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The woo in my backyard

Snixtor

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Sep 20, 2009
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There is a small conference and function room near to where I live that I occasionally wander past. Functions held there vary from poker games to wedding receptions to... absolute empowerment of psychic children and medical intuition? Wait, what was that last one?

On my most recent walk past the room I saw a gathering of what looked like middle aged, midlle income, middle inteligence middle managers. "Millenium Eduction" read the A-frame sign at the entrance. www.absoluteempowerment.com the fine-print URL at the bottom. My mind filled in the blanks and threw the word "Financial" between the two in the title and I went on my way. Mortgage-owners wanting annual 1st class tickets to France and a Mercedes in the driveway, nothing too wrong about that I thought.

But curious as I am, I decided to check the website. Maybe I could get a giggle out of whatever shoddy money-making plans they were selling. Pyramid scheme? time-share accommodation? day-trading? No, nothing that silly, why, only "a journey for those wanting a new beginning, new life and manifesting all their desires to design their destiny according to the ancient writings of 2013 & Beyond".

The, um, what? "incorporates medical intuition, ancient wisdom, new age sciences and quantum physics". At which point the manifesting of my emotion quickly transitioned from frown, to dropped-jaw, to wide-eyed guffaw.

The woowoo had hit the fan, it was a full-blown believers meeting in my own backyard. How exciting, maybe 6 months after discovering what could be colloquially described as "the skeptic movement", I had my very own case study. But how quickly my curiosity turned to concern, as the further I dug, the more insane it all became.

The "Medical Intuitive III" course for example, includes (but is not limited to):
  • Alchemy
  • Psychic surgery
  • Working with Kundalini Energy
  • Metaphysical pharmacy

The onslaught did not abate, everywhere I looked was more of the same, and worse. "Atlantis Myth & Legend - Are you a Golden One?". And then the really frightening item, "Psychic & Awakened Children". What's the harm? My mind spins...

The Crystal Child - Within their cellular memory they retain the memories of Atlantis and how to heal with crystals and awaken people using ‘hands on healing’.
The Aqua Child - Having only communicated telepathically, some children may have speech problems.
The Rainbow Child - The Rainbow Child has an ability to ‘take on’ and accept other people’s past lives so as to have an accelerated hu-man experience and learning.
The Star Child - But even though increased cranial size is a rough index of intelligence, even more important is the qualitative increase in human development, in areas such as enhanced psychic abilities, ability to harness bioenergetics energy and earth and cosmic forces to heal, and telepathic and intuitive linking with others and with Source Consciousness.

Fantastic, your child is either a psychic healer, telepathic, a past-life vessel or a bit of everything! Your child isn't autistic, he's just too busy communicating telepathically to bother looking at you in the eyes.

I'm stunned, I'm perplexed, I'm a little apprehensive. They're over there in the function room right now. It's Medical Intuitive IV today, at a full-weekend rate of $550. Right now they're "The tools and techniques that transform the evidence of Christ consciousness in manifestation by making the individual aware of disease an disharmony within the body, with the use of Alchemy and emotions." I recognise those words, but placed in that sequence they don't make any sense, they don't even make a sentance.

I'm tempted to walk over there and sneek a peek. I'm tempted to write an angry letter to... someone. I'm tempted to lock the doors... :boxedin:
 
I am now looking into my crystal ball... (dusts it off.. puts on mystic-y looking purple scarf... goes "woo, woo, woo...") and my official psychic prediction is that someone at this weird insane thing is going to try to frighten people with the horrible hideous evils of giving their special crystal aqua rainbow star children Ritalin, because there's no such thing as ADHD. :mad: It will squelch their magical creativity and turn them into soulless robots and puppets of Big Pharma! Peter Breggin will probably speak on the second day. Anyway, if you want to hear the entire prediction, call 1-900-555-1212 today. Only $5.99 a minute.
 
I'm warning you right now -- STAY AWAY FROM THAT Kundalini Energy. A couple of blasts of that stuff and you may find yourself wanting a glass of water or a cookie or . . . something. :scared:
 
When I read sites like that l feel the pull of the dark side. I mean old Phineas Taylor Barnum wasn't really a bad fella, was he?
 
Maybe you could print out several copies of a few web pages like these and scatter them outside the place just before they're due to come out. Some of them might pick them up and read them and then have second thoughts about what they're getting involved in, you never know. Is there a car park you could scatter them around? :)

The Art of Cold Reading.
Cold Reading: The Tricks of the Psychics (William Goldberg).
Before You See a Psychic...By Tony Youens
A tough match for astrologers.
John Edwards - Talking to the Dead - Fake or Real?
Psychic Frauds.
Past-Life Recall as Modern Proof for Reincarnation?
The confessions of a leading psychic.

Or maybe you could print out several copies of a page or two containing a compilation you put together of quotes from the articles on it and links to each website for anyone who wants to know more, although it would take a bit of dedication to put such a thing together, and if an authority figure caught you littering ... :)

But if you did something like that, you could also put the link to the What's The Harm website on it, a site where you get information about all kinds of quack things.
 
Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here!
We've got woo for adults, woo for kids, woo for cats, for dogs and guinea pigs,
We can heal your mind, heal the sick,
Create mystical powers and make you psychic.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here!
We'll detox your body with a candle in your ear,
We'll cleanse your energy, waving hands around you gently,
We'll empower your mind with messages sent mentally.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
We'll treat you with lotions and potions and pills,
A different herb for each different ill,
A combination that will heal, no side effects,
We take EFTPOS and Credit, but sorry, no cheques,

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
We have highly qualified therapists present,
Some with diplomas, some gifted by heaven,
Each one has their own approach here today,
But each is able to make worries go away.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
We can fix anything, no need to fear,
Even problems only diagnosed here,
No actual doctors need to be present,
Some of the treatments even feel pleasant.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
A weekend full of like-minded folks,
People with names like Liberty, Summer and Hope,
We'll sympathise, empathise, theorise and then,
Blame it all on corporations, medications and men.
 
softstuff said:
Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here!
We've got woo for adults, woo for kids, woo for cats, for dogs and guinea pigs,
We can heal your mind, heal the sick,
Create mystical powers and make you psychic.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here!
We'll detox your body with a candle in your ear,
We'll cleanse your energy, waving hands around you gently,
We'll empower your mind with messages sent mentally.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
We'll treat you with lotions and potions and pills,
A different herb for each different ill,
A combination that will heal, no side effects,
We take EFTPOS and Credit, but sorry, no cheques,

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
We have highly qualified therapists present,
Some with diplomas, some gifted by heaven,
Each one has their own approach here today,
But each is able to make worries go away.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
We can fix anything, no need to fear,
Even problems only diagnosed here,
No actual doctors need to be present,
Some of the treatments even feel pleasant.

Roll up, roll up,
Get your woo woo here,
A weekend full of like-minded folks,
People with names like Liberty, Summer and Hope,
We'll sympathise, empathise, theorise and then,
Blame it all on corporations, medications and men.
Click to expand...

Wow! I'm stealing this for sure! Very, very nice.

Also nominated. :cool:
 
Wow, I had never heard of aqua children and rainbow children before. Being a crystal child wasn't enough.

Anything of note happen since your post?
 
softstuff said:
... We'll cleanse your energy, waving hands around you gently, ...
Click to expand...

Well of course, part of the allure of this kind of thing is its mystique, and the fact that some of the techniques do help to make people feel better, albeit not through the means they think they do. For instance, in an article called New Study Reviews Science Behind Efficacy Of Biofield Therapies - Reiki, Therapeutic Touch And Healing Touch it claims:

... These techniques have been used over millennia in various cultural communities to heal physical and mental disorders. They have only recently been under the scrutiny of current Western scientific methods.

In a detailed review of 66 clinical studies looking at biofield therapies in different patient populations with a range of ailments, Jain and Mills examine the strength of the evidence for the efficacy of these complementary therapies. They show that overall, published work on biofield therapies is of average quality - in scientific terms.

Bearing that in mind, they find strong evidence that biofield therapies reduce pain intensity in free-living populations, and moderate evidence that they are effective at lowering pain in hospitalized patients as well as in patients with cancer.

There is also moderate evidence that these therapies ease agitated behaviors in dementia and moderate evidence that they reduce anxiety in hospitalized patients. There is inconclusive evidence for the efficacy of biofield therapies on symptoms of fatigue and quality of life in cancer patients, as well as for overall pain reduction, and anxiety management in cardiovascular patients. ...
Click to expand...

The reduction in agitation could perhaps easily be explained by the fact that touch/massage/pampering is known to be soothing; and the pain reduction might be explained by the fact that such therapies can be relaxing, and muscle tension and stress can make pain much worse, so relieving it will alleviate it to some extent.

What's unfortunate is that people will be paying a lot of money to learn a lot of false theories and some things that work but could be done much more cheaply without the "woo" trappings. For instance, relaxation techniques can be learned free by finding information online about them. For example, there are several in part of this article: Overcoming Depression and Worry; and relatives could learn to massage sick members of their families without years of reiki training.

These people are basically paying a lot of money to be misled, which is a shame. Maybe provided with positive alternative suggestions, they would take to them instead.
 
Baby Nemesis said:
Well of course, part of the allure of this kind of thing is its mystique, and the fact that some of the techniques do help to make people feel better, albeit not through the means they think they do. For instance, in an article called New Study Reviews Science Behind Efficacy Of Biofield Therapies - Reiki, Therapeutic Touch And Healing Touch it claims:



The reduction in agitation could perhaps easily be explained by the fact that touch/massage/pampering is known to be soothing; and the pain reduction might be explained by the fact that such therapies can be relaxing, and muscle tension and stress can make pain much worse, so relieving it will alleviate it to some extent.

What's unfortunate is that people will be paying a lot of money to learn a lot of false theories and some things that work but could be done much more cheaply without the "woo" trappings. For instance, relaxation techniques can be learned free by finding information online about them. For example, there are several in part of this article: Overcoming Depression and Worry; and relatives could learn to massage sick members of their families without years of reiki training.

These people are basically paying a lot of money to be misled, which is a shame. Maybe provided with positive alternative suggestions, they would take to them instead.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I wonder, though, if without the woo trappings, the efficacy would drop. Is it the therapy itself, the massage or relaxation benefits, or is it convincing people that the therapy works "magically," altering energy fields or whatever it might be, that works?
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Wow! I'm stealing this for sure! Very, very nice.

Also nominated. :cool:
Click to expand...

I thank you.

Unfortunately we were too late to take action, it was over before we saw the perfect idea from Baby Nemesis (I'm Snixtors wife incidentally). Though it has given me an idea of how I could be more militant about our local woo, and boy is there a heap of it.

On their website the "Psychic and Enlightened Children" are mentioned as being "Indigo Children". All I imagine when I see that is an unfortunate incident in a Turkish village I visited where they painted the kids blue for a school concert where they were smurfs, but the paint proved to be a bit too durable.

I can understand entirely that being touched and attended to is soothing and reassuring and that it could be easily taught and available for free. The biggest issue I have is it being a huge money-spinning enterprise. Say there were 100 people present, at $550 for the weekend, that's $55,000. Room rental and meals aside you'd be left with $45,000. $45,000 to talk about complete BS. It makes me want to vomit.

Some would say if a person was stupid enough to pay that, let them. I just imagine all the more positive uses they could make of the money rather than lining a woo-mongerers pockets. Besides which, it strikes me that diagnosing your child as a psychic, intuitive, healer or whatever the heck else is a form of abuse, especially if it detracts from seeking real medical or psychological help for a child with genuine issues.

If there was a guy selling a bottle of "Mr Dexters Magical Elixir" from a painted caravan crying out what I wrote earlier, there would likely be an outcry. But for some reason we've moved from the travelling trickster to someone who is able to set up camp, charge more and somehow make the same claims with an air of authority and legitimacy. I need to take some action that's for sure.
 
ExMinister said:
Interesting. I wonder, though, if without the woo trappings, the efficacy would drop. Is it the therapy itself, the massage or relaxation benefits, or is it convincing people that the therapy works "magically," altering energy fields or whatever it might be, that works?
Click to expand...

Possibly a mixture of the two, because the placebo effect will come into play to some extent. You've probably got a lot more knowledge about what attracts people to this kind of thing and the benefits they think they're getting out of it than me, so your opinion would probably be insightful.

Apparently, some research on the placebo effect suggests that ritual that builds up the expectation of being made better can help. But I don't know whether it's the case that the more elaborate the ritual is, the better it will work. If someone was told that plain old relaxation techniques could help them a lot and given suggestions as to how to create a soothing atmosphere for themselves, or told that massage had been found to have great benefits, for instance scientific studies have found it can help premature babies thrive, so their expectations of it working were increased, then maybe the effects would be just as good.
 
You know i have a tendancy to make the comment that New-woo is reading more and more like a list of D and D powers, races, abilities, etc. But seriously this one takes the cake.

Though i mean seriously, these would make for some fairly poor charecters, i don't think a 15th level star child would be a decent adventurer.

Word to the woo, at least make the powers cool, i mean where are the fireballs, cone of cold, Fast healing, damage reduction, etc? If your going to B.S. at least put a little effort into it.
 
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