In chapter three, which is mainly an attack on homeopathy, Park commits his first major factual blunder when he states that "homeopathy as currently practiced still relies almost entirely on Hahnemann's listing of substances and their indications for use". The opposite is true: of the thousands of remedies that homeopaths work with today, Hahnemann proved only about 100, and new remedies are still being added to the homeopa thic materia medica.
One mischaracterization is quickly followed by another, when Park states that "troubled by the side effects that frequently accompanied his medications, Hahnemann experimented with dilution. As you would expect, he found that with increasing dilution the side effects could be reduced and eventually eliminated. More remarkable, he also found that the more he di luted the medicine, the more his patients seemed to benefit. He came to the astonishing conclusion that dilution increased the curative power of his medications."
Wrong. Hahnemann found the exact opposite. As he successively diluted his medicines, both side effects and curative effects decreased, as one would expect. Only when he added succussion to his procedure did the medicines retain their healing power. This process is called potentization, as opposed to mere dilution. Park does everything he can to blur the distinction between the two; even though he mentions the succussion step briefly, he continues to refer to homeopathic preparations as "dilutions".
He then ritualistically demolishes a straw man, showing that high dilutions cannot contain a single molecule, a point which is readily conceded by the homeopaths themselves. Park is aware of this, so he needs to discredit the work of Jacques Benveniste, whose research shows that molecules are not needed for pharmacological action. Prior to his fall from grace, Benveniste was a leading medical researcher with an impressive publication record in the peer-reviewed literature. Inconvenient as this is, Park chooses to label him "a French Homeopathist", which is not only a complete untruth, but, after all of Park's preceding arguments, another word for "quack".
After attacking the man, Park goes after the research itself. He complains that Nature published it in the first place, ignoring the fact that Nature published it only after it had been independently replicated by four different laboratories, and then explains that
"Benveniste, after all, had turned scientific logic on its head. Much of experimental science consists of devising tests to ensure that an experimental outcome is not the result of some subtle artifact of the experiment or its interpretation. 'Infinite dilution' is one such test. If the observed effect does not go away when the concentration is reduced to zero, it is clear proof that the effect has nothing to do with the substance being tested."
From this passage, one can only draw two conclusions: either Park never read Benveniste's research (in which case he could not have known that the observed effect did go away when mere high dilutions were used, as opposed to potentizations, which validates Benveniste's research by the very criterion outlined by Park), or he is intentionally misrepresenting valid research whose conclusions he does not like. Foolishness or Fraud?
After briefly ridiculing the use of homeopathic medicines in practice, still oblivious to the difference between dilution and potentization, Park once more returns to Benveniste, noting that the French researcher is now claiming that he can record the information contained in a homeopathic preparation, store it in digital form, transmit it over the internet, and then, using an electromagnetic coil, transfer it back to a water sample, which then takes on the healing characteristics of the original preparation.
Just two pages earlier, Park complains that "no one has produced an experiment to test [the conjecture that water can store information]". He should be happy, because Benveniste's transmission experiments constitute exactly the kind of evidence that he is asking for. Park's cavalier dismissal of Benveniste's new research speaks volumes:
"This is the point at which everyone is supposed to realize how ridiculous this is and share a good laugh."
His response shows that his demand for corroborating evidence was purely rhetorical. He has already made up his mind, and the only way he can deal with the cognitive dissonance created by the Benveniste results is ridicule. For a scientist, an argument like this is a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy.
The chapter on cold fusion contains more of the same. For on objective, fair and scientific overview of this field, I refer the interested reader to Charles G. Beaudette's recent work "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed".
There was one "confirming" study, however, that had to be taken seriously. In 1988 David Savitz of the University of North Carolina, a highly respected epidemiologist, set out to check the Wertheimer-Leeper results, using the same "wiring code" method of estimating the 60 Hz magnetic field. He also found an increased risk of leukemia among Denver children living in homes with "high field" wiring. The very important difference was that Savitz had used accepted double-blind methods. Although the increased risk was only about half as great as that reported by Wertheimer and Leeper, Savitz thought further study was clearly called for. Most scientists, however, remained highly skeptical of the purported EMF-cancer connection. Microwaves, as we saw can induce heating. At a mere 60 Hz, however, there is not even that.
Did it not occur to Dr. Park and "most" scientists that there might be effects of EM fields on biological systems that their theories cannot account for? Biophoton research(which has of course been ignored by mainstream biology, even though it is published in the hard scientific literature) has proved the existence of an electromagnetic intercellular communication system that regulates biological functions such as biochemical activities, cell growth and differentiation. V. P Kaznacheev conclusively demonstrated over 30 years ago that disease states can be transmitted electromagnetically between cells. It is therefore reasonable to assume that it is the information carried by ultraweak EM emissions that makes them exert a biological effect, not the negligible amount of energy. The argument that weak EM fields cannot directly affect biochemistry (because they are too weak to produce heat) is therefore irrelevant, even if it was true. Park's argument, as usual, is based on incomplete knowledge of the relevant scientific evidence.
Scientists who have actually studied the interaction of biological organisms and electromagnetic fields have come to very different conclusions. Dr. Robert O. Becker, who has conducted groundbreaking work on electrical regeneration of body parts and been nominated for the nobel price in medicine twice, told Linda Moulton Howe in a 2000 Interview:
There are basically two most important biological effects of electromagnetic effects on, or in, living systems are their effects on growth and development. There is potential for producing disturbances in growth processes in the body that can lead to the presence of malignancies. And in that regard, for a long time the National Institutes of Health had studiously insisted there was absolutely no evidence that there was ANY affect of such fields upon any cancer system in the human. I think this is absolute nonsense. And last year, the NIH - without any fanfare and rather quietly in the dark of the night - issued a little report that says there is a relationship between electromagnetic effects and childhood leukemia. Period. End of story, as though that was all. That's not true. Absolutely not true.
Park's across-the-board dismissal of the substantial evidence for negative health effects of EM fields raises a troubling question about his motives. Is he truly just ignorant, or does he have an agenda? One way or another, this particular chapter of the book is more than just intellecual garbage. It is a public health hazard.
In his tenth chapter, titled "How Strange is the Universe? In which Ancient Superstitions Reappears as Pseudoscience", Park sets out to debunk parapsychology, astrology and touch healing. Following his established pattern of "debunkery by association", he continues to juxtapose obvious pseudoscience with serious unconventional research so that the former may stain the latter. He gets the reader into a suitably dismissive mood for what is to come by noticing how New Age authors like to justify their vague and unfounded assertions by appealing to quantum theory. Indeed, what scientifically educated person does not wince when hearing, say, a registered nurse who practices touch healing talk about "quantum physics" and "E=mc2", and just from having throwing in the names of theories and concepts she understands nothing about, conclude that the efficacy of her methods is backed by the full authority of modern physics?
To be clear on this, I am not dismissing the scientific evidence for the efficacy of spiritual healing modalities, only the scientific status of many of its practitioners. Of course Park does not even mention that spiritual healing is being studied scientifically, since it is so much easier to just discredit the subject with anecdotal evidence of the stupidity of some who practice it.
Park then dismisses over a century of parapsychological research in just over four pages. True to the principle of debunkery by association, he discusses not the results of parapsychology per se (as they are reported in scientific journals such as the Journal of Parapsychology, the Journal of Scientific Exploration, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research or the European Journal of Parapsychology), but as reported in mainstream media outlets!
Park's principal witness against parapsychology is an obviously unscientific 1997 ABC program titled "Fringe or Frontier? Science on the Edge" that discussed, among other topics, precognition and psychokinesis. Attempting to discredit the latter, Park first briefly describes random machine experiments, then makes the following remarkable statement:
Why, you may wonder, all this business of random machines? Jahn has studied random number generators, water fountains in which the subject tries to urge drops to greater heights, all sorts of machines. But it is not clear that any of these machines are truly random. Indeed, it is generally believed that there are no truly random machines. It may be, therefore, that the lack of randomness only begins to show up after many trials. Besides, if the mind can influence inanimate objects, why not simply measure the static force the mind can exert? Modern ultramicrobalances can routinely measure a force of much less than a billionth of an ounce. Why not just use your psychokinetic powers to deflect a microbalance? It's sensitive, simple, even quantitative, with no need for any dubious statistical analysis.
No truly random machines? Did Park slip back into the 19th century? By the standard interpretation of quantum theory, radioactive decay (from which RNGs derive their randomness) is truly random. Even though the collective behavior follows an exponential decay law, any given atom may decay during the next second, or not within our lifetime. Park's statement to the contrary, as inconspicuous as he makes it, is an extraordinary claim of the highest order, but he gives no justification for it. His criticism of standard statistical detection methods is uncontrolled [meaning it could be equally applied to accepted disciplines] and therefore invalid (for details, I refer the reader to my notes on skepticism). But above and beyond those two objections each of which alone suffices to invalidate Park's argument, there is a third, more fundamental problem with his statement.
Park concedes that machines which according to our best knowledge of physics should be truly random may exhibit non-random behavior after many trials. But that is precisely what parapsychologists claim, nothing less and nothing more! Long-term non-random behavior of systems that should be random according to known physics! By admitting that the central claim of parapsychology has merit, and simultaneously denying the reality of paranormal phenomena, Park is playing a purely semantic game of obfuscation.
Park uses an old taktic here, one that has already been addressed and refuted. Two years before Park's book was published, in 1998, Radin wrote in The Conscious Universe :
Because no plausible explanations remain for the experimental results obtained with psi, the few remaining hard-core skeptics rehash the same old polemical argument used in past decades. The core assertion is the tired claim that after one hundred years of research, parapsychology has failed to provide convincing evidence for psi phenomena.
This argument follows a certain logic. Skeptics refuse to believe that psi experiments, which they admit are succesfully demonstrating something are in fact demonstrating psi itself. (..) This is like a skeptic refusing to call a group of nine players who win the World Series a "baseball team". In that case, the skeptic can simply smile, shrug, and doggedly claim that yes, people do apparently go running after balls that other people occasionally hit with a bat. But still, after one hundred years there is no solid evidence that anything called a baseball team actually exists
Park's use of the "century of failure" argument already suggests a certain unfamiliarity with the the state of the art of psi research, and his next argument proves it:
[in psi research] there does not appear to be anything resembling progress. The evidence never gets any stronger. No proof of psychic phenomena is ever found. (..) No mechanism is ever uncovered. No testable theory ever emerges.
How would Park know, since he evidently derives all his knowledge of parapsychology from junior skeptic magazine? Nelson and Radin's 1987 meta-analysis of RNG experiments dating 1959-1987 confounds the first two of Park's claims. Did the evidence for an anomalous effect get stronger? Yes, because skeptical objections were addressed, but as experiment design quality increased, the effect size did not decrease. Was the existence of the anomalous effect proved? Yes, as the overall probability of the observed results was less than 10E-9, three orders of magnitude less than what passes for "proof" in say, particle physics.
It is true that no mechanism has been uncovered to explain these results, but that same criticism could be directed at neurology for failing to explain the "anomaly" of consciousness, or at physics for failing to produce a mechanism that explains inertia or gravity.
This book is a textbook example of 'debunkery by association'. Park randomly lumps together genuine scientific anomalies with obvious examples of fraud and charlatanism to produce a deceitful mix that will probably convince most readers that some of the most exciting scientific discoveries of the 20th century are fraudulent. The book is a disservice to the public, and I cannot recommend it, except as an encyclopedia of invalid criticisms.