ASM202 Nosodes, Woo and Garbage in the Oceans

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no sews woo and garbage in the oceans all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemike [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response this is a show that celebrates curiosity and i'm your host mike mccarg known online as ask science mike this show is a lot of fun and we've got some great i mean great science questions this week so what do you say let's get it started save the date okay because on january 11th i'm going to be at trinity church in buffalo new york if you're in buffalo i'd love to see you at trinity church for their fresh voices series there'll be more information about that on asksciencemike.com soon but for now just go ahead and save the date and also i'd like you to save the date if you're in fort smith arkansas or more accurately save the dates is i will be in fort smith doing a series of events uh from january like 21st to 26th so if you're in fort smith arkansas save the dates there again there will be more information to follow but i just know some of you might be firming up plans in the new year and i'd like to be a part of it if you're in buffalo or fort smith also uh i said i've been saying this at the end of the show but maybe i thought i'd say it at the beginning this week ask science mike has actually never been more popular in terms of downloads the show is getting downloaded a great deal every week but it's we don't have the number of questions coming in that we used to and i've been trying to figure that out um and i think it might be i used to on every episode say hey send in your questions and i just stopped doing that and we got a lot of new people listening and they may not realize how to send in a question here's the thing if you have a question about literally anything especially a question that you felt maybe judged for not uh if you'd have asked before that isn't safe in your community that's what this show is about and you can send in your own question via ask sciencemike.com there's two ways to do that one is you can fill out a form that basically sends uh caitlyn the show's produced for an email and she looks through all of those and andrew looks through all those and and picks uh some that then the patrons on the scene smack patreon page vote on and they become a part of the show and you can also send a voicemail you'll notice that we do two voicemail questions pretty much every week um and we get way fewer voicemail questions than email questions so if you want your question on the show your best chance is to go to ask sciencemike.com and then send me a voicemail and andrew and caitlin will hear that and the patrons will pick their favorites and then boom next thing you know that's how questions show up on ask science mike we do get enough questions of course to do the show every week um but you know i just make sure that we always have enough questions uh to to keep the show going so because i don't have anything to talk about without questions by the way if you all have been listening for a while you know that i don't really know what to talk about until you ask me and then i get really excited about your questions so the way you participate in the show and anyone can do that is go to ask sciencemike.com and then you just scroll down to the bottom of the page and you can submit a question right there hi science mike my name is clint i'm a huge fan of the show and your work i've been listening almost since day one but this is my first question so i recently discovered a friend of mine is an anti-vaxxer since i'm an enneagram five i told her i'd do plenty of research before i decided whether or not she was crazy so i've read a few books on vaccines in general but my question isn't about vaccines it's about homeoprophylaxis or homeopathic prophylaxis so instead of vaccinating her children she's chosen to use a homeopathic method which employs giving her kids something called a no sewed that is supposed to have the same effects of vaccinating but without all the chemicals and stuff that comes in vaccines that anti-vaxxers are afraid causes things like autism which it obviously doesn't but that's what she believes so what is the science if any behind the use of no soaps have any reputable studies confirmed the usefulness effectiveness or safety of no soaps does science have anything to say at all about no sews thank you for considering my question your question is a great question and a timely one and uh gosh the chemical thing it really gets me there's nothing wrong with chemicals we'd be dead without chemicals there would be no life on earth without chemicals let's be clear that water is a chemical and water is not bad for you in fact it's quite essential for your life so i i get annoyed when people use the word chemical to villainize a given product or treatment you know something contains chemicals well of course it does most things are made of chemicals especially biological things now some types of chemicals are carcinogenic they cause cancer some types of chemicals do get absorbed into our bodies and and stored or metabolized in strange ways so i understand where this line of thinking is trying to go but just dismissing things because it's a chemical lacks so much nuance that it becomes useless and in fact harmful so i want to start there with the fear of chemicals and vaccinations um orange juice is chemicals right and i mean like literally squeezed from an organic orange that's never been touched by pesticides and that orange juice would be full of chemicals uh a kale smoothie is full of chemicals etc etc okay just had to get that out of the way um let's talk about before we talk about if they work no so let's talk about what they are uh they're really gross i mean really really really gross um to make a no-sew basically um you take dried fluids and or tissues from someone who's had a given disease and then you use sympathetic magic which is curing like with like to take that infected tissue and or or dried fluids and dilute it i mean to be clear we're talking about literally dried blood and or mucus acting as the um initial composition of these homeopathic solutions called no sodes and then they are diluted an absolutely absurd amount um a common ratio would be one in 10 to the negative 60 uh parts um that that's uh that's that's insane you i mean you're talking about i don't even know the math billions or trillions of doses to get even one molecule from the original i guess fluid sample there this is also how essential oils are often made by the way it's not science there's nothing scientific about that you know i guess the idea is to distill some kind of energy it's absurd it's complete nonsense um so you've diluted this so that statistically there's not even a single molecule or atom from the original now in your mixture or ting tincture or whatever you're making and because of that of course there is no science to support no-sews as substitutes for vaccines and i mean none at all when we've done studies we and and we have actually done research on those the results won't surprise you a bit uh if we look at vaccines vaccines are about a hundred percent effective at preventing diseases for which vaccines are designed to protect you from about 100 percent uh placebo is right around 20 to 25 and no sodas land on average at 22 these things are literal placebos there is no medical value beyond placebo to these things at all on the other hand when they're improperly made when they're not diluted enough they can be vectors for infectious disease because dried blood and or mucus and or tissue is used to make these things so on the one hand they won't protect your children from vacate from diseases which we have vaccines for and the other if they're improperly made they can actually get your child or you sick with something else my gosh hard pass on no sews for me yeah i mean this is this is why anti-science movements concern me they have a real and significant public health cost when children don't take vaccinations other children who are immunocompromised or for legitimate reasons can't take vaccinations they have an elevated risk of getting sick but then healthy children who could have a vaccine not only might get the disease but often these homeopathic solutions to try to avoid vaccination can cause unrelated health problems this is the downside of internet knowledge we have to have media literacy friends we have to look at evidence and i i hear the arguments that the scientific method is not perfect that there are structural biases in science that we don't publish negative results very often that there is a reproducibility crisis yes yes yes to all that the work of science can and must improve and and good rigorous methodical data tells us vaccines don't cause autism that vaccines are in fact safe that vaccines are one of the most successful medical interventions in human history at preventing disease and improving quality of life and that yes many homeopathic solutions are beyond useless and can actively be dangerous or harmful homeopathic is often another word for a treatment proved ineffective proven ineffective in research gives me the heebie-jeebies so just say no to no sews my friends that is not a way to keep you your family or your friends safe from infectious disease and in fact might actually make you more prone to get them i just love kiwi co kiwico is gotta be one of my all-time favorite sponsors on ask science mike because they make really cool hands-on projects and toys designed to expose children to science technology engineering art and math also known as steam kiwico is based right in the state of california and mountain view and they're on a mission to help kids build confidence and create problem solving skills all while having fun these are just incredible products they're called crates they come in a variety of lines they're all really exciting and the the engineers and experts at kiwico spend thousands of hours designing and testing each and every crate and they are simply a delight seven different lines for different ages and age-appropriate including the new eureka crates for ages 14 to 104 i personally have signed up for the ukri eureka crate service after getting jealous of watching my daughters open their tinker crates and doodle crates and of course i see all of you sending me your pictures on social media of your children using those and the panda crates for very little ones koala crates the classic kiwi crate for ages five to eight and the atlas crate ages to 11. these are great projects that teach kids how to be fearless innovators to feel empowered and they're also just super super fun and it's that time of year when everybody's trying to think about what to get people for the holidays do you just go to toys r us uh and get another toy is toys r us even around anymore do you just go to a retailer and buy a toy that you know maybe other relatives get as well why not do something unique for the kids in your life this year and send a kiwi co subscription this holiday give the gift of hands-on learning for hands-on projects for tomorrow's makers and you could do that really easily just go to kiwico dot com slash science and that way you can um not only give a child the joy of fun learning uh this year but you can also get your first crate completely for free so as you go down your shopping list invest in the makers and thinkers of tomorrow by sending a kiwi crate kiwico.com science and of course i also want you to know about betterhelp which is a sponsor i'm thrilled to work with because they're focused on mental health better health is an online counseling service that is there for you they allow you to connect with a professional counselor in a way that's safe and private it's very convenient i've told you before that sometimes getting to the therapist's office is too much work for me and i spend my whole session calming down from trying to drive across los angeles and find a parking space but with better help i'm able to write from the comfort of an app connect with a licensed therapist who specializes in the kinds of issues that i'm facing and betterhelp can help you find someone as well all you do is go to betterhelp.com fill out a brief questionnaire that will let the experts at better health assess your needs and connect you with a counselor that is perfect for you and of course if the counseling relationship doesn't work they can connect you with a new counselor anytime for no additional charge best of all for me better help's really affordable and available on a sliding scale based on income it's really a phenomenal service and i'd encourage you to start today by going to betterhelp.com sciencemike to take the first step to better mental health for you [Music] our next question was an email it reads dear science mike i have been going through the process of deconstructing my christian faith for the past three years now and you and the liturgists have been truly life-saving in this journey i'm now at a place where i want to explore the possibility of reconstructing a new framework of spirituality for myself but i'm finding that the process of deconstruction and disillusionment that i've undergone has left me very skeptical and wary of other spiritual teachers particularly i'm drawn to ideas within eastern religions but have seen multiple instances of these ideas used to exploit searching people for capital gain i'm a phd student in the health sciences and know far too many examples of groundless pseudoscience being proclaimed as cure but also know of examples such as mindfulness and yoga which have roots in eastern religion that have shown genuine potential for healing how do i extinguish the woo from the truth how do i navigate the world of spirituality with healthy skepticism while also keeping my heart open to finding meaning i love this question it feels almost like a letter i think this is like the essential struggle for people today there has been so much harm done to the world and to the people of the world by people following a religious belief system i just don't think there's any way around the reality that western christianity played a big role in the building of empire and colonization and today is american christianity is deeply wed to a very exploitive system of capitalism that hurts people it hurts everyone it hurts the people marginalized by the systems and the people supposedly benefiting from it so what what do we do you know i had a very similar experience to you myself where i started to question christianity but still wanted to be close to god so i started to study hinduism and taoism and buddhism and islam and the baha'i faith i went on a tour of world religions seeing if maybe i just had the wrong one and i had a real tendency to glamorize and get excited about theological ideas that were new to me especially because reading about these things in books instead of experiencing them in community let me avoid the ways in which those religious systems had been co-opted in their own societies and used to marginalize and harm people i also noticed that i i tended to learn about world religions which is a problematic way of describing non-christian non-western religions primarily from white men and women who themselves either didn't follow those religions and study them academically or converted to those religions and popularized them in the west and in doing so made lots of money and that insight made me very reticent to discuss my dabbling in eastern religion publicly i didn't want to be a western white appropriator and popularizer of other faith traditions of course if you know my story i didn't spend a long time in those spaces i ended up becoming an atheist leaving faith behind then having a mystical experience and grew to a new era where i appreciated and continue to appreciate the personal impacts that a faith journey has on someone's life gosh one of my favorite things is to hear about people's spiritual practices spiritual beliefs and spiritual feelings it's one of the great joys of my life and work is to talk to people from so many faith backgrounds every kind of christian you can imagine literal witches muslims new age spiritualists buddhists hindus taoist just the whole beautiful rainbow of spiritual experiences i value hearing about it so much but i hold these religious notions very loosely i view them as part of the human experience i don't project them into necessarily how i understand or relate to physical reality or cosmology or the structure of things these are mythic poetic allegorical manifestations of the human experience to me and as long as i hold them loosely i find them deeply deeply valuable so is it woo when i have a friend who channels energy through a crystal well i mean if we're talking about healing disease probably it's going to be probably placebo effective but the qualitative aspect of their experience i'm fascinated by and value deeply um i'm a bad person to ask about truth my my epistemology has been rough shot and weak for years all knowledge is provisional to me i'm looking on a spectrum from uncertainty to uh maybe and rarely if ever find myself confident in a given idea there's just too many ways to take things apart the deconstruction so what i'm finding instead is that being present in faith practices allows me to find meaning in life and that itself is valuable enough what do i look for one i value faith experiences that aren't exclusivist meaning my faith is better than other people's faith i value faith experiences that are inclusive meaning uh i believe all people deserve a right to spiritual experiences i value faith experiences that are not exploitive um you know when i had a big hospital bill a little while back some people encouraged me to start doing one-on-one spiritual coaching for a high fee based on the fact that i'm internet famous and some people would probably pay a lot per hour to talk to me about faith experiences and i just couldn't do that it felt wrong it felt inappropriate and it felt exploitive so i did not do that um and i think that's what you look out for is this exclusivist like this is the only right way to have faith is it exclusive and that some people aren't allowed to have this experience is it exploitive meaning am i using a faith system to extract something from other people that could be currency capital material resources people's time people's energy people's emotional support if you're doing any of those if any other things are happening that's how i see woo that's how i see harmful or dangerous faith traditions um if it's enriching personally if it builds community if it promotes empathy those are the signs of really exciting and healthy spiritual experiences to me i don't have like a a resource to cite unless you want to read my first book finding god in the ways which is all about this stuff um this is the rare question where i don't have a resource to point to these are just the thoughts i'm puzzling through because uh you and i are in such similar situations only i'm not a phd student i'm a college dropout so um i don't know maybe maybe you could give me some advice [Music] hi mike i love your show i hope you can tell us about the fires in the amazon um how bad is it and what's causing it what can be done about it thanks so much well in a word really bad especially when you compare the burning this year to recent years although the burning isn't as bad compared to average rates of burn in the amazon because average rates incorporate the much more significant deforestation that was happening in the past that was getting much better because of better environmental policy because of international collaboration to protect and preserve uh the rainforest um here's what's happening like basically is um deforestation has traditionally been a big problem in the amazon which is huge uh you're talking about something like roughly the basin that contains the amazons like about the size of the lower 48. states in the us and if you're talking about um you know the the heavily forested portion which has some of the highest biodiversity on earth you're still talking about something you know i think six or eight times the size of the state of california that um is spread across multiple countries in south america um and that is the complexity the problem we're seeing today is most intense in the part of the amazon called the amazonas in brazil where public policy has changed because of new political leadership basically there's been an anti-environmentalist pro-industrial movement in brazil and that's created a two-prong problem number one climate change is making the dry season more intense than it has been historically and that's compounded by the fact that these policy changes have increased industrial deforestation which was in dramatic decline and there's also an increase in subsistence burning to convert uh rain forest forest land into arable soil for agriculture and uh that that double threat between climate change and increased pressure on the forest is why these fires are so bad there and they are bad it's causing significant air quality problems um obvious loss of biodiversity now you may have heard that uh the amazon produces 20 of the world's oxygen that is technically true and like one in five molecules released by a plant happens the amazon but most of that gets reabsorbed in terms of like the amount of net oxygen from the amazon it's probably more like five percent um so it's not like if the amazon keeps getting burned we won't be able to breathe literally won't be able to breathe um but the continued burning and deforesting the amazon's a big deal because the amazon among many reasons is a huge carbon sink all those trees are holding absolutely massive amounts of carbon um and so as we deforested that carbon goes in the atmosphere and accelerates more climate change it creates more burning and it's just a nasty cycle somewhat terrifying but what i want you to hear is that very recently the direction of deforestation and burning the amazon was on the right track it was getting better and better every year and a change in political leadership has reversed that and put us back on a bad trend folks it is not hopeless our relationship to the environment our actions and the people we elect create the policies that create our relationship to natural resources so if you're in brazil you have a big role to play in lobbying for and electing different political leadership in brazil but everyone can do something so i've got an article uh that several articles you should read uh on this on ask sciencemike.com this week but one in particular is called amazon fires eight ways you can help stop the rainforest burning this is from pri and it is uh well written and well researched it has eight specific things you can do which includes things like making a donation to uh organizations that protect amazon land either by buying it outright or supporting indigenous populations so that they don't have a a subsistence need or need to feed themselves by burning rainforest supporting indigenous people um one thing that's really striking about uh the change in brazil is is how hostile the current leadership in brazil is to indigenous people in brazil as an american i can't really lecture uh about how indigenous people are treated as america might be one of the most uniquely insidious cultures in human history and how indigenous people have been treated but it's still wrong the way the needs and rights of indigenous people in brazil are being attacked and eliminated by the current administration eating less beef and using less wood and paper those things can all help and of course the big one is it's not actually people who cause a lot of the environmental calamities in our world it is corporations trying to maximize their profits so challenging corporations is a major part of protecting the amazon and you can learn more about that again on ask sciencemike.com go to the show notes for episode 202 and look for amazon fires eight ways you can help stop the rain forests burning [Music] our last question is an email it reads what is the process of food decomposition in the ocean i live on a boat and often throw organic food scraps overboard like kale leaf stems and chicken bones tonight figuring that i'm composting in some way shape or form am i totally off base thanks for your great work here i am um you're a little off base unfortunately ariane um ecosystems uh that happen in water uh have a really delicate balance of nutrients and nutrient cycles and so by law you can't actually toss out food waste or organic waste like that unless you're 12 miles or more from the shore for really good reason as people throw food items into the water you can cause blooms of microbial life and algae that are really destructive to natural ecosystems fertilizer and food waste can cause things like red tide and devastate coastal communities and the sea life that lives in those regions so i would immediately stop throwing food scraps overboard assuming as you live on a boat you're near ashore if you're 12 miles out that's another thing but understand that food won't decompose the same way in the sea that it does on land things like um fruit peels can last for decades in the water why uh food decomposes using oxygen right let's say throw these terrestrial food masses into aquatic ecosystems and depending on where you are in the oceans different types of organisms might reclaim some of those especially soft tissues but other things don't break down readily in the ocean at all and can last a really long time i don't know about kale leaf stems those chicken bones could stick around for a while though and that's the concern so we want to avoid we've been treating the oceans like our garbage cans for hundreds of years thousands really but as the human population has grown the aggregate of our individual actions on boats adds up and then our industrial scale pollution is devastating ocean ecosystems so composting is a great idea actually but uh find a place to compost on land where those nutrients originated and where ideally if they aren't too close to the shore they don't end up leeching into coastal ecosystems and damaging them i'll leave a link for you in the show notes this week on asks mike.com called tips for deal with waste at sea which is from cornell cornell boy you can take the boy out of the south right uh cornell sailing and uh they have a lot of um not only the hard and fast law but also some helpful guidelines on how to be compliant with those laws and what those laws are necessary uh but no don't don't throw food waste overboard certainly within 12 miles of the shore and ideally not at all ever [Music] ask science mike would be impossible without everyone involved in making it happen i'd like to specifically thank brent cradle for management services caitlin hermstad for being the executive producer of ask science mike i'd like to thank greg nordin for producing and doing uh sound design and editing and andrew golucky for pre-production work and of course jeff botifor for writing the ask science mike theme song finally i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon who not only make the show financially possible but pick the questions every week you can learn more about joining our patreon community at asksciencemike.com by clicking on the little patreon icon thanks for listening everyone and i can't wait to talk with you next week