From Abracadabra to Zombies

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reader comments: Emotional Freedom Techniques

15 Aug 2010
....I won't argue placebo, power of suggestion, whatever. All I know is that it [EFT] works. I have not had a single nightmare in 2.5 years. I Haven't had a single anxiety attack, hell I don't even have to take meds for depression anymore. The Drs at the VA will attest to all this, they are amazed as well.

I'm a work in progress, I still have joint pain from arthritis in my back. Gary will admit it doesn't cure everything. He will also tell you: "We really don't know how it works. It isn't about me curing anybody. The human body heals itself." ... What Gary Craig did for me was out of goodness.... I realize you'll probably never understand....EFT has no belief status. You don't need to believe it's going to work, it still will. As far as placebo, animals don't talk about results or beliefs. Yet it works incredibly well on animals too. They don't communicate about expectations or sugar pills. Oh my God, I am so glad I don't have to take all those freak-en pills anymore!

OK enough said. I wish you well, have a wonderful week!

DS

reply: I do not claim that EFT doesn't help people. Contrary to DS's claim, Gary Craig does claim to know how EFT works: by manipulating subtle energy (chi).  That is the claim that I focus on in my article on EFT. If Craig merely claimed to be helping people overcome problems, without claiming to be some sort of energy healer, I wouldn't have written about him unless I discovered that he was lying about helping people.

Regarding animals and the placebo effect: it is a common misunderstanding of the placebo effect that leads many people to think that a therapy can't be a placebo therapy if it works on animals. Not so. A study of all the things going on under what is called "the placebo effect" would reveal that classical conditioning is what is going on in animals who appear to be helped by various alternative therapies. (There are also those cases where the animals aren't known by any objective test to actually have been helped. A subjective judgment by an interested party is taken as evidence of healing.)

I wish DS well, too. She has had a rough time of it and has found relief.

_______________

24 Dec 2009
Mr. Carroll:

In the process of surfing the Internet for websites that comment on “Emotional Freedom Technique” (EFT), I came across The Skeptic’s Dictionary and the page with your write-up on that subject.

I was looking for reports of success or failure by people who have used or witnessed that technique. Your report seemed critical, so I read on, looking for more specifics. I was disappointed.

reply: Since my entry on EFT is intended to explain what it is and why it seems to work, rather than report on successes or failures, it was inevitable you'd be disappointed. Maybe you expected a critical report to explain why EFT fails to help people or why it doesn't work, instead of an analysis of how EFT and other energy medicines work and remain popular despite the fact that the basis for their healing is delusional.

What I say below will appear as though I am very defensive of EFT. I have no investment in it; I am not a practitioner in the technique; I do not make any money from it. I am only interested in human capabilities. I am an engineer and my motto is, “if it works, use it.”

reply: Your motto is a very popular one among defenders of placebo medicine. Defenders of each of the following are fond of saying: It works! acupuncture, alphabiotics, angel therapy, anthroposophic medicine, aromatherapy, astrotherapy, aura therapy, Ayurvedic medicine, bio-ching, bioharmonics, chiropractic, detoxification therapies, dolphin-assisted therapy, EFT, faith healing, healing touch, homeopathy, hypnosis, iridology, joy touch, magnet therapy, naturopathy, osteopathy, healing prayer, reflexology, reiki, supplement therapy, therapeutic touch, thought field therapy, and urine therapy.

I don't deny that these therapies and treatments have many satisfied customers and that sometimes some of them have positive effects on people's health.

I'm not an engineer. I was trained in philosophy. I'm interested in why things work and in the explanations people give for why things work. I have tried to explain in many articles why none of the above treatments and therapies works the way their advocates claim they do. They all work due to several well-known and understood mechanisms that are lumped together as "the placebo effect." (These are explained in my entry on that topic.) Other factors that contribute to their popularity are communal reinforcement, confirmation bias, subjective validation, and wishful thinking. If you take the time to study the many cognitive, perceptual, and affective biases that hinder our ability to make fair, accurate, and unbiased judgments, you may begin to understand where I'm coming from. Witch doctors and shamans figured out this stuff thousands of years ago. You'd think more moderns would get it, what with all the sophisticated sources and knowledge bases we have.

I don't begin an investigation into a therapy or treatment by looking for anecdotes. I begin by looking for double-blind randomized controlled studies (RCTs). You won't find any for EFT and that fact should tell you something important. Either it can't be tested, so it's not scientific. Or the advocates are marketing it before it's been scientifically validated. I realize that one good story trumps a thousand RCTs in the minds of many people. I could have written a more persuasive piece had I just collected a bunch of horror stories from people who've tried EFT and are now permanently deranged or some such thing, but that wouldn't be fair.

I am an older person. Over the years I have purposely sought out analytical and “doubting” reports to prevent my being a victim of potential frauds; but as the years go on and we learn more, I have become skeptical of skeptics.

reply: That may be because some people who call themselves 'skeptics' would be more accurately described as deniers (e.g., deniers of the Holocaust, that HIV causes AIDS, that humans are contributing to climate change) or liars.

When I was very young (1930s – 40s) my family had an ice box; we didn’t have a refrigerator with a freezer section. If I burned my finger, I would chip off a piece of ice and hold it to the burned area. It felt good and relieved the pain. If my aunt saw me do it, she would say, “Stop that, Billy. You’ll make it blister”. They would take away the ice and put butter on the burn.

Many, many years later I read the bold head of a newspaper article: “The XXX hospital today announced a new treatment for burn victims. Patients are now packed in ice.”

As a child in elementary school I was fascinated with the concept of rockets as a source of power to lift a vehicle. I read every scrap of information I could lay my hands on. Unfortunately, you did not dare say to grown-ups that you would like to be involved in the development of such devices as a career. People would look at you strangely. It was in the 1940s, I believe, that the New York Times stated the idea of space travel using rockets “is ridiculous because there is no air in space for the rocket’s exhaust to push against”.

In a similar vein, I have a vivid memory of sitting in a large freshman orientation assembly at Austin High School in Chicago in 1941. I remember listening to one of the speakers, a science teacher at the school - a tall man, exuding authority (he looked something like Yul Brynner, the actor – I don’t remember his name).

I recall him admonishing us, “when you are in a rowboat and want to change direction, you place an oar in the water or move the tiller. The force of the water against the oar or tiller will turn the boat. In an aircraft, the force of air against the controlling airfoils allows the plane to change direction. But in space there is no air; there is no way to control the direction of a vehicle, so all this talk about space travel is nonsense.”

That gentleman was well-educated, intelligent, and well-meaning. He wanted to protect us from this foolish information being circulated.

In the years that followed I became a Chemical Engineer and an Aerospace Engineer at that. Since 1953 I have been contributing to the “nonsense” of space travel, having worked on many rocket engines including the Atlas, the F-1 – used for the Saturn moon vehicle, and the Space Shuttle Main Engine. By the way, rockets develop more thrust in a vacuum than in the Earth’s atmosphere. They don’t push against air.

I remember years ago when the taking of cranberry juice for bladder infections was labeled a “folk remedy”. A quick check on the internet will tell you that studies have since established that cranberry juice does work – though not for everyone, nor to the same degree; in fact one study referenced was performed by the Harvard Medical School and reported in a 1994 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Earlier studies could not establish “why” it worked. Perhaps it was for that lack of agreement on the mechanism that doctors didn’t prescribe it; not because it didn’t work.

Which raises the question: Since a full, scientifically sound explanation of the mechanism involved was not available years ago, even though a large number of people relied on it, would the Skeptic’s Dictionary have recommended that you don’t use cranberry juice for a bladder infection?

reply: I now see that you have become skeptical of skeptics because a few people made skeptical remarks about different subjects and were proven wrong. You have not been misled by the deniers or the liars who claim to be skeptics.

I don't give medical advice or recommend that people use or don't use particular remedies or therapies. For example, I don't recommend that people use or not use vitamin supplements, but I do state that there is no good reason to take them unless you have a specific deficiency. I state that because that is the conclusion drawn from several large-scale scientific studies.

Over the years I have had lucid dreams, on and off (the kind where you realize you are dreaming and can take control). In 1980 the phenomenon was demonstrated to be real by Dr. Stephen Laberge in the sleep laboratory at Stanford. For centuries some individuals have experienced and reported lucid dreams (they didn’t call them that name then). But as recently as 30 years ago some psychologists have insisted that such dreams are impossible. Skeptics.

James Randi takes the position (unless he has lately come around) that spoon bending (made popular by Uri Geller) is a fraud; he explains that it is accomplished by magicians using prepared props. Randi can demonstrate that. However, I and my son were in seats close to the stage during a performance by Geller about 37 years ago at an auditorium in Oxnard , California. He invited members of the audience to bring their house or car keys to the stage. Without the benefit of colorful handkerchiefs, boxes, tables, or other magician’s paraphernalia, wearing only black jeans and a black sweatshirt, and sitting on a folding chair at the edge of a bare stage, Geller would take a key from each of the people lined up at the stage stairway and, in view of the audience, rub the key with his thumb. The key would slowly curl. Geller would display it and then hand it back to the donor. I have never seen Randi bend a house key. He rails a lot on YouTube about how Geller uses trickery, but as I said, I have never seen Randi bend a key. There are magic supply houses that now sell a “key-bending” trick. The video presentations make the trick look phony. To investigate this metal-bending fraud myself I attended an “energy” class at the Learning Annex in Los Angeles. Near the end of the class we formed groups and were given spoons and forks. These were standard heavy restaurant supply flatware, not some tinny imitation. Using my left hand and only the ends of the fingers of my right hand I bent a couple spoons and the tines of a couple of forks over backward. I watched with fascination as several young ladies in my circle bent theirs easily - into coils like a snake, better than mine. I still have the spoons and forks. I found that I cannot straighten any of them with my hands in the position used to bend them originally. I would probably have to put the handle in a vice and use work gloves to bend the bowl back to its original position. A skeptic would argue that in the class I was given extra strength in my hands through “hypnotic suggestion”.

reply: You bent a spoon and a fork by holding it in one hand and applying pressure with the fingers of your other hand, you're an engineer, and you think some special explanation is needed to account for your feat? I don't know what to say.

Anyway, I've seen Randi and Bob Steiner bend keys. It's a trick. You may have heard of Richard Feynman. When Uri Geller did the key-bending trick, Feynman remarked that he was smart enough to know that he could be fooled.

How does all the above relate to EFT? From the comments made in the Skeptic’s Dictionary you seem to be more concerned about Gary Craig’s explanation of the mechanism rather than whether EFT produces results or not. Let me modify that. You wrote, “It apparently did not occur to Gary that maybe he had tapped into the placebo effect or the power of suggestion.” That statement indicates to me that you acknowledge there are effects resulting from the use of EFT. But the word “placebo effect” raises other questions. Your site does an excellent job of documenting the extensive research on the manifestations of the placebo effect. But I did not see any explanation of how a thought can translate into a bodily change.

reply: No, and you will be disappointed if you expect me to provide one now.

That being the case, maybe the “placebo effect” is one of a sub-set of other unexplainable mind-body relationships that include EFT.

reply: Maybe. Maybe not.

My examples above were meant to demonstrate a pattern. Often there could be more than one explanation for an effect. Persons who refer to themselves as “skeptics” cling to an explanation they understand. But one legitimate explanation doesn’t exclude others.

reply: Since we're getting philosophical, let me remind you that for any event there are an infinite number of possible explanations. We're lucky if we can come up with two or three plausible explanations for complex phenomena, however. Your examples show how we eliminate wrong explanations from the mix.

Suppose a cave man told his friend that he had discovered a way to create fire. He explains that the spirit of fire is in a dry stick and when you rub two dry sticks together, the spirit of fire is irritated and leaves the sticks and becomes visible. Being a skeptic, should the friend say, “there is no such thing as a spirit of fire in a dry stick, so don’t waste your time rubbing them.”

reply: No, the skeptical cave man would urinate on his friend's fire and tell him that the spirit of urine trumps the spirit of fire any day. Seriously, the skeptic would say: "So that's why the trees burn when hit by lightning! Wow, that explains a lot. Let's see what else irritates the spirit of fire. Let's throw a rock at the tree and see what happens. Huh. Not irritated. Let's whack the sticks with some antlers. Huh. Not irritated." After trying about a thousands ways to irritate a stick, the skeptic might say to his friend: "why do you think rubbing the sticks is so irritating? Do you think we hit the fire spirit's ticklish spot? And why doesn't the spirit get irritated when the sticks are green or wet? Hey, you know what? Maybe you're wrong. Maybe the fire has nothing to do with irritating a spirit."

James Randi knows very well how someone can pretend to bend a spoon with his mind using artifice. Why does that necessarily exclude someone doing it by an unexplainable mental process?

reply: Whoever said it did? Randi hasn't. He's simply pointed out that if Geller is bending spoons using his mind he's doing it the hard way.

Let’s assume that EFT works on the “placebo effect”. Is that bad? If I have a sore shoulder and a half-day of work at the desk ahead of me doing income taxes and someone recommends my using EFT to relieve the pain, would you say “don’t try it; it’s only a placebo”?

reply: It depends on whether I like you or not. If I don't like you, I'd do nothing to discourage you from going to the EFT fellow. If I like you, or if you have a disease like cancer, I'd explain to you what I know about EFT and explain why I doubt that this kind of placebo medicine will help with strained muscles or a torn rotator cuff, and certainly won't be of any value as a cancer treatment.

I assume you are not against taking advantage of the placebo effect. Your site gives ample evidence that a significant part of the healing power of prescribed medication or medical processes are dependent on the placebo effect of the doctor’s attitude. So it must be a good thing.

Putting the explanation aside, does the number of people who report being helped by EFT have any bearing on your judgment? Shouldn’t that be the focus of your attention rather than the explanation? What are the data on the successes and failures?

reply: I guess if I were an engineer, your approach would be the one I'd take. But I'm not, so I don't.

Suppose Gary Craig had merely suggested that people “Do this (tap)” and while you’re tapping, say this” without offering a single word of explanation. Where would you go with that?

reply: If he were making the suggestion in order to perform some sort of healing (as a shaman might), I'd treat it just as I do EFT.

It was stated somewhere, “placebos only work for a limited time”. That is also true for an aspirin. The EFT either works or it doesn’t, and it’s free. Let us say someone is about to apply EFT to overcome a fear of a dental appointment or fear of snakes (actual examples). Aren’t you curious as to whether you could tell someone about to use EFT for those purposes that the method is probably a “placebo” and see if there is any difference in the results?

reply: There are some therapies that work for overcoming fears. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has had a good amount of success in this area. Hypnosis, which is indistinguishable from placebo medicine, has also been used successfully in modifying behavior. Other therapies like EMDT seem to incorporate CBT along with superfluous activities. Some forms of EFT might incorporate CBT or hypnosis. In any case, I'd tell a friend who wanted to overcome a fear of snakes to go to a cognitive behavioral therapist.

On that note, again assume that EFT works on the “placebo effect”. Let’s also assume that we are in a period of time before the EFT approach was conceived. Suppose I asked you to suggest a convenient consistent regimen to offer to people to apply this effect on their problems, aches, and pains. The best you probably would have to offer, based on the literature, is to tell them they have to first visit a physician and ask for a sugar pill.

But someone, like Gary Craig, comes along and encapsulates a practice (called EFT) that makes the “placebo effect” available in standard, recognizable packaging and you throw cold water on it.

I would support your contention that Gary Craig doesn’t really know what causes the effects observed in the practice of EFT. But then do you? Isn’t it possible that there are “subtle” processes that determine who we are and how we behave that human intelligence is incapable of detecting or understanding? Do you really want to hang your hat on the “placebo effect”?

William Vietinghoff

reply: The placebo effect has been studied scientifically and we know quite a bit about how various mechanisms work, including a number of mechanisms called false impressions of placebo effects. These scientifically understood mechanisms seem obviously much better explanations for why energy healing works than belief in "subtle energy" or spirits.

__________

24 Oct 2008
I do think we need healthy skeptics in this world. It is just a shame that it is now a case of proving you are right rather than being happy. You will always find what you are looking for.

reply: ?? I'm not sure I follow you. We need healthy skeptics or we need to have a healthy skepticism?

Are you saying that we must choose between being right or being happy? Why?

Maybe you always find what you're looking for, but I don't. I also don't see what these three points have to do with each other.

I have used EFT and NLP [neuro-linguistic programming] to help hundreds of people with many different problems. If I had read your website before starting and was easily convinced, then I would have not learnt it. The knock-on effect would be all the people I have helped would not be helped.

reply: Since you didn't read my website before you started using EFT and NLP, we don't really know what you would have done had you read it first. We can be pretty confident that the people who come to you would have some other purveyor of energy woo-woo to "help" them. But let's stick with the facts and then we'll look for an explanation: you've "helped" hundreds of people with many different problems. Could you be a bit more specific?

Then we come to the question and from what I could see you explain techniques like EFT as working due to placebo. Every drug has double-blind studies to dismiss placebo. The last place I looked placebo accounted for 51% of results. If I can get 98% of results how do you explain the placebo? It even works if people don't believe it can work.

reply: If you read what I've written, then you know that energy healing works by the placebo effect, which is a term that describes several distinct components. NLP is not a form of energy healing and I don't claim that NLP works by the placebo effect.

I'm not sure what you mean be getting 98% results, but if you mean that you have a success rate of 98%, then I would like to see the data. I would like you to define what problems you are trying to help people resolve, describe precisely how you determine when the problem is resolved, and that you include in your data all clients who do not have their problem resolved, including those who don't finish the program. I'd like to see a description of the program that is administered. I'd like to see some sort of blinding process involved, so that we can eliminate as far as possible any self-deception. We really shouldn't let you decide success on the basis of your subjective impressions.

How exactly it works is under questions. My experience tells me it does. If you look through history one thing that is true is that humans are stupid and refuse to accept changes in their environment. This is why science moves on one funeral at a time.

reply: Once again, your train of thought eludes me.

I really couldn't care who believes what I do is a hoax or not. The results speak for themselves. How I get those results as long as ethically right is irrelevant. It beats the other ways that people heal through mainstream methods and certainly costs a fraction of the price.

reply: First, I wouldn't say that what you do is a hoax. You seem to believe that what you are doing is legitimate. You don't seem to be intentionally deceiving people, which is what frauds and hoaxers do. But, just because a practice is ethical doesn't mean it is without fault or that it does what it claims it does.

It would be helpful if you could be more precise about "beating" other ways of healing. Exactly how does what you do "beat other ways that people heal through mainstream methods." You say your work costs a fraction of the price? What do you charge? What kind of mainstream treatment tries to accomplish the same thing you do? What is the charge for that treatment?

If you are the sole judge of the results, you might consider reflecting on some of the problems we all have with evaluating our own experience. It's not that we're stupid, as you say, but that human nature tends to lead us to beliefs that are comfortable and self-satisfying, whether they're true or not.

Websites like this are needed for the doubting minds. As Osho said "A doubting mind is always a doubting mind". No amount of information you ever get will change that.

reply: Osho? Why bring Osho into this? Is he now teaching EFT or NLP? In any case, he's wrong. Some doubting minds are changed by evidence and argument. I think that's a good thing. On the other hand, some believing minds are not changed even when shown they're wrong. I don't think that's a good thing.

It may be that your identify relies too much on you not believing anything you can see. So infrared, dog whistles and ultraviolet cannot exist.

reply: Your non sequiturs are really starting to annoy me.

I just hope that your words do not stop people healing hundreds as I have done. And of course you are missing out on the healing yourself. Ponder that for a while.

Steve

reply: Just what is it that needs healing? My skepticism regarding energy healing? In any case, I don't think I'm missing anything or that I need any healing from you or other EFT practitioners. I pondered my loss for a second or two and decided it's not worth worrying about. All that was required was that I readjust my tinfoil cap.