Sun 11 Apr 2010
Science With Dr Werner
Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, Science, Skeptical Thinking, Stupidity, WooWoo
[14] Comments
This week is, apparently, World Homeopathy Awareness Week ((… as I discovered over at Cubiks Rube. Thanks writerJames)) so I’m performing my skeptical duty by making you aware of it (wow – even just thinking about homeopathy has made me feel better this morning!)
In the past I have been harsh on homeopathy so in honour of WHAW I’m going to allow some equal time for its proponents. It’s the least I can do. Let me present for you Dr Charlene Werner (a doctor of homeopathy, I presume), who will, using her own words, guide you through the science behind how homeopathy works:
Did you stick it out to the end, or did your laughing fit cause you to hyperventilate like I did? I had to take a whole bottle of homeopathic sedatives to calm me down.
To recap what we have learned from Dr Werner:
• The total mass of the universe is about the same as something the size of a bowling ball (ie, virtually none at all), and is not the 8 × 1052 kg ((Just in case you’re not good with numerical powers, the language description of that would be ‘AN AMOUNT SO FUCKING HUGE THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE IT’)) generally accepted by physicists. ((Estimation based on measured stellar density. There is, as always, dispute on the accuracy of this figure, but I think we can safely say that it’s nearer ‘A FUCKING HUGE AMOUNT’ than it is near Dr Werner’s preferred quantity of ‘none’))
• Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence formula is wrong and it should read E=C2. Many of you will see at once that this is in conflict with the ShooTag reworking of it as E=M¾ and so Dr Werner is possibly in error here.
• Stephen Hawkings was ‘sent to Earth by God in His Infinite Wisdom to bring us String Theory.’ This is evidently a different person to Stephen Hawking, the great physicist and cosmologist, who was born naturally of human parents, and, although a proponent of String Theory, can take no credit for its genesis.
• This supernatural Stephen Hawkings dude also discovered a new kind of particle shaped like ‘little U-ies’ that ‘work by vibration’ (no I don’t know what the hell she’s on about either).
• E=MC2 is an expression of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
• Protons, electrons and neutrons, despite all scientific knowledge to the contrary, are made of energy and not matter.
• The ‘definition’ of disease is ‘Transforming your energy into something different’ and has nothing to do with a pathogenic biological process as is generally thought.
• If your neighbour’s dog craps on your lawn, the best way to deal with the matter is to bomb his house. ((Did anyone else start to wonder at this point whether this woman has some serious issues…?))
So there we have it. I hope your awareness of homeopathy is suitably heightened. During the next few days we will be celebrating further illuminating homeopathic moments.
Your health!
14 Responses to “ Science With Dr Werner ”
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[…] 12, 2010 by Melliferax anaglyph of the Tetherd Cow informs us that this week is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. To increase awareness of homeopathy, I was […]
Sorry, “Doctor” Werner, but the only thing that gets me to vibrate is my trusty Cowlexâ„¢
I got to 1 minute 42 secs before I had a laughing fit (or was it the effects of extreme nausea? – hard to tell). Is that respectable?
oops, better go and watch the rest….
omg why did i go and watch the rest?
OK. Let’s regroup after the shock.
Dr(?) Werner is nice. She is disarmingly charming. She giggles and she is sweet. She also speaks UNBELIEVABLE CRAP.
Is she a believer?
With no other reference but this video, I’m inclined to think she is.
Is she retarded?
See above.
How did she get this way?
NO FUCKING IDEA.
Dear Rev, I know you post these things to help your flock. So WTF?
What can I say – are you more AWARE of homeopathy now that you were an hour ago? There ya go!
O tempora! O mores!
I like the way the story at the end pans out:
Firstly the sync goes – so they can’t even remedy a spurious bit of ‘energy’ (or is it string) in their edit suite.
Secondly I loved this little gem:
He said “Can you help me?”
I said “I don’t know.”
So we took the case(and his money). Blah blah etc. Then the fabulous bit about “I want people to treat me as a man of my word” and she takes that as “I want my treatment to be related bizarrely to ‘being a man of my word'”.
WTF
As for how homoepathy works, once again they try to convince people with what sounds like science. Why can’t they just say, “look folks it’s magic!” But no, once again science is the known gold standard to which they desperately try to cling.
And why is this?
Because deep in their hearts they know science is real, science has allowed them to film and broadcast their little private lunacy, science allows them to drive to work, to watch television, to fly to Grandma’s ranch in Arkansas and couple with the hapless farm animals.
And perhaps most importantly, science and all it’s glories has a special place even still in the enfeebled minds of their audience, it’s the lingua franca of ‘how things work’ and to invoke ‘magic’ as an explanation in these tech heavy times is to invite disaster, especially as these days ‘no one believes in magic’. Also in Christian America magic, if it does exist, is the work of Satan, and Satan doesn’t sell!
Reminds me as much of Shootag as the Orbo. Stupid or ruthless people continually amaze me with their gall or naivety or greed.
I’d put them all to the sword, they’re using up my air.
The King
ps What starsign are you Rev, I’ve been meaning to ask.
People like Werner make me homeophobic.
Cissy Strutt: I think there’s a homeopathic remedy for that…
King Willy:
This dichotomy runs deep in the heart of irrational belief. I believe it’s simple to work out why:
In our daily lives it is easy to understand the process of cause and effect. If you drop a glass, it falls toward the floor and it will in all likelihood smash. Likewise, if I pick up the letter opener that’s lying here in front of me on my desk and stab my hand, pain will most likely result. We don’t feel the need to invoke supernatural explanations for these things because they seem direct and obvious. But as we move a little away from the direct and obvious we still feel a need to ‘explain’ cause and effect. Because science does such a great and quite obvious job at explaining the very direct (like the smashing plate and the pain in the hand) it is a great tool to invoke – put simply, we have used science experiments (reproduceable, data-rich, phenomenological, un-anecdotal processes) to map out our world and we trust them.
(A young child may not believe you when you tell them not to touch a hot object – strictly speaking they are not listening to your ‘anecdotal’ evidence – but through their own (short) experimentation they will discover that the science of hot things holds true.)
The problem arises when people get to the stage of ‘wanting’ to believe something is true in the face of it actually ‘being’ true, especially if that something involves complex mechanisms. What I believe happens is that people go for what appears to them to be the simplest and least convoluted explanation – their experience with ‘life’ has taught them to do this.
Unfortunately, as we get to know more about the nature of things, we realise that their behaviour is very often not determined by the simple rules that our animal selves use to navigate the world. In the case of homeopathy we have a situation where simple (or I would say ‘simplistic’) ideas govern the process: Hahnemann’s ‘like-cures-like’ principle is a piece of folk ‘wisdom’ that stretches back to the Ancient Egyptians at least, and probably longer (note here that longevity of belief does not equal proof of efficacy). It is based on such child-like concepts that it really surprises me that it’s even remotely believed today. But the truth is that it’s a simple idea that is easily grasped. The mechanisms of disease, in contrast, are so complicated that we only know a very little about what makes people ill (this should not be in the least surprising if you take some time to consider it – biological systems are VERY complex, so it follows that their malfunctions will also often be complex). So a simple explanation tends to get preference because it requires less brain work – a situation of plain old economy if you like.
However, coupling Hahnemann’s idea of like-cures-like remedies to the process of dissolving such minute amounts of them in water as to be insignificant, starts to sound to any sensible person, well, a little bit weird. It might have slid by in the 19th century (when it was still quite a fringe belief I have to point out) but in an age of more critical scientific views it is on the back foot. Homeopaths absolutely know this. So what they must do in a more scientific age, is revise their simple ‘folk’ wisdom in such a way that it aligns somehow with people’s intuitive need to see logical and rational explanations. Unfortunately, because homeopathy is inherently unscientific this necessarily requires some sleight of hand. In homeopathy it has happened a few times, but my favourite would be the ‘water memory’ ploy; since it’s scientifically demonstrable that a dilution of a substance past a certain point has none of the original substance left in it, homeopaths completely invented a way around this – the water might not have stuff in it, but it ‘remembers’ what was in it. This idea is to anyone with a brain, completely daft on many levels, but surprisingly the scientific community bought into it. They shouldn’t have. When it became apparent that water actually doesn’t have a memory, the homeopaths just changed their claims again (they’ve pretty much fallen back completely on anecdotal evidence now – a last refuge from science if ever there was one).
What we’re seeing with Dr Werner here, is the very outer fringes of this kind of thinking (I’m pretty sure that a lot of the homeopathic community wishes Dr Werner would go back to Planet Airhead because she is certainly one of the most persuasive cases against their cause to have come along in a very long time). If you attempt to follow her argument completely credulously, she is just stringing along a whole lot of half-formed concepts that she’s heard about that give her hooks to hang her beliefs on:
• There is more space in the universe than matter by many orders of magnitude.
• Most solid objects are, technically, ‘space’
• Energy is coupled somehow to matter and light
• Quantum behaviour is weird
• Stephen Hawking is a genius
• String theory is weird
• Albert Einstein was a genius
But like most people she doesn’t really know what any of this stuff actually means and the fact that she gets most of her science completely wrong is almost irrelevant: she’s picked up enough of the gist of the weird stuff (which is actually true) to lend an ersatz weight to her rambling.
To sum it up, her entire argument in the video is simply:
In this way, belief in homeopathy is science – just like ‘belief’ in Quantum Theory and String Theory and electrons and protons and all those other things that you can’t directly experience. It’s not magic at all! You can run that argument on pretty much any irrational belief system you encounter today and it will hold.
(And I was born under the sign of Ophiuchus – the mysterious 13th Zodiac sign that, although acknowledged by ancient astrologers, vanished for millennia because it was inconvenient. That’s me – an inconvenience to irrational thought)
Atlas: People like Werner make me giddy.
Duk: You’re allowed to investigate and then make an informed decision – that’s the idea. I wasn’t always skeptical of such things. Experience and learning to think rationally showed me that how I’d like to think the world is and how it really is are two different things. This, coupled with the eventual realisation that human beings (including myself) are very easily deceived (by others and by themselves) means that I have a very rigorous standard of proof…
Queen Willy: Don’t encourage her.
That bitch took up one minute of my life that I could have used for something useful!!Like cow tipping or vomiting. Here’s some math doc, if ‘m’ is infinitesmally(?sp) small then E becomes infinitesmilly(?sp) small as well. E = C^2 only if mass = 1!
Bitch! making me try and remember all that math from so long ago!
My head hurts.goodnight.
I think the only thing that doesn’t matter is what that crazy bitch spews on about, no matter how much energy she puts into it.
That video is so full of bizarre non sequiturs that it causes a homeopathic dilution of MY BRAIN.
I seriously cannot even begin to think of a comment to it.
Cogito ergo sum.
Melliferax: You are now in a state perfectly receptive to homeopathy.
Cissy Strutt: Noli illegitimi carborundum.