Motivational Biology with Dr Bruce Lipton, Cancer Quack
November 25, 2012UPDATE April 2020 — A more thorough (and less polemical) critique of Lipton can be found here: The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton: A Final Summing Up
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Commenters on my previous posts about Dr Bruce Lipton have often complained that the material I selected was not a representative sample of his ideas. So by “popular demand” I have decided to review a lecture which was kindly suggested by one such commenter. The lecture goes for two and a half hours, and this post will only cover the first hour of it.
Having watched it, I am not surprised that those who previously commented here in favor of Lipton, felt that they had really received something of substance from him. Lipton does seem to have a genuine desire to share his ideas with people. He doesn’t merely push a string of products at his audience in the manner that has become standard for New Age teachers. He comes across as a friendly, enthusiastic chap who I’m sure bears no ill will to anyone. This is not about judging his character or his personal beliefs, nor about idly “contemplating the interface between science and spirituality”. Lipton claims, seriously and scientifically, to have a cure for cancer. I take that claim seriously, and will examine it in relation to the science he claims supports it.
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Lipton presents some reasonably complicated cell biology, and as far as it went, I think he did a fair job of explaining a couple of basic concepts. Unfortunately, these basic concepts do not support his central argument. I expect his fans may be a little surprised when I present his basic concepts stripped of the scaffolding that he surrounded them with in the lecture.
Obviously, I am not impressed with what Lipton offers his audience, but I intend to present his views as fairly and accurately as I can. Comments are open for anyone who wishes to correct any errors they feel I have made in my presentation of his ideas.
I am going to leap straight into the lecture at about the one hour point, quote Lipton summing up his central thesis, and then retrace the steps he used to get there.
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The New Biology: Where Mind and Matter Meet by Bruce Lipton Ph.D
Lipton:
It’s your belief about the environment that adjusts your physiology. And your beliefs become most important because your beliefs are connected to your genes.
And the expression* that you have is related to what you have going on in your head. Think about it. Maybe think about a time when you were really sick and you said “Oh I can’t get up” and then somebody said “Look you gotta come to work right now, you gotta do something. You have to change your belief.”
What happened? You changed your belief, you got up, you got dressed and you did the job just fine, until you were able to go home and say “I think I can go home and be sick now again.”
And so the issue is this, that the point is the truth: perception selects genes, but perceptions may not always be right. And therefore perceptions by definition are called beliefs. And therefore when I put that back into the equation, you are not controlled by genes, you’re controlled by belief.
(*I guess I may as well point out that he is completely misusing the term gene expression. It doesn’t refer to your day to day feelings or activities. He talks about “expression” all the way through the lecture without ever telling the audience what it means.)
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So that should give an impression of the kind of terrain we are about to head into. In order to understand how Lipton climbed that mountain I will focus on Lipton’s teachings about the nature of cells; about the role of DNA in both human and cell behavior; and finally about the nature and effects of perception, as defined by Lipton.
The first core concept that I will deal with, is the idea that each cell in the human body shares the same attributes (functions and organs/organelles) with the individual cells in our body. In other words, or rather in my words….
1. “The cell is a microcosm of the human body”
With all the magnificent machinery that we call the human body, there is no new function that’s present in your human body that’s not already present in every single cell. You have a digestive system, a respiratory system, etc, so does a cell.
He doesn’t go into detail about this, but does offer a long explanation about proteins and the way they react to chemical “switches”, by changing their structure. I thought he did quite a nice job of explaining all this. But then he suddenly, and without any good reason decides that this change in structure can be defined as behavior. He implies a continuum from this kind of “behavior” to our behavior. So the statement that your beliefs affect your behavior is suddenly deemed to mean that your beliefs affect the “behavior” of your cells as well. One might argue for specific scenarios where such an explanation might hold, but he does not suggest any such scenarios, nor provide any other evidence beyond this blunt assertion.
He also explains that the string of amino acids which determine protein structure, could be said to form the spine of the protein.
This is of course another metaphor which he attempts to force into reality by the power of assertion.
Then he pushes things even further: humans live in communities; and in biology, multicellular organisms (including humans) are sometimes described as “colonies of cells”. There is a good biological basis for describing a human as a colony of cells, but there is no reason at all to believe that cells share the same emotional dramas as humans do in their communal existence. But Lipton’s reasoning takes him there and, completely without reason or even any attempt at a justification, suddenly leads him to deduce the cause of cancer:
If a cell doesn’t listen to the community’s voice, then the cell is not part of the community. cancer cells have withdrawn from the community. They’re still in there but they’re not listening to the voice of the community. They’re doing their own thing. Why would some cells get out of the community? And the answer is why are people homeless? Why are people out of work, or why are people out of work or why are people suffering? If their community is not supporting them at some point the cells recognize at some point “My God what do I want to be in this for?” So there’s a point that cancer starts to recognize as a result of break down of the community.
Again, this is not a simplification to explain a carefully developed theory grounded in cell biology. This IS the theory. It’s an assertion which has simply been presented as fact.
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He spends quite some time considering the “command center” of the cell. He quotes a journal article which uses that term, but instead of acknowledging that the term is a metaphor, he makes it look as if biologists have in fact been searching for an actual “brain of the cell”. As if this idea of the cell as microcosm of the individual is a common concept in biology. It isn’t. He’s borrowed the idea from mystical teachings. But that doesn’t stop him spending ages and ages explaining why science has supposedly reached the conclusion that the cell nucleus must be the “brain of the cell”.
Science, he notes, is male dominated; men think with their testes, and that’s why scientists concluded that the cell nucleus, full of genetic material like the testes, must be the “brain of the cell”. The audience laughs, but is of course unaware that science concluded nothing of the sort. Nor does it approach the cell in such an unscientific manner.
Lipton, by the way, thinks that the brain of the cell is the cell membrane. He’s pointed out elsewhere that the word even contains “-brane”. We will come back to this idea of the membrain when we look at perception. Now on to the second core concept.
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2. “You’re not controlled by DNA. You’re controlled by environmental signals”
Lipton’s fans have often insisted to me that the above statement is true; that Lipton has done the research and proven it; and that science refuses to accept it.
First, science does not make any such claim, and second, Lipton goes totally overboard in the implications he draws about environmental control of DNA.
Lipton gives, I think, a fairly good description here of the way a stretch of DNA is switched on or off by the action of proteins.
And he is indeed right in saying DNA can’t switch itself on or off by itself — this is standard, normal, mundane science. At least for normal scientists it’s normal science. But for Lipton it’s a chance for his favorite type of switch: the bait and switch. And this is a bit complicated……
Having convinced the audience that scientists believe the nucleus is the brain of the cell, Lipton boldly sets out to disprove that (nonexistent!) proposition. He argues that this can’t possibly be the case, because cells can live for months in a dish after they’ve had their nucleus taken out. He thinks this is a triumph, because, as he explains, if you remove the brain in a human, what happens? Death. But remove the nucleus of a cell, and the cell doesn’t die. Therefore, scientists are wrong when they claim the nucleus — with all that DNA — is the brain of the cell.
The cell can live for two or more months without any genes in it at all. It’s not sitting there, it’s moving around, it’s eating, it’s growing, it’s meeting other cells and communicating with them. It recognizes toxins and avoids toxins. In other words I did not change the behavior in one way whatsoever by taking out all the genes. What does that mean? Think of the logic, what does the logic mean? Can the genes control the brain of the cell, yes or no. (Audience: No!)…
He is very excited about this, but he shouldn’t be, and neither should anyone else. Science doesn’t predict that all chemical reactions will cease as soon as the nucleus is removed. There are many reasons why science doesn’t claim this, including, I guess, the fact that science does not claim that the nucleus is the brain of the cell.
On the other hand, however, if the cell continued to divide after the removal of the nucleus, that would probably cause a bit more interest. Lipton must have been snoozing when the role of the nucleus and DNA in cell division was being explained. This is actually a rather important concept in biology! How did he miss it??????
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Having failed to disprove a nonexistent theory, Lipton turns his attention to an even more important non-existent theory: The “Primacy of DNA”.
In 1953 when Watson and Crick found the secret of the DNA code, the hypothesis was made that genes control biology.
I’ve never encountered the term “The Primacy of DNA” in anything I’ve read or heard in biology, but maybe I missed something. But then why is it that all the top items on Google are a bunch of articles in New Age journals?
I do, however, recognize this “DNA>RNA>Protein” sequence and I even know it’s an early model of information flow from genetics. Lipton is right in that this model has been superseded. It is also, apparently, still commonly used, despite causing some confusion. However, the new improved version of this model, does not support Lipton’s views any more than the old model did. Sorry, even if I was capable of going into more detail, this is not the place to attempt to correct Lipton’s errors. The real science described succinctly here on a blog article by Larry Moran, author of a text book on molecular biology.
But just for the record, this is the current model.
The dotted arrows are the new additions. Lipton needs an extra arrow to go from protein back to DNA. There isn’t one. And this absence demonstrates that Lipton’s ideas, especially those presented in the next section, have no basis in biology.
(Please also note that the addition of the dotted arrows refers to very specific exceptions to the rule, not wholesale re-writings of the whole of mammalian physiology. This revision happened while Lipton was still at university. Why is he having his science corrected by a hot-headed blogger with no background in science?)
….So our belief in the primacy of DNA says this. Who you are, what you are, is predetermined in the blueprint, the DNA. So you become a read-out of the DNA.
This also completely and utterly wrong. Biology has not reached any such conclusion, as can be seen by glancing at any field of biology at all. And anyway, the above mentioned “rule” has nothing to do with behavior.
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3. “You’re not controlled by environmental signals after all. Instead, you’re controlled by your perceptions”
Having attacked a string of beliefs which science doesn’t hold about the function of DNA, Lipton is ready to move on to his next core belief.
But then that leaves us with the important question, If the genes aren’t controlling the cell, what is controlling the cell?….
His answer is “perception”. I’ve used inverted commas because Lipton means the chemical interactions that take place at the cell membrane. He has relabeled this “perception” because of the way the cell wall can “read” which molecule is present, and either open or close a channel as it approaches.
Again, he describes this complicated process fairly well as far as it goes, but as always, follows it up with vast leaps from one idea to the next without informing his audience that he has stopped talking science. He seems not to perceive the distinction himself.
At this point we enter the realm of Lipton’s cancer quackery, so it is important to follow the line of his thinking, as he starts from normal accepted science and moves through a series of transformations until he arrives at the desired end point: the idea that by changing our beliefs we can can cure cancer.
He does this by a very simple technique: he takes an accepted scientific term, gives a complicated scientific explanation of its meaning, and then pushes that word through a series of redefinitions. Each of these steps is justified by the idea of the cell as a microcosm of the human being — that any attribute a human being has, must also be found in a cell.
So we start with activity at the cell membrane.
You will notice the word “self” appearing in the inside of the “cell-f”, because as we have seen, the cell must also have a self.
…The membrane is like a barrier that separates the outside from the inside because water can’t go through the middle of the membrane and carry information across. So the Self on the inside is separated from the environment on the outside.
Lipton goes through a fairly elaborate description of receptors on the cell membrane. He suggests that we also have receptors: the sense organs. So just as Lipton redefined the term “behavior“, to refer to chemical activity in a cell, now we get the activity of receptors being redefined as “perception”, of course with all the implications involved in human perception.
He has already “established” that cell behavior is not controlled by genes (again, no one ever claimed it was); and now he has “established” that cell behavior is controlled by this process of “perception”. You can probably already see where he’s going with this: that because cell behavior is “controlled by perception” then our behavior must also be controlled by perception.
At this point, he does something startlingly stupid, even by his own standards.
He sets about demonstrating that perception is based on beliefs, and that beliefs can be wrong. His demonstration actually doesn’t establish this at all (he uses maps of the world — don’t ask!) And from all this he draws a string of staggeringly stupid conclusions. That perception is determined entirely by ones belief system; and that “perception” in cells is also entirely determined by the cell’s belief systems; that our mental perceptions-belief-systems hook up directly with the perception-belief-systems of each cell in our body…….
…..and concludes therefore that our belief systems control our _______.
[Fill in the blank]
For me, the obvious answer is “cells” — The belief system controls the cells. Surely that’s the conclusion that any cancer quack would love to reach, isn’t it? Not Dr Bruce. This is the correct answer:
Our belief systems control our DNA.
Of course, this means that our beliefs cause any medical problem we might have of a genetic nature, and likewise our beliefs can heal such problems. This is coming from a man who spends a lot of this lecture bashing mainstream science for supposedly thinking genes “control everything”. Science does not hold such a reductionist, one dimensional and idiotic position. But Lipton does. All he has done is replace a non-existent belief in the primacy of DNA with a vastly more stupid, and sadly very existent and very dangerous belief in the Primacy of Belief.
I honestly have absolutely no idea why Lipton wants to reach that conclusion. He has already said that DNA doesn’t control cell “behavior”, so what in God’s name he is going to make of this I don’t know. I really don’t.
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Conclusion
All of this is sunk by the lack of that arrow in the diagram above leading from protein back to DNA. Protein has never been found to transfer information back to DNA and alter it. But on Lipton’s account, this is not only possible for protein, but for beliefs! But these are not just any old beliefs. These beliefs have made a special magical journey. They started out as the simple chemical reactions on a cell membrane, and then they turned into perceptions. From this state they turned magically into beliefs, and rose magically into the brain, or something. Who knows…. We don’t need to know because this is a magical story. And from there they made the great journey back home where they rebuilt the bridge from protein to DNA that was knocked down by the naughty Crick and Watson, and crossed the mighty chasm into back into the cell nucleus….. Where they lived happily ever after.
Or what? Does anyone else have a clue how this is supposed to work? More will be posted on this topic.
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Spirituality is No Excuse 
The more I read from and about Lipton, the more I think he’s got some kind of problem understanding equivocation and the fallacies of composition and dissolution. I honestly wonder if he’s capable of grasping the concept that a word can have very different meanings depending on context. I honestly wonder if he’s incapable of understanding that parts are not necessarily miniature versions of the whole or that a whole can have properties that emerge from the parts interacting, rather than those properties being inherent to the parts.
His success is based on his unperspicaciousness!
It always amazes me how New Age teachers always go into great detail about the things that can skew our perceptions, but never mention things like confirmation bias, post hoc fallacies, etc.
“And your beliefs become most important because your beliefs are connected to your genes.”
Sorry, after reading this sentence I skipped to the end, here, so I have ignored the remainder.
Saves me a lot of time doing this…
Reason, mathematics and science should trump belief, intuition and/or religion every time. Not having read further I assume this argument connecting beliefs with genes is bogus.
A cancer patient might or might not recover from cancer by thinking positively, but it’s not going to affect your genes, you are born and die with your genes.
I don’t think my beliefs are connected much to my genes at all.
I have some beliefs that neither of my parents had.
Various people have beliefs which they can change or contradict at the drop of a hat, depending on who they are talking to or who is listening – think of politicians, lawyers, advertising executives, and company directors, just about everyone, except some religious or spiritually commited types.
Sorry, again, especially if I sound rabid today, could be affecting my genes, but I am not frothing at the mouth yet.
Interesting that “membrane” contains a homonym of “brain”. And “mem” is short for “memory”! It’s a mem-ory-brain!
Anagrams of “Dr Bruce Lipton” include:
Blunder-tropic (my personal favourite)
Purblind recto (almost “stupid arse”)
Public nerd rot (is what he’s been talking about the)
Blueprint cord (DNA. Maybe he’s an)
Inbred cult pro?
The anagrams don’t lie. There are harsher ones for those of an Anglo-Saxon disposition. http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html 😉
That’s good! I think I forgot to hurl any obscenities in this post. I probably should have done because it would have given Lipton’s fans a chance to complain about something without having to defend anything he said. Most inconsiderate of me.
@Donald,
No worries mate! That’s exactly why I opened with that quote – so people would know what they’d be letting themselves for.
Excellent post, Yakaru. I laughed, I cried.
Well it was certainly an epic. The thing that emerges most clearly for me from all this is that Lipton doesn’t even know what his own teachings are.
I have a feeling this will become one of the most clicked on and least read posts on this site. I predict that none of Lipton’s fans will comment here.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that last one. I suspect most will comment because they didn’t read the post, aside from skimming for buzzwords to tone troll about your “negativity.”
I hope you’re right, Bronze Dog. I really do. I can’t describe what a torture it was listening to that lecture and trying to put Lipton’s ideas into some sort of coherent order for the post. I’ll feel somehow cheated if at least one nut bag doesn’t show up here telling me I need to shift my paradigm.
But I fear they only respond to genuine negativity. Otherwise they just decide it “doesn’t resonate” with them and they move on.
@Yakaru If he doesn’t even know his own teachings, he fits right in with his fellow Hay House authors. I guess when you’re spouting nonsense, it’s hard to keep it all straight.
Well thanks to his specialist knowledge, he has the ability to not know his own teachings to a far greater degree than most at Hay House. Louise Hay, for example, can only wave her arms about and insist that beliefs control everything. Lipton can get right into specifics about proteins and cell receptors and DNA, before waving his arms about and insisting that beliefs control everything.
One thing that amazed me was how mechanistic his explanations were. From the moment he attacked biology for being mechanistic, he described how proteins did what they did simply because of their shapes, called them machines, and even said they were machines despite not looking like the machines we’re used to. I think your observation about him being versed in NLP techniques was probably spot on, and this mechanistic foreplay was probably some kind of subliminal message to show that he understood the mechanistic models, before doing that slight of mind where they began to “perceive” and then act in a binary fashion of “growing” or “defending themselves”, right up to making a decision to turn feral, the cancerous outlaws of the cell community!
I imagine the messiah-on-acid delivery was a big part of it, the high-pitched, urgent, almost screaming tone, which beats your brain into submission and doesn’t give you time to critique a sentence before he’s onto the next. Then there’s the awful Q&A thing, which I noticed were also delivered with great impatience, and were often a closed question, sometimes reinforced with “Come on, yes or no?” (when as we know the correct answer was mostly “mu”).
You’re right, Yakaru, it was actually painful to sit through, and I’ve still got another quarter of an hour to go, but I’m going to do it if it kills me…and if he’s right about stress and EM fields, it just might. That’s the other insane thing – if he believed his own line, he’d give a nice calm delivery, because he’d be chilled out, meditating twice daily and not letting himself get all het up. But I don’t think he does. At some point the financial incentive to go over to the dark side showed itself. I wonder if he’ll be another Jerry Hicks if he gets a serious illness, straight off to the top orthodox doctors for the latest drugs or radiation therapy. Of course, by then we might have discovered much more about the mechanism of aging and death, and ways to get round it, and it’ll be mechanistic, as always.
For a brief period in the lecture he was actually advocating an extreme behaviorist position — saying that the environment controls everything, even right down to being able to alter DNA. (Why the hell do woos always want to alter DNA anyway?) But then he suddenly changed it, and decided that beliefs control everything, which is even more extreme than the most fanatical behaviorist ever was.
He’s certainly a strange character. What surprised me the most is that he structured his talk in exactly the same chaotic and unstructured manner as the shorter talks I’ve seen where he seems to be raving off the cuff, leaping from topic to topic, yet all his slides were in the right order. So he really planned it like that. There is a real plan behind it — he misrepresents the science, attacks it and then solves the nonexistent problem by throwing in something utterly irrelevant but sciencey sounding — but there is no way the audience would have followed any of it. If they didn’t know any of the science, they could not possibly have seen any relevance, and obviously if they had have known the science hey would have been climbing up the walls and tearing their hair out.
I had to watch it at almost half speed just to follow his monologue, and I ended up transcribing the whole thing too, because there is no way to just mentally note it and then recount it in ones own words.
It’s ironic that he was dissing Descartes too, because his world view shares more with Descartes than with modern science. Descartes’ belief that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul because it isn’t bifurcated like other parts of the brain and could resonate with the winds of the spirit is quite Liptonesque in its reasoning (though a million times more sophisticated). Of course Descartes was writing 350 years ago and science developed by refuting it. But Lipton has no excuse, and neither does Sheldrake for that matter.
[…] Update: For a more thorough critique of Lipton’s teachings, see Motivational Biology with Dr Bruce Lipton, Cancer Quack. […]
[…] Bruce Lipton: Quack, Creationist, Buffoon, PhD « Spirituality is No Excuse on Motivational Biology with Dr Bruce Lipton, Cancer Quack […]
An excellent analysis. As yet I’m not sure who is more annoying, Lipton or his militant fans who I could well imagine as suicide bombers if Lipton only asked. It would be interesting to see an a attempt at a rebuttal by Lipton himself. Have you thought of inviting him to debate his position?
Thanks!
Yeh, his fans been quite vociferous (and vague!) on the other couple of posts I’ve done on Lipton. Not surprisingly, they’ve stayed silent on this one.
Debate him? Jeez, I’d have to explain his own position to him and try and keep him on topic! And actually, just clearly explaining what his teachings actually are is enough to thoroughly expose the stupidity and the danger of it all.
I’d imagine the other strategy would be to get him to say one thing definitively and hold him to it when he contradicts himself later. Given all the equivocation, getting him to define his terms consistently would be a nightmare.
It looks like this is a thing synonymous with Hay House authors. As I have a interest in Brain Science somebody recommended reading something by a Nueroscientist called Joe Dispenza. When I checked him out I found that he is in fact a Chiropractor and self proclaimed Genius! I looked at a couple of Youtube offerings and they’re worse than Lipton’s nonsense, believe it or not.
Hahahahahaha…I meant Jerry Hicks in my last post, not Bill. Perhaps you’d edit that for me, Yakaru, save me looking even more of a plonker than I already do. Oh the irony. Hard to know which of them would be spinning faster in his grave.
Yep, corrected.
For the record, Jerry Hicks, made a career out of telling people that cancer is a result of bad thoughts and can be healed with good thoughts, and advised against treatments like chemotherapy. Then he discovered he had leukemia and immediately started chemotherapy. A story was spread that his poor health and hair loss was due to a spider bite, but when it was clear that he was going to die, it was admitted that he had leukemia. Then he died, demonstrating how well his product (the law of attraction) works.
The current story is, I believe, that he sacrificed himself so that his wife Esther could learn non-attachment. Personally, I would have suggested marriage counseling or divorce, but each to his own I guess.
Yeah, that’s even better – it’s worth looking a plonker to read your explanation.
*** From the site owner: Comment deleted due to complete failure to address the issues raised in the post, while spouting sexually violent obscenities and insults. Try again, dickweed, and you can even keep all the insults if you really must, but if all you can do is repeat Lipton’s assertions without even attempting to back them up, don’t bother. Read the post for my response to your repetitions. (Also, learn to spell.) -Yakaru***
A reminder for Lipton fans who want to comment here: your opinions are welcome and your thoughts appreciated. I would be especially interested to hear from anyone who is familiar with DETAILS of Lipton’s SPECIFIC claims. Please feel free to correct any misrepresentations you feel I have made.
However, just repeating Lipton’s claims — which is what the previous (deleted) commenter started off doing doing before having a complete gibbering meltdown, is a waste of time. I already explained Lipton’s ideas in the post. You don’t need to do it again. You need to explain what you think I got wrong, and why, giving reasons.
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So far on all the Lipton posts here, most of his fans have either insisted there are studies that support Lipton, but not listed any of them; or listed studies, but not said which parts of Lipton’s teachings they support.
In response to Lipton’s claim that the Membrane is the “Brain” of the cell, here’s an interesting news Item that he, and his pal, Rupert Sheldrake may like to take a look at.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130118064725.htm
That’s funny! I wonder what Lipton would make of that. After implicitly claiming that a cell can’t live without its “brain”, he’d probably have to view cells continuing to live without a membrane as some kind of miracle I guess…. Or maybe it’s diabolical. evil materialistic scientists forcing a cell to live without its brain. They probably didn’t even communicate with the cell first to get its permission.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130118064725.htm
Have a laugh by all means. The development of the fruit fly cells within the embryo are without membranes in the first instance.
“After the 13th division cell membranes slowly invaginate, dividing the syncytium into individual somatic cells.”
While you are laughing, produce to us a cell without a membrane that can actually preform its function.
Ron, correct me if I’m wrong, but it looked like you just posted a link to a cell without a membrane that can perform its function (at least, of living and dividing 13 times), and then challenged someone to produce evidence of one. That was the point of the preceding posts, from which you copied the link, that one exists. Lipton seems to suggest that would be impossible, since he says the membrane controls the cell.
@Ron,
What on earth are you talking about?
What has that got to do with Lipton’s teachings?
What has it got to do with my criticisms of Lipton’s teachings?
For no particular reason I have always imagined that Hay House has a third world sweat shop employing young children to spot dissenting blogs and post responses like Ron’s.
I can not imagine why anybody who is not on the payroll would attempt an Ad Hoc Hypothesis such as Ron’s, in support of Lipton’s mem-brane nonsense.
Well that’s more plausible than anything I can think up to explain what Ron was thinking, but I just checked his IP and it’s not from a third world country.
Quite a few people on these Lipton posts here have done what Ron did. Maybe it’s a kind of cargo cult phenomenon. They see people linking to scientific studies and saying “this means I’m right”, and then they try to do the same thing. And the study you linked to was the first one he saw.
“While you are laughing…”
😀
typed:
The development of the fruit fly cells within the embryo are without membranes in the first instance.
“After the 13th division cell membranes slowly invaginate, dividing the syncytium into individual somatic cells.”
While you are laughing, produce to us a cell without a membrane that can actually preform (sic) its function.
(Now from me, i.e. Donald)
Maybe Ron is a microbiologist ? If he is, then he knows more about this than I do. That limitation could also apply to other readers here.
I do not know the source of the quote starting “After the 13th division cell membranes…”
It may or may not be an authentic quote, I cannot tell. I had a look around in the the links, but no trace of it, the closest thing to 13 I have found so far is the Gregorian year 2013. I´m worried about the number 13, 13 gives me bad vibes, I would not expect 13 to have much use in the natural world´s phenomena, although it does appear in the Fibonacci sequence/series. I have not looked up “invaginate”, “syncytium” nor “somatic” yet.
I think or ponder about the meaning of the word cell in the English language ? Possibly cells were originally named cells after people could see them down microscopes because of their structure (the structure is a container, in biological cells I guess the membrane has the property of being able to expand, stretch, and subdivide into two smaller copies of itself). There is some process at work there, seemingly controlled by the membrane, but calling the membrane a brain is going too far, if you take a brain to be a distinct organ.
Possibly Dr Lipton is misunderstanding the science (deliberately ? probably there is money in this somewhere), and the various commentators here are misunderstanding the misunderstanding (accidentally ?) and misunderstanding each other. That is the impression I get. I am not at all sure what Ron was trying to express, he may for example have been being sarcastic. Or he may have been positing that if a cell has its membrane removed it is both: a) no longer a cell, & b) no longer functional.
That still does not suggest to me that a membrane is a brain. My skin is not a brain, although without my skin I would not work very well for much longer, notwithstanding that my brain was still operational.
The first word is missing from the previous post. What came through missed the name “Ron”. So it should be: “Ron typed”, not “typed”
The quote is sourced from a Wikipedia article, in a paragraph which in turn is referenced to something outside Wikipedia (at [23]):
The quote is:
After fertilization of the oocyte the early embryo (or syncytial embryo) undergoes rapid DNA replication and 13 nuclear divisions until approximately 5000 to 6000 nuclei accumulate in the unseparated cytoplasm of the embryo. By the end of the 8th division most nuclei have migrated to the surface, surrounding the yolk sac (leaving behind only a few nuclei, which will become the yolk nuclei). After the 10th division the pole cells form at the posterior end of the embryo, segregating the germ line from the syncytium. Finally, after the 13th division cell membranes slowly invaginate, dividing the syncytium into individual somatic cells. Once this process is completed gastrulation starts.[23]
23 — Katrin Weigmann, Robert Klapper, Thomas Strasser, Christof Rickert, Gerd Technau, Herbert Jäckle, Wilfried Janning & Christian Klämbt (2003). “FlyMove – a new way to look at development of Drosophila”. Trends in Genetics 19 (6): 310–311. doi:10.1016/S0168-9525(03)00050-7. PMID 12801722.
[…] this lecture, he argues that the popular press has misinterpreted the modern science of genetics and […]
[…] the middle of an incredibly long and garbled lecture (which I wrote about here), there is a brief segment where Dr Bruce Lipton isolates a very straight forward topic for […]
Yakaru,
I don’t have time to look for good references regarding all your comments. just want to give you one example… I think that your comments are biased.
“Having convinced the audience that scientists believe the nucleus is the brain of the cell, Lipton boldly sets out to disprove that (nonexistent!) proposition. ”
there are quite many papers in the scientific literature, which state that the nucleus is the brain of the cell. have a look here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X05021388
“The nucleus is the brain of eukaryotic cells that guides the life processes of the cell by issuing key instructions.”
traditional behavior genetics certainly assumes that behaviors are based on genes and not on environmental influences leading to epigenetic changes etc.. so there was an assumption that certain genes cause traits etc..
new papers which I’m aware of show increased risk of specific genetic variation with certain environments on some outcomes..
but it’s all a work in progress.. and of course it is a lot more difficult to take environmental influences into account (error, methodology etc)
here is a nice article on the human genome project which also shows the implicit assumptions leading to the project which have proven to be wrong.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/11/the_human_genome_project_ten_y040311.html
I think Lipton is right in criticising the overemphasis on nature and neglecting nurture. of course he is highly speculative regarding many issues.
there is so much controversy within the scientific literature itself regarding many issus f.e. does the psyche in any way influence the development of cancer etc..
I don’t like that Lipton says as if his speculations were true. but to be fair, many scientists do the same, when showing their preliminary findings to the public. there was/is so much hype in genetics and neuroscience telling the public as if it was only a matter of several years until scientists have found ways to cure complex illnesses.. it turned out to be a lot more complicated than it was expected by simple genetic assumptions
I would love to get more into all of this but I simply don’t have the time.
… there was even a science publication titled “the brain of a cell” by Baltimore in 1984.
“Given our knowledge of the standard neural body, the nucleus of the cell has often been compared with the rational brain of the body. The radial axis of the genetic body is, like in the neural body, the Great Chain. The chromosomes of the nucleus are perceived as being the blueprints — the idea — upon which the body is constructed. The nucleus is the “brain of the cell” and its “executive suite” (Baltimore 1984). ”
here is the paper of the citation: http://journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=2264912
Thanks for finding the articles, Piotr, but you are saying something completely different to what Lipton is claiming. I don’t think you have realized yet just how stupid this man is, or how much damage he is doing to people.
Science does not say that the nucleus is the brain of the cell. Science uses the ANALOGY that the the nucleus is LIKE a brain.
It’s just an ANALOGY.
Lipton doesn’t understand this and takes it literally. He does not realize that scientists DO NOT mean that the nucleus can think, or that if you remove the nucleus the cell will die.
…
And incidentally, thanks for confirming that Lipton is a creationist. The last link is to a creationist website.
But Lipton is so stupid that he thinks he is disproving a tenet of cell biology by showing that some cells don’t die if you remove the nucleus. In fact all he has done is shown the point where the ANALOGY doesn’t work any more.
Even more stupidly, he then uses a different ANALOGY, saying that the membrane is the “brain”, but he is so stupid that he doesn’t realize that this is also an ANALOGY.
He takes his own analogy literally and decides that this “brain” can “perceive” — which is another ANALOGY that he takes literally. Then — and this is really stupid — he confuses two meanings of the word “perceive” to conclude that these “perceptions” that occur in the cell membrane can be called beliefs.
Then he decides that these beliefs can somehow be influenced by thoughts in the brain, and that these thoughts can cure cancer.
That is why I call him a cancer quack. What he is selling is pure quackery with absolutely nothing to back it except a bunch of analogies. There are no articles that will back it up. Lipton can’t find any either.
Lipton is not speculating about an interesting field like you are. He is using his PhD status to sell cures to desperate people.who don’t want to die.
And incidentally, thanks for confirming that Lipton is a creationist. Your second link is to a creationist website.
mhm. I don’t know lipton and would have to know a lot more to make conclusions on that matter..
everything in the sciences are analogies and modells to understand it; we are just striving for having better and better modells of reality; we are profoundly limited by out methodologies..
good to know that it was a creatonist website, I didn’t know that. I’ll only look for research papers from now on 😀 but there are quite some interesting papers on the genome project by collins etc which show that genes explain just a fraction of the risk for diseases.. just looked for something simple; that was obviously a mistake
*EDIT: Thanks for commenting again. I didn’t see it before posting the comment below.*
The only evidence Lipton provides for is ideas in the lecture is the following — a dance troupe that consists of women over 50 who look young and are fit enough to keep dancing.
Sadly for Litpon — and even more sadly for anyone who is dying because they bought his products instead of seeking treatment — there is fairly straight forward biology concerning aging. It relates to telomere length. The longer your telomeres, the more slowly you will age.
For Lipton’s example to work, he would have needed to find a group with short telomeres who look older. Instead he bases his entire case on the idea that these folks look young, therefore it is because their beliefs affected the “beliefs” of their cell membranes. This is really really pathetic.
In fact, the example of aging is one of the few cases where a very straight forward connection between DNA structure and outwardly observable physiology.
I am not sure that I qualify as a Lipton fan. I see flaws in what he says as well as some truth.
At the same time, I, without having a Ph.D in biology or anything else have drawn similar, if not exactly the same conclusions.
My conclusions are based on years of observation of people whose internal health problems resemble their external lives and whose cells act as they do. I came up with the expression micro matches macro, meaning that peoples cells and other smaller parts of their bodies tend to act as do the people themselves. For instance people experiencing autoimmnune issues involving cells attacking their own bodies, also tend to be fighters and attackers in the lives they lead.
Further one of your key points is that Bruce Lipton is a quack who gets people to use his methods rather than seek treatment.
Here is where I stand on that..
Most of the people I have worked with have actually sought and used medical treatment without much success. In some cases available treatment methods have not generated results. In others, such as those involving diagnoses of so called als, there are no treatments to be found. So, while I myself basically have little to no use for medicine, many of those working with me are not of the same mind.
The thing is that these people who were not succeed in getting healthier via medical treatment often have succeeded in getting healthier by changing belief and behavior. I have seen dramatic changes from people simply learning new ideas.
Having some understanding of the conventional wisdom regarding how biology and things like cancer work, at first I was perplexed by what I was seeing. So it’s not as if I came up with some random theory and then went on to sell it. Quite the opposite. I saw and experienced things and had to adjust my conceptual framework to fit what I was, amazed to be, seeing and experiencing.
In close to twenty years of helping people heal this way, while I have received many benefits of many kinds, I have received only small amounts of money from only a small number of people, some of whom I have worked with for hundreds of hours. So it would be difficult to call me a quack or to see what other than actually seeing results would motivate me to keep doing what I am doing.
Also I heal myself using the same approaches I show others and have had no need for medical treatment in decades.
Additionally, by applying the conceptual framework, I have been able to predict illness. In other words by seeing what a person believes and how that person applies those beliefs in life, I can tell in advance with some accuracy what types of health issues the person will go on to experience.
So while you may find flaws in some of what Bruce Lipton is saying and in the logic of his arguments, you might want to be careful about dismissing the entire thing and about being too sanguine about the validity of your own conceptual framework.
Hi Marty, are you telling us that you have had success treating Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, in paragraph six. Or are you saying that you help people through it by helping them feel better in some way?
I am saying that I have had success helping people so called diagnosed with als to heal.
In other words, among other things, they have stabilized their health and maintained and in some cases increased physical functioning ability.
I am currently working with dozens of people so called diagnosed with als and most of them are getting at least some results from using a holistic approach to solve their health problems.
As we are all getting better at this, we are seeing better results.
Further, possibly the thing that is most effective in changing their health situations for the better is, as a matter of fact, changing psychology.
This video one of them was taken while we were working together intensely.
I am also currently involved in the making of a documentary the subject of which is people who have been diagnosed with als and healed themselves. Some of those appearing in the documentary have worked with me, particularly on the psychological aspects of solving als.
People can call me a quack all they want. I am happy to discuss what I do and why it works and, by the way, to improve my ideas and refine it all with input from others. In over twenty years of helping people heal I have only won converts, sometimes via arguments spanning years,
Everyone who has ever taken real time to discuss with me my conceptual framework and how it can be applied has come away agreeing more than they had and the more they learn about it the more they agree.
Another thing, one has to be careful about blasting something just because it is not based on experimental science.
People make decisions all day long without using control groups or multiple trials or attempting to duplicate results. They assess situations and decide what course of action seems appropriate.
Yes, anything that is valid can be verified and duplicated. That does not mean that something that has not been run through an experimental process is not valid.
Marty, I have just placed you back on comment moderation. Please keep any future comments brief — at best raise only one point per comment — and please don’t double post.
— Yakaru / site admin
***UPDATE***
Thanks for your polite note, Marty. Moderation removed.
@Marty,
Thanks for commenting. But there are a few problems with all that…
You wrote:
Unfortunately, with that you have made exactly the same mistake that I just spent the whole post criticizing Lipton for making.
You’re interpreting what you see in terms of assumptions which you don’t acknowledge. You assume there must be some connection between what you see as people’s “external lives” and what you understand their cells to be doing. It’s a hypothesis, but this is obscured by the wording of that sentence. Your wording makes it sound like it’s an established fact.
This is a simple error and easy to correct without stopping you from expressing any of your ideas or pursuing any lines of research. But it is a standard error which has become the standard mode of communication among alt med people as well as quacks like Lipton.
Try this:
“For ten years I have observed behavior of people with known internal health problems. There appear to be certain similarities between their actions and their illnesses, beyond those which might be expected….”
— Of course you will have found a way to factor in the obvious ways in which an illness might be causing a behavior.
“…My intuition leads me to wonder if there may be something in the ancient mystical idea that there are connections between the “microcosm” and the “macrocosm”. I wonder if such speculation might lead to useful therapy techniques.”
— And of course you will have factored in things like confirmation bias and post hoc reasoning, as well as the basics of professional observation & recording techniques.
There are no known physiological mechanisms and no plausible basis in biology for that hypothesis. Lipton’s ideas do not support it, for the reasons I pointed out in the post.
Unless you acknowledge all this, you are wasting everybody’s time and heading straight down the road to quackery.
…
Please note that this post is about Lipton, and not your work. Feel free to respond to criticism of your ideas here — that’s only fair, but otherwise please relate any future comments directly to the contents of the post.
Your points are well taken and I appreciate and can use the feedback.
I felt that I was defending in general Lipton’s arguments by saying that while there may be flaws in some of the particulars of what he says, I have observed phenomena which correlate with much of the conceptual framework he presents.
While I acknowledge that I have not strictly followed certain protocols commonly used in research, there have been a huge number of cases observed and given that and other aspects of the data I have gathered there is reason to believe that my conclusions are largely accurate.
So while I understand much of your reasoning and basic arguments, which if true would seem to debunk what Bruce Lipton is saying, the truth may be closer to this, that while Bruce Lipton may at times say illogical, irrelevant or even ridiculous things, for those who sort the wheat from the chaff, some, or all, for all I know, of his seemingly outrageous big picture ideas may actually be of great value.
Regarding my descending into quackery, while it may be the job of others to do research following strict protocols, I see my job as helping people get healthy. If I observe a phenomenon hundreds or even thousands of times, see a logic to what I am observing and successfully apply that logic to helping people heal, I am not descending into anything, I am getting the job done. That’s what I do and that’s what my comments are based on, and if people want to get an accurate picture of how things work they might be well served by considering what I have to say.
Hi Marty, I’d like to support you in working with people diagnosed with ALS, and it’s a kind thing to do without much in the way of payment. At the same time, I do think you should consider yakaru’s points carefully, and consider your own carefully too.
“Yes, anything that is valid can be verified and duplicated. That does not mean that something that has not been run through an experimental process is not valid.” That’s right. Things “not run through an experimental process” have not been “verified and duplicated”. They may or may not be valid. They are unknown. If you keep those hunches and ideas in proportion and guard against getting carried away by confirmation bias, you’ll probably be fine and do good supportive work. Without being careful about what you do and do not know, you might cause harm by promoting untested things you believe that happen to be false. As just one example out of many, if you measured and studied the people you work with carefully, you might discover that other therapies they receive are more likely causes of any improvement you discern.
ALS is a complicated set of conditions and diagnosis is imperfect. It is possible you happen to have worked with lots of people who were wrongly diagnosed, in which case the diagnosis is at fault, but so is the conclusion that you can cure ALS by changing beliefs…since it wasn’t ALS. You also say that most of the people have not benefitted from orthodox treatment, but ALS is, sadly, remarkably unresponsive to any treatments available, so this is not surprising at all. It also sets the scene for alternative “treatments” or approaches to appear useful (by confirmation bias) when it may be other, remedial, therapies providing benefit, natural fluctuations in the illness, or any number of other things. If you don’t verify with proper scientific tests, as you recognise yourself, you haven’t verified. But you have “concluded”. Beware.
What yakaru and others here are “blasting” is more than just “something not based on experimental science”, it is the extreme case of pushing a philosophy forward, advertising it and selling it when it is not based on science and indeed is contradictory of a lot of science, and calling it better science!
While your points and concerns are valid, there are also solid foundations for my ideas.
Oddly enough, things I promote tend to not contradict science, although I do disagree with conclusions some draw from some science, which is different from contradicting the data itself.
The people diagnosed with als with whom I work are generally receiving no treatment at all other than what we are doing, Quite the contrary they have often been told there is nothing to be done.
So their results cannot be attributed to other treatments.
In any case, while there is much more to what I do and more upon which I base my ideas, this may not be the best forum for discussing that in detail. If you would like to discuss it further, my email and phone number are all over the internet and you could comment on my blog posts.
You have not understood the post. I made it clear that Lipton’s ideas are based on stupid misunderstandings. He makes an analogy perception and the activity of a cell membrane reacting to chemicals outside it. Then he decides this is not an analogy but literally true, and makes further leaps to the conclusion that cells also have beliefs. Then he decides that these beliefs can be altered somehow by the brain, and then leaps again to the further conclusion that changing these beliefs can alter what the cells perceives.
And he sells that as a cancer cure.
And you think your ad hoc observations and assertions about them support that?
He expressed his ideas far less coherently than I did in the post. I had to transcribe his entire stupid garbled lecture merely to understand what the hell he was talking about — he jumps from topic to topic so quickly that no one can keep up.
You clearly have not understood Lipton’s ideas. You just like his conclusions and don’t care that he got there by talking rubbish.
He is a quack because he:
(a) presents a hypothesis about the cause of illness as if it is a fact, and
(b) sells a product which purports to counter the effects of that fake cause.
As Lettersquash says above–
“If you don’t verify with proper scientific tests, as you recognise yourself, you haven’t verified. But you have “concluded”. Beware.”
You don’t seem like a quack to me. But your methods and your blithe acceptance of Lipton’s blatant and damaging cancer quackery makes me think you are on a very dangerous path.
Marty, “this may not be the best forum for discussing that in detail.” Agreed. I shouldn’t have engaged you on it.
“If you would like to discuss it further, my email and phone number are all over the internet”. Are they now. That’s a surprise.
Yakaru,
I have not blithely accepted anything. Rather, after having briefly skimmed some of what Bruce Lipton has said, I was intrigued to find that while I tended to disagree with some of it, some of it at least partly fit things I have observed myself.
From what you said in the post, my take is that the most basic components of his argument are the following, that conventional wisdom assigns primacy to DNA, and that beliefs rather than DNA are the foundation of what goes on. So I am addressing those two components.
First, whether or not any textbook description of biology assigns primacy to DNA, it is the case so called lay people talk of traits and disease as being “caused by genes” and scientific types do not do anything to disabuse people of this notion, saying things like “We can cure this disease by finding a way to silence this gene.” Everything from obesity to behavior is ascribed to genes. Is that assigning primacy? Maybe. Maybe not. It seems to me that it is not so out of line to say that that is assigning primacy.
Regarding the second basic component of his argument that rather than genes being the foundation of what goes on, beliefs are, this is what I have observed myself as described in comments above.
Most of those reading what Bruce Lipton is saying probably don’t much care about the details of how he arrives at these conclusions. They mostly care about and seek to apply these two basic components, and my point is that given what I have observed, that could be rather beneficial.
“…rather than genes being the foundation of what goes on, beliefs are, this is what I have observed myself as described in comments above.”
…And that is exactly, as I said in the first response to you, the same mistake as Lipton makes. You are confusing a speculation with with established fact.
How exactly did you “observe” beliefs affecting the activity of cells? I don’t see how you could achieve that even with an electron microscope and a hundred subjects. There are too many variables and you are not in a position to control them in any way, even if you bothered to include them in your thinking. You are claiming to have knowledge that you can’t possibly have, and disguising it by misusing the English language. They are not observations, rather they are assertions, based on a completely unsupported hypothesis.
There are plenty of known and well studied mechanisms by which state of mind (stress, relaxation, etc) can affect the metabolism. There is no need to use any grand unifying mystical theories that disregard genetics and overturn physics in order to study this.
Lipton’s teachings are, as I said, based on fudging the difference between an analogy and literal truth. This has nothing to do with biology and it does not support your speculations; nor do your speculations support Lipton’s incoherent ravings.
Yes, some science journalists do misrepresent genetics, but they are much closer to the truth than Lipton, and are not selling fake cures to desperate people who should be seeking proper help. His ideas are deadly dangerous, as well as extremely stupid.
I decided to do a search for “Marty Murray ALS”, and I must retract my earlier support for working with people, especially for little money. Marty should stop “working with” people. His name and phone number are all over the internet, that much is true, but most of what he writes is lies. He is quite infamous on the internet, especially ALS support forums. His methods, according to a large number of complainants, is to do internet searches, somehow find people’s names and numbers and then cold-call sufferers and their care givers, badgering them to buy his “solutions” (he is mostly careful not to call them “treatments” or “cures” except maybe when it seems safe, to avoid prosecution for practising medicine without a licence. I found in a few minutes several people threatening him that if he called them again they would call their solicitor, or even “hunt him down and put a bullet in him”. Any criticism of his methods or lack of clear philosophy results in him accusing the person of shutting people out, being closed, emotionally out of balance or whatever instead of clarifying or considering (I’m rather surprised he’s so mild here, but then I guess Yakaru has edited a lot). He has had a report by Quackwatch at the request of many victims, which makes very sombre reading, and includes the admission that he charges $60-80 an hour, and “maybe $2100” every six months. So MM is not in danger of going down the quack route. He’s preying on people suffering a debilitating and very often fatal illness, preaching nonsense, selling his teachings, ignorantly denying genetic research, and probably weedling as much cash out of people as he possibly can. He has a website, and it’s the worst instance of quackery I’ve read for a long while – utter nonsense dressed up as deep insight. Get help, Marty – there are treatments available for what you suffer from.
Yakaru,
Regarding “How exactly did you “observe” beliefs affecting the activity of cells? I don’t see how you could achieve that even with an electron microscope and a hundred subjects.”
I am using diagnosis as an indicator of the nature of cellular activity and improvement in health as a indicator of change in cellular activity.
If you consider it, every diagnosis indicates a type of cellular activity. For instance, a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis indicates one type, a diagnosis of lymphoma another type. So while there could be some inaccuracy of diagnosis, I think you will agree that in general using diagnosis as an indicator of cellular activity is a reasonable approach.
Now given that cellular activity directly underlies the situation leading to the diagnosis, should the situation change and the person’s health improve significantly, in ways such as tumors shrinking, going from degeneration to stability, or gaining physical functioning, it seems rather safe to conclude that the cellular activity has changed, and that is in fact what I mean when I say I have observed cellular activity change when beliefs change.
Regarding “disregard genetics”, now it sounds as if YOU are giving genes primacy. Just saying.
@Marty,
You have not observed any causal link between behavior and changes in cellular activity. You haphazardly observe two disparate things and assume that they are connected. Yet you claim to have “observed” the effects of beliefs on cells. You have done no such thing.
I note that the criticisms I have made of your statement here are along very much the same lines of what Quackwatch wrote about you. (Thanks @lettersquash.)
No case of ALS has ever been shown to be
caused or exacerbated by emotional repression.
Statements that patients may have somehow caused
their own ALS by repressing their emotions are not
only completely unfounded but potentially hurtful,
as pointed out by the numerous angry patient and
caregiver posts cited.
You have been unusually polite here — certainly the most polite quack ever to have posted here, but I am afraid you have now been exposed as a quack here as well.
The link to the Quackwatch article on Marty Murray is here
Click to access murray.pdf
I did not say anything about a causal link. What I said was that in a large sample, there was clear correlation between type of belief and type of cellular activity associated with diagnosis, and further that there is correlation between change in beliefs and change in cellular activity as assessed via change in health.
So, for this and other reasons beyond what has been discussed here, my conclusions are not completely unfounded, unless one chooses to disregard concepts such as statistical significance, which, by the way, is not my favorite thing. I prefer logic and clearer connections. Still, I am sure those who wrote that Quackwatch thing, on the other hand, use statistical significance all the time.
Regarding being “exposed”, let’s be clear that I am using my actual first and last name and that it was I who said that my phone number and email address are all over the internet, essentially directing lettersquash to what he found. I am not exactly concerned about being exposed. Seems better to have everything on the table so it can be dealt with, resolved, refined and things like that. That’s how progress is made.
“I did not say anything about a causal link.”
Yes, you did. You said a lot about a causal link, especially to paying customers, apparently. You state relentlessly that thoughts cause diseases such as ALS, and that you have solutions, even cures. You tout your healing tuition to the point where people beg or threaten you to stop calling them long after they have declined your “help”.
“What I said was that in a large sample, there was clear correlation between type of belief and type of cellular activity associated with diagnosis, and further that there is correlation between change in beliefs and change in cellular activity as assessed via change in health.”
Nope, you do not have a “large sample” or a “clear correlation”, even if you now lie about whether you claimed any causal link – the rest of it is a lie too. The stupid thing about you is that you lie about things you’ve already admitted the opposite of! Dumb.
“So, for this and other reasons beyond what has been discussed here, my conclusions are not completely unfounded,”
…there are always “reasons beyond what has been discussed here” aren’t there? We’ve had NO REASON yet, not ANY…
” unless one chooses to disregard concepts such as statistical significance”
No, that’s what we’re suggesting you should stop doing, disregarding statistical significance (like in the decades of genetic research you disregard).
“, which, by the way, is not my favorite thing. I prefer logic and clearer connections.”
If you did, you would (a) not keep contradicting yourself, and (b) appreciate statistical significance. It’s the most logical and clear-thinking method of ascertaining relationships between things that humans have ever devised.
” Still, I am sure those who wrote that Quackwatch thing, on the other hand, use statistical significance all the time.”
Yes, they might, because they do not disregard the concept. You, on the other hand, disregard statistical significance, whilst doing your best to pretend that your “large sample size” and “clear correlation” satisfy that condition.
Choose science or guesswork, and stop dressing the latter up as the former. You can’t have the moral high ground on two opposite points of view. You talk all sciency about sample sizes with one of your faces, while the other is saying “People make decisions all day long without using control groups or multiple trials or attempting to duplicate results.”
“Regarding being “exposed”, let’s be clear that I am using my actual first and last name and that it was I who said that my phone number and email address are all over the internet, essentially directing lettersquash to what he found. I am not exactly concerned about being exposed. Seems better to have everything on the table so it can be dealt with, resolved, refined and things like that. That’s how progress is made.”
What Yakaru was referring to as your exposure was as a cyber-stalking quack. What you are twisting that into – revealing your real name and phone number – is something else entirely (as I suspect you know), and (as I also suspect) is probably mere self-promotion, which is what you came here for.
If you wanted to resolve things, you wouldn’t have answered the challenge (how do you know it works?) with two mutually irrelevant answers:- “clear correlation in a large sample” (which you don’t have because you don’t do proper research) AND “statistical significance isn’t my favorite thing like those stupid quackwatch people”. We know the latter is the true answer, because it doesn’t suit you to do any proper research. Just like Bruce Lipton. Hey, I’m on topic!
I just came across a nice quote from Bertrand Russell which I thought was appropriate to share given the recent comments:
“If you genuinely desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble personal happiness are not open to you.
If your child is ill, and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the quack while it lasted.
If people loved humanity as genuinely as they love their children, they would be as unwilling in politics as in the home to let themselves be deceived by comfortable fairy tales.”
-Bertrand Russell “The Impact of Science on Society” (1952).
lettersquash, the fact that statistical significance is not my favorite thing does not reduce the statistical significance of the data.
As far as anything I said about a causal link, my point is on this topic, on this forum, I did not in my discussion of Bruce Lipton’s work really say anything about a causal link.
While I guess some kind of self promotion has to be in the back of my mind in general, the truth of the matter is that in doing a search on Bruce Lipton I was intrigued by results associating him with the word quack. So I came here and seeing what had been written decided to contribute what I have observed.
That’s all,
As far as all the other things you are saying go, as I said I am not disregarding the data produced by any research, rather disagreeing with conclusions some have come to.
Further, as you went about your detective work, among other things, I guess you did not notice what you would have if you were more careful, which is that there is nobody anywhere who has complained about actually working with me or about anything to do with money they gave me. Among all those “bullet in the head”, “call my lawyer” drama queens, few to none of them actually spent time talking with me, other than maybe one who actually pretended to be sick and attempted on multiple occasions to get me to ask her for a check so she that could get some kind of lame sting thing going.
I dunno, is this still about Bruce Lipton? Maybe that’s enough. I have basically said what I have to say. If settling this Bruce Lipton thing is going to take me proving my entire thing, then I guess it may have to happen as that actually unfolds, which it is.
So unless anyone has any complaints about my doing so, I will leave it at that. All the same, please feel free to contact me directly or to bash me online or wherever, as long as I am invited to the discussion and we can have it out and continue making progress. I can be nothing but appreciative of your challenging comments and positive energy, this has been valuable as well as enjoyable for me, and I trust it has been for y’all as well.
Marty, you say “the fact that statistical significance is not my favorite thing does not reduce the statistical significance of the data.” Obviously. Excellent point. I mean, excellent duck. Twisting your own words now to mean something other than what you intended when you said them, into a logical tautology nobody can deny. If scamming the terminally ill doesn’t produce enough income, you could always train as a lawyer.
“As far as anything I said about a causal link, my point is on this topic, on this forum, I did not in my discussion of Bruce Lipton’s work really say anything about a causal link.”
I can’t be bothered to quote mine you on Lipton, but you do say a lot about the cause of ALS. You kindly share the “facts” on your website and all over the net, that it, and a lot of other things, including hair loss, are the result of emotional and psychological patterns, and people bring it on themselves.
“As far as all the other things you are saying go, as I said I am not disregarding the data produced by any research, rather disagreeing with conclusions some have come to.”
This is another of those double-meaning sentences,a lie dressed up as truth. Disagreeing with the conclusions some have come to equates in reality to disregarding the data. You disagree with the medical conclusion that ALS is very much a genetic disease and there is no evidence that it is brought on by stress or other psychological factors. You, without medical training of any kind, apparently, “disagree”, both because statistical significance isn’t your favourite thing and because of the “clear correlations” you casually observe in your “large sample size”. Summary – you have a hunch, you don’t care what science says about it, and you’re prepared to dress your hunch up as science too.
“Further, as you went about your detective work, among other things, I guess you did not notice what you would have if you were more careful, which is that there is nobody anywhere who has complained about actually working with me or about anything to do with money they gave me.”
That does not mean there are none whom I didn’t find, nor that there are some who would complain if they could, nor that there might be several who are harmed, misinformed, their time and money wasted, who do not complain because they bought your stupid theories. Indeed, it is very likely that there are some of each. Those who realise that your “help” isn’t reversing their decline are likely to turn their attention to their considerable physical, emotional and financial difficulties, paying for expensive medicines proven scientifically to slow the progression of the disease. Some, almost certainly, don’t complain because they are dead. The calousness of your disregard for potential damage your casual hunch about the causes of ALS might cause is quite disgusting already – to argue that we haven’t found a complainant following your pointless treatment is seriously sick-making. The Quackwatch document reports no client of yours whose prognosis improved, although at least one reported subjective improvement. This is to be expected due to the action of placebo. The person’s clinical assessment was the opposite.
It seems highly unlikely to me that clients are on the whole satisfied with your help when so many are documented as sick to the back teeth of you cold-calling them, repeat calling, tracking them down, stalking them on forums, etc. These complaints you characterize as “drama queens” who didn’t spend much time talking to you. I gather they couldn’t get a word in edgeways.
This is about Bruce Lipton in a sense. He hasn’t come here to talk his dangerous double-think, but you came to give us a really good taste of it instead. So for that, thanks. These lessons are invaluable.
Here’s an example I’ve been thinking about. Several times on forums I saw exasperated sufferers, care-givers and bereaved people react angrily when you told them ALS is self-caused by emotional/psychological factors, and you gave the same defence: their angry response shows that they are reacting negatively – either that is the source of their ALS, or I saw you once predict that someone would get it! However, on your website you cite repressed emotions as one of the contributing factors. So we’re apparently damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Express your emotions and you’re “reacting negatively”, don’t and you’re “repressing your emotions”. No doubt you can make up some fine-print style of waffle to differentiate these things from your long experience as a non-practitioner, but I believe strongly that it will just be more of your amateur fraudulent bullshit, more ducking issues, laying down more obscurantist strata over your earlier lies.
Possibly worst of all – if I’m right, and of course I have no proof – is that you think being calm and polite will be taken as an indicator of your good character. Accused of deliberately fleecing the terminally ill by talking dangerous bullshit at them, I think I’d express my emotions pretty fiercely, I’d argue my case very passionately, say exactly how I work with people, and I’d gather a lot of success stories, properly documented. I’d ask the happy, well-adjusted survivors (who will be very numerous) to write about their recovery and document their true identity. That would then lead to medical investigation (instead of the probable legal one that will ensue) to help the world at large discover what I know. Funny, there don’t seem to be any documented successes, not even on your own website. You should have a customer feedback page, surely? All I see is vague suggestion of how to cure Alzheimer’s, ALS, alergies, autism, cancer, multiple sclerosis and hair loss.
I have only seen one person write in support of your “help”, on a forum, which means it could be anyone, including you, or it could be the documented case of placebo response who thought he was getting better but was actually getting worse – he certainly seems to have bought the it-was-all-in-my-mind spin. I suspect some of the casual, drive-by “give him a break” comments might well be from your sock puppets.
Your views are utterly baseless. It’s possible you are very deluded but innocent, but I suspect you are a very callous person indeed.
Pretty simple.
You, as have many others, are jumping to conclusions.
You are assuming I am lying.
You are assuming there must be people whom I have taken for a ride.
You are once again saying that my “clients” are complaining when in fact the only ones complaining are people who have essentially nothing to complain about other than that they were contacted by someone whom someone else said negative things about, and by the way, given the fact that I have been doing all this outrageous stuff for over a decade, there are not really all that many people saying much.
You are guessing that possibly the person who has positive things to say is I without giving equal weight to other possibilities.
Ok. Let’s deal with the Quackwatch report.
According to ALSUntangled, the source of that report, they said that they wrote it after being contacted by people diagnosed with als, not victims, as you said.. While that may be partly true, even more accurate would have been to say that I contacted them long before that to engage them in dialogue which broke down when I found that they did not want to really research what I was doing, more do some cursory examination. Further, they left out the fact that what I really said was that while I might like to be paid for what I do in the relatively inexpensive way I described, I generally have not been and basically work for tips if anything. Further I sent them three cases to investigate. They did not mention that none of them had paid me a cent. They somehow ignored that one of them said he was getting physically stronger as backed up by third parties on a public forum here. http://www.bayarearidersforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=340364&highlight=kully Also, they did not contact another and did not inform me of that until after the report was published. They barely talked with me and never met with me. The work was sloppy and geared to fit a conclusion already made. So much for the scientific method.
Regarding the person who has positive things to say, once again you were in such a rush that you did not investigate and find that actually he is known worldwide for having healed after being diagnosed with als and that he is currently spearheading a drive to scientifically investigate the use of holistic methods for solving als,
Also, apparently you did not watch the video I posted in a previous comment.
You do make one good point, the one about repression and expression and I’ll try to address that quickly by saying this. People make themselves sick by responding negatively, whether or not they repress those responses, and another aspect of making one’s self sick is self repression in general. There’s plenty of research indicating the latter, by the way.
Any quack can post numerous success stories and testimonials, as I suspect you will realize and may have seen. I on the other hand mostly depend on the logic of what I do and the intelligent analysis of the ideas by others. That is why I have not tended to talk of success stories and all that. I brought up some things like that here because that seemed like the way things are accomplished here and I was looking to quickly say something about what was being said about Bruce Lipton.
Maybe if nothing else my highlighting the weakness of the way you, and others of a similar mind, research, and your tendency to jump to conclusions and espouse so tenaciously inferences for which there is no actual basis other than hypothesis will motivate you to reconsider other conclusions you have come to including those regarding Bruce Lipton.
Having said that, I have to acknowledge that at the very least you have energetically engaged in this discussion, done some real looking into things, done a decent job of getting me to address seeming inconsistencies in things I have said, and even in one or two aspects somewhat accurately assessed or understood what I have going on, and for that I applaud you and the others here.
Well summed up, @lettersquash.
Marty, you are a quack for the same reason that Lipton is. You use a standard of evidence for the effectiveness of your product which would have been acceptable in the Middle Ages, but not today. But you sell your product as if it meets modern standards.
You can argue till the cows come home that you are right and simply lacking sufficient evidence to meet normal medical standards, but just as in mainstream medicine, that means that you are ethically obliged to hold off promoting your wares until you have sufficient evidence.
You will notice that I have broken the links to your website up until it became clear that you have a conflict of interest in this discussion.
Marty, I will convert to you as soon as YOU recover from the kind of disease you mention (I hope nevertheless you will not have to).
Man with ALS rides motorbike. Mind over matter has been proven.
I haven’t really jumped very far to conclusions. I took a bit of a risk in judging you, but the majority of what I did was just read what you write. You told me you’re a fraud, although you probably don’t realise that.
I predicted that you would fine-tune the repression problem to suit your conclusion. I also suspected the trick would be to have no negativity. Don’t express OR repress negative emotion. Obviously.
Let me remind you of your earlier point that your helpees don’t access other therapies, so it’s not down to them. I forgot to point out how unlikely that was. “Mark has been suffering with the debilitating disease ALS also known as Lou Gehrig Disease but with a lot of strength training and a lot of help and support from friends and businesses in and outside the industry, Mark’s making a comeback”. I guess you’re one of the friends, but let’s not forget all those other activities, including “a lot of strength training”. And does he no longer have ALS? Have his naughty genes got the message and started thinking positive?
Just imagine how awful it must be to have a diagnosis like ALS or MS. Now imagine someone tells you the doctors don’t know what they’re talking about and they have the solution – you’re doing it to yourself and can turn it around. Brilliant. As you say in one of your “soundness bites”, “Some of the best news one can get is that the problems one is experiencing are of one’s own making.” Well yes, if it’s true.
Now imagine that this person is mistaken or a fraud, and you spend years trying to work out whether you should express different emotions, what your psychological patterns are that have caused your disease, waiting and hoping to turn the corner and start getting better, only finally to realise that it was wrong and you’re going downhill like everyone else. Faster, perhaps, because you also took notice of their soundbite “Taking pills can lead to new ills.”
That kind of pain, added to that kind of diagnosis, should require nothing short of absolute certainty, which only comes from proper research conducted by trained professionals.
Caroline,
While, you will eventually buy into the holistic approach and mind body methods, it won’t happen for that reason as I am constantly improving my health and the likelihood of my ever experiencing significant degenerative types of health problems is close to zero.
lettersquash,
while the scenario you described does sound painful, it has never occurred, at least with anyone working with me. In most cases people who have done that much work have healed or improved their situation in some significant way. So I guess you are saying it would have been better to let them suffer while we waited years for “professionals” to “prove” what I had already figured out. Given the reality of what is going on, rather than some theory of what might happen, that does not really make sense.
Further, the fact of the matter is I don’t tell anyone to do anything they would not be better off doing anyway, eat better, handle your emotions better, heal relationships and things like that, and of all things there has been high quality research done by Dean Ornish and others demonstrating that doing all this does in fact beneficially change gene expression. More homework for you.
You seem to have missed that my point was that Mark Kully’s success was ignored by ALSUntangled in their report. They never even followed up to confirm or investigate in any way what the others said and what he said directly to them about his strength increase. They instead said he reported no improvement. This should call anything they say into question. Also, while your point about his using other modalities has some merit, if you do a little research, you will find that it is commonly held that strength training is ineffective in improving the health of those experiencing motor neuron disease and that exhausting athletic competition is completely contraindicated. You also might do well to look at report writer Rick Bedlack’s list of possible conflicts, posted right there on the Duke website. While I am basically working for tips, he is clearly not.
Yakaru,
Given that there are essentially no so called negative side effects of improving diet, using more healthy ways of relating, learning mindfulness meditation (“proven scientifically” to reduce inflammation), having a more positive outlook, reading success stories of others who have solved similar problems and other such things, there is significant difference between what I am promoting and the methods used by mainstream medicine, which generally come with significant downsides,
Downside is further reduced by the fact that I am offering it all payment optional, which in many cases means basically for free.
The upside, on the other hand, is huge.
So I am offering to help people learn things based on years of research, experience, analysis, and success, what I promote has essentially no negative effects, I am spending thousands of hours doing this while minimizing risk, real or perceived, by doing it all on my own dime, and real people with real lives and real families are healing.
I hope you can see why I consider this all ethical, and generally a rather good idea. I myself find the whole thing basically bulletproof, a no brainer. I know how much people love to call people quacks and in my case, while the uninformed say all kinds of stuff like that, the truth is they have little to nothing to stand on.
Marty, those aspects of your pseudo-mystical theories that you say concur with Lipton’s idiotic and baseless claims are damaging quackery. That is why you are a quack.
Just stick to quackerizing yourself with idiotic claims like — “the likelihood of my ever experiencing significant degenerative types of health problems is close to zero” — and stop doing it to others.
And stop pretending that mainstream techniques like better diet etc are anything but part of a bait and switch that cloaks your over-blown “knowledge” and your quackery.
Yakaru,
You say they are damaging quackery without really demonstrating that they are damaging while the word quackery seems amorphous and rather loosely and user defined.
Still, we have indeed narrowed down to the issue. In a way you nailed it Yakaru.
In spite of the success stories, the studies that confirm what I am saying, my knowledge of arcane medical concepts and theories, the huge pool of data I am working with and other such things, the truth is that, as you can tell, that I am operating in a way different from that of you and mainstream medical types.
Funny thing is though, my way of operating is working. The methods are working. Before I saw the studies, the data, the success stories, I knew they would.
There has been no damage, Rather people have healed, and meanwhile mainstream medical types, in their slow, plodding, self obfuscating way are discovering the same things.
So you can wait for them and the way they operate or you can learn to operate the way I do. Either way, eventually you will agree with basically everything I have said.
Ciao ciao y’all. Been fun. Keep doing your homework. Learn and heal. Anyone can.
It’s your ignorance of how to gather and interpret data, and your habit of claiming certain knowledge (as in the sentence I quoted above, for eg.,) that make you both dangerous and a quack.
That’s what happens when you don’t understand confirmation bias, selection bias, post hoc reasoning, separating observation from inference, and a host of other simple techniques that you don’t use and clearly don’t understand.
Marty, life can be surprising. I concede, it can be scary.
You made my point.. A la perfection.
Yakaru,
First of all that bait and switch thing is pushing it. While you are right they they are not central to what I do, those more mainstream methods are part of what I promote and even related to what I promote.
Regarding my not understanding “confirmation bias, selection bias, post hoc reasoning, separating observation from inference, and a host of other simple techniques” you are once again jumping to conclusions, and not necessarily well founded ones given my clear ability to apply rather solid logic in addressing the comments you and others have made. Regarding my not using them, anyone functioning at certain level of intellectual development clearly applies these concepts, if not formally.
The truth is Yakaru, that in a way you get me. Even your cheap shot comment about the mainstream techniques, while in a way incorrect and misguided, shows that.you do.
On the other hand, in a way you don’t get me and how I operate.
You and the others assume that I am lying, motivated by money or who knows what else. Now Caroline seems to be implying that I am maybe motivated by fear.
While Caroline is correct that life can be surprising, it is not as surprising to me as it is to others, at least regarding health, as I can pretty much predict who will get sick and how and who will heal, and having for two decades analyzed exactly what makes people sick and healthy it totally makes sense that I would know how to make myself healthy.
.
I don’t get sick. I have helped members of my family to heal. I recently healed the heart of a little kid whose mother had been told her daughter had a genetically caused permanent type of health problem. People often take me for ten to fifteen years younger than I am. I can keep up physically with people half my age. Among other things, I have solved my allergies, stemmed my hair loss, healed my finger, healed my heart and cleared up my skin. Life is good and getting better.
In any case, I guess we have established that I am operating in a way that you call quackery, a characterization which, among other things, ignores that there is only confirmation in many forms that my way of operating has merit. In other words, the truth is you can say all you want about research methods and whatever else, when anyone, not only I, uses solid research methods, the results they get confirm what I am saying, every time, For an example, I would suggest you follow the ongoing research at Harvard which is investigating mindfulness and als progression. I say they will announce results that essentially confirm what I am saying. Wanna bet against me?
As I said before, you can learn to operate more as I do, or you can wait for it all to be confirmed by people who operate more as you do.
Your standard for what counts as confirmation is the problem.
Your standards are too low and you don’t know how to interpret data. You demonstrate this in the comments. You don’t have enough evidence to declare that there is a nearly zero chance of getting a degenerative disease. With that statement you demonstrate how low your standards are.
I have nothing else to say to you.
Yakaru,
I have worked with multiple people experiencing ms, I understand ms bigtime. Basically no way I am experiencing ms, or any other autoimmune disease for that matter. I have worked with people diagnosed with als and watched this one for years. Ain’t no way I am experiencing als. Parkinson’s I have a pretty good understanding of and kinda dealt with any tendencies for that years ago. Prostate cancer same thing. Some slight chance of melanoma and yet my take from what I have seen is not going to happen. Some other form of cancer? Used to worry me some. Worrying me less and less as I do more inner work. Alzheimer’s? Just not my style. Endocrine issues? Not my style either.
Could I have issues with some kind of infection?. Well having worked with a few with Borrelia burgdorferi infections and other infections, I am pretty confident in that area too.
Have to work on heart disease a little. Some stuff that might indicate that if I don’t get on it I may have an issue of that type. Still, as long as I address it, that’s not happening either.
All other kinds of freaky rare stuff? Eh, I have never seen a health problem I couldn’t solve and I am already skilled at solving them. I guess somehow something could happen, and at the same time, given all the preventive work I have already done and my skill at solving things, I doubt that even if anything got going it would continue for very long before I solved it.
I totally rock at healing, and am constantly in healing mode, especially given the fact that as I help others heal, I am healing myself. So rather than heading for disease, I am getting healthier all the time.
So that’s my rather solid basis for my saying that the chance of my experiencing significant degenerative disease is pretty much zero.
My take? As usual while in a small way you may be onto something, for the most part you have once again leaped to conclusions because of the barely tempered bias you bring to the conversation.
You don’t really know that much about healing and I guess assumed that there was no way I had a basis for what I said.
Maybe you are doing something akin to what you say I am, making big confident statements without really knowing the subject matter.
In any case, if you are done I surely am.
Plenty.
Marty, I was thinking the same as Yakaru, but couldn’t bring to mind the term “bait and switch” until he wrote it. It’s the same mistake (or lie, sometimes) that came up earlier, when you assume that your coaching or methods have helped someone because they’re not doing anything else that could cause improvement, but of course people are doing all sorts of things differently when they’re trying to help themselves overcome an illness, and then there are also spontaneous remissions, wrong diagnoses, etc.
Thanks for the invitation to do more homework. I looked up Dr Dean Ornish. I’ve seen something of him before, but not for some time. And what did I find immediately? His acclaimed health work appeared to be “integrative”, including various things like dietary changes and exercise along with mindfulness meditation. I haven’t studied his work at all, but that was a concern, and it’s the same concern as before, isn’t it? And it’s the same mistake as thinking that Dean Ornish’s work backs up whatever-the-hell-it-is (you haven’t described it at all yet) that you do, promote, teach, etc.
It doesn’t, because your version of “lifestyle changes” is way over on the woo side, where it’s not particularly about dietary changes or exercise, but more about this other thing you haven’t described yet. Personally, I think it’s basically about getting whatever it is that Marty Murray has to offer. This is why you don’t describe it – if you did, people could implement those things and you’d be irrelevant again. You have to keep hinting at some secret ability, until now, when your back is up against the wall, where you instead shout and brag, “I totally rock at healing”.
Then I checked out the criticism of Ornish from more educated minds. I give everyone a fair whack on the positive side, then add “criticism” or “scam” or “quack” to the google input. And I found a cancer surgeon criticising Dean Ornish for pretty much the error I noticed, mixing up uncontrovesial scientific interventions with unproven pseudoscience and bundling it up as “integrated medicine”…then teaming up with the likes of Deepity Chopra. The blog calls Ornish back from the dark side. You can read it and rationalize your next excuse here. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/03/05/dr-dean-ornish-turn-away-from-the-dark-s/
Regarding people using other modalities, while my main point was that people were not using medical treatments, especially in cases where there were none even available, there is no modality supposedly that does a thing to get people diagnosed with,for instance, als healthier. So my point was that generally those people were not using anything that anyone would say would get them healthier, other than working with me and doing things related to that, such as maybe working with a nutritionist, which I was saying in totality would result in their healing. Physical therapists, speech therapists, the rest of them basically say that they are just helping people deal with inevitable decline. So sure someone might be working with them, and yet that could pretty well be ruled out as the key source of their healing results.
You keep acting as if I am trying to pull the wool over your eyes or leave things out. This thing about other treatments seems obvious. Now I have to explain it, maybe because you will try anything to back up some idea that I am doing something unethical or not noting or providing all the facts.
Regarding Dean Ornish, I don’t need rationalizations or excuses.. All I was referring to was the gene expression work which I didn’t see any serious criticism of. Doesn’t matter much that he hangs with others that that blogger is not into. Chopra can be a little silly and at the same time has things to offer. I have read a great article by Hyman, although beyond that I have mixed opinions of things he says. Don’t know much about the others.
Anyway that blogger sounds a little into worshiping the scientific method as if nobody had ever discovered anything or come to a correct conclusion any other way.
At the same time interestingly the blogger seems to respect Dean Ornish and his work. So for my specific purpose of mentioning Dean Ornish in response to your comment about genes changing their ways, I guess things look pretty good.
Regarding the wedge thing it may or may not have merit. Maybe some see it as a wedge and some see all the stuff as related and connected as I basically do. As I keep saying, it’s not exactly that I am equating what I do with what someone like Dean Ornish does or with what is currently being done at Harvard. It’s more that what I do does not disagree with “science” and that further as new research is done the results are leading down a path that intersects or merges with what I am saying.
You are basically correct about my version of lifestyle changes. It does not center on mainstream things like diet changes. It more centers on mind body concepts and changing one’s mind to change cellular behavior. At the same time it seems obvious that doing more pedestrian things to improve health is of value. I even recommend doing such mundane things as using simpler toothpaste. I better. I only win at my game when people get healthier.
I am not really hiding anything. C’mon. This started as a thing about Bruce Lipton and I just said what seemed appropriate as the discussion has progressed.
As a matter of fact I have started, get it? STARTED, writing something entitled ALS Explained and Solved. It’s already posted in its current way incomplete and unedited, get it? INCOMPLETE and UNEDITED, form and you can go see it and confirm pretty much exactly what you are saying about what my work centers on. Still, I even said on the About page that I realize I so far left out the mundane change the diet type of stuff, among other things.
At the same time, I am sure you that in a way you are right, and in some unconscious or not so unconscious way I want to insure my relevance.
And you know what,
I am so glad you pointed that out, because the truth is that being relevant in that way is pretty much worthless and I will be so much better off when everyone is as good at healing as I am and I can be irrelevant and go back to just living my life and playing jazz and stuff.
So I have to remember what I am shooting for, and that is it.
Meanwhile, I would give you more detail here, but as perceptive as you are, when you do your better work, you can probably piece most of the central ideas together by reading ALS Explained and Solved and I can refrain from writing a book in the comments on Yakaru’s blog. If you do that, just do me a favor and keep up your better work rather than your sloppier and more biased and negative work, as dealing with your lamer, trite, jump to conclusions type of comments is not the funnest, nor is explaining what might be obvious to someone without bias blinders on.
Marty ?
Names of the healed ones, medical reports of the diagnosis, medical report after recovery, explanations of what has been done exactly, medical treatments, life changes. Supervised from a college.
You wrote “While, you will eventually buy into the holistic approach and mind body methods…”
i did it. Oh I did it. Empiricaly.
I don’t deny there is a mind-body connection of sorts. If an angry, fretful person learns to be calm and solve the issues that are distressing them, they are likely to positively affect their health. So I don’t deny that there might be good advice and coaching that you might do, although – if you haven’t already – I would strongly recommend you do some formal training in psychology or counselling if you’re going to work with people’s head stuff.
There’s a big difference between acknowledging those connections, though, and taking it to the extreme and thinking we can heal everything by intervening at a psychological/emotional level. There is no evidence for that, and a lot of evidence that it’s pretty useless. So, given that balance of evidence, to finish by reiterating my main point – it is unfair, dangerous and conceited to encourage people to try it, especially with conviction, especially with a disregard or dislike for conventional treatments that might be doing them good.
There is nothing wrong with having a personal opinion and sharing it casually with someone in those circumstances. But to present yourself as an extremely accomplished – even infallible – healer, the cutting-edge top authority on ALS, MS and a load of other stuff, and repeat the message to a lot of people, and preach it on the net, that changes things. It’s no longer a mate saying “Well, of course, it’s up to you, but how I see it is this…them doctors is nuts”. You begin to actually transform yourself into a practitioner of medicine, and you ain’t got basic biology down yet (jump to conclusion), let alone a medical licence. AFAIK, you don’t have any psychology or counselling or life coach training (big leap, but I’ll risk it). Now you’re talking about how in your draft of ALS Explained and Solved you forgot to mention the “mundane change the diet stuff”, and I’ll dare to jump to the conclusion that you haven’t much knowledge about nutrition either.
Now the great thing about jazz is if you have no training and/or you’re shit at it, you can call it “alternative” and nobody gets too badly hurt.
All the best.
Caroline,
Interestingly, during the past several years I have been basically in charge of quality control at two businesses. At both of them, I showed up, started noticing and correcting issues and soon it was like, “How about that’s your job now.” Should my work be supervised, or would it be better for me to supervise the colleges? is actually a decent question.
If someone wants to do all that empirical stuff, it’s fine with me. People are doing it without me and if someone wanted to use me as part of a study that would be fine too.
Not my job exactly though. I am more just helping people heal.
lettersquash,
While there may be studies indicating that certain things do not work, there are no studies indicating that what I do does not work as almost nobody else knows how to do it. I have been refining it for decades and I look around and don’t see many who even come close.
Meanwhile here’s the reality regarding the other issues.
Anyone can easily figure out what training I have or don’t have and anyone can find all the comments about me online. In fact, I generally direct them right to those comments the first, which is often the last, time I talk with them.
So the yahoos respond to me and all that by saying they are going to kill me and old ladies listen politely and I never hear from them again, and others kinda play along some, and the most tenacious, educated, intuitive, intelligent, determined to heal ones get into it with me, and nutritionists, and even medical doctors for what that’s worth, I don’t stop them, and tend to get good results.
Could I be doing an even better job? Sure, anyone could. Am I already accomplishing things considered by many, even the majority, to be basically impossible? That’s true too.
Meanwhile the whole thing is being proved out in universities in their way, and in general others are carefully analyzing the situation and arriving at similar conclusions.and having similar success, and it’s all rather positive.
All the best to you too.
I willl try my best to have a understandable english :
Seriously, who wouldn’t want to believe you ?
Wouldn’t anyone in your case do everything to bring the evidences out to the whole world and change millions of lifes, save millions of children. Isn’t it worth two f…. pieces of reports to begin with ?
As you seem to be immune to all kind of awfull stuff, pay nontheless attention to not have a second head growing out of your shoulders.
Caroline,
Too funny and good points all around.
While I am already doing much to get people to learn about this stuff, maybe I’ll take your advice and become more involved with the mainstream team, as I recently have in a small way by getting into something along the lines of a consulting role with someone who is doing empirical studies of the types of things being discussed here.
In general this discussion has been very productive for me and has served to get me to take a more balanced and somehow more realistic view of what I am doing and how it fits in with the work of others and the world in general..
No no Marty. There was no advice of this kind. Just asked for reports.
I am done with your obscene publicity.
@Caroline,
Well said.
Caroline,
Oh ok. Good to have clarification.
I am so glad you, as am I, are done.
Holy cow.
I cried at Martis comments.
I am certainly not throwing body mind relation, only the dirty water.
This is a piece of anthology.
I even had to sign up to WordPress to be able to make a comment here, but I had to:
Short summary:
Good to know that there *is* some intelligence left on this planet.
You just saved me 200,- for a Lipton event that i was close to book.
I was really curious about seeing this guy live on stage, but I think, I’ll do myself a greater favor by spending the day doing garden work.
And besides that:
Your comments really made me laugh.
And *that*’s what the world needs more than everything else:
Humor.
(which of course loops back to intelligence…)
Thanks
—
a.
Thanks for that comment — I appreciate it greatly!
$200 for a Lipton event? Holy cow. I actually presented his ideas more clearly in the above post than he did in the lecture! Honestly – I transcribed an entire hour of it just to figure what he was talking about!
As I wrote in the post, I can understand why people would come away from it thinking they’ve got something – he certainly has a lot of ideas. Just the bits that hold it all together are completely spurious, which only becomes clear on closer analysis.
Anyway, Lipton has certainly given the world many opportunities for humor!
P.S. Sorry you had to sign up to wordpress. I don’t know how that happened. You should have been able to simply fill in an email address and leave a comment. (There have been some glitches lately with wordpress.)
Well – I probably missed something out and I might have been able to reply without signing up wordpress, but – who knows, what that might be good for again…
Besides that: The quack issue seems to be quite a thing.
As healing somehow is still a mystery besides all the scientific insight, it’s kinda open door for almost anyone courageous enough to propose he (or she) can ‘heal’ somehow.
And as our medical system is quite stressed out almost everywhere, and if someone is desperate enough (because ill enough) to catch any straw – … (most of it already written in previous comments)
Yet, again, I do appreciate people like you spending a lot of time trying to bring some light behind the curtain of ignorance that tends to cover more and more of people’s being…
Thank you!
There’s certainly plenty wrong with the medical system in general. And I’d even have some sympathy for giving some modalities more of a role to play, and maybe even advocate turning a blind eye to some claims occasionally (eg., if some claimed a nice massage technique balances your chi, or whatever) if alt med fanatics weren’t constantly running around claiming they can cure all known diseases.
And I wish they’d start keeping proper records and develop some proper professional standards. In mainstream medicine, problems arise when protocols aren’t followed. In alt med, following the teachings and principles as recommended is what causes problems. Anyone who uses Lipton’s approach to try to heal a malignant cancer will die from it. And where will that be recorded? Nowhere apart from Lipton’s bank account.
Ok, now you went too far. Cancer is a mind body thing in many ways and a program incorporating some, while maybe not all, of Bruce Lipton’s ideas, along with other concepts can be very effective in solving cancer.
Malignant cancer is only malignant until you change your ideas, ways, diet, psychology, lifestyle, things like that. To think that you need medication to solve such a problem is foolishness and does not even really make sense.
And going forward we need to stick to the topic, not my approach, my programs, my agenda or anything else not directly related to the topic.
Your comment is pure quackery, Marty. I have absolutely no patience for such baseless assertions and absolutely no sympathy for quacks like you spouting your quackery here.
If you have nothing to say about the post, your comments will not appear here. You are now again on moderation and will stay there.
Just because “malignant” has two meanings does not mean that such semantics automatically bleeds over into physiology. I pointed out in the post how Lipton uses this mistake to pole vault into unfounded claims about medicine, and you have ignored it.
Feel free to deal with the other criticisms of Lipton that I made I too, BTW. Like his claim that you can heal cancer just the same way you can stop the world from ending on December 21 2012.
Hah. That’s too funny. Runs right to “quack” “quackery” and “baseless assertions”. Well that’s a strong comeback, not. You are pretty clueless and seem intent on staying that way. Still it’s sure you will wake up one day.
Interesting phenomenon meanwhile. Silly little boy stuck in a mental box.
I guess the only tragic thing is that some people will be influenced by you, not that everything you have to say is incorrect, just that the foundation of it is so insane and misleading.
I thought Marty was done commenting? Had to come back after a few months and insult the blog host?
@Mariah,
Yep, more than 6000 words later he’s still lecturing and insulting me.
At least his standards of proof have improved. Previously he thought it was fine to play word games equating “malignant” ideas with “malignant” cancer — because he kinda “knows” there’s a connection: he’s “seen” it. But now suddenly the standards have been raised — I have to demonstrate why someone who promotes quackery can be called a quack.
Oh, Marty, you seem to have relapsed. Are you bipolar or something? Remember when you emailed me a link (unsolicited, not that I mind, but just to be clear who took the argument here into a private discussion)?
Marty emailed:
Since this struck me as one of those woogasms of the credulous and didn’t really adequately report any actual science, I spent some considerable time tracking down the paper it obliquely referred to, via another that was also rather oblique, and several publication searches. I eventually found the dense and technical paper, and eventually replied,
“Hi Marty
Thanks for the link. Sorry for the delay in replying…..
Not really. 😉
Too much of Lipton’s exaggerated claims and fantasies. So I went to the Wisconsin-Madison News site http://www.news.wisc.edu/22370 and read a bit less-exaggerated reportage about a paper, which they fail to give the title of or link to. The results are summarised as:
which is not exactly world-shattering, but does further support the work that’s been going on at least since Dr Benson identified the Relaxation Response. This concerns me somewhat:
The JTF do rather keep cropping up in inadequately controlled research, from what I hear.
The paper is at investigatinghealthyminds.org/pdfs/KalimanRapidPNEC.pdf but I don’t understand much of it (almost nothing, in fact).
If you are holding this paper up as supporting the view that a person can prevent or cure serious, inherited, genetic disorders or cancer or hair loss by the power of their mind, I would suggest that you are several steps away. The main problem is exaggeration (if I ignore the possibility of poor experimental design, small sample size, contamination of data or deliberate cheating).
Scientific papers make specific findings, which their authors try to overstate as much as they dare. Before publication, these are often toned down by editors, but the claims in the synopses are sometimes a little skewed towards bravado and encourage further research grants. I note, for instance, that Kaliman says, “Our findings set the foundation for future studies to further assess meditation strategies for the treatment of chronic inflammatory conditions,” which both fits the goal of eliciting more grants and sets the scene for the unwary to think “this research has pretty well proved that meditation cures chronic illnesses”. That hasn’t been studied yet (or has it?!). That is an enormous distance from the findings that some chemicals related to stress are inhibited. The first big jump is from SOME effect on inflamatory response to chronic inflamatory conditions. Another is from inflamatory conditions to cancer, ALS, MS or Alzheimer’s.
Then the universities and other bodies overseeing the work, the vested interest groups who commissioned it and funded it, publish their reports, hyping it up a little bit more. Universities want to brag about their impressive work and attract rich students and research grants.
Then all manner of placebo-quacks like Dreamhealer (or you) cook the whole thing up at gas mark 11 and serve it with Lipton or Chopra. Mmm, tasty. Now we can reprogram our genetic code ourselves by practising certain visualisations that a deeply-in-tune person has – specially for us, using the full potential of their divine intuition, and with great skill – pulled out of their ass.
It pisses me off that the news that meditation can be good for reducing pain and inflamation gets lost in a whirlwind of pseudoscientific spin. I have to take a moment to manage my stress levels, in fact. And that’s the least of the dangers.
I’m not sure there is much else for me to say. Do you want to tell me what you think this means, or shall we leave it there?”
I expected Marty to rant a load of pseudoscientific nonsense at me, but I was very gratified and surprised to get this:
You’re welcome, Marty, but I’m disappointed you’ve gone back to “kinda thinking” again, colluding with new age quackery and insulting critical thinkers with your projected accusations. You have demonstrated your “baseless assertions”, being “pretty clueless” and “the only tragic thing is that some people will be influenced by you”. I’m sorry to share a private conversation, but I feel it’s probably in everyone’s best interest.
Ok, sure Yakaru has done some nice work highlighting things Bruce Lipton says that don’t really, from what I have seen here, seem to make much sense from any angle.
On the other hand, hiding behind the skirts of medical orthodoxy, clinical trials, the so called scientific method and all that stuff and yelling “Quack quack quack” at anything not so ensconsed is not critical thinking.
And that seems to be the essential flaw with all the quackbuster types. Rather that starting with a clean slate or some neutral base in reality, the foundation they use is the ivory tower conglomeration I just mentioned, which is actually has weaknesses and flaws and so is not a good enough foundation for anything.
Out of this reliance on that conglomeration as the gold standard come absurd scenarios such as this one, wherein I spend years,even decades, observing phenomena and figuring out what is going on and applying what I have observed to achieve consistent results, and somehow in Yakaru’s mind it is sufficient to respond to an assertion I make by just calling it all quackery, whatever that even is.
Maybe quackery is whatever does not match the pseudo gold standard of the orthodox conglomeration? It sure seems that way, in which case obviously reality gets ruled out, because the conglomeration is not reality and the methods used by those who adhere to that conglomeration are somehow not as good for discovering reality as they believe them to be.
So to tie it all together, the orthodox conglomeration is not the real base and the fact that something I said, or anyone says, is not exactly based on the rules and constructs of that conglomeration does not make it baseless. Quite the contrary, that could be an indication that it is founded more solidly than something that is based on those rules and constructs.
So I would hope that going forward Yakaru will seek to actually discuss particulars, argue points and discover reality rather than merely do something along the lines of randomly saying things like “observer bias”, “scientific method” or “quackery” and thinking that pretty much does it.
No, Marty. Here is a two step definition:
(1) Culpable ignorance is claiming effectiveness without adequate data to back it up.
(2) Quackery is continuing to claim effectiveness after the inadequacy of the data has been pointed out to you.
You have spent much of your 7000 words or so here repeating the following:
As has been pointed out to you repeatedly here, you do not have sufficient data to make the claims you are making.
That is why I say you’re not merely guilty of culpable ignorance, but that you are a quack.
If you can’t be bothered recording your data systematically and professionally, then don’t bother expecting everyone else to simply accept your word for the grandiose conclusions you draw from it.
@LS,
Yeh the Templeton Foundation has an openly declared agenda of attempting to find predetermined results.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Templeton_Foundation
If Marty — or any of the other million and a half quacks out there who have found “the cure for all known diseases” — really did have a cure for something, they would have done everyone a disservice by not recording their data properly. The fact that they don’t have the faintest idea how to record and assemble data — Marty is even proud of this deficiency — doesn’t help.
It’s very easy to say “But I KNOW it’s true I’ve seen it, bla bla bla bla” but if we lower the standards enough for Marty’s word alone to count as valid evidence, then we have no way of distinguishing the one true Marty’s Grand Cure from all the other millions of quacks who say it’s not lifestyle that causes illness, it’s alien implants, it’s God’s punishment, it’s parasites, it’s acidity, it’s non-acidity, it’s cell phones, it’s bad Feng Shui, it’s the acupuncture meridians, it’s homosexuality, it’s skeptic bloggers, it’s astrological forces, it’s black bile, it’s microwave ovens, it’s electricity cables, it’s pesticides, it’s jet trails, it’s an energy cyst from a traumatic event, it’s childhood trauma, it’s birth trauma, it’s sexual repression, it’s promiscuity, it’s past lives, it’s…
🙂
Love it.
Besides the serious issue.
And even at risk of making a quack statement now:
(here it comes)
Make people laugh – and you’ll heal them at least a bit…
I’m on your side.
Thanks, amjisan… Laughter is certainly a healer, like love, music, relaxation, etc — there be more of that stuff in hospitals and in the health system generally. It would improve the quality of care and quality of life, which should be ends in themselves.
It’s a piece of trickery by alt med practitioners to claim all this good stuff for themselves, and then try to smuggle their cancer cures in with it.
Now you are making ME laugh.
So that’s what I am doing, tricking people, smuggling in cures
Oh man.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Too much.
Well the jury is out on that, in your case, as far as I know, but you’re certainly blabbing the vacuous garbage of the cure-smuggler. You like to call it a “solution” instead of a “cure”, don’t you? Here’s what you say on your website about “solving” cancer:
This kind of vague, self-referential psychobabble (but including very serious assertions like “the person can solve any cancer problem”) seems well designed to attract the unfortunate who imagine you are qualified to pronounce on such matters or help people with cancer. And that, combined with the big “Transact” button on your website that takes me to my PayPal login with you already set up as payee, strongly suggests to me that “smuggling in cancer cures” is probably what you’re up to in practice. You’re certainly up to it in theory, which is dangerous enough. You’re NOT a medical professor.
When people take you to task about pretending to be a medical professor, you attack the scientific method, just as vaguely as you pontificate about the “solution” to cancer (which you have deduced through personal observation and brilliance, no doubt, but not published any data about).
Your “work” (as you refer to it on a blog) is a case study in the Dunning-Kruger effect – the superiority complex of the inept – just like your hero’s, Bruce Lipton. Thinks he’s god’s gift to medical science – deluded and thick as a brick.
Your arguments in defence of your esoteric wisdom remind me of the bullshit Sheldrake comes out with – vaguely, jealously, attacking the “ivory tower conglomeration” that happily shuts tosspots like you out. You can’t help but honour it as you try to insult it. Yes, it’s the “gold standard”, empiricism! It stands up to the acid test. We’re not “hiding behind the skirts of medical orthodoxy”; we require evidence for claims, it’s as simple as that.
We’re carefully trying to tease out the bits that have evidence from the bits that don’t. It does seem that being calm and thinking positively, meditating or doing yoga, for instance, can positively affect your health. But that’s not the same as telling people they “can solve any cancer problem”, that you can guide them in that process, and inviting donations, especially on a website with the promising name “creatingparadise.net”. That is messianic quackery, and you are a messianic quack.
You know all this, or you’ve a good idea of it by now. You probably think you’ve gone too far too publicly to turn back, but I hope you do before you kill someone, if you haven’t already.
[Health Warning from site owner: Marty Murray is a dangerous quack]
Funny thing, of the three or four people experiencing some kind of cancer thing who have been involved with me, all have done great. Another has been able to dissolve moles on her body using her mind only, and myself I am working on some solving skin cancer type of stuff right now.
Clear vision and logic trump all, especially plodding misdirected empiricism in the hands of mentally boxed in pharmaceutical industry handmaidens who are so twisted as to think that the world’s problems can be solved via the torturing of millions of animals, a conception of things which itself defies logic.
That’s why I with basically no budget have accomplished over the past couple of decades more than scores of white coat types with billions in financing. My whole approach is tighter and more logical.
I don’t come up with some halfway logical theory and then seek to “prove” it with some empirical experiment, which in the end may prove nothing even if it generates replicable results. I figure out what is going on.
What is going on is that cancer works much as I described in the text you cited and you can be sure that as time goes on that is what the plodding medical establishment will figure out as well.
There is something you are missing, something you don’t get, about life, about health and about me. For one thing, that Donate button? Hahaha I think maybe two people have pushed that button in the past seven years or so since I put it up, and if I made 50c an hour working with those people I’d be surprised. Meanwhile I am a trained analyst who used to direct research at an asset management firm and walked away from a career where I could have been making millions barely breaking a sweat.
Nah, there’s basically just one reason really what I do what I do and it’s because I find it the only thing to do. I don’t care about getting published, funding, affiliations, getting tenure or any other thing but getting the job done, and it shows up in the results.
This last post by Marty reads like a Poe post. Surely it’s a joke?
P.S. Moles on skin come and go. They don’t need to be dissolved by thought.
It is a kind of joke, I think, Mariah. But it’s the last that I’ll be letting through moderation. I’ve had enough of this fellow using my site as a sounding board of his delusions and self aggrandizement.
Marty can go off and argue with other quacks about their unsupported assertions are wrong and his are right; and why standards of evidence apply to them but not to him.
That’s probably for the best, Yakaru. The added warning makes me laugh. Sorry for feeding the troll. I have to admit I was quite getting into it. What strikes me is the complete absence of argument. We’re told the scientific method is flawed, but not how. We’re told his method, “logic”, trounces empiricism, with no explanation at all. Funny the ancient Greeks never split the atom.
The “trained analyst” cites “three or four people experiencing some kind of cancer thing who have done great” and a psychic mole-dissolver. I’d like to know if it works for moles in the lawn. Mariah’s right, it’s too funny. I wonder if the accusation of being a quack has made him exaggerate the diminished responsibility card.
Surely nobody can seriously characterize empiricism as doing “some empirical experiment, which in the end may prove nothing even if it generates replicable results”. WTF is the difference? Replicable results are proof. Surely he can’t seriously intend to counter the scientific method with “I figure out what is going on”. Oh well, maybe he’ll email me with something else “Dreamhealer” said.
I appreciated your services very much. lettersquash.
There is quite some value in dealing with nutcases like Marty, as your comments demonstrate. They always go through the same list of quack behaviors — grandiose claims, backed up by their own grand theories of everything, bolstered by personal attacks on their critics and peppergun attacks on what they think science says.
Marty has just reached a point where I don’t want him using my blog as a platform for his stupid ideas anymore. He hasn’t attempted to deal with any of the criticisms that are leveled at him — apart from admitting that my criticism of Lipton is valid, and then immediately changing the topic to his own important self.
Marty’s methods are just as wrong as Lipton’s. He merely makes different mistakes to arrive at the same wrong conclusions.
Typical “science” type, if all else fails, moderate out the dissenting voice, and then talk about him after he is gone.
Maybe that pretty well sums up why you are how you are.
Ciao Ciao boys and girls. May you all wake up soon.
What I think you meant to say Marty was something more like —
“Thanks for letting me post more than 7000 words on your blog, even though absolutely none of it was relevant to the post you spent hours researching and writing. Thanks for going to the trouble of moderating me (and letting all my comments through swiftly and unedited) after I insulted you & other commenters, and ignored your comment policy. – Marty Murray, Cancer Quack”
Had you attempted to deal with the serious objections to both your methods and the unsubstantiated conclusions you draw from them, I might have allowed you to comment further. Instead you have merely dodged or ignored all criticism and preferred instead to change the topic to your other equally stupid ideas. I’m not putting up with it anymore.
My advice to you Marty is go back to that job you “could have become a millionaire” with. Talentless delusional people with no training or communication skills do indeed strike it rich occasionally.
Other commenters are invited to discuss anything Marty has written. I think we all can imagine what kind of response he would give. Just imagine a long rant grizzling about why we don’t simply accept his word for everything he claims.
I did find a link from protein to DNA although I’m not a scientist. In this study it states that ‘Many in vivo enzymatic processes such as transcription, repression, activation etc. are triggered by specific binding of proteins to their respective target sites on DNA.’ Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4627088/
I’m not entirely sure what you are intending to imply with that study. If you mean that it somehow alters the genetic code and thereby contradicts the so called ‘Central Dogma’ of genetics, it doesn’t do that. Or did you mean to relate it to one of Lipton’s claims?
I know what I am about to say is anecdotal. It is just my own experience and actually is not about what Lipton says or your critique of his work at all. Just thought I put it out here and see what you reckon is going on here.
About 9 years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar, was on high dose of Lithium and Zyprexa for couple of years. Their side effect was worse than the relived bipolar symptoms and I decided to just stop. Of course symptoms came back and I was just suffering from it in my room as I was playing online games all day everyday (It was my income, fun and social life). One day some old friends asked me to come to a festival and I was on a manic episode so I went ahead with it. There I took a whole bunch of LSD/Mushroom/MDMA, and something happened I got a new perspective (in short that new perspective was an understanding that good things are hard to get and I should get off my ass which I have been comfortably sitting on for decades and that I can choose not to be lazy – a new belief per say) felt like my life was going to be different. This is nothing amazing since I was manic and on drugs. Amazing part of it is, its been about 5 years since then I have not had a single episode of bipolar without taking any medications for it and having a bipolar episode like ones I used to have are very obvious when you do not physically feel tired or have the need for sleep for several days so I would know if I was having an episode, I’ve lost 35 Kgs, quit smoking, and many other positive changes. Quite frankly this past 5 years I have been really productive, extremely motivated, become healthier and a happier person, I even volunteer at suicide crisis center a place I used to call when I was having suicidal thoughts. These actual, measurable changes happened so drastically, and so suddenly that everyone that knew me before and this period is literally shocked, and finds this unbelievable.
Currently I am in my third year of a psych degree really I want to understand what happened to me so I can help make that happen for others who are suffering, or just not living a life that they enjoy.
Now I only heard about Lipton a year ago or so, I am not saying these changes have had anything to do with Lipton nor are they anecdotal evidence for his theories.
However, I am reading DSM-5 in my studies and bipolar does not just go away, you have it for life and medications are only used to relief symptom. But it clearly has just disappeared in my case. So in a way I am prone to believe that there is something really significant about your beliefs and that they can certainly create lasting changes.
Hi Masoud,
Congratulations on that significant change in your life, and I commend your response to it of helping others! I feel I went through something similar, although my recovery (from depression and anxiety rather than bipolar) was more gradual.
As I read your comment, I was thinking, ‘this is about the potential of hallucinogenic drug therapy, surely, not Lipton’s ideas,’ and I believe there is some evidence that hallucinogens can elicit these sorts of positive changes, although not without risks. I’ve not assessed the evidence myself, however.
But I see the link. A crucial issue is what changes in belief you are alluding to. You were giving a brief account, but that was the view that good things only come through effort. And that’s a great example of how beliefs do indeed affect the quality of our lives – but only through interacting physically with the world, not by magic.
My recovery had much to do with that, too, taking responsibility for myself, when I’d spent many years sitting around complaining about the world, trying to work out what was wrong with it and trying to get people to recognise it and change (which was, I thought, that we were all too materialistic and not “spiritual” enough).
In my case there was no big moment. Maybe my recovery would have been much quicker if I’d done acid or whatever – I used hash, but was frightened of harder drugs and avoided them. Instead, I struggled on, getting even more depressed and desperate until I couldn’t bare it any longer. My dad died, which was maybe the trigger. It was the only time I got so bad I phoned the Samaritans.
Shortly after I went to see a therapist, which was when things began to take a turn for the better. I got involved in voluntary work and from there developed a career in counselling, and I remember thinking of the old truism (from Einstein and many others) that happiness comes from service to others, from making other people happy. I’d become less self-obsessed and felt honoured to have the opportunity to listen to people, learn from them, and try to help them.
It’s generally true that what you give out to the world tends to come back. But Lipton and his ilk would have you believe you can do that sitting in a chair (preferably reading their books), or by chanting or channeling your spirit animal, praying to god, or whatever. I suspect many of them are actually stuck in that first phase I was, making no real effort to help anyone and instead inventing imaginary silver bullets. It takes guts and the willingness to be wrong and start again to find something valuable to contribute to the world.
Thanks for your comment, Masoud, and also thanks @lettersquash for your response and observations.
Masoud, whoever refers you to Lipton when they hear your account thinks that Lipton’s teachings are relevant and provide a science-based explanation for how such transformations are possible. Unfortunately, the only reason they think that is because they *didn’t* read his book, and in fact can’t make head or tail of his actual teachings.
That is how it works. People always think that Lipton provides a science-based account of how thoughts can heal, but in fact he doesn’t. He doesn’t even try. But none of his fans realise it, because none of his fans has ever actually read his book. Not one of them.
But I have. I read it all. Here is a link to the article I wrote summing up what Lipton is in fact doing–