Yesterday I flicked on the Discovery channel and caught a program called "Science Mysteries” halfway. I’d never seen the program before, but I enjoy watching science documentaries, so I gave it a chance.
I don’t habitually watch the Discovery Channel for extended periods of time. I try from time to time, however the channel’s primary purpose seems to be to turn your TV into an aquarium. Or a savannah, or a rainforest. I very rarely catch solid real science on the Discovery Channel, and the public TV stations where I live usually import much better and more in-depth documentaries. I stress that I live in Asia, and Discovery probably has different programming around the world. This program appeared to have Japanese backing, but from what I can tell it was an American production.
Anyway, I sat mumbling in shock in front of the TV as the Science Mysteries program took me on the kind of trip I would normally expect to have a Jimi Hendrix soundtrack.
I saw a number of people interviewed on the topic of Chi, or Qi. Special effects were employed to show rippling “fields” of “energy” around actors. The program explained how the Chinese have known about Chi for 5,000 years. How practitioners of Chi manipulate Chi energy. How Chi energy is important in Chinese Traditional Medicine, and how people have obtained REAL results with such Chi-based techniques, on themselves and even on others. Interestingly enough, all results were reported anecdotally by the patients themselves or by proponents of Chi stuff or related disciplines. No independent confirmation of anything was provided throughout the program.
“Eastern” medical practitioners, the program claimed, balance certain “forces” in the body in order to avoid disease. “Western” medicine on the other hand, “simply” treats the symptoms. Now, this is by far the most pedestrian classification of medical schools I have heard, but it’s a very popular tirade against real medicine and I guess it will never lose its appeal. So let’s ignore it.
How do they balance these forces in the body? By using traditional herbal remedies and acupuncture, for example. The program stressed that Western science does not understand how acupuncture works. Not that any credible explanations were forthcoming from the Eastern camp, mind you. The program made some very wild claims. Among them:
- Acupuncture really works
- Acupuncture also works on animals, eliminating such explanations as the placebo effect (they performed acupuncture on a racehorse, and said that it was more calm and performed better)
- The effects of acupuncture are utterly unexplainable by modern science, as the “meridians” along which acupuncture is conducted do not correspond to nervous or lymphatic or any other systems
- Surgeons have conducted surgery on patients using acupuncture instead of anesthesia.
Again, no third-party verification was offered, merely the puzzle of acupuncture. I would appreciate comments on any of these claims by the readers of this board. Cecil has debunked acupuncture, but I am interested in the specific claims above and in any new information that may have come to light since the writing of the columns. For example, Cecil reports that the Chinese claimed they conducted surgery on patients using only acupuncture, however the program implied that “Western” surgeons had done it too. Cecil on Acupuncture and Cecil some more on acupuncture
Next on the program (I may be garbling the order) there was a brief segment on Auras, and how examination of an aura can yield important information about the person and the person’s health. We’ve covered auras quite extensively on this Web site the last two years, and determined that there is zero confirmation of someone who is actually able to see auras consistently, whether the subject is visible or not. I’m not talking about the optical trick anyone can learn in a few minutes, because it’s really not that hard to “see” auras. As proof of the existence of auras a woman who heads the Bioenergy Fields Foundation –or something like that—made this statement: “We can’t see radio waves, but we know they exist. The information in radio waves is meaningless until it is decoded by a radio set. Likewise, some people can sense and decode the energy fields that surround each of us” (paraphrase, quoting from memory). Of course, no mechanism for this magical detection of auras was offered. The program did not mention that the human eye has a limited range of vision in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that the human eye does not detect electrical fields such as those generated by our bodies.
Next item on the list: a doctor somewhere (I think Siberia??) who took “energy” readings from cadavers. He found that energy lingers in the body several hours or days after death. I think he was referring to electrical energy, but I am not sure as I missed some of this segment. He claimed that the corpses of people who had died in different ways showed different energy fields. Suicide, violent death, calm death etc., he claims each causes the body to produce an energy signature of distinct duration, and that the signature is identifiable.
I almost fell off my couch as the program trotted out their piece de resistance: KIRLIAN PHOTOGRAPHY!!! I can’t believe I saw this cagal on the Discovery Channel, but they were dead serious. Cecil wrote about Kirlian Photography several years ago: Cecil tackles kirlian photography.
The program did not mention that Kirlian photography has been debunked a million times, nor that skin moisture and resistance, as well as the high-voltage jolt, can account for the resulting auras on pictures. The program made a big deal of how a leaf left an aura image, but they did not mention the fact that every object imprints an aura, whether living or dead, organic or inorganic.
Back to the corpse- doctor. He and others determined that a corpse that became a corpse owing to a poorly functioning liver leaves a certain type of aura image, and that when the liver is removed the aura changes. The liver itself has a distinct aura as well. And so forth, I am getting a bit confused remembering all this stuff.
Next on the list was a guy who took energy readings (I think, again, electrical) of trees. When he hit tree number one, which was supposedly isolated from tree number two, readings for tree one immediately showed a spike. Readings for tree two showed a similar spike, but only some time later. This was supposed to be evidence that plants are somehow able to communicate. That’s pretty much all the information provided. I don’t even know where to start on this one.
The program tied these “Science Mysteries” together to form a pseudo-argument for the existence of energies and phenomena about which science knows little. Brace yourselves for some exceedingly bad logic. Each science “mystery” was employed as support for another science “mystery”. For example, the fact that acupuncture works against everything modern anatomy teaches means that it must tap into the body’s Chi, and Chi is also the reason why some people can see auras. The fact that people (and at least one doctor) are able to tell a person’s health by looking at the aura must be confirmation for Chi, the flow of which supposedly governs health. The doctor who looked for energy fields in cadavers was (I think) using a modern variation of Kirlian Photography, and the evidence obtained by this method was offered as scientifically reliable. Kirlian photography registered malfunctioning organs, which are dictated by Chi balance, and so forth.
My question, apart from the obvious ones in this long post, is: how can a channel dedicated to “Discovery” air a program that seems about as credible as the Fox Moon Landing Hoax special???
With “science” like that, no wonder they have “Mysteries”
