Magic, medicine and technology

This morning, I saw a picture of a truck on which the owner had painted "Jesus is my vaccine". I immediately began to write a piece that referenced this quotation:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Clarke’s Third Law, Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1973.

When I went to dig that out of my files, I recalled that I had written about this same matter at the start of my e-book, Not Your Usual Treatments, so I just plundered that. You don't need to read the book (though you'll never be the same if you do!). Here are the salient bits.

I use four different computing devices at different times, and for different purposes. Each uses a different sig file for emails, and right now, the message below appears under emails sent from my tablet:

Away from my desk, and using something with technology sufficiently advanced to pass for magic, given the right lighting. The fully indistinguishable bit will come with the next upgrade.

The sort of people I work and play with recognise that as a reference to Clarke’s Third Law. They probably also know the unofficial corollary: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

My friends live in the world of logic, science and technology. They know what I know: that when we find “magic” being presented as real, rather than as entertainment, we’re in the presence of ignorance, or fraud, or both. Nearby, we will find charlatans and/or the gullible.

I first encountered “magic” when I was about 13. I had a severe rope burn on my leg, and my uncle had been dabbling with a new “religion”. He treated the burn using a neat trick taught to adherents of this movement. His sons, younger than me, mispronounced the trick as “touch and fix”.

Like most conjuring tricks, it was simple. He repeatedly touched my skin near the wound, asking each time if I could feel it, and in the end, according to my mother who watched the process, he was scraping his fingernail down the wound, quite hard — and I was reporting no pain.

Basically, this was desensitisation, a matter of overloading the pain receptors so they stopped sending strong pain signals. I was a scientifically-inclined child and I knew, even then, about desensitisation and deception. On the other hand, my mother, a life-long gullible, was impressed. Even though this was the first rope burn she had ever seen, she told all and sundry that no rope burn in history had ever recovered so quickly.

She was just about ready to sign us all up to join the group, which would have been a salutary experience for them, having me inside the tent and still aiming inwards, but my uncle realised they were dangerous, dropped them, and warned her off.

Desensitisation is easily explained by science. It is simple technology, but in the wrong hands, it can easily be packaged to look like something close to magic. In the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc, much as I would have done, inside the tent.

Almost anything in the wrong hands can wreak havoc.

In Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl showed us that the frozen leg of a fluffy lamb makes a grand club for braining somebody. The poison in 200 kg of potatoes will kill anybody persuaded to eat them, and a medicinal leech in a soldier’s drinking water may attach inside his throat and choke him to death. Any book, placed in a drum of cement, and tied to the ankle of a literary critic may be used, in damp environments of sufficient depth, to improve the human gene pool.

It’s all about context and intent. Medical havoc usually comes when a person lacks any basic knowledge of a technology, culture or set of procedures. Guided by a charlatan (or being a charlatan), the ignorant person adopts or constructs a nonsensical explanation of reality, and applies it without any thought, or hesitation.

In ignorant minds, analogy sounds as good as analysis, and by a false analogy with scurvy, cancers can be blamed on dietary deficiencies. It’s an easy slide, all the way down the slippery slope after that. Some users progress to believing that one can eliminate TB by rubbing the patient’s brow with crystals. Soon, the very same treatment is credited with fixing headaches, beating sunstroke, banishing syphilis and mending varicose veins.

Filled with excitement, the converts claim that eating worms mends broken bones, that a tea made from a noxious weed stops HIV in its tracks, or that snake bite is cured by injections of meerkat urine. These people enter a frauds’ universe where, while many things are still impossible, they, the victims, don’t know it. This is not magic, they parrot — just advanced and esoteric science that the listener could never comprehend.

To be fair, some of the frauds are the victims of self-delusion, but they are still a threat to public health. In 1709, Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Criticism, “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, though this is usually seen and heard as “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

This book is about people with little knowledge or learning, and no inclination to find out — and about people with a great deal of knowledge of deception, and a strong inclination to find money.

I originally planned to look at Australian quacks, but I soon realised that context and intent are all-important, that most “quacks” were nothing of the sort — and that strange medicine knows no borders. In the end, I realised I simply had to spread the net wider, but there is still a strong emphasis on the Australian side of this story.

One generation’s orthodox medicine is seen by the next generation as out-and-out quackery, and the only thing that has changed is the dominant paradigm, the accepted model of what makes us ill.

Occasionally, a far-seeing practitioner has been denounced as a quack, before later being proven right. These rare examples of genius struggling along, unrecognised, are just what the frauds and charlatans need.

“They laughed at Einstein,” they jeer, trying on their Einstein wigs.

All the same, there is a difference between the medically trained lone-wolf pioneer and the fraud. The pioneer was merely working to a different paradigm, while the charlatan works only to a greed paradigm.