science – Page 2 – Fooyah

December 21 2016December 11 2018

Rogue One

This feels like a hard communication to write and for people who are interesting in not knowing anything about this film please consider this a warning that there are going to be many spoilers.

I took a trip with some science type friends to see Rogue One, the stand-alone Star Wars movie set in between film episodes three and four. I went to the Odeon cinema in Maidstone which was fine. As is a custom now I rated the film after watching it on IMDB, you should probably read this communication about the rating system and you might also be interested in this one about Star Wars Episode Seven.

I rated Rogue One (2016) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/kZhNMLvUin

— Ian Parish (@iparish) December 19, 2016

I think I ought to explain this rating as a six is pretty low. Episode 7 got a ten by default but the more I think about it the more I feel I should have been more honest with myself. I’m not sure it would get a 10 now, even though I own a copy. Rogue One will probably be purchased which would default the score to a 10, but in reality the film was a little bit shit.

Do Not Read On (mostly because it is poorly written)

The best thing about this movie and quite likely the only good thing about this movie was the droid K-2SO. I would have quite happily listened to him much more throughout the film, he was the only character who seemed to have a sense of perspective, or even character. He was voiced by Alan Tudyk who has been in some of my favourite shows.

I was slightly bothered that there were no floating words telling me what had happened and that we didn’t get the Star Wars opening theme. Start with a child disobeying her father and then watching her mother killed, obviously you need psychological trauma and daddy issues to be a hero. Then we have little sequences on lots of planets that I couldn’t give a shit about and we learn that the Empire is making a massive weapon.

This film seems to be consistent with conspiracy nuts in that it believes you can have a massive infrastructure project and keep it secret from everyone, even though everyone knows this is being built. Also, it seems that the entire galaxy knows that a cargo pilot has defected with information and he needs to be debriefed.

I spent a large amount of the first act worried about intelligence gathering in a age when the whole galaxy has access to rumours and ideas. I just didn’t like it.

Then the heroine gets rescued and debriefed / interviewed in the Rebel fucking control room in front of the senators and all the bloody equipment. You DON’T put prisoners in the control room, what shit.

Then some stuff happens. I may have to come back and fill this in once I’ve seen the film again. Perhaps I can over my prisoner logistical problems.

Then we have a scene in the control room again where the Rebel senate appears to be discussing ALL the details about the secret plans in front of everyone including every pilot and vaguely important person. “The secret plans are held on this planet” etc. Arrrrrgh.

There’s a blind monk who chants shit about the force, but the film maker clearly shows him using his hearing to work out where things are, he doesn’t use the force. He’s a charlatan.

Let’s invade a planet and make it look like a Vietnam War film, that’ll keep the dads happy. I seriously felt like I was watching a ‘nam film. Bloody palm trees.

Why was there a random shutter opening and closing at the top of the data tower. WTF? It makes absolutely no sense that it is there, apart from trying to appease kids who watch and play computer games and need to get the timing correct.

So, you build a massive tower to store all your plans for every building in your Empire. Then you need a transmitter which you just happen to build on top of your tower. Finally, you place a data reader and transmit controls OUTSIDE at the TOP of the tower. Not somewhere safe inside the building. WHY would you do that? Why would you put a control system in a place where the weather will get to you? AND then you place some of the controls on the end of a platform sticking out from the tower. Fuck this movie.

I quite liked the ending.

July 28 2016

Not A Thing

I should have learnt by now. I really shouldn’t look. But sometimes it’s a handy way to kill twenty minutes. I glance over the headlines of the Daily Mail online to see what crap they are infecting the populous with these days. I saw this:

Please click on the picture to read more if you want but trust me, it’s propaganda and mostly an advert for an online ancestry DNA company. It also doesn’t tell you anything about your own ancestry.

Up front I should tell you that I have big issues with nationality and pride in our country. I don’t even understand why being born somewhere makes you different to people born in other places. I don’t understand good old British values. For instance, Leonard Da Vinci was born in the Republic Of Florence, but we would describe him as Italian if we wanted to. So where you were born has no influence on the nations that will rise after you and claim you for themselves.

This Ancestry company takes a swab of your DNA and then compares common components of it with that taken from people around the world. This is bullshit. They compare your DNA with that of people living now in other countries to see what you share. That’s what you share now. In this time. Not what you share that’s from a common ancestor. It doesn’t tell you about your “racial” or “nationality” make up. It tells you that you have a common ancestor with people in another country.

EVERY modern European is descended from Charlemagne. Go back far enough and everyone has a common ancestor. Someone having children 2000 years ago has contributed to the DNA of virtually all Europeans.

There is no such thing as race. There is no such thing as nationality.

Now, let’s get to the headline.

Saxons

The Saxons are from Germany. Saxony. In Germany. Or rather in what is now Germany and wasn’t Germany for many many years.

Angles

The Angles were from what is modern Germany. It’s why we are called English. It’s why the French talk about Anglais.

So, there are no British people. Just people who happen to be born on the island of Britain at some point in time.

Fuck the Daily Mail.

June 1 2016

Stupid Comparisons

The following picture was tweeted by BBC Radio 4 this morning as an explanation for the scale of the new Gotthard Base Tunnel. I have a few things to say but initially I would like to let you know that the genius of man never fails to surprise me. We have been so successful in being brilliant. The things we can do to overcome problems are stunning. An irritating by-product of this is that our ingenuity has also been used to create ever more bizarre ways of killing our own species.

I have a few things to say:

I am not even aware of Nicaragua’s GDP and I care not a lot. How about comparing it to teachers employed, or even the cost of other tunnels. 12.5 billion seems reasonable to me in terms of EU budgets.
I have never understood the football field comparison. Surely people understand that football fields are roughly 100m long anyway. It’s not necessary.
This is the one that really bugged me. 4,000,000 cubic metres does NOT compare to a height. One is a volume and the other is NOT. Apart from reservoir engineers who can picture or comprehend this volume anyway.
Because I know exactly how much a freight container holds???
Why do I need a diagram showing me the distance between London and New York. They haven’t even used the Great Circle. I get it 3200km is a long way.

At least they didn’t mention double decker buses.

The ONLY comparison that should be made is country area and Wales because it leads to countries being described in KiloWales [thanks to More Or Less for that].

April 11 2015April 11 2015

Science Reporting Rage

I am annoyed.

The BBC are arseholes. The headline and photo ALL imply that plucking makes hair grow in humans. Here’s the first few paragraphs. With my emphasis.

Plucking hairs in a precise pattern can make even more pop up in their place, a US study suggests. Playing with the density of hair removed altered how serious an injury the body recognised and in turn how much hair regrew. The team managed to regenerate 1,300 hairs by plucking 200, in the study using mice reported in Cell journal. Experts said it was “really nice science” but were uncertain if it could lead to a cure for human baldness. Half of men have male-pattern baldness by the age of 50. The team at the University of Southern California were investigating how hair follicles communicate with each other to decide on the scale of repair job needed.

So, with only a single reference to the fact that the study was in MICE and lots of human type text and a picture this article screams that plucking in humans will cause hair growth.

Ok, so it happens in mice. So fucking what. When they can show it works in humans I may interested in knowing about it. Not for myself although I am mostly bald, I’d rather have less hair.

This is extremely poor reporting. There is no need for this article. It is a waste of time.

September 17 2014

Chin Strap

This really is a headline on the BBC News website. There’s a picture below this of a piece of chewing gum.

Apparently two engineers have taken a pre-existing material and attached it to a chin strap. It then produced some electricity when the user used their jaw and it could feasibly be used to charge a device.

I don’t even know where to start being annoyed at this. While I am nearly impressed with their idea it seems ludicrous to me that you would wear something on your FACE that then required you to use your jaw constantly. SURELY there are other parts of a body that move further and more often. This would only work if you have to wear a chin strap for safety reasons anyway [definitely not Sikhs].

Most of my anger remains directed at the BBC. They are the premier news reporting service in the UK and yet they constantly produce shit like this. Is it really someone’s job to read science journals and then EXTRAPOLATE wildly to make some form of headline that will attract readers. I hate it. It’s lazy and not what a NEWS service is for.

Let’s see what the final line of the article is:

“This is just a proof of concept,” Dr Voix emphasised. “The power is very limited at the moment.”

If you have to include this in your story then it is NOT a story. Report on real science responsibly.

September 7 2014September 7 2014

Evidence – How To Change My Mind

Let’s take something that is quite obviously a load of rubbish: Homoeopathy. I will now state the following:

Homoeopathy does not work

My reasoning for homoeopathy goes as follows:

Implausible (there is no prior plausibility that suggests HOW it should work)
No good scientific evidence to show it works

I want to make the following clear:

I would love for homoeopathy to work. It would revolutionise medicine and curing people and it would also create whole new areas of physics for us to learn about.

However, the evidence does not show it works. The gold standard of medical trials, double blind random controlled, all show negative. See my “discussion“.

If you can show me the evidence and it needs to be good evidence then I would be willing to change my mind. I will shout it from the rooftops and I will become your cheerleader. I will work tirelessly for your cause because it would be so wonderful.

If you can show me the evidence I will change my mind.

I think that’s quite a simple rule to live by. It does mean I have to be able to evaluate the quality of evidence and I could make mistakes there, but I am willing to correct myself.

If what you are suggesting is a quite remarkable “new thing” then the evidence needs to also be quite remarkable to persuade me. If what you are suggesting adds to my current understanding then it will take a normal amount evidence. This is not to say I am closed minded. I would love to be wrong about many of the things I currently know are not true. It would be a brilliant and happy thing to be shown good evidence for something you say is true. As I mentioned earlier I would happily change my mind. Here’s a list of types of evidence ranging from very bad to good:

Anecdote [NOT evidence. NOT even interesting]
Testimony [NOT evidence. Human memory is remarkably poor at recalling what happened]
Human Experience [NOT evidence. We can only explain the world within our understanding]
A single experiment or non-blinded medical trial [an interesting start but NOT fact]
Results of single experiment reproduced by teams working separately [Good evidence]
A medical trial which is controlled [still more interesting]
Results of different reproducible experiments leading to same conclusion [this can go in stone]
Results of large scale double-blinded placebo controlled medical trial NOT paid for by pharmaceutical company [expect the results to lower efficacy a bit over time but this is a good treatment]

The wonderful thing about this process of requiring evidence, oh I know, let’s call it the scientific method, is that it does not rely on me believing. The truth is there whether I believe it or not. A scientist working in Japan should come to the same conclusions as a scientist working in Brazil. The scientific method leads us to knowledge whatever our social and cultural background.

A good place to start when faced with something you understand to be quite fanciful is to ask for the VERY BEST evidence for the thing. If this is poor, then walk away. Do NOT accept the following argument:

Oh, the effects are subtle and can’t be measured.

If the effects are that subtle that they can’t be measured by scientific means then they don’t exist. We observe our world and we do our best to understand it and measure it. If you can’t measure it then it deserves to be rubbished. Just because someone believes it dearly it doesn’t mean it’s any more true. Aren’t we doing them an injustice by not educating them?

August 26 2014August 26 2014

Multi Tasking

There’s a common myth that humans can multi-task and work well at all the tasks upon which they are concentrating. First, let’s discuss the term multi-task. It’s derived from computer speak then best definition is:

apparent performance by an individual of handling more than one task at the same time.

Now, I am going to mention what the science tells us about multi-tasking. When I say science in any of my communications I mean the broad consensus of the outcomes of scientific studies. I don’t mean just what a single scientist or person says, I aim to give you the CONSENSUS. Over time science has looked at things, asked questions and tried to answer them. The human endeavour has produced, over time, a consensus on how reality works. When we find errors we correct them. Science is a self correcting process. If things are wrong, science will correct them. The consensus changes with our latest understanding of what is correct. You will always be able to find a scientist who will disagree with the consensus, especially with politically charged ideas [anthropogenic global climate change], but the consensus is important as it gives us the best ideas of how things work.

OK, my research here is mostly from Wikipedia. I am perfectly aware that this can be a site that has reliability issues, but on matters of science I think it is a good start point. I would NOT look at Wikipedia to get a balanced view of politics or people, but on science issues it is very good.

There has been a reasonable amount of research into human multi-tasking and the results of these experiments indicate that although we can switch tasks quite quickly we can perform none at the best of our ability. If you multitask you are going to do all the jobs to a poorer standard than if you concentrate on a single thing at a time. Moreover, if you wish to complete all tasks to a good ability then you will get them done quicker if you concentrate on a single task at a time.

Our brain is NOT a computer and the analogy fails all the time if it is thought of as a computer. Our memory is remarkably plastic, our brain function is plastic and our concentration can only really be on one thing. If you start reading about how our brains work and the amount of information they ignore and just make up you will be very surprised.

There is no evidence that there is a gender difference in multi-tasking, so if people say women are good at it you should correct them. You should also correct people who say they can multitask. Point out the evidence says that you will perform the tasks less well than if you cover them individually. These people will try to argue from personal experience but they would be wrong to do so. We are very subject to confirmation bias and incorrect thoughts that personal experience is pretty much always subjective. The reality is often different – just remember that dancing bear in the basketball players video.

I was going to give you personal examples of failures to multitask, but my previous paragraph excludes me from doing so. In which case I will just give you some more general ideas to confirm in your heads that what I say is generally true [I’m using your preponderance to have confirmation bias as a route to accepting this communication].

Ever been driving and talking or doing something and then suddenly thought: I don’t remember the last mile of driving?

Ever phased out of a conversation because something is happening in the background?

If you talk to people who design cockpits for airplanes they will always talk about reducing the pilot work-load. This is so that the pilot can concentrate on flying the plane rather than have to worry about checking things all the time and flicking switches. If the pilot has a reduced work-load s/he will be better at doing his/her job properly and being aware of the important things.

When driving cars it is important to concentrate on the driving aspect of being on the road and not other stuff happening in the car. It is your job to make sure you are safe to you and the other road users around you. If things go wrong it is your concentration that could save you and others. The problem is that for most of the time when driving nothing goes wrong and so people concentrate minimally on driving and spend their time “multi-tasking”. This reduces their ability to pay attention to what is going on around them. Gladly it is quite rare for shit to happen but it does happen and you need your whole attention when it does. Pilots spend their entire careers practising over and over again the drills needed to save an aircraft and the lives on board so that if/when it does happen they can automatically make the right decisions. We don’t practise any of this in cars, apart from an emergency stop for our driving test, and so this causes problems when things do go wrong. People are not practised at what to do. I would argue that this is largely because it is not financially worth it to save a few lives on the roads compared to the investment that would be needed to make everyone practise car saving techniques regularly.

That last paragraph loses the plot a little. But here’s the summary and a little more exposition. People can only perform a single task to their total ability. If they attempt to multi-task then the overall effect is a significant drop in their output and understanding.

In terms of education this communication explains why children can’t do homework in front of the television. I would also argue that listening to music will hamper their understanding as they will concentrate on the music and not what they are studying, or they are doing both but to poor effect. I have some music on while writing this but I couldn’t tell you what words they are singing because I am mostly concentrating on this writing. I am using the music to block out other distractions and this may prove useful for learning if it is in an environment where there are auditory distractions. Finally, we take examinations in quiet rooms because the quiet allows us to concentrate on the task in hand.

Now, for some Gran Turismo.

July 7 2014

False Debate

Well, I have had this communication as a draft title since 8 April 2014. I thought I should write some more on sceptical thinking matters since I wrote the piece on osteopathy. I have returned to this matter today because for the last few days the virtual world has been lit up by the news that the BBC are no longer going to be allowed to have quacks and frauds on TV programmes to give the “two sides to every story”.

In a nutshell you take a generally accepted view on reality and interview an expert in that subject and then because you can’t appear to be biased you give a nutter the chance to speak about what they think. So you might have someone on the news or science programme discussing evolution and to “balance” the argument (there is no argument, evolution is pretty much done and dusted) you get some religious nut who really thinks the Earth is 6000 years old and therefore evolution can’t exist.

When a view of reality is considered fact (as far as we can accept it) you then have to understand that it takes a huge amount of evidence to over-throw those views and not just someone from a lobbying group going on about how climate change doesn’t exist.

Here’s the link to the Telegraph’s new story.

Just in case you were wondering, here’s some things that are scientifically accepted:

Gravity
Evolution by natural selection
Immunisations
Anthropogenic Climate Change

Here are some things that are considered bullshit:

Young Earth creationism
Homoeopathy
Chiropractic
Osteopathy
Reflexology
Zero loss power machines
Astrology
Crystal energy

Here are some things you are welcome to argue the toss about but there is never going to be proof of the positive:

Existence of god and or gods
Telepathic powers
Mediumship
The “soul”

January 15 2014February 18 2019

Osteopathy

Introduction

Osteopathy is a treatment that is prevalent in the area I live. There are 60 results of osteopaths within 10 miles of Maidstone for comparison there are 46 osteopaths (from Yell.com) within 10 miles of Bristol. Close to Maidstone is the European School of Osteopathy. There are many osteopaths working in Kent and many people I know see osteopaths and probably pay reasonable sums of money for the sessions.

What I aim to do here is look into the history of osteopathy, what osteopathy is and the medical efficacy of osteopathy to treat various conditions. Although I will admit up front to being very sceptical of osteopathy as a treatment and I would describe myself as a free thinking, religious free, sceptic however, I will try to give a balanced view. If you think I have made errors of fact then please let me know. If I have written opinions with which you disagree then keep it to yourself.

The History

Osteopathy started in 1874 in the USA. A school was started in 1892 and the term osteopathy was coined. Andrew Still, the founder, was dissatisfied with the limitations of conventional medicine and chose to award DO or Doctor of Osteopathy degrees. Osteopathy as a practice spread and is commonly practised around the world. [1]

What Is Osteopathy?

Osteopathy is a form of healthcare that emphasises the interrelationship between structure and function of the body. Osteopaths claim to facilitate the healing process by the practice of manual and manipulative therapy. [2]

Classical Osteopathy

This is a traditional form of osteopathy where practitioners claim to be able to heal infections and diseases with manipulations which unblock the body’s mechanisms for transferring fluids. [3]
The John Wernham College of Classical Osteopathy is an example of classical osteopathy practised in Maidstone. They have made claims in the past of being able to treat diseases with osteopathy. They were told to change their claims by the ASA who found there was no good evidence to support their claims. I know about this because I challenged their claims through the ASA. [4]

Modern Osteopathy

Is a mixture of treatments applied by people trained in the physiology of humans. This is what the European School of Osteopathy says:

The ESO has always had a broad approach to osteopathic education, covering a wide range of osteopathic modalities and concepts at undergraduate level. This includes a full range of structural osteopathic techniques, General Osteopathic Treatment (GOT), studies in the cranial field (Involuntary Mechanism studies), Balanced Ligamentous Tension techniques, Muscle Energy Technique (MET) and Visceral osteopathy. Students receive a good grounding in obstetric and paediatric osteopathic care and are able to see a wide range of patients within the teaching clinic, including some time spent in the specialist Maternity and Children’s clinics. [5]

Efficacy

It is vitally important to know whether a treatment works or not before it is endorsed. I will briefly cover medical trials and how we know what works and what doesn’t.

The best form of medical evidence is a double-blind randomised controlled study. The worst form of medical evidence is a collection of anecdotes. Reading and interpreting medical trials is pretty much an academic discipline in itself. I shall do my best here to explain. [6]

Medical trials need to be randomised and controlled. There should be a control group that receives either no treatment, the next best treatment or sham treatment. The participants should be divided between groups randomly. The participants should not know which group they are in. The people administering the treatment should not know which group they are in. All scientific evidence shows that knowledge of what you receive increases your chance of it “working”.

The placebo effect is mentioned a lot in medical trials. The placebo effect is a misnomer. The placebo is no effect at all. In trials where subjective reporting is used people will report feeling better even if they have had no effective treatment. In trails where objective outcomes are measured there is no effect when there is no effective treatment. For example, in an asthma trial, people who were in the placebo wing reported that they felt more able to breathe but when this ability was measured it was no different. The placebo is just the fact that humans will feel better but that they are not actually any better. This is why anecdote is useless. [7]

Acupuncture often shows to be as effective as sham acupuncture in studies. In essence “real” acupuncture is as effective as “sham” acupuncture. This is the placebo effect. Objective measurements show no difference between the two groups.

For evidence of efficacy each condition being treated must have its own trial. It is not acceptable for a therapy to claim that just because it works for lower back pain it is also effective at treating upper back pain. We would not accept a drug that is good for healing tonsillitis to also be able to heal athletes’ foot. It would need to be tested in both circumstances.

Good scientific evidence for a medical treatment can be considered to be double-blind placebo controlled randomised trials with a good structure and well defined aims. From this “gold standard” the quality of the evidence deteriorates as more freedom is introduced into the trial. Scientists always qualify what they say with the terms good/excellent/limited/variable evidence for something. That is because scientists do not work in absolutes. Even with something as obvious as evolution or gravity scientists will talk about the overwhelming evidence and not that it “is”.

So I shall look for good scientific evidence that osteopathy works in a variety of medical problems. My sources for this will be The Cochrane Collaboration, the NHS and NICE (The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence). PubMed has a wealth of papers published about osteopathy but there is too much for me to read through, especially when looking at each initial problem that is being treated. If you look through these yourself please make sure that you understand statistics, causation and the flaws in designing medical trials.

The National Health Service and NICE

The NHS Choices website explains that there is good evidence that osteopathy is an effective treatment for lower back pain and there is limited evidence that it may be effective for other neck, shoulder or lower limb pain [my emphasis]. There is no good evidence that it is effective for any other form of condition. [8]

The NHS Choices website then explains that osteopathy is considered an “alternative” or “complimentary” therapy, i.e. not medicine and therefore doesn’t work.

Osteopaths may use some conventional medical techniques, but the use of osteopathy is not always based on science.

This means that the good bits are what we would call medicine and the rest is not.

Cochrane Collaboration

This is an organisation that reviews all the medical trials available to come to valid conclusions for the treatments being suggested.

Osteopathy and pain control during childbirth:

We found six studies, with data available from five trials on 326 women, looking at the use of massage in labour for managing pain. There were no studies on any of the other manual healing methods. The six studies were of reasonable quality but more participants are needed to provide robust information. We found that women who used massage felt less pain during labour when compared with women given usual care during first stage. However, more research is needed. [9]

Let me interpret this for you. Women who had massage and other nice things done to them during childbirth “felt” less pain. This is a subjective measurement and means nothing in terms of actual reductions. The last sentence asking for more research essentially says that although this is interesting there aren’t enough data for the results to be conclusive.

Osteopathy, manipulations and period pains:

The review of trials found no evidence that spinal manipulation relieves dysmenorrhoea. [10]

‘nuff said.

Osteopathy and infant colic:

Although five of the six trials suggested crying is reduced by treatment with manipulative therapies, there was no evidence of manipulative therapies improving infant colic when we only included studies where the parents did not know if their child had received the treatment or not. [11]

So, when the patients were blinded there was no improvement. Often with “alternative” therapies the better designed the trial the effectiveness disappears.

These trials were looking at things that are more likely to be practised by a traditional osteopath. Curing infant problems and pain not related to the back. In essence, from the information so far osteopathy is only effective for lower back pain and that may be because they use more medical techniques than osteopathic treatments.

In America

In the USA Doctors of Osteopathy are recognised. But as explained by Marc Crislip most leave behind their osteopathic training when they graduate, turning into proper doctors. [12]

It Costs Money

In the UK people generally have to pay to visit an osteopath. It is well understood that paying more for a product invests that person into believing it works. Just look at audio cables. You can pay a fortune for audio cables and when blinded random trials are conducted people are unable to tell the difference between expensive cables and cheap cables. If osteopathy costs a lot of money then you are invested to believe it works and so will feel better. This does not mean that you are any better.

My Conclusion

Osteopathy can be effective for lower back pain.

However, osteopathy cannot be taken seriously. There is scant evidence that it can treat or is effective at treating many of the conditions that it claims. It started as quackery in a time when our medical knowledge was poor. As our medical knowledge has increased it has tried to change to meet new standards and treatments. However, it fails to provide GOOD SCIENTIFIC evidence that it works. Practitioners of osteopathy are mostly either doing regular physiotherapy and modern medicine and so shouldn’t be called osteopaths or they are practitioners of something that just plain doesn’t work.

You can tell it doesn’t work by the company it keeps in shops and practices. As explained in this communication if somewhere offers homoeopathy and something else consider it a red flag to be wary of what they do.

As Tim Minchin says:

“By definition”, I begin “Alternative Medicine”, I continue “Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call “alternative medicine” That’s been proved to work?

Medicine.”

As an aside I personally find it appalling that you can gain a SCIENCE degree from studying this stuff at the European School of Osteopathy. There isn’t really any science content in the “science” course. It’s a shame that the University of Greenwich validates this. [13]

References

1. Wikipedia page on osteopathy. Link
2. Glossary of Osteopathic Terms. Link
3. Wikipedia page, section “Scope of manual therapies”. Link
4. Advertising Standards Authority ruling on Wernham clinic. Link
5. European School of Osteopathy pages. Link
6. Wikipedia page on clinical trials. Link
7. A description of the placebo effect. Link
8. NHS Choices. Link
9. Cochrane Collaboration. Pain control in childbirth. Link
10. Cochrane Collaboration. Controlling painful periods. Link
11. Cochrane Collaboration. Manipulative therapies for infantile colic. Link
12. Science Based Medicine – Marc Crislip. Link
13. ESO Courses validated by the University of Greenwich. Link

This is my first proper article on this website and it’s taken six hundred communications before I got there. I’ve tried to include some links to specific claims and I will add some when I find the sources. Most of my knowledge on this matter comes from years of reading Scientific American and listening to some excellent podcasts on the matter “Skeptics’ Guide To The Universe” and “Skeptics With A K”. I do not claim to be an expert. I do not claim to understand everything but my understanding is that most of what an osteopath practises is not science and has little evidence to support it. I have written this in good faith.

If you have something factual you would like to correct then email me ([email protected]) and I will do my best to correct what is factually incorrect. If you really want to impress me then send me the links or papers of good medical trials for osteopathy and other conditions to show it is effective. I will gladly change my mind if the evidence shows I am wrong. That’s what being a rational thinker is about. Accepting good evidence and changing my views if needed.