Am quite late on this too, the authors mention the 27 days in other sources, such as volume 2 of this journal (available to download):

www.scientificexploration.org/edgescience/

I quote:

“One of the chair’s department members had been doing mice studies on a particular form of mammary adenocarcinoma that is 100 percent fatal within 27 days of injection. The model itself was so well understood that statistical studies of lifespan were routinely done, even as no mouse had ever lived past 27 days. If we
could even get our mice to live closer to the 27 day mark, that would be strong evidence of a healing effect. If a mouse were to live to day 28, well, then we’d own the world record.”

I agree with brainteaser that IF the the 27 days claim is verified it would be useful investigate, and that the blacebo effect discussion is not justified.

does anyone know anything about this “particular form of mammary adenocarcinoma”?

Sorry I am late to this and normally would not post.

I have read the paper and see no reference to corroborate mouse survival in previous experiments, maybe I missed it where did you get your information.

Also I see nothing in the paper that says in previous experiments the mice have never lived past 28 days

can you enlighten me!!!

Here is the kicker: the mice were injected with a form of cancer that normally kills all mice within 27 days. That’s 100% fatality within 27 days, folks. No mouse in the history of cancer research has ever lived with this cancer to the 28th day, no matter what form of treatment they received. Most of THESE mice recovered to live their full lifespans and developed immunity to the cancer. Does this compute? This research has succeeded where no other cancer research has to date: IT CURED THE MICE OF CANCER.

There were 6 experiments in 3 different medical schools over a period of several years, with mice from different sources and the involvement of bona fide scientists throughout, including a medical school professor. So it would be difficult to impute errors in the handling or injecting of the mice or to say the cancer “did not take”. Judging from the extensive ulceration and from the presence of viable cancer cells at all stages until total cure, it clearly took.

There were no crystals involved

Please read the article before you leap to knee-jerk conclusions.

Now I don’t know about you but the words “selective reporting” are looming very large in my mind and I am forced to concur with pv – this study was either written by charlatans or Sokal style hoaxers (here’s hoping – I do always try to see the best in people).

“I understand the experiment as follows: they had three groups, a group with treated sick mice, a control group of untreated sick mice in an adjacent lab, and later on in the last two experiments a control group of untreated sick mice in another city. The mice off site always died.

[...]

So, the mice in the control group on site that actually should not have received treatment and should have died, actually did survive when they did get treatment, while the control group off site that never got any treatment always died (although I don’t understand why this group was always so small compared with the other control group)”

The mice in the third control group off site always died. How is this to be explained? I assume the sample of the third control group is too small to draw any significant conclusions?

What I don’t get about Homeopathy in particular is why the practitioners can’t just admit it is a sort of “stealth psychotherapy with added cultural overtones”, which seems blindingly obvious to me. I can see why people can’t be “unconvinced” once they have spent years as believers – as John Diamond said years back in “Snake Oil”, you are effectively asking them to “renounce” years of their life and work – but how the smarter ones get to the point of believing in it in the first place…. that I can’t figure.

BTW, if you are in mainstream science and are pretty unscrupulous, you don’t have to make up all that much – just be a bit dishonest with the interpretation, cherry pick or “edit” the data, do no proper controls and then call a press conference. You too can be Andrew Wakefield, as it were.

And making stuff up is probably harder than you would think.

Anyway, one could hardly fail to see that hundreds of hours went into things like (e.g.) Milgrom’s papers.

Sometimes I just think about all the hours (years? lives?) that intelligent (though crazily misguided) people put into alternative nuttiness and a sense of despair overwhelms me…

Thanks for mentioning Feynman. The quote is apt!

Dr Aust, surely it’s a darn sight easier to invent the stuff than actually do any meaningful research and be honest about the results – especially where, with the aid of a credulous press, there’s a buck to be extracted from a gullible public. And even if Milgrom isn’t indulging in some elaborate fraud (which I don’t believe at all), wasn’t it Feynman who said that the easiest person to fool is oneself?

Do you think this was really done with actual mice at all, or was it made up, or is it a 21st century Sokal?

For a good example look up the published output of Ben’s sometime Bete Noire Homeopathique Lionel Milgrom:

Search Pubmed

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

with “Milgrom LR”

I agree, in fact looking at the paper I’m wondering if they actually bothered with an ethics committee at all – let alone a licence to actually run experiments on animals, particularly ones this cruel. Is there a way we can check out whether they did or didn’t?

Oh, but of course that would be ‘presupposing’ that basic logic applies to the universe.

Wow. I’ve got a theory that the dead rats from the woo-treated group actually travelled back in time and told their past-selves to go into remission. The resultant paradox caused the universe to explode, so God got a bit annoyed and quickly rebuilt everything as if nothing had happened. It’s got the same amount of evidence as the resonant bond “hypothesis”.

And how the hell did they get that past an ethics committee? I’ve seen a research plan which could potentially save people’s eyesight and save millions of pounds (or at worst improve PPE recommendations). But I can’t do it because various authorities think the current (rather inaccurate) animal tests are sufficient. I’ve got no problem with that research plan being blocked, but when crap like this gets through…

Hahaha

I don’t think the conclusion escaped them at all. I rather think they hope it will have escaped your normal CAM believer who is (they hope) too stupid to know any better. As I said – charlatans!

Remission in the healed group was assumed to be because of the “healing-by-intent” – basically someone thinking really hard about the disease going away. Remission in the non-healed group was then assumed to also be because of the healing: which had somehow leaked into them along a “resonant bond” which had been created with the mice being healed. The paper then presents these “resonant bonds” as an explanation for why tests show control groups receiving placebo seem to get better just as well as groups receiving so many tested therapies.

“Now I don’t know about you but I’d be more inclined to interpret this experiment as proof that crystal healing doesn’t work since it acheived no better results than doing nothing but this conclusion is one that seems to have escaped the experimenters entirely.”

Indeed. In order to explain what looks like the ineffectiveness of their healing magic they have invented a whole new kind of magic featuring “macroscopic entanglement of experimental subjects so that a stimulus given to one group also
stimulates the other group” (their own words). This can be used to explain away the failure of any treatment to perform better than placebo.

i think the answer to your question is not that there is any suggestion that the placebo effect works on mice (although interestingly it does seem to work for domestic pets albeit not as well as in humans, possibly because the pet is picking up vibes from the owner’s belief in the homeopathic remedy – although the chances of the experimenters managing to replicate this kind of relationship for 30+ mice is minimal). No, the point is that no “healing” as recognised by sane medical practitioners happened at all in this experiment. All they did was poison two groups of mice, wave crystals over one of them and then compare how they did. they ASSUMED that any remission in the group that they waved crystals over was down to the crystals and that any remission in the non waved mice was due to the placebo effect. Now I don’t know about you but I’d be more inclined to interpret this experiment as proff that crystal healing doesn’t work since it acheived no better results than doing nothing but this conclusion is one that seems to have escaped the experimenters entirely.

I’d also agree that this does seem a shockingly unethical use of experiemental animals (and I support medical testing on animals in the main) – are we sure that they actually did have the relevant ethical OKs sicne I thought the authorities were very strict about this sort of thing. Is there any way we can check?