Only human sacrifice could pacify it

Imagine you’re a father to a wonderful son. You’ve raised this son for 18 years. One day around his 18th birthday, your child succumbs to a mysterious illness. Your family is poor and you cannot afford proper medical care. As your son’s sickness worsens, he tells you that his sickness can be cured, but there’s a catch: the cure is human flesh. You refuse to entertain the thought as it sickens you, but as your son’s health continues to deteriorate, you decide there is no other option. Thus, you turn to a local shaman who advises you that the only way you can save your son is with a human sacrifice. With desperation setting in, you and several relatives lure a 10-year-old child with the promise of food and money. Once in your grasp, you kill the child. Sounds like the plot of a horror movie, no? Unfortunately this story of modern human sacrifice is all too real.

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Only human sacrifice could pacify it
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Extraordinary claim? Check. Extraordinary evidence? Umm…

The late Carl Sagan popularized the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (I mistakenly thought it was the late atheist warmonger Christopher Hitchens-you learn something new every day). Central to critical thinking and skepticism, the phrase is often uttered in skeptic, atheist, and rationalist circles.  “God exists”, “aliens visited ancient civilizations and erected massive structures”, “Bigfoot is real”, and “psychics can commune with the dead” are just some of the extraordinary claims the phrase is applied to. Believers in psychic powers, aliens, or gods often have little to no evidence to back up their claims (and when they do provide what they think of as evidence, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny), let alone the extraordinary evidence necessary to convince others that [for example] human beings can communicate with the dead. Obviously the popular phrase doesn’t apply to all claims.  When I tell readers that I ordered a deep-dish pepperoni and Italian sausage pizza from Domino’s Pizza earlier, that’s not an extraordinary claim. Why? Domino’s Pizza exists.  That can be confirmed by millions of other people. You can visit their stores. You can view their online site. Phone numbers and addresses exist for their locations. The names of franchise owners can be found. Articles discussing their products can be Googled. You can actually call them up, order food, and have it delivered to your door.  All of that is evidence that Domino’s Pizza exists. Contrast that with the lack of evidence to support the claim that

  • the positions of the planets and stars affect the personalities of human beings
  • Uri Gellar can bend spoons with the power of his mind
  • any deity exists-be it Odin, Zeus, Hephaestus, Isis, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Allah, or Yahweh

Nor is there, to the best of my knowledge, any evidence to support the claim that airplanes existed in India 7,000 years ago:

Aeroplanes existed in 7,000 years ago and they travelled from one country to another and from one planet to another, the Indian Science was told today in a controversial lecture that examined ancient aviation technology in the Vedas.

The hosting of the lecture, presented by Captain Anand J Bodas, a retired principal of a pilot training facility, had recently attracted criticism from some scientists who said it undermined the primacy of empirical evidence on which the 102-year-old Congress was founded.

The lecture was presented on the second day of the Congress under the aegis of University as part of a symposium on ‘Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit’.

Drawing upon the ancient Vedic texts to support the claim that there was flying technology in ancient India, Bodas said, “There is a reference of ancient aviation in the Rigveda.”

He said Maharishi Bharadwaj spoke 7,000 years ago of “the existence of aeroplanes which travel from one country to another, from one continent to another and from one planet to another. He mentioned 97 reference books for aviation.”

“History merely notes that the Wright brothers first flew in 1904,” he said.

Bharadwaj, who authored the book Vimana Samhita, had written about various types of metal alloys used to build an aeroplane, Bodas said, adding, “Now we have to import aeroplane alloys. The young generation should study the alloys mentioned in his book and make them here,”

He also spoke of the “huge” aeroplanes which flew in ancient India. “The basic structure was of 60 by 60 feet and in some cases, over 200 feet. They were jumbo planes,” he said.

“The ancient planes had 40 small engines. Today’s aviation does not know even of flexible exhaust system,” he said.

The ancient Indian radar system was called ‘rooparkanrahasya’. “In this system, the shape of the aeroplane was presented to the observer, instead of the mere blimp that is seen on modern radar systems,” he said.

Bharadwaj’s book mentioned a diet of pilots. It contained of milk of buffalo, cow and sheep for specific periods, Bodas said.

The pilot’s dress cloth came from vegetation grown underwater, he said.

An online petition by a scientist at the NASA research centre had demanded that the scheduled lecture be cancelled as it mixes mythology with science.

The comments by Bodas came a day after Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan told the Congress that Algebra and the Pythagoras’ theorem both originated in India but the credit for these has gone to people from other countries.

Incidentally, these 7K-year-old airplanes must have been far more advanced than the airliners of today, as there is no plane I know of that can achieve the speed necessary to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity*, let alone the speeds necessary for interplanetary travel.

*escape velocity, roughly 25,000 mph

Extraordinary claim? Check. Extraordinary evidence? Umm…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

…and former Lockheed Martin engineer Boyd Bushman failed to provide sufficient evidence for his claims that he encountered aliens while working at Area 51. Though he passed away on August 7 at the age of 78, Bushman created a video before his death describing his encounters with aliens (they have nifty names like ‘wranglers’ and ‘rustlers’; I guess they’re cowboy aliens):

A video featuring Texas man Boyd Bushman, a former Lockheed Martin and Texas Instruments engineer who died Aug. 7 at age 78, describing his encounters with “aliens” while working at Area 51 has been making the rounds on social media and news sites.

In the video, shot by an aerospace engineer named Mark Q. Patterson and posted Oct. 21, Bushman shows several out-of-focus and blurry photos taken with a disposable camera of what he claims are aliens.

“There are two groups of aliens,” said Bushman, who has more than 25 patents registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, most of which are held by Lockheed Martin. “They divide them into two groups. One group are wranglers, and the others are rustlers – the ones who are stealers of cattle. The two groups act differently. The ones that are wranglers are much more friendly, and have a better relationship with us.”

Bushman claimed the “aliens” — which definitely share no resemblance to the common conception of extraterrestrials shown in, say, this alien prop on Amazon or any B-movies from the 1950s — are about five feet tall and use telepathy to communicate with others while flying saucer-shaped aircraft.

Out of focus and blurry photos…where have I seen that before?  Oh yeah, flying saucers & UFOs.  Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Photos are insufficient evidence to substantiate claims that any of these things exist.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Science, Skepticism, & Social Justice links

Man sets a new world record by diving more than 1000 feet

Diving off the coast of Dahab, Egypt, Gabr reached a depth of 1,090 feet 4 inches (332.35 meters). The previous record holder for the deepest scuba dive, Nuno Gomes of South Africa, also dove off the coast of Dahab, in 2005, reaching a depth of 1,044 feet (318.21 m).

To put these depths into perspective, three American football fields laid end to end would measure 900 feet (274.32 m) long — less than the distance these divers reached underwater. Most recreational scuba divers only dive as deep as 130 feet (40 meters), according to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors.

It took Gabr only about 12 minutes to reach the record depth, which he achieved with the help of a specially tagged rope that he pulled along with him from the surface, Guinness World Records officials said in a statement. However, the trip back up to the surface took much longer — about 15 hours. Returning too quickly from such depths is associated with a number of health risks, such as decompression sickness (also known as the bends) and nitrogen narcosis from excess nitrogen in the brain, which Gabr luckily avoided.

15 hours to return to the surface? I wonder if he got bored with all that waiting.

****

Paralyzed rats walk with spinal cord stimulation

Spinal cord injury is one of the leading causes of paralysis in the US, and the outlook for the vast majority of patients is depressingly bleak. The spinal cord is essential for movement because it acts as a middle man between the brain and the rest of the body; when it is injured, the flow of information to other body parts can be disrupted, resulting in the inability to move some or all limbs. Unfortunately, there is no effective treatment, so for many the paralysis is permanent.

But recently, there have been some encouraging developments in treatment as scientists figured out a way to mimic the brain signals required for movement by directly stimulating the spinal cord with electrical pulses. Remarkably, this experimental therapy allowed four paraplegic men to regain some voluntary movement in their hips, ankles and toes.

The problem with this technique, which is known as epidural electrical stimulation (EES), is that the amplitude and frequency of electrical pulses need to be constantly adjusted, which is difficult to achieve while an individual is attempting to walk. To overcome this limitation, EPFL researchers have developed algorithms that automatically adjust the pulses in real-time during locomotion, dramatically improving the control of movement.

For the study, the researchers used paralyzed rats whose spinal cords were completely severed. They surgically implanted electrodes into their spines and then placed them on a treadmill, supporting them with a robotic harness. After testing out different pulses and monitoring walking patterns, the researchers discovered that there was a relationship between how high the rat lifted its limbs and pulse frequency. Using this information, the researchers were able to develop an algorithm that constantly monitored the rats’ movement. This data was then fed back into the system which allowed automatic, rapid adjustments in the stimulation in real time, mimicking the way that neurons fire naturally.

The rats were able to walk 1,000 steps without failure and were even able to climb staircases. “We have complete control of the rat’s hind legs,” EPFL neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine said in a news release. “The rat has no voluntary control of its limbs, but the severed spinal cord can be reactivated and stimulated to perform natural walking.”

If they can successfully adapt this for use on humans, this could benefit so many people.  Science-continuing to advance understanding and making lives better.

****

Bob Carroll of The Skeptic’s Dictionary asks a few questions in an entry on Political Skepticism

Most skeptics don’t do politics unless religion is involved. Some don’t do religion unless politics is involved. Most skeptics, however, whether they do politics or religion, claim to be involved in some sort of consumer protection. They have no problem with criticizing and debunking various so-called alternative health practices. People are risking their lives and wasting their money on treatments that provide false hope at worst and some sort of placebo effect at best. Most skeptics have no problem with criticizing and debunking pseudoscientific ideas such as perpetual motion machines, free energy claims, and junk science programs that promise to unleash all that potential you have in your brain, your heart, or your body. People are wasting their time and their money on programs and devices that have no plausible scientific support. Most skeptics have no problem criticizing and debunking people who claim to be psychic. People are being emotionally manipulated at great expense by those who claim to get messages from the dead or see into the future. So why–when people are being manipulated, robbed, or physically and emotionally abused by those cloaked in the authority of religion or the state–do some skeptics balk at going there to criticize and debunk? One answer is tradition: skeptics have traditionally focused on exposing psychic fraud, paranormal mischief, and pseudoscientific quackery. In any case, there are only a few prominent skeptics who stay away from anything to do with religion, but most still do not spend much time scrutinizing the political scene for deception, fraud, abuse, unethical extortion of money, and lies that do much more damage to us than all the psychics, supplement pushers, cancer quacks, detoxers, and promoters of brain-enhancing exercises put together.

[…]

Where are the skeptics questioning the long-term effects of creating a nationwide militarized network of local police departments that not only monitor our every move, but are prepared to turn against our own citizens? What kind of Homeland Security is that? Add to all this the federal government’s monitoring of phone conversations that have nothing to do with national security or terrorism and what do you have? A recipe for a very dark future, all begun under the guise of protecting us from foreign enemies–those terrorists who “hate our freedom.

****

Police Militarization Infographic

Science, Skepticism, & Social Justice links

Science, Skepticism, & Social Justice links

Man sets a new world record by diving more than 1000 feet

Diving off the coast of Dahab, Egypt, Gabr reached a depth of 1,090 feet 4 inches (332.35 meters). The previous record holder for the deepest scuba dive, Nuno Gomes of South Africa, also dove off the coast of Dahab, in 2005, reaching a depth of 1,044 feet (318.21 m).

To put these depths into perspective, three American football fields laid end to end would measure 900 feet (274.32 m) long — less than the distance these divers reached underwater. Most recreational scuba divers only dive as deep as 130 feet (40 meters), according to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors.

It took Gabr only about 12 minutes to reach the record depth, which he achieved with the help of a specially tagged rope that he pulled along with him from the surface, Guinness World Records officials said in a statement. However, the trip back up to the surface took much longer — about 15 hours. Returning too quickly from such depths is associated with a number of health risks, such as decompression sickness (also known as the bends) and nitrogen narcosis from excess nitrogen in the brain, which Gabr luckily avoided.

15 hours to return to the surface? I wonder if he got bored with all that waiting.

****

Paralyzed rats walk with spinal cord stimulation

Spinal cord injury is one of the leading causes of paralysis in the US, and the outlook for the vast majority of patients is depressingly bleak. The spinal cord is essential for movement because it acts as a middle man between the brain and the rest of the body; when it is injured, the flow of information to other body parts can be disrupted, resulting in the inability to move some or all limbs. Unfortunately, there is no effective treatment, so for many the paralysis is permanent.

But recently, there have been some encouraging developments in treatment as scientists figured out a way to mimic the brain signals required for movement by directly stimulating the spinal cord with electrical pulses. Remarkably, this experimental therapy allowed four paraplegic men to regain some voluntary movement in their hips, ankles and toes.

The problem with this technique, which is known as epidural electrical stimulation (EES), is that the amplitude and frequency of electrical pulses need to be constantly adjusted, which is difficult to achieve while an individual is attempting to walk. To overcome this limitation, EPFL researchers have developed algorithms that automatically adjust the pulses in real-time during locomotion, dramatically improving the control of movement.

For the study, the researchers used paralyzed rats whose spinal cords were completely severed. They surgically implanted electrodes into their spines and then placed them on a treadmill, supporting them with a robotic harness. After testing out different pulses and monitoring walking patterns, the researchers discovered that there was a relationship between how high the rat lifted its limbs and pulse frequency. Using this information, the researchers were able to develop an algorithm that constantly monitored the rats’ movement. This data was then fed back into the system which allowed automatic, rapid adjustments in the stimulation in real time, mimicking the way that neurons fire naturally.

The rats were able to walk 1,000 steps without failure and were even able to climb staircases. “We have complete control of the rat’s hind legs,” EPFL neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine said in a news release. “The rat has no voluntary control of its limbs, but the severed spinal cord can be reactivated and stimulated to perform natural walking.”

If they can successfully adapt this for use on humans, this could benefit so many people.  Science-continuing to advance understanding and making lives better.

****

Bob Carroll of The Skeptic’s Dictionary asks a few questions in an entry on Political Skepticism

Most skeptics don’t do politics unless religion is involved. Some don’t do religion unless politics is involved. Most skeptics, however, whether they do politics or religion, claim to be involved in some sort of consumer protection. They have no problem with criticizing and debunking various so-called alternative health practices. People are risking their lives and wasting their money on treatments that provide false hope at worst and some sort of placebo effect at best. Most skeptics have no problem with criticizing and debunking pseudoscientific ideas such as perpetual motion machines, free energy claims, and junk science programs that promise to unleash all that potential you have in your brain, your heart, or your body. People are wasting their time and their money on programs and devices that have no plausible scientific support. Most skeptics have no problem criticizing and debunking people who claim to be psychic. People are being emotionally manipulated at great expense by those who claim to get messages from the dead or see into the future. So why–when people are being manipulated, robbed, or physically and emotionally abused by those cloaked in the authority of religion or the state–do some skeptics balk at going there to criticize and debunk? One answer is tradition: skeptics have traditionally focused on exposing psychic fraud, paranormal mischief, and pseudoscientific quackery. In any case, there are only a few prominent skeptics who stay away from anything to do with religion, but most still do not spend much time scrutinizing the political scene for deception, fraud, abuse, unethical extortion of money, and lies that do much more damage to us than all the psychics, supplement pushers, cancer quacks, detoxers, and promoters of brain-enhancing exercises put together.

[…]

Where are the skeptics questioning the long-term effects of creating a nationwide militarized network of local police departments that not only monitor our every move, but are prepared to turn against our own citizens? What kind of Homeland Security is that? Add to all this the federal government’s monitoring of phone conversations that have nothing to do with national security or terrorism and what do you have? A recipe for a very dark future, all begun under the guise of protecting us from foreign enemies–those terrorists who “hate our freedom.

****

Police Militarization Infographic

Science, Skepticism, & Social Justice links

Traditional Chinese Medicine is Quackery

There are people who think Traditional Chinese Medicine is superior to evidence based Western medicine.  These people think that TCM successfully treated people for a variety of ailments for thousands of years, so they turn to such treatments, rather than science based medicine.  Why do they think this?  What is TCM?   The introduction to this paper describes it this way:

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a history of thousands of years. It is formed by summarizing the precious experience of understanding life, maintaining health, and fighting diseases accumulated in daily life, production and medical practice. It not only has systematic theories, but also has abundant preventative and therapeutic methods for disease.

 

Steven Novella explains why TCM is not a valid form of medicine:

It may be trivially true that TCM has a long history, but it is hard to ignore that the placement of this statement at the beginning of a scientific article implies an argument from antiquity – that TCM should be taken seriously because of this long history. I would argue that this is actually a reason to be suspicious of TCM, for it derives from a pre-scientific largely superstition-based culture, similar in this way to the pre-scientific Western culture that produced the humoral (Galenic) theory of biology.

The next line is an admission that TCM is largely based on anecdotal information, described as the “precious experience” of life. This is a point that is often overlooked or not understood by proponents but central to the scientific/skeptical position – what is the value and predictive power of “precious experience” in developing a system of medicine?

I maintain that there are many good reasons to conclude that any system which derives from everyday experience is likely to be seriously flawed and almost entirely cut off from reality. Obvious short term effects, the lowest hanging fruit of observation, are likely to be reliable. Uncontrolled observation is a reasonable way to discover which plants, for example, are deadly poisons. This is likely to produce some false positives but few false negatives, which is fine for survival.

Other obvious effects, like nausea, diarrhea, and psychedelic effects are also easy to discover. Similarly it was probably obvious that people need to eat, breathe, and drink in order to stay healthy and alive. But records of pre-scientific thinking about health and disease shows that little else was.

Pre-scientific doctors thought, for example, that pus was a good thing, a sign that a wound was healing.  They also did not realize that removing blood from the body was harmful, because they did not understand the vital physiological effects of blood and had fanciful superstitious notions about its role in the body.

So there are severe practical limits to what uncontrolled life experiences could figure out about health and disease. Every culture figured out some basic things, like local plants that had some uses, how to treat some forms of trauma, and to midwife childbirth, but could not figure out the complexities of biology, physiology, anatomy,  biochemistry, genetics, infection and disease pathophysiology and epidemiology.

Understanding health and disease took a more sophisticated method of observing nature – science.

How, then, could a pre-scientific culture without any knowledge of modern biology and without the methods of science develop a valid and effective system of medicine? The answer is – they couldn’t. In addition, there is now a large body of psychological research showing the many ways in which people systematically deceive themselves when it comes to finding correlations and making assumptions about cause and effect.

There is nothing about the Chinese culture or the Chinese people that should make them exempt from these documented psychological effects, or that would make their culture unique among the world’s cultures in stumbling upon notions about health and illness that were actually correct. It is extreme cultural hubris to think otherwise. When the institution of medicine in the West incorporated scientific methods as the standard of determining which treatments were safe and effective, and in understanding disease, over time almost everything that constituted “traditional Western medicine” was overturned. The “precious experience” of centuries of Western medicine resulted in largely worthless or harmful treatments, from blood-letting to toxic mineral-based treatments.

I’m not a scientists. I’m not a doctor.  I don’t know the first thing about treating illnesses or ailments.  I *do* know that our brains trick us in a variety of ways. Whether by cognitive shortcuts or biases, our minds fool us in many ways.  When practitioners of TCM claim that their methods work because people tell them they work, all they’re saying is that “our methods work bc we are told they work”.  That’s not a reliable method of determining the reliability of a given treatment.  That’s where science comes in, and specifically, the scientific method:

The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.  To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”

The chief characteristic which distinguishes the scientific method from other methods of acquiring knowledge is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself, supporting a theory when a theory’s predictions are confirmed and challenging a theory when its predictions prove false.  Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features distinguish scientific inquiry from other methods of obtaining knowledge. Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable to guard against mistake or confusion in any particular experimenter. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure. Theories, in turn, may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.

Scientific inquiry is intended to be as objective as possible in order to minimize bias. Another basic expectation is the documentation, archiving and sharing of all data collected or produced and of the methodologies used so they may be available for careful scrutiny and attempts by other scientists to reproduce and verify them. This practice, known as full disclosure, also means that statistical measures of their reliabilitymay be made.

Testability, r
epeatability, weeding out bias-these are proven methods for enabling us to understand reality.   This is not present in TCM (or any form of alternative “medicine”). Dugald Christie wrote the book Thirty Years in Moukden. 1883-1913. Being the Experiences and Recollections of Dugald Christie, C. M.G., which is available online for free.  Harriet Hall illuminates several examples of TCM found in the book:

Acupuncture

Chinese doctors own that they know nothing at all of surgery. They cannot tie an artery, amputate a finger or perform the simplest operation. The only mode of treatment in vogue which might be called surgical is acupuncture, practised for all kinds of ailments. The needles are of nine forms, and are frequently used red-hot, and occasionally left in the body for days. Having no practical knowledge of anatomy, the practitioners often pass needles into large blood vessels and important organs, and immediate death has sometimes resulted. A little child was carried to the dispensary presenting a pitiable spectacle. The doctor had told the parents that there was an excess of fire in its body, to let out which he must use cold needles, so he had pierced the abdomen deeply in several places. The poor little sufferer died shortly afterwards. For cholera the needling is in the arms. For some children’s diseases, especially convulsions, the needles are inserted under the nails. For eye diseases they are often driven into the back between the shoulders to a depth of several inches. Patients have come to us with large surfaces on their backs sloughing by reason of excessive treatment of this kind with instruments none too clean.

[…]

Mercury for bullet wounds

He describes removing a piece of bone from a severe gunshot wound, upon which a quantity of pure mercury poured out. The patient said, “That is the melted bullet!” Chinese doctors make no attempt to extract bullets, and they put mercury into the wound saying it will “melt the lead.” The patient is easily deceived.

[…]

Superstitions

Lucky days are chosen for taking medicines. A hair is twined around a limb above a sore to keep the poison from going to the heart. A patient attributed his illness to punishment for having offended the Tiger-god by eating tiger’s flesh. A Chinese doctor brought his daughter to the Western doctor, asking him to operate to “remove the evil thing that is preying on her life.” He believed a tortoise was growing in her abdomen and drinking her blood three times a day. He thought he could feel the tortoise’s head moving; he was actually feeling the pulsations of her aorta. The child didn’t have an abdominal problem; she had advanced tuberculosis of the lungs.

[…]

Doctor-shopping

Patients have little confidence in their doctors. If the medicine doesn’t cure them in a few days, they set it aside and consult another doctor without telling the first. It is common to use the medicines of several doctors at once.

Note: This is important to know, because people commonly assume that an herbal treatment that has been used for centuries must be safe and effective because if it wasn’t the herbalists would have known by now and would have stopped using it. Patients switched doctors when the treatment wasn’t working, without telling the first doctor. So he would assume his treatment had cured the patient and he got no feedback about treatment failures and side effects. These ancient herbalists had no systematic way of evaluating treatment successes vs. failures or of discovering adverse effects.

Hall concludes with:

The book offers a glimpse into history showing how truly ineffective and barbaric TCM really was. This information could go a long way to correct the misconceptions of those who have succumbed to the “ancient wisdom” fallacy. If they read it and paid attention. Which they won’t.

Plants often contain chemical compounds that act on the human body, and TCM accidentally came across some herbal remedies that actually work, but scientific testing is required to figure out which ones those are. And regulation of sources is required to prevent contaminants and ensure purification and standardization. TCM may have made a few serendipitous herbal discoveries, but as a system of medical care it has no validity. It is a historical curiosity and an anachronism.

 

 

 

Traditional Chinese Medicine is Quackery