Tag Archives: Facebook

Fake science is no joke

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Happy Easter everyone.

I went to church this morning, and came home to get a lamb ragu going in the slow cooker, and thought I would just hop onto Facebook to see what was going on in the world. I was greeted with this:

“Your body literally treats negative thoughts like an infection.” Dr Peter Amuaquarshie

Oh dear … oh dear, oh dear, oh dear …

Easter is meant to be about redemption, about hope, about God’s great love for us. Clearly #TheDrLeafShow isn’t any of that.

Unfortunately, this is more pseudoscience from Dr Leaf and her cabal.  And while it might also be April Fools Day, fake science is no joke.

Dr Peter Amua-Quarshie has been in cahoots with Dr Leaf since the beginning of her teaching. He has supplied most of the illustrations for Dr Leaf’s ministry over the years, so I’m sure he’s profiting handsomely from Dr Leaf’s enormous sales and influence.

It’s so sad to see academics trade their integrity and sell their soul for the sake of the ill-gotten gains of popular pseudoscience.

Your body doesn’t “literally” treat negative thoughts like an infection. Our thoughts have literally no bearing on our immune function. In research work that has intentionally studied thought separately to stress, thought has not been associated with any significant changes in stress or health behaviour [1]. It’s also been confirmed that thought alone does not lead to detrimental biological changes, such as significant changes in immune function [2].

If anything, it’s the other way around – our immune system and our thoughts respond to physical changes in our bodies internal milieu. For example, an adrenaline surge causes us to feel fear and engage in fight or flight behaviours, and to respond quickly to injury, the balance of our immune system’s cells and cytokines changes to prepare for possible injury.

Another example, a physical infection from a microbe of some kind (bacterial or virus) causes a flood of chemical mediators called cytokines to float around the blood stream. This inflammatory response leads to an immune system that is better able to fight off infection, but it also changes our feelings and our thoughts – this flood of cytokines is the reason why we feel tired, achey and miserable when we’re sick.

Having “negative thoughts” is not the same as having an infection. Infections are disease states, whereas “negative thoughts” are normal and more often than not, beneficial. It’s normal to feel sad. It’s normal to feel angry. It’s normal to feel disgusted or embarrassed. These feelings are adaptive. Without them, we wouldn’t grow or change. Without them, we couldn’t have a rich, full life.

Dr Leaf claims that her goal is to “equip and empower you to use your mind to overcome labels and mental ill health (depression, anxiety, etc) to live a more fulfilled and successful life.” It’s a bit hard to do that by promoting fake science.

For his part, Amua-Quarshie should know better. He’s a teaching academic by trade and has a medical degree from the University of Ghana, after all. Unfortunately, it appears that Dr Amua-Quarshie has been exiled from mainstream academia, leaving a full-time position as an Adjunct Professor (lecturer) at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menomonie, Wisconsin and is now working as a lecturer in a school for chiropractors (Parker University, Dallas, Texas).

Though that’s more of an aside. The bottom line here is that Dr Leaf might claim that she wants people to overcome ‘labels and mental ill health’ but she isn’t going to do that by promoting such obvious mistruths that mislead people into fearing normal, adaptive human emotions. She isn’t promoting a more fulfilled and successful life, she’s promoting imbalance. She’s promoting false hope.

I know it’s April Fools, but believe me, this is no joke.  Fake science is misleading and harmful.  If Dr Leaf really wants people to live a more fulfilled and successful life, she should refrain from using it.

References
1. Doom, J.R. and Haeffel, G.J., Teasing apart the effects of cognition, stress, and depression on health. Am J Health Behav, 2013. 37(5): 610-9 doi: 10.5993/AJHB.37.5.4
2. Segerstrom, S.C. and Miller, G.E., Psychological stress and the human immune system: a meta-analytic study of 30 years of inquiry. Psychol Bull, 2004. 130(4): 601-30 doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.130.4.601

Stop mislabelling labels.

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The last time I looked through the supermarket, I bought some baked beans. How did I know the can I took off the shelf was full of baked beans and not freshly harvested sheep’s innards? Because the label on the can said so.

Labels aren’t perfect of course. Every now and then, a can of something has the wrong label applied in the factory. Usually it’s nothing too sinister – no accidental swaps of some goat entrails instead of your tinned salmon. Instead, it’s usually something similar – tuna gets labelled as salmon and vice versa, and the worst that happens is that the tuna mornay you’ve just made had an unexpected flavour.  Even these sorts of mild mix ups are rare. Overall, we trust that the labels are guides and the information they provide us helps us make an informed decision about what do to with that particular can and its contents.

It would be pretty silly for some random person to preach out the front of the supermarket, ranting about how all labels for a particular thing are all wrong.

“Uh, just because the occasional can of tuna was accidentally filled with cat food doesn’t mean to say that all labels are wrong. And just because one person had a bad experience with the wrong label, the supermarket shouldn’t stop using them … otherwise how else is anyone supposed to manage their cans effectively without labels? Honestly, stop looking like a fool by preaching about labels and let the rest of us finish our shopping.”

Dr Caroline Leaf, communication pathologist, self-titled cognitive neuroscientist, and a self-elected champion of irrelevant mental health advocacy, has come out all guns ablazin’ over ADHD labels again. She needs to give it a rest – she’s just like the crazy person standing in front of the supermarket.

“Labels for ADHD are bad”, she says. “Look at Avery Jackson, who was labeled ADHD but did not accept the label. He went on to earn multiple degrees and become one of the top neurosurgeons in the U.S!”  The underlying message – labelling a child with ADHD will lock then into a life of pathetic excuses and they won’t ever reach their full potential until they renounce the curse of their ADHD label.

For every scary anecdote about the evils of ADHD and the mental prison that everyone with such a label is supposed to find themselves in, there are ten more where the ADHD label helped them.  There are so many more people where the ADHD label helped them to finally understand their condition and receive the correct treatment, enabling them to reach their potential and improve their life in leaps and bounds.

Take, for example, one of my patients called Little Jimmy (not his real name). When Little Jimmy was in the early primary school grades, he was a bit of a fidgeter and couldn’t concentrate well enough at school or at home to complete his homework tasks. His mother took him to a naturopath who told him he had a disorder of “pyrolles disease”. Thankfully, mum brought him to see me, and after a careful history and a long chat, Little Jimmy went to see a specialist who diagnosed him with ADHD and commenced him on stimulant medications. Before his label, Little Jimmy’s reading levels were languishing at the bottom off his class after two years of stagnation.  He was more than a year behind in reading levels and going nowhere fast.  Two weeks after getting his label and the right medication, he went to the top three reading levels in the class.  His mother told me of the massive gains he made, and the flow-on effect this had to his self-esteem and confidence in other areas of his school work and school life. She cried as she recounted his story, and then I cried too.

So perhaps Avery Jackson became an orthopaedic surgeon because he chose to ignore his label of ADHD and worked hard anyway.  Good for him.  Little Jimmy got a label of ADHD and because of it, he learnt to read. Now he’s got the chance to follow in Avery Jackson’s footsteps, BECAUSE of his label.

Labels are important. Without them, we wouldn’t know how to know who needs which treatment. Labels can help people overcome some of the strongest barriers and connect with others for support.

And let’s face it, if someone really wanted to, they don’t need a label of ADHD to find excuses in life.

So labels are not a hinderance, but rather, they are a guide to help you know what’s going on so informed choices can be made. In Dr Leaf’s mind, those kids with ADHD are just naughty children, with bad parents, who are using the label of ADHD to cover their poor parenting and their bad behaviour. Clearly all they need to do is to stop their toxic thinking and they wouldn’t need their medications, but they would be cured.

Dr Leaf is wrong … she can stand and scream blue murder about labels and ADHD all she wants.  But just like the crazy random person screaming about labels in front of the supermarket, it means very little. It’s not helping her cause, and if anything, it’s sewing distrust in an system that, despite it’s flaws, works very well, and has helped thousands of children and adults alike to achieve their potential.

That’s the power of labels, and Dr Leaf would do herself and all her followers a favour if she stopped mislabelling them.

The lost art of joy – Friendship

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Last night, my family and I had dinner with an old friend.

I should clarify … by ‘old’, I don’t mean ‘geriatric’. I mean that I have known this friend for a long time. She is the person I have been friends with the longest, having first met her in early medical school nearly a quarter of a century ago. It’s a friendship that survives despite geographical, logistical and theological differences, because it’s built on the deepest mutual respect and care. I don’t have many friends, but this friend is definitely a keeper.

Friendships mean different things to different people. Some friends are gregarious, a source of instant joy, that person that always makes you laugh even when life makes you want to cry. Then there are those friends who enkindle that deeper sense of joy, because they are steadfast through the tough times.

In the 21st century, our concept of friendship has undergone some pretty radical changes. Before 2004, ‘social networks’ were the people you physically hung out with. Now when you talk about ‘social networks’, people assume you’re referring to Facebook.

Is physical social networking better than virtual? Everyone has their own opinion. We know that humans are wired for social interaction, with specific areas of the brain devoted to social behaviour, such as the orbitofrontal cortex. There are also neurotransmitters and hormones that are strongly associated with bonding and maintenance of social relationships, like oxytocin and β-endorphins. Research has shown that both humans and other primates find social stimuli intrinsically rewarding—babies look longer at faces than at non-face stimuli.

We also know that people who engage in social relationships are more likely to live longer, and that loneliness predicts depressive symptoms, impaired sleep and daytime dysfunction, reductions in physical activity, and impaired mental health and cognition. At the biological level, loneliness is associated with altered blood pressure, increased stress hormone secretion, a shift in the balance of cytokines towards inflammation and altered immunity. Loneliness may predict a shortened life-span.

It’s important to understand what loneliness is, and conversely, what defines good social relationships? Fundamentally, good or bad social relationships are related to the quality of the social interaction. This rule applies equally to real social networks and their on-line equivalents. So quality is fundamentally more important than quantity in terms of friendships, with that quality strongly determined by the connection within those social relationships. For example, loneliness “can be thought of as perceived isolation and is more accurately defined as the distressing feeling that accompanies discrepancies between one’s desired and actual social relationships”.

The corollary is that friendship can be thought of as perceived connection within social relationships, or the comforting feeling that accompanies the match between one’s desired and actual social relationships.

So healthy social relationships aren’t defined by the size of your network, but by the strength of the connections that your network contains, relative to what’s important to you. Just because you’re not a vivacious extrovert who is friends with everyone doesn’t mean that your social network is lacking. It also means that you can have meaningful connections to friends through social media, just as much as you can have meaningful connections through face-to-face interactions. It’s not the way you interact, but the quality of the connection that counts.

One way to increase the quality of your social connections is to enjoy your friendships mindfully. Mindfulness is being fully engaged in the present moment. So mindful friendships is to be fully engaged with the other people around you, to use all your senses to connect with those around you. To ignore the other social networks around you on your phone or tablet, keeping them out of sight and out of mind until afterwards.

Try it. At the next Christmas party, or when you’re with your loved ones on Christmas Day, turn off the phone and engage with the people around you as mindfully as you can, and see if you experience a new and improved form of Christmas joy.

The lost art of joy – Loving yourself again

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How many doctors does it take to change a lightbulb?

That depends on whether it has health insurance.

None of the lightbulbs in my house have health insurance, but that’s not why I don’t like changing them. I’m just not the handy-man type, that likes to climb around on ladders, pulling off light covers, changing the bulbs and putting everything back together. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult, but unless all of the lightbulbs in a room are broken, I’m not going to go through all of the bother. I would much rather have lightbulbs that never die.

Of course, lightbulbs inevitably burn out. Some will work for an hour and then stop, others will last for years before finally giving out. An engineer who designed the light bulb would have an idea about how long the light bulb should work, and according to their tests, the light bulb would be expected to work for a certain time. For instance, say that I put a light bulb into my office lamp that is rated to last for 2500 hours, and it lasts for 2600 hours before it finally gives out. It’s lasted 100 hours longer than it’s rated for, and so to the engineer who designed it, the bulb is a success. But it’s still stopped working, and I’m in the dark. To me, it has still failed.

It’s interesting that failure is as much about the standards that people set, either individually or collectively, than anything else. My standards for light bulbs are probably unrealistic – I want them to work forever because I hate replacing them.

Sometimes we judge ourselves by an unrealistic standard, or we allow others to judge us by an unrealistic standard.

It’s easy to look at the people on magazine covers or on TV who look so perfect, and use that as our yardstick for self-comparison. We yearn for their perfect figure, or their talent, or their business acumen.

We compare ourselves to our ‘friends’ on social media and wonder why our lives aren’t as good.

We remember the criticism from our parents or our teachers – who wanted us to be skinnier, or smarter, or stronger – and strive to please them.

There’s nothing wrong with striving with the right motivation, but when our goal is unattainable or unrealistic, the energy we expend for no perceived gain just sucks the life from our soul, resulting in cognitive overload, resentment, anger and despair. None of these things helps us build joy in our lives.

The antidote is to love yourself again. We need to forgive ourselves and set goals that are realistic and attainable.

Setting realistic and attainable goals first comes from understanding our values and living by them, sailing in the direction that our particular breeze is taking us, not fighting against it.

We also need to understand our own capacity based on our own particular skills and talents. If you’re a Ferrari, you’re not going to be driving up rough mountain tracks, through rivers and around sand dunes. If you’re a Land Rover, you’re not going to be carving up a race track. Use the talents that you have to set your own course, not try to drive someone else’s.

It’s also ok to fail. We succeed because we fail. It’s ok to set some seemingly attainable goals and still not attain them. Beating yourself doesn’t help anyone, all it does is leave you bruised and bloodied. Love yourself even when you fail, and forgive yourself. Remember, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free, and discover that the prisoner was you.” (Lewis B. Smedes)

This Christmas, love yourself.  Don’t try to live up to the unrealistic standards of others, but set your own goals based on your values, even if you don’t always attain them.  And, forgive yourself. That will allow joy to flourish.

Anti-psychotics, damn lies and statistics

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Today, I was asked to clarify some information surrounding an earlier post about Carrie Fisher and the role that anti-psychotic medications may or may not have played in her death from a heart attack.  I appreciated the question which was about whether I’d seen the statistics put up by the Mad In America (MIA) blogger who wrote about Carrie Fisher (the blog which, incidentally, Dr Leaf had then uncritically decided to slyly try to regift it in the form of her newsletter article).

In the opening of her post, the MIA blogger said, “There’s an important question here. Is she one of the cases in point to explain why our community has a 25 year lower life expectancy?” and then threw in a table plucked out of context from a journal article.  At least, unlike Dr Leaf, the MIA blogger was intellectually honest enough to attach the source of the table, which was an article published in the European Heart Journal in 2012.

While the MIA blogger is certainly entitled to her opinion, I thought it was worth discussing the statistics in a bit more detail, if for nothing else than to give some context to the whole “anti-psychotics kill you” trope that keeps getting around.

First, there needs to be the proper context.  No one is denying that there’s a higher mortality rate amongst people with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis, though I don’t see exactly where she got her “25 year lower life expectancy” line from. To me, that seems excessive.

Then to the study itself.  The paper that the table is extracted from is Honkola et al [1]. The study specifically examines the association between the use of different classes of psychiatric medications with the rate of sudden cardiac death during a coronary event (a heart attack, or angina).

In her post, the MIA blogger throws around a lot of numbers but she was loathe to put her numbers in the right context.  For example, she claimed that “smoking is four times safer than the older types of antipsychotics. And it’s twice as safe to smoke as it is to take any antipsychotic, including the newer ones”.  Except, her comparison is a fallacy of conflation – she’s comparing the all cause mortality of smoking (which is more like three-fold rather than two-fold, just FYI [2]) with the highly specific ‘sudden cardiac death during a heart attack’ mortality of the study she’s referencing.  It’s apples and oranges – the groups aren’t directly comparable.

Besides, even if her numbers were directly applicable, the positively immoral sounding four-fold increase in the rate of death sounds is just an association, not a cause.  There is a dictum in science, “Correlation is not the same as causation.”  Just because two things occur together does not mean that one causes the other.  There may be other explanations beside the medication that might explain that number, including but not limited to, statistical anomalies and lifestyle factors, and other factors not considered in the analysis.

There are other problems with relevance too.  Most of the numbers in the table were small and not statistically significant (that is, could have been related to chance alone).  The only strong numbers were for old anti-psychotics, phenothiazines, tricyclic antidepressants and butyrophenones, none of which are first line medications for psychosis or depression anymore.  Newer anti-depressants and the newer atypical anti-psychotics did not have a statistically significant association.

And, like I said before, this study is looking at the association between sudden cardiac death in people having a heart attack, which is a very specific form of mortality.  It’s not particularly applicable to everyone on the medications, so even if the 4- or 8-fold increase is rock solid, you can’t translate that statistic to everyone on anti-psychotic medications or anti-depressants, or Carrie Fisher for that matter since no one really knows how she died other than she had a heart attack.  The rest is just disrespectful speculation.

For me, rather than trying to take a table full of weak and inapplicable statistics and beat a conclusion out of them, a more useful thing would be to know the benefit or harm of anti-psychotics on all causes of death.  If anti-psychotics were really as poisonous as Dr Leaf and the MIA blogger portrayed, then all-cause mortality would be much higher in those exposed to the drugs versus those who were never exposed to the drug, which is why this study by Torniainen and colleagues [3] is particularly interesting, and in particular, this graph – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393693/figure/F1/

In this study, the chance of dying from any cause was significantly higher in those people with schizophrenia who were never treated with anti-psychotics compared to those who were treated.

Does this answer the question why there is a lower rate of mortality? Not really, because in fairness, this study also showed just an association between no anti-psychotics and a higher death rate.  It doesn’t specifically prove causation one way or another.

Does it show that we should throw anti-psychotics around like lollies, or that they are wonder drugs without any associated harm? No, they are medicines and need to be used responsibly.

It does show there’s a general benefit to anti-psychotics for people with schizophrenia so they’re not the toxic killers Dr Leaf and the MIA blogger try and make them out to be.

Anyone can cherry-pick weak statistics and bend them to suit their self-interested propaganda.  The remedy to damn lies and statistics is to look more broadly and consider the strength of the numbers and their context.  When we do that with the studies on anti-psychotic medications we see that they aren’t the evil killers that some people would like to make them out to be.

References
[1]        Honkola J, Hookana E, Malinen S, et al. Psychotropic medications and the risk of sudden cardiac death during an acute coronary event. Eur Heart J 2012 Mar;33(6):745-51
[2]        Jha P, Ramasundarahettige C, Landsman V, et al. 21st-century hazards of smoking and benefits of cessation in the United States. The New England journal of medicine 2013 Jan 24;368(4):341-50
[3]        Torniainen M, Mittendorfer-Rutz E, Tanskanen A, et al. Antipsychotic treatment and mortality in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia bulletin 2015 May;41(3):656-63

Dr Caroline Leaf – 2 Corinthians 10:5 doesn’t support brain detoxing

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According to Dr Caroline Leaf, communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist-come-theologian, 2 Corinthians 10:5 says that “We take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah.”

Sure, part of it does, but does the scripture 2 Corinthians 10:5 lend any credibility to Dr Leaf’s idea that thoughts are toxic and we need to take them captive to detox from them?

She may want it to – her 21 Day Brain Detox is so scientifically anaemic that I can understand her desperation to bolster its credibility any way she can.  Unfortunately for Dr Leaf, misinterpreted scripture isn’t the elixir her teaching needs.

2 Corinthians 10:5 is Pauls famous scripture in which is pens the words “thought” and “captive”, a concept which seems to support Dr Leaf’s ideas.  Except that Paul isn’t speaking generally to us, the body of Christ, but specifically about the Corinthian church. Look at the verse in context:

“By the humility and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you – I, Paul, who am ‘timid’ when face to face with you, but ‘bold’ towards you when away! I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be towards some people who think that we live by the standards of this world. For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.  You are judging by appearances. If anyone is confident that they belong to Christ, they should consider again that we belong to Christ just as much as they do. So even if I boast somewhat freely about the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than tearing you down, I will not be ashamed of it. I do not want to seem to be trying to frighten you with my letters. For some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’ Such people should realise that what we are in our letters when we are absent, we will be in our actions when we are present.” (NIV UK, 2 Corinthians 10:1-11)

This chapter is a specific rebuke to some of the Christians within the church at Corinth, and also a defence against some of the murmurings and accusations that some in that church were levelling at Paul. For example, in verse 2, “I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be towards some people who think that we live by the standards of this world.”

Verses 3-6 are a specific and authoritative rebuttal against the accusations levelled at Paul, paraphrased as, “You may speak against us and the church, but we have weapons that smash strongholds, and we’re coming to take down those pretensions of yours and take every thought of yours captive to make it obedient to Christ, and punish every act of disobedience …”

The specific nature of the verse is also supported by some Bible commentary:

“But how does St. Paul meet the charge of being carnally minded in his high office? “Though we walk in the flesh [live a corporeal life], we do not war after the flesh,” or “according to the flesh,” the contrast being in the words “in” and “according.” And forthwith he proceeds to show the difference between walking in the flesh and warring according to the flesh. A warrior he is, an open and avowed warrior – a warrior who was to cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; a warrior too who would punish these Judaizers if they continued their disorganizing work; but a prudent and considerate warrior, deferring the avenging blow till “I am assured of your submission” (Stanley) “that I may not confound the innocent with the guilty, the dupes with the deceivers.” What kind of a preacher he was he had shown long before; what kind of an apostle he was among apostles as to independence, self-support, and resignation of official rights in earthly matters, he had also shown; further yet, what kind of a sufferer and martyr he was had been portrayed.”
(C. Lipscomb – http://biblehub.com/commentaries/homiletics/2_corinthians/10.htm)

Similarly, the translation from the original text is more specific than general. The verb used for “bringing into captivity” is aichmalōtízō, “to make captive: – lead away captive, bring into captivity” which is in the Present Active Participle form of the verb. The present tense represents a simple statement of fact or reality viewed as occurring in actual time. The active voice represents the subject as the doer or performer of the action. The Greek participle corresponds for the most part to the English participle, reflecting “-ing” or “-ed” being suffixed to the basic verb form. Actions completed but ongoing or commands are different verb tenses (see https://www.blueletterbible.org/help/greekverbs.cfm for a better explanation). Paul wasn’t making a general statement, but a specific statement about what he would do in his present time, not the future.

So, Paul isn’t telling us to “bring every thought captive into obedience to Christ”.  Paul is issuing a smack-down to his critics, not telling us to fight our thoughts.

Dr Leaf is guilty of perpetuating a common scriptural misunderstanding in order to try and validate her already weak teaching.

Our thoughts are not toxic.  We do not need to detox our brain.  Misquoted phrases of scripture taken out of context doesn’t change that.

Hollywood knows more about cognitive neuroscience than Dr Caroline Leaf

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Anyone ever watched the Will Smith movie, “Concussion”?

The movie is based on the true story of Dr Bennet Omalu who is a Nigerian-born pathologist (a pathologist is a forensic specialist who is able to determine the cause of a person’s disease and death).  Dr Omalu became curious as to why otherwise healthy middle-aged men were displaying changes to their behaviour and memory before dying at a young age.

What he found was changes to the brain of these NFL players similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s Disease.  The recurrent physical head trauma sustained by those football players was resulting in abnormal proteins in their brain cells.  The abnormal proteins resulted in the destruction of those brain cells.  As a result of the destruction of those brain cells, the thinking and behaviour of those players changed.

After initially denying the link, the NFL was forced to change their policy on repetitive head trauma under the weight of the avalanche of confirmatory data that followed in support of Dr Omalu’s findings and it’s been reported that “as of the summer of 2015, more than 5,000 former players were involved in a consolidated lawsuit, with a settlement figure of $765 million deemed insufficient by a judge”.

But good news for the NFL … self-titled cognitive neuroscientist Dr Caroline Leaf reassures us that “Your mind controls your brain.  Your brain does not control your mind.”

Maybe she can act for the NFL as their star witness.

But if I were her, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.  After all, it’s not like she’s able to mount particularly strong logical arguments.  Today she wrote on Facebook, “It’s important to remember that our thinking changes the structure of our brains because our minds are separate from our brains.”

How is the mind going to control the brain if they’re separate?  Suggesting that one thing controls another carries the implication that they are intrinsically linked.  If your hands are separated from the steering wheel of your car, are you in control of your car?

The other reason why Dr Leaf won’t be getting a call from Roger Goodell any time soon is because she isn’t really an expert on cognitive neuroscience as much as she’s convinced the Christian church otherwise.

Oh, and then there’s that minor detail that even Hollywood knows more about cognitive neuroscience than she does.  The whole point of “Concussion” is that brain damage results in disordered thinking which is the exact opposite of what Dr Leaf is trying to claim, and it’s hard to withstand any real scrutiny when your hypothesis has been trumped by a Hollywood screenplay.

The mind is a function of the brain, it does not control the brain.  The fact that Dr Leaf can not or will not bow to the weight of the undeniable scientific evidence means that she is either delusional, ignorant or utterly obstinate.  The fact that the western church is still willing to deify Dr Leaf in spite of these qualities is a stain on the reputation of the church and a blight on it’s witness to a world which only needs to look to Hollywood to find more credible information than what’s coming from Dr Leaf’s pulpit.

On sperm and common sense

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I’ve been thinking the last few days about critical thinking, or more specifically, the lack of it.

I’ve written about critical thinking before.  I realise that critical thinking can be difficult, and it doesn’t always come naturally to us humans.  And in discussing it here, I don’t want to give the false impression that I expect everyone to suddenly become Aristotle or Francis Bacon, but I’d like to think we can all have enough critical thinking skills to have some basic common sense.

A case in point came across my Facebook feed tonight.  A Facebook friend had laryngitis and was about to embark on a speaking engagement and was asking the hive mind for some advice.

Now I know that this was a question posed to lay people, and I wasn’t expecting anyone to be giving specific medical advice … but it was interesting that the answers, by and large, didn’t even pass the common sense test.  Most of the answers recommended either gargling or drinking various home-made potions.  Except, when you gargle something or drink something, it doesn’t go anywhere near the voice box – we know that because we know what happens when you get liquid into your voice box, you cough or choke.  So clearly, no matter what you’re gargling or drinking, it isn’t going to affect your vocal cords one bit.  You don’t need a medical degree to know that, you just have to use a little bit of common sense.

The same deficiency in entry-level critical thinking is seen in the church all the time.  It afflicts everyone from pew-warmer to pastor.  Common sense so often escapes us when it comes to understanding scripture.  Christian celebrities skew the text of the Bible to suit their own agendas all the time, and most Christians are too gullible and just accept the incorrect interpretation.  Sometimes a scriptural misinterpretation can be passed down from generation to generation because people don’t question the orthodoxy for fear of appearing divisive or ignorant.

A funny example of how the scripture can be taught with all sincerity but without much understanding is in relation to sperm.  When I was in my final year of high school at a prominent Christian school, one of the male teachers took it on himself to get all the boys together from our year level for a chat about important man things.

One of the things that was mentioned was that we shouldn’t masturbate, because of the story of Onan.  In Genesis 38, Onan ejaculated on the ground rather than in his sister-in-law and God smote him.  Somehow, that was taken to mean that semen is precious, therefore it shouldn’t be wasted.  This lead to a historical view, expressed by Clement of Alexandria who wrote, “Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted. To have coitus other than to procreate children is to do injury to nature.”  This lead to the concept that masturbation is evil because it is seminal genocide, which eventually lead to the Monty Python parody “Every sperm is sacred” (https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk?list=RDfUspLVStPbk).

Anyway, back to my high school – the teacher wasted our entire morning tea time talking about Onan, and about how we should be chaste and not masturbate because every sperm is sacred.  But he clearly didn’t read the actual scripture, nor did he or anyone else ever consider why, if God was so stressed about wasting semen, He would create men to have wet dreams.  I really wanted to make this point, but didn’t because it was morning tea time and everyone wanted to get out of there, and I also didn’t want to be mercilessly harassed about being pro-masturbation by every guy in my grade.

My high school teacher and the story of Onan is an example of how people can be well meaning and still misguided, and why we need to apply common sense to scripture.  It doesn’t take a great deal of biological knowledge to know that men have nocturnal emissions of semen, yet for centuries, the story of Onan was about how he was smitten because of his treatment of his sperm, not about how he was disobedient.

Another example of how well-meaning but misguided teaching can be perpetuated comes from the Christian course, “Valiant Man” by Australian pastor, Dr Allen Meyer.  The “Valiant Man” program was a ten-week series of small group sessions designed with the intention of helping men develop their Christian character in the area of sex.  In week three, Dr Meyer (not a medical doctor) tried to show that men should respect women more because we all started off in the womb as females, and the Y-chromosome eventually turned us from a girl into a boy.

This little factoid wasn’t the only significant defect in the Valiant Man program, but it was one of the most memorable.   “We all start off female” was one of the things that the other participants in the program all remembered, and it even made it to Sunday morning church as part of a testimonial one of the men gave about the program.  And yet, it was one of the most clearly inaccurate parts of the program – all embryos have the structures to be either male or female.  We didn’t all start off as women.  Men aren’t an aberration of the female default setting*.

In week one of the program, all participants were required to agree to some ground-rules in order to keep going on the program.  Point 2 of this ‘contract’ said, “intellectual opinions play no part in our discussion, except where they are relevant to our growth.”  In other words, don’t challenge the material gentlemen, and don’t think for yourselves.  While this might be conducive to running a smooth program, it meant that gross errors and distortions were left unchallenged.

This pattern of unquestioning acceptance of misguided teaching continues throughout the church.  This is something that Dr Leaf does all the time.  It doesn’t take theological training to see that her use of scripture is inaccurate (like her interpretation of Proverbs 23:7, for example), but the vast majority of Christians simply accept her misguided interpretation and theologically trained church leaders also accept it, or don’t correct it (both of which are just as heinous).

I know that critical thinking is sometimes tricky, but I’m not advocating for anything more than common sense.  Entry level critical thinking doesn’t take much effort but it can be particularly life changing.  Like with “Valiant Man”, a little bit of critical thinking can stop bad teaching from being accepted as truth.  Like the story of Onan, a little bit of critical thinking can stop centuries of incorrect teaching being perpetuated.  Like with my friends Facebook status, a little bit of critical thinking can help a person make the best choice for their own personal health.

As Christians, we need to have some self-respect and stop being so gullible, just accepting something as the truth because some Christian celebrity says it from the pulpit.

Ultimately it’s the truth that sets us free, not some gilded assumption.

* In fairness, I did the program in 2010 and it may have been updated since then … here’s hoping.

Dr Caroline Leaf and Testimonials – Good marketing, poor evidence

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Dr Caroline Leaf is a communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist. She is a pseudoscientist of the highest order. She once wrote a PhD. Now she has episodes of her TV show titled “Surviving cancer by using the Mind”.

This weeks edition of her newsletter started off with some subtle boasting:

“We have received many E-mails over the past years asking for Testimonies with regards to Dr Leaf’s research and teachings. We have summarized eight pages of testimonies received at TESTIMONIES. Be encouraged and feel free to refer them to friends, family, acquaintances, and work colleagues struggling with Mind issues.”

Testimonials are an empty box wrapped in shiny paper and trimmed with a bow. They look really good but offer nothing of substance. They’re simply an old advertising trick.

According to the Market Science Institute, “Testimonial solicitations – in which firms solicit consumers’ personal endorsements of a product or service – represent a popular marketing practice. Testimonials are thought to offer several benefits to firms, among them that participating consumers may strengthen their positive attitudes toward a brand, through the act of writing testimonials.” [1]

Who can argue with a person who says that Dr Leaf helped turn their life around? Saying anything negative just makes you sound like a cynical old boot.

And that’s the real problem, because while publishing a whole bunch of positive stories is good for marketing, it makes it very hard for those who had a genuinely bad experience to say anything. No one wants to listen to those people whom Dr Leaf has confused or mislead – it makes for terrible PR. Those people feel devalued, and sometimes worse, because it seems like everyone else had a good result from Dr Leaf’s teaching, except them.

Testimonials also make for very poor scientific evidence. Indeed, testimonials are considered the lowest form of scientific evidence [2]. It’s all very well and good for a bunch of people to share their positive experiences, but as life changing as the experience may have been, they are not evidence of the effectiveness of Dr Leaf’s teaching. Without specific, well-designed research, no one can say if the testimonials Dr Leaf is publishing are the norm. Recent research demonstrates that self-help literature for depression may not have any benefit over a placebo treatment [3]. So it may be that any improvement attributed to Dr Leaf’s teaching was actually the placebo effect. Dr Leaf can list testimonials until she’s blue in the face, but that doesn’t prove that her work is scientific or therapeutic.

Indeed, selectively publishing testimonials is duplicitous, telling half-truths, positively spinning her own story. How many e-mails has Dr Leaf gotten from people who have found her teaching inaccurate, ineffective, unbiblical or harmful? Dr Leaf’s social media minions deliberately delete any negative comments and block anyone from her sites that disagree with her. And over the years, many people have shared with me how arrogant and dismissive her team has been to polite, genuine concern or criticism. I can personally attest to the same treatment. If Dr Leaf was honest with her followers, she would be openly publishing the brickbats as well as the bouquets.

For her readers and followers, the testimonials need to be seen for what they are: just individual stories. Sure, we should rejoice with those who are rejoicing (Romans 12:15), and so good for those who feel Dr Leaf has helped them. But they do not constitute evidence for the therapeutic efficacy or scientific integrity of the work of Dr Leaf.

For people genuinely struggling with “mind issues”, the last thing they need is testimonials collated by Dr Leaf’s marketing team.  They don’t need to be referred to Dr Leaf’s work, they need to be referred to psychologists and doctors.

And if Dr Leaf really wanted to prove her legitimacy, she would rely on independent peer-reviewed published research, not on the list of vacuous, self-serving cherry-picked testimonials that she is currently offering.

References

[1] Marketing Science Institute. Consumer Testimonials as Self-Generated Advertisements: Evaluative Reconstruction Following Product Usage. [cited 2014, Aug 3]; Available from: http://www.msi.org/reports/consumer-testimonials-as-self-generated-advertisements-evaluative-reconstru/.
[2] Fowler, G., Evidence-based practice: Tools and techniques. Systems, settings, people: Workforce development challenges for the alcohol and other drugs field, 2001: 93-107
[3] Moldovan, R., et al., Cognitive bibliotherapy for mild depressive symptomatology: randomized clinical trial of efficacy and mechanisms of change. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy, 2013. 20(6): 482-93

Dr Caroline Leaf and her Genesis moment

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Dr Leaf, communication pathologist and self-titled cognitive neuroscientist, had this to say on social media earlier today: “You are constantly creating matter out of mind … so you are always in a Genesis moment.”

Wow! Just wow! She may not have crossed the line into heresy, but she is pretty much right on top of it.

Because again, she has claimed that we can do with our minds what only God can do. We can not create matter.  The only being that has every created matter is God himself, in Genesis. In adding her little “Genesis moment” comment, she’s essentially equating our mind with God’s.

She might as well just come out and say, “We create matter with our minds, so we are like God”.

There’s a real Genesis moment where people thought they were like God: “‘You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”  We all know how that eventually turned out.

Ultimately it begs the question, where are the church leaders? I don’t hear anyone denouncing Dr Leaf’s comparison of our mind to God’s. How much is too much? When will they say, “Enough’s enough”?

It should have been said already, but sadly, with every unscientific, unscriptural meme that Dr Leaf publishes, the impotence and inaction of the church to becomes more and more painfully obvious.

Please church leadership, please take a stand, before it’s too late.