In the last episode, we spoke about the supernatural, so aura photography, past-life regressions,
horoscopes, chiropractic. 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. There were a whole bunch of them: Barnum statements, multiple
end points, one-sided events, the confirmation bias, and the list goes on.
This week we're going to turn our attention to health claims specifically. 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. We could, again, spend episode after episode, week after week, going though
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. The list goes on. 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, hear and remember are all shaped
by our experiences. That's true. When you see what you expect to see, there are limits
to that. 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. That's perception, but it also
works for beliefs as well, right?
If I were to ask you or somebody why they believe in acupuncture and the power of acupuncture
in curing depression or something, it's very unlikely that someone is going to say, "I
believe it because I believe it," 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. Then they're going
to look at the evidence for that, that sort of vague experience that they had, as evidence
that this thing was effective.
Also notice, when we were travelling around the MindBodySpirit 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. They were things like well-being
or integration or balance—very vague, ambiguous statements that you can do a really good job
at contorting to your expectations, to see what you expect to see.
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 inkblot test. People may have seen this. This is a
test developed a long time ago where you show people ink blots and you ask the patient what
they see in these ink blots. They can say everything from animals or a bat or a butterfly
or people having intercourse or something, 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 were making at the MindBodySpirit 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. 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.
Yes. 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. 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. The person who didn't do particularly well in the exam,
lots of things were working against him. It was ganging up. The person who did particularly
well in 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. 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 or alternative or even medical treatment, you are at your
worst. There are lots of random multiple things happening to push you down. 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 going 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.
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 propter 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. That's probably a phenomenon that's operating a lot in medical treatments.
That's related to another effect called "the placebo effect" that many people are familiar
with. I spoke to Shep Siegel about this, and he's had decades of research into this, and here's what he had to say.