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Episode 82: Weird Science: When It Doesn't All Add Up
1.2k Plays2 months ago
Welcome to Season 5, Episode 82 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel and Sarah navigate the worlds of science, pseudoscience, and outdated science.
We’ll be looking at claims from a range of topics, including crystals, Reiki, and Ayurveda, to personality tests, fad diets, yoga, Pilates, physical therapy and CAM treatments.
Our discussion is organized around the "non-negotiable ingredients" of a science-based claim to separate pseudoscience from outdated ideas and solidly science-based claims.
REFERENCES: Posture Panic: Pt. 1, 2, and 3,Dexa Scammed?, Walk Your Bones Stronger?, Knee Myths, McGill - 62 and 74, Meakins, Long & Lean: Pt. 1, 2, and 3, Make Yoga U Make Sense, Alignment Dogma: Shoulders, Spine, and Pelvis, Nutrition, Yoga w Jake, Conspirituality on Terrence Howard, Unbiased Science: Acupuncture, Cupping, Decoding the Gurus, Maintenance Phase Myers-Briggs, Beall's List, Onero
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Transcript
Introduction to Movement Logic Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
Announcement of Bone Density Course
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Cort. Sarah, we are launching bone density course. Yes, so we are. The cart closed just a few days ago. We are recording this actually before the cart closed, though, in this weird land of podcasting where time ceases to have meaning. And so we don't actually know who all signed up, and we don't know how many signed up. But we do know that people have already signed up, a lot signed up. We do. Just as we were preparing to record this episode, we just got another person. So it's very pleasing and makes me feel like I haven't embarrassed myself to know that people are still signing up for this. Yes, I would say that the enthusiasm is even stronger this year than it was last year.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yes, definitely. Yeah, so and very, very fun.
Importance of Listener Reviews
00:01:37
Speaker
um We got a new review in Apple, which I want to read to you because we have been in a bit of a review drought and I would like to quench our review thirst in this moment. Indeed. The podcast I've been waiting for from ba.R.5 stars.
00:01:58
Speaker
I found your podcast through your guest episode on spirituality and I am so grateful. As an aerial arts coach and personal trainer, I am always looking for ways to continue learning and better meet my client's needs. And as you know, it can be so hard to find sources of well-researched evidence-based information presented in ways that are digestible and still full of personality. Very excited to have found you and looking forward to catching up on all this amazing material.
00:02:26
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, B.A.R. I feel seen. I mean, that's like our dream review. Yeah, we love reviews. We love reading your ah feelings about the podcast. We love when you tell us how you found us. We love when you request a topic. We love it when you call out something specific that you loved in a podcast. So please be in touch with us via that that medium. It does help Sarah and I get our work to more people, and it is work. Let's let's not mince words, okay? So if you want to help us reach more people, ah you can lead us or leave us a review. You can also ah subscribe and share and put some stars down. If you don't have time to write a review, just put some stars down. Listen, we'll take the stars. We'll take the
Season Wrap-up and Future Plans
00:03:18
Speaker
stars. And before we get on with the topic of today's
00:03:21
Speaker
episode we want to let you know that this is the last episode of season five but we have some in between episodes coming your way that will carry you into the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 there will be six before we start season six, and they will be every other week. These in between episodes are short episodes with either Sarah or I, where we talk about a topic that we feel needs to be addressed or should be addressed, but maybe doesn't need an entire long episode. So they're like little quickies in betweenies. You should to just call start calling them in betweenies. Yeah, I think in betweenies is fun.
Understanding Scientific Claims
00:04:00
Speaker
yeah Today we're talking about science versus pseudoscience versus outdated science and how to tell the difference between claims that are pseudoscientific versus claims that are based in science, as well as claims that draw from outdated science. This is obviously an enormous topic, but we will attempt to organize our investigation around what I call the non-negotiable ingredients of a science-based claim and then try to parse claims.
00:04:30
Speaker
or separate the pseudoscientific ones from the outdated ones, from the science-based ones, we'll use the ingredients or these non-negotiables for a science-based claim as a way to organize our understanding of the differences ah between these different sciency claims, pseudoscience, outdated science, up-to-date science,
00:04:53
Speaker
So I collected seven non-negotiable ingredients for a science-based claim. These could just be called criteria through a Google search. So this is not some official list, but rather it's a collection of standards or pillars that I compiled on my own that I found repeatedly stood out in my research. So that being said, I might be missing some. I might be overemphasizing some over others. And I am by no means an expert in this topic. I am not a philosopher of science and neither is Sarah. so This is your disclaimer. Now, if anyone listening is a philosopher of science, and you would like to come on the podcast, please reach out to us. I think that would be a fun episode, right, Sarah? Yeah, I think that would be fantastic. So while writing the outline for this episode, Sarah, I was reminded of so many episodes we've already recorded where we look at a lot of some of the topics we're going to discuss today in much more depth than we will be looking at them today. Because again, today is really about telling the difference so
00:05:51
Speaker
between science, pseudoscience, and outdated science. But for the specific topics we're using to learn this, right we go into much more depth than a lot of other episodes. And so we're probably not going to, in the moment, be able to rattle off the top of our head every single episode in which a particular topic arises. But definitely check the show notes.
00:06:11
Speaker
for episodes that I will be beneficial for you to listen to for more background on some of the things that we talk about in this episode. There will be a whole bunch of them and we'll also link episodes of other people's podcasts as well. I kind of think of this episode as a good wrap up of our fifth season because of how it kind of ties together a lot of themes that we have spent the last five seasons really chewing on, but it's also kind of a buffet of possible topics to come. like There might be some topics that get mentioned in this podcast that people want to hear more about or want to tell us more about.
Science vs. Pseudoscience
00:06:50
Speaker
So here's how this episode is going to go. I think and we're going to define science. We're going to define what a claim is generally. Then we're going to discuss what makes a claim scientific by discussing each of these non-negotiable ingredients of a scientific claim. We'll then define pseudoscience.
00:07:13
Speaker
Then we'll take a scientific claim and compare it against various pseudoscientific claims to see how the non-negotiable ingredients are often missing or non-existent in the pseudoscientific claim. Now here's where I want to say feathers may be ruffled during that last part I just mentioned because we'll be using examples of various forms of pseudoscientific claims of various levels of egregiousness.
00:07:40
Speaker
So I suspect the subtler one ones might be a little surprising to some of you and you might feel some kind of way about it being called a pseudoscientific claim. So that's where in the next part of this episode, we hope you become unruffled somewhat because we will then look at how we can all continue, if we would like, to engage with certain exercise or health and wellness practices that we enjoy that also happen to often be riddled with pseudoscience.
00:08:09
Speaker
And we'll see what types of stances or habits of thought or ways of communicating around these practices might keep us from falling prey to pseudoscientific thinking or pseudoscientific beliefs that often proliferate these practices. Or hopefully, if we are practitioners of these practices, how can we avoid making pseudoscientific claims around the surfaces we provide?
00:08:38
Speaker
here's Here's the thing, okay? I just don't think every single thing we do and interact with needs to be based in science, Sarah. Do you? No, God no. God no. Definitely not.
00:08:49
Speaker
That would be kind of limiting. and So unfun. Not extremely human, not entirely human. Yeah, just not a good time. I do think, though, we should probably avoid making things that are not science based seem like science, though. Does that make sense? What do you think? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a difference between making everything science based like, oh, I'm going to go to this hip hop dance class and I'm going to like you know, count the number of times I stomp my feet and enter it into my thing about like my impact training for osteoporosis, you know what I mean? Like you could die of, it's just the the the death of joy, right? It's like not not, in that sense, I guess what I'm saying is like, in that sense, you get taken away from the sort of inherent fun and free nature of just doing something that feels good. Right. And so much of what we do as humans really
00:09:44
Speaker
doesn't have a scientific basis. It might have an artistic basis or a cultural basis. right And so I guess i'm I want to say that right off the bat, that if we call something pseudoscience or a claim, it's really going to be about claims that are pseudoscientific. If we call a claim pseudoscientific or we say that a practice is riddled with pseudoscientific claims, we don't mean that that claim that belief perhaps has is valueless. And we also aren't saying that the practice from which it originates has no value either. Right. But I think the the issue comes in when people do end up, though, coming across things that claim to be scientific, but that are actually pseudoscientific, aren't based on science at all. And so that's where
00:10:35
Speaker
That's where we want to make sure that we're really clear in what we're calling something, maybe something we're offering or understanding our participation in using something is not based in science. And the claims that it is can quite often not be true. But again, that's, that's fine, right? I mean, not everything has to be science. Right, right. I think just understanding that when it's not science, but it's being presented as science, that that's problematic.
00:11:01
Speaker
for various reasons that hopefully we'll get into. Now, after all of that, we're gonna discuss outdated science, right? It's a little bit different from pseudoscience and it's definitely not up to date science.
Science-minded Approach Tips
00:11:12
Speaker
We're gonna define it, we're gonna give examples of it. And then finally look at tips for how we can stay more science-minded, just really to be able to discern between what is a science-based claim and what is not, as well as how can we know who and what information to trust.
00:11:30
Speaker
Because let's be honest, we are all basically drinking from a fire hose of claims every day on the internet and the podcasts we listen to on the TV. channels we're watching and books that we're reading from our friends. I mean, basically anywhere we get information, there's so much information coming at us. It's extremely hard to filter. So hopefully this episode gives you a few good tools or ways of thinking about what you're hearing and the claims you're hearing so that you can avoid maybe becoming overwhelmed, maybe falling prey to pseudoscientific claims.
00:12:02
Speaker
maybe wasting your money. And hopefully it also lends nuance to any discussion around the value and meaning of beliefs for humans, regardless of whether they are science-based or not. So we're gonna try to see this from a human perspective of why might these beliefs have value?
00:12:22
Speaker
Okay, so let's start with what is science. Sarah, what is science? ah You'll just start with an easy, simple question. yeah yeah If we think about a definition of what is science, science is a way of learning about the world around us by watching, experimenting, and using facts to understand things. So science helps us gather knowledge that we can test or repeat in ah in a research setting so that we can then make predictions about and explain how things work. And so there's this thing called the scientific method. And the scientific method is a step-by-step way to explore questions and find answers. So you start by asking a question and then you make a guess, which is called a hypothesis about what might happen. So like your question might be, I think that if I go for a run barefoot, my feet are going to hurt afterwards, right? The question would be,
00:13:17
Speaker
Are my feet going to hurt afterwards if I go for a run barefoot? And then the guess is, yes, your hypothesis is yes, it will. And then you test the hypothesis to see if it really happened that way. And then based on the information we gather, then we can see if it was right or wrong. And then it also involves the scientific method, also involves sharing what we learned by publishing our research. And then if we get into what is a claim, like what is a scientific claim?
00:13:43
Speaker
A claim is a statement or an assertion that something is true or false versus a hypothesis is a guess, which we then test. So a claim expresses a ah belief, an opinion, or a conclusion that can be supported or challenged by evidence. Claims can be to more than one kind. They can be factual that then you can verify through data or research, but they can also be subjective just based on your personal feelings or opinions.
00:14:13
Speaker
It's sunny outside where I am. Sunny days are the worst. There you go. So the first one is fact and the second one is opinion. In order for a claim to be scientific, it needs to be substantiated with evidence to determine if it is valid and reliably true. Cool. Thank you. So we know what science is. We know what a claim is. We know generally what makes a claim scientific. It has to be substantiated with evidence.
00:14:39
Speaker
to determine if it is valid valid and reliably true. We're gonna fill in on what evidence and valid and reliably true like can mean because there's a little bit more to it.
00:14:52
Speaker
So here's where we're going to bring in the seven non-negotiables for evaluating if a claim is based in science. Is it a science-based claim? So I'm going to list them, but I'm going to share a fun mnemonic. I think it's fun. Mnemonic device is the right word, right? No. it's I mean, you're so close. What is a mnemonic? Hang on. It's not p mnemonic like a mnemonic drill. It's mnemonic like that. Oh, so it was just my spelling that was wrong. Well, but then also your pronunciation, because you were saying mnemonic.
00:15:22
Speaker
It's mnemonic? Mnemonic. Mnemonic. Yeah. <unk> I wrote new new p mneummonic because mnemonic because Sarah's favorite injury is a pneumothorax. That's right. I knew it was Y. I just wanted to remind you of your favorite injury. Thank you so much. Okay. I'm going to share a fun mnemonic. Did I do it right? Was that right? No, the first M is silent. Mnemonic. No, there's no, just ignore the first here. I'm go think i'm messing with i'm just messing with you. I know. Here, that's how you say it.
00:15:53
Speaker
Mnemonic. There we go. ah we're We're going to go through these multiple times looking at like, what are they? How can we remember them with this fun mnemonic? We're then going to look at a science-based claim and look at how it fulfills the essential ingredients. And we're going to look at some pseudoscientific claims and see how they're kind of lacking. OK, so a claim is based in science. When it is empirical, falsifiable, reproducible,
00:16:23
Speaker
supported by a peer-reviewed study. Objective, based in an existing theoretical framework and when the claim has predictive power. Whoa, okay. hey So it's not science without these ingredients. So here's my mnemonic. Empirical, falsifiable, reproducible, peer-reviewed, objective, theoretical framework, predictive power, seven. Empha repi obtheopred.
00:16:53
Speaker
M for repeat M repeat repeat repeat
00:17:20
Speaker
wow Oh, oh, oh. The credits just go wild. I'm probably going to be singing that in my head now for the rest of the day, but getting it wrong, I'm going to be like, em-pa-ree-fee-poo-ba-bap.
00:17:35
Speaker
i I call it twinkle, twinkle, little science-based claim. Very nice. Yeah. I like it. OK, let's go through each one, one by one. Empirical. OK, so science-based claim is empirical. It's based on empirical knowledge or information This is knowledge or information that is derived from observation, experience, or experimentation. Evidence to support the claim has been observed and measured. So it's not based on hunches. It's not based on feelings. It's not based on intuitions. It's not even solely based on putting ideas together logically. It's really based on evidence.
00:18:15
Speaker
okay yeah Fulsifiable, that's the FA of EMFA.
Criteria for Scientific Claims
00:18:21
Speaker
falsifiable, the claim can be tested, it can be tested, not all claims can be tested, and it can be proven wrong. So some claims can be tested, but they cannot be proven wrong. So I was myself asking, why can't we just say it should be testable? Some claims can be tested, but are framed in ways that cannot be proven wrong, right? So if you say this crystal brings good energy,
00:18:51
Speaker
That is potentially testable. You could just gather experiences by asking people, but there's really no clear way to know if it's false because the term good energy is very vague, it's too vague, and it's impossible to measure or define it objectively. So just saying testable is not enough, it has to be falsifiable. Claims that are testable could include things like personal experiences or anecdotal evidence. But here's the thing about that. You cannot falsify someone's personal experience because it's their experience. Falsifiable claims, on the other hand, can be shown to be wrong. And and so it's really important that a claim is falsifiable because this is key in science. Science advances by discarding ideas that don't hold up under scrutiny. So we have to be able to scrutinize the claim.
00:19:42
Speaker
I cannot scrutinize someone's personal experience, but I can scrutinize a claim that doesn't hold up when studied in a randomized controlled trial. So here's what I want to say about this really quickly because yeah this can feel very confusing. Yes. it really And it was very confusing to me when I first started studying research. I was like, well, wait a minute. I thought we were trying to prove a an idea. so But what you're telling me is what we're actually trying to do is disprove or falsify the opposite claim, right? That's the only way that you can then also prove the claim. You have to be able to say, like Laura was saying, so when people do research, like the research question they set up often is the opposite of the thing they want to prove, right? So, like, let's say for the LIFMOR trial, the the hypothesis would be, ah you know, eight months of weightlifting is not going to impact bone mineral density, right? so
00:20:39
Speaker
they have to be able to show with their data that actually it did. Right? And then that's, that's how you prove it. So it's a little bit, you have to kind of wrap your brain around it a little bit. Yeah. Thank you for that. That's helpful. Sure. All right. Empha, now we're on re repeat, repeat, repeat. Wait, is repeat, is that when you like go to the bathroom and then you're like, I still feel like I need to go to the bathroom. And you repeat. Yeah. And you pee again? Yeah. Okay.
00:21:04
Speaker
reproducible evidence to support the claim can be reproduced across multiple tests or multiple studies. We're going to get into that. Let's move on to she reviewed peer reviewed.
00:21:18
Speaker
Studies that support or refute a claim that is scientific have been subjected to peer scrutiny in order to determine the study's quality, its methodological rigor, the validity and reliability,
00:21:35
Speaker
of the claim, the ethical considerations that took place in conducting the study, and whether or not the conclusions drawn were justified, just to name a few. So this is important because there are such things as predatory journals These are journals that feature non peer reviewed studies, which we'll get into. I'll say this, if you don't just hire any old person to fix your bathroom, clean your teeth or exterminate pests in your home, then you probably also definitely want to be reading research that has been peer reviewed. Yeah. Like for example, you don't want me cleaning your teeth. I mean, I'll try. I'll give it a good college go, but I'm probably going to stab you in the gums a couple of times. Yeah.
00:22:19
Speaker
Exactly. And you don't want anyone related to me fixing your bathroom. Oh, wow. Okay. Our ancestors were not plumbers. so
00:22:31
Speaker
okay Okay. All right. Objective. This is obtheopred. Objective. The claim is not vibes based, folks. It's not based on opinion.
00:22:44
Speaker
It's not about beliefs and intuitions. What if I just really, really wanted to be true, though? It's just that, nope, it's not feeling it. I'm feeling it. We don't care. okay It's based on observations and measurements that are empirical in nature and testable slash falsifiable, and that come from peer reviewed studies. Okay, so we'll get more into that. Theoretical. Obtheopred. Theoretical frameworks.
00:23:09
Speaker
This means that the claim exists within some structured model or theory. And these models or theories help to explain other similar observations and claims. Additionally, it's important that these models and theories from which this claim arises from or is based in,
00:23:31
Speaker
that these are constantly modified or replaced as new evidence emerges. Now, we talk about models, ah but we don't necessarily call them models. We've talked a lot about the BPS model, which is the biopsychosocial model for pain and rehabilitation. We have also spoken about the patho anatomical model, and we talk about it pretty directly in our episode with Adam Meekins, which will definitely be linked in the show notes. So the BPS model has started to replace the patho anatomical model. So that's a just why I bring those up because we've talked about them a lot and it's a good example of why it's important that if we're talking about scientific models and theories, that they are modified or replaced as new evidence emerges. Okay, here I also think it's important to say that just because a claim fits within an established model or theory, this doesn't make it scientific.
00:24:26
Speaker
because it still needs to be tested. So remember, we need empirical evidence for something to be science-based. Now, the claim, even though it hasn't been tested, if it has plausibility, if it is scientifically plausible, this means that based on existing theories and models, a claim can sort of seem to fit with other claims that have been made that have been tested and in which case it is plausible and that's a step in the right direction because actually many pseudoscientific claims entirely lack scientific plausibility right there is no existing theory or framework to support them but other pseudoscientific claims they may seem to fit into an existing theory or model but then are tested and found to not actually hold up so
00:25:13
Speaker
This is just good to remember. And I'm going to give you some examples here because I think this is important. So the claims strength training improves bone mineral density. fits within some theories. It fits within what's called the mechanostat theory and Wolf's law. Wolf's law states that bones remodel themselves based on the forces they experience. The mechanostat theory further elaborates that bones strengthen in response to repeated loading beyond a certain threshold. These theories support the claim that strength training improves bone mineral density. but Bones adapt to mechanical loads from strength training
00:25:47
Speaker
and bone strengthen in response to repeated loading beyond a certain threshold, but testing is still needed because we need to know the specific effects of strength training on bone mineral density across different populations, such as post-menopausal women, younger adults, individuals with osteoporosis. And additionally, we need to test because we need to clarify what types of strength training exercises high intensity, low intensity, or what types of impact training exercise, which you know is also an evidence-based way to improve bone density. Is it high impact, low impact? We need to determine what types are most effective. Now, numerous studies, including the LIFTMORE trial, have shown that high intensity strength training and impact training can significantly improve bone marrow density in older adults, particularly in post-menopausal women.
00:26:34
Speaker
I mention this because scientific plausibility, again, it gets us close to a science-based claim. You know, science is empirical, so it's based on observation, experimentation, and measurement. We must test the claim to be able to say that it's a scientific claim.
00:26:50
Speaker
I say this because we actually used to believe that performing higher repetitions, typically 12 to 20 reps with lighter weights of an exercise, we used to believe that that was the best approach for muscle growth or hypertrophy. And this was based on our working theory about hypertrophy. However, numerous studies have investigated the relationship between rep ranges and muscle hypertrophy.
00:27:13
Speaker
and have found that while it's true so that higher rep ranges can contribute to hypertrophy, it's also true that moderate to heavy resistance or moderate to lower rep ranges can also effectively stimulate muscle growth. Okay, so hopefully that illustrates how even though a claim exists within an existing theoretical framework or model,
00:27:37
Speaker
That doesn't necessarily mean that it's a science-based claim. That claim itself has to be tested. Finally, we have Obtheopred, predictive power, so scientific scientific models and theories to which these claims can connect. They should be able to explain past phenomena as well as they should be able to accurately predict future occurrences of phenomena. So if we look back and go, why did we get a specific result from training?
00:28:04
Speaker
a model could help us explain that. It might help us also predict the results we'll get in the future. Okay, so that was amphoripiaptheopred. We're gonna change gears now, and Sarah's gonna tell us what pseudoscience is. Yeah. And you can just keep singing this mnemonic in the background.
00:28:23
Speaker
and okay so read Amphoripiaptheop... No, I don't think that that's a winning strategy. um Okay, so what is pseudoscience? So pseudoscience,
00:28:34
Speaker
is something that attempts to mimic the appearance and the language of legitimate science, but it totally lacks the non-negotiables of our evidence-based science that we just went through,
Identifying Pseudoscience
00:28:46
Speaker
right? So here's some of the ways that pseudoscience masquerades as science. So the first one is it uses science-sounding terminology or complex jargon, big words to appear credit credible. So claims made around things like, my favorite one,
00:29:04
Speaker
detoxification, hormone balancing, ah resetting your nervous system, spot toning, clean eating. I'm a pretty dirty eater myself. Okay. So me too.
00:29:21
Speaker
So, you know, using language, it sounds, I remember one time at Equinox, I was, you know, in the, one of the little like food area things and This guy was talking about explaining a smoothie to someone. He was like, you know, it's like organic and natural. And, you know, I was like, oh, he's just picking all the words that sound like the right words, you know, natural, organic. Okay. So the second one is it pseudoscience often cherry picks or misinterprets or misrepresents evidence by selecting the data that supports their position and ignoring
00:29:52
Speaker
contradictory evidence, right? This is also related to like shifting the goalposts, you know? So for example, if somebody says that a specific treatment can cure a disease like yoga for osteoporosis, and then they are presented with evidence that it doesn't, they then might shift their argument to say that yoga as an intervention is still beneficial for preventing other risks associated with osteoporosis, like, oh, well, yoga is good for balance and it helps prevent falls, but they never go back to address the fact that their first claim is false. So, you know, I mean, our episode on Yoga You comes to mind. I think we also saw that with a lot of massage schools who realized that massage doesn't, you know, quote unquote, break up adhesions, and then they flipped it entirely to talk about nervous system effects without ever going back to correct the misinformation that they previously spread.
00:30:41
Speaker
um Something else that it does, pseudoscience, is it appeals to the kind of conspiracy theory thinking that us versus them rhetoric, right? It's a very, it's it's kind of a, I think it's a ah red flag when you see somebody claiming that their science, their pseudoscience is different than the mainstream. right The mainstream is is suppressing the truth. It sounds exhausting, first of all, but it's this very black and white thinking. It's like, they're wrong. We're right.
00:31:14
Speaker
you know And look, it's true, our healthcare care system is extremely problematic and deserves criticism, but pseudoscience will take this criticism into the realm of conspiracies, right? Painting the like ah fucked up i just of capitalism as some kind of centralized cabal, right? Some inner circle controlling everything. When in reality, it's more it's far more decentralized than that. It's the outcome of centuries of unregulated unmitigated greed that also brought us things like chattel slavery in addition to a fucked up healthcare care system, right? So yes, the system is messed up, but it's not that's not the same as trying to claim that like every doctor is out to get you, right? And then another one is misuse of scientific instruments or techniques, right? Pseudoscience may employ scientific tools, but they will do so inappropriately. Yeah. Can I jump in with a the story? I was yes at a friend's wedding and her sister's
00:32:09
Speaker
boyfriend was an applied kinesiologist. So a kinesiologist and an applied kinesiologist are two very different professions. A kinesiologist has a bachelor's of science. An applied kinesiologist does not. So this was an applied kinesiologist who wanted me to believe that electromagnetic fields from my phone were causing muscle weakness and other problems.
00:32:37
Speaker
So he had me hold my phone and then he pushed down on my arm to do muscle testing. And he tried to show that like, oops, I just hit the mic. he He tried to show that my arm that was holding the phone was significantly weaker than the other arm. And even at the young age of however old I was like 27,
00:32:58
Speaker
I was like, no, bro, that's not what's happening. And he was like, yeah, no, yeah, it is. It is. And I'm like, no, bro. And I don't think he, I don't know if he'd ever in his life encountered someone who just didn't like swallow what he was saying. I was like, no, dude, I don't believe you. He didn't know what to do with it. He was like, well, we're not. Yeah. So yeah, muscle testing. Okay. So if we keep going, so pseudoscience has a total lack of peer review and reproducibility, right? so and unlike a genuine scientific research claim where you would then give your paper to your peers and say, hey, does this seem right to you? And then if they're like, actually, no, it seems like you totally missed this part. And then you would actually go back and redo your research based on it, right? Because you want it to be the best quality pop possible. But pseudoscience often just bypasses this part. Like they don't they're not looking around for peer review because they know that and they're not going to get some people are going to be like, nah, man, there's a very funny story about
00:33:53
Speaker
ah Terrence Howard, they go into it on Conspiratuality. He has all these claims about his version of math. And he sends send in ah and and basically he says like, one plus one equals one. And he does this whole thing. It's very funny if you go listen to the episode on Conspiratuality, there's this whole thing where he I don't know, somehow manage it magics that into some, like, you know, not math, but he claims it is and then he writes a whole letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson, I believe,
00:34:23
Speaker
And then it's upset when Neil deGrasse Tyson writes back and is like, this is bullshit. This is not real.
00:34:31
Speaker
um So another example is, if do you remember those ah power poses Amy couldn't? Yeah, I believe i believed that for a while. Sure. It may have been peer reviewed, but it was not reproducible. Famously, a lot of people tried to to reproduce it and they couldn't. Yeah.
00:34:48
Speaker
right And you know some predatory journals, like Laurel had mentioned, they don't actually require peer review for your studies to appear in those journals. So that's that's a red flag right there. We've got a reliance on anecdotal evidence. So pseudoscience often prioritizes personal testimonials over controlled studies. Yeah. Yeah. So this is funny. This reminds me of when we were sleep training my daughter and I reached a breaking point where I was like so deprived of sleep that I was like, I am just going to read books until I figure this out. So I lost more sleep, binge reading, sleep training books. And the first one I read was written by a mom. And but the method that she shared worked for her. I was like, are you kidding me?
00:35:36
Speaker
So maybe it will work for you. The one that we actually went with worked well for me. I'm not saying it'll work well for everyone, but that was written by an expert in training parents how to sleep treating their children. And so she had seen hundreds of parents and was like, here's how I've noticed it goes. And I was like, ugh.
00:35:54
Speaker
And I literally slept much better after reading that book and applying the method. um Also, I'll say bro bro science is is basically anecdotal evidence. Work for me bro.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah. Listen, if it broke works for me, bro, then it's maybe it was going to work for you, bro. Yeah. And make a whole social media post about it. Yeah. All right. And so then another one is pseudoscience misrepresents credentials, right? So a lot of pseudoscience proponents may claim, you know, a false or just completely irrelevant expertise. For example, so just cause someone has a PhD.
00:36:32
Speaker
Even if it's in a related field, it's not gonna make them an expert in another field, right? like So Huberman's a great example of that. Fascinating to hear him talk about things relating to the brain and vision, but when he jumps in and he starts to tell you three-hour episode on back pain, I was like, dude, stay in your lane. Or the common cold. Yeah.
00:36:52
Speaker
What are you talking about, dude? Or like you know a yoga teacher might give advice on exercises to alleviate back pain or sacroiliac joint pain, or they might diagnose their student with sciatica, all of which, well, only the diagnosis is really wildly out of scope of practice, but claiming to have some sort of expertise that you don't have right is is a real mis misrepresentation.
00:37:16
Speaker
yeah And then the last one is ah the the second to last one is appealing to nature or tradition. right They're often claimed to have a validity because they're presented in contrast against like modern day Western. right it's It's natural or it's ancient or it's indigenous. right A lot of um herbal supplements are marketed as safe and effective.
00:37:40
Speaker
just because they're derived from plants, but that doesn't mean, you know, there's plenty of plants that are not so good for you to eat, right? It's not necessarily safe or beneficial. Same thing with with tradition, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we'll talk a little bit about Ayurveda in this episode, but Ayurveda appeals to tradition and is a wellness practice that I know many people involved in the yoga community are familiar with, but it it does lack almost all of the non-negotiables of science we mentioned earlier. So we'll we'll be talking a little bit more about that. But also in the realm of strength training, like a lot of people are just very evangelical about the importance of squatting and how, quote, functional squats are. Since I think a lot of the times it is believed that ancient humans squatted a lot
00:38:27
Speaker
But okay, that's impossible to verify empirically or objectively just saying, but this is also this idea that squats are primal slash functional is also an appeal to nature in a way and pseudo scientific. It's got a pseudo scientific feel to it. ah function Functional, by the way, is a very ill-defined term scientifically.
00:38:50
Speaker
It's not a scientific term at all. It's just a word that got real popular. um Okay. And so then the last one is making unfalsifiable claims, right? So they make claims that cannot be tested or disproven in pseudoscience. For example, astrology.
00:39:07
Speaker
you read your horse go for the day, makes vague predictions that really could apply to anyone, right? So it's very difficult to falsify. You will encounter challenges today. I mean, yes, I'm going to get in my car. So of course I'm going to encounter challenges today.
00:39:22
Speaker
You know, it's like, it's one of those tricks where it's just so easy to read it. You could, I mean, the funny thing would be to read somebody else's and imagine that it was yours or just like read somebody else's out. Like if I read the, you know, the Leo one out to you, which I know you're not Leo and you're like, Oh yeah, that totally sounds like what kind of day I had today. Right. Yeah. Because you can just, it's so broad that you can like literally basically any, any apply it to anybody. Exactly.
00:39:52
Speaker
All right, we're going to go through now all the non-negotiables, those pillars, those essentials for a science-based claim, the EMFA repeat optiopred with an example of a valid, reliable scientific claim that does have empirical evidence behind it that has been reproduced and that is based on established scientific theories and that does have predictive
Exercise and Health Claims
00:40:18
Speaker
power. So here it is.
00:40:20
Speaker
Regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. So resting heart rate is your heart rate at rest when you're sleeping. It can be a reliable marker for an individual's overall cardiovascular health and fitness. And typically when we start to engage in regular moderate exercise, you can even look at this on your phone. You might notice that if your phone tracks your resting heart rate,
00:40:44
Speaker
that your resting heart rate will start to go, will start to go down. So let's go one by one through M. Faripi Optiopred to see how this claim differs from some pseudoscience claims. So here's where we're going to do a little compare contrast. um Now these pseudoscience claims are of various egregiousness levels. So, so warning, if your feathers are easily ruffled, you may want to turn this episode off right now.
00:41:07
Speaker
I kind of am conjuring Adam Meekins again. Cause he'll say, if you don't like swear words, you better turn this episode off right now. so Okay. So here's the, here's the scientific claim. Again, regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. Is it empirical? Yes, it is. It can and has been observed and measured. We can observe exercise. We can measure the parameters of exercise like intensity and duration. We can measure heart rate and how resting heart rate changes over time.
00:41:36
Speaker
Let's contrast it with this claim. Crystals keep me safe. If this were a scientific claim, there would be observable measured evidence to support it. Is there? No. No. no there's not there There is no empirical evidence for this claim.
00:41:53
Speaker
And you know you can argue, well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? Just because you don't have evidence for it doesn't mean it's not happening. How many times have we seen that in the comments section of a post? So often. It's up there with, I just know. I just know. They're like right next to each other. Yeah. Or there are two sides to this. No, there's not.
00:42:15
Speaker
These are facts. Facts don't have two sides. yeah um So yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? That's a logical statement, but logic and science are not the same thing, right? Absence of evidence doesn't prove something is false, but in science, we rely on evidence to support claims about whether or not something is true or false. So if there's no evidence to show that crystals have an effect on safety, we can't reasonably believe that they do.
00:42:45
Speaker
especially when there are well-established explanations for what does keep people safe, like situational awareness, like keeping an eye up when you're walking around at night or using safety equipment, helmets, shoes, seat belts. So without evidence, the claim that crystals keep us safe is just speculative and it's not something we can reliably count on. All right. Yeah.
00:43:06
Speaker
Next one. So I'm going to repeat the claim that is scientific in nature. Regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. Is it falsifiable? It sure is. It can be tested and also proven wrong. How so? Well, we can falsify this claim. Regular moderate exercise reducing reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults by subjecting it to a test.
00:43:32
Speaker
And if in a well-controlled, well-written study, if we find no meaningful difference between the study group, right the one that does the exercises, and the control group, the group that does no exercise, then we will have falsified the claim. All right. Contrast it with the claim, yoga aligns the chakras. Is this a scientific claim? Could we test it, Sarah? How would we test this? Yeah. I mean, there is no anatomical. You cannot open a body and find chakras. right Shockers are part of the energetic body or the esoteric body or the subtle body, right? So you can't test for something that you can't physically find.
00:44:14
Speaker
um you know A more subtle example of this kind of non-testable idea would be something like, oh, well, yoga fixed my back pain or it fixed my student's back pain.
00:44:27
Speaker
um It's always unfalsifiable when it's an anecdote, right, which is me telling you something that happened. When we test something in science, we subject a whole population of people to an intervention, not just one person, although sometimes we start with a case study, which is just one person.
00:44:42
Speaker
right And we maybe gather up a lot of individual studies to then say, okay, this might be something, let's do a real full large size study. But nobody's making massive like changes to you know CBC recommendations off of a case study. right It's off of like very much reproduced evidence.
00:45:00
Speaker
um you know Anecdotes are compelling. right They're relatable. They're personal stories. We feel it's true because if somebody is telling it right to us. but you know, they can't be proven in research, right? Large bodies of research show that there is no single type of exercise that is better or worse than any other type of exercise for back pain. Yeah. Sarah, would you say that physical therapists fall prey to confusing anecdote with science when it comes to like the interventions they suggest are most beneficial for their patients? Sometimes, but we are drilled so much in research and school that typically
00:45:38
Speaker
You know, what what we're given, there's sort of a, what they call a three-part approach to working with a patient. It's evidence-based research, clinical observation, and patient desires. And so some of what you're doing is based on evidence-based research. Some of it's based on like, when I've seen other patients with your particular presentation and we've done this thing, I have seen that help them.
00:46:03
Speaker
yeah but And it just depends on the individual PT, I guess, but science, you know, research moves slowly. And if you're finding that there's an intervention that you've been using with people that has repeatedly been shown to be effective, I certainly would try it with someone. I might not, you know, if it's not working, I'm not going to be like, let's just do it more. But and what about interventions that have repeatedly shown to not perform?
00:46:25
Speaker
better than like standard exercise. I'm thinking cupping and dry needling, which I have noticed are actually very popular amongst physical therapists as treatments that they offer. Yeah, I mean, all of the, all of those kinds of what they call modalities, which is anything that the person is receiving passively. So cupping, dry needling, acupuncture, ice, heat, laser, e-stim, right?
00:46:51
Speaker
the research around all of them is extremely mixed.
Anecdotal Evidence in Therapy
00:46:54
Speaker
So a lot of people end up using them based on their clinical experience with them where they're like, okay, you know, there may not be a lot of research around this, but I have found blah, blah, blah. I think there's also a difference between mixed research where some research is actually showing that it does outperform physical therapy, for example, or it does outperform certain like NSAIDs, right? Like what is an NSAID, like Advil, right? um Or it does outperform, I guess there's like injectable medications that you can give people. But I think a lot of these don't actually show that it ever outperforms. Some do. I mean, you'd have to go through intervention by intervention. I'm talking about like, because we are going to talk about cupping and dry needling a little bit. And I'm going to, I'm going to link to two episodes.
00:47:44
Speaker
on the, um, this podcast is called unbiased science. It's hosts are scientists and they have a couple of episodes on dry needling, acupuncture and cupping. And basically the takeaway is that I wouldn't say evidence is necessarily been mixed, but rather just very, very scant in showing that these treatments, which often are paid for out of pocket. Some of them are covered by by insurance, but that they don't actually perform better than these more standardized forms of treatment. yeah I was just wondering about this because I i notice a lot in you you know Instagram, anytime something like dry needling or cupping, for example, is called into question, there seems to be a lot of feathers ruffled from physical therapists who regularly use those modalities
00:48:37
Speaker
and swear that they work for their patients. right And so I'm i'm wondering if we could just we could just talk a little bit about like how how anecdote can sometimes be confused with science or rather how bias can play a role in how we perceive the outcomes of our treatments for our parents patients. like I'm thinking about things like natural history, right this idea of there being a natural course that a injury must take to heal and sometimes we We treat it with acupuncture. We treat it with cupping. Well, I don't, but like physical therapists do. And then they go, oh, look, it fixed your situation when, in fact, it was really probably just the passive of passage of time that played the biggest role. right um And then there's also recency bias where like you do the treatment on a couple people, you get a positive outcome, and then you think that because the most recent memory you have of this treatment
00:49:30
Speaker
is that it works, you continue to apply it, or there's confirmation bias, which is that you kind of think that it works. You see what you want to see, right? I'm wondering, because from my perspective, I noticed that this is actually quite prevalent in the physical therapy world, but maybe it's because this is social media land. Yeah. So what I wanted to say in response to what you were saying about, you know, the PTs who go on Instagram and say, oh, but this always works.
00:49:56
Speaker
Frankly, nobody should be saying that anything always works. I don't know if they're saying it always works, but they they do they do get they seem to be getting upset when evidence when the evidence behind these treatments is presented as being really quite thin. Right. Well, I mean i think that social media is a place where people like to get really upset about things um in general. So in terms of like being able to say that this particular treatment you know works or doesn't work based on evidence. In those two cases, you know obviously what what you're saying specifically is that there is no evidence. and In a lot of cases for the other
00:50:39
Speaker
modalities that are out there, there is mixed at best evidence, but mixed evidence also still doesn't prove it, right? Just but you you don't have ah an overwhelming, you don't have the reproducibility, right? It doesn't have strong support. It doesn't have strong evidence behind it. And I think people also, I mean, I think this is probably true, not just in the world of PT, but in any sort of like world of working with people in their bodies is people get real good at doing certain things. And then so that's like, that's their go-to, right? yeah Like they're getting really good at cupping. Do you know that in California, you cannot practice dry needling as a ah physical therapist? It is illegal in some states you can. Every state is a little different. Yep. Yeah. um But let's say you really like doing cupping and you find that that's impactful on people. I mean, an example that I would give you is we have a laser at the clinic where I work and
00:51:32
Speaker
lay this particular type of laser, people often ask me if like they can use it on their face. I'm like, no, it's not the kind of laser that it is. The way that it works, apparently based on the the science and that what I've read of the research around it is that it actually infiltrates, it penetrates to the level of the mitochondria. It basically works in a way that reduces, helps to reduce inflammation. I have used it on people who feel like it was really helpful and we kept using it. And I have used it on people who didn't feel like it had any benefit.
00:52:02
Speaker
And so we stopped using. it Does it have a strong research behind it? It has some research behind it. Um, I haven't spent a lot of time looking into the research behind it. I've also used it on myself and had improvements in certain things and I've used it on myself and not had improvements in certain yeah things. So it starts to get into that criteria, which is not what our conversation is about today, but that's the, um, patient centered preferences, right? if your patient came in and they're like, oh my God, that that laser last time, did oh that definitely changed things for me. yeah Even if I'm sitting there thinking, maybe it did, or maybe it was like the 10 exercises I had you do, right? But if they want it, I'm going to give it to them, right?
00:52:42
Speaker
is there Is there potentially a role that placebo is effect is playing absolutely as well? Absolutely. yeah We're going to talk about placebo effect a lot more in this episode. but I just wanted to to ask that because I also want to you know bring physical therapy into the mix here and and just note that you know pseudoscience actually proliferates almost every single industry and field. Not just yoga teachers. It's kind of everywhere because really what pseudoscience is is that it's sciency sounding stuff.
00:53:09
Speaker
that doesn't have empirical strong empirical peer-reviewed evidence supporting it, but is presented as something that is effective when, in fact, the evidence kind of suggests otherwise, not kind of, but does. This is all in the context of anecdote, and this is all in the context of falsifiability and how anecdote is not falsifiable, right? Another claim that is not falsifiable is meditating daily improves your spiritual wellbeing. okay This, you could test it, you could gather evidence, but it would remain unfalsifiable because we can collect data on meditations of facts on stress, mental health, some measurable outcomes. The concept of spiritual wellbeing is very fag vague, it's very subjective. um Definitions of spiritual wellbeing may vary,
00:53:57
Speaker
It makes it very difficult to pin down and objectively test. So even if no measurable effects are found, what happens with non-falsifiable claims is that proponents can then argue that, for example, spiritual benefits are personal or they occur on a different unobservable level, right? So now we can no longer falsify this claim. um That's one of the things that happens with religion, right? You can't falsify religion.
00:54:24
Speaker
It comes from a different plane, right? It's not science. Yeah. Okay. um Here's an important tip I think that could be useful for those of you who like to go on Instagram. This is a, this is a tip for arguing on the internet. Here it is. The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. All right. So when people come into your comments section and start making claims that argue against something you've posted,
00:54:52
Speaker
do not become defensive. Do not feel that you need to defend yourself. Instead, go on offense and ask them for evidence for their claim instead. You will save a bunch of time if flame wars in the comments section on Instagram could ever be classified as a way to save time. But my my point is don't get defensive. Instead, put them on the defense and ask if the person commenting has evidence for their claim. Now, they might actually come on and comment on your post asking you for evidence for your claim, in which case they're placing the burden of proof on you and hopefully you can bear that burden. I also want to talk about supplements as it as it relates to falsifiability.
00:55:38
Speaker
So I'm not talking about an iron supplementation for an iron deficiency or a vitamin D supplement or a vitamin B supplement. I'm not talking about the type of stuff where you would go to the doctor, get a blood panel. Your doctor would sit down with you and go, we need to bring your levels up in this particular regard. I'm talking about proprietary blends of supplements that likes of which are sold on the Andrew Huberman podcast.
00:56:02
Speaker
These are marketed by Andrew Huberman, Joe Rogan. Lots of folks actually sell these proprietary blends of supplements. Hang on. You said proprietary. Proprietary. that's ah That's a word I struggle with. It's hard. I'm pro-pi. This is my proprietary blend. ah So here's the problem with proprietary blends of supplements. They don't tell you what's in them.
00:56:30
Speaker
They only provide you the total amount of the formulation. They might tell you like, they might tell you the ingredients in them, but they don't tell you how much of each ingredient is in them. A lot of times there are ingredients added that they don't tell you about.
00:56:42
Speaker
A lot of times they'll tell you there's an ingredient there and then you'll test like the chemists will test it and find out that it wasn't actually in there. So this makes it impossible to empirically test claims made about the benefits of these proprietary blends because we don't actually know what's in them. This is very different than getting iron tablets for an iron deficiency because iron deficiency has well established diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols. you know Doctors can clearly measure iron levels. They can adjust how much you need accordingly. They can test again to see if it's been effective.
00:57:18
Speaker
right so This has been scrutinized and validated by actual evidence. Proprietary blends have not. The opacity surrounding ingredient dosages means that there cannot be any meaningful scientific evaluation. We don't know how much of what or what is even in these. And without knowing this, we cannot determine if what is supposedly in them is present insufficient or excessive amounts. We can't assess their potential benefits.
00:57:43
Speaker
we can't We can't know even if they're harmful for us. right This lack of transparency not only complicates our ability to test it empirically, but we also have to wonder you know what are the adverse side effects.
00:57:58
Speaker
because people sometimes unknowingly consume ingredients that they really shouldn't be, or they consume ingredients in these proprietary blends that are, they're not good for them, or there's just too much of that ingredient in there to be good for them. All right, let's let's go to our next claim. So so Sarah, let's remember what our science-based claim is. Regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. Is it reproducible? Yes, it is. It can, and it has been reproduced across multiple studies and tests.
00:58:28
Speaker
So a great many of these studies are actually meta-analyses, right? When they gather up all the information from a whole bunch of other tests, that's an even better level of evidence, right? There's a lot of consistent findings, right? the The same results are showing up in test after test. The mechanism, right? How it works to do this is well understood. the So the reduction in resting heart rate is generally attributed to improved cardiovascular efficiency and increased stroke volume.
00:58:59
Speaker
and also enhanced autonomic regulation, right? A better balance between your sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system activity. So if we compare that to a claim like power posing changes people's hormones to make them feel more confident, right? So that's that Amy Cuddy power pose study that claimed that adopting these expansive big body postures could increase someone's confidence and actually alter their hormone levels.
00:59:25
Speaker
It was very popular, but you know all subsequent attempts to replicate it failed. right So there were a lot of method methodological, that's my hard one, there were a lot of methodological issues, and that raises a lot of doubts about how reliable the original results actually were. Yeah, was it reproducible? No. but Yeah. All right. ah Similar problems, though.
00:59:52
Speaker
i've been learning exists for personality tests like the Myers Briggs, which is like the holy grail of personality tests, or at least it was. I mean, I'm not, I'm not super up on personality tests, but yeah, similar problems exist for personality tests in which they're just not, you don't get the same results are not reproducible. So a way that we can discern science from pseudoscience, one of the ways is to ask, have these findings been reproduced in other studies?
01:00:17
Speaker
right Is this expert making a claim that science has found to be true? Do other experts refute this expert's claims? Is there scientific consensus? h Yeah. I think this is there scientific consensus is really important because if you hopefully get your information from a variety of sources and they are hopefully not always saying the exact same thing. I think that's important too. but If you are getting your information from a variety of sources, and one person is, like you said, Sarah, kind of going rogue, saying something that is completely different from other experts in that field, for example, other doctors or other scientists, right? That is a red flag, because what it means is that this person is saying something that goes against probably goes against scientific consensus.
01:01:10
Speaker
um so We're talking about reproducibility here and scientific consensus is sort of related to that. Ayurveda suffers from reproducibility issues due to its emphasis on individualized treatments. These vary widely among practitioners. There's no standardization in, for example, the herbal formulations perhaps. There's also limited research or if there is, it has poor methodological quality.
01:01:40
Speaker
And basically it's the subjective nature of the health assessments that take place within Ayurveda. And I think probably strongly the influence of the cultural and contextual origins that complicate an ability to achieve consistent and replicable outcomes in studies. So just another example of something that ah suffers from this problem of reproducibility.
01:02:08
Speaker
um in addition to things like personality tests, power poses. A ah slightly different take are the anti-vax claims that kind of first resurfaced in a big way around vaccines and autism. And then of course we saw so much of it during the pandemic. And, you know, this is what makes me go, because scientific studies consistently show the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Pseudoscience and Science Denialism
01:02:35
Speaker
for basically everybody. And anti-vaccine arguments rely on this kind of cherry-picked, isolated cases, anecdotal evidence. It's not reproducible. It's not representative of a larger population. Vaccines have been studied a lot, a lot, a lot. And so that is an example of claim could be that vaccines save lives or vaccines are effective at preventing the spread of disease, right?
01:03:01
Speaker
and And that has a reproducibility. It's been shown to be the case over and over and over again. Yeah, we still have people who deny the efficacy of vaccines. and And this is an example of science denialism. Science denialism is denying established scientific claims are true in the face of overwhelming evidence. And I think this is one of the biggest harms of pseudoscience is that it contributes to science denialism. It contributes to people's distrust in qualified professionals. It contributes to people's poor scientific literacy. How do we talk to science deniers? I find it very difficult. I mean, it is very difficult because there isn't, you know, the argument is, I did my own research, right? Or like, that's not true. There's a conspiracy. The healthcare care system is trying to make you sick. Bill Gates is doing this.
01:03:58
Speaker
George Soros is doing this. like there's no It's like trying to argue with a marshmallow. like there's nothing You can't land anything. Yeah. and and Maybe closer to our fields of study are there are also people who insist that posture predicts pain. Right. That's also a form of science denialism. There are also people who insist that strength training is dangerous.
01:04:22
Speaker
That is also a form of science denialism, right? um How do we talk to those people? I mean, I think we're better at talking to those people. I think we're better at talking to those people than maybe anti-vaxxers, although I don't have to talk to too many anti-vaxxers, I find so. Well, we might be better at talking to them, but I don't know that they're any better at changing their mind. Yeah. We had an interview with Yoga with Jake. Remember our interview with Yoga with Jake? Yes, we did. Yes. And Jake said that he found his mind changing by listening to our podcast. His mind was changing about alignment. His mind was changing about posture. So I do think that minds can change. I mean, my mind changed about it. Oh, sure. But that's also like, you know, yeah I think both of us, I mean, it's in the tag of our show. Like, we hold beliefs strongly, but we hold them loosely. And we're willing to let go of them when we see evidence that indicates the contrary. And I think as someone who is
01:05:15
Speaker
holding on real tight to pseudoscience may not be comfortable letting it go, right? They might actually double down in the face of any sort of evidence to prove the contrary. Yeah. If we go back to our i our claim. right Regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. Is this peer reviewed? Yes, because the studies that support this claim have been subjected to peer scrutiny. right Comparable scientists and researchers have sat down, gone through the studies and been like, yeah, this looks good.
01:05:47
Speaker
right so more officially, a peer review process is not just somebody saying, yeah, this looks good. It's a process where experts in a field evaluate research before it's published in a scientific journal. And this evaluation helps to ensure that the the work is of a high quality and that it's credible.
01:06:06
Speaker
Right. They provide feedback. They suggest improvements. They might say, actually, this little bit of this sentence of this claim here, you cannot say because your study didn't actually prove this bit. Right. So it's sort of like quality control. yeah It's not perfect. Right. People might still read something and be like, yeah, it looks good to me. And then realize like, oh, wait, it's not. But it's like if you were writing an email to somebody And then you just sent it off without rereading it. And then afterwards you realize there's a bunch of spelling mistakes, right? If you go through and reread it, you may find those spelling mistakes or that you actually said something that like, I do this a lot. Or I'm like, I need to make this sound nicer. ah so Right off the top of my head, it's likely to be a little more rude.
01:06:47
Speaker
written down, right? And so I might have to be like, it seems like possibly instead of you did this, right? So yes, it's quality control. But it's, it's still, we're all still humans. And we all still make mistakes. Yeah, definitely. I mean, otherwise, all research would be perfect. That's right. All peer reviewed research would be perfect. Yeah, you can find research to support any claim. I think that is an important realization to have, right? Which is, you know,
01:07:13
Speaker
scary, but also you know just a part of living in a free world. So examples of complementary and alternative medicine, sometimes shortened to CAM. right An example of this is homeopathy. right There are lots of studies on homeopathy, but they are typically published in journals without rigorous peer review.
01:07:37
Speaker
On the other hand, large-scale meta-analyses and peer-reviewed studies have consistently failed to show any effectiveness for homeopathy beyond placebo. Yeah. So again, if we're if we're collecting these tips on how do I tell if this is science or pseudoscience, one of them is, was this study published in a credible journal or a predatory journal?
01:08:03
Speaker
And so if you're asking yourself, well, how am I supposed to know the difference? Well, a predatory journal, it's an academic publication that exploits the open access model by just accepting all articles or whatever articles they want without proper peer review or any editorial oversight. They charge high fees to be published. They use misleading metrics so that they appear reputable and they aggressively solicit submissions from researchers.
01:08:28
Speaker
And, you know, they they typically lack clear editorial policies. They publish low quality work. And ultimately this just works to undermine the integrity of scientific research. And the way that you can find this is something called Beals List, which it may not check, it may not list all of the predatory journals, but they'll, there are, it's a, what it's an aggregate. Yeah. It's like a black lists certain predatory journals.
01:08:55
Speaker
Yeah, and also, you know, there should be clear information about their editorial bird. Bird? Cheep, cheep, cheep on the editorial bird. I got some news for you. Cheep, cheep.
01:09:07
Speaker
You also want to make sure there's clear information like, is there an editorial board? Is there a peer review review process? what do they What do they charge for people to publish in their journal? and And a legitimate journal will provide detailed guidelines to all of this. Yeah, we'll link Beale's list in the show notes. There are also other tools that are frequently used by academics and researchers, but may have a paywall associated with them. And I think Beale's list is one where you don't have to pay to use it.
01:09:35
Speaker
We just finished up ah peer-reviewed. We're going on to objective. Regular, moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. Is it objective? It is. This is not a vibes-based claim. It is not based on my opinion or my intuition. It is based on objective, measurable, observable phenomena that can be tested and falsified. so Regular moderate exercise reduces heart rate in sedentary adults is something that can be determined objectively. Now, here's the deal though. Sometimes objectivity means that we need to define terms. okay We have to assign specific definitions to words that might otherwise be vague. For example, the words regular, that's vague. Moderate is also vague. Exercise is even a bit vague. Sedentary could also be considered vague.
01:10:25
Speaker
However, once we have defined these terms for the purpose of testing, they become capable of being objectively measured. So regular could be defined in terms of frequency and duration of exercise. Moderate could be specified in terms of ah you know There's not always an agreement of what moderate exercise is, but once you settle on that agreement, it might have something to do with heart rate or or whatever you decide, that would become a way to make it objective. Exercise also needs to be specified, but that's easy. Sedentary can also be defined because behavior is observable and quantifiable with regards to things like maybe time spent sitting. And and of course, we know resting heart rate can be objectively measured.
01:11:06
Speaker
So we have to ask, if we want to make sure something is objective, right a claim, if we want to make sure a claim is objective, we have to ask, are all the terms well-defined? This is another Instagram argument tip. If you're getting into a fight with somebody about what is true or what is not true, and there's all these words being tossed out, you need to ask people what they mean by moderate or what they mean by heavy or what they mean by whatever it is you're arguing about.
01:11:30
Speaker
because until you define terms, you're really arguing about God only knows what, you're talking past each other. um You also have to ask if you wanna know if a claim is objective, how were the outcomes observed and measured, right? Did bias play a role? This is important, like who wrote the study?
01:11:48
Speaker
right A lot of times the research published, for example, around acupuncture and cupping is published by people who like to do acupuncture and cupping, for example. And that's true for research on CrossFit. That's true for research on any entity that has a vested interest in their research, supporting their bias, and that vested interest is money, right? Lauren Fishman and his daily yoga regimen reverses osteoporosis. There are also confounding variables that we need to take into account and have they been controlled for. What other exercise is the person doing? what other How much are they sleeping? What's their diet?
01:12:32
Speaker
What's their prior exercise capacity until this time? Are they on medications, right? All of that could affect resting heart rate, right? So if we want to know if it's the moderate exercise that's affecting resting heart rate, we need to control for those those variables. Those are called confounding variables. And then also what role does placebo play? Did placebo impact the outcome of a particular applied intervention, right? So placebo is the expectation that an otherwise neutral intervention, it's the expectation that it will be pleasurable or produce positive results, right? So if I'm given a sugar pill, but I believe that it is going to take my stomach pain away, placebo suggests that it actually could reduce my stomach pain because I believe in the fact that this pill will reduce my stomach pain.
01:13:26
Speaker
Okay, let me give you an example of a practice that does lack objectivity and that is Reiki. Reiki and other types of energy healing. So here's the issue with energy healing is we need to understand what do we mean by energy? A lot of times energy is defined very esoterically and there's no real scientific framework for understanding what it is and there's no real good way to measure it.
01:13:53
Speaker
There's no good way to observe changes taking place to energy. Another one is aromatherapy. okay This is a wellness practice that also lacks a scientific framework to ensure objectivity, making it very difficult to validate claims made around aromatherapy because benefits are often very subjective.
01:14:13
Speaker
Ayurveda lacks objectivity as well because it relies on traditional beliefs like balancing dosas, which are not measurable or scientifically validated. Its treatments often have unclear mechanisms, subjective outcomes, and this makes it really difficult to test or verify them through empirical methods. There's also very little standardization in practices around Ayurveda, which leads to inconsistent and non-reproducible results.
01:14:41
Speaker
Even something like massage therapy, you know it involves a wide range of different techniques that people can use and how each therapist applies these techniques is going to vary significantly. you know to two different people working Two different therapists working on the same person might use different levels of pressure or speed or hand movements, even as they're aiming to treat the same issue, which then might also create different outcomes.
01:15:05
Speaker
or it may create the same outcome, which then questions whether or not it matters, what kind of method you're using in the first place, right? this sort of So this variability makes it difficult, it's really challenging to reproduce results reliably. That's part of what makes it difficult to study empirically. There's a lot of subjectivity, right? You're relying on their your what your hand feels to identify areas of tension or knots or tightness. and one person's perception of tension might not be the same as another person's perception of tension. right So then there's not consist consistency in how the muscles are being treated. So then it's also harder to reproduce. Yeah. yeah So we'll, again, mention the interview with Adam Meekins, where he talked about some research that he was on the team ah with to to talk about some of these limitations of massage therapy. We did an interview with him. We'll link in the show notes.
01:16:01
Speaker
um All right, Sarah, ah we're almost there. We're almost at the end here of our essentials. Regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate in sedentary adults. Does it come from an established theoretical framework?
01:16:17
Speaker
Yes. Yes, the claim exists within a structured model or theory. And these models or theories explain other similar observations and claims. right And additionally, these models and theories are modified or replaced as new evidence emerges. right So this claim, regular moderate exercise reduces resting heart rate and sedentary adults is rooted in exercise physiology.
01:16:42
Speaker
and the cardiovascular adaptation theory. It's not a just sort of random standalone claim. right It's plausible based on existing theories. This doesn't automatically make it true, but it goes a long way towards helping us identify that it has a scientific basis. You contrast this with something like Pilates makes you long and lean, which is not ah scientifically plausible, right and also how do you test it? It's well established that exercise is not a good tool for weight loss. Diet is a main driver of weight loss. Pilates is not a diet format. It's also not a well-established exercise format to build muscle mass according to exercise science. Muscle length is determined by genetics and your bone length, right? So the real statement is that a lot of people who teach Pilates are already long and lean. check Check the show notes for our long and lean three-part series. Yes.
01:17:41
Speaker
And so here's another tip. If you are trying to figure out if something is scientific or not scientific, if it's pseudoscience, you say, what is the underlying theory or model from which this claim has plausibility? If there is one, has this theory been accepted in the scientific community? And if so, has the claim been directly tested? There's similarly the proposed mechanisms behind cupping lack a clear and universally accepted scientific explanation.
Debunking Health Myths
01:18:11
Speaker
the proposed mechanisms behind cupping are varied, and I will refer you to Unbiased Science, the episode on cupping. But basically, one of the most popular explanations for the proposed mechanism behind why cupping works is that it improves circulation, but actually, it causes a hickey, which is a bruise.
01:18:37
Speaker
which is a blood clot, which is the opposite of improving circulation. It's creating stagnant blood. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like the argument would always be like someone would say, I mean, I've never had cupping done, but I've seen, you know, patients will come in and they'll take their shirt off and be like, Oh, somebody's been cupping you. And the way it's explained to them is that the areas where there's the biggest hickey basically means like you have the most stagnation in that area. And I'm like, that doesn't,
01:19:05
Speaker
It doesn't make any sense. Also, just the fact that I can see a whole bunch of blood here doesn't tell me that now it's circulating better in this area. It just tells me it's concentrated in this spot where you pulled on it. The the the the spot with the biggest hickey is the spot with the most stagnation because you created them. Stagnation sounds terrible. Big old bruise there, and a bruise is stagnant blood. here so guess Guess who likes cupping?
01:19:31
Speaker
Gweneth. Gweneth. Of course she does. Yeah. So in go in Goop, there's an article on cupping. So unbiased science is where I got this quote, but I looked it up myself. So here's what Goop says about cupping. Quote, the cupping method functions to stimulate and promote the free flow of chi, energy and blood in the meridians, the energy highways. This creates a kind of local congestion that can eliminate blood stagnation that may be causing pain from a deeper layer in the muscle. By creating this suction and negative pressure, cupping is used to drain excess fluids and toxins. Loosen adhesions and lift connective tissue, bring blood flow to stagnant skin and muscles and stimulate the peripheral nervous system. Indications include, but are not exclusive to, the common cold with cough. So this is this is what cupping can help you with. Asthma, headache,
01:20:26
Speaker
dizziness and digestive orders. It is a veritable panacea for all that ails you. Most patients find the experience pleasant, although they may be left with localized discoloration that will fade and disappear within a few days, up to a week. Curiously, cupping doesn't always leave a mark. Diagnostically supporting that there is no stagnation in that area. Oh, so if it doesn't leave a mark, there's no stagnation. If it does leave a mark, there is stagnate stagnation. The thing is that the mark is the stagnation. Yeah, it's no it is. It's the i just kind of wrap my head around the all of the
01:21:07
Speaker
like What's it called? Buzzwords. Yeah. I'm going to refer you to the unbiased science episode, but but basically there is no plausible theoretical framework that begins to explain how cupping is beneficial. What about detox diets?
01:21:26
Speaker
so Detox diets. If I want to get Sarah worked up, there's one word that I know I can use, which is detox. Well, so a detox diet, if we're still working with this idea of ah an established theoretical framework.
01:21:40
Speaker
It does not fit any framework for how we know that detoxification actually already takes place in your body via your liver and your kidneys without any particular diet. Preach. So, yeah. You know, the first time that I saw you bust a myth was when I had just recently become aware of who you are in the yoga tune up community. And you, I think I was just on Facebook at the time. I don't even think Instagram was really a thing.
01:22:08
Speaker
or maybe it was, but I saw this post on Facebook where you basically posted a talking video about how detox is bullshit, like detox diets is bullshit. And I just remember being like, oh shit, if she started like posting like that more, she would probably amass a huge following because it was like really compelling. It was obviously smart and true. And I just remember like thinking in my mind, like,
01:22:34
Speaker
i'm gonna do a podcast with her one day i was like that's her superpower like she's really good at that in my mind i was like i want to be good at that someday i was still kind of stuck in the yoga echo chamber i love the yoga committee i was stuck in the echo chamber and i wanted to speak out about things that i kind of felt were bullshit but i hadn't quite found my voice yet and i saw you find your voice and i was like Damn, that's powerful. Damn, that's cool. And yeah, now fast forward like, I don't know, even like maybe 10 years later. here Here we are. So it's pretty cool. I just had to share that with you. and Okay. Regular, moderate, exercise, reduces resting heart rate and sedentary adults. Does the model or theory have predictive power? Yes. Scientific models and theories.
01:23:19
Speaker
They should be able to explain past phenomenon, and they also should be able to accurately predict future occurrences of phenomena. So based on exercise physiology models, cardiovascular adaptation theories, we should be able to explain why exercise has seemed to have the effect on our population that it has, such as lowering resting heart rate. And we should be able to make accurate predictions about how applying exercise to a population will affect them as it relates to their resting heart rate. And we do see that this is the case with this particular claim. Now contrast this with the fact that there doesn't appear to be any superior diet for weight loss. Crazy.
Pseudoscientific Practices
01:24:05
Speaker
Adopting a specific diet for weight loss actually has poor predictive power for whether someone will lose weight. Instead, it's whether or not a person consumes fewer calories than they burn.
01:24:18
Speaker
That tends to be a far better predictor. And you can consume fewer calories than you burn on any diet. um So here's the questions you could ask yourself. Has the model been tested over time? Does the model explain past observations? And can it predict accurately about the future? Or does it frequently seem to fall short in its ability to do this?
01:24:45
Speaker
Okay, we are switching gears away from a deep dive comparison between a scientific claim and a pseudoscientific claims and how the seven essential ingredients kind of come into play with making that discernment or figuring out which is which. We want now want to talk about, because maybe some feathers have been ruffled, now we're going to talk about how can pseudoscientific claims about these practices be made on pseudoscientific, or even how can they be made scientific? Not all of them can, but can. So here are the things we talked about. Not not an exhaustive list. Crystals, Ayurveda, astrology, chakras, yoga, meditation, power posing, personality tests, CAM treatments like acupuncture. Remember, CAM is complementary in alternative medicine. Treatments like acupuncture, cupping, and massage, homeopathy,
01:25:42
Speaker
Reiki, aromatherapy, Pilates, fad diets. How can we engage with, share or teach exercise or wellness practices or CAM-based or alternative remedies or folk therapies that may have lots of pseudoscientific claims surrounding them without then conflating them with established science-based treatments for specific health problems?
01:26:09
Speaker
As practitioners, how can we avoid promoting pseudoscientific claims while continuing to perhaps enjoy these practices or even offer these practices? Because I'm not saying that all of them are wrong or bad or worthless at all. In fact, all of the ones I listed I think could have some value. It's a free fucking country, bitches.
01:26:32
Speaker
Okay, if you find value in this stuff, and you aren't hurting anyone with it, no one should get to stop you. Okay. In fact, some of these that I listed do have evidence behind them, they have been studied, such that you could even make science based claims about them like yoga improves balance, Pilates improves core strength, massage can promote relaxation and emotional well being meditation improves sleep quality.
01:26:58
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that every claim made about those practices are then also science-based. Like, yoga improves bone mineral density is not a science-based claim, for example. To misquote Joseph Pilates, you are not only as young as your spine is flexible. Spine flexibility is is not a marker of health. It's not a marker of health and longevity.
01:27:16
Speaker
We are here to say, though, that it is unethical to make claims about these practices that paint them as equivalencies to science-based methods or that portray them as scientific. I think that's unethical. I also think that it might happen by mistake, and that's different, right? When we make a claim that's pseudoscientific by mistake, that's called misinformation.
01:27:38
Speaker
If we're making it on purpose to mislead people on purpose, that's called disinformation. I think most of the time a lot of it is misinformation. I think people believe what they're saying is true. There are instances though that are a little bit darker where people are actually actively trying to lie to you. So here's my question. How can we speak about these practices? Practice them, even share them with others while remaining un-pseudo scientific. I think we need a t-shirt. That says un- pseudoscientific movement logic. I'm on it. I'll add it to the list. How can we speak about these things while remaining unsuitoscientific in our presentation? Yeah. I mean, the one thing that I actually want to go back to slightly that you were talking about when you were listing all the things like crystals and Ayurveda and all that kind of stuff, and that you know it's fine to do them, it's a free country, as long as you're not hurting anyone with it. I think that's a really important um delineation, right?
01:28:36
Speaker
because there's a difference between saying, this is something that that feels good to me when I do it versus this is something that's going to heal your pain. yeah right So that's this first one that you're talking about in this list of like how do we how do we speak about them in a way that is un-pseudo-scientific. So you acknowledge that it's anecdotal evidence and you highlight this more than once, right? I'll very often share a story from the clinic and I pretty much I do my best to always say this is anecdotal, right? So I'm not um'm not presenting it as this happened to Susie headquarters and because of that, that means it's I don't know who Susie headquarters is. Sounds like the boss. I think she's the head of HR. So she's actually quite irritating.
Anecdotal Evidence vs. Scientific Value
01:29:23
Speaker
Yeah, oh, um yeah, that's my take on Susie headquarters. So I'll say like this worked when I did it with Susie headquarters, but that doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody, right? I typically am not presenting the stories that I share as evidence. yeah um The other thing you want to acknowledge is that, you know,
01:29:40
Speaker
there are limitations in the evidence for most of these. There may be no evidence at all. And and make sure that you are not over promising what the treatment can deliver. These might be beneficial on a personal level or have a cultural significance, but they're not always meaningful on a scientific or a medical level. And then again,
01:30:02
Speaker
highlighting how they may be beneficial in a complementary way instead of a replacement way as far as established science-based care. There's plenty of people who go through cancer for treatment who do all of the like chemo and radiation and surgery, but then they're also taking, like, I took Chinese herbs and I did acupuncture as well. yeah Did it change anything? I don't know.
01:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, because I don't know what it would have been like without it, but I still did it, but I also didn't do it instead of the chemotherapy, right? If the claims are are plausible, but they're not tested, then you should acknowledge this if you can. And if there is mixed or lacking evidence around a certain claim, you should also acknowledge that. Yeah. So let's say I like crystals. um My daughter loves stones, rocks. She has a couple of crystals, right?
01:30:50
Speaker
i think I do too. I think they're pretty. I like crystals on my rings. right I like crystals. my my My wedding ring that I lost, unfortunately, it was a rose quartz. I was like, oh, it's pretty. I think I could speak about crystals as a way that I used to carry like a rock in my pocket to remind myself of a habit that I didn't want to have. right it's so It's a way of practicing introspection, potentially, of reminding yourself of something, of thinking about something, of meditating on something,
01:31:20
Speaker
And I think that you can speak about the value that crystals have for you personally, or the way in which they can offer sort of ah a focal point that could be beneficial. Yeah, definitely. That they don't have universal value, but rather personal value, yeah depending on the meaning that you make of them. That's one way you could talk about crystals that is unsuitoscientific. Right. So then for something like astrology.
01:31:44
Speaker
you might be like, oh, I just think it's fun to read my horoscope in the paper. There are all these sort of like archetypical ideas of personalities or or characters that, you know, how you could be in the way that you are in the world. And so maybe these characteristics help you get a little introspective about yourself and be like, wow, you know, I am hot tempered or I am impatient, or am I just listing things about myself now that I think I need to work on?
01:32:08
Speaker
yeah um you know And that might be born out in the description of your ahro ah astrological sign, right? But you know to say like, oh, I knew she was a Leo the moment she started talking. is If you're saying it seriously, that's that's a different thing. If you're saying it just to kind of be funny, um you know that's that's something else. Right. I think that there's a playful aspect to a lot of these practices that
01:32:40
Speaker
has value just because it's playful, but it's very indirectly beneficial, right? It's not a one to one. It's not a astrology will make your marriage better, right? It's more of a astrology offers room for introspection and play and maybe gives you a language sometimes to use that's helpful that could be indirectly beneficial to your marriage, right? Right. But it would be hard to show that causality. In fact, it's not possible. ah your marriage Yeah, yeah. Are you Veda? So this one, I think it's close to home for a lot of people.
01:33:09
Speaker
I definitely was interested in Ayurveda and have been on and off throughout the years. So to make claims about Ayurveda un-pseudo-scientific, you have to recognize that Ayurveda doesn't have a scientific framework. right So instead you can emphasize Ayurveda as a traditional healing system with historical and cultural significance and highlight that, highlight its history, highlight its cultural significance, and rather than framing it as some sort of scientific methodology, we can highlight the role that it's played in cultural practices and also in community care, we can share our personal stories. We can share testimonials from individuals who have benefited from Ayurvedic practices, highlighting that these are anecdotal results that might not be the same for everyone. And I think what this does is it just emphasizes that Ayurveda is subjective and experiential and it avoids trying to paint it as some type of scientific practice. Yeah.
01:34:07
Speaker
I always had a really hard time figuring out which one I was. like I remember reading a book and being like, well, I think I'm this, but I could definitely also be this. I'm going to link an episode in the show notes. ah It's a three-part series by Decoding the Gurus on up a influential personality named Dr. K, who is a medical doctor with a Harvard degree who is a Ayurveda proponent. And one of the points that the hosts of Decoding the Gurus make about Ayurveda, which I think is very interesting is that while Ayurveda is often explained as this very individualized, individual centered approach that treats the individual as an individual, it also simultaneously tries to often group people into these very blanket categories, which is kind of a
01:34:57
Speaker
An interesting inconsistency sort of built into how Ayurveda is explained. Yeah. I mean, I, I understood it as like, once you know which of the, is it the doshas that you are, then you can make choices on your food. And like, yeah, I don't know. It's going to like tell you things about who you are. And I don't know. I just could never figure out which one I was. Well, simultaneously treating you as uniquely individual, we are also going to really gloss over a lot and put you into one of three categories. Right, exactly. We're going to try very hard. yeah um so Then something like personality tests, right? Meyers Briggs is a famous one, or I've even taken tests to see if I if i was on the autism spectrum at all.
01:35:48
Speaker
and Turns out I'm not, but I'm close, which makes a lot of sense to me. um But I think, you know, I mean, I feel like I remember as a kid reading like 17 magazine, like, what kind of a girlfriend are you? You know, and then you would like, are you the one who shows up with like freshly baked cookies and blah, blah, blah? Yeah. Are you the one who's like grumpy in the corner? that You know, whatever. And so I think there's something in us as humans is we want to know who we are. Right. We want to ask and who other people are. Like, who am I? What do I seem like to the world outside of me?
01:36:18
Speaker
um So the Myers-Briggs is the one that's based on, it's got four characteristics, like introverted, extroverted. I think thinking, feeling is one. There's like a judging, perceiving, and then there's one other that I can't remember.
01:36:33
Speaker
And you you do a whole bunch of questions and then they basically give you like, well, which ones are these? Are you the highest on um maintenance phase? Just did a great episode about virus breaks. I don't know if you heard it, but that would be a fun one to link as well. And send it to me and I'll send you that link. Yeah.
01:36:48
Speaker
Basically what they said is like, it's totally bullshit. and There's no science to prove it. And a lot of companies, a lot of big companies, I want to say like Amazon and Google had them for a while as part of their interview process. But then I think it became something that they had to get rid of because it was considered a way of... It's a way of discriminating? Discriminating, thank you. It's a way of discriminating against you based on like how you would behave in a meeting. When you took this autism spectrum test, was it administered by ah like oh no but by a psychologist or a no psychiatrist? No, it was administered by the internet. like theres ideas I do think that there are tests given to determine
01:37:28
Speaker
If someone there is actually on the autism, but these are given by qualified like doctors, clinicians. Yeah. Not, not available on the internet, not available on the internet, but I was just like, well, let's see. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe, maybe some of this is.
01:37:43
Speaker
I don't know. Dry needling and cupping, perhaps we could share that we just personally have found these helpful for reducing our pain. you know We could acknowledge that they don't perform better than established treatments like physical therapy, but we can we can you know remind people that evidence is lacking in mix. But we can also suggest that if you've tried everything and nothing's worked and this is something that you can afford and you want to give it a shot, like they're actually these treatments are mostly safe. There are some adverse events that can take place from them. but For the most part, they are they are fairly safe. and and you know Depending on where you go, they're also maybe not going to break the bank. so but no I know a lot of people, including people close to me, love acupuncture. I'm like, listen, if that helps you relax, maybe it's being in that quiet room with that
01:38:28
Speaker
person paying attention to you and maybe it's the fact that you just get to lie down and maybe there's some nice music playing and and maybe it's something about the needles too. you know there's just There's been a lot of research using sham acupuncture in the control and then actual acupuncture in the study group and they found like no difference. so Listen to the episodes linked in the show notes on Biascience. If you want to know more about cupping and dry needle So then like, let's say you like using the framework of chakras to discuss, you know, the different qualities of your body. So chakras is something that it's ah it's a representation of the body that has ah a very deep and rich history, but it doesn't it doesn't have a physiological, biological basis. It's more artistic, it's more esoteric, it's more sort of ah almost like a thought experiment, if you will, on ways that it can represent the body. so
01:39:29
Speaker
We just have to, if we're going to be talking about the chakras, we have to avoid suggesting that they have any scientific basis and avoid using any language that makes it sound like there are equivalencies between evidence-based psychology versus the cultural beliefs around chakras. Emphasizing again that there's not any scientific basis for this, but there doesn't have to be, right? That's not the point.
01:39:55
Speaker
yeah it I'm just looking on my bookshelf to see if I still have the book. I think I might have donated it. I used to have a book written by, I think, a qualified mental health professional who wrote an entire book about aspects of mental health and a relationship to the chakras. And at the time was super interested in chakras and was also experiencing some mental health mental health issues. And I read the book and I was like looking for answers that could you know be related to chakra imbalances. And I actually remember trying things that were suggested in the book. and ah Looking back now. I realized that that was a very pseudo scientific book But it was written by somebody who did have their credentials to be talking about mental health It's just that there wasn't a really clear distinction made in the book that like now when we're talking about chakras We're not actually talking about science We're talking about something that might be complementary to your understanding of the science or something that might be complementary to like actual mental health care from a
01:40:52
Speaker
qualified mental health care professional. And so I just remember feeling very now looking back kind of misled by that book. Whereas I think the book could have been helpful had there been these clear distinctions made between like, we are now leaving the realm of science to talk about chakras. And now we are re-entering it to talk about mental health. Reiki, same thing we might share that we really appreciate the ritual, the interpersonal connection, the feeling of being deeply attended to,
01:41:18
Speaker
Right? Even just taking time to lie down and have a person put their hands on you or near you and just pay attention to you for an hour. I can see how that would be beneficial. Yeah. But it's different from saying that Reiki heals energy because that just, it sounds sciency, but it's not based in a scientific framework. Yeah, no, not at all. yeah Same with something like aromatherapy, right? We might find personally that we, certain smells or scents,
01:41:49
Speaker
make us feel more relaxed or they make us feel more awakened. But you can't say that objectively everybody loves the smell of peppermint, right? Or everyone gets more awakened by the smell of peppermint. yeah There's certain things, you know, and also it's it's never it's not something, there's no like future of it necessarily. Like maybe you like a certain scent and then you have so much exposure to it that you can't stand it anymore. I remember when I was doing my cadaver dissection, I couldn't be in the room with because the there's so much formaldehyde in the air. I couldn't be in the room without a mask on my face that had lemon essential oil drops on the inside of the mask. Yeah. So that all I smelled was lemon. And then after a while, this for a while, the smell of lemon made me think about. Oh, no. Yeah. And I was like, oh, like it kind of it got like sort of a gross out factor for a while. Right. I chose it because it was something I liked. But then it was like now inextricably tied. um do you remember that One day i I called you after having a really bad first
01:42:45
Speaker
therapy session with a psychotherapist, she was actually an art therapist, yes who had basically, she conveyed to me in our session that she was a COVID denialist, and suggested that she use doTERRA essential oils to keep people from getting COVID while in her office receiving therapy during the pandemic. Like when we were told the social distance, she kept seeing people in her small office and she was like, yes, but the essential oils. And she's like, this essential oil specifically. And I was like, oh, God.
01:43:19
Speaker
I have to leave. I have to go now. And I called you. I called you. I was like, sorry. I gotta to tell you about this. I just met the worst therapist. Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah Like what's some what's the minimum amount of time where I can leave and it's not rude. Yeah. Oh man. w ha yeah and then for that Fad diets, right? So hey listen, you might find that you felt better on paleo, low carb. You might feel that you feel better satiated with keto. That intermittent fasting allows you to to have better boundaries around when you're eating and maybe cause you to introspect on why you're eating. you know I think that fad diets aren't necessarily all bad. It's just that they have not been shown, any diet has not hasn't been shown to be more effective than another diet for weight loss.
01:44:07
Speaker
It's really going to come down again to personal preference and and and really anecdote at the end of the day. Here's my question. How can proprietor proprietary blend supplements be made on pseudoscientific? Like Andrew Huberman. Here's some advice for Andrew Huberman. If you would like to become less pseudoscientific Andrew Huberman, here's what you can do. Stop promising positive outcomes from taking your proprietary blend of supplements that you sell. And instead, here's what you should say. I don't really know what this will do for you.
01:44:37
Speaker
It might actually do nothing. It might actually cause more harm than good. It might help you. I cannot promise any of this. We don't have any empirical evidence to support any claim that we could make about these supplements, about this supplement that I sell that is enriching me because I don't actually know what's in them. I don't know about how much of what's in it is in it. And even if I did, I'm not going to tell you about it because I'm not allowed to because this is a proprietary blend and you don't get to know.
01:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so in the United States, dietary supplements are regulated by the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, but they're not as strictly regulated as pharmaceutical drugs. They're categorized as food products, which means they don't require pre-market approval or evidence of safety and effectiveness before being sold. The FDA does have the authority to take action against unsafe ah supplements after they're on the market.
01:45:33
Speaker
but that requires a whole bunch of people taking them and having adverse effects, right? So the regulatory framework for supplements, it's really a lot less stringent than for medication. Yeah. Yeah. So how does CAM, complementary and alternative medicine fit into treatment? And how can we talk about CAM? Some CAM may have, some CAM has mixed evidence, right? So the verdict is not completely out yet. Some CAM has poor quality evidence, pretty much only.
01:46:00
Speaker
and overwhelmingly other evidence showing that it it does not perform as well as evidence-based interventions like physical therapy. Some, though, argue that the placebo effect is the main driver in terms of the benefit of CAM, and they argue that placebo is inherently good.
01:46:20
Speaker
Why should we complain about it being the reason for a positive response from an intervention like acupuncture? Because acupuncture is believed that one of the reasons people benefit from reduced pain after acupuncture is the process of receiving acupuncture, not the acupuncture itself. Why complain about placebo if it results in a positive response, Sarah?
01:46:43
Speaker
yeah
01:46:46
Speaker
Uh, it's not inherently positive that we're going to say that this thing works because of the but placebo effect because it masks the fact that whatever the treatment is, doesn't have a scientifically supported mechanism. So people can start to believe that the thing they're doing is an effective intervention when it may not be right. If I hand you this sugar pill and I'm like, here, take this aspirin. It's going to help with your blood pressure.
01:47:16
Speaker
Right? And you're like, Oh, great. And you you're like, Well, yeah, this this apparently this helps with my blood pressure. But you know, then when they go to measure your blood pressure, it hasn't changed. Because just because you believe it's going to change doesn't mean it actually is going to you might say like, Yeah, I feel really calm. Now I feel more relaxed. i feel like My stress is lower. It must be because my blood pressure is going down. Right? So it can divert patients from evidence-based interventions that have actual proven efficacy and it can delay getting appropriate care, right? And it's also not a, it's an unreliable basis for treatment or placebo effect. I just always think of it as Placebo because that was what one of my teachers used to call it. Placebo effect, it can really vary among different individuals and conditions, right? So something that works for one person doesn't work for other people.
01:48:03
Speaker
And if we focus on you know relying on the placebo effect, we overlook the need to address the the root cause of the health health issue, right? So we don't end up having a deeper understanding of what's actually going on with the patient, right? and This may cause people to ignore legitimate symptoms or health concerns, right? And potentially make them feel worse, make their symptoms worse. And one of the things people ask me about acupuncture all the time, they're like, should I, you know, they'll typically come in and they'll, you know, they'll be dealing with whatever they're dealing with. And they'll say something like, should I also get acupuncture for this? And my answer is pretty much always the same, which is it works for some people. It doesn't work for other people. If you've done it before and you like it, go for it.
01:48:47
Speaker
it's not going to change anything about what I'm doing with you. But if it's something that you enjoy, but definitely you can go for it and do it. If it's something you've done before and you haven't found it effective, then I don't see any reason to do it now. yeah you know So i I place it much more in the category of like, well, if it makes you feel better, sure. yeah But it's not changing anything that I'm doing.
01:49:12
Speaker
And also, P.S., what I'm doing is part of what's going to make you feel better. yeah Like, really? Yeah. So now we're going to talk about outdated science. I told you this was a big episode and a big topic. We're still going, folks. We're still going.
Outdated Science Examples
01:49:25
Speaker
What is an outdated science? Outdated science refers to scientific ideas, theories, or practices that were once widely accepted but have since been disproven, revised, or improved based on new evidence, research, or technological advancements.
01:49:42
Speaker
It reflects concepts that are no longer considered accurate or reliable in light of more current understanding. Now, the cool thing about science is that it's always changing. It's always updating based on new information. That new information can come about by a number of ways. One way is that new research sometimes uncovers more detailed or contradictory evidence around a topic. Sometimes technology improves,
01:50:11
Speaker
and simply allows for better observation and experimentation and methodologies evolve. And when they do, sometimes they're able to provide more accurate data. Yeah. So basically outdated science, it kind of just represents a phase in the history of scientific knowledge that has now been surpassed by more precise and more reliable findings, right? So I was trying to think of an example of this and then I i started my head going into like, Oh, when people will say, Oh, it's just a phase, right? So it's like, uh, it's like, if you looked at your bedroom of walls from when you were a teenager and you have posters of heartthrobs on the wall that you pulled from like tiger beat.
01:50:50
Speaker
for Seventeen magazine. I know it wasn't just me. I was really, this is true. And I'm so embarrassed to say this right now. I was really into Mickey Rourke and Johnny Depp, which both of them are appropriately embarrassing at this point. Because like, you know, if I was still really into them, if I still had their posters on my bedroom wall, it would be weird because that was a phase.
01:51:14
Speaker
Right. It would be weird if I hadn't ever moved on from that phase. Right. So outdated science is like if I still had a poster of Johnny Depp on my bedroom wall and I never and I didn't think there was anything wrong with it. So Laurel, I know and the listeners know you didn't have quite as much pop culture during your four minutes of years as I did. But did you have teenage crushes? I don't know what yours are. Oh, ah hell yeah. So in elementary school, I was a new kid on the block, baby. Yes. And especially Jordan and Danny.
01:51:43
Speaker
Oh, Jordan and Danny. Wait, which one was Danny? Oh, Danny Wahlberg. Yeah. No. The old one. Oh, wait. No, it wasn't Jordan and Danny. It was Jordan. No, it was just Jordan and. Oh, shit. Now it wasn't Danny. You're making me realize it wasn't Danny. It wasn't Danny. It was. Hold on. There's Chris. He's one. Wait, wait. List him off. List him off. Oh, geez. Jordan. Danny.
01:52:09
Speaker
make it on the block um Let's see. where There they are. Jordan, Danny. um Wait, hold on. There's like direct Jonathan, Jordan. So definitely Jordan. Joey. Joey. Joey is a cute one. I was calling him Chris. He was like the young one, right? Yeah. Jordan and Donnie Wahlberg. Not Donnie. Jordan. Wait, which one was Danny? Danny Wood. He was the least attractive one, I think. According to you. Oh, no, not Danny. No.
01:52:42
Speaker
Joey. so Joey and Jordan. Joey and Jordan. i I think maybe Jonathan too. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. So New Kids on the Block and then in in junior high school it was Daniel Day Lewis and this is deeply embarrassing. sir Deeply embarrassing because the movie in which I fell in love with him during was Last of the Mohicans.
01:53:06
Speaker
I will find you. I will find you. That is so problematic now looking back because the movie and the book are, you know, James Fenimore Cooper's book is, they're a little bit problematic in their depiction of Native Americans, but I really just could not stop thinking about Daniel Day-Lewis after watching him in the movie. It does, it does. And then and then in high school, i I started dating and was finally and in love with boys my own age, so that's good.
01:53:35
Speaker
All right. So what we're going to do now is we're going to give some examples of outdated science and we're going to use our list of non-negotiables to see why this example has become outdated. We're also going to try to talk about ways for people to spot outdated science in the wild, though it's not always easy. No. Right. Because it doesn't automatically look crazy. Yeah. When I was working on this, I texted Laurel and I said, can I start with the medieval humors? Because I wanted to give an example that was just so wildly, obviously outdated that it would be hilarious to still consider it scientific. And she was like, yes, absolutely, because there's still plenty of things out there that a lot of people ah think is real, but is outdated. It's like humor's level outdated. Yeah. If you don't know what I'm talking about, in medieval times, the theory of humor's was this dominant framework for understanding health and disease. And it originated from ancient Greek medicine, primarily from Hippocrates and from Galen.
01:54:29
Speaker
And this theory proposed that the human body was governed by four bodily fluids, also known as humors. And these four bodily fluids needed to be in balance for a person to be healthy. So the humors were blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. And I'm just going to break in and say, you know, one of the things they got right is like, if they've ever got black bile coming out of you, that's probably a really big problem. So.
01:54:54
Speaker
Some of this and is not, you're not inaccurate. yeah So each of these humors represented a part of your general constitution and you wanted all of them to be, you know, quote unquote, in balance to be in good health. So the first one blood, blood was linked to air and spring and it was ah associated with having an optimistic and lively personality.
01:55:17
Speaker
Flem, everyone's favorite, was linked to water and winter and Flem was associated with a like a calm but also like a sluggish disposition. Yellow bile was linked to fire and summer and yellow bile was connected to a fiery and irritable temperament and then black bile was linked to earth and autumn and black pile bile was associated with a melancholic nature. This kind of reminds me of the the seasonal the color wheel for fashion? Like what season? Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, I'm an autumn, apparently. Yeah. girl Do you know what you are? I would think maybe you're a spring. No, my mother was into that. She told me I'm a summer. I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. I do know that I look pretty good in fire engine red. Nice.
01:56:04
Speaker
I definitely don't. I look crazy in fire. so I'm definitely not a summer. Yeah. You know, at the time, obviously, there was no way to measure these fluids at the level of scientific measurement that we would, is you know, expect something to be done at today, right? So the physicians at the time, they basically like look at what was coming out of you, right? Is it blood? Is it phlegm? Is it yellow bile? Is it black bile? And also then, like, what were your behavioral tendencies? So they would look at things like the color, the consistency, the amount of fluids like your blood or your urine or your mucus or your a feces and then use that to determine the presence or imbalance of certain humors like if you had dark urine or if you have very black stools that might signal an excess of black bile. This is an aside but I have a patient who's an art historian
01:56:56
Speaker
And she introduced me to the to the phrase laudable pus, which I guess is a good kind of pus. It's pus that should be applauded. But she was telling me how like in this whole thing, like sometimes in there, when they're talking about the humors, they're like, Oh, well, this patient's got laudable pus. Oh, yeah. So emotional and behavioral tendencies were also seen as reflections of humoral balance. So if you have a hot temper, this might mean you have an excess of yellow bile.
01:57:27
Speaker
If your humors were in balance, it meant you were healthy. If they were out of balance, it meant you had too much of one or more, and this was believed to cause physical or mental disease. So if you had too much blood, you got fevers, or you had this overly optimistic personality.
01:57:47
Speaker
Don't be too optimistic. You're a little too cheerful, French. If you have too much phlegm, you were lethargic and you might have respiratory issues. If you have too much yellow bile, you were prone to anger and you might have digestive problems. And if you had too much black bile, you probably were going to suffer from depression and also have digestive issues. They obviously also had very limited treatment options at the time. but What's interesting is all of these are still practiced today in some form. Maybe not for these reasons, but in some forms. So one of the things they did was bloodletting, right? So if you had too much blood, you were overly optimistic. yeah They would use leeches to take blood out of your body. I'm like, yeah, that's going to make you less optimistic. It's certainly going to make you a little less cheery. And then they would you know do dietary adjustments. you know Certain foods were believed to increase or decrease the levels of each of these specific humors.
01:58:44
Speaker
then also herbal remedies, right, plants were used to either quote unquote cool or heat the body depending on the imbalance, right? So you may be thinking, okay, yes, I would believe that there are certain older cultures that are still around that are still practicing bloodletting, but not in Western medicine, but you would be wrong because I went down a little bit of a bloodletting internet K-hole. And it turns out it's a yes and situation, you know, yes, there are indigenous cultures. What is a K-hole?
01:59:09
Speaker
It's a ketamine induced distortion of time and space, out get which causes hallucinations and mild dissociative effects. I think it's often used not as relating to ketamine, but just saying like you went down a hole. You were as if on ketamine. yeah yes Got it.
01:59:28
Speaker
So, it yeah, you know, there are indigenous cultures that practice bloodletting to this day. Some of them still use leeches for this purpose, but there are also reasons given for bloodletting in Western medicine.
01:59:40
Speaker
which they call therapeutic phlebotomy, to treat specific conditions like hemochromatosis, which is a genetic disorder where you have too much iron in your blood, or polycythemia vera is a condition where you actually produce too many red blood cells. So in this case, the removing of the blood helps reduce the excess iron or the excess red blood cells. It's it's bloodletting, but it's not for medieval humor.
02:00:02
Speaker
reasons. And then I also went down a little side street about leeches and whether they were still used in Western medicine. It turns out yes, but for different reasons. So leeches are used in a lot of cosmetic surgery because the leeches saliva actually has an anticoagulant. And so it helps to keep as the surgery is healing, it helps to keep it clean. And so in a way, they were they were kind of onto something using leeches for bloodletting, because it would you would you know, this anticoagulant would make more blood come out, but you know, not that they knew what it was. So if we're going to put the meta medieval humerus theory through our same set of science non-negotiables, we are missing any sort of empiricism,
02:00:47
Speaker
We're missing falsifiability. We're missing objectivity. I mean, we're missing basically everything off the list. Since this is not an episode about bloodletting, although maybe that's what I want to do. What am I in between is about, apparently. um I'm going to leave it here for now about about it, unless Laurel has anything she wants to add. No, I don't. i know and enough blood I know almost nothing. In fact, I knew about the leeches being used still to this day. I didn't actually ah put it together. that They were used as anticoagulants. That's interesting. Cool, right? yeah All right, so in no particular order, let's look at some more modern 20th and 21st century outdated science beliefs. I think I'm going to write a children's book about how animals are heroes and I'm going to feature the leech. Yeah, for sure.
02:01:31
Speaker
If you have a child, and you know about this ah Animals as Heroes book topic. There are a lot of them. All right, somatotypes. We talked about this one in our coverage of Stu McGill's appearance on the Huberman Lab podcast. That's episode 74. McGill, we go again. So please check the show notes for that.
02:01:50
Speaker
Funnily enough, it was Huberman who kept insisting on trying to use somatotypes as a framework for who gets to lift heavy things based on their somatotype. Like, how should we exercise based on our somatotype? And he was saying phenotype, but what he was describing was actually somatotype. So the concept of somatotype was developed by American psychologist William H. Sheldon in the 1940s.
02:02:14
Speaker
He was working on something he called constitutional psychology theory, which attempted to link body types with personality and behavior. He suggested that people could be categorized into three main body types or somatotypes, which he believed were then also linked to personality traits and behaviors.
02:02:32
Speaker
which sounds like lunacy at this point in time. It's basically like astrology. But again, if people like Huberman, who are actual scientists with the credentials to call themselves scientists, can still bring them up in conversation and have another person who also has a PhD, McGill, not say, those are not real things, my friend. And this is podcasted about to millions of people Then we've got a mess on our hands. We've got a bell to unring. We've got some debunking work cut out for us. So here it is. In somatotype theory, there are three types. Actomorph characterized by lean, delicate, poor muscles, poor muscles.
02:03:17
Speaker
Sheldon said ectomorphs were introverted, intellectual, quiet, and restrained. Then there's the mesomorph, which is defined by a muscular, athletic, and solid build with low body fat. Sheldon believed mesomorphs were bold, assertive, and competitive. Then there's endomorphs marked by a rounder, softer body with higher fat storage. Endomorphs were thought to be sociable, relaxed, and comfort seeking. Sarah, if you had to pick one, which one are you? I think I am a mesomorph.
02:03:46
Speaker
I think I'm like an ectomorph personality that's trapped in a mesomorph body. That's good. Love that. yeah So he assigned numerical scores based on a person's degree of ectomorphy, mesomorphy, and endomorphy, and believed this physical body structure influenced temperament and social behavior.
02:04:09
Speaker
so I think a majority of people listening can agree that this just doesn't sound like it could be real, but but that's not an automatic quality of outdated science. okay so Let's pull up the non-negotiable list and see what comes up. okay so There's a lack of empirical evidence. When Sheldon collected photographs of college students and attempted to quantify body types. His methods did not have rigorous scientific backing. There was no strong empirical evidence connecting body types to personality traits. Reproducibility, later research certainly found there were no reliable correlations made between body type and personality. There's also the falsifiability problem
02:04:59
Speaker
The negative cannot be disproved. There is no connection between body type and personality. How could you prove it, let alone disprove it? It's basically a matter of opinion.
02:05:11
Speaker
Objectivity. His scoring was based on how much someone looked like a specific type in his opinion. Predictive power. There was an none. Because your body shape can change. Your personality probably wouldn't. But how would you prove that?
02:05:27
Speaker
yeah yeah Yeah. So that's another one that's sort of more modern, but I think a lot of us can still look at it and be like, yeah, that seems really outdated. yeah But this next one for a lot of us does not seem outdated. And it's one of these topics that Laurel and I talk about add in thin item. So this is the idea that posture and or alignment determine your health and your pain. This is a really, really huge topic. And in order to not get like just completely bogged down in the difference between posture or alignment and what you know what this means versus the other means, I'm just going to zoom out and go macro and just say that there's this idea of a right place and a wrong place to be both for your whole body and then also for certain body parts.
02:06:16
Speaker
and that the right place is quote unquote better for your body or body part and won't cause pain and the wrong place is worse for your body or body part and will cause pain. So we have done a lot of episodes on this topic. We did a three part series on alignment dogma that looked into specific dogmatic beliefs around the position and posture of the pelvis, the spine and the shoulders. And then we did another three parter called posture panic,
02:06:42
Speaker
that looked at the historical racist, sexist, and eugenicist history of where our beliefs about posture really come from. There is an absolute Everest of research that disproves these old ideas, it as well as a fantastic book called Slouch, Posture Panic in Modern America by our good friend, Dr. Beth Linker, who we recently, you may have just heard it recently, we recently interviewed for the third episode in that Posture Panic series. so If you are looking for a good read that is going to force you to rethink some outdated ideas around alignment and posture, this is a good one to do it with. um So underneath this umbrella, I'm going to pick a few specific you know outdated but still commonly believed ideas to discuss. So here's the first one. Lifting with a rounded back or sitting with a slumped posture is going to cause a disc herniation to occur.
02:07:32
Speaker
So look, I was taught this and I was like, well, it makes sense to me.
Challenging Outdated Beliefs on Posture
02:07:38
Speaker
So this belief comes from the idea that if you flex your spine, if you round your spine, you're going to put more pressure on the anterior part of all of the intervertebral discs in your spine. And that pressure at the front of the disc over time is going to force the nucleus pulposus, the jelly in the middle of the jelly donut to be forced backwards, and that backwards force is then theoretically going to weaken the annulus fibrosis, the tough outer layer, and then the nucleus populsus will squirt out the back, aka herniate, right?
02:08:11
Speaker
So unlike this idea of like a body type could determine your personality or humors are going to de determine your general health, this kind of makes sense, right? Like if you follow the story along, you can see how the A to B to C goes. But of course, the truth is not as straightforward as A to B to C. And what we actually know about disc herniations now is that they have a lot of influential factors, including genetics.
02:08:35
Speaker
And while sometimes posture may be part of it, in some cases, it is not a predictor of a future herniation, right? So if you run this through a list and see what comes up, empiricism is an issue because a lot of the studies that suggests that flexion causes herniation. They were done on cadaver tissue or animal tissue, and neither of these can really directly be translated to living human tissue. They don't possess the same qualities, right? In particular, cadaver tissue doesn't heal, right? So while they did measure some evidence, it was not a very accurate choice of the type of evidence, right? This is the type of evidence that McGill gives for why flexing your spine under load is a terrible idea, according to him.
02:09:17
Speaker
We should also add into our list of of episodes, our first McGill episode, Make McGill Make Sense, where we talk about that. As far as reproducibility, can other people reproduce your study and get the same results? It's really mixed at best, and there is a potential correlation in some cases, but the correlation, as we know, does not mean causation, right?
02:09:41
Speaker
Yeah, and a lot of studies can't even find correlation. Yeah. And then you know is what happens when the there's peer review? or whatever your what are What do your peers think about this? you know There's a lot of researchers and scientists and PTs and other clinicians who disagree with McGill's findings in the light of more recent findings that disagree with his findings, right? And then predictive power, right?
02:10:04
Speaker
ah This made me think of that person on Instagram recently who commented on one of our barbell videos with something like, well, let's see how these heavy weight lifters are feeling in 20 years. And then try to backtrack and say they weren't fear mongering healthy movement. McGill does this a lot as well, right? There's a lot of like, well, see, you're going to make a bad choice and see what that does to you. But there's no evidence to prove, to support that his theory of the dangers of spinal flexion is going to predict anyone's future back pain. Yep.
02:10:32
Speaker
So there's one. of What about knees? Yeah, we did a whole episode on knees, episode 78, behemoth, nemeth. That's another thing I can say to get Sarah to react. So knee valgus is dangerous. This is a common claim. This is one of those scenarios where it's hard to tell when science is outdated because we get this gut feeling like, ew, those knees are knocking in. That just looks wrong. It looks like it's causing damage. It looks like it's going to cause damage down the road. and This would be a hard one to get over.
02:11:01
Speaker
If you listen to our episode on Behemoth Nemeth, Sarah likes to call it the best title ever. Thank you. Thank you. um you'll hear You'll hear about a lot of evidence that that shows that this is just not really a well-supported claim. It does bring us up against that feeling though that it can't be right. you know We get this cognitive dissonance going and and that can be really uncomfortable and potentially we just say, fuck it, I'm still going to tell people not to let their knees go immediately in warrior two or squats or honestly. That's fine because sometimes putting the knees in a specific place can lead to better efficiency, but just know that it's not necessarily inherently dangerous for the knees to do that. Same thing about technique, right?
02:11:41
Speaker
Yeah. Tech neck or text neck is a thing that gives you neck pain. In episode 76, we debunked this one. It's got that feeling again that it should be true like knee valgus. But again, we have loads of evidence that suggests that it's just not as bad as people make it seem, it doesn't do the things that people say it will. There's even a piece of research we share that shows that actually it's better to have bad neck posture for some people because having a good neck posture or being hypervigilant about good neck posture actually led to more pain potentially. yeah um So for both of these outdated scientific beliefs, they they suffer from a lack of reproducibility.
02:12:18
Speaker
And I would also say that they both suffer from an empiricism issue. Not that there was no data that could be measured previously, but because given a purely mechanical reason for why something might occur, like your neck is a crane for every inch forward, it adds five pounds of load to an area that just doesn't work in a a soft tissue physics. Look at biomechanics as it relates to the human body, where we've got soft tissues that behave very differently than cranes.
02:12:46
Speaker
um so Here's another one. This is not a posture related one. This is osteoporotic people shouldn't lift heavy. and This one actually really pisses me off because we're seeing in real time how this misbelief can actually create more problems for the person with osteoporosis in the end. and What I'm me personally, Sarah, specifically irritated about is the fact that a lot of medical doctors, internists, ah primary care physicians have been and continue to be detrimentally cautious around their advice to their patients with osteoporosis. I would assume that many are are probably the most familiar with the drugs that are used and that they're likely to suggest that their patients go on some sort of medication and if it's appropriate for them. But we talked about the various issues around medications for osteoporosis in episode 77. Are you getting DEXA scammed? And how for a lot of people they cause side effects that are so uncomfortable it actually stops them from using it at all. And then
02:13:44
Speaker
If their doctor says, OK, well, then just do weight-bearing exercise, like walking or climbing stairs for your osteoporosis, that's even worse, because now they don't have any meaningful recourse. ah There is a recent New York Times article that I discussed in my In Between a Zone number 71, Can You Really Walk Your Bones Stronger? There's a doctor in that in that article who admits that her field has been too cautious in their recommendations of just body weight exercise and says they have probably caused some issues because of it.
02:14:12
Speaker
yeah That's great. Yeah, I was talking to a student who is a member of my virtual studio who signed up for a bone density course. And she said she for some reason was on a call with doctors at MD Anderson. And someone asked, I don't know what the call was pertaining to, because she's not a medical doctor. But someone on the call asked, is yoga enough to improve bone density? And there was consensus among the doctors that Noah was not. And she shared that with me.
02:14:40
Speaker
That's why she signed up for bone density course is because these doctors had consensus around the fact that yoga is not enough. Um, so I was so relieved because when she was telling me the story, I was like, please don't say that they said it was enough. please don't so seriously yeah Yeah. There's a piece of evidence we reference all the time, which is the lift more trial in which postmenopausal women with osteoporosis were able to improve their DEXA scan scores with eight months of heavy lifting and impact training. That is why our course is the way it is.
02:15:08
Speaker
check out the show notes again for the 580 billionth link to the Liftmore trial that we've included in every episode. ah But so here you see we have a piece of research that actually meets all of our non-negotiables. And we'll focus on two examples of how it did. So empiricism data must come from measurable observable evidence rather than intuition or belief. They use DEXA scoring, which can be mixed in its accuracy depending on the type of machine, but it's not intuition or belief. And then reproducibility. experiment Experiments should yield the same results when repeated under the same conditions.
02:15:39
Speaker
ensuring that findings aren't due to chance or error. This one is from O'Narrow Academy website. O'Narrow. So do you know about the O'Narrow Academy? it's It's actually created by Professor Belinda Beck, who was one of the people who did the LIFMOR trial. Awesome. Yeah, I know they did a trial on men. O'Narrow is an evidence-based exercise program developed from the LIFMOR study conducted at Griffith University under the supervision of Professor Belinda Beck and recently published in the Journal of Bone Mineral Research 2018.
02:16:09
Speaker
Since 2015, Onaro has been implemented at the bone clinic in six Southeast Queensland locations. Like the Liftmore findings, ongoing data collection at the bone clinic sites indicates that Onaro increases bone mass, improves posture, and decreases falls in clinic patients. Results show that 86% of patients increased bone mass at the lumbar spine and 69% of patients increased bone mass at the hip. Those results were recently presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research.
02:16:39
Speaker
in Montreal and that was in 2018. That's amazing. So they've been able to take the methods from the lift more trial and turn that into a trademark program. have And, uh, we looked at their site and there's a handful of places in the u US that do it, but not a ton. There's a few in California and a few in the Northeast.
Upcoming Focus on Outdated Science
02:17:00
Speaker
um Another example, this is not direct reproducibility, but we had a participant in the last cohort of our bone density course who has reversed her osteoporosis score with about six months of lifting. The reason that is not an example of reproducibility is that is not a study. That is that is an anecdote that is an anecdote, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. the reason The only reason it's not a study is nobody's turned it into, like I could turn it, I'm hoping to at some point.
02:17:29
Speaker
turn it into a case study. Yeah. So, you know, that's, that's again, just a very, it's a very beginning sort of stage of research, but I'm going to try and get some people in our current cohort as well to do a few more case studies. Amazing. Amazing. All right. So we were going to talk about how to identify outdated science or pseudoscience in the wild.
02:17:49
Speaker
But Laurel and I are thinking that maybe everyone's brains need a break. Yeah. I think we're going to do in between episodes about this. And I don't know if we're going to break up identifying outdated science in the wild and have Sarah do that, or you know identifying both outdated science and pseudoscience in the wild. But we will you will be hearing from us in a future shorty in betweeny.
02:18:13
Speaker
about how to identify science versus pseudoscience versus outdated science, and also how to know what information to trust, who to trust, what are good signs and bad signs with regards to what you're seeing from experts and influencers, even people who have MD and PhD behind their name, right?
02:18:35
Speaker
So, in conclusion, I hope you enjoyed this very long episode, and yet are positively impacted, and that you love science more, but also that you aren't like suddenly all judgy about students
02:18:58
Speaker
Check out our show notes for all the links to references we mentioned and we didn't mention in this podcast. You're going to see a big list of podcast episodes from us and from others. Finally, it helps us out. If you like this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts. Quench our review thirst, and we're going to be back with in-betweenies, so we will in-between you in two weeks.