don’t want to get in its way for too long if you can avoid it. As you go higher into 1017 (X-Rays) and on into Gamma rays, it can get most unpleasant indeed. Below these ionising levels there is a heating effect, but this reduces quickly as the frequency and power outputs drop.
Given the trade-off between coverage and capacity there is a useful part of the spectrum that is perfect for human exploitation, known as Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR). This falls into the kHz to GHz range.
Low frequency RFR covers the traditional LW, AM and FM radio bandwidths; High Frequency RFR (sometimes called microwave or millimetre wave) is used for more specialist data hungry communication such as radar.
Mobile phones, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, TV and satellite communications use the Mid Frequency RFR sweet spot of around 500MH to 4GHz, where enough information can be carried by a wave travelling a useful distance.
The slices of the spectrum used in the UK are controlled by OFCOM. They decide who gets what for what purpose. UK mobile networks have their own frequency ranges and use them as they see fit. This chart summarises how the spectrum is sliced and used:
As you can see from the bottom of the chart, some of the current spectrum used for mobile phones was once used for analogue TV in the UK. It is worthwhile bearing in mind that the power output of a mobile phone is around one watt ,and a mobile mast is measured in tens of watts. TV masts operate in hundreds of thousands of watts. Remember the adage “the dose makes the poison”? It is telling that anti 5G campaigners ignore TV masts that have been putting out huge amounts of radio waves at the same frequencies for generations.
Currently all the 5G offerings in the UK use the same frequency ranges as have been traditionally used for all the previous G’s. Radio waves conform to the laws of physics and they are incapable of acting directly on living tissue unless concentrated at very high power levels. The power output would need to be several orders of magnitude higher than mobile phone levels to have any discernible effect. This is why there are limits set by various agencies and bodies around the world and why there is barbed wire around radio and TV masts.
There are plans to use bandwidth around 24GHz. This is higher than that traditionally used for mobiles, but it is still way, way, WAY below ionising radiation levels. It is far below visible light, so if you are worried about RFR, be careful standing under that 100w bulb.
The use of this High Frequency RFR for future 5G offerings, means masts need to be much closer together because the signal will not travel far enough. This is what campaigners mean when they claim there will be a mast on every streetlight. It is nearly true. For the signal at this frequency to be useful transmitters would have to be a few 100m apart. Streetlights make excellent, already available, potential masts. However, the mast would be small and the signal very low powered.
5G Weapons-Grade tech
Proponents claim that 5G uses the same frequency and technology as the Active Denial System. This non-lethal weapon developed for the US military (who else) used extremely high powered, directional High Frequency RFR to cause mild burning and pain in people they wished to temporarily disable.
There is a ring of truth to it. Some of the technologies developed have been co-opted into 5G mobile phone technology (and vice-versa): beam-forming, massive MIMO and the potential use of a similar frequency radio signal for instance (though slightly higher and massively more powerful). But to claim it is ‘military grade’ and therefore dangerous is akin to calling your Bonfire Night sparkler a bomb because it contains potassium nitrate.
5G is not a weapons system. It uses the same safe, well understood principles of radio waves that have been used for over a century. The rules for use are well within safety levels and decades of research along with ongoing studies have demonstrated this. Despite what proponents claim, there is no evidence 5G, or any other G has caused, or will likely cause Covid-19, cancers, or the myriad health scares that are attributed to it.
This is the general gist of most email enquiries I receive in my nutrition clinic now. During the first national lockdown, while many people faced furlough and redundancy, my self-referrals went through the roof. It seems that lockdown has contributed to, or exacerbated, many people’s poor relationship with food.
In times of extreme stress, our diets can be influenced in a number of ways – some of us eat more than usual, and some of us eat less than usual, while some of us somehow manage to keep things about the same. Our responses are hugely divided, depending on what lessons we were taught as children, what type of stress we are facing (acute or chronic, for example), our overall support network, and so on. There is no one ‘typical’ eating response to stress.
I spend a fair amount of my time in clinic gently reassuring people that eating in response to strong and/or difficult emotions is normal. To find comfort in food is normal. It’s what makes us human. After we are born, our first experience of eating is in the arms of a caregiver. This first meal is paired with feelings of comfort and safety, and in an ideal caregiving environment it continues that way.
Throughout our early development, physical affection is important, but it is not the complete picture – if we don’t feel that our emotions are listened to and accepted, we may learn to see them as ‘wrong’, and we may suppress them. Food is a very convenient method of achieving this: we physically feel warm and cosy when we feel full, and our minds and body are occupied with the task of eating. There’s a reason why we call it comfort food – it’s like a warm hug.
In the vast majority of cases, these lessons are not taught with malicious intent. I’m not here to play a blame game and point fingers at parents. We do the best we can with the resources we have available. Having said that, these lessons are often taught in a black and white way: food is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’; emotions are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It is completely devoid of necessary context, and when we lose context the outcome is rarely positive.
Of course, not all of us learn and internalise these messages as we grow up, and yet many of us are still finding ourselves turning to food during these difficult times. The weight gain some are experiencing as a result of this has even become a meme – the ‘quarantine 15’. None of us have ever had an experience like this before, it’s totally new, no blueprint, no guidance… we’re struggling.
I invite you to consider a possibility: By eating to soothe and comfort ourselves we have not failed. We haven’t been greedy. We are not bad people. We have given ourselves a small gesture of care and support during a time where we receive little from others. We have coped in ways that have been helpful and necessary.
Self-criticism and self-hatred is not the way forward. It doesn’t make any difference, at least not a positive difference. We have plenty of research showing that shame is an incredibly ineffective weight-loss strategy (in fact, it tends to drive weight gain), and rumination will only continue to bring those foods to the forefront of your mind, thereby increasing the likelihood of you craving them. I encourage people to accept what has happened, take the lessons from it that you can, and move on.
Also, the link between weight and covid19 is not clear-cut, particularly once confounding variables are taken into consideration (as they should be). Weight gain does not automatically increase someone’s risk of infection, hospitalisation, or death, and worrying about this is a thankless task. All those fitness pros, celebrity chefs, and Instagram gurus capitalising on our societal discomfort with weight gain are forgetting one big thing: weight stigma – social stigma due to higher body weight – is having a negative effect on people’s mood and binge eating. In my humble opinion, it also makes you an arsehole.
Self-compassion and being kind to ourselves is not about ‘letting ourselves off the hook’, it’s about being realistic with what we are able to achieve right now, and not beating ourselves up for it. To put it another way, you can beat a donkey with a stick, or bribe it with a carrot, but either way it makes it up the hill. The difference is that while the beaten donkey feels like crap, the bribed donkey gets a delicious carrot at the end. I’m all for the latter.
Over a million people worldwide have died of covid19 so far. You have survived. If a bit of stress-eating is what got you through, well done. You did what you needed to, and that’s ok.
References:
Shame and weight gain: Vartanian LR, Porter AM. Weight stigma and eating behavior: A review of the literature. Appetite. 2016;102:3-14.
Captured by Aliens? A History and Analysis of American Abduction Claims provides an excellent introduction to the fascinating phenomena of alleged alien contact and abduction covering all the important aspects: the history of the phenomena, notable cases (especially that of Betty and Barney Hill), psychological aspects, and alien movies and TV.
Readers should be aware that this is a revised version of Watson’s book, The Alien Deception: An Exploration of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon, self-published in 2009. I just checked and the latter is going for a mere £242.20 on Amazon (but that is with free delivery). Even the revised edition is not cheap at £33.69 for what is a relatively slim volume (206 pages) but, if you are thinking of buying this volume, I would definitely recommend that you save yourself £208.51 by purchasing this revised edition – or, even better, the Kindle version if you are appropriately technologically equipped.
Of course, the fact that this is a revised edition immediately raises the question of how extensively the previous edition has been revised – and unfortunately the answer appears to be “not very much”. There is a long list of “Further Reading and Notes” at the end of the book but I only counted about a dozen that were post-2009. It is possible that there are actually a few more than that as there is no indication of the date on which many of the websites listed were actually accessed but even if this is the case, it is clear that the vast majority of references are pre-2010. This strikes me as a missed opportunity given that the number of serious academic publications on these topics in the last decade is small and it would have taken relatively little effort to have included some discussion of them and thus presented the reader with a volume summarising the current “state of the art”.
As you might expect, what with me being a psychologist and everything, I was particularly interested in the contents of the chapter on the psychology of abductions. Watson presents reasonable (and critical) discussions of the main psychological factors that have been discussed in the academic literature including the dangers of using hypnotic regression to “recover” memories of alien abduction, the probable role sleep paralysis, temporal lobe epilepsy, tectonic strain theory, earthlights, electronic pollution, mass hysteria, and social context. There is some discussion of the notion that some claims of alien contact and abduction may be based upon false memories resulting from the inappropriate use of hypnotic regression. But there are several direct experimental investigations of the possibility that such claimants may have a more generalised susceptibility to false memories (even without the use of hypnotic regression) that are not mentioned at all. This includes a number of peer-reviewed papers in high-quality journals by internationally recognised memory experts at Harvard University, Maastricht University, and the University of Warwick, as well as a group from the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths (but modesty forbids me from naming names).
Despite the above criticisms, I still think this book provides an excellent overview of the topic, especially if you are not already familiar with the work of writers such as Hilary Evans, Peter Brookesmith, Philip Klass, Jenny Randles, David Clarke, and Andy Roberts (to name but a few). To be honest, things have not changed that much with respect to these phenomena since 2009. It is just a pity that Watson did not include much coverage of those few additional publications that have appeared in the last decade.
Captured by Aliens? A History and Analysis of American Abduction Claims. By Nigel Watson. McFarland & Company: Jefferson, NC, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-4766-8141-2. Paperback, £33.69 (Kindle edition on Amazon: £13.99)
