Tomfoolery Blog

Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Yesterday I enjoyed my first full speaking invitation at a skeptics society, when the Leeds Skeptics invited me to give a talk on the scientific method. I was given a warm welcome, and the friendly atmosphere continued as I went over the scientific method, did a bit of creationist bashing, before testing my very own imaginary product: homeopathic luck! I hope everyone enjoyed it, Leeds has a very supportive and friendly skeptical community!

Special thanks to the people who took me out for a curry afterwards. Cheers!

I’ll put some pics up when I get them.

After bugging people for long enough, some poor soul has given in and let me on a podcast! Gavin Schofield, Alex Dennerly and Dr Janis Bennion of the Greater Manchester Skeptics host the “Just Skeptics” podcast, where they discuss the skeptical issues of the day. In this episode, we discuss the state of homeopathy in the UK, skeptical issues in India, and my soap box segment is on the argument from authority.

Big props to Gavin for cutting out most of my “ummms” and “errrs”!

If you’ve got any comments on the show, please leave them on the Just Skeptics website, the GM Skeptics website, or on this very blogpost.

The show can be listened to here, and is available on iTunes. Just search for “Just Skeptics”.

By the way, if any Adam and Joe fans recognize my sign off, you know what to do!

The big celebrity news here in the UK is that pop singer Cheryl Cole (nee Tweedy) has been diagnosed with malaria following a holiday to Tanzania. In their infinite wisdom, the BBC News website has decided to run an article entitled “Anti-malarial pills didn’t stop me getting the disease”. As I type, it is at number seven on their “most read” list, and is even featured on the front page of the site, captioned “Malaria Misery: Cheryl has it, and the pills don’t always work”.

The article itself is a story from Katie Fraser, and it details her symptoms following a trip to the Soloman Islands.  She claims she took anti-malarial drugs everyday, and also used a mosquito net and repellent spray, yet still caught malaria. The take-home message appears to be “don’t bother with antimalarials, they didn’t work for me”, but it’s also got a whiff of “don’t trust doctors” about it, as she was misdiagnosed as having flu three times.

People tend to be curious about diseases when a celebrity catches them, so why on earth have the BBC deemed it necessary to publish and promote an unfortunate, individual scare story? The article does NOT stress the importance of antimalarials when traveling abroad, and in my opinion publishing it is dangerous. Any neutral could come away thinking “antimalarials don’t work, so why bother?”.

If you feel like I do and want to complain to the BBC, you can do so here. You’ll need the full URL of the article, which is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/10522909.stm. Thanks.

Acupuncture: the ancient Chinese art of sticking pins in the body in an attempt to cure all ailments. Unsurprisingly, acupuncture is a target for skeptics, as there is little evidence for it’s efficacy, and any benefits appear to be due to the placebo effect.

So, imagine my surprise when I heard of a peer-reviewed paper supporting acupuncture appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The paper, entitled “Adenosine A1 receptors mediate local anti-nociceptive effects of acupuncture”, is the work of Nanna Goldman, Maiken Nedergaard et al, and it comes out of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester. At first glance, it would appear to be a cohesive piece of literature that supports the practice of acupuncture. But does it stand up to closer inspection?

Well, no. As others have already pointed out, the methodology does not support the conclusion. In this study, the authors follow the levels of adenosine nucleotides (ATP, ADP and AMP) after acupuncture is applied to mice. They find the levels peak after 30 minutes, returning to pre-acupuncture levels after about 90 minutes (see Figure 1 of the paper). What can be drawn from this? We can certainly say that this is evidence that acupuncture leads to an increase in adenosine nucleotides, but is this a mechanism for acupuncture, or is this just what happens when a mouse has a needle stuck in it’s leg?

This is my main problem with this study: a lack of controls. The authors appear to induce pain with acupuncture, rather than use acupuncture as a method for treating pain. This first experiment should have been repeated with a non-acupuncture method of causing pain, or they should have put the needle somewhere other than the ‘Zusanli point’, supposedly the most effective acupuncture point on the body.

So, in my mind the authors have not established a mechanism for acupunture, they have merely shown what happens in terms of adenosine levels when acupuncture is applied to a mouse. Their summary of the evidence for the efficacy for acupuncture is also rather worrying. They don’t cite any actual studies, but use the positions of various organisations to justify acupuncture. According to the authors, the tax status of the treatment (recognised by the IRS) is “most telling”.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. What do we know about the authors? To be honest, I expected hundreds of adverts for acupuncture clinics to pop up from a quick Google search of the authors. That didn’t happen, but I did notice something fairly unusual: the two most important contributors, Maiken Nedergaard and Nanna Goldman (the first and last contributers are always the most important) are mother and daughter. Although it’s not uncommon for parents and their children to be involved in academia together, my suspicions were raised. I then learned that Maiken Nedergaard and her husband Steven Goldman’s eldest child was 19 in 2009. This means that Nanna Goldman is at most 20 years old, which is very young to be publishing in a Nature journal. Added to this, Steven Goldman is currently Chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Rochester, and he works together with his wife as co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, also at the University of Rochester.

So, this paper is the work of a 20-year old researcher, with her mother as a supervisor, and her father as joint head of department. Now, I really don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I would love to know who the anonymous reviewers for this paper were. Time will tell on this, but I really don’t think this supports acupuncture at all.