Blinded by Science

I don’t why it is that Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science pieces for the Guardian don’t get more front-page promotion. His current piece takes on a quack peddling anti-radiation jewellery in the form of the Q-link pendant, here pictured in in gold at 800 dollars:

As so many of us have I’ve been afflicted many times by perfectly well-meaning but also totally irrational and deluded new-agers who insist on giving me ‘medical ‘ advice. They are people that I’d really, really like to shake some bloody sense into. The trouble is that often it’s like talking to a brick wall, and before you know it you’re on the point of screaming ‘Oh for fucks sake!” which tends to cast a pall over a lunch with your boss or a family funeral.

So I like the way Goldacre looks at the actual evidence and calmly demolishes the mad claims of whatever the latest touchy-feely, crystal-powered craze is amongst the elves and rainbows types. It gives us rational people actual facts to hold on to when the conversation takes off into auras and spirit journeys.

Quackery is one of my hotbutton issues and to see otherwise educated, sane people off with the fairies, and not only that but proselytising, well you can tell, It Pisses Me Off.

I find it hard to engage new-agers politely; I get to boiling point in short order when confronted with mulish irrationality and so instead of calmly and politely explaining why they’re wrong I have to bite my tongue and walk away for fear of tipping the contents of my glass over their head. Don’t ever, ever mention homeopathy to me. It won’t be pretty.

So. This time Goldacre debunks the QLink pendant, and what a ripoff it is:

The QLink is a device sold to protect you from those terrifying invisible electromagnetic rays, and cure many ills. “It needs no batteries as it is ‘powered’ by the wearer – the microchip is activated by a copper induction coil which picks up sufficient micro currents from your heart to power the pendant.” Says Holford’s catalogue. According to the manufacturer’s sales banter, it corrects your energy frequencies. Or something.

The guy selling these has a whole self-created ‘scientific’ hinterland on his modelled-on-big-pharma shiny website (warning, Flash intro). Some of the pendants, as jewellery, are actually quite pleasing but the claims made for them are entirely laughable :

Last summer I obtained one of these devices (from somewhere cheaper than Holford’s shop) and took it to Camp Dorkbot, an annual festival for dorks held – in a joke taken too far – at a scout camp outside Dorking. Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open.

Camp Dorkbot? In Dorking? Really? The spirit of English amateurism is not yet dead , despite the antiterrorism regimes’ best efforts.

But I digress. As I said, the Qlink pendant, pretty as it is, is a piece of shit: it couldn’t possibly do what it claims.

No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing. I contacted qlinkworld.co.uk/2 to discuss my findings. They kindly contacted the inventor, who informed me they have always been clear the QLink does not use electronics components “in a conventional electronic way”. And apparently the energy pattern reprogramming work is done by some finely powdered crystal embedded in the resin. Oh, hang on, I get it: it’s a new age crystal pendant.

As the Qlink for pets above, priced $59.95, shows, there’ll always be money to be made from public credulity. But it becomes truly dangerous when fakery starts to replace real medicine. People die because of believing in hucksters.

Ultimately medical treatment is up to the individual’s choice, but it’s good to see a newspaper doing some actual fact-based science reporting and helping that choce to be an informed one.

Now about the political reporting…