Friday, June 30, 2006
Pseudoscience Fights Back
Filed under: etc.
Dear Medgadget Readers,
You may remember that a few days ago we featured a post on the emWave Personal Stress Reliever. Shortly thereafter, we received an irate response from one Miss Gabriella, Director of Public Relations for said product. We would sincerely like to offer our apologies for what she called "inaccurate and misleading statements".
Although she never outlined the facts in error, it was nonetheless inappropriate for us to accurately and truthfully portray a product so clearly meant to relieve literally dozens of people of their hard earned $199 ($221.00 Canadian). The tactful thing to do is to take our lumps quietly, and not to mention the glaring inaccuracies rampant throughout their own website. But of all the things we've been called in our brief existence, tactful is not one of them. Let the witty retort commence:
In retrospect, we think it was the "pseudoscience" label that really ruffled emWave's feathers. When a company stamps the term "scientifically validated" on their product, shouldn't we just blindly accept that? Who would betray the sacred realm of scientific principles just to hock wares? Don't ask questions. Don't inquire. Blind faith got us this far, so just close your mind and enjoy the now stress-free ride. Honestly, to expect a company to back that up with even one legitimate publication is preposterous.
To clarify, they did have the integrity to cite several articles from their own company publications and two (yes, two) 'manuscripts in progress'. Miss Gabriella was so bold as to state "a substantial body of our research has been published in respected peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Stress Medicine and Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science." Agreed. Researchers from the company including R. McCraty, R. T. Bradley, D. Tomasino, and M. Atkinson have a number of publications completely unrelated to emWave or its founding principle of "psychophysiological coherence". And I'm sure our readers wouldn't be interested to know that there are no peer-review published articles on "psychophysiological coherence".
Based on the rare, but plausible, chance that I may have overlooked valid data supporting the emWave, I emailed Miss Gabriella requesting any such available literature. What I got instead was a phone call to my home from Miss Gabriella, never mind that I never gave her my home phone, nor is it listed on Medgadget.com, but I digress... No, no she didn't try to persuade me with well-formed arguments or an armory of 'data' ... she chose the more sly "but why don't you like our product" approach along with the cunning "it doesn't need evidence" angle. It wasn't long into the conversation before Miss Gabriella complained about my argumentative tone and I quickly corrected her, stating that my tone was sarcastic, and away we were again. Finally though we were able to reach common ground: she agreed that there was no valid research supporting the emWave and I agreed that sarcasm isn't helpful.
Sadly readers, I must confess that Gabriella had at least one valid point: there was a major inaccuracy in my pithy little review. I incorrectly refered to D. Childre as a doctor, complete with the credibility which accompanies such a title. Oh how I erred. I simply made the mistake any commoner would make when reading the emWave's homepage by assuming 'Doc Childre' (the only name appearing throughout the site) was a reference to Doctor Childre. No, quite the opposite in fact. Doc Childre is simply a regular honest-joe business man who conveniently happens to have the first name of--you guessed it--Doc. When I commented to Gabriella that this was odd, she said "well Josh is an odd name too!" Alas, her years as a master debater have paid off so that I could not respond.
As this apology to you and the emWave comes to a close, I think we should recap what I learned: 1) Call the phone company and have them block my number, 2) Pseudoscience wants to be respected as the leaders in false, undocumented claims, and 3) you can call Gabriella at 831.338.8710 -- we don't expect she'll be bothered, as she is a big fan of a scientifically-validated stress-reliever.
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