But Woo Doesn't Hurt Anyone!

I hate to horn in on what I feel might properly be one of Bronze Dog's Doggerels, but the title claim is one that hit just a little close to home recently. One one level, the claim is irrelevant; whether or not a a particular brand of woo is harmless says nothing about its truth or efficacy. On another level entirely, however, this claim is patently false.

Case in point: thanks to some woo, my girlfriend was fired from her job last week.

She's a preveterinary student who had been working at a local vet clinic for the last year and a half or so. Things went pretty well at first. Then, a few months in, during a routine shift, she walked into an examination room and through the looking glass. One of the doctors, a woman educated for years in veterinary medicine and who must have a strong background in the sciences, was hunched over a poor sick dog pressing a vial of blood to his chest.

This might seem like some sort of morbid ritual to summon Hod-Canus-Sq'ctamoreth, the Ancient Tentacled God-Creature of Insanity and Domestic Dogs, but it was in fact a variant on the bullshit quackery known as "applied kinesiology." My girlfriend was told to enter the room and take the doctor's place in pressing the vial of dog's blood against the ailing canine's chest. She was then told to hold out her arm while the doctor pushed down on it.

See, the vial contained a mixture of the dog's own blood and an allergen. There were a number of vials, each with a different allergen in them. The ease with which the doctor could push down my girlfriend's arm supposedly told her how allergic the dog was to the substance in the vial. See, the dog's aura (or something) sensed the substance in the vial mixed with his own blood (or something) and became weaker based on what physiological reaction the dog would have to the substance (or something) and that weakness was transferred to my girlfriend, the channel (or something) who would then have more or less difficulty holding up her arm. Or something.

I remember getting tested for allergies. It was quick and painless, it didn't require drawing my blood, and it was, most importantly, thoroughly well-established in its accuracy. Plus it actually made sense.

A later variant involved standing a dog up and pressing vials of blood and various toxins to its chest and observing how tired it looked.

As a non-idiot might guess, both of these procedures eventually find a natural termination point when the beleaguered girlfriend/canine no long had the energy (or inclination, in the case of the bullshit-sensing human) to perform strongly the activity being observed. When the dog, in the course of nature, got tired of standing up, it was seen as proof that they had found, through vial-pressing, what ailed it. When the girlfriend, out of irritation and exasperation, stopped actively resisting the doctor, success was claimed.

Let's not forget to mention the massive subjectivity inherent in these observations, the huge openings for confirmation bias, post hocking, and ad hocking, or the complete lack of blindness or control. The "experiments" being performed and the "diagnoses" garnered from said experiments were both completely invalid and useless. Nevertheless, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine decided that such results were good enough for her, and proceeded to treat the animals "diagnosed" in these (and other) nonsense ways as if the kinesiology was useful and supplied her with a wealth of accurate information.

She once performed acupuncture on a cat. A fucking cat. Cats, as you may well know, cannot benefit from the placebo effect. However, their owners can benefit, if you want to call it that, from confirmation bias. My girlfriend repeated to me the "oohs" and "ahhs" of the afflicted animal's human as she gushed about how much better Fluffy looked than she did before, how she was so much happier after some idiot vet had made her into a feline pincushion.

These claims are obviously absurd. Lacking an objective, quantifiable control, the pet's owner is only seeing what she wants to see and believes she should see. Sorry, lady, but the emperor's naked. This time, however, the kid that called him out did not do so to the acclaim of the other onlookers.

Eventually my girlfriend became uncomfortable enough with the ridiculosity of these procedures that she politely inquired as to their necessity. She was told something to the effect of "I do it if the patient asks. At the very worst, it's not like it'll hurt."

Well, aside from the fact that you're draining the dog's veins dry so you can fill your vials with "unclean" blood for your asinine tests, or the fact that you're covering a cat in fucking needles, I guess you're right. And by "right" I mean "totally fucking wrong, you asshole."

While a doctor indulges the idiot whims of some creduloid pet owner, the suffering animal in question keeps suffering. When a simple allergy test is put off in lieu of a long, drawn out, and ultimately useless procedure, the animal suffers more. When the doctor is as credulous as the owner and treats the dog according to what is about the worst diagnostic procedure I can think of apart from throwing darts at a wall covered in diseases, the animal will be very lucky if it is given a useful treatment. More likely it will continue to suffer as it is subjected to useless treatment after useless treatment, and without a proper diagnosis, any treatment attempted could interact poorly with the real problem. Sorry, Dr. Dipshit, but your willingness to humor your clients and dabble in the bullshit of "holistic" medicine can and probably will harm your patients, either through inaction and negligence or by misdiagnosis and complications therefrom.

The polite and reasonable way in which my girlfriend attempted to question the usefulness of these treatments did not in any way indict the doctor's integrity or intelligence as I have here today. She merely voiced politely her skepticism about the methods. Nevertheless, things changed after that day. Her bosses, the vets, began treating her differently. They regarded her askance and turned away their suspicious eyes when she met their gaze. People became colder, more "professional" in person, while rumors started floating around behind her back. Work became a generally hostile environment for her in which each day brought new problems, new worries, new passive aggression. She would get berated for not knowing how to do something, and when she pointed out that she had never been trained to do that something though she had asked multiple times her protests fell on deaf ears (and they never did train her to do many things). Multiple times she spoke of quitting but stayed to gather more experience for her vet school application.

Then she was unceremoniously dumped. Turns out that, under the orders of the holistic woo bitch of a head doctor, her co-workers had been essentially spying on her, her every transgression had been catalogued, until they had a long list on increasingly minor and inane "issues," including the doozy "asked the doctor a dosage question," because it is apparently bad to make sure you're doing your job properly. One honest mistake later and she was out on her ass.

Now, is it really fair to say that the woo in this story is the culprit? After all, applied kinesiology did not itself fire my girlfriend. That would be a rather strange turn of events. She was fired by a woo-peddling doctor. All things being equal, the doctor's wooishness shouldn't matter. But my girlfriend was fired, in the end, not because she did anything wrong but because she did not toe the party line on empty, harmful treatments. Her disagreement with what any decent doctor would recognize as a dangerously designed "test" got her on someone's shit list. Her refusal to believe in the bullshit of applied kinesiology was a major factor in her firing and her subsequent loss in future job opportunities. Though she was a decent, hardworking employee, she didn't fit in with Dr. Dipshit's crazy view of the world and veterinary medicine and so had to be eliminated. This woman will likely give her a poor reference should future employers call to check up on a resume, not because of the one real mistake that they used as an excuse to fire my girlfriend (though that will be the good Doctor's excuse again, I'm sure) but because of her stance on animal acupuncture and applied kinesiology.

And these people dare to call skeptics closed-minded.