Reality shopping; a consumer's guide to new age hokum

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Alan M. MacRobert

A similar resurgent alternative health practice is zone therapy, based on the belief that every organ of the body is connected to a different spot on the bottom of the foot, the roof of the mouth, and the hands. Zone therapy is often linked by its practitioners with acupuncture and shiatsu massage, an association from which it derives venerability, but the truth is that, like iridology, zone therapy was another turn-of-the-century invention, by a Dr. William H. Fitzgerald of St. Francis Hospital of Hartford, Connecticut. Zone therapy flourished for a while, aided by testimonials of spectacular cures. But the cures somehow didn't endure the test of time, and the practice slowly faded out. By 1950 it was nearly extinct. Now it has been resurrected as reflexology, and poster charts of the botom of the foot can be found in health food stores everywhere. It is currently practiced without some of Dr. Fitzgerald's more unusual treatments, like the application of tight rubber bands and spring clothes pins to various fingers and toes.

Many other past systems of bygone medical quackery have been revived in recent years, including chromotherapy (healing with colored lights), colonics (enemas), and homeopathy (where medicinal tinctures are made so dilute that not one molecule of the active ingredient remains).

5. By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

The preceding examples lead to the next guideline: Watch whether the field of study remains barren over time.

In the end, the most telling argument against the Bates system, iridology, and zone therapy was not that they were founded by cranks or were based on spurious theories, but that they bore no fruit. The Bates exercises had every chance to succeed. Thousands of people "threw away their glasses" and practiced the system religiously. Millions more gave it briefer tries. If palming, shifting, and swinging really could cure poor eyesight, glasses would be as obsoloete now as horse-drawn carriages.

As physicists Rolf M. Sinclair pointed out at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1980 in San Francisco, one of the key distinctions between science and pseudoscience is that science changes rapidly. New ideas are quickly accepted once they are proven, and disproven ideas are likewise quickly rejected. Most of the focus of current research involves ideas less than ten to fifteen years old. In cntrast, pseudoscience clutches doggedly at ideas for their own sake. "Astrology froze about two thousand years ago and simply hasn't changed much," Sinclair said. "That unchanging character is what allows me to say astrology is a pseudoscience."

My father finally became inactive in the American Society for Psychical Research partly because nothing ever seemed to lead anywhere. At home we have a shelf lined with issues of the Society's Journal, marching back through the decades. Unlike other scientific journals, it contains nothing that one can build upon. In essence, the Society is just were it began in 1885, and where its precursor, the London Society for Psychical Research, began before that. It has yet to demonstrte that psychic powers exist at all, much less learn anything about them.