It is a classic example of both the Feynman point - in real science you have to work hard to eliminate confounding effects, and if you don’t it’s not real science - and the credulity of the authors AND the referee-ing in AltMed journals.

And not just the authors and referees - the whole ethos of the AltMed journals is credulous, from the editors on down.

DUH! The authors didn’t make the shapes of the same volume. Rats do NOT like being in exposed areas … and looking at the wooden pyramid and box, they got lower average ceilings in the pyramid, hence less stress from a feeling of being exposed.

As for peer-review in CAM magazines, if one is a quack one’s peers are quacks. I adopted a rule that I do not bother looking at articles in CAM journals.

Even in good journals, peer review can be inadequate (Dr. Aust knows that- this is for non-scientists); so publication is really just the first step in scientific acceptance. A few years ago, homeopaths were raving over a small (ca. 20 subjects) study showing the utility of one of their preps. A more careful analysis showed that the placebo group was significantly sicker than the treated group. This happens quite often (as does the opposite) in such small studies, despite true random assignment of subjects.

The idea of who / how one picks to referee a paper comes back to the role of journal editors. A few years back I interviewed for a job as a “manuscript handler” (person who “triages” submissions, decides what gets referee-d and who to send things to) at a well-known general science journal. One of the Qs I got asked was: “for these three papers we have given you, what sorts of referees (i.e. in what sort of specialist field) would you send them to?”.

Clearly a paper on stress effects in rats should go to at least one referee expert in stress studies in lab animals, and probably an animal behaviourist too if the stress study expert is not a behaviour person. At a mainstream journal I would expect that to be who they would get. But at an AltMed journal…?

The trouble with the existence of all the Woo-journals running scepticism-free “apparent peer-review” is that these studies are then quoted by Woo-fans as “real scientific evidence from real scientists for the effect of whatever Energy-woo” (or similar). See the subsequent post on this topic for an example.

The message, of course, being that there is expert peer review, and then there is “expert peer review”. And it is the standing of the journal (and I don’t just mean the Impact Factor) that really tells you how expert / rigorous the reviewing will have been.

One eminent scientist who I was talking to recently about the Woo-journals said: “Well it really is genuine “peer” review, isn’t it? Their peers are all the other people who believe in magic, and that’s who reviews the stuff”.

I would say in response to coments that animal rights is not innately ‘woo’ at all–nor indeed is animal psychic research or any philosophy if actually subjected to falsifiable testing. It may be a little anti-Occam but then so is a lot of respectable theory at the outset. The proof is in the procedure and even a rampant reductionalist like myself will take an experiment on its merits. I can’t say I have found a good paper to make me rethink my behaviorist stance yet but as a good scientist I also have to be ready to change my position based on valid evidence.

Personally I still would not hold wooscience to a higher standard. There is indeed a lot of cancerwoo, anorexiawoo and other ratwoo out there that shouldn’t get a free pass either (and is). Otherwise what we end up with is the insidious confirmatory bias.

p.s. the idea of a cone control is nicely elegant. It does indeed control for air mass, overhead and lateral cover and could be equalised for light and temperature with little effort! I am sure the authors would be delighted to hear the idea (or perhaps not) LOL

I don’t know any info or survey about funding for research into AltMed. Some funding will no doubt be from companies that make CAM remedies (like Boiron, or Lichtwehr, although I don’t think they fund much in the UK), some will be from private donors, and some wll be Govt-derived (NHS, MRC, etc in the UK, NIH in the US)

David Colquhoun has been arguing recently that the Govt shouldn’t spend money on this, and that if it does it should not let the AltMed types have a hand in deciding how to dish the cash out unless they can admit (i) that good evidence of lack of efficacy trumps bad evidence of efficacy (for CAM therapies), and (ii) that definitive evidence for efficacy (or lack of it) should be actively sought.

Colquhoun argues that historically the AltMed advocate types have tried to steer funding for CAM research away from people - like Professor Edzard Ernst - who are really committed to working out if CAM things works or not. The US National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which is part of the NIH, has been heavily criticised on similar grounds. Sceptics and scientists say NCCAM has spent close to a billion US taxpayer dollars so far and has not got anywhere closer to working out if the therapies are effective, largely because they have not funded projects to look.

I must say that from reading CAM research, unless it is in a non-CAM specialist (i.e. mainstream) journal I am highly suspicious of it. As this post and the subsequent one indicate, you can have “peer review” without anyone asking relevant tough questions, and it seem to me that this scepticism-free attitude is rife at AltMed journals.

One can make the same argument for the funding of AltMed projects. If you fill a funding panel with committed AltMed “integrative therapy” types, the danger is that they will suggest more of the same people to review proposals by yet more of the same people. In essence, what you get is a circle of friends, and scepticism and “does it work” won’t get a look in. In this sort of system you will end up funding lots of “here’s a new type of CAM investigation, aura photography, let’s run a badly-designed trial on it” rather than “let’s run a well-designed trial to say once and for all if Valerian works as a sleep remedy”.

Is it mostly donations from private indivduals, charity grants or some other funding source?

Any information you could give would be received with great interest.

I’d wager that there’s a significant overlap between those two groups of woowoos. (And I’d love to see the infighting - let’s be honest.)

Even simpler difference in set-up: They claim that these pyramids must be built as scalemodels of the Kheops/Khufu pyramid. Then why not use three or four pyramids of various slopes. That way it would almost be possible to blind the experiment relative to the investigators too.