Back in March a study came out, though it was only recently hyped up in the media, which explored an interesting intersection between psychology, vaccination, and the communication of risk. This study by Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse (2012) covered two experiments in which the researchers looked at how the wording of vaccine risk messages affected participants’ perception of the safety of vaccines.

The idea of these experiments was to explore what the researchers call the negativity bias. This bias is a tendency for negative messages to influence our perceptions of risk more than positive ones. This creates a problem for the communication of negating messages—messages that downplay a risk or offer contradictory evidence against a risk. So, relating to information about vaccines, how strongly should we word our pro-vaccine arguments?

“There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.” 
― Ambrose Bierce

Science and discovery - expanding the limits of our concepts of reality - takes real imagination. Pseudoscience (or the cheap imitation, as Sagan called it), not so much. Perhaps that is why old ideas are recycled over and over again as if they were new with the world of pseudoscience. Alternatively, new ideas are stolen from real science and then twisted into the latest scam.

In my previous post for Swift I covered the common features of the "quack clinic" - clinics or practitioners making dubious claims that are not based upon science and evidence. In this article I will cover the different categories of unscientific medical claims.

While there is an endless parade of new unscientific health products and services, they are largely a repackaging of the same basic themes. Understanding these themes is helpful in dealing with the flood of nonsense. Being able to say, "Oh, that's just another version of X," is a huge time saver. Here are some of the most common "flavors" of medical pseudoscience you are likely to encounter.

One of the most famous early parapsychologists was Joseph Banks Rhine.  He didn’t initially set out to study psychic powers. He was trained as a botanist at the University of Chicago. His life would change after he had a fateful encounter with none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle, who was born May 22, 1859, is best known as the author who created the character of Sherlock Holmes.  Later in his life, Doyle became a major advocate of Spiritualism.  In 1922 he embarked on a multi-city tour of the United States in an effort to popularize it.

Doyle gave two talks in Chicago that year.  On May 23, 1922 his talk was entitled “Proofs of Immortality” and on May 26 his second talk was titled “Recent Psychic Evidence”. It was at this talk that Doyle exhibited newly obtained spirit photographs and talked about other alleged spriit evidence such as ectoplasm.