Last year, chatting on, he saw people recommending "Miracle Mineral Solution", which turned out to be industrial bleach, sold with a dreary conspiracy theory to cure Aids, cancer and so on.Īged 15, he was perfectly capable of exploring the evidence, finding official documents, and explaining why it was dangerous.
Therapeutic Touch practitioners, including some in university posts, were deeply unhappy: they insisted loudly that JAMA was wrong to publish the study.Ĭloser to home is Rhys Morgan, a schoolboy with Crohns disease. The therapists performed no better than chance, and with 280 attempts there was sufficient statistical power to show that these claims were bunk. Rosa flipped a coin, hovered her hand over the therapist's left or right palm accordingly, and waited for them to say which it was. Twenty-one experienced practitioners put their palms on a table, behind a screen.
BRAIN GYM TEACHERS EDITION TV
At the age of nine she saw a TV programme about nurses who practise "Therapeutic Touch", claiming they can detect and manipulate a "human energy field" by hovering their hands above a patient.įor her school science fair project, Rosa conceived and executed an experiment to test if they really could detect this "field". More interesting, though, is how often children are able to spot bullshit, and how often adults want to shut them up.Įmily Rosa is the youngest person ever to have published a scientific paper in JAMA, one of the most influential medical journals in the world. Now, this is weakminded, and perhaps even vicious. But the school decided they couldn't print it, because it would offend teachers in the junior school who use Brain Gym. This pupil wrote an article about Brain Gym for her school paper, explaining why it's nonsense: the essay is respectful, straightforward, and factual. This week I got an email from a science teacher about a 13-year-old pupil.
BRAIN GYM TEACHERS EDITION MANUAL
It's a series of elaborate physical movements with silly pseudoscientific justifications: you wiggle your head back and forth because that gets more blood into your frontal lobes for clearer thinking you contort your fingers together to improve some unnamed "energy flow" they are keen on drinking water, because "processed foods" – I'm quoting the Brain Gym Teacher's Manual – "do not contain water." You pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for Brain Gym, and it's still done in hundreds of state schools across the UK.
Brain Gym is a schools programme I've been writing on since 2003. I f you can tear yourself away from Ryan Giggs' penis for just one moment, I have a different censorship story.