Archive for June, 2009

Remember chemtrails? Well, look at what I recently spotted coming out of the CN Tower:

This is clearly a government conspiracy to take over our minds. We’re doomed!

Also posted on That’s the Way the Banana Crumbles.

I was asked to write a post about Chiropractic. I am (obviously) not a medical professional, and so I won’t deconstruct any of the studies pointing to specific things that chiropractic can and cannot do. Instead, I’ll attempt to look at broader trends within chiropractic. Wikipedia has been used (and linked to), but for definitional purposes only.

Chiropractic is a minefield for any skeptically-minded person. On the one hand, the entire institution was founded on theories of health and disease which have been thoroughly discredited, and are obviously wrong. On the other hand, unlike faith healing or homeopathy, chiropractic involves an actual physical mechanism, which can plausibly affect the body. Regardless, the people who continue to practice chiropractic based on false beliefs and discredited theories of sickness and disease (i.e. “straights“) are dangerous, due to their lack of understanding of what they’re doing, and the inherently dangerous nature of manipulating peoples’ spinal cords.

Fortunately, amongst chiropractors, this group is slowly shrinking. The growing trend in the field of chiropractic seems to be one where genuine medical diagnoses are mixed in with vestiges of the old vitalistic belief system. These “mixers“, though not as dangerous as their “straight” counterparts, are still a few subluxations short of being medical professionals.

As with anything that can affect/be done to/be inserted into the human body, if you look hard enough, you will find claims that chiropractic can cure any disease — from headaches to cancer. However, this would be disingenuous to chiropractors, as the ones making these claims are part of a small (radical) fringe group. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s very little controversy over the studies and claims that show that chiropractic manipulation can ease lower back pain, or help treat other chronic pain-related conditions. In this way, chiropractic is somewhere between physical therapy and massage therapy in its efficacy.

So where does that leave us with chiropractic? Realistically, it’s disingenuous to talk about chiropractic as a unified organization (or profession) in the same way we might talk about neurosurgeons. There’s no unifying philosophy, standards of practice, or professional ethics that are upheld by all chiropractors.

Some who argue in defense of chiropractic might point to the developmental history of the medical profession. Medicine as it was practiced a century ago doesn’t resemble modern medicine at all. If medicine had not been given the benefit of the doubt, it never would have reached its present state, so shouldn’t we extend that benefit to chiropractic as well?

The medical sciences took thousands of years of trial and error and development to reach their present state. There was a time when the practice of medicine was based on flawed knowledge and, as a result, caused more harm than good. That being said, medicine has already evolved past this point. Thanks to things like the germ theory of disease, medicine is no longer a guessing game. That being the case, it’s hard for me to see why anybody would think it appealing to ignore this progress and practice medicine based on outmoded and flawed ways of thinking. We already have a system that works; so I don’t see the need to go back and re-iterate past mistakes.

I also think that it’s incredibly telling that the more chiropractic progresses and enters the mainstream, the more it begins to resemble modern physical therapy techniques. The fact that chiropractic seems to be honing in on real medicine as it matures seems to indicate not that it is a new way of treating disease; but merely that it is slowly converging on what medical science already knows.

Cross-posted from That’s the Way the Banana Crumbles.

I had always heard, and thus assumed, that Pringles were not classified as potato chips because they were prohibited from doing so due to their mostly non-potato make-up. It’s well known that Pringles are not manufactured like ordinary chips. As opposed to being made from whole potatoes, they are formed from a type of potato dough containing less than 50% potato content and then baked.

However, it turns out that the truth is somewhat different from popular belief (imagine that!). According to this article by the BBC, the fight to have Pringles classified as a “cake or biscuit” was led by Procter & Gamble (the parent company of Pringles). The reason? Potato crisps (chips) are subject to a 17.5% value added tax (VAT) in the UK, whereas cakes and biscuits are not. By having the snack food de-classified as a crisp/chip, they were exempt from paying the tax. This just goes to show that often times the truth is much more straightforward than people make it out to be and reinforces the notion that if you want to find the underlying cause of an issue, you should “follow the money”.

Also of interest, according to a more recent article, the decision has been reversed on the grounds that the 42% of Pringles batter made from potatoes “is more than enough potato content for it to be a reasonable view that [Pringles are] made from potato”.

So what should we conclude from all this? No matter what you thought you knew about Pringles, you were probably wrong.