Monthly Archives: October 2014

Why do we get well?

Why do we get well?

 

After we get sick, why do we get well?

Modern, evidenced based medicine has only been around for about the last 140 years, so how and why did we get well in our early history and pre-history?  Thousands of years ago, how did we get well?

When we are sick, we get well for the same reason that all plants and animals get well after getting a disease: we are the result of 3.4 million years of our ancestors successfully surviving diseases.  In addition to that main process, nursing care (shelter, warmth, food, water and cleanliness when we are incapacitated) delivered by family members, clans and tribes, is a secondary, “social animal” factor for getting us through significant illnesses over the millennia.  In addition to these two main and significant evolutionary benefits, our very recent and modern evidence based medicine (since the 1870’s), clean water and reliable nutrition are responsible for nearly doubling our life span.

So, we get well because we are the survivors of millions of years of evolution, the actual “survival of the fittest” process in action.  However, this cyclical nature of disease, that is, our natural ability to heal ourselves and survive, opens the door to all manner of non-scientific, folk medicine “cures” and “snake oil” salesmen masquerading as evidenced based medicine.  The usual process is that as our bodies naturally heal, some “cure” or magic pill is presented to us and we convince ourselves through false associations and confirmation bias that the magic pill or procedure made us better…even though our bodies were getting better on their own.  Due to this typical false association, which continues to recur in every generation, the only way to know that one event causes another is to do repeated, double-blinded, placebo controlled experiments.

Instead, people tend to associate notable events before an illness as the cause and notable events toward the end of an illness as the cure.  “I got a flu shot and it gave me the flu” is an often heard refrain.  We remember the flu shot (a notable event) but we cannot sense when the flu virus actually entered our body and subverted our immune system, so we blame the notable event.  Flu shots contain dead cells so it is impossible for the shot to cause the flu.  As our body naturally fights off the flu virus over several days, we might try high doses of vitamin C, aroma therapy or homeopathic dilutions and falsely associate that those procedures were responsible for healing us.  But we were getting better anyway.

So with all these biases, false associations and placebos cluttering our decision making landscape, what is the best method for making decisions about our health?  The process of getting sick naturally causes us to focus on getting well and the sicker we get the more focused we become on getting better.  This process of being sick and getting well, repeated many times during our lives, puts us in a very vulnerable position and susceptible to believe in just about any placebo that promises to cure us and make us healthy.  The history of medicine through the ages is about believing that just about any strange practice will cure us and make us better.  Even today the equivalent of modern day shamans and “healers” scramble to benefit from our disease cycle of getting sick and then naturally getting well.  Bloodletting is still practiced as a folk medicine, invisible body parts are claimed to channel life energy, the body reacts to special vibrations of substances that cause harmony, magical water and sugar cures us, psychic surgery removes toxic substances, cranial massage and therapy realigns our biofields, aromas, auras, ear candling, moxibustion, chelation therapy and even magnets heal our body.  These practices, which take advantage of our suggestibility when we are sick, are individually described in the Skeptics Dictionary (Skepdic.com).

Most unfortunately, last year Steve Jobs fell prey to this typical false association pattern:

“In 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which further tests revealed to be an islet cell or pancreatic neuroendrocrine tumor that is treatable with surgical removal, which Jobs refused.  ‘I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,’ he later admitted with regret.   Those other things included consuming large quantities of carrot and fruit juices, fasting, bowel cleansings, hydrotherapy, acupuncture, herbal remedies, a vegan diet and a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people around the country, including a psychic. These other things didn’t work, and in the process we find the alternative medicine question, “What’s the harm?” answered in the form of an irreplaceable loss to humanity.”  (Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine, 7/10/13).

So, if the recurring “disease” of humanity is an overactive suggestibility to placebos when we are sick, then the cure, most certainly, is Science Based Medicine.  It can’t cure everything but it’s not a placebo, not a patient generated effect and it has the distinct advantage of not being invisible or using magical and undetectable forces.

Victor Dominocielo, M.A.

Victor Dominocielo, M.A., a California-credentialed teacher for 36 years, is the human biology and health teacher at a local middle school. He earned his Master of Arts degree in education from UCSB. The opinions expressed are his own.

 

The Science Creation Story

The Science Creation Story

 

I asked my 13 year old science students, “Where is everything?”  They looked back, knowing that I hadn’t given them enough information.  I said, “Not just the pencil sharpener, the stapler and the scissors in the room, but in the whole school.  Wait…  How about showing me everything in Santa Barbara…and California…and the planet…and in the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy and even the entire universe?  Where is everything?  You can point to something in this room and show me everything in the universe.”

After looking around a bit and calling out the first thing that came to mind, someone pointed to an inconspicuous chart on the wall and said, “The Periodic Table of Elements”!

It is a startling revelation for many of them.  There is invariably some disbelief and questioning. “But that’s not everything.”  I don’t have to say a word.  I just nod my head that, “Yes, actually it is”.  I can see the wheels clicking and turning.  “But the other planets…The stars millions of light years away?  Are you sure?”

I wait.  The discovery is mind-boggling and beautiful.  Some of the other students confirm that the elements and combinations of elements is, sure enough, everything:  “Plants, animals, burgers and curly fries, the nose on your face and the color of your eyes”.

“But how do we know that the elements of the stars millions of light years away are the same elements here on earth?”  Then I teach the students, very briefly and simply, about the science of spectrographic analysis and “Fraunhofer lines” and how this can tell us the composition of far away stars.  But we must move on.  We are on a tremendous journey of 13.7 billion years, the Scientific Creation Story.

Every culture has their very own Creation story.  They are beautiful, poetic, awe inspiring and emotionally uplifting.  The ancient Greeks and Christians had God’s Son come down to earth in the form of Hercules and Jesus. The Jewish Creation story in the Old Testament tells of God’s work day by day and was also adopted by the Christians.  The Islamic Creation Story incorporates many biblical accounts including Adam and Eve as the first parents who live in paradise until they eat the fruit from a forbidden tree.  The Chumash have their “Rainbow Bridge” from their Earth Goddess, Hutash, which took them from Santa Cruz Island to the mainland.  The stories go on and on and are as rich as the cultures that birthed them.

Science has its own Creation Story and it is every bit as fantastic as all the other Creation Stories.  At the beginning, about 13.7 billion years ago, there was an initial singularity in which all the matter and energy of the universe was collapsed in on itself.  Then the Big Bang occurred, which was not an explosion at all, but a great inflation/expansion of all the matter and energy to create the universe as we know it today.  Stephan Hawking describes these first few seconds of the universe in his now famous book, “A Brief History of Time”.  At first there was no light or gravity but these basic forces soon “kicked in” and there was a great deal of heat, about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit, which began the thermonuclear fusion to create the lighter elements in the Periodic Table.  Bill Bryson in, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”(p.10), describes it like this:  “In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast…In three minutes 98% of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced.  We have a universe.  It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful too.  And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”

The universe was about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium at the beginning and it is still close to that percentage today.  Soon the four forces of nature began.  There are only four: gravity, electromagnetism (the EM spectrum including radio, light, micro, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma and X ray waves), the weak nuclear force (radiation) and the strong nuclear force (which holds atomic nuclei together and which, if you split it, you get an atomic explosion).  The universe is very simple: four forces of nature and twelve elementary sub-atomic particles (including electrons, quarks, leptons, muons, tau and the elusive but now observed, Higgs Boson, etc).

There is a star life cycle, from birth to death, observable at its different stages out there in the wide universe.  Over the last 13.7 billion years there have been births and deaths of stars and when a star goes supernova the lighter elements combine to form the heavier elements in the periodic table.

Brian Cox, a “rock star” physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN describes the Science Creation Story with wonderful enthusiasm during a TED conference here: http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider?language=en

The scientific creation story is different from the other creation stories in that it was not created by any cultural expression of the hopes and fears, dreams and emotions of a great people.  No one need believe it.  This story stands on its own.  It is as observable as the night sky and yet completely fantastic and magical.  Carl Sagan explained the Scientific Creation Story in the most elegant and simple terms: “This is what hydrogen atoms do, given 13.7 billion years”.  Indeed.

Victor Dominocielo, M.A. 10/4/14

Victor Dominocielo, M.A., a California-credentialed teacher for 37 years, is the Human Biology and Health teacher at a local middle school. He earned his Master of Arts degree in Education from UCSB. The opinions expressed are his own.

New Community Science Standards

New Community Science Standards

 

This is actually not about Common Core or Common Snore or Apple Core (because of Bill Gates funding) or even Obamacore as some have called this latest cycle of Federal Education Programs.  However, I will digress for just a moment to mention this latest in a long line of Federal Education Programs.

Every president wants to be the “Education President”.  Unfortunately, centralized planning reform in our gargantuan public education system always falls short which creates the need for reform and further reform during each presidential cycle. Every president has millions of education budget dollars to reform their predecessor’s reforms.

President G.W. Bush uttered the now famous words, “In return for Federal Dollars…” the states would sign on to his No Child Left Behind program.  Bush’s comments explain how presidents get compliance on their signature programs.  If the states don’t endorse the President’s program, they don’t get the money.  This explains why the 45 states who appear to be “Racing to the Top” for Obama’s efforts are not giving Common Core a rousing endorsement because it’s a great educational program.  The states are endorsing whatever program Washington is producing because they are being blackmailed with federal extortion/education dollars: “In return for Federal dollars…”  “Common Obamasnore” is just the latest incarnation of the States’ struggle to get Federal education dollars.

The real test of Common Core by education professionals would be for the Federal government to disperse education funds to the states with no strings attached.  Then we would see which states and educational institutions would endorse Common Core without the threat of losing money.

Now on to the new community science standards.  These are personal science education standards which have to do with how well our high school and college graduates are doing in applying science in everyday life in our society.  What is our Scientific Literacy Index?  I propose that we open up the online phone book and look at how many psychics there are in town.  Then we look at how many bookstores cater to Bigfoot and UFO investigations.  We might also include sales of sensationalistic “National Enquirer” type papers in our standards.  Certainly, looking at the number of ghost hunting and alien autopsies shows on the Discovery and National Geographic channels would also be an indicator of how well we are training our science students.

If we find that the community has a lot of these supernatural outlets then we know that the science education in that community is lacking.  I’ve gone to beautiful Sedona, Arizona many times and when I visit the grocery store, there is a giant bulletin board filled with every imaginable psychic expression.  From the famous humming vortexes, to energy pyramids, crystalline matrix light healing, Star Families, Tarot, astrology readings and chakra balancing, these people have you covered.  So the science educators in Sedona should be having a field day with all the readily available examples of differences between fantasy and scientific methodology.

Locally, our very own Ojai, while not having quite the reputation of Sedona, is noted for its variety of interesting practices.  If you pick up a copy of the, “Ojai Quarterly” (Fall, 2014, pages 134-5), you will be amazed.  They have all the normal, healthy yoga and massage practices but they also advertise Chrystal Light Healing developed by John of God (or JOG, as I like to call him).  JOG practices psychic surgery in Brazil and calls himself a healer.  He sticks sharp objects up peoples’ noses and into their sinus cavities and then claims that this mother of all distraction techniques cures everything from migraines to cancer.  You can watch him stick a 7 inch hemostat way, way up into a person’s sinuses as he performs his “psychic” surgery here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYF0SWma000.  (The clip is about 9 min.  Skip to 4 min to see the distraction technique)

Continuing on, there is advertising for chakra balancing, shaman dream weaving, crystal healing, miracles, psychics, Tarot, channeling and past life trauma release.   The absolute top of the heap, though, has got to be the person who does energy healings for humans and animals…with Jesus of Nazareth…over the phone!  You could go to the website and for $125 (paypal) you get a 30 minute phone consultation with Jesus.  This is sort of “upping the bar” on the common psychic claim (psychic John Edward also “talks” to the dead and does phone consultations) of being able to talk to dead relatives: who ya gonna call, Uncle Bob or Jesus of Nazareth?

My interest in all this activity is that someone is actually paying these people.  Having a strange belief, (for instance, that you can talk to dead), is one thing.  Creating a business out of it and taking money from emotionally vulnerable people is something else entirely.  Many people in our complex society need professional psychological help at one time or another during their lives.  There is a robust psychological/medical care system where people can get professional help.  However, being emotionally vulnerable and needing psychological help is not the time to consult a psychic, Tarot reader, or energy healer who will use a simple “cold reading” procedure to tell you what you want to hear and charge you major bucks for something that any 12 year old could do.  Anyone can learn the 10 easy steps to performing a psychic reading here: http://www.skeptic.com/downloads/10_Easy_Psychic_Lessons.pdf.

The clients of these psychics graduated from high school and college and their science teachers completely and utterly failed them.  Somewhere along the educational line, their science teachers didn’t give these psychic clients, alien autopsy people, Bigfoot believers and ghost hunting specialists the common science sense that evolution gave a gnat.  If you can listen to a Homeopath (or health food store clerk) tell you that diluting a solution makes it stronger, then your chemistry teacher failed to teach you the simple mechanics of serial dilution.   If your biology teacher didn’t explain evolution by natural selection as the fundamental theory of all biology and how all living things change and evolve over time, then your biology teacher failed.   If you can look at this Star Trek “transporter” in the mall video and believe that scientists invented teleportation and didn’t tell anyone, then your physics teacher failed to teach you scientific methodology and how to examine evidence for scientific plausibility.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RbF2tjTt0)

So let’s get science educated so that we, as a society, don’t pay people to connect us to Jesus of Nazareth over the phone.  Let’s get our collective scientific literacy and understanding to the point where we can easily recognize parlor tricks, scams and frauds in everyday life.

Victor Dominocielo, M.A. 11/12/14

Victor Dominocielo, M.A., a California-credentialed teacher for 37 years, is the human biology and health teacher at a local middle school.  He earned his Master of Arts degree in Education from UCSB.  The opinions expressed are his own.