 I'm about to show you the most miraculous thing you have ever seen. I will now use my power of harmonic resonance to power this vacuum cleaner. Note that it is unplugged and will be powered only with my harmonic resonance, which can generate up to 500 megawatts. I'm having to reduce the power level so I don't cause the vacuum cleaner to explode. Thanks to this miraculous new phenomenon, our energy problems will be solved. All economies will be based on my technique, which requires nothing more than a simple set of principles discovered by the ancient Babylonians, and only recently rediscovered by archaeologists digging in an ancient tomb. Anyone can do it, even a child. Okay, here I go. Oh, wait, first I have to turn the light off. It only works in the dark. Okay, there. Hang on for a minute. Where is that thing? Okay, okay. It's still unplugged, but I'll use my harmonic resonance. And there it is. You just witnessed a miracle of our inner power. Okay, I can turn the light on again. Now, what do you think of my miracle? I hope you're actually unimpressed. Why? Because it only works in the dark. How many things that people believe in are like my harmonic resonance miracle? They don't bear scrutiny. They require a certain suspension of disbelief. As the amazing Randy said, some of these phenomenon he tests don't work if he is in the building. What about all those miracle cures touted by people on the internet? Cure for cancer, cure for AIDS, cure for diabetes. They're always accompanied by testimonials, people who were miraculously cured. There's always a man in a lab coat saying profound things that sound very plausible. I'm thinking here of amygdalin or vitamin B17 as they like to call it, or colloidal silver, or a megavitamin therapy, or electrical field devices of all descriptions, or magnet therapy and the like. What should we think about them? Michael Schermer has done an excellent video on his Bologna Detector Kit. My standard is a bit simpler for what I will accept and reject. Does it work when objectively tested by a third party? Can an outside agency find a significant benefit in a clinical setting and reproduce that result thousands of times? The phrase used by the Food and Drug Administration is safety and efficacy. Does it work? And does it cause unacceptable side effects? Why do these miracles in the dark fail to submit to the safety and efficacy test? If you ask them there's always a shadowy nemesis who wants to prevent the world from receiving this gift. Maybe it's the government, or the jealous doctors, or pharmaceutical companies, or perhaps unnamed economic forces. Perhaps scientists are baffled by the miraculous results, or the secret is a closely held ancient technology known only to the ancient Egyptians or Chinese. Notwithstanding that these people have died by the thousands from plagues and in childbirth or to diseases that we have practically eliminated. If they possessed health secrets they must have kept them very well hidden. The truth is that if any cure for cancer or AIDS or diabetes or heart disease existed it would be immoral to keep it locked up. Anyone who possessed such a thing would be obligated to submit it to clinical testing just like every other drug on the market. If they don't they are either selfish profiteers worse than any drug company ever or their cure just doesn't work. Let me say that again. Anyone who actually has a cure for cancer or whatever but doesn't make it public and submit it for testing for the benefit of mankind and instead sells it privately and infomercials or over the internet is an evil corrupt and selfish monster, the worst human being to ever live profiting at the expense of millions of dying people. But they won't submit their miracle to scientific scrutiny to objective third party testing because somewhere possibly deep down they know that their product doesn't work. I'd like to talk about two examples. The first is oxygenation therapy. The idea is that most chronic diseases are caused by defects in oxygen or aerobic metabolism. This is based on the work of Otto Warburg, one of those double Nobel Prize winners who discovered how proton pumps work in the mitochondria in the 1940s. He insisted until his death in 1970 that the cause of cancer was anaerobic metabolism. This is of course completely false. Cancer is multifactorial, genetics, environment, immunology, and cell biology all have a role to play in most cancers. Dr. Warburg, though a brilliant man, committed the scientific sin of making an assertion he couldn't back with evidence. Oxygenation therapy is also based on the work of a Detroit physician, William Koch in the 1910s. Koch postulated that the universal miracle cure for cancer was a molecule called glyoxalide, and he provided the formula for this miracle cure. There was the usual anecdotal evidence. Several people were cured, but the results were never verified, were reproduced by an impartial third party. Some chemists, examining his formula, are quite certain that not only did he never have this chemical, it cannot physically exist in this universe. Of course that was the last we ever heard of glyoxalide or oxygen therapy. Just kidding. Koch's imaginary molecule is still touted as the long lost miracle cure for all cancer. Websites and unregulated clinics around the world dispense this particular brand of quackery as the cure for cancer, AIDS, and diabetes. They sell ozone machines. In Germany you can have your blood pulled out, ozonated, and returned to you as a cure for HIV that doesn't work. Some advocate rubbing 35% hydrogen peroxide on your skin, or drinking 0.5% every day in a glass of water. Somehow the peroxide is supposed to be reoxygenating your tissues. Mostly it just kills people, of course. It's never been submitted for clinical testing, but that doesn't stop people from believing in it. The second example is mega vitamin therapy. This is the taking of huge supplemental doses of something the body needs, many hundreds of times the US recommended daily allowance. Other than faith healing, meditation, and chiropractic, this is one of the most common complementary or alternative therapies people use. The concept has even been given a very scientific-sounding name, ortho-molecular medicine. But the science behind it is weak. Much of the hype stems from one of my favorite people, Linus Pauling, another winner of two Nobel Prizes. He was also a tireless advocate of world peace, and the chemist who did the foundational work on the covalent bond. Unfortunately his science was a bit off on two topics, mega vitamins and the genetic material. The latter is why he's not a triple Nobel. He spent feudal months of his peak years convinced that DNA was a triple helix. If he, instead of Watson and Crick, had had access to the clear x-ray crystallographs produced at King's College, scientific history might have played out differently. But Pauling also had a stubborn streak, and was convinced that a triple helix was more stable than a double helix. His views on mega vitamin C were likewise a case of being brilliant but too stubborn. Vitamin C is a potent antioxidant. There is a clear advantage to a balanced diet, high in fruits and vegetables. But the jury is still out on whether there are net positive benefits to taking larger doses of vitamin C. It hasn't been clearly shown to prevent cold or flu, although it may shave an hour or two off the duration. It hasn't been shown to prevent cancer. The data on longevity and overall health are so mixed as to be worthless. And frankly there is a faulty logic at work here that I find very common in alternative health circles. If 2.4mg of vitamin B is good for you, then 24mg of vitamin B is even better. This is simply not the case. It mostly means your body has to clear over 20mg of useless vitamin B to prevent toxic buildup. Unfortunately your body is normally up to the task, but some vitamins have a very narrow range where they are beneficial. And daily overdoses tax the ability of the system to clear them. Megavitamins have been known to have some decidedly toxic effects, such as blocking copper metabolism, causing kidney stones, and even a phenomenon called rebound scurvy, where you actually get scurvy after going off the high-dose regimen. To conclude, there have been many real miracle cures. But we arrived at them by a process known as evidence-based medicine. It is the single greatest weapon in our medical arsenal. Miracles like antibiotics, antivirals, stem cell therapy, recombinant antibodies, exogenous insulin, and antidepressants have produced unambiguous results that stand up to repeated objective testing by third parties. When I am asked why I am so critical of alternative or complementary miracle health cures, my answer is that calling these things miraculous is to celebrate the wrong kind of miracles, those that only work in the dark. Thanks for watching.