 Welcome back. I'm Dr. Harriet Hall, and this is lecture 7 in a series of 10 lectures on science-based medicine. In this lecture, I'll talk about energy medicine. Wouldn't it be nice if you could take a medicine that would give you energy? Well, actually you can, sort of, amphetamines. When my children were little, I used to wish I could bottle some of their energy. But that's not what energy medicine means. Here is how the National Centers for Complimentary and Integrative Health defines energy medicine. Energy healing therapy involves the channeling of healing energy through the hands of a practitioner into the client's body to restore a normal energy balance and, therefore, health. The National Centers for Complimentary and Integrative Health recognizes two kinds of energy. Veritable energies, which can be measured, electromagnetic, light, and sound. And putative energies, which have yet to be measured. Biofields, subtle energies. No one has ever been able to demonstrate the existence of biofields, much less any therapeutic effects from them. Have yet to be measured implies that they're real and eventually will be measured. They're being too kind. The shoe size of the tooth fairy has yet to be measured, too, but don't hold your breath. Scientists are able to measure infinitesimal amounts of all kinds of energy, even down to the subatomic level. The most plausible explanation of why these putative energies have yet to be measured is that they don't exist. Instead of veritable and putative, we might as well call them real versus imaginary. There are all sorts of medical uses for real energies. Real medicine uses magnets in MRI machines and pulsed electromagnetic fields to improve healing of stubborn fractures. And transcranial magnetic stimulation is being researched for various possible uses, such as the treatment of depression. Real medicine uses sound energy for ultrasound imaging and to break up kidney stones with extra corporeal shockwave lithotripsy, ESWL. Real medicine uses electricity in electroconvulsive therapy, pacemakers, defibrillators, nerve conduction studies, muscle stimulation in rehab, and many other uses. Putative energies don't have any proven uses. Different terms are used to describe putative energy fields. Here are a few of them. Biofield. Human energy field. Chi. Prana. Mana. Numa. Vital fluid. Orgone. And I'll add one to the list. I call them woo-woo. These are the underlying principles of putative energy medicine. There is an ineffable human energy field that can't be detected by scientific instruments. Undefined imbalances in that field somehow cause illness. And practitioners can somehow adjust the energy field to restore health. There isn't a shred of credible evidence to support any of these fanciful beliefs. One of the earliest examples of energy medicine was Mesmer's animal magnetism. He claimed that there was a universal life force fluid that could be directed by the mesmerist for healing. He was investigated and tested by Benjamin Franklin and the French Royal Commission, and his claims were thoroughly debunked. They showed that Mesmer's effects were produced by suggestion and that no mysterious force was involved. Mesmerism really amounted to an early form of hypnosis. Now, hypnosis is not some mysterious state of trance. It's simply a state that I like to call the sassy state, S-A-S-I, for selective attention and selective inattention. It's produced by the suggestions of the hypnotist and the cooperation and the play-acting of the subject. Now, that was in the early days of electricity and magnetism, when those phenomena were still mysterious at the borderlands of science. Poor public understanding led to all kinds of electrical quackery. Like Perkins tractors, these were three-inch rods that were pointed at one end. One rod was steel, the other one was brass. Stroking the patient with these rods supposedly drew off the noxious electrical fluid. They were quite popular for a time. George Washington bought a set. In 1799, Dr. John Hagarth decided to test them. He made placebo tractors out of wood, and he painted them so that they looked like the metallic ones. And he found that they worked every bit as well. Patients had been responding to suggestion, not to the rods. Here are just a few examples of the many quack electrical devices that were being sold in the Victorian era. Belts, corsets, hairbrushes, you name it. This is Albert Abrams. He invented a radionic device that was tunable to different frequencies. The machine supposedly diagnosed patients from a drop of blood or from their signature on a piece of paper. It could even be used over the telephone. Abrams didn't sell these boxes. He rented them out. And he warned the users never to open them. Well, of course, suspicious customers did open them. And they found nothing inside but senseless wiring schemes. In one, all the supposedly different tuning points were wired together so they gave identical outputs. It was glaringly obvious that this was a deliberate fraud. But believe it or not, these radionic devices are still being sold. This is Wilhelm Reich. He discovered organ energy, the anti-entropic principle of the universe. You might wonder why you didn't learn about that in your physics class. Abrams discovered that disease was caused by deficits in bodily organ. His organ boxes were constructed of alternating organic and inorganic layers. Sitting in one of these organ energy accumulators was supposed to improve the flow of life energy and release energy blocks. The natural news website still offers instructions on how to make your own organ box. Here are some of the therapies used today that claim to use putative energies for healing. Therapeutic touch, healing touch, Reiki, Qigong, crystal healing, acupuncture, Ayurveda, yoga, zero balancing, spiritual healing, distant healing. And there are many, many more. Reiki stands for life plus energy. It's a spiritual practice that was developed by a Japanese Buddhist monk. The client remains fully clothed and the practitioner's hands are placed in 12 to 15 designated positions on or over the client's body. They don't have to actually touch the patient. Each position is held for two to five minutes or until the practitioner feels that the heat or tingling sensations have stopped. A practitioner can learn these skills in one to two days after being initiated by a Reiki master. Reiki is claimed to help every known illness and injury. Dr. Oz's wife is a Reiki master. Eric Pearl is a chiropractor who's built a whole industry around his concept of reconnective healing. He waves his hands over patients and they feel his touch without any contact. They also feel a mysterious presence. They see colors unknown on earth and they often see angels. One particular angel is George, a multicolored parrot. After his treatments, patients report miraculous healings of cancer, AIDS, epilepsy, you name it. He discovered this ability to heal after an encounter with a Jewish gypsy. Is there any such thing? I don't know. Anyway, this Jewish gypsy read his cards at Venice Beach and she told him about the axiotonal lines that reconnect your body's meridian lines to the grid lines on the planet that connect us to the stars and other planets. And he realized that he could reconnect people to that grid. He mentions that books and I never got along. By this point in my life, I had maybe read two books and one of them I was still coloring. Yoga is both a form of exercise and a spiritual practice. Most instructors talk about energy. Now, exercise is good for health in general, but some instructors claim specific health benefits for specific poses. One pose is said to squeeze the liver. Another is said to stretch the optic nerve, which really doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. Yoga is said to open the chakras. There are seven chakras or energy centers. The throat chakra routine is designed to strengthen the neck muscles, enhance your communication and thyroid gland, and work with the energy center around the throat. The throat chakra is associated with the element of sound and with the color blue. Chakras are purely imaginary. In crystal healing, various stones and crystals are placed on different parts of the body, often corresponding to chakras, or they may be placed around the body to create an energy grid to surround the client with healing energy. Specific crystals help with specific problems. Sujalite for cancer. Amethyst for backache. Lowlight for alcoholism. Grows quartz for chest problems. Turquoise for fear of speaking in public and so on. You might say this guy in the picture is getting stoned. Medical intuitives claim to see into the human body and visualize illnesses. This is Natasha Dimkina. She's the girl with the X-ray eyes. She claims to see people's internal organs as a colorful picture. She was tested by Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman for a discovery channel documentary. She failed. A few years ago at the amazing meeting another medical intuitive was tested for James Randy's million dollar challenge. She was asked to look at ten people from the back and see which one was missing a kidney. She was confident that she would be able to do this accurately and she guessed wrong. These intuitives can often improve their guesswork by gathering information from any available source, by careful observation and subtle clues. In this case, the one who was missing a kidney happened to be wearing an Air Force t-shirt. That might have misled her into assuming that he couldn't be the one because people missing a kidney are disqualified for enlistment in the Air Force. In fact, he was a retired Air Force officer who was born with only one kidney but didn't find out about it until late in life. Masaru Imoto believes that human consciousness affects the molecular structure of water. That water takes on the resonance of the energy directed towards it by our intentions. He exposes water samples to messages that are good or bad. Then he freezes the water to make crystals similar to snowflakes. Good messages produce beautiful crystals, bad messages produce ugly ones. He's a victim of confirmation bias. He gets to decide which crystals to look at and he uses no valid controls. The messages can be music, spoken words, written labels, photographs, or even long distance thought messages. You can even buy water with intention. It comes in seven varieties with seven different intentions that allow you to drink your way to love, perfect health, gratitude, prosperity, willpower, joy and peace. They're essentially selling spring water in suggestion for about four dollars a quart. No one has ever tested these products to see if they can be distinguished from plain tap water. These bogus electrodermal testing devices are versions of the electroacupuncture of Vole, EAV. First there was the dermatron, then the vagatest, the entero, the Lyssen device, Omega, Orion, QMCI, ZYTO and various others. They're basically a biofeedback machine connected to a computer. The biofeedback machine measures an electrical skin conductance with a probe over the acupuncture points. The readings are affected by moisture, pressure, and the angle of the probe. The operator asks questions that can be answered yes or no, and takes a measurement with the probe to determine which the answer is. The idea is that the body can hear the question and can give the answer to the machine by changing its skin conductance. Then they proceed through a complicated computerized rigmarole where the readings are used to diagnose all sorts of imbalances. The readings tell the operator which homeopathic remedies and diet supplements she gets to sell the patient. The computer even says when this patient should return for follow-up and how much water he should drink every day. The computer program was simply dreamed up by someone out of thin air. Instead of using the machine, you could just as well use one of those magic eight ball toys or flip a coin to answer the questions. The machines are also used to diagnose allergies and sometimes to treat patients by sending frequencies into the body. Here's an example of the results for one patient. The liver is low in vital force. The insulin level is 55% above normal. There are three issues at her pancreas. Her pH is too low at 0.7. That's hilarious. That level would be incompatible with life. The computer said she needed 11 homeopathic remedies, foot baths three times a week, chiropractic treatments, IV infusions of multiple minerals and vitamins, and an alkaline-ash food diet. One of the first articles I ever wrote was about Dr. Upledger's energy nonsense. He had a patient's husband wire her to the kitchen sink with a long copper wire to keep her grounded and remove her excess energy. You've probably seen those energy bracelets like the power balance bracelet that claim to improve balance, strength, and athletic performance. Their claims were tested on Australian TV in a double-blind placebo-control test and they failed miserably. The company was ordered to retract their false advertising and it went bankrupt, but several other companies continued to sell similar products. Expensive Philip Stein watches are sold with claims that they have embedded frequencies that offer all kinds of benefits. The craziest one I've seen is ancestor bands. They claim to be infused with frequencies that will connect you to your ancestors in the afterlife so they can advise you and heal you. The word frequency is a red flag for pseudoscience. Frequencies of what? Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. 33 and a third RPM means revolutions per minute. A heart rate of 70 means 70 beats per minute. Alternating current means 60 cycles per second. To have a frequency, something has to be vibrating or rotating or doing something measurable. You might be able to embed something that's vibrating at a certain frequency, but you can't embed just a frequency all by itself. They claim that the body has a frequency and that individual organs have characteristic frequencies and that something in the bracelets resonates with those frequencies, but that's ridiculous. In physics, resonance occurs when a given system is driven by another system or by an outside force to oscillate with greater amplitude at a specific frequency. You may remember Galloping Gertie, the bridge over the Tacoma Narrows. The wind made it resonate and swing back and forth with ever increasing amplitude until it collapsed. They tell us that we are all frequencies, that organs vibrate at unique frequencies. What do you suppose the frequency of the liver is and how would you go about measuring it? A glass can be made to resonate. We've all done that at dinner parties by rubbing a wet finger around the rim to make a sound. And we know that the pitch of the sound varies with the amount of liquid in the glass. A soprano can sometimes shatter a glass by singing a note that makes the glass resonate. A soprano can't shatter a cat. A urologist can shatter a kidney stone with sound waves in the procedure called lithotripsy, but it doesn't shatter the kidney and it doesn't require any particular frequency. Any frequency will do if the energy is sufficient. Energy medicine is not science. Modern medicine deals with universal facts of anatomy, physiology, pathology, etc. that can be tested by anyone. Energy medicine deals with undetectable, unmeasurable, and therefore unfalsifiable entities. Unfalsifiability puts it outside the realm of science. But that hasn't stopped people from trying to do scientific tests on it. Steven Novella calls energy medicine a perfect example of cargo cult, tooth fairy, noise-based pseudoscience. I'll explain what he means by each one of those. Cargo cult science. In World War II, natives in Melanesia were fascinated by the American plains that brought in all kinds of material goods like canned food and clothing. The natives formed cargo cults. They built crude replicas of airplanes, runways, and control towers, hoping that the effigies would somehow magically bring the material goods from the skies. Cargo cult science tries to imitate science without understanding the principles involved. Tooth fairy science is when you use science to study something that doesn't exist. You can study the tooth fairy. You can measure how much money the tooth fairy leaves to kids in rich versus poor families. You can use rigorous scientific methods. You can get replicable results that are statistically significant. But you won't have learned anything about the tooth fairy because she doesn't exist. Tooth fairy science studies phenomena that are no more real than the tooth fairy, like therapeutic touch studies where practitioners study the effect on sick patients of manipulating an imaginary human energy field. Signal-to-noise ratio. One of the challenges of scientific research is pulling the signal out from the background noise with randomness in the data, interference from other sources, etc. Investigations of non-existent phenomena get completely lost in the noise of data, seeing whatever phantom signals support their philosophy. Remember that humans are so good at pattern recognition that they're prone to seeing patterns where none exist. You know how they say, think before you speak? There's a nerdy way to say that. Please increase your signal-to-noise ratio before speaking. The energies that reiki practitioners claim to detect and manipulate are no more real than the tooth fairy. And sure enough, they've done lots of tooth fairy science trying to validate it. A systematic review found nine studies that met the criteria for review. There were nine randomized trials of reiki for seven different conditions. Four of them got positive results and five of them got negative results. The positive studies were flawed and they were never replicated. They concluded that the evidence is insufficient to suggest that reiki is an effective treatment for any condition. But those studies should never have been done. Before they studied the effect of reiki energies on patients, they should have tested whether those energies were real. They took a child to do that. Therapeutic touch is similar to reiki. It's practiced mainly by nurses who believe they can feel a patient's human energy field and can smooth out the wrinkles with their hands to heal the patient. Therapeutic touch is something of a misnomer. They don't actually touch the patient. But they claim to be touching the energy field by holding their hands a few inches away from the patient's skin. When Emily Rosa was nine years old, she tested therapeutic touch for a school science project. She set up a simple experiment to test whether practitioners could really sense the human energy field as they claimed. She tested whether the subject could detect the energy field from her hand when she held her hand over theirs. When they could see where Emily's hand was, they could very reliably sense when her hand was near their hand. Then Emily repeated the test with a screen and a draped towel that prevented the subject from seeing what was happening. When they couldn't see, they couldn't tell where her hand was. Their guesses were no more accurate than a coin toss. Emily's study was repeated with the collaboration of scientists, and it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. She made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest author to ever have been published in a major medical journal. She was like that child in the story about the emperor's new clothes, who realized that the adults were fooling themselves and that the emperor was naked. It took a child to realize that there is no use in doing experiments on a phenomenon before you've established that the phenomenon exists. That didn't stop Gary Schwartz. He wrote this book, The Energy Healing Experiments. Science reveals our natural power to heal. He believes that we all emit human energy fields, that we can sense each other's fields, and that healers can influence those fields to heal illnesses and injury. He believes that these are scientifically supported facts, and he believes that he has done experiments to prove it. In his most basic experiment, his subjects were blindfolded. They sat facing the experimenter with their hands on their laps, and they tried to detect which hand the experimenter was holding his hand over. The subjects often said they couldn't tell, but they were asked to guess, and their guesses were statistically significant. Now, the first problem is that blindfolds don't work very well. People can peek down their nose or circumvent them in other ways. Magicians are experts at defeating blindfolds. Emily Rosen knew this. That's why she used a screen to prevent any possibility of visual cues. And if Schwartz's results are real, independent researchers should be able to replicate them using the same protocol. If they haven't been replicated, in fact, Emily Rosen's experiment amounts to an independent replication of Schwartz's experiment only with better controls, and it contradicted his findings. Schwartz has done a lot of experiments, but they seldom get published, and they're never followed up or replicated. He never tries to rule out other explanations. After he does an experiment, instead of subjecting it to outside scrutiny, he just goes on to different experiments to try to convince others that he's right. He goes off on a tangent. He does an experiment showing that a subject is sensing the energy field, and then he does another experiment showing that the subject isn't sensing the energy field, but is actually sensing the conscious intention of the experimenter. James Oshman wrote this book, Energy Medicine, the Scientific Basis, trying to show that those putative energies had been scientifically proven to exist. This book is pure pseudoscience. It's mostly stories and speculations mixed with paranoia about how the scientific mainstream is being mean to investigators like him. The only actual evidence in the book boils down to two experiments. The first was a Japanese study of 37 supposed chi emitters. They did detect electromagnetic fields, but only in three out of those 37 subjects. In fact, they said they detected fields that were so strong that the associated currents would be expected to vaporize tissue. But there weren't any associated currents, at least not any that they could measure, which would seem to indicate that the electromagnetic field was not really present. I think those three positive results out of 37 were due to experimental error or to noise in the data. The second experiment was a squid study, not those marine animals with tentacles, but a superconducting quantum interference device, squid. They detected a large biomagnetic field emanating from the hands of a practitioner during therapeutic touch. So large it could not be quantified by the squid device. After this book was published, a later study with better equipment attempted to replicate their findings and failed. A book with the title Energy Medicine, The Scientific Basis, ought to consist of blank pages. There is no credible evidence. Now, just how strong are these putative energies supposed to be? There are unsubstantiated claims that healing fields of two milligoths are emitted from the hands of energy medicine practitioners. That's billions of times less energy than the energy your eye receives when you look at a bright star in the night sky. It's 18 orders of magnitude less than the energies required to affect biochemical reactions. It's 15 orders of magnitude below the cell's noise level. Remember a signal to noise ratio? The magnetic field of the Earth is 500 milligoths and a typical refrigerator magnet is 50,000 milligoths. So even if they were proven to exist, how could those two milligoths' human energies possibly affect healing in the human body? Energy medicine research is usually hit-and-run. They find an apparent phenomenon instead of checking for flaws and seeing if it can be falsified. Instead of trying to better define it and study its properties, they quickly move on to another kind of experiment to demonstrate something else. The totality of their research is an unconnected mishmash that proves nothing and that has resulted in no progress. Here are some more lame excuses that have been offered as proof that putative energy exists. Biophotons. Curly in photography. Experiments where one person's EKG synchronizes with that of another individual. Emotos water crystals that are allegedly influenced by human intentions. Torsion fields that travel faster than light. Quantum nonlocality. Biophotons are a random byproduct of cellular metabolism. They can only be detected by powerful photomultipliers. Energy healers claim that biophotons create some kind of dynamic, coherent web of light within our bodies. But how could they measure that? And what would it even mean? It's not plausible that these ultra-weak photons could have any significant effect or that a whole-body coherent web could result. And it's even less plausible that it could carry any information. Curly in photography captures the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges. The phenomenon is real, but the idea that they show a human biofield is bogus. Sure enough, you can see an aura around the body and in the hands. But the same phenomenon can be seen with inanimate objects. Can they possibly think that a wrench is alive and has a biofield? Pseudophysics is a branch of pseudoscience that explains magical thinking by using irrelevant jargon from modern physics to exploit scientific illiteracy and to impress the unsophisticated. Real physicists can measure infinitesimally small amounts of all kinds of energy right down to the level of subatomic particles. But they can't detect this so-called human energy field. Pseudophysics offers a lot of quantum flap-doodle. Berg's uncertainty principle says that when measuring paradigmic properties such as position and momentum, increasing the precision of one measurement decreases the precision of the other. This has been distorted out of all recognition by pseudophysicists to claim that the observer influences the results and by extension to claim that all kinds of mind-over-matter phenomenon are possible. They tell us that everything is connected and everything influences everything else. Well, yes, in principle, but if a flea moves two inches to the left on a dog, how much do you think that's going to affect the orbit of Jupiter? Quantum theory is invoked to explain anything that looks like it might be spooky action at a distance. And anything you don't have an explanation for is attributed to a quantum effect. A real physicist Eugenie Milzerich pointed out that when energy fields are used as a medium for conveying information, scientists ask questions like these. How large is the signal? What is the transmitter located in the source? What and where is the receiver? How can the device be tuned and detuned? How can one replicate this by a device to be used for medical intervention? Pseudophysicists don't ask these questions. They claim to have detected a subtle energy, but they never bother to test anything about it, like whether it can pass through glass or other materials, or whether the effects drop off with distance. They don't bother to test because they've already decided that the effects don't drop off with distance. Here's an example. This is Adam Dreamheeler. He began manifesting bizarre powers like telekinesis at age 15. He said pencils would fly into his hands, but no one ever witnessed these strange happenings. A dream told him to go to a specific island off British Columbia to meet a large black bird. He did. The bird locked eyes with Adam and imparted to him complex scientific information about the universe. Adam's parents were so impressed that they took a picture of the bird. Here it is. What do you think? Does this look like a picture of a supernatural quantum mechanics instructor or maybe just a random crow? With Adam's new bird brain knowledge, he discovered he could visualize, go into a trance and heal people. By age 19, Adam was already making over a million dollars a year healing people. He allegedly healed Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, at a distance of roughly 2,700 miles. Mitchell has always been interested in the paranormal. He tried a psychic communication experiment during the Apollo 14 mission. It was a complete failure. He's also a firm believer in UFOs, and he spent the last 30 years exploring the science of the paranormal. Let's just say Mitchell has a very open mind. So open that his brains may be in danger of falling out. Mitchell had an MRI scan that showed an incidental finding of some kind of irregularity on one kidney. His doctors didn't know what it was. They wanted to do a biopsy, but he refused. He jumped to the conclusion that he had kidney cancer, and he asked Adam to cure him while he was in Florida and Adam was in British Columbia. Sure enough, on a follow-up MRI, the lesion had vanished. He believes Adam cured him of kidney cancer. Now, which is more likely that Adam treated cancer from thousands of miles away, or that Mitchell never actually had cancer in the first place, but only some kind of imaging artifact or some benign lesion that resolved on its own? We can explain the observed phenomena of energy medicine without invoking any putative energies. Symptom relief from energy treatments can be explained by factors like the placebo effect in the natural course of illness. Experimental results can be explained as false positives due to psychological mechanisms, experimenter bias, methodological flaws, fabricated data, scientific misconduct, noise-based science, and tooth fairy science. What would it take to convince scientists that the human energy field was real? Well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We need a large body of strong evidence that was quantifiable, reproducible by non-believers, coherent and consistent with large effect sizes that arrived at the same conclusion using several different routes of investigation, and that showed progress as new evidence built on older findings. In short, pretty much the same kind of evidence that science demands for any claim. Hold your breath. Dr. Oz said the next frontier in medicine is energy medicine, but then he lives in the land of Oz, and his wife is a reiki master. I'd like to leave you with a healing moment. This is Braco the Gazer. He's a good-looking, long-haired Croatian man who stands on a podium and silently stares at the audience for five to ten minutes. He doesn't make any claims for himself, but his supporters say that during the gaze time they can feel tangling and they see energy or a golden aura and they experience peace or relief from pain. And they claim to have been miraculously cured of everything from migraine to heart disease to cancer. Braco is making millions by just standing there doing nothing. Wouldn't you like to have a job like that? His supporters claim that just by looking at his picture you can be healed. So, behold and be healed. Now in the last five lectures I've covered the five major areas of alternative medicine. In the next lecture, I'll cover a few more miscellaneous ones.