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April Fool Award

The April Non-Skeptic Award

(We think you are dead wrong and foolish to boot)

During the past few months, we have been collecting outrageous claims from the news media for an award to be given April 1st. We received four nominations. However, we as skeptics need to remember that the people involved in the these items actually do believe in what they are doing and saying. They are not necessarily looking at scientific evidence. They are interpreting what they see and think by what they or someone else has said is the truth or fact. Skeptics, seeing no current scientific evidence, do not believe them.

Having said that, the four claims we received are as follows.

1. February 13, 1997 at 8:40 AM, WVXU broadcast an opinion piece by Don Merrill, a political science and electronic media major at the University of Cincinnati. Mr. Merrill claimed that the variety of human opinion is like the electromagnetic spectrum, like light waves, x-ray waves, radio waves, sound waves, etc. As though human opinions were as fixed and stable or as simply progressive as the electromagnetic spectrum. A remarkable combination of poor physics and bad political science.
2. Leslie and Jacobi, authors of Unveiling the Secrets of the Soul in an interview on "Interconnect," WVXU, 91.7 FM, 10:00 A.M., Thursday, January 23, 1997, made this claim: Mozart was too young to have written his early symphonies "himself." He "channeled" them by "moving his consciousness out of the way," thus allowing a more mature consciousness from somewhere to write them for him. Other odds and ends from the same show: One member of the pair said she had developed breast cancer because she repressed unhappy feelings, thus storing up bad energy in her body which caused the cancer. She also said the soul has many parts, much like an automobile,. That human beings are essentially electrical, so that when we say something mean we put "negative energy out in the world," which comes back to us as negative energy later. Similarly with positive energy. The energy comes back to us because of "magnetism," in which positive energy attracts positive energy, and negative attracts negative. That is very unlike any magnets you may have run into.
3. In the Cincinnati Enquirer on November 13, 1996, Chris West was extolling the "benefits" of Therapeutic Touch. The article was entitled "He's Hooked on Holistic......" This article describes the reaction of one man to hip replacement surgery. He was nervous about the procedure. He was encouraged by people at the Wholistic Center to use Therapeutic Touch, and Acupuncture along with his medical treatment. Prior to this experience he claims he was very skeptical. After the surgery, he was convinced enough to issue a memo to the employees of the Cincinnati-Dayton Franciscan Health System (he is president) bringing Wholistic services to their attention. However, at the end of the article he states, "Did it help me recover faster? Come back to work faster? Use less pain medicine? I like to think it did. But can I prove that? No." I think his words speak for themselves.
4. The Cincinnati Enquirer's USA Weekend Magazine on February 23, 1997, ran the following quote on page eight: "Students learn to read auras so they won't sever patients energy fields with their scalpels" in big bold letters. Yes, it was an attention grabber but the author is serious! The article basically reported that the University of Virginia Medical School in Charlottesville along with a lot of other medical schools around the country are now teaching alternative called "integrative" medical subjects. These subjects include homeopathy, acupuncture, meditation, massage, nutritional therapy, and herbal remedies. Surely doctors should be more aware of relaxation techniques and general nutrition. However, to promote the idea, that "Anyone who wants to put on a course can do it,"is going too far. Whatever happened to medical research ? And, more worrisome would I want to trust my doctor who tells me to just relax, place your broken leg at a 45 degree angle and it will straighten and heal if you just meditate.

-- Donna Loughry