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Category: Australia (page 4 of 7)

Amcal experts?

12 June 2010 / / 8 Comments

Here’s the new ad for Amcal, a pharmacy chain. I caught this ad last night in a rare spate of TV watching.

So I popped down to my local Amcal chemist. Along with perfumes, diapers, and magazines, here’s what I found.

Lots and lots of homeopathy. The message is starting to get out that homeopathy doesn’t work, but it seems the chemists are either clueless, or they can’t resist all the tasty tasty money that it brings.

Bach flower essences are also popular, but just as dodgy. “Traditionally used to relieve feelings of stress”, it says.

This is a bottle of some patent medicine. If you look closely, it says, “With creosote.” That’s not a warning; I think it’s meant to be a selling point.

This is supposed to be for migraines. It’s mostly just lavender oil.

And lots of ear candles. Everybody knows these are bogus, right? A brochure says that in addition to sucking the wax out of your ears, they can restore your harmonic energy balance. I asked, if they don’t restore my harmonic energy balance, do I get my money back? They said no.

And check it out — colloidal silver, ffs.

I don’t think my local chemist is atypical. Chemists around here have real medicine that works, but they don’t mind selling a bit of the fake stuff on the side. So if you walk into a chemist expecting expert advice, you might get it, or you might shell out good money for a lot of crap.

People look to pharmacies as places where they can get accurate information about health and drugs. Maybe pharmacists don’t ask for this reputation, and it’s an expectation that the public has created. Which would let the pharmacists off the hook.

But now that Amcal is embracing its image that their people are ‘experts’ (and trading off of this image), then they have a responsibility to provide expert advice and educate the public, and not supply fake cures just because the unwary will pay for it.

Homeopathy kills again

9 June 2010 / / 34 Comments

Lately it’s been out-of-stater Meryl Dorey grabbing the attention with AltMed woo-woo in Perth, but let’s not forget that we’ve got a lot of woo-sters of our own.

Peter Dingle is not a medical doctor, but he gives medical advice on his blog. He’s come out against cholesterol-treating drugs. He finds the time to spread uncertainty about vaccines. The stuff he writes isn’t always wrong, but it’s a worry that he tends to cherry-pick scientific reports that confirm his views about natural health, all presented in an authoritative-sounding package. People think he knows something.

Sadly, his wife Penelope Dingle died of rectal cancer, which is treatable if caught early enough. What did the Dingles use to treat it? Homeopathy.

The State Coroner is investigating the death of a Perth woman who died of cancer after refusing traditional medical treatment in favour of alternative therapies.

Penelope Dingle died of bowel cancer in 2005.

In 2007, her family approached the coroner’s court to investigate her death.

The inquest has been told Mrs Dingle was being treated by a homeopath when she developed symptoms from bowel cancer.

Counsel assisting the coroner told the court her condition was not diagnosed until two years later at which point her homeopath told Mrs Dingle her cancer could be cured with alternative therapies.

Mrs Dingle then refused treatment from doctors who told her she had a reasonable chance of recovery if she underwent chemotherapy and an operation.

And Peter Dingle’s role in this? He wanted to write a book.

Ms Brown told the inquest that Jennifer Kornberger, a friend of Penelope’s, told her that Ms Scrayen, Penelope and Peter had made “a pact” that if treatment with homeopathy together with his regimen of anti-oxidants, vitamins and protein drinks was successful, he would write a book.

If I’d been through what Peter Dingle has been through, there’s no way in hell I’d be blithely offering up medical advice, especially with no medical qualifications. Why does he think he has any credibility?

There’s a bright side to this sad story. This time, they didn’t kill a child like usual. Penelope Dingle’s death was terrible, but at least she was an adult who made her own choices. She could have had access to good information if she had wanted it, especially with a supposedly scientifically-minded husband.

The other good thing: One less book about alternative medicine.

Action item: Counter the Anti-Vaxers

1 June 2010 / / 3 Comments

Via Pharyngula and Podblack:

The State Library is hosting an anti-vaccination event tonight, 1 June 2010 with Meryl Dorey of the so-called ‘Australian Vaccination Network’. They’ll be promoting their noxious brand of pseudoscience. Alt-Med is always a problem, but in this case, the stakes are higher. They tell worried parents that they’ll be harming their children by vaccinating them, when in fact the risk of death and disability from disease is much higher without vaccination than with. So more WA kids are going to die as herd immunity diminishes.

Your orders: meet Kylie (along with me and the Perth Skeptics) at the coffee shop at the State Library at 6:00 tonight. Let’s spread some good information.

A good source for info is the Immunise Australia Program.

‘Prick’ is no longer offensive

11 May 2010 / / 2 Comments

It’s official.

Australian court clears student on offensive language charge

An Australian student who called a police officer a “prick” has been cleared of verbal abuse charges after a judge ruled that the word was in “common usage” and therefore not offensive.

Henry Grech insulted the senior constable during an argument at a Sydney railway station last year but the offensive language case against him fell apart after the magistrate said the word was in common use.

“I consider the word prick is of a less derogatory nature than other words and it is in common usage in this country,” Robbie Williams, the Waverley Local Court magistrate, told the court on Monday.

It’s not very nice to call a police officer a prick, but if we had a few more test cases like these, it could be useful to linguists in finding out what’s considered offensive and what’s not. What a judge finds offensive may not reflect public opinion perfectly, but it does have the seal of officialdom.

Maybe religion can still do ‘comfort’ and ‘social cohesion’.

8 May 2010 / / 3 Comments

It’s just as the ministers feared: If you offer secular ethics, no one’s going to want religion anymore.

Scripture classes lose half of students to ethics, say Anglicans

THE controversial trial of secular ethics classes has ”decimated” Protestant scripture classes in the 10 NSW schools where it has been introduced as an alternative for non-religious children, with the classes losing about 47 per cent of enrolled students.

Seems that religion’s attempt to evolve has led to a conflict. See, back in the old days, religion offered a view of the earth’s history and future that claimed to be true. When that turned out to be a load of old bollocks, some religions decided that providing ‘moral instruction’ was more in their line. The problem with that was that secular people are already doing morals, thank you very much, and the morals they’ve come up with are a lot more relevant than those of the world’s religions.

I can’t say it better than Dawkins did (and ex tempore too).

Religions are not all that good at moral instruction. Their scriptures are punctuated with unprincipled savagery, and the behaviour of their leaders has been at times reprehensible. (And I forgot to mention in my original post: one recent study showed no difference in the ethical behaviour of atheists and church-goers.)

There are some good bits in with the nasty bits, but on the whole, what a mess. Leave it out of schools, and let the secular humanists present a view of morality that is well-thought out, and centered on what’s good for humans, not for imaginary people or their representatives.

Attacking Scientology is a little bit bullshit.

16 April 2010 / / 5 Comments

Via Hungry Beast.

Are some religions more loopy than others? Not intrinsically. I happen to think that all religions fall within a narrow band on the loopiness scale. If Scientology seems intrinsically wacky to you, then you’re probably just more familiar with stories about talking snakes, people made out of clay, dead people coming back to life, ritual cannibalism, and people floating up to heaven.

But are some religions more evil than others? Again, I’d say not intrinsically. Whether a religion is one of the ‘nice religions’ is more a function of who’s running it at the present moment. Giving someone the license to claim they’re acting in the name of a supreme being is just inviting abuse — which may or may not be exercised. The nice pastor of the Mild-Mannered Christian Church won’t be around forever. All the ‘bad scriptures’ will be in that bible, waiting for a charismatic extremist to come around. (Tick tick tick.)

Here’s where I disagree with the Beast: At the present moment, yes, some religions are much much worse than others, including fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, and probably fundamentalist anything else. And of course Scientology, for reasons mentioned in the clip. These religions are affecting lives and minds by controlling the information that reaches their people, and by not allowing them to leave.

So, for people keeping score at home:
Scientology: Bullshit.
Other religions: Also bullshit.
Criticising Scientology’s doctrines: Not bullshit.
Criticising Scientology’s doctrines more than other religions: Bullfuckingshit.
Criticising crimes done to promote Scientology: Not bullshit at all.
Being wary of the tendency for all religions to become oppressive: Quite a good idea, really.

Update: Blogger layouts narrower than the minimum YouTube video size: Total bullshit.

Global Atheist Con, Day 3: Richard Dawkins

15 March 2010 / / 2 Comments

Richard Dawkins blew onto the stage at the Melbourne Convention Centre, blinding us all with science and leaving us breathless with his speech about gratitude. Yes, gratitude. Here were the main points.

Life is highly unlikely, especially our own existence. We don’t know how many times life has arisen in the universe. It may be that there’s a bubbleverse — a collection of universes that appear as bubbles in foam. In which case, our universe was one of the successful ones. In our universe, there are six different physics constants, and if any of them had been different, the universe would not have arisen. Twiddle the gravitation constant, and the universe might have collapsed onto itself in the first few femtoseconds. But why should we say that a god twiddled the knobs?

Dawkins: To postulate a divine knob-twiddler…
Audience: (Ribald laughter)
Dawkins: … Why is that funny? To postulate a divine tuner…
Audience: (Raucous laughter)

We should feel gratitude to be alive. But gratitude to who?

We have inbuilt urges, even though cognitively we may no longer have the need for such urges. Feelings of gratitude (like the ones religious believers express to a god) may be hold-overs from earlier useful urges. For example, beavers locked in concrete rooms try to build phantom dams with imaginary logs. People feel the urge for sex (because of the drive for reproduction) even when they know it won’t lead to reproduction. So our gratitude impulse could be part of our inbuilt calculator for fairness and reciprocity. This might have evolved so we wouldn’t let others cheat us, and it may have even led to mathematics. These urges of gratitude are nothing to be ashamed about.

Best question during Q&A after the talk: “When do you think we will able to criticise Islam without fearing for our lives?”

Were I in his place, I might have set my jaw and said, “Islam sucks. I ain’t askeert,” while mentally calculating my life insurance.

Dawkins instead suggested that he was not overly eager to insult Muslims. But (speaking to a hypothetical Muslim): “I may refrain from insulting you. I may refrain from publishing a cartoon of your prophet. But it’s because I fear you. Don’t think for one minute that it’s because I respect you.”

Worst question: A woman said that she was a believer, and that she was going to give gratitude that night… to god. (Boos, and people shushing the boo-ers.) Her question was about DNA: what is it, and could he explain how it had arisen?

Now I’m a human, so I’m pretty good at detecting intentions when someone asks a question, and I detected high levels of self-righteous smarm. It’s possible to ask that question in a way that says “Gee, I don’t really understand DNA, and could you explain it to me?” This wasn’t like that. She was saying “How do explain DNA without god, Mr Smarty-Dawkins?”

I don’t care if someone gives Dawkins a bit of stick; he can hack it. But it was a real shame that she decided to waste everyone’s limited question time with a question she hadn’t bothered to look up by, say, reading the relevant chapter in Dawkins’ book The Greatest Show on Earth.

That said, it was really great to hear Dawkins give us the run-through on DNA, which was basically out of the book. It was still a far better answer than she deserved.

Global Atheist Con, Day 3: Dan Barker

15 March 2010 / / 4 Comments

You could tell who the former true believers in the crowd were, just by looking at people who came out of Dan Barker’s talk. Atheists who were once casual believers or never-believers thought it was a great talk, while former true believers came out looking stunned, and saying, “That was just like my story.”

Dan Barker used to be a Christian preacher, but deconverted in 1984. He is now at the head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

He described his work in converting others to Christianity. “I never got any doors slammed in my face. I never got an informed response.” He surveyed the audience of atheists. “Where were you guys? I could have used you. You probablty didn’t say anything out of respect.

“Well, don’t do that.”

The striking thing for me was how he described having exactly the same kinds of feelings that Mormons describe as the feelings of the Spirit. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I still am. Mormons customarily claim that non-Mormons don’t have regular access to the Holy Ghost. I have also heard some believers claim that the feelings of the Spirit is something that Satan cannot duplicate. But, as one should expect, there’s nothing unique about Mormon testimony. The ‘positive feelings’ Mormons get are in sync with the feelings felt by other believers and — dare I say? — non-believers.

Having been a believer once, he raised the question of how to have “dialogue without disprespect, and the answer is to respect them and the reasons why they believe…. I think there can be a small place for ridicule, if that’s not all we’re doing.”

From Barker: “Paul said, ‘God is not the author of confusion.’ But can you think of a book that’s caused more confusion than the Bible?”

Global Atheist Con, Day 3: Peter Singer

15 March 2010 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con, Day 3: Peter Singer

People get breathless about Peter Singer. I had the chance to catch up with our good friend snowqueen in Melbourne, and she was all, “OMG you’re going to see Peter Singer.” And I had to make a terrible confession: I haven’t really been aware of Peter Singer’s work since I read ‘Animal Liberation’ in the late 70’s. My mom showed it to me. She was convinced it was satire.

Since then, Singer become well-known with his work on ethics and the environment. His talk was called “Ethics Without Religion”.

He raised three points that believers often make when asking atheists how they can be moral without religion:

1. Who is to say what’s good or bad without a god?
This view provides a paradox: is something good simply because god likes it? Then goodness is arbitrary. But if you take the opposite view that god is good because he likes good things, then we could save time by ignoring god, and worshipping the set of values that he holds. Either god is an arbitrary tyrant, or there’s a notion of good that is independent of what god wills, and we don’t need a god to have it.

2. But if goodness is independent of god, maybe we still need god to reveal it to us.
Well, people with scriptures are very selective about the things they accept from scripture as ‘goodness’. They’re not using scripture — they’re using their own moral sense.

Singer mentioned that Jesus is not much help for Christians. According to him, divorce is adultery (though many Christians ignore this), he says nothing about abortion even though many Christians are certain it’s wrong, and he requires someone to sell everything he has, contrary to papal opulence and prosperity gospels.

3. Religion gives us the motivation to do what’s right by offering eternal rewards or punishments for our actions.

But does this help? We can compare the behaviour of religious v non-religious people. The notoriously religious USA doesn’t seem to offer a model of social utopia compared to secular Europe, which offers health care, lower crime, and higher rates of charity.

Singer makes the argument that human morality is an evolved phenomenon. We seem to come to similar moral judgments regardless of background. Singer points that in some cases there’s a ‘yuck’ factor to some of our moral judgments.

But this moral sense only works on situations that humans would have been familiar with, and in cases outside of human experience, our evolved response is not good enough. Xenophobia could be instinctive, but in our global post-tribal world, we need to get over it. Climate change is another issue that could be disastrous, but we don’t have an evolved response for it. It’s too gradual, too long-range.

Or consider this example posed by Singer: If a child was drowning, would you wade in, wrecking your pair of shoes? Of course. But for the cost of a pair of shoes, you could save the life of a child via Oxfam. It doesn’t hit us the same way, though, because the child is more remote. Again, our evolved response is not good enough.

Singer describes his sense of morality as concern for those people who could be affected by our actions. Are atheists borrowing morality from religion? Quite the reverse. Religion is borrowing from our innate moral sense.

Global Atheist Con: Zingers!

14 March 2010 / / 1 Comment

John Perkins: If religions were true, they would not be religion.

Jane Caro: At one point the church fathers debated whether women have souls. And they came to the wrong decision — they decided that we did. We don’t, but they don’t either.

Catherine Deveney: If there is anybody out there who is not an atheist, don’t worry: it’s an intelligence test and you will be eventually.

Robyn Williams: I can give you an argument against reigion in two words: ‘Senator Fielding‘.

Discuss.

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