Trial by Medicine

It was an inauspicious start to the week.

In order to prove my identity I needed something with a photograph on it. As an avowed non-driver, the only thing which would pass muster was my passport. Which I didn’t have.

I wasn’t at home and had only an hour until my screening appointment, so having made some explanatory phone calls I jumped on a pair of buses and went home to retrieve it. Except it wasn’t there.

I always keep my passport in the same place. Why had I made an exception this time? Starting to panic I pulled boxes from shelves, went through the pockets of my jackets and jeans, my man-bags. It simply wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

I called them back, explaining that I couldn’t find my passport anywhere. A voice from the landing piped up authoritatively, “You won’t find it”. Of course I wouldn’t – I’d posted it to my previous employers as proof of identity for a claim on an old pension I used to pay into. Dammit.

I made my fourth phone call of the day (already a record for me) to explain that my passport was elsewhere and there was nothing I could do about it. I had been foiled. There was nothing anyone could do to verify that I was, indeed, John Robert Ward Jr – despite the fact that I had attended a screening appointment just two weeks previously during which they’d photocopied the all-important document. I had a photocopy of my own. I had other forms of photo ID. But they were not enough.

I was furious. I’d previously failed a screening due to my blood being too sugary (or some such triviality) and had been due to take part in a trial which had been cancelled at the last moment. My efforts at donating my body to science were being thwarted at every turn.

Except just when I was about to explode in an apoplectic rage, the phone rang and a calming Geordie accent explained that they would make an exception on the basis of my previous efforts to help and the last-minute circumstances under which I’d volunteered. Hurrah.

Of course, my determination to participate in a clinical trial had absolutely nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with the fact that I would be paid £800 (tax free) for sitting in bed reading books and taking pills. In my badly paid profession, this kind of renumeration would enable to finish my summer-holidays in style.

Like Neo from The Matrix i was plugged in to an ECG machine, had vials of blood and urine forcibly extracted, my groin prodded by a doctor and numerous questions asked of my medical history and recreational activities. And then I was in.

Unfortunately I had two hours to fill in until the other candidates arrived. It wasn’t worth going home and coming back, so I was deposited in a comfortable television room with a glass of water. And there I remained. By this point my stomach was beginning to devour itself – I’d been fasting since the previous evening. And as anyone who’s spent time with me when I’m hungry can attest, this is not a state I like to be in.

Thankfully it eventually ticked around to 1pm and I was taken upstairs for a briefing, another barrage of questions and – hopefully – some food. A delightfully matronly nurse asked me some questions which were remarkably similar to those I’d been asked earlier and I told her that:

Yes, I’d had a small glass of wine over the weekend.
No, I hadn’t consumed any grapefruit juice or Seville oranges.
Yes, I’d had some ibuprofen on Thursday to cure a headache.
No, I haven’t donated any blood in the last three months.

I then went and deposited yet more urine in a plastic bottle and waited for the doctor running the trial to come and ask me exactly the same questions again. In the meantime, a lovely young man explained the procedure: we’d be on a strict timetable of when we could eat; we must eat everything we were given; we must keep every drop of our piss; we must not refrigerate said piss; we could be fined for misbehaviour; we might not get on the trial.

Hang on. What was that? We might not get on the trial? The five volunteers in the room looked bemusedly at one another. It transpired that they only needed three volunteers at this stage and that two of us were just back up. This was news to everyone. The pill was sweetened only slightly by the news that the two not selected would stay in the unit for just two nights and would receive £200 for their trouble. Not ideal, but better than a sweet FA. But my disgruntlement was growing.

Feeling like I’d not been told the whole truth, my mood was quite surly when the doctor arrived to interrogate me for the third time that day. He asked me exactly the same questions I’d been asked twice before, only this time his reaction was different. He was perturbed by my having taken ibuprofen. He was a bit snappy with me. I was monosyllabic in response. He left the room. Rejection felt inevitable.

I was gearing myself up to leave. Upon his return he explained that I was not allowed to take any form of medication in the two weeks up to the trial. His tone was accusatory – like I’d been wasting his time. Au contraire, mon frère. I was the one having my fucking time wasted.

I’d taken the painkillers on Thursday. I’d then received a call the next day asking me to participate at short notice in the trial. I was asked to come in for a screening immediately after the weekend. I acquiesced and followed all their instructions. At no point did anyone ask me if I’d partaken of any pills, potions, lotions or otherwise. I’d have told them if I had.

So through no fault of my own I’d been sat inside a soulless hospital for over five hours. I’d had my genitals felt by a man, blood sucked from my arm, piss piped from my penis and question after question asked of me. I’d made seven or eight phone calls, caught buses from one side of the city to the other. I’d had my bags searched and my underwear rummaged around in. I’d fasted for fuck all. I’d not made any plans for the week (a full week of my summer holiday). Mentally, I’d spent the money. And now I was being told that because a couple of people had made oversights in asking about or reporting my use of contraband ibuprofen I had never been eligible to take part at all.

I was not happy. I made my feelings clear, explaining my position firmly and calmly – but ensuring there was enough of a ‘don’t fuck with me’ edge to voice for them not to attempt to mollify me. I demanded that the company remove all records of me from their files, remove me from all mailing or contact lists. I managed not to swear, although I did refer to the company as ‘a joke’ in full view of plenty of people. I’d packed by bag and was leaving before the doctor had chance to respond.

A very polite member of staff accompanied me out of the building apologizing all the way. I felt sorry for him having been put in such a position. But then he rubbed me up entirely the wrong way: he told me at least I’d get a £15 for attending the screening. You can imagine what solace I took from that.

Sadly, I’m not allowed to reveal the name of the company in question. I signed confidentiality agreements, you see. But I can say this: it’s a large, famous company which conducts clinical trials in Leeds. Perhaps you’ll be better at putting the evidence together than they are.

Homeopathic Vodka!?!?

If you've ever read my blog before you'll know how much homeopathy gets on my tits! I've tried to describe what bollocks it is in words, but the above video does it far more eloquently and understandably than i ever could. It's absolutely brilliant and i doff my cap to the guys who made it. Awesome stuff.

Derren Brown Explained!

Have a read of this. Read without prejudice and try not to second guess where the words have come from or why they have been presented to you...

You are a person prone to bouts of real self-examination. This is in sharp contrast to a striking ability you have developed to appear socially very engaged, even the life and soul of the party; but in a way that only convinces others. You are all too aware of it being a facade.

You will often be at a gathering and find yourself playing a part. While on the one hand you'll be talkative and funny, you'll be detaching yourself to the point where you will find yourself watching everything going on around you and feeling utterly unable to engage. You'll play conversations back to yourself in your head and wonder what that person really meant when he said such-and-such - conversations that other people wouldn't give a second thought to.

How have you learned to deal with this conflict? Through exercising control. You like to show a calm, self-assured, fluid kind of stability (but because this is self-consciously created, it will create bouts of frustrated silliness and a delight in extremes, or at least a delight in being seen to be extreme). You most easily recognize this control in how you are with people around you. You have learned to protect yourself by keeping people at bay. Because in the past you have learned to be disappointed by people, you instinctively keep people at arms' length, until you decide they are to be allowed over that magic line into your group of close friends. However, once across that line, the problem is that an emotional dependency kicks in which leaves you feeling very hurt or rejected if it appears that they have betrayed that status.

Because you are prone to self-examination, you will be aware of these traits. However, you are unusually able to examine even that self-examination, which means that you have become concerned about what the real you is. You have become all too aware of facades, of sides of yourself which you present to the world, and you wonder if you have lost touch with the real and spontaneous you.

You are very creative, and have tried different avenues to utilize that ability. It may not be that you specifically, say, paint; it may be that your creativity shows itself in more subtle ways, but you will certainly find yourself having vivid and well-formed ideas which others will find hard to grasp. You set high standards for yourself, though, and in many ways are a bit of a perfectionist. The problem is, though, that it means you often don't get stuff done, because you are frustrated by the idea of mediocrity and are wearied by the idea of starting something afresh. However, once your brain is engaged you'll find yourself sailing. Very likely this will lead to you having considered writing a novel or some such, but a fear that you won't be able to achieve quite what you want stops you from getting on with it. But you have a real vision for things, which others fall short of. Particularly in your work situation, you are currently fighting against restraints upon your desire to express yourself freely.

Partly this is because there are ways in which you have been made to feel isolated from certain groups in the past - something of an outsider. Now what is happening is that you are taking that outsider role and defending it to the point of consciously avoiding to be part of a group or who exhibit any cliquey behaviour, and you always feel a pang of disappointment when you see your 'close' friends seeming to follow that route. Deep down it feels like rejection.

For all that introspection, you have developed a sensational, dry sense of humour that makes connections quickly and wittily and will leave you making jokes that go right over the heads of others. You delight in it so much that you'll often rehearse jokes or amusing voices to understand yourself in order to 'spontaneously' impress others with them. But this is a healthy desire to impress, and although you hate catching yourself at it, it's nothing to be so worried about.

You're naturally a little disorganized. A look around your living space would likely show a box of photos, unorganized into albums, out-of-date medicines, broken items not thrown out, and notes to yourself significantly out of date. Something related to this is that you tend to lack motivation. Because you're resourceful and talented enough to be pretty successful when you put your mind to things, this encourages you to procrastinate and put them off. Equally, you've given up dreams a little easily when your mind flitted elsewhere. There are signs of an excursion into playing a musical instrument, which you have since abandoned, or are finding yourself less interested in. You have a real capacity for deciding that such-and-such a thing (or so-and-so a person) will be the be all and end all of everything and be with you for ever. But you'd rather try and fail, and swing from one extreme to the other, than settle for the little that you see others content with.

Conclusion: You present something of a conundrum, which won't surprise you. You are certainly bright, but unusually open to life's possibilities - something not normally found among achieving people. You would do well to be less self-absorbed, as it tends to distance you a little, and to relinquish some of the control you exercise when you present that stylized version of yourself to others. You could let people in a little more, but i am aware that there is a darkness you feel you should hide (much of this in the personal/relationship/sexual area, and is related to a neediness you don’t like). You have an appealing personality – genuinely.

How accurately did it describe you? Did certain phrases ring true? Did it bring a wry smile to your face? Could you see yourself in those passages? You probably could – and you wouldn’t be alone.

The words themselves were written by Derren Brown. During his Tricks of the Mind series for Channel Four (i have referred to this ‘trick’ in past blogs), Brown invited a mixture of students in three different countries to participate in an experiment. Deliberately choosing a mish-mash of believers and sceptics, Brown asked them to anonymously provide him with their dates of birth, a personal object and to draw around their own hand. Using this information he would produce a reading for them in an attempt to accurately predict their personality. In an additional twist, the participants were from three different countries: England, Spain and USA.

Having been presented with their readings, each subject then gave an interview for camera, describing the accuracy of their evaluation and awarding it a mark out of 100. Of the fifteen participants, one in each country were less than impressed and awarded half the available marks or less. The remaining twelve were effusive in their praise, awarding the readings extremely high marks for accuracy. One girl awarded 99%. Another suggested that Brown might have accessed her private diary before reading her.

Having established the accuracy (or otherwise) of the readings, Brown then invited the students to swap their results with each other so they could work out whose reading belonged to whom. It was at this point that they realised they’d been had – the readings were all identical (and identical to the one you read earlier). They’d also been written weeks in advance of meeting any of the participants.

So how does it work? Firstly, it was written with people between the ages of twenty and thirty in mind. If you’re reading my blog, you will largely fall into that age bracket (and if you don’t it will remain our secret). Chances are you’re also fairly intelligent – why would your enquiring mind be directing you to a blog about how the mind works if it were not at least curious!?

So the first thing the fake reading does is to prey on the insecurities of the audience it was designed for. It assumes that people from its target demographic will be pretty self-involved, searching to ‘find’ themselves, prone to introspection and, quite probably, aware of the contradictory aspects of their personalities. The way these insecurities are preyed upon is devious indeed – it prevents them as statements which are almost impossible to refute. In order to achieve this it takes two opposite traits (such as ‘introverted’ and ‘extroverted’) and suggests that the reader is likely to fluctuate between the two. Which, of course, almost everyone does at one time or another. But to say, “Sometimes you’re introverted, sometimes you’re extroverted,” would convince nobody. The strength here lies in burying those messages among many others, deliberately building an elaborate profile which uses an awful lot of words to say very little. The many meanings hidden to greater or lesser degrees within the text also ensure that the subject can pick and choose which aspects they remember and apply to themselves and which they can sweep under the carpet.

A specific example of this can be seen in the statement, “you’ve given up dreams a little easily when your mind has flitted elsewhere”. Of course it bloody has. One day you wanted to own a sweetshop, the next day you wanted to be a fireman: your dream died and was replaced by another as your youthful mind wandered. Equally inane is the statement, “You instinctively keep people at arms’ lengthuntil you decide they are allowed over that magic line into your close group of friends”. Seems obvious to me – most folks only open up to people once they’ve befriended them. People who spill their guts to strangers seem slightly unhinged to most of us.

Newspaper horoscopes use a similar technique, although they’re even less specific. Interestingly, a number of the students admitted that they were expecting to get something vague and general from Brown, only to be astonished by the accuracy of his reading.

Of course, Derren Brown is not the first person to conduct this experiment. Originally described by Bertram R Forer (http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html) as part of a genuine psychological study, it has also famously been performed by uber-sceptic James Randi, Penn & Teller and many others.

Sadly, Channel 4 have blocked YouTube footage of Brown’s version, so instead, here’s a clip of him discussing it with another legendary sceptic, Richard Dawkins...



Oh, and here's a footnote courtesy of my wonderful researcher, Shirley Farkles:

In 1979 the French astrologer Michel Gauquelin placed an advertisement in Ici-Paris offering free personal horoscopes. Of those who received the horoscope, 94% subsequently rated it as accurate. Unfortunately, they had each been sent the same one, that of Dr. Petiot, France's most notorious mass murderer.

Homeopathic Hokum

Knowing my sceptical nature, someone recently posted the below video on my Facebook wall.



It’s a film I cannot wait to see, containing as it does the following pithy epithet:

“By definition ‘alternative medicine’ has either not been proved to work or proved not to work. Alternative medicine which has been proved to work is called... medicine”.

Along with fortune tellers and mediums, one of my biggest bugbears relates to homeopathic remedies. During a brief spell of sobriety at a recent festival I was almost tempted to confront a hemp-clad hippie peddling her homeopathic hokum and ask her what the hell she was doing flogging her ‘magical’ water to gullible (and inebriated) punters for grossly inflated prices. I resisted. Arguing with crusties is not the done thing in the middle of the Lake District.

What I really ought to have done is to ask her if she knows how homeopathic remedies are produced. If she had been able to answer the question she would have undermined her whole business to the extent that she’d almost certainly have needed to close it down, flee the country and embark on a spiritual journey which may or may not end in her finding her true vocation in life.

You see, homeopathic remedies are produced by the following means:

• You take your ‘ingredient’ (maybe a herb or a mineral) and dilute it in such a vast quantity of water as to render the initial ingredient redundant.

• Homeopaths believe that an ingredient which might cause vomiting (syrup of ipecac) will prevent it when administered in smaller doses – this is not necessarily the case.

• The dilution is usually somewhere in the region of one part syrup of ipecac to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts water - anyone who’s ever made a glass of squash knows that this level of dilution is not gonna make for a tasty beverage.

• Homeopaths circumnavigate this argument by claiming that water has a memory and can ‘remember’ the initial ingredient as it has been in close proximity to it over a period of time.

It can’t just be me who thinks that process of making ‘medicine’ (I haven’t even mentioned the strange procedure of striking a leather ‘saddle’ with the full bottles of brewing remedy) smells a little bit like particularly unsavoury bollocks? A substance which may or may not cure an ailment is diluted in gargantuan quantities of water and imparts its curative properties to each molecule of H2O because water has a fucking memory?!? And in some cases this marvellous magical water can be turned into restorative tablets? Get a grip!

The dilution is a major issue for me – and ought to be for you, too. Essentially, homeopaths are selling you nothing but bottled water. Extortionately expensive bottled water, at that. And if water really does have a memory, why the blue blazes would we need homeopaths to remind said water of its history? Each glass of liquid (or gobful of homeopathic mouth-swill) that you consume has been part of the water cycle for years. It’s likely to have been a cloud, a raindrop, a river or an ocean at various stages in its existence. It could have been part of the apple which struck Newton on the head, the bead of sweat which almost undermines Tom Cruise’s quest in Mission Impossible or part of a piss which your great-great grandfather dribbled into his chamber pot. Why wouldn’t the water remember that as clearly as it remembers its relatively brief dalliance with a miniscule amount of syrup of ipecac?
It would be perfectly possible to argue that despite the complete lack of evidence that it works and the peculiar ‘science’ which underpins it, homeopathy can be beneficial in terms of the ‘placebo effect’. I’ve read around this strange phenomenon and it’s certainly true to say that there is such a thing and that the mind and body can work together in all sorts of strange and wonderful ways to make ill people feel better. But most ill people will feel better at some point – often after they’ve taken a pill/applied a lotion/got some fresh air. They would almost certainly have got better regardless of those activities, but might choose to attribute their recovery solely to what they believed to have ‘cured’ them.

To make this argument is to ignore the fundamental error which supporters of homeopathy would commit: claiming that the potion or pill they provide prevents you being poorly. It does not. It will not. It cannot.

It seems fitting that you can buy 10ml of Gambogia from ABC Homeopathy for £8.35. This remedy supposedly cures diarrhoea by giving you a small dose of the ailment – as homeopaths are keen to point out, like cures like. Purchase this (or any other so-called remedy) and you are literally paying over the odds for a miniature bottle of shit.

This blog owes a debt to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science: a book which attempts to debunk scientific twaddle, discredit charlatans (step forward Gillian McKeith) and explain why scientific stories are so often misrepresented and/or misinterpreted by the media. It’s an absolutely fascinating read and is easily understandable - even to a layman like me. The chapter on evidence based medicine and trialling of homeopathy versus real placebos is particularly enlightening.

Written In The Stars?

Just about every daily newspaper in the western world contains a horoscope page. It’s usually near the back after the news, editorials, gossip columns, TV listings, agony aunt and crossword. It’s often located just before the horse-racing form guide – something which seems deliciously appropriate to me. Women’s magazines always carry horoscopes. There is usually a dedicated area in your local bookshop (remember those?) with shelves creaking under the weight of astrological tomes. Astrology is big business. But is it a bafflingly popular pseudo-science or an efficient and accurate way of determining a person’s personality and, more importantly, their future?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I’m a sceptic. Without conducting any form of research I can come up with a whole battery of reasons why astrology is bullshit. So here’s a few to get us started:

• If astrology were based on science and fact, all daily horoscopes would be the same. They might be worded differently but ought to contain roughly the same message. They do not.

• If astrology is true, there are only twelve character types, meaning that an accident of birth means that I am destined to share the same personality traits as the people born in the same thirty day period as myself. This is demonstrably not the case. People are far more complicated than that.

• If the position of the stars and planets led to my path being decided for me, I would not ever be acting independently and with free will. My choices would have already been made for me, rendering my consciousness an irrelevance. I don’t want lasagne because it tastes good: I want it because I was born under a waning moon. Clearly nonsense.

But maybe I’m being unfair? Let’s assume that the people who produce the meaningless drivel in the back of your Sunday supplements are merely hoping to cash in on the true science behind astrology. I once heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about a newspaper that made the poorest performing journalist each week write the ‘stars’. And that wouldn’t surprise me given the appallingly predictable and general nature of those meaningless paragraphs of piffle.

True astrologers who have honed and perfected their art through years of practice and study would presumably distance themselves from the second-rate claptrap in the back of your tabloid newspaper. Instead, they would provide an individual with a tailored reading, drawn up only after ascertaining your specific date, place and time of birth and then consulting their mystical charts...

So can a scientific reading of the position of the planets provide a personal perspective on your life? Does the position of the sun when you were born (which ultimately reveals which constellation you were born under) have a determining influence on your fate? Does the position of far away planets and balls of burning gas matter?

Of course it doesn’t. Regardless of what your astrologer might think, there is no way that celestial bodies can influence your future. How could they? They are so far away that it takes millions of years for the light from them to reach Earth. Just looking at the sun is tantamount to looking back in time eight minutes. And the sun is huge. Its gravitational pull is so enormous that it keeps all the other planets in the solar system orbiting it. How can any of those other planets affect an individual life form on Earth? They don’t exert an influence over Earth itself, so to assume that they can make a difference to a human being is an insane notion. We’re not just the product of nature, but also of nurture. You really think that the time you were born is more relevant that the person who gave birth to you? You’re an idiot.

I don’t doubt that there are some people out there performing readings who genuinely believe that there is some science behind their actions. And some of them are evangelical about their beliefs. But so are people who believe in the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs and Ouija boards. People believe in all kinds of strange stuff. And I think a lot of the reason for that is that they want to believe. Not all chart-reading astrologists are charlatans: some of them are just misguided. But not as misguided as the poor fools who swallow this nonsense hook, line and sinker.

Here’s a revelation which will come as no surprise to anyone... people believe what they want to believe. But here’s one which is only slightly more surprising... people ignore evidence which doesn’t support their beliefs! Shocking, isn’t it?
Think about your astrological personality type. Let’s use mine as a template. I’m a Scorpio so I just Googled ‘typical Scorpio’ and went to the first suggested website (you can play along at home if you wish). The site displays a table of sixteen ‘positive’ and sixteen ‘negative’ attributes. Some of these describe me enormously accurately (intolerant and quick tempered being my favourites). Some of them don’t describe me all that well. But I would say that at some points all of them describe me to some degree. I am rarely jealous of anyone or anything – but rarely doesn’t mean I’m never jealous.

If I was a suggestible person, what I would take from that list would be the words which resonate with me. And what would I do with the words that I don’t feel a relationship to? I’d forget them, of course. And what I’d be left with was a feeling that I was, indeed, a fairly typical Scorpio with typical Scorpio traits – throw enough shit and some of it sticks!

This is how people choose to listen to those who read astrological charts. During a conversation or a reading with an astrologer irrelevant or unwanted information is discarded. People simply don’t remember the blind alleys which their reader wandered up. They don’t recall the three or four possibilities which are offered because their inclination is to seize on the salient pieces of information and to disregard the detritus. They hear what they want to hear and are deaf to what they don’t. And this is accentuated after the event when they tell their friends, selecting the three or four most amazingly accurate pieces of info and sharing those with their associates.

Another technique widely used to dupe suggestible people is to offer two opposing pieces of information. Let’s say, for argument’s sake that someone was to tell me that, ‘you can be outgoing but at times you are quiet and introverted’. Does it hold true for me? Yes, it definitely does. Sometimes, in the right company I am ebullient – the life and soul of the party! At other times I’d prefer to lock myself in my room and cry into a handkerchief rather than share my time with anyone. But does that make it an accurate assessment of my character or a sweeping generalisation which applies to anyone and everyone? Think about it in terms of your own character - I’m 99% certain that it could be accurately said about any of you.

If you have any doubts about the veracity of what I’m saying here, consider the following experiment...

A group of people (students ideally) are asked to write on a piece of card their name, a random series of characters and one sentence which describes themselves. The cards are then fed into a machine which reads them and produces an assessment of each participants’ personality. These are then rated for accuracy according as either: poor, fair, good or excellent. The machine has an amazing track record – over 17 years it has been rated as good or excellent by 70% of subjects.

It goes without saying that there is no such machine. In fact, unbeknown to each other, the participants are all given exactly the same character assessment. It’s full of sweeping generalisations which can be interpreted in any number of ways. People have an awful lot in common, and the social nature of being human ensures that most of share a core of extremely similar attributes and characteristics. But the really clever part is that every single sentence in the assessment is taken directly from an actual horoscope. If you have any doubts about how this experiment works, Derren Brown once did a version for TV which I’m sure you could track down on YouTube or you can visit James Randi’s website – he invented the test and just loves debunking anything he sees as fraudulent!

Why do I even care? It’s just harmless fun! Isn’t it? Well I’m not so sure. If people placed no stock in what astrologists said, why would they pay good money to go and see them? Impressionable people are easily impressed. Vulnerable people are easily misled. People who are lost can easily be taken advantage of. That’s not to say that any of the advice or predictions given by astrologers is intended to be anything other than beneficial. They mean well, I’m sure. But given their lack of knowledge about an individual is it responsible for them to offer any information which might affect important decisions in their lives? Does a prediction of the future absolve people from taking responsibility for their own actions? Maybe. And I certainly wouldn’t wanna think that Russell Grant had influenced anybody to ever do anything other than change the TV channel.

Colonic: A Load Of Old Shit?

Cranks, crooks and charlatans have never had it so easy when it comes to fleecing gullible souls who long for short-term fixes to their unhealthy lifestyles. A society which demands maximum benefit from minimum effort will always take a pill rather than participate in exercise. Detoxifying diets and supplements empower the lazy and encourage them to rely on potions, lotions and placebos rather than a sensible approach to looking after their own bodies.

A drunken conversation (what a delicious irony) recently turned to the subject of colonic irrigation. Amongst a group of friends were sceptics and believers. Unsuprisingly, i was in the former camp for a number of reasons: i don't ever want a four inch speculum up my arse, i'm firmly of the belief that the anus is an outlet rather than an inlet and i'm confident that my body is adept enough at expelling faeces so as not to need any additional help.

So i now have sufficient motivation to investigate the potential benefits of having your colon cleansed - i can save some of my naive friends the indignity of having their bottoms uncomfortably invaded by health 'gurus' to no discernible benefit and paying for the 'privilege'.

For those who have managed to exist in blissful ignorance about what this procedure involves, essentially a tube is whacked up your bum, tepid water (or sometimes coffee?!) is pumped inside and then flows out carrying with it pieces of poo. Delightful, eh?

Obviously, there is no better place to begin a research project than that popular bastion of reliable information: Wikipedia. Wiki asserts that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that colon-cleansing has any health benefits and goes on to espouse the values of the bowel's ability to clean itself 'naturally and without assistance'. But can we trust this website any more than we can trust those encouraging us to drop our drawers and have litres of water pumped into our anal cavity? Probably not. So i looked at some real scientific articles and discovered the following...

The liver, kidneys and gastro-intestinal tract are a finely tuned machine when it comes to expelling anything which is not supposed to be inside us. There are no pockets, nooks or crannies where food can hide. Your intestines work on the same principal as your oesophogus, squeezing food (or in this case waste food) down a pipe using muscular contractions - you never hear about anyone needing throat irrigation!

Dr Steven Jones from the eminent UCLA School of Medicine thoroughly disagrees with any assertion that the 'cleansing' of the colon can add any extra years to your life (apparently this is a popular misconception although i'd never heard of it). Another phallacy is that there are parasites in the colon which can be expelled through the procedure. Not so, according to the experts. Or not in the western world, anyway. We don't have these parasites due to our clean drinking water and clean food sources (thank heavens for Asda).

Cindy Iverson from the Colo-Rectal Cancer Initiative at the Cancer Reasearch & Prevention Foundation cites colon cancer as the second biggest cancer-killer in the USA (56,000 deaths a year). It's certainly in her interest to promote colonic irrigation if it has any health benefits but she says that in order to prevent such conditions we should have a healthy lifestyle by eating fruit and veg, drinking less alcohol and maintaining a healthy weight. Colonic irrigation, to paraphrase the Cancer Research people, is a load of crap.

The shit that you see coming out of the tube, is indeed, shit (i still don't know why they need to use a clear hose - surely most people would be perfectly happy if it was matt black). It is not, however, old shit which is lodged in your colon. There is nowhere for it to get lodged. Your intestinal tract is a smooth, muscular pipe which squeezes things out extremely effectively. What comes out of the hose is merely crap which hasn't made it out of your arse yet. If you hadn't shit it out during the colonic irrigation, you would have shit it out the next day anyway. You're just having your next dump a bit earlier than usual.

Colonic irrigation is utter bunkum. The human body is the most complex, efficient and highly evolved machine on the planet. The colon is a one way system and should remain that way. Paying to have your colon cleansed is tantamount to flushing your cash down the toilet.

Incidentally, if you have any further desire to read about poo/dietary myths head to the excellent Bad Science website where you can chuckle away to twenty-four articles about the execrable Gillian McKeith's unique brand of bullshit.