 In the last episode we spoke about the supernatural, so aura photography, past life regressions, horoscopes, chiropractic, and we came up with some more natural explanations for why these things are happening. We spoke about why people believe what they're told and why people see what they expect to see. So there were a whole bunch of them, Barnum statements, multiple endpoints, one-sided events, the confirmation bias and the list goes on. This week we're going to turn our attention to health claims specifically. So again last week we saw somebody who claims to be able to heal people through touch and put that prayer energy into physical batteries. We also saw a chiropractor who claimed to be able to heal a whole range of ailments just by tweaking a little nerve in the back of your spine. And we could again spend episode after episode, week after week, going through and debunking each of these claims, acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, detox diets, blood diet, any diet that you can imagine is usually a kind of... Magnet therapy. Magnet therapy is another one. That's true. The list goes on, right? But we're more interested in why people believe these things, not just debunking a lot of the stuff that's out there. That's right. Last week we also talked about, well throughout the course I suppose, we've been talking about the power of expectation, how what we see here and remember are all shaped by our experiences. And that's true. When you see what you expect to see, there are limits to that, right? So if I can't, for example, see a unicorn appear in front of me, even though I really, really want to, instead you need to have some sort of ambiguous information. It needs to be a dark room or a noisy sort of environment where you can bend this noisy information to almost contort into the thing that you expect to see. So that's perception but it also works for beliefs as well, right? So if I were to ask you or somebody why they believe in acupuncture and the power of acupuncture and curing depression or something, it's very unlikely that someone's going to say, I believe it because I believe it or without any sort of basis for it. Instead they're going to probably cite some experience that they had or not even that they had, something that their family member had or a friend had or even seeing it happen on a television show or some expert or alleged expert said that it's going to work. And then they're going to look at the evidence for that, so that sort of vague experience that they had as evidence that this thing was effective. And also notice when we were traveling around the Mind, Body, Spirit Festival, a lot of the health claims or the benefits that each of these people were making reference to weren't things like open wounds or broken limbs or skin disease, right? They were things like well-being or integration or balance, right? Very vague, ambiguous statements that you can do a really good job at contorting to your expectations to see what you expect to see. And that's one of the mechanisms that we talked a lot about last week and it's really prevalent when it comes to health claims, these very ambiguous statements that people make that you can contort into your expectations. One really good one is the Rorschach ink blot test. Now, people may have seen this as a test developed a long time ago where you show people ink blots, right? And you ask the patient what they see in these ink blots and they can say everything from animals or a bat or a butterfly or people having intercourse or something, right? Depending on the nature of that person's personality or motivations. Now, a lot of what they see or the claims of these tests seem to be no better than a lot of the claims that people are making at the Mind Body Spirit Festival in terms of the scientific rigor for these things. It's no better than interpreting somebody's dreams on the basis of what they see in these ink blots. And it's a really nice example of the role of ambiguity and how you can contort your expectations to coincide with what you expect to see when it comes to health claims. Yep, I think one of the biggest mechanisms that's operating in health claims is regression towards the mean. We've spoken about this a couple of times before. In episode seven, if you remember, we had our two people that were taking an exam and one of them did really, really poorly and one of them did really, really well. Now that's likely a result of multiple independent error factors. So the person who didn't do particularly well on the exam, lots of things were working against them. It was ganging up. The person who did particularly well on the exam, lots of random, independent multiple factors were ganging up on that person for them to do really well. Now I think this is happening when we're sick in health claims. So think about it. When you are sick, you are at your absolute worst. Your health is in decline. And about the time that you start to seek a traditional alternative for even medical treatment, you are at your worst. So there are lots of random multiple things happening to push you down. And about that time that you decide that you need to do something about this is the time that things are going to start moving in the opposite direction. Things will stop working against you and might start moving towards the mean and you might start feeling better. Your body is amazing at healing yourself with sometimes no interventions at all. But if you have a treatment at that time when you're at your absolute worst, it's going to appear as though that treatment is the thing that is causing you to get better. Remember we spoke about post hoc ergo proctor hoc after this because of this. We have this treatment here and we attribute that our feeling better, our getting better to that treatment rather than just regression towards the mean. And that's probably a phenomenon that's operating a lot in medical treatments. And that's related to another effect called the placebo effect that many people are familiar with. And I spoke to Shep Siegel about this and he's had decades of research into this and here's what he had to say.