Letters : . . .
London
Rita Carter’s article raises some very important issues. In a number of areas
the issues are already being addressed and managed by groups such as The British
Acupuncture Council (BAcC). The BAcC represents some 1600 fully trained and
registered professional acupuncturists.
The BAcC is a self-regulating body with codes of ethics and conduct. Through
the British Acupuncture Accreditation Board, it ensures that the education and
training of professional acupuncturists meets appropriate standards. We welcome
acupuncturists working in Britain onto our register provided they meet strict
criteria of competence and skill.
The work of Edzard Ernst is important. But when reported without hard
references his statements can be misleading. We understand that the one case of
septic arthritis involving acupuncture happened many years ago and the very
unfortunate death mentioned in the article was not in this country.
The BAcC is also fostering research into all aspects of acupuncture, but
funding for such work is a key issue, particularly when there are no major
commercial gains, as there are with drug trials.
We are not complacent about potential hazards and are helping to form a
framework for the provision of acupuncture in Britain that gives patients the
highest level of confidence in its effectiveness and safety.
Letters : . . .
Norwich
Your article includes the ubiquitously quoted kidney problems caused by
Chinese herbs in a slimming programme. Chinese herbal medicine was never
intended for slimming. The herbal formulas were devised to cure pathological
problems within a medical framework so different from the Western model that
their use for slimming is like speaking Chinese words while retaining English
grammar.
I am a reflexologist, and have seen slimming cures available whereby
eliminatory organs are constantly stimulated by special foot pressure pads. To
any holistic therapist, these applications are highly suspect. Holistic medicine
is designed to be tuned to each individual, and attempts to use techniques
indiscriminately and out of context will lead to problems.
Last month I was one of several hundred applicants for four 拢2500
complementary medicine research grants. When I am aware through experience that
my techniques are both cheap and effective, it is depressing to compare this
available funding with the billions spent on orthodox medical research.
Letters : Credit due
Kidlington, Oxfordshire
Fred Pearce is so right when he says, “Lack of credit is a major stumbling
block for poor entrepreneurs” (“Squatters take control”, 1 June, p 38). The
experience of the Orangi Pilot Project credit scheme in the squatter settlements
in Karachi mirrors that of other microcredit programmes, such as the Grameen
Bank in Bangladesh and ACCION in Latin America.
Overturning deep-seated myths, such programmes have shown that, despite
having no collateral, the poor are credit-worthy and are willing and able to
work their way out of poverty given the chance.
Providing small loans to very poor people for income-generating projects,
microcredit schemes now reach 8 million people and have repeatedly demonstrated
that they reduce poverty, raise dignity and hope, and improve welfare in the
poorest communities. However, 1.3 billion people still live in absolute
poverty.
In February 1997 an international Microcredit Summit will be held in
Washington DC to launch a global campaign to provide 100 million of the world’s
poorest families, especially the women, with credit for self-employment by the
year 2005. The Summit will bring together those who practice microcredit with
the range of organisations and individuals that have the resources to help
extend microcredit.
Letters : Keeping the books
Birmingham
I have just caught up with Ian Watson’s article on libraries (Forum, 15 June,
p 49). He states that a fail-safe procedure “ensures that any last copy of a
book gets looked at twice by senior staff. If it is considered of value鈥�
it will be sent for safekeeping to the British Library”. Would it were so.
Because of cuts in staffing and cuts in funding over the past 15 years, such
systems developed by professional librarians to meet the national long-term
interest have largely gone by the board. Such “peripheral” activities as these
can no longer be carried out in the face of more immediate problems, such as how
to keep libraries open at all, or how to meet increasingly specialist demands
for services from a shrinking budget.
The time needed to be spent on a national strategy for the preservation of
stocks can no longer be justified in the local context, and there are no funds
for transporting material to the British Library.
Ironically, as the demands generated by the information age increase, the
ability to meet them is being severely hampered by reduced quality and standards
of service, the closing of public libraries, shorter opening hours and
reductions in the range and depth of stocks being purchased.
Letters : Logically possible
Ralph Estling credits me with the absurd view that because parapsychological
phenomena are possible, then they are real (Forum, 6 July, p 44). A careful
reader of the piece in Nature (volume 39, p 685) to which Estling
refers will notice that I did not say that parapsychological phenomena are real.
In fact, the conclusion of the article was that we have no good reason to
believe in the reality of these phenomena. My point was rather that we do not
have to prove that parapsychological phenomena are impossible to show that they
don’t exist.
The term “possible” can be used in many ways, and my usage has obviously
misled Estling. A useful distinction we can make is between things that are
impossible because they are inconsistent with the laws of physics, and things
that are impossible because they are inconsistent with the laws of logic. The
Sun going around the Earth is impossible in the first sense, while round squares
are impossible in the second sense.
The view expressed in my article was that although parapsychology is not
logically impossible, it is false. So how do I know that it is logically
possible? I claimed that our imagination provides evidence for its possibility,
not (as Estling claims) that imagination makes it possible.
The best account, in my opinion, is that imagination is a good, but not an
infallible, guide to what is possible. But this has nothing to do with what the
actual scientific truths about the world are. To adapt a phrase of Kant’s,
science only tells us how the world is, not how it must be. Since Estling fails
to distinguish between our knowledge of the world and our knowledge of what is
possible, he entirely misses the point of my article.
Letters : . . .
Ely, Cambridgeshire
Estling’s trotting out of the scientist’s contempt for philosophy is now so
clich茅d as to be almost quaint.
Has he actually read any philosophical works in the past 20 years pertaining
to scientific issues? It doesn’t sound like it. He sneers that “the trouble with
philosophers… is that when they write in their knowing way about hard science,
they eventually come up against the problem that trips up allearnest amateurs:
the actual facts”.
He says it is rarely a good idea to write about things we do not know much
about, which is precisely what he is doing. Is maths a science? If yes, was
Bertrand Russell an “earnest amateur” when he scribbled out Principia
Mathematica?
Does Estling really believe that Karl Popper’s work throughout this century
consisted of towing science into shallower waters because he was out of his
depth with it? Has he read the philosophical work by, for instance, Patricia
Churchland on the brain, or Michael Lockwood on quantum physics, or Daniel
Dennett on consciousness? One may disagree with their views but they are surely
not scientific simpletons.
And if philosophy is just so much confusion, why are so many scientists in
every generation drawn to it? Underlying Estling’s contempt for philosophy is
the old arrogance that science can explain everything. This is fundamentally
narrowminded, a point illustrated by those scientists who do not take this view,
such as Sir Peter Medawar, John Polkinghorne and Nobel prize winning physicist
Brian Josephson.
They and their like take the effort to think deeply and widely, and are not
content with “merely” being experts in their own, necessarily narrow field of
study.
Science will never provide a complete explanation for many
phenomena鈥攕uch as why people like Estling should believe in it with such
Messianic fervour.
Letters : . . .
Coln St Aldwyns, Gloucestershire
Estling uses the example of the “heavens” revolving around the Earth to show
how wrong our imagination is.
Followers of the debate will know Paul Davies said the same about common
sense, with his example of the Sun orbiting the Earth (Letters, 1 February, p
49). Both writers agree the laws of physics determine what is “possible” in the
world, independent of observation, imagination and common sense.
But are they right? For example, if something is “possible” because “physical
law” says it is, then are we not seeing the “impossible” when we see the Sun
orbit the Earth? And if, as Estling says, “parapsychological phenomena are
proven to be real `in some sense'”, is it not simply in `that’ sense鈥攊n
the sense of real perception鈥攖hat we can prove something exists outside
physical law?
Perhaps this is the turning point we have been waiting for.
Letters : Temporal confusion
Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland
Peter Coveney, in his article about time (Review, 29 June, p 42), appears, as
so many others do, to confuse two issues: temporal anisotropy and temporal
becoming. He quotes Einstein’s view that: “For we convinced physicists, the
distinction between the past, the present and the future is only an illusion,
however persistent.”
The time-symmetry or asymmetry, and the reversibility or not of phenomena,
all concern the relationship between times, or the finding that the Universe is
temporally anisotropic. This is a quite separate issue from that of temporal
becoming, and whether or not past, present and future are an objective reality
or are illusory.
It was, contrary to what Coveney writes, the latter to which Einstein was
referring. His words were written as part of a letter of condolence to the widow
of his lifelong friend M. Besso. He sought to console her with the thought that,
in the static or objective interpretation of time which he favoured, our lives
have a kind of permanence.
Though our experiences are successive, like the ever-changing image on a
cinema screen, the objective reality is seen as timeless and static, like the
reel of film itself. Thus we are not simply three-dimensional entities
navigating a path to extinction, but are also, in a sense, four-dimensional
beings.
It was with this in mind that Einstein felt able to write in his letter that
death was, for him, “of no significance”.
Letters : Mad spuds
Bracknell, Berkshire
It has for some time been known that certain vegetable tubers employ a
protein synthesis mechanism based on DNA using the same coding sequence as is
found in the brains of sheep, cows and certain other ruminants. How long will it
be before we are subjected to the “mad potato disease” scare?
Letters : Holistic healing
Heathfield, East Sussex
While agreeing that nothing is entirely safe, I would like to point out that
complementary medicine is not an unknown quantity as implied in your article
(“Holistic hazards”, 13 July, p 12). Insurance actuaries have professionally
assessed the risks involved in the practice of complementary medicine, and all
reputable practitioners have comprehensive professional indemnity insurance.
Perhaps the fact that this costs less than the cheapest car insurance at only
拢72 a year, might help put this so-called problem into perspective. In
contrast, professional indemnity insurance for GPs now costs nearly 拢1000
a year.
Moreover, a 1992 study by the medical monitoring organisation Social Audit
estimated that 10 000 people a year are admitted into British hospitals
suffering from the side effects of prescribed medicines. The National Poisons
Unit’s study on the side effects of natural remedies found only 42 cases of a
probable link with health problems in eight years.
Although there were a few serious problems with ethnic medicines, many of the
reports were trivial, such as “drowsiness after taking herbal
tranquillisers”.