To make training for combat medics more realistic, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have designed the first detailed computer simulation model of an injured human leg-complete with spurting blood.
Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the simulator was created at UCLA’s Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology (CASIT). The research team included surgeons, fluid dynamicists, biomedical engineers, mathematicians and psychologists.
“This model truly is a breakthrough in how combat medics can be taught to control hemorrhaging,” said Dr. Ray Perez, a program officer in ONR’s Warfighter Performance Department. “Leg injuries are particularly difficult to treat since different points of entry cause different levels of blood loss. This new simulator model can better prepare medics with various ways to staunch bleeding.”
The goal of the simulator is to provide future medics with a virtual patient that reacts in realistic fashion to leg wounds. Although previous work has measured blood fluid dynamics and the impact of gunshot and shrapnel wounds to different parts of the body, this is the first such modeling for legs.
Office of Naval Research-sponsored researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have designed the first detailed computer simulation model of how an injured human leg bleeds. (Still image from a YouTube video provided by the team at UCLA’s Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology.)
Legs, which are rich in blood vessels, are particularly vulnerable places to be injured. Bullets or shrapnel can slice through veins and arteries, resulting in lost limbs or even death. Another threat is damage caused by improvised explosive devices, roadside bombs or mines.
To create the simulator model, researchers combined detailed knowledge of anatomy with real-life CAT scans and MRIs to map out layers of a human leg-the bone, the soft tissue containing muscle and blood vessels and the skin surrounding everything. Then the design team applied physics and mathematical equations, fluid dynamics, and pre-determined rates of blood flow from specific veins and arteries to simulate blood loss for wounds of varying sizes and severity.
“This simulator is unique because it uses mathematics and fluid physics to replicate blood flow,” said Dr. Erik Dutson, a general surgeon and CASIT’s executive medical director, who oversaw the simulator’s design. “Other simulators provide a less detailed, more cartoonish picture of blood flow. We worked with experts in fluid dynamics to create an accurate, realistic vision of the speed and distribution of blood loss.”
Dutson envisions the simulator being used in real-time training exercises by combat medics. It would enable them to test different methods of staunching blood flow to perform more effectively in actual battlefield situations. Even better, Dutson said, medics could change the size and shape of virtual wounds-as well as the speed and amount of blood flow-and complete exercises multiple times to improve proficiency.
The CASIT team also designed the simulator to reflect the latest breakthroughs in the science of learning-targeting how the human brain best processes information, adapting to an individual’s learning proficiencies, and accelerating learning time and retention during training.
While Dutson is pleased with the simulator’s design, his team already is planning improvements-chiefly, enhancing the liquid model representing blood.
“As it stands, the liquid model is similar to water in its composition,” he said. “We eventually want to have it mirror more closely the physiological characteristics of blood, which is a living tissue. These include red and white blood cells, plasma, and platelets and clotting properties. We feel we’ll get to that level of accuracy soon.
Perez said talks are underway with the Navy and Marine Corps to test the simulator on a trial basis among combat medic recruits.
“Dr. Dutson and his team have created an ambitious suite of technologies serving a major need for the military,” said Perez. “We look forward to helping him get this in the hands of combat medics.”
Warren Duffie is a contractor for ONR Corporate Strategic Communications.
from Armed with Science http://ift.tt/2096tVC
By Warren Duffie, Office of Naval Research
To make training for combat medics more realistic, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have designed the first detailed computer simulation model of an injured human leg-complete with spurting blood.
Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the simulator was created at UCLA’s Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology (CASIT). The research team included surgeons, fluid dynamicists, biomedical engineers, mathematicians and psychologists.
“This model truly is a breakthrough in how combat medics can be taught to control hemorrhaging,” said Dr. Ray Perez, a program officer in ONR’s Warfighter Performance Department. “Leg injuries are particularly difficult to treat since different points of entry cause different levels of blood loss. This new simulator model can better prepare medics with various ways to staunch bleeding.”
The goal of the simulator is to provide future medics with a virtual patient that reacts in realistic fashion to leg wounds. Although previous work has measured blood fluid dynamics and the impact of gunshot and shrapnel wounds to different parts of the body, this is the first such modeling for legs.
Office of Naval Research-sponsored researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have designed the first detailed computer simulation model of how an injured human leg bleeds. (Still image from a YouTube video provided by the team at UCLA’s Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology.)
Legs, which are rich in blood vessels, are particularly vulnerable places to be injured. Bullets or shrapnel can slice through veins and arteries, resulting in lost limbs or even death. Another threat is damage caused by improvised explosive devices, roadside bombs or mines.
To create the simulator model, researchers combined detailed knowledge of anatomy with real-life CAT scans and MRIs to map out layers of a human leg-the bone, the soft tissue containing muscle and blood vessels and the skin surrounding everything. Then the design team applied physics and mathematical equations, fluid dynamics, and pre-determined rates of blood flow from specific veins and arteries to simulate blood loss for wounds of varying sizes and severity.
“This simulator is unique because it uses mathematics and fluid physics to replicate blood flow,” said Dr. Erik Dutson, a general surgeon and CASIT’s executive medical director, who oversaw the simulator’s design. “Other simulators provide a less detailed, more cartoonish picture of blood flow. We worked with experts in fluid dynamics to create an accurate, realistic vision of the speed and distribution of blood loss.”
Dutson envisions the simulator being used in real-time training exercises by combat medics. It would enable them to test different methods of staunching blood flow to perform more effectively in actual battlefield situations. Even better, Dutson said, medics could change the size and shape of virtual wounds-as well as the speed and amount of blood flow-and complete exercises multiple times to improve proficiency.
The CASIT team also designed the simulator to reflect the latest breakthroughs in the science of learning-targeting how the human brain best processes information, adapting to an individual’s learning proficiencies, and accelerating learning time and retention during training.
While Dutson is pleased with the simulator’s design, his team already is planning improvements-chiefly, enhancing the liquid model representing blood.
“As it stands, the liquid model is similar to water in its composition,” he said. “We eventually want to have it mirror more closely the physiological characteristics of blood, which is a living tissue. These include red and white blood cells, plasma, and platelets and clotting properties. We feel we’ll get to that level of accuracy soon.
Perez said talks are underway with the Navy and Marine Corps to test the simulator on a trial basis among combat medic recruits.
“Dr. Dutson and his team have created an ambitious suite of technologies serving a major need for the military,” said Perez. “We look forward to helping him get this in the hands of combat medics.”
Warren Duffie is a contractor for ONR Corporate Strategic Communications.
Was the Iowa Caucus outcome determined by a coin flip?
We have seen several reports that Hillary Clinton won the Iowa Caucus by a coin toss, or by six coin tosses. Or some other number. We’ve also seen reports that six delegates were awarded to Clinton on the basis of coin tosses, implying that of the 44 delegates determined on Monday in Iowa a large percentage were chosen by the toss of an unfair coin, that somehow the Clinton campaign controlled the coin tosses causing them to all come out in her favor. And so on.
After a barrage of these reports, we are now seeing a small number of reports trying to describe what actually happened, which was very different. Some of these reports are somewhat accurate, but most leave the reader not fully understanding what really went down. Here, I want to ‘splain this one more time in a way that I hope makes sense. Warning: This is not simple. Which, really, is the point I want to make.
Then, I want to make a couple of meta comments about what this all means.
Most of the difficulty in understanding what happened in Iowa arises from the fact that Iowa uses a caucus system, not a primary. So does Minnesota and over a dozen other states and territories. This is important because quite a few convention delegates are determined by this system, and those involved in the political process need to understand how a caucus works in order to effectively engage.
I’m going to generalize here, mainly from my Minnesota experience; your caucus may vary. But there are some general principles that seem to apply widely.
How does a caucus work?
The exact rules of how a caucus works vary from state to state, but also, from year to year. The rules are determined by the party officials through an arcane process that anyone is welcome to join in but few do. The rules are handed down and enforced by those leading local meetings. The people running local meetings are always experienced dedicated party officers and volunteers. Except when they are not because they ran out of party officers or experienced volunteers, then the meetings are run by confused and frightened citizens who do their best. This is the first thing that makes a caucus system different from voting. Voting is easy. Caucusing is harder, and how well it goes at a given site can vary.
The next thing you need to know is that the caucus system often addresses many issues, not just a presidential nominee. There may be local candidates, state wide candidates, and congressional candidates chosen by the caucus process.
Normally a caucus system, therefore, happens at near or at the lowest geographical level for a state. This then leads to a second caucus later at a higher geographical level. Then, at the state level. For instance, Minnesota will caucus on Super Tuesday (March 1st this year). But we will have another caucus in April at the State Senate district level. Eventually there will a meeting at the Congressional District level. Then a statewide convention. Depending on the state or year, the national political party convention delegates may be chosen somewhere along the line. In Iowa (and in Minnesota, and may be everywhere) number of national delegates representing each presidential candidate, are chosen at the first caucus, at the lowest level. Which, of course, makes no sense until you understand the entire system. (If it makes sense to you then, please let your local Democratic party officials know because they need you.)
There may be delegates at each level. Indeed, everybody who shows up and is a legal voter in the precinct or district might be considered a delegate. So there can be many many thousands of delegates involved in the caucus system, depending on how it is defined. But, at the lowest level (a precinct, in Iowa) these people use a system to pick a subset of themselves to be the delegates that advance to the next level. Typically, these delegates are committed to a candidate. In the case of Iowa, they all had the potential to become Clinton, Sanders, or O’Malley delegates. And there were thousands of them.
These delegates then advance to the next level at which a subset of them is selected to go on to yet another level, etc. Eventually, in Iowa, 44 delegates are chosen. Except the actual delegates do not winnow down to 44. Rather, the distribution of the thousands of delegates by preferred candidate is used to determine the distribution across the candidates among those 44, and who those individuals actually will be — who gets to go to the national convention and party, er, represent — is a whole other system not addressed here.
The initial selection of the lowest level of thousands of delegates is chosen at each local site using one or more methods. The methods, as I said, follow the rules handed down by the party. I don’t know the exact rules used this year in Iowa, but there are two methods that are generally used. For small groups, it is not uncommon (if the rules allow) for the group to sit down and talk in a room then vote for how many delegates of each type they will put forward. In some cases, such as when a party has an incumbent president, they don’t even do that, but rather, use a simple ballot system to chose one of two “candidates,” the sitting president or “other” (or write-in). The point is, the process can look like a mini election that results in some paperwork and that’s it.
But the more traditional and more fun way is to use a Walking Caucus. Here is a typical framework for Walking Caucus (but, again, the rules vary).
Everybody who is properly signed in gets in one part of a big room. The number of people involved is known because they checked in, so there is a number, we will call N, of individuals. Using duct tape or some other means, the rest of the room is divided off and no one who is not a delegate can cross that line. Party officials are usually standing on a stage or table nearby directing things.
Some people have signs they hold up with the name of a candidate or issue on them, like “Clinton, Climate Change, and Jobs” or whatever. They are all yelling things at each other. Over time people move into clusters where each cluster is a group of people who favor a given candidate or set of issues.
Variant: Sometimes people are not running around and shouting, but rather, sitting around and talking, and not all caucuses address issues. But it amounts to the same thing, people will move to physical proximity to each other by candidate or issue or something.
Either way, you get a bunch of clusters of people. We will call these clusters “sub caucuses” because that is what they are sometimes called.
It might look like this:
There is a time limit on this process, and eventually the party officials “freeze” the caucus. At this point, or some other later point, delegates are told they can’t return if they leave the room or cross the line. Some delegates will leave because they are tired, need to go to the bathroom, are annoyed, or have something to do. These become “missing delegates.” Sometimes they are let back in later, sometimes not.
Meanwhile, the party officials have taken two numbers, D, which is the number of delegates that can advance from this caucus, and N, the number of people supposedly in the room, and applied some basic integer math. They need to use integer math if they can’t advance proportions of delegates (i.e., they must use whole numbers) and because they are not allowed to saw the actual delegates into bits even if they sometimes want to. This integer math results in a Viability Number. If you are allowed to put ten delegates forward, and you have 100 participants, the viability number is 10. Any group of people fewer than 10 does NOT get to advance a delegate.
Now, back to the frozen caucus. The party officials demand a count of each cluster of people. Each sub caucus is then determined to be “viable” (the number in the group is at or above the viability number) or “not viable.” At this point, the “not viable” sub caucuses are dispersed, not with dogs or firehoses or anything, just told that they are not viable and should break up and find somewhere else to go.
This is when the shouting starts again, as the non-viable people are invited to join viable caucuses.
Eventually the walking caucus is frozen again, and counted again.
A lot of things can happen at this point in time. Ideally, no one has left the room, and everybody has divided themselves into groups that are exact integer multiples of the Viability number. In this case, each sub caucus is simply counted (how many people in it) and then that number is divided by the Viability Number. The result is the number of delegates that sub caucus can advance. Those delegates are typically committed to support the candidate the sub caucus they were in represents, if the caucus is choosing state level or congressional candidates.
For the national convention, this simply translates into a number that is passed on via a form or electronic device, and the people standing in the room will have little to do with what happens next. The party will figure out who gets to go to the convention, and the number sent representing each candidate (if proportional representation is used) will be decided later. But the actual delegates that are actually advanced from each sub caucus will, in theory, go on to the next level (state Senate district, or US Congressional district, or whatever). So, typically, there will be a tiny little election within each sub caucus to elect their moving-on delegates. In my experience, this is often the most important moment in the caucus, because you have to send someone on you can trust, but you don’t know these people and suddenly you are faced with choosing them.
In Minnesota, we require gender proportional representation (male and female only at the present time) so if your sub caucus has two delegates one has to be a boy and one has to be a girl. The party may reserve the right to remove and add delegates later if they need to to make sure the gender proportionality is 50-50.
Now, imagine the following scenario. The exact number of people who ended up on the floor exactly matches the number of people who are properly signed in. Nobody leaves for any reason. The number of people who showed up happens to be an integer multiple of the number of delegates your caucus gets to put forward. There is no confusion. As the people make their sub caucus, they all, each and every one, understand the above described system or its applicable variant, and have thus formed perfect sub caucuses, each divisible by the viability number. So, when the sub caucuses are polled as to how many delegates they represent and for which candidate, absolutely nothing goes wrong.
LOL
Now, imagine this scenario. It is late. The party officials have burned off half the scheduled caucus time dealing with esoteric party decisions. Half the delegates are retired older people with weak bladders. Some are parents with a time limit on their baby sitter. Nobody really knows how to do math these days. The psychic unity of humankind has failed to make sure the number of people who showed up is an exact multiple of the viability number. And so on.
So, you end up with a set of sub caucuses that does not perfectly produce the exact number of delegates required.
This will be, typically, off by one. It really can’t be off by two, because if the number of people in the room changes that much during the process, the actual viability number is simply changed. This should happen before the walk, and when the viability number changes, there is a lot more movement between sub caucuses. In any event, a little adjustment there, a bit more shouting and cajoling and walking around, and counting and recounting, and with luck the number of delegates that is required from that meeting can be assigned.
Or, one will be orphaned. Because of all of these sources of error, it is possible via many possible sequences of events to end up not being able to fairly assign one of the delegates to a candidate.
There are various ways this can be dealt with, but a common and accepted method is to flip a coin. If there are two candidates, each has a 50-50 chance of getting a delegate. This is interesting because it gives candidates that have a low representation a small chance of getting one delegate more than they deserved, which is considered both harmless and polite. If the split is very close, it could determine whether or not a single meeting location sends one more or one less than the other on to the next level.
What has not happened is that the outcome of that caucus, at that location, was determined by a coin flip. In Iowa, the average precinct has about 7 or 8 delegates, I believe. The number of delegates that are passed on because of a coin flip should usually be zero, but now and then, one. One out of seven or eight. Not all seven or eight. One.
In Iowa, over 11,000 delegates were chosen with the caucus method. About a dozen (according to reports, though I suspect a few more) of those 11,065 delegates were the result of a coin toss.
Iowa will send, using this process, 44 delegates to the national convention. They determined the number that would represent each candidate by using integer arithmetic to divide up the 11,065 precinct level delegates into 44 national delegates. So if there was a coin toss for a dozen precinct level delegates, then one tenth of one percent of that decision was influenced by random chance. The rest of the allocation was determined by the totally sane non-random process described above.
There is more, of course. The actual delegates and the actual numbers depend not only who shows up on caucus night, but who shows up later. Given this number of delegates, and the fact that they are regular citizens, means that many individuals will abandon the process along the way. As noted, there may be issues of allocation by gender, or other factors.
Because of the possibility of little things going wrong along the way, I think it is typical for party officials to have a lot of leeway in who ends up being a delegate. During off years, the number of people who show up at the first meeting during which people are recruited to be delegates is often so small that anybody who calls up the precinct captain (or some other official) later on can probably become a delegate. During presidential or, even, midterm years, there may be a lot more public involvement, but it might be highly variable across the party’s geographical space, so the number of people involved in selecting a given delegate may vary. This may also be a difference between states (such as Iowa vs. Minnesota). The point is, if you want to find randomness, capriciousness, or arbitrariness in the system, there is plenty.
But not the coin toss. The coin toss is an effective and fair way to allocate the occasional orphan delegate. It will favor low-number candidates slightly, and mean nothing in a close race.
What can we learn from coinflipgate?
Coinflipgate got legs because the people who initiated the meme, or later spread it, were ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of how the caucus system works.
Coinflipgate was a political ploy exploited inappropriately by anti-Clinton or pro-Sanders activists for the purpose of affecting people’s attitudes about the Clinton campaign.
Coinflipgate, because of the thinness of its veneer and its inherent absurdity, was not a good political strategy.
An important aspect of the caucus system is that it is complex, confusing, and difficult. Contrast the following two scenarios.
Scenario A: Dozens, maybe close to 100, people show up at a caucus site because they feel strongly about a candidate, but have never been to a caucus before and have no clue as to what to do. Party officials are barely able to manage the ensuing fray. The caucus happens, but inefficiently. Delegates are advanced, but several people leave the room realizing they were in the wrong sub caucus, or an orphan delegate emerges and is randomly assigned.
Scenario B: The candidates being considered at a caucus recruit experienced caucus experts to attend a caucus and help guide their supporters to form efficient sub caucuses, and to effectively persuade the undecided to join them, or occasionally, to turn a delegate to their side. These activists may not even be voters in that precinct or district, and in fact may even be from out of state (because you don’t want to use individuals who should actually be caucusing). Each candidate also has several supporters among the delegates, and those supporters have met once or twice with an expert who has trained them in how to caucus.
One could easily imagine one candidate following scenario A and a different candidate following scenario B at the same caucus. If those two candidates are roughly even in their support, the candidate that runs scenario B at most of the caucus sites will come away with more delegates. This is very different from voting. In short, the “ground game” wins the day.
This may seem rather capricious but it is not, for one of the reasons that the caucus is a good system. The candidate that can run a good ground game in a caucus is the candidate that can manage everything better, run a better campaign, have a better chance of winning in other contexts, in other caucus states, in non-caucus states, and in the general election. This is the candidate that has good people working for them. All else being equal, you want to support the candidate that can do this better. Ability to manage a caucus is not the only criterion on which we chose our candidates or leaders, but it is one criterion that is meaningful and a valid test of skill, level of organization, commitment of supporters, and so on.
That is certainly not the only goal of a caucus. The main goal of a caucus is to get people together to make an important decision in a way that goes beyond merely showing up and checking off a candidate’s name in a box.
My description of how a caucus works is based mainly on my experience in Minnesota and some reading and conversation about how Iowa works. If you are an experienced Iowa caucuser, feel free to add or correct details in the comments below. But the basic idea is there, and similar across cases.
People who are repeating the absurd idea that national delegates were chosen with a coin flip, and people who are calling for a “recount” of the caucus, are either not understanding how the system works, or are exploiting the fact that most people don’t know how this system works, to toss some mud and cast some doubt. That is not helpful, no matter which candidate one supports, because it is a less than honest and, in the end, very ineffective, likely to backfire tactic.
And now, a word from the Minnesota DFL
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1SGvrLe
Was the Iowa Caucus outcome determined by a coin flip?
We have seen several reports that Hillary Clinton won the Iowa Caucus by a coin toss, or by six coin tosses. Or some other number. We’ve also seen reports that six delegates were awarded to Clinton on the basis of coin tosses, implying that of the 44 delegates determined on Monday in Iowa a large percentage were chosen by the toss of an unfair coin, that somehow the Clinton campaign controlled the coin tosses causing them to all come out in her favor. And so on.
After a barrage of these reports, we are now seeing a small number of reports trying to describe what actually happened, which was very different. Some of these reports are somewhat accurate, but most leave the reader not fully understanding what really went down. Here, I want to ‘splain this one more time in a way that I hope makes sense. Warning: This is not simple. Which, really, is the point I want to make.
Then, I want to make a couple of meta comments about what this all means.
Most of the difficulty in understanding what happened in Iowa arises from the fact that Iowa uses a caucus system, not a primary. So does Minnesota and over a dozen other states and territories. This is important because quite a few convention delegates are determined by this system, and those involved in the political process need to understand how a caucus works in order to effectively engage.
I’m going to generalize here, mainly from my Minnesota experience; your caucus may vary. But there are some general principles that seem to apply widely.
How does a caucus work?
The exact rules of how a caucus works vary from state to state, but also, from year to year. The rules are determined by the party officials through an arcane process that anyone is welcome to join in but few do. The rules are handed down and enforced by those leading local meetings. The people running local meetings are always experienced dedicated party officers and volunteers. Except when they are not because they ran out of party officers or experienced volunteers, then the meetings are run by confused and frightened citizens who do their best. This is the first thing that makes a caucus system different from voting. Voting is easy. Caucusing is harder, and how well it goes at a given site can vary.
The next thing you need to know is that the caucus system often addresses many issues, not just a presidential nominee. There may be local candidates, state wide candidates, and congressional candidates chosen by the caucus process.
Normally a caucus system, therefore, happens at near or at the lowest geographical level for a state. This then leads to a second caucus later at a higher geographical level. Then, at the state level. For instance, Minnesota will caucus on Super Tuesday (March 1st this year). But we will have another caucus in April at the State Senate district level. Eventually there will a meeting at the Congressional District level. Then a statewide convention. Depending on the state or year, the national political party convention delegates may be chosen somewhere along the line. In Iowa (and in Minnesota, and may be everywhere) number of national delegates representing each presidential candidate, are chosen at the first caucus, at the lowest level. Which, of course, makes no sense until you understand the entire system. (If it makes sense to you then, please let your local Democratic party officials know because they need you.)
There may be delegates at each level. Indeed, everybody who shows up and is a legal voter in the precinct or district might be considered a delegate. So there can be many many thousands of delegates involved in the caucus system, depending on how it is defined. But, at the lowest level (a precinct, in Iowa) these people use a system to pick a subset of themselves to be the delegates that advance to the next level. Typically, these delegates are committed to a candidate. In the case of Iowa, they all had the potential to become Clinton, Sanders, or O’Malley delegates. And there were thousands of them.
These delegates then advance to the next level at which a subset of them is selected to go on to yet another level, etc. Eventually, in Iowa, 44 delegates are chosen. Except the actual delegates do not winnow down to 44. Rather, the distribution of the thousands of delegates by preferred candidate is used to determine the distribution across the candidates among those 44, and who those individuals actually will be — who gets to go to the national convention and party, er, represent — is a whole other system not addressed here.
The initial selection of the lowest level of thousands of delegates is chosen at each local site using one or more methods. The methods, as I said, follow the rules handed down by the party. I don’t know the exact rules used this year in Iowa, but there are two methods that are generally used. For small groups, it is not uncommon (if the rules allow) for the group to sit down and talk in a room then vote for how many delegates of each type they will put forward. In some cases, such as when a party has an incumbent president, they don’t even do that, but rather, use a simple ballot system to chose one of two “candidates,” the sitting president or “other” (or write-in). The point is, the process can look like a mini election that results in some paperwork and that’s it.
But the more traditional and more fun way is to use a Walking Caucus. Here is a typical framework for Walking Caucus (but, again, the rules vary).
Everybody who is properly signed in gets in one part of a big room. The number of people involved is known because they checked in, so there is a number, we will call N, of individuals. Using duct tape or some other means, the rest of the room is divided off and no one who is not a delegate can cross that line. Party officials are usually standing on a stage or table nearby directing things.
Some people have signs they hold up with the name of a candidate or issue on them, like “Clinton, Climate Change, and Jobs” or whatever. They are all yelling things at each other. Over time people move into clusters where each cluster is a group of people who favor a given candidate or set of issues.
Variant: Sometimes people are not running around and shouting, but rather, sitting around and talking, and not all caucuses address issues. But it amounts to the same thing, people will move to physical proximity to each other by candidate or issue or something.
Either way, you get a bunch of clusters of people. We will call these clusters “sub caucuses” because that is what they are sometimes called.
It might look like this:
There is a time limit on this process, and eventually the party officials “freeze” the caucus. At this point, or some other later point, delegates are told they can’t return if they leave the room or cross the line. Some delegates will leave because they are tired, need to go to the bathroom, are annoyed, or have something to do. These become “missing delegates.” Sometimes they are let back in later, sometimes not.
Meanwhile, the party officials have taken two numbers, D, which is the number of delegates that can advance from this caucus, and N, the number of people supposedly in the room, and applied some basic integer math. They need to use integer math if they can’t advance proportions of delegates (i.e., they must use whole numbers) and because they are not allowed to saw the actual delegates into bits even if they sometimes want to. This integer math results in a Viability Number. If you are allowed to put ten delegates forward, and you have 100 participants, the viability number is 10. Any group of people fewer than 10 does NOT get to advance a delegate.
Now, back to the frozen caucus. The party officials demand a count of each cluster of people. Each sub caucus is then determined to be “viable” (the number in the group is at or above the viability number) or “not viable.” At this point, the “not viable” sub caucuses are dispersed, not with dogs or firehoses or anything, just told that they are not viable and should break up and find somewhere else to go.
This is when the shouting starts again, as the non-viable people are invited to join viable caucuses.
Eventually the walking caucus is frozen again, and counted again.
A lot of things can happen at this point in time. Ideally, no one has left the room, and everybody has divided themselves into groups that are exact integer multiples of the Viability number. In this case, each sub caucus is simply counted (how many people in it) and then that number is divided by the Viability Number. The result is the number of delegates that sub caucus can advance. Those delegates are typically committed to support the candidate the sub caucus they were in represents, if the caucus is choosing state level or congressional candidates.
For the national convention, this simply translates into a number that is passed on via a form or electronic device, and the people standing in the room will have little to do with what happens next. The party will figure out who gets to go to the convention, and the number sent representing each candidate (if proportional representation is used) will be decided later. But the actual delegates that are actually advanced from each sub caucus will, in theory, go on to the next level (state Senate district, or US Congressional district, or whatever). So, typically, there will be a tiny little election within each sub caucus to elect their moving-on delegates. In my experience, this is often the most important moment in the caucus, because you have to send someone on you can trust, but you don’t know these people and suddenly you are faced with choosing them.
In Minnesota, we require gender proportional representation (male and female only at the present time) so if your sub caucus has two delegates one has to be a boy and one has to be a girl. The party may reserve the right to remove and add delegates later if they need to to make sure the gender proportionality is 50-50.
Now, imagine the following scenario. The exact number of people who ended up on the floor exactly matches the number of people who are properly signed in. Nobody leaves for any reason. The number of people who showed up happens to be an integer multiple of the number of delegates your caucus gets to put forward. There is no confusion. As the people make their sub caucus, they all, each and every one, understand the above described system or its applicable variant, and have thus formed perfect sub caucuses, each divisible by the viability number. So, when the sub caucuses are polled as to how many delegates they represent and for which candidate, absolutely nothing goes wrong.
LOL
Now, imagine this scenario. It is late. The party officials have burned off half the scheduled caucus time dealing with esoteric party decisions. Half the delegates are retired older people with weak bladders. Some are parents with a time limit on their baby sitter. Nobody really knows how to do math these days. The psychic unity of humankind has failed to make sure the number of people who showed up is an exact multiple of the viability number. And so on.
So, you end up with a set of sub caucuses that does not perfectly produce the exact number of delegates required.
This will be, typically, off by one. It really can’t be off by two, because if the number of people in the room changes that much during the process, the actual viability number is simply changed. This should happen before the walk, and when the viability number changes, there is a lot more movement between sub caucuses. In any event, a little adjustment there, a bit more shouting and cajoling and walking around, and counting and recounting, and with luck the number of delegates that is required from that meeting can be assigned.
Or, one will be orphaned. Because of all of these sources of error, it is possible via many possible sequences of events to end up not being able to fairly assign one of the delegates to a candidate.
There are various ways this can be dealt with, but a common and accepted method is to flip a coin. If there are two candidates, each has a 50-50 chance of getting a delegate. This is interesting because it gives candidates that have a low representation a small chance of getting one delegate more than they deserved, which is considered both harmless and polite. If the split is very close, it could determine whether or not a single meeting location sends one more or one less than the other on to the next level.
What has not happened is that the outcome of that caucus, at that location, was determined by a coin flip. In Iowa, the average precinct has about 7 or 8 delegates, I believe. The number of delegates that are passed on because of a coin flip should usually be zero, but now and then, one. One out of seven or eight. Not all seven or eight. One.
In Iowa, over 11,000 delegates were chosen with the caucus method. About a dozen (according to reports, though I suspect a few more) of those 11,065 delegates were the result of a coin toss.
Iowa will send, using this process, 44 delegates to the national convention. They determined the number that would represent each candidate by using integer arithmetic to divide up the 11,065 precinct level delegates into 44 national delegates. So if there was a coin toss for a dozen precinct level delegates, then one tenth of one percent of that decision was influenced by random chance. The rest of the allocation was determined by the totally sane non-random process described above.
There is more, of course. The actual delegates and the actual numbers depend not only who shows up on caucus night, but who shows up later. Given this number of delegates, and the fact that they are regular citizens, means that many individuals will abandon the process along the way. As noted, there may be issues of allocation by gender, or other factors.
Because of the possibility of little things going wrong along the way, I think it is typical for party officials to have a lot of leeway in who ends up being a delegate. During off years, the number of people who show up at the first meeting during which people are recruited to be delegates is often so small that anybody who calls up the precinct captain (or some other official) later on can probably become a delegate. During presidential or, even, midterm years, there may be a lot more public involvement, but it might be highly variable across the party’s geographical space, so the number of people involved in selecting a given delegate may vary. This may also be a difference between states (such as Iowa vs. Minnesota). The point is, if you want to find randomness, capriciousness, or arbitrariness in the system, there is plenty.
But not the coin toss. The coin toss is an effective and fair way to allocate the occasional orphan delegate. It will favor low-number candidates slightly, and mean nothing in a close race.
What can we learn from coinflipgate?
Coinflipgate got legs because the people who initiated the meme, or later spread it, were ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of how the caucus system works.
Coinflipgate was a political ploy exploited inappropriately by anti-Clinton or pro-Sanders activists for the purpose of affecting people’s attitudes about the Clinton campaign.
Coinflipgate, because of the thinness of its veneer and its inherent absurdity, was not a good political strategy.
An important aspect of the caucus system is that it is complex, confusing, and difficult. Contrast the following two scenarios.
Scenario A: Dozens, maybe close to 100, people show up at a caucus site because they feel strongly about a candidate, but have never been to a caucus before and have no clue as to what to do. Party officials are barely able to manage the ensuing fray. The caucus happens, but inefficiently. Delegates are advanced, but several people leave the room realizing they were in the wrong sub caucus, or an orphan delegate emerges and is randomly assigned.
Scenario B: The candidates being considered at a caucus recruit experienced caucus experts to attend a caucus and help guide their supporters to form efficient sub caucuses, and to effectively persuade the undecided to join them, or occasionally, to turn a delegate to their side. These activists may not even be voters in that precinct or district, and in fact may even be from out of state (because you don’t want to use individuals who should actually be caucusing). Each candidate also has several supporters among the delegates, and those supporters have met once or twice with an expert who has trained them in how to caucus.
One could easily imagine one candidate following scenario A and a different candidate following scenario B at the same caucus. If those two candidates are roughly even in their support, the candidate that runs scenario B at most of the caucus sites will come away with more delegates. This is very different from voting. In short, the “ground game” wins the day.
This may seem rather capricious but it is not, for one of the reasons that the caucus is a good system. The candidate that can run a good ground game in a caucus is the candidate that can manage everything better, run a better campaign, have a better chance of winning in other contexts, in other caucus states, in non-caucus states, and in the general election. This is the candidate that has good people working for them. All else being equal, you want to support the candidate that can do this better. Ability to manage a caucus is not the only criterion on which we chose our candidates or leaders, but it is one criterion that is meaningful and a valid test of skill, level of organization, commitment of supporters, and so on.
That is certainly not the only goal of a caucus. The main goal of a caucus is to get people together to make an important decision in a way that goes beyond merely showing up and checking off a candidate’s name in a box.
My description of how a caucus works is based mainly on my experience in Minnesota and some reading and conversation about how Iowa works. If you are an experienced Iowa caucuser, feel free to add or correct details in the comments below. But the basic idea is there, and similar across cases.
People who are repeating the absurd idea that national delegates were chosen with a coin flip, and people who are calling for a “recount” of the caucus, are either not understanding how the system works, or are exploiting the fact that most people don’t know how this system works, to toss some mud and cast some doubt. That is not helpful, no matter which candidate one supports, because it is a less than honest and, in the end, very ineffective, likely to backfire tactic.
View larger. | This composite image contains X-ray data obtained by Chandra at various times over 15 years (blue) and radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (red). Image credit: NASA/CXC/Univ of Hertfordshire/M.Hardcastle et al
On Tuesday (February 2, 2016) NASA released this image showing a spectacular jet emanating from a supermassive black hole in the center of the Pictor A galaxy, located nearly 500 million light years from Earth. Material falling onto the black hole is driving an enormous beam, or jet, of particles traveling at nearly the speed of light into intergalactic space. The jet extends across 300,000 years toward a brilliant hotspot and a counter jet pointing in the opposite direction.
The jet in Pictor A displays continuous X-ray emission over a distance of 300,000 light years. By comparison, the entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter.
In addition to the prominent jet seen pointing to the right in the image, researchers report evidence for another jet pointing in the opposite direction, known as a counterjet. While tentative evidence for this counterjet had been previously reported, these new Chandra data confirm its existence. The relative faintness of the counterjet compared to the jet is likely due to the motion of the counterjet away from the line of sight to the Earth.
The labeled image shows the location of the supermassive black hole, the jet and the counterjet. Also labeled is a “radio lobe” where the jet is pushing into surrounding gas and a “hotspot” caused by shock waves – akin to sonic booms from a supersonic aircraft – near the tip of the jet.
The detailed properties of the jet and counterjet observed with Chandra show that their X-ray emission likely comes from electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines, a process called synchrotron emission. In this case, the electrons must be continuously re-accelerated as they move out along the jet. How this occurs is not well understood.
A paper describing these results will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.
View larger. | This composite image contains X-ray data obtained by Chandra at various times over 15 years (blue) and radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (red). Image credit: NASA/CXC/Univ of Hertfordshire/M.Hardcastle et al
On Tuesday (February 2, 2016) NASA released this image showing a spectacular jet emanating from a supermassive black hole in the center of the Pictor A galaxy, located nearly 500 million light years from Earth. Material falling onto the black hole is driving an enormous beam, or jet, of particles traveling at nearly the speed of light into intergalactic space. The jet extends across 300,000 years toward a brilliant hotspot and a counter jet pointing in the opposite direction.
The jet in Pictor A displays continuous X-ray emission over a distance of 300,000 light years. By comparison, the entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter.
In addition to the prominent jet seen pointing to the right in the image, researchers report evidence for another jet pointing in the opposite direction, known as a counterjet. While tentative evidence for this counterjet had been previously reported, these new Chandra data confirm its existence. The relative faintness of the counterjet compared to the jet is likely due to the motion of the counterjet away from the line of sight to the Earth.
The labeled image shows the location of the supermassive black hole, the jet and the counterjet. Also labeled is a “radio lobe” where the jet is pushing into surrounding gas and a “hotspot” caused by shock waves – akin to sonic booms from a supersonic aircraft – near the tip of the jet.
The detailed properties of the jet and counterjet observed with Chandra show that their X-ray emission likely comes from electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines, a process called synchrotron emission. In this case, the electrons must be continuously re-accelerated as they move out along the jet. How this occurs is not well understood.
A paper describing these results will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.
Like cockroaches, the conspiracy theorists suggesting Zika is anything but a normal, naturally-occurring event have begun to come out of the woodwork. To be expected, the theories they’re espousing make no sense scientifically, and each theory is incompatible with the others, but why should anyone expect that conspiracy theorists would actually use logic?
Claim One: the current Zika virus outbreak is due to the release of genetically-modified mosquitoes by British company Oxitec. The suggestion is that GMO mosquitoes were released in the same area of Brazil now experiencing Zika outbreaks, and somehow these mosquitoes caused the outbreak. The mosquitoes are engineered to require the antibiotic tetracycline in order to survive development in the wild, so when a wild female mosquito breeds with a male GMO mosquitoe, it’s essentially is a death sentence to the female’s offspring. Theorists argue that livestock use of tetracycline leaves this antibiotic in the environment, allowing some offspring to survive. Somehow, Zika is inserted into this.
What’s wrong with it? There’s absolutely nothing that makes sense to relate this to Zika. Even if these GMO mosquitoes can reproduce, that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly infected with the Zika virus. This article probably lays it out the best as far as a suggested mechanism, but even then it’s a convoluted mess, suggesting a transposon (a “jumping gene”) moved from the mosquito into Zika virus (but where did the Zika come from in the first place though? was it already in Brazil?), then that transposon made Zika more virulent and gave the virus “an enhanced ability to enter and disrupt human DNA” (what??), which then leads to microcephaly. All without absolutely any citations from the scientific literature to back up this scenario, of course.
And that’s even assuming that the area where the testing occurred was the same as where the mosquitoes were released. It’s not, as both The Mad Virologist and Christie Wilcox point out. Both have many more details taking down this theory as well.
What’s wrong with it? Pretty much everything. First, the vaccine isn’t recommended until relatively late in pregnancy; even one of the links cited by the “shrunken heads” page notes that it’s suggested in the 27th to 36th week of pregnancy. This is very late in pregnancy to have such a severe effect on brain/skull development. For other microbes that cause microcephaly (such as cytomegalovirus or rubella), infection occurring in the first half of the pregnancy (before 20 weeks) is usually associated with a higher likelihood of adverse developmental outcomes, not one very late like Tdap. And of course, this theory completely contradicts the “Zika-GMO mosquito” one, which suggests that Zika is the cause.
Biologically, this makes zero sense–and furthermore, why wouldn’t other countries be seeing this spike, if Tdap is truly the cause? Women in the U.S. and other countries also receive this vaccine during pregnancy, but we haven’t seen an increase in microcephaly cases. Furthermore, a recent study has demonstrated yet again that Tdap is very safe during pregnancy.
Claim Three: Rockefeller something something bioterrorism something, maybe. They’ve taken the fact that an organization, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), has Zika virus available on their website, and twisted that into apparently some kind of deliberate release, maybe? It’s all pretty shadowy.
What’s wrong with it? Even the Freethought Project post basically unravels its own conspiracy theory, but still posted this for some reason, noting “It seems that while the virus is available online, it is not extremely easy to get, and would likely require some extremely creative fraud in order to make it happen,” but still concluding that “…it definitely does seem that it would be possible for a group or individual that is determined enough to make their way through the website’s security measures.”
I seriously doubt that.
For those of you who don’t know, ATCC is basically a global clearinghouse for biological samples–they offer tissue culture lines, bacteria, viruses, etc. Researchers need these for a number of reasons, such as having positive controls for assays, or to be sure they’re using the same cells as another investigator whose work they want to replicate or expand upon. I’ve used them many times to get both bacteriophage as well as isolates of bacteria for my research projects. And they won’t ship to just some random person.
When I moved institutions and set up my new laboratory, on my first ATCC order, they contacted the director of biosafety at my institution to be sure my lab was equipped and ready to handle the organisms I had requested. When that was assured, we still had to establish a Material Transfer Agreement in order for the items to actually be shipped–a legal document between ATCC and my university, signed by an “authorized representative” of my institution. It was only after jumping through all of these hoops that I was finally able to get the requested samples.
Even if someone had chosen to order Zika, an obscure, mostly-asymptomatic virus that until this outbreak was not associated with any serious ill effects, and perpetuated the “extremely creative fraud” mentioned by the Freethought Project…why? They’d need to initially infect themselves or others in order for the mosquitoes to subsequently become competent vectors of the virus. The mosquitoes would feed on them when there was adequate virus in the blood, and presumably the insects would then be released–to what end? To spread a previously-thought-relatively-harmless virus into a new population? Again, nonsensical.
I’m sure this will not be the last of the conspiracy theories. Like those we saw with Ebola, these have the potential to cause real harm. Outcry over the GMO mosquito program can curtail use of another agent to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito–the primary vector not only of Zika, but also yellow fever, chikungunya, and dengue. I know those who benefit from these type of conspiracies will never stop churning them out (Mike Adams, I’m looking at you), but we need to bring them to the light and show just how little scientific support any of this has. It won’t inoculate everyone against these ideas, but hopefully it will provide enough community immunity that they’re unable to spread far and wide.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1SsRA1z
Like cockroaches, the conspiracy theorists suggesting Zika is anything but a normal, naturally-occurring event have begun to come out of the woodwork. To be expected, the theories they’re espousing make no sense scientifically, and each theory is incompatible with the others, but why should anyone expect that conspiracy theorists would actually use logic?
Claim One: the current Zika virus outbreak is due to the release of genetically-modified mosquitoes by British company Oxitec. The suggestion is that GMO mosquitoes were released in the same area of Brazil now experiencing Zika outbreaks, and somehow these mosquitoes caused the outbreak. The mosquitoes are engineered to require the antibiotic tetracycline in order to survive development in the wild, so when a wild female mosquito breeds with a male GMO mosquitoe, it’s essentially is a death sentence to the female’s offspring. Theorists argue that livestock use of tetracycline leaves this antibiotic in the environment, allowing some offspring to survive. Somehow, Zika is inserted into this.
What’s wrong with it? There’s absolutely nothing that makes sense to relate this to Zika. Even if these GMO mosquitoes can reproduce, that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly infected with the Zika virus. This article probably lays it out the best as far as a suggested mechanism, but even then it’s a convoluted mess, suggesting a transposon (a “jumping gene”) moved from the mosquito into Zika virus (but where did the Zika come from in the first place though? was it already in Brazil?), then that transposon made Zika more virulent and gave the virus “an enhanced ability to enter and disrupt human DNA” (what??), which then leads to microcephaly. All without absolutely any citations from the scientific literature to back up this scenario, of course.
And that’s even assuming that the area where the testing occurred was the same as where the mosquitoes were released. It’s not, as both The Mad Virologist and Christie Wilcox point out. Both have many more details taking down this theory as well.
What’s wrong with it? Pretty much everything. First, the vaccine isn’t recommended until relatively late in pregnancy; even one of the links cited by the “shrunken heads” page notes that it’s suggested in the 27th to 36th week of pregnancy. This is very late in pregnancy to have such a severe effect on brain/skull development. For other microbes that cause microcephaly (such as cytomegalovirus or rubella), infection occurring in the first half of the pregnancy (before 20 weeks) is usually associated with a higher likelihood of adverse developmental outcomes, not one very late like Tdap. And of course, this theory completely contradicts the “Zika-GMO mosquito” one, which suggests that Zika is the cause.
Biologically, this makes zero sense–and furthermore, why wouldn’t other countries be seeing this spike, if Tdap is truly the cause? Women in the U.S. and other countries also receive this vaccine during pregnancy, but we haven’t seen an increase in microcephaly cases. Furthermore, a recent study has demonstrated yet again that Tdap is very safe during pregnancy.
Claim Three: Rockefeller something something bioterrorism something, maybe. They’ve taken the fact that an organization, the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), has Zika virus available on their website, and twisted that into apparently some kind of deliberate release, maybe? It’s all pretty shadowy.
What’s wrong with it? Even the Freethought Project post basically unravels its own conspiracy theory, but still posted this for some reason, noting “It seems that while the virus is available online, it is not extremely easy to get, and would likely require some extremely creative fraud in order to make it happen,” but still concluding that “…it definitely does seem that it would be possible for a group or individual that is determined enough to make their way through the website’s security measures.”
I seriously doubt that.
For those of you who don’t know, ATCC is basically a global clearinghouse for biological samples–they offer tissue culture lines, bacteria, viruses, etc. Researchers need these for a number of reasons, such as having positive controls for assays, or to be sure they’re using the same cells as another investigator whose work they want to replicate or expand upon. I’ve used them many times to get both bacteriophage as well as isolates of bacteria for my research projects. And they won’t ship to just some random person.
When I moved institutions and set up my new laboratory, on my first ATCC order, they contacted the director of biosafety at my institution to be sure my lab was equipped and ready to handle the organisms I had requested. When that was assured, we still had to establish a Material Transfer Agreement in order for the items to actually be shipped–a legal document between ATCC and my university, signed by an “authorized representative” of my institution. It was only after jumping through all of these hoops that I was finally able to get the requested samples.
Even if someone had chosen to order Zika, an obscure, mostly-asymptomatic virus that until this outbreak was not associated with any serious ill effects, and perpetuated the “extremely creative fraud” mentioned by the Freethought Project…why? They’d need to initially infect themselves or others in order for the mosquitoes to subsequently become competent vectors of the virus. The mosquitoes would feed on them when there was adequate virus in the blood, and presumably the insects would then be released–to what end? To spread a previously-thought-relatively-harmless virus into a new population? Again, nonsensical.
I’m sure this will not be the last of the conspiracy theories. Like those we saw with Ebola, these have the potential to cause real harm. Outcry over the GMO mosquito program can curtail use of another agent to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito–the primary vector not only of Zika, but also yellow fever, chikungunya, and dengue. I know those who benefit from these type of conspiracies will never stop churning them out (Mike Adams, I’m looking at you), but we need to bring them to the light and show just how little scientific support any of this has. It won’t inoculate everyone against these ideas, but hopefully it will provide enough community immunity that they’re unable to spread far and wide.
Saturn and its rings, via the orbiting Cassini spacecraft.
Saturn’s rings look solid through telescopes and for, hundreds of years, many thought they were solid. But the solidity of Saturn’s rings turned out to be an illusion, and, since spacecraft have begun exploring the solar system, we’ve known Saturn’s rings as billions of separate moonlets. Now – using data from NASA’s Cassini mission – researchers who “weighed” the central parts of Saturn’s B ring for the first time showed that Saturn’s rings are presenting us with another optical illusion. Their results show that the denser-looking areas in the rings don’t necessarily contain more material.
In fact, they said, although some parts of the B ring are up to 10 times more opaque (less see-through) than the neighboring A ring, the B ring may have only two to three times the A ring’s mass.
It seems intuitive that an opaque material should contain more stuff than a more translucent substance. For example, muddier water has more suspended particles of dirt in it than clearer water. Likewise, you might think that, in the rings of Saturn, more opaque areas contain a greater concentration of material than places where the rings seem more transparent.
But this intuition does not always apply…
[In this analysis, we found] surprisingly little correlation between how dense a ring might appear to be — in terms of its opacity and reflectiveness — and the amount of material it contains.
The study was published online by the journal Icarus in late January, 2016.
Saturn’s B ring is the most opaque of the main rings, appearing almost black in this Cassini image taken from the unlit side of the ringplane. Yet, a new study shows, the B ring does not contain more material. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Some parts of Saturn’s B ring are up to 10 times more opaque than the neighboring A ring, but the B ring may weigh in at only two to three times the A ring’s mass. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
These scientists determined the mass density of the B ring – its mass per unit volume – in several places by analyzing spiral density waves. According to the JPL statement, these are:
… fine-scale ring features created by gravity tugging on ring particles from Saturn’s moons, and the planet’s own gravity. The structure of each wave depends directly on the amount of mass in the part of the rings where the wave is located.
They used a new technique to analyze data from the Cassini spacecraft, obtained when its instruments peered through the rings toward a bright star.
Although these scientists performed their unique analysis for Saturn’s B ring only, they say the results are consistent with previous studies that used different techniques to draw similar conclusions about Saturn’s other main rings.
They said they also found that, while the opacity of the B ring varied by a large amount across its width, the mass – or amount of material – did not vary much from place to place.
And they said that this new research on the mass of Saturn’s rings has important implications for the age of the rings, explaining:
A less massive ring would evolve faster than a ring containing more material, becoming darkened by dust from meteorites and other cosmic sources more quickly.
Thus, the less massive the B ring is, the younger it might be — perhaps a few hundred million years instead of a few billion.
The B ring is the brightest of Saturn’s rings when viewed in reflected sunlight. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The lead author of the study is Matthew Hedman, a Cassini participating scientist at the University of Idaho, Moscow. Herman tried to explain the apparently counter-intuitive result of his study by saying:
At present it’s far from clear how regions with the same amount of material can have such different opacities. It could be something associated with the size or density of individual particles, or it could have something to do with the structure of the rings.
Cassini co-investigator Phil Nicholson of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, added:
Appearances can be deceiving. A good analogy is how a foggy meadow is much more opaque than a swimming pool, even though the pool is denser and contains a lot more water.
Despite the low mass found by Hedman and Nicholson, the B ring is still thought to contain the bulk of material in Saturn’s ring system, these scientists said.
They said a more precise measurement of the total mass of Saturn’s rings is on the way. Previously, Cassini had measured Saturn’s gravity field, telling scientists the total mass of Saturn and its rings. In 2017, Cassini will determine the mass of Saturn alone by flying just inside the rings during the final phase of its mission.
The difference between the two measurements is expected to finally reveal the rings’ true mass.
Bottom line: Researchers who “weighed” the central parts of Saturn’s B ring for the first time showed that the denser-looking areas don’t necessarily contain more material.
Saturn and its rings, via the orbiting Cassini spacecraft.
Saturn’s rings look solid through telescopes and for, hundreds of years, many thought they were solid. But the solidity of Saturn’s rings turned out to be an illusion, and, since spacecraft have begun exploring the solar system, we’ve known Saturn’s rings as billions of separate moonlets. Now – using data from NASA’s Cassini mission – researchers who “weighed” the central parts of Saturn’s B ring for the first time showed that Saturn’s rings are presenting us with another optical illusion. Their results show that the denser-looking areas in the rings don’t necessarily contain more material.
In fact, they said, although some parts of the B ring are up to 10 times more opaque (less see-through) than the neighboring A ring, the B ring may have only two to three times the A ring’s mass.
It seems intuitive that an opaque material should contain more stuff than a more translucent substance. For example, muddier water has more suspended particles of dirt in it than clearer water. Likewise, you might think that, in the rings of Saturn, more opaque areas contain a greater concentration of material than places where the rings seem more transparent.
But this intuition does not always apply…
[In this analysis, we found] surprisingly little correlation between how dense a ring might appear to be — in terms of its opacity and reflectiveness — and the amount of material it contains.
The study was published online by the journal Icarus in late January, 2016.
Saturn’s B ring is the most opaque of the main rings, appearing almost black in this Cassini image taken from the unlit side of the ringplane. Yet, a new study shows, the B ring does not contain more material. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Some parts of Saturn’s B ring are up to 10 times more opaque than the neighboring A ring, but the B ring may weigh in at only two to three times the A ring’s mass. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
These scientists determined the mass density of the B ring – its mass per unit volume – in several places by analyzing spiral density waves. According to the JPL statement, these are:
… fine-scale ring features created by gravity tugging on ring particles from Saturn’s moons, and the planet’s own gravity. The structure of each wave depends directly on the amount of mass in the part of the rings where the wave is located.
They used a new technique to analyze data from the Cassini spacecraft, obtained when its instruments peered through the rings toward a bright star.
Although these scientists performed their unique analysis for Saturn’s B ring only, they say the results are consistent with previous studies that used different techniques to draw similar conclusions about Saturn’s other main rings.
They said they also found that, while the opacity of the B ring varied by a large amount across its width, the mass – or amount of material – did not vary much from place to place.
And they said that this new research on the mass of Saturn’s rings has important implications for the age of the rings, explaining:
A less massive ring would evolve faster than a ring containing more material, becoming darkened by dust from meteorites and other cosmic sources more quickly.
Thus, the less massive the B ring is, the younger it might be — perhaps a few hundred million years instead of a few billion.
The B ring is the brightest of Saturn’s rings when viewed in reflected sunlight. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The lead author of the study is Matthew Hedman, a Cassini participating scientist at the University of Idaho, Moscow. Herman tried to explain the apparently counter-intuitive result of his study by saying:
At present it’s far from clear how regions with the same amount of material can have such different opacities. It could be something associated with the size or density of individual particles, or it could have something to do with the structure of the rings.
Cassini co-investigator Phil Nicholson of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, added:
Appearances can be deceiving. A good analogy is how a foggy meadow is much more opaque than a swimming pool, even though the pool is denser and contains a lot more water.
Despite the low mass found by Hedman and Nicholson, the B ring is still thought to contain the bulk of material in Saturn’s ring system, these scientists said.
They said a more precise measurement of the total mass of Saturn’s rings is on the way. Previously, Cassini had measured Saturn’s gravity field, telling scientists the total mass of Saturn and its rings. In 2017, Cassini will determine the mass of Saturn alone by flying just inside the rings during the final phase of its mission.
The difference between the two measurements is expected to finally reveal the rings’ true mass.
Bottom line: Researchers who “weighed” the central parts of Saturn’s B ring for the first time showed that the denser-looking areas don’t necessarily contain more material.
Our sun is located about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. There are 100 billion suns in our Milky Way. Illustration via Caltech.
Recently the star KIC 8462852 (aka Tabby’s Star) has made news again because of its strange behavior. Possible explanations for its varying brightness (such as comets) don’t seem to fit the observational data, which has some speculating that the star’s behavior could be explained by the presence of an alien civilization. While many astronomers admit that is a possibility, they don’t think aliens are the likely cause. For one, mysterious behavior is not enough to conclude the cause is aliens. For another, the likelihood that an alien civilization actually exists is still a matter of some debate.
The odds of an alien civilization coexisting with humans is often calculated by the Drake equation. It was first proposed by Frank Drake in 1961. Simply take the rate at which stars form in our galaxy and multiply it by the fraction of stars with planets, the average number of planets per star that could support life, the fraction of those that actually develop life, the fraction of life bearing planets that develop civilization, the fraction of civilizations that have detectible signals, and finally the length of time a civilization might last. Crunch the numbers and you have the number of civilizations in our galaxy capable of communicating with us.
When Drake first proposed the equation, the values for each term were largely unknown, but we now have good estimates for many of them. We know that most stars have planets, and the odds of a potentially habitable planet is actually quite high, possibly as high as 100 billion in our galaxy alone.
Unfortunately the really important factors of the Drake equation are still completely unknown. On how many potentially habitable planets does life actually arise? How many of those give rise to civilizations? How long does a typical civilization last? No idea. Depending on the answer to those questions the number of civilizations in our galaxy could range from hundreds of thousands to only one.
The equation was never intended to give an absolute number, though it is often used that way. There are also alternatives such as the Sara Seager’s equation, which focuses on our ability to detect civilizations indirectly rather than requiring active communication. Just because an alien civilization is quiet, that doesn’t mean we can’t see evidence for them. Seager’s approach is to focus on stable red dwarf stars with known potentially habitable worlds. Since red dwarf stars are by far the most common, the odds that we’d find alien life near such a star is higher. She then focuses on planets that transit their home star from our vantage point and are near enough that we have a chance of observing the effects of the planet’s atmosphere on the star’s light. She estimates that there might be two inhabited worlds might be detectable in the next ten years.
Of course this presumes that life forms readily on a habitable planet and survives billions of years, which might not be the case.
The famous Drake equation, formulated by Frank Drake in the 1960s. It brings together key factors to consider when estimating the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.
What make’s Tabby’s Star particularly interesting is that it hints at being evidence of an artificial structure the size of a solar system, such as a Dyson sphere, which is something only highly advanced civilizations could create. Of course the big underlying assumption here is that the more advanced a civilization is, the more likely it will build such a structure. The idea was first presented by Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, who proposed a classification of civilizations based upon their energy use. Type I civilizations harness the resources of their home planet, such as humans today. Type II harness almost the full energy of their home star, possibly through technology such as Dyson spheres. Species within the Star Trek universe would typically be Type II. Type III are civilizations that can harness the energy of an entire galaxy, such as the Asgard of the Stargate universe.
Carl Sagan later generalized the Kardashev scale to a logarithmic function of energy use, and estimated that we were at about 0.7.
The Kardashev scale presumes that more advanced civilizations will necessarily demand more energy. Humans have so far lent credence to this idea, since our modern global civilization consumes much more energy than earlier agrarian civilizations. If our human population and demands for technological convenience grows, we will likely expand out into the solar system with a continued rise in energy consumption.
But such a future is not guaranteed. It’s also possible that we will instead reach a stable and sustainable population level, and combined with increasing energy efficiency our energy consumption may flatten. Technological civilizations may stabilize at type I rather than continuing up the scale.
That’s the real challenge with calculating the odds.
Everything we’ve pinned down so far point to a good chance that life forms on planets across the universe … but there’s still too many unknowns.
Even NASA has toyed with the idea of large space habitats. This is a painting of what one might look like on the inside, by space artist Don Davis.
Bottom line: The star KIC 8462852 continues to display strange behavior, baffling astronomers and causing speculation about advanced aliens. However, now – as in 1961, when Frank Drake formulated his famous Drake equation – the fact is that there are many unknowns, and we don’t know if our galaxy has numerous advanced civilizations … or one.
from EarthSky http://ift.tt/208DJMw
Our sun is located about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. There are 100 billion suns in our Milky Way. Illustration via Caltech.
Recently the star KIC 8462852 (aka Tabby’s Star) has made news again because of its strange behavior. Possible explanations for its varying brightness (such as comets) don’t seem to fit the observational data, which has some speculating that the star’s behavior could be explained by the presence of an alien civilization. While many astronomers admit that is a possibility, they don’t think aliens are the likely cause. For one, mysterious behavior is not enough to conclude the cause is aliens. For another, the likelihood that an alien civilization actually exists is still a matter of some debate.
The odds of an alien civilization coexisting with humans is often calculated by the Drake equation. It was first proposed by Frank Drake in 1961. Simply take the rate at which stars form in our galaxy and multiply it by the fraction of stars with planets, the average number of planets per star that could support life, the fraction of those that actually develop life, the fraction of life bearing planets that develop civilization, the fraction of civilizations that have detectible signals, and finally the length of time a civilization might last. Crunch the numbers and you have the number of civilizations in our galaxy capable of communicating with us.
When Drake first proposed the equation, the values for each term were largely unknown, but we now have good estimates for many of them. We know that most stars have planets, and the odds of a potentially habitable planet is actually quite high, possibly as high as 100 billion in our galaxy alone.
Unfortunately the really important factors of the Drake equation are still completely unknown. On how many potentially habitable planets does life actually arise? How many of those give rise to civilizations? How long does a typical civilization last? No idea. Depending on the answer to those questions the number of civilizations in our galaxy could range from hundreds of thousands to only one.
The equation was never intended to give an absolute number, though it is often used that way. There are also alternatives such as the Sara Seager’s equation, which focuses on our ability to detect civilizations indirectly rather than requiring active communication. Just because an alien civilization is quiet, that doesn’t mean we can’t see evidence for them. Seager’s approach is to focus on stable red dwarf stars with known potentially habitable worlds. Since red dwarf stars are by far the most common, the odds that we’d find alien life near such a star is higher. She then focuses on planets that transit their home star from our vantage point and are near enough that we have a chance of observing the effects of the planet’s atmosphere on the star’s light. She estimates that there might be two inhabited worlds might be detectable in the next ten years.
Of course this presumes that life forms readily on a habitable planet and survives billions of years, which might not be the case.
The famous Drake equation, formulated by Frank Drake in the 1960s. It brings together key factors to consider when estimating the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.
What make’s Tabby’s Star particularly interesting is that it hints at being evidence of an artificial structure the size of a solar system, such as a Dyson sphere, which is something only highly advanced civilizations could create. Of course the big underlying assumption here is that the more advanced a civilization is, the more likely it will build such a structure. The idea was first presented by Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, who proposed a classification of civilizations based upon their energy use. Type I civilizations harness the resources of their home planet, such as humans today. Type II harness almost the full energy of their home star, possibly through technology such as Dyson spheres. Species within the Star Trek universe would typically be Type II. Type III are civilizations that can harness the energy of an entire galaxy, such as the Asgard of the Stargate universe.
Carl Sagan later generalized the Kardashev scale to a logarithmic function of energy use, and estimated that we were at about 0.7.
The Kardashev scale presumes that more advanced civilizations will necessarily demand more energy. Humans have so far lent credence to this idea, since our modern global civilization consumes much more energy than earlier agrarian civilizations. If our human population and demands for technological convenience grows, we will likely expand out into the solar system with a continued rise in energy consumption.
But such a future is not guaranteed. It’s also possible that we will instead reach a stable and sustainable population level, and combined with increasing energy efficiency our energy consumption may flatten. Technological civilizations may stabilize at type I rather than continuing up the scale.
That’s the real challenge with calculating the odds.
Everything we’ve pinned down so far point to a good chance that life forms on planets across the universe … but there’s still too many unknowns.
Even NASA has toyed with the idea of large space habitats. This is a painting of what one might look like on the inside, by space artist Don Davis.
Bottom line: The star KIC 8462852 continues to display strange behavior, baffling astronomers and causing speculation about advanced aliens. However, now – as in 1961, when Frank Drake formulated his famous Drake equation – the fact is that there are many unknowns, and we don’t know if our galaxy has numerous advanced civilizations … or one.
I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. I also know that I’m getting older because (1) there was no new post yesterday and (2) even today this post will look familiar to a significant number of our readership. Mea culpa, but trying to put the finishing touches on two R01 grants I’ve been working on takes a toll. Who knew? Things should get back to normal tomorrow or Friday at the latest. Be that as it may, let’s get back to Fridays. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of more of the aforementioned grant writing), it’s not infrequent that my wife and I order pizza, plant ourselves in front of the TV, and end up asleep before 10 or 11 PM. Usually, a few hours later, between midnight and 3 AM one or both of us will wake up and head upstairs to bed, but not always. Sometimes it’s all Friday night on the couch.
Last Friday was a bit different. It wasn’t different in that I did fall asleep on the couch sometime around 10 PM. However, unlike the usual case, when I woke up around 1:30 or 2 AM to head upstairs I was stone cold wide awake, feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, eyes held wide open. So I did what I do when insomnia strikes. I popped up the computer and checked my e-mail and Facebook. Immediately, I saw messages asking me if I had seen Real Time With Bill Maher that night and, oh boy, I really should watch Maher. Apprehensive but curious, I fired up the DVR and watched.
And, shortly after the monologue, was totally appalled by this;
Funny, how the segment hasn’t yet been posted to Bill Maher’s YouTube page, as many of his interviews are. If he ever does post it, I’ll switch out the video above for the “official” source. Somehow, though, I doubt that the video will ever be posted, the reason being that it contains an embarrassingly fawning 10 minute interview with “Dr.” Samir Chachoua, better known (at least to skeptics) as Charlie Sheen’s HIV quack. Somehow, when Charlie Sheen was on The Dr. Oz Show a couple of weeks ago, other things were going on and I didn’t blog about it. Fortunately, Steve Novella did. Now, with Sheen’s very own quack who failed him being fawned over by Bill Maher, it gives me a chance to take down three birds with one stone: Bill Maher, Dr. Oz, and, of course, Sam Chachoua. Sadly for Bill Maher, America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz comes off looking a lot better than he does, and that’s saying something.
Prelude: Charlie Sheen does The Dr. Oz Show
When Charlie Sheen first announced that he was HIV-positive on the Today Show in November, it appeared to be an announcement that surprised exactly no one. Nor was it particularly surprising that he only went public because he had been discovered. As has been the case with any celebrity diagnosed with HIV, Sheen’s revelation was an excellent opportunity to point out how HIV is no longer a death sentence and can be managed with a very effective cocktail of anti-retroviral drugs, such that the life expectancy of HIV-positive people is approaching normal. It was also a great opportunity to point out yet again that, if there is any one disease in our lifetime that demonstrates the power of science-based medicine, it is AIDS. Back when I was in medical school and early into my residency HIV was basically a death sentence. Patients, once diagnosed with full blown AIDS, did not survive long. Once diagnosed as HIV-positive, most progressed within several years to full blown AIDS (although some patients progressed very slowly or not at all, which helped to fuel the rise of the HIV/AIDS denial, a pseudoscientific belief system that claims that HIV does not cause AIDS). By the mid-1990s, a mere 15 years or so since the syndrome was first defined and only a decade or so after the identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS, there was effective antiretroviral therapy. Now, 32 years after the identification of HIV, HIV-positive people can expect to live a relatively long time, as long as they manage their disease and take their medications.
It sounds easy, but I realize that for patients it’s not. The drugs must be taken according to schedule, and some of them have nasty side effects. It’s not surprising that some people, when their viral titers fall to undetectable, might think they can get away with stopping their medications. It’s similar to patients stopping their antibiotics when they start to feel better, letting their infections come roaring back, or parents of children facing two years of chemotherapy thinking that if the first course drives the tumor into remission the child doesn’t need the remaining courses. It’s human nature, and apparently it’s just what Charlie Sheen fell prey to. With HIV, the drugs can cause spectacular falls in viral titers to the undetectable range, but that doesn’t mean that the virus is gone. HIV can “hide” within certain cells in the body, where the drugs don’t eradicate it. Stop the drugs, and it will reemerge. That’s what Charlie Sheen did.
Enter Dr. Oz.
About three weeks ago, Dr. Oz and Charlie Sheen’s doctor, Robert Huizenga, staged an on-air “intervention” because apparently Sheen had gone off his HIV medications and sought out a doctor in Mexico who claims to be able to cure cancer, HIV, and all manner of diseases. (Don’t they all?) This doctor was—you guessed it—”Dr.” Samir Chachoua.
Initially in the segment, Dr. Oz, with Sheen’s permission, shows a graph of Sheen’s viral load, which was 4.4 million/mL. Treatment was begun on July 19, 2011, and by December 7, 2011 Sheen’s viral load was zero, undetectable. There it stayed for three and a half years. Here’s one video of it:
One thing that came out in this segment is the sort of thinking that leads to a decision as bad as Sheen’s. He defends his action by saying that he didn’t view it as “Russian roulette” (actually, his odds with Russian roulette would have been better) and says he’s presenting himself as a “guinea pig” and that he doesn’t recommend that anyone else do what he did.
Dr. Oz tracked down this Dr. Chachoua and found pretty much what I found (more on that later), namely that there isn’t much to find out about him online. He managed to get Chachoua on the phone, where Chachoua claimed that Charlie Sheen is the first adult in history to go HIV negative and that conventional medicine has never done that. He even went further and said that Sheen’s count went to zero after taking just his treatments. It’s a rather remarkable claim, given that to prove it you’d need a lot of long term follow-up to show that Sheen’s HIV didn’t return for a long period of time after stopping his antiretrovirals and that antiretrovirals are very good at driving viral load to zero. We just know that the virus, although eradicated from the bloodstream, is “hiding” elsewhere, ready to emerge.
To get an idea of the magical thinking going on here, Sheen describes an “experiment” in which he mixed his blood with blood drawn from two friends, incubated it, and noted that all three samples had undetectable levels of HIV, an experiment that tells us exactly nothing. Perhaps the most shocking revelation from the Oz segment was that Chachoua drew some of Charlie Sheen’s blood and injected himself with it, an act so reckless and stupid that it’s hard to believe any physician would do it. Sheen also pointed out that this was not blood from a venipuncture, but rather drawn from a “lump” on his elbow (which sounded like a hematoma from an injury), which means it was old blood.
Through this segment, I kept asking two questions, which were never answered. First, when did Sheen stop taking his meds? Chachoua claimed that Sheen was HIV-positive again, but the graph shown in the segment showed Sheen HIV-negative as recently as December 3, 2015. So when was he suddenly “HIV-positive” again? December 3, 2015 to January 12, 2016 (when the show aired) is only six weeks. In any case, at the end of the segment, Dr. Huizenga (who looks just like the way I pictured him, all spray-tanned and with perfect hair) implores Charlie Sheen to start taking his medications again and makes a very moving speech about how HIV used to be a death sentence but isn’t any more. In response, Sheen promised to start taking his meds on the flight home, asking, “What am I, an idiot?”
As Steve noted, the whole segment was ethically dubious, but probably good television, as was the segment where Oz took Sheen to a morgue to show him what drugs and alcohol can do to one’s organs. Part of the answer as to when Sheen stopped his meds appears in a segment following him around as he visits Dr. Huizenga and to the Scripps Research Institute to interview a researcher about vaccines, who explained how HIV “hides” in the genome of certain cells in the body, to reemerge if HIV medications are stopped. Not surprisingly, there’s a trip to Dr. Miles Farr, described as a “renowned integrative HIV specialist” (in other words, someone who combines quackery with science based medicine) and who has his acupuncturist give Sheen a session of what looks like auricular acupressure. It’s after this that he admits that he has been off his medications for about a week and “feels great.” It’s not clear when this segment was taped, but, given that he tells Oz that he’s still off his meds, it’s unlikely that it was taped much more than a month or so before the show aired. So, whatever Chachoua says, Sheen was not off of his medications very long, fortunately. Unfortunately, just before going on the show, Sheen discovered that his viral load had started to rise again, which is likely what led to his agreeing to go back on his meds.
Overall, I’m glad that Sheen is (apparently) back on his antiretroviral medications, but there are so many unanswered questions that would better allow me to put things into proper perspective. Obviously, Chachoua’s claims that Sheen was rendered “HIV-negative” with his treatment are worthless without independent verification and long-term follow-up. After all, I could give Charlie Sheen the proper cocktail of antiretroviral drugs and then, after his viral load drops to zero, tell him he’s HIV negative. It’d be meaningless without long term follow-up, because the virus eventually starts replicating again.
So before I get to Bill Maher, who is this Samir Chachoua, anyway, and what is his treatment?
Samir Chachoua and the goat milk cure
Oddly enough, before Sheen was on Dr. Oz’s show, I had never heard of Samir Chachoua before. I thought I knew all the major quacks out there, but obviously that’s a conceit. I keep encountering new ones every month. Naturally, I went straight to Chachoua’s website, which had many of the red flags of quackery right there on the first page, starting with this a statement that “There is no disease you cannot access. No disease you cannot improve. Nothing is incurable. No situation is ever so hopeless that you stop trying.” Apparently his “cure” for cancer and HIV is based on something he calls “nemesis theory”:
The nemesis theory first postulated by me in 1980 was that – “for every disease there is an anti-disease organism capable of destroying it and restoring health.” It is not surprising therefore that every case of spontaneous remission investigated shows that cancer or AIDS or other disease may disappear miraculously even for a short period of time after infection with its nemesis.
Of course, this is far more a statement of philosophy than science. There is no a priori scientific reason why for every disease there is an anti-disease organism that can destroy it. This sounds far more like yin and yang in Asian philosophy and religion than it does science. Indeed, nemesis theory rather reminds me of homeopathy, which postulates “like cures like” in that there’s no scientific reason to believe that this is true. Be that as it may, this idea lead Chachoua to develop “induced remission therapy” (IRT).
In the case of HIV, this “theory” led Chachoua to “discover” that a goat virus, Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis Virus (CAEV) is the virus that is the “anti-disease” organism, and that it is this virus that allowed him to make a “vaccine” that eliminates HIV and, as Chachoua puts it, produce an “effective therapy against cancer and other diseases with no side effects.” Yes, this is another red flag of quackery, the claim that one’s treatment cures many diseases with no side effects, and Chachoua’s website has it in spades. In the case of HIV, CAEV is indeed a goat retrovirus, and some researchers have even speculated that it might be used as a model for HIV in in animal research. Based on this and little else, Chachoua claims:
In the greatest experiment done by nature, millions of Mexicans have drunk goat milk infected with CAEV (Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis Virus). I followed people from a small village in Mexico who were infected with CAEV, and thousands more were studied by USC, not one developed AIDS over decades of follow-up.
Just like a cold will affect the nose and the flu the lungs, there are infections that will only infect cancer cells or other disease tissue. There are organisms that neutralize each other in nature, such as seen above in CAEV and HIV.
Even measles and mumps can interfere with AIDS and leukemia and other types of cancer. These common infections have been reported to give long lasting remissions from these ailments, but there are strains and infection types that are far more efficient than others. I had developed, isolated and enhanced a library of organisms that could be used to create vaccines and therapies to eradicate cancer and AIDS. The therapies achieved phenomenal success and when American celebrities were cured, Cedar Sinai Medical Center and UCLA sought me out to work with them with promises of FDA registration and the healing of mankind.
Yes, Chachoua’s “preliminary evidence” is the claim that people from a small village in Mexico drink milk from arthritic goats (I kid you not) and as a result none of them ever developed AIDS, coupled with the existence of a goat retrovirus that can cause this arthritis.
I perused the science sections of Chachoua’s website, and found them…wanting. OK, it’s a lot of horrifying pseudoscience based on a germ of real science. Sadly, that’s the case with so many quacks’ nostrums. See if you can see the problems in Chachoua’s treatment:
Biological lytic and apoptosis agents are used to destroy disease cells and organisms.
Vaccines made from Nemesis Organisms TM are used to optimize the above process and protect cells and tissues that have not been corrupted by disease (this essentially stops metastasis in cancer and prevents HIV from being able to progress). These vaccines also contain DNA correction enzymes that enables [sic] disease removal from our genetic blueprint. This process is both enzymatic and immunologic.
In most disease cases the immune system is exhausted and a fresh younger version is supplied from a bank or from children of the ill person. This can be more than just a younger fresher system. For example, if the measles or mumps are used to tag and attack cancer, and blood from children recently vaccinated against measles and mumps is used, then the immune response from the children will directly attack any cancer cells carrying the measles or the mumps virus.
This system, described as profound and exciting by Cedar Sinai Medical Center and UCLA, showed that the blood transfusions from children were an effective treatment for cancer and without side effects.
While Chachoua is correct that cancer is a genetic disease, he seems to vastly underestimate the complexity of the genetic derangements and mutations and how difficult it would be to correct them. As for blood transfusions curing cancer without side effects, first of all it’s not at all true that transfusions are without side effects. They carry the risk of hypersensitivity reactions, disease, and the like. Second, using the MMR against cancer is highly experimental and uses an experimental genetically-modified MMR vaccine instead of the standard MMR vaccine. Using the blood of one’s children recently vaccinated with MMR will not result in the child’s white cells attacking the cancer, and certainly Chachoua provides no evidence or publications to indicate otherwise. Indeed, his entire website suffers from what I like to call cite-openia in that he cites no scientific literature directly and just makes a lot of claims that have nothing to back them up.
I then perused some of his case studies, particularly the breast cancer case studies. To call them unconvincing is to be flattering. For instance, the first breast cancer case study shows two mammograms, one in which it’s claimed that the breast cancer is adherent to the chest wall (it doesn’t look like it to me) and then one after treatment in which it is claimed that the film “Clearly shows that the oval Cancer structure has shrunk and receded away from the muscle wall. This mass is now easier to resect and remove. Response was after four weeks of Dr. Chachoua’s therapy.” To me the cancer looks roughly the same size and any differences in appearance look like differences in mammographic technique.
Indeed, if there’s one thing that these “case histories” have in common it’s that the images of scans are such poor quality that it’s hard to say much about them one way or the other. Another thing is that frequently we’re not looking at the same thing. For instance, Chachoua shows a “before and after” image of a liver tumor and claims that the “image below it clearly shows the disappearance of one of the metastases (black hole) with shrinkage of the other after four weeks of therapy.” No, it doesn’t. Bad film quality aside, it looks as though these films were taken at two different levels, and the contrast is so different that it’s hard to say much of anything. Ditto the case with lung CTs. Another set of breast cancer “before and after” images shows no clear effect due to differences in technique of the mammograms. “Before and after” films of breast cancer metastases to the liver were taken at different levels.
At the bottom of the page, it states, “The slides and exhibit references all refer to evidence presented to the judge during Dr. Chachoua vs. Cedars Sinai. This is why they may seem non sequential.” No kidding.
Then, in the testimonials section, there are a bunch of testimonials of the type that regular readers have no doubt become familiar with, such as a thyroid tumor disappearing after a biopsy (small ones sometimes do; sometimes the biopsy is enough to remove them); a melanoma not completely excised by shave technique that hasn’t come back (this happens sometimes; incomplete excision increases the risk of recurrence greatly but the tumor doesn’t always come back); and the like. As is the case with such testimonials, it’s difficult or impossible to tell if Chachoua’s treatment had any effect.
Chachoua has, however, added a section on Charlie Sheen to his website. In it, he seems to mistake regular statistical “noise” you’ll see in any test of a very low to undetectable viral titer for actual effects, for instance mistaking a decline from 34 to undetectable as significant (anything under 50 is considered undetectable). There are some real howlers in it too:
It doesn’t matter if Cedars played with the numbers or not when they found out what Charlie was going to say on air. And nothing in Charlie’s history or life style would have taught him how viruses grow and spread. But if 700 is a true representation of what his counts were like after stopping Dr. Chachoua’s treatment for a week, then the virus was still being controlled otherwise, it would have been in the hundreds of thousands or millions. When Charlie stopped conventional therapy for a day, his count went up to 34.
In other words, if it weren’t for my woo, the viral load would have been hundreds of times higher! Of course, there’s no way to know that. Also:
1.) Again, when he stopped Dr. Chachoua’s medicines for two or three days, the virus remained non detectable and only went up after he abstained for a week. This makes it better than the conventional therapy.
Um, no. Just no.
2.) During the two months or so he was on this treatment, there was no detectable virus even though he was not taking any conventional medicine and was only taking Dr. Chachoua’s treatment. The virus was at lower counts i.e. non detectable to the more sensitive tests. He had not been able to achieve this in 5 years of normal treatment. This makes it better than conventional treatment.
Except that during much of that time period Sheen appears to have been still taking his antiretrovirals, and it’s not clear at all that Chachoua’s treatment had anything to do with this. Admittedly, it’s unclear exactly when Sheen stopped his HIV medications, but it doesn’t appear to have been for more than a month or so.
To me, the bottom line is that Chachoua is a quack, and Bill Maher sure does love him some quackery, so much so that he irresponsibly promoted Chachoua, lips planted firmly on Chachoua’s posterior, on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday.
Bill Maher: Credulously promoting alternative medicine quackery
So I suppose it’s not that surprising that Maher went full quack. I just never expected him to embrace so quacky a quack so credulously. My bad.
The first thing that bothered me about the interview was just how unethical it all was. Sure, I was a bit skeeved out by the things Dr. Huizenga revealed, but Sheen was right there and the doctor clearly had Sheen’s permission to discuss his case. There was no such deal in the case of Chachoua, who gleefully started disclosing private medical information about Sheen (and did so on his website as well, as discussed above), in clear violation of HIPAA law and medical ethics in general. For instance, he claims that Sheen had severe encephalitis, which, if true, would indicate that he needed to be hospitalized, not treated by a quack. After Chachoua’s description of Sheen keeping his house all dark, Maher quipped that that was because of the hookers. (Stay classy. That’s all I can say.) Chachoua also claimed that Sheen had liver failure, which is certainly possible given his history of alcohol abuse.
Maher, for his part, does inject a little “skepticism” when he asks, in essence, how come nobody else knows about this if it’s so great? Interestingly, as is so often the case (I’m talking to you, Stanislaw Burzynski), Chachoua has a lovely conspiracy theory in which he claims UCLA and Cedar-Sinai Medical Center “came courting” him to test out his work in the mid 1990s, which might actually be true given that the NIH was at the time being politically pressured to examine alternative cancer cures. As is the usual case, this collaboration, if it ever happened, didn’t turn out well. If you believe Chachoua, “they published it on their own and buried it.” Well, certainly there are no publications by Chachoua about it. Searching PubMed didn’t turn up anything. There is another Chachoua who has published about AIDS, but it obviously isn’t Samir Chachoua.
So what is Chachoua’s claim? Maher played an excerpt from this old news clip (the video quality stinks, unfortunately):
It’s a story about a $10 million judgment against Cedar-Sinai for Samir Chachoua for allegedly taking or losing cultures of many of the microorganisms that Chachoua claimed to be able to use to treat and cure cancer and AIDS. (It was at this point that I asked: What kind of idiot gives anyone all of his cultures and doesn’t save aliquots for himself?) It’s a very credulous report. Of course, Maher neglects to mention a very important bit of follow-up information about that lawsuit, namely that it was dismissed (more on that in a moment), instead choosing to let Chachoua blather on about how he studied spontaneous remission and that led him to his ideas. Meanwhile, Maher waxes poetic about “groupthink” in Western medicine (irony meter destroyed—again) and how it’s usually individuals not working for institutions who discover things (maybe 150 years ago, but not anymore, and of course, many of the examples cited did work for hospitals or universities).
He also let Chachoua outright lie. I’m sorry, but it’s hard to see how I can characterize what Chachoua said when he claimed that all of Sheen’s great tests were during his treatment, not his conventional doctors, any other way. Of course, the plummeting of Sheen’s viral load happened in 2011, four years before he ever met Chachoua. Yet Maher never challenged even that blatant of a lie. Instead, he climbed up on his own cross, prefacing his question with an observation about how he would be attacked for featuring Chachoua (consider it done) and Chachoua had been called a quack (which he is). His question was: Does it last? In response, Chachoua claimed that his vaccine had eradicated HIV in a small country (Comoros). It was the sort of obscure claim that most wouldn’t be able to check, but someone on Twitter did:
What’s wrong, Bill? Couldn’t your fact checkers have bothered to Google?
Finally, what really happened with the Cedar-Sinai lawsuit? The judge tossed it out on appeal, stating that the award was based on speculative testimony. Chachoua only received $11,250. HIV activist Peter Staley points out:
The $10 million case that “Doctor” Sam Chachoua claims he won from L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was another lie he told to Bill Maher. The court immediately reduced the “breach of contract” damages to $11,250 (in 2001). Cedars then successfully sued for recovery of their own court costs, in excess of that amount, and Chachoua started missing court dates after that. His own lawyer quit the case at that point. Cedars never paid him a dime.
I paid small amounts to look at the case reports, which are endless, starting in 1997, and ending in 2004. One of the court’s orders called it “the longest case in this court’s history.” If any of my legal friends want to provide a fuller account of these record [sic], which are accessible with a PACER account, you can find them all here:
http://ift.tt/1P47Iju
The central reason listed for dismissing the case was:
[Chachoua’s] consistent refusal to comply with court orders regarding representation; his pattern of using medical excuses as a device to prolong the action unnecessarily, avoid appearances for deposition or other court proceedings, and obtain continuances at the last minute; and his pattern of substituting counsel in order to secure deadline extensions or continuances of potentially dispositive proceedings.
In the past, I’ve said that nothing Maher could say or do would surprise me anymore. I was mistaken. As highly critical as I’ve been of his promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience and outright quackery, even I never thought he’d fall for such an obvious cancer quack hook, line, and sinker like this or that he’d let this quack repeat such obvious misinformation, all while admiringly lapping it up. I mention destruction of irony meters, but at the end of his show, the rest of which was fairly standard issue Maher-led political commentary and snark, Maher declared that “Lies are the new truth” thanks to the Internet:
Now there’s an irony meter so well and truly fried that it’s been vaporized. Bill Maher just doesn’t realize it, so far down the rabbit hole of antivaccine pseudoscience and cancer quackery he’s fallen.
Oddly enough, Charlie Sheen seems less credulous now than Bill Maher. Once burned, he’s now blasting Chachoua on Twitter, calling him, in essence, a liar.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1PUhCKn
I know I must be getting older because of Friday nights. I also know that I’m getting older because (1) there was no new post yesterday and (2) even today this post will look familiar to a significant number of our readership. Mea culpa, but trying to put the finishing touches on two R01 grants I’ve been working on takes a toll. Who knew? Things should get back to normal tomorrow or Friday at the latest. Be that as it may, let’s get back to Fridays. After a long, hard week (and, during grant season, in anticipation of a long, hard weekend of more of the aforementioned grant writing), it’s not infrequent that my wife and I order pizza, plant ourselves in front of the TV, and end up asleep before 10 or 11 PM. Usually, a few hours later, between midnight and 3 AM one or both of us will wake up and head upstairs to bed, but not always. Sometimes it’s all Friday night on the couch.
Last Friday was a bit different. It wasn’t different in that I did fall asleep on the couch sometime around 10 PM. However, unlike the usual case, when I woke up around 1:30 or 2 AM to head upstairs I was stone cold wide awake, feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, eyes held wide open. So I did what I do when insomnia strikes. I popped up the computer and checked my e-mail and Facebook. Immediately, I saw messages asking me if I had seen Real Time With Bill Maher that night and, oh boy, I really should watch Maher. Apprehensive but curious, I fired up the DVR and watched.
And, shortly after the monologue, was totally appalled by this;
Funny, how the segment hasn’t yet been posted to Bill Maher’s YouTube page, as many of his interviews are. If he ever does post it, I’ll switch out the video above for the “official” source. Somehow, though, I doubt that the video will ever be posted, the reason being that it contains an embarrassingly fawning 10 minute interview with “Dr.” Samir Chachoua, better known (at least to skeptics) as Charlie Sheen’s HIV quack. Somehow, when Charlie Sheen was on The Dr. Oz Show a couple of weeks ago, other things were going on and I didn’t blog about it. Fortunately, Steve Novella did. Now, with Sheen’s very own quack who failed him being fawned over by Bill Maher, it gives me a chance to take down three birds with one stone: Bill Maher, Dr. Oz, and, of course, Sam Chachoua. Sadly for Bill Maher, America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz comes off looking a lot better than he does, and that’s saying something.
Prelude: Charlie Sheen does The Dr. Oz Show
When Charlie Sheen first announced that he was HIV-positive on the Today Show in November, it appeared to be an announcement that surprised exactly no one. Nor was it particularly surprising that he only went public because he had been discovered. As has been the case with any celebrity diagnosed with HIV, Sheen’s revelation was an excellent opportunity to point out how HIV is no longer a death sentence and can be managed with a very effective cocktail of anti-retroviral drugs, such that the life expectancy of HIV-positive people is approaching normal. It was also a great opportunity to point out yet again that, if there is any one disease in our lifetime that demonstrates the power of science-based medicine, it is AIDS. Back when I was in medical school and early into my residency HIV was basically a death sentence. Patients, once diagnosed with full blown AIDS, did not survive long. Once diagnosed as HIV-positive, most progressed within several years to full blown AIDS (although some patients progressed very slowly or not at all, which helped to fuel the rise of the HIV/AIDS denial, a pseudoscientific belief system that claims that HIV does not cause AIDS). By the mid-1990s, a mere 15 years or so since the syndrome was first defined and only a decade or so after the identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS, there was effective antiretroviral therapy. Now, 32 years after the identification of HIV, HIV-positive people can expect to live a relatively long time, as long as they manage their disease and take their medications.
It sounds easy, but I realize that for patients it’s not. The drugs must be taken according to schedule, and some of them have nasty side effects. It’s not surprising that some people, when their viral titers fall to undetectable, might think they can get away with stopping their medications. It’s similar to patients stopping their antibiotics when they start to feel better, letting their infections come roaring back, or parents of children facing two years of chemotherapy thinking that if the first course drives the tumor into remission the child doesn’t need the remaining courses. It’s human nature, and apparently it’s just what Charlie Sheen fell prey to. With HIV, the drugs can cause spectacular falls in viral titers to the undetectable range, but that doesn’t mean that the virus is gone. HIV can “hide” within certain cells in the body, where the drugs don’t eradicate it. Stop the drugs, and it will reemerge. That’s what Charlie Sheen did.
Enter Dr. Oz.
About three weeks ago, Dr. Oz and Charlie Sheen’s doctor, Robert Huizenga, staged an on-air “intervention” because apparently Sheen had gone off his HIV medications and sought out a doctor in Mexico who claims to be able to cure cancer, HIV, and all manner of diseases. (Don’t they all?) This doctor was—you guessed it—”Dr.” Samir Chachoua.
Initially in the segment, Dr. Oz, with Sheen’s permission, shows a graph of Sheen’s viral load, which was 4.4 million/mL. Treatment was begun on July 19, 2011, and by December 7, 2011 Sheen’s viral load was zero, undetectable. There it stayed for three and a half years. Here’s one video of it:
One thing that came out in this segment is the sort of thinking that leads to a decision as bad as Sheen’s. He defends his action by saying that he didn’t view it as “Russian roulette” (actually, his odds with Russian roulette would have been better) and says he’s presenting himself as a “guinea pig” and that he doesn’t recommend that anyone else do what he did.
Dr. Oz tracked down this Dr. Chachoua and found pretty much what I found (more on that later), namely that there isn’t much to find out about him online. He managed to get Chachoua on the phone, where Chachoua claimed that Charlie Sheen is the first adult in history to go HIV negative and that conventional medicine has never done that. He even went further and said that Sheen’s count went to zero after taking just his treatments. It’s a rather remarkable claim, given that to prove it you’d need a lot of long term follow-up to show that Sheen’s HIV didn’t return for a long period of time after stopping his antiretrovirals and that antiretrovirals are very good at driving viral load to zero. We just know that the virus, although eradicated from the bloodstream, is “hiding” elsewhere, ready to emerge.
To get an idea of the magical thinking going on here, Sheen describes an “experiment” in which he mixed his blood with blood drawn from two friends, incubated it, and noted that all three samples had undetectable levels of HIV, an experiment that tells us exactly nothing. Perhaps the most shocking revelation from the Oz segment was that Chachoua drew some of Charlie Sheen’s blood and injected himself with it, an act so reckless and stupid that it’s hard to believe any physician would do it. Sheen also pointed out that this was not blood from a venipuncture, but rather drawn from a “lump” on his elbow (which sounded like a hematoma from an injury), which means it was old blood.
Through this segment, I kept asking two questions, which were never answered. First, when did Sheen stop taking his meds? Chachoua claimed that Sheen was HIV-positive again, but the graph shown in the segment showed Sheen HIV-negative as recently as December 3, 2015. So when was he suddenly “HIV-positive” again? December 3, 2015 to January 12, 2016 (when the show aired) is only six weeks. In any case, at the end of the segment, Dr. Huizenga (who looks just like the way I pictured him, all spray-tanned and with perfect hair) implores Charlie Sheen to start taking his medications again and makes a very moving speech about how HIV used to be a death sentence but isn’t any more. In response, Sheen promised to start taking his meds on the flight home, asking, “What am I, an idiot?”
As Steve noted, the whole segment was ethically dubious, but probably good television, as was the segment where Oz took Sheen to a morgue to show him what drugs and alcohol can do to one’s organs. Part of the answer as to when Sheen stopped his meds appears in a segment following him around as he visits Dr. Huizenga and to the Scripps Research Institute to interview a researcher about vaccines, who explained how HIV “hides” in the genome of certain cells in the body, to reemerge if HIV medications are stopped. Not surprisingly, there’s a trip to Dr. Miles Farr, described as a “renowned integrative HIV specialist” (in other words, someone who combines quackery with science based medicine) and who has his acupuncturist give Sheen a session of what looks like auricular acupressure. It’s after this that he admits that he has been off his medications for about a week and “feels great.” It’s not clear when this segment was taped, but, given that he tells Oz that he’s still off his meds, it’s unlikely that it was taped much more than a month or so before the show aired. So, whatever Chachoua says, Sheen was not off of his medications very long, fortunately. Unfortunately, just before going on the show, Sheen discovered that his viral load had started to rise again, which is likely what led to his agreeing to go back on his meds.
Overall, I’m glad that Sheen is (apparently) back on his antiretroviral medications, but there are so many unanswered questions that would better allow me to put things into proper perspective. Obviously, Chachoua’s claims that Sheen was rendered “HIV-negative” with his treatment are worthless without independent verification and long-term follow-up. After all, I could give Charlie Sheen the proper cocktail of antiretroviral drugs and then, after his viral load drops to zero, tell him he’s HIV negative. It’d be meaningless without long term follow-up, because the virus eventually starts replicating again.
So before I get to Bill Maher, who is this Samir Chachoua, anyway, and what is his treatment?
Samir Chachoua and the goat milk cure
Oddly enough, before Sheen was on Dr. Oz’s show, I had never heard of Samir Chachoua before. I thought I knew all the major quacks out there, but obviously that’s a conceit. I keep encountering new ones every month. Naturally, I went straight to Chachoua’s website, which had many of the red flags of quackery right there on the first page, starting with this a statement that “There is no disease you cannot access. No disease you cannot improve. Nothing is incurable. No situation is ever so hopeless that you stop trying.” Apparently his “cure” for cancer and HIV is based on something he calls “nemesis theory”:
The nemesis theory first postulated by me in 1980 was that – “for every disease there is an anti-disease organism capable of destroying it and restoring health.” It is not surprising therefore that every case of spontaneous remission investigated shows that cancer or AIDS or other disease may disappear miraculously even for a short period of time after infection with its nemesis.
Of course, this is far more a statement of philosophy than science. There is no a priori scientific reason why for every disease there is an anti-disease organism that can destroy it. This sounds far more like yin and yang in Asian philosophy and religion than it does science. Indeed, nemesis theory rather reminds me of homeopathy, which postulates “like cures like” in that there’s no scientific reason to believe that this is true. Be that as it may, this idea lead Chachoua to develop “induced remission therapy” (IRT).
In the case of HIV, this “theory” led Chachoua to “discover” that a goat virus, Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis Virus (CAEV) is the virus that is the “anti-disease” organism, and that it is this virus that allowed him to make a “vaccine” that eliminates HIV and, as Chachoua puts it, produce an “effective therapy against cancer and other diseases with no side effects.” Yes, this is another red flag of quackery, the claim that one’s treatment cures many diseases with no side effects, and Chachoua’s website has it in spades. In the case of HIV, CAEV is indeed a goat retrovirus, and some researchers have even speculated that it might be used as a model for HIV in in animal research. Based on this and little else, Chachoua claims:
In the greatest experiment done by nature, millions of Mexicans have drunk goat milk infected with CAEV (Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis Virus). I followed people from a small village in Mexico who were infected with CAEV, and thousands more were studied by USC, not one developed AIDS over decades of follow-up.
Just like a cold will affect the nose and the flu the lungs, there are infections that will only infect cancer cells or other disease tissue. There are organisms that neutralize each other in nature, such as seen above in CAEV and HIV.
Even measles and mumps can interfere with AIDS and leukemia and other types of cancer. These common infections have been reported to give long lasting remissions from these ailments, but there are strains and infection types that are far more efficient than others. I had developed, isolated and enhanced a library of organisms that could be used to create vaccines and therapies to eradicate cancer and AIDS. The therapies achieved phenomenal success and when American celebrities were cured, Cedar Sinai Medical Center and UCLA sought me out to work with them with promises of FDA registration and the healing of mankind.
Yes, Chachoua’s “preliminary evidence” is the claim that people from a small village in Mexico drink milk from arthritic goats (I kid you not) and as a result none of them ever developed AIDS, coupled with the existence of a goat retrovirus that can cause this arthritis.
I perused the science sections of Chachoua’s website, and found them…wanting. OK, it’s a lot of horrifying pseudoscience based on a germ of real science. Sadly, that’s the case with so many quacks’ nostrums. See if you can see the problems in Chachoua’s treatment:
Biological lytic and apoptosis agents are used to destroy disease cells and organisms.
Vaccines made from Nemesis Organisms TM are used to optimize the above process and protect cells and tissues that have not been corrupted by disease (this essentially stops metastasis in cancer and prevents HIV from being able to progress). These vaccines also contain DNA correction enzymes that enables [sic] disease removal from our genetic blueprint. This process is both enzymatic and immunologic.
In most disease cases the immune system is exhausted and a fresh younger version is supplied from a bank or from children of the ill person. This can be more than just a younger fresher system. For example, if the measles or mumps are used to tag and attack cancer, and blood from children recently vaccinated against measles and mumps is used, then the immune response from the children will directly attack any cancer cells carrying the measles or the mumps virus.
This system, described as profound and exciting by Cedar Sinai Medical Center and UCLA, showed that the blood transfusions from children were an effective treatment for cancer and without side effects.
While Chachoua is correct that cancer is a genetic disease, he seems to vastly underestimate the complexity of the genetic derangements and mutations and how difficult it would be to correct them. As for blood transfusions curing cancer without side effects, first of all it’s not at all true that transfusions are without side effects. They carry the risk of hypersensitivity reactions, disease, and the like. Second, using the MMR against cancer is highly experimental and uses an experimental genetically-modified MMR vaccine instead of the standard MMR vaccine. Using the blood of one’s children recently vaccinated with MMR will not result in the child’s white cells attacking the cancer, and certainly Chachoua provides no evidence or publications to indicate otherwise. Indeed, his entire website suffers from what I like to call cite-openia in that he cites no scientific literature directly and just makes a lot of claims that have nothing to back them up.
I then perused some of his case studies, particularly the breast cancer case studies. To call them unconvincing is to be flattering. For instance, the first breast cancer case study shows two mammograms, one in which it’s claimed that the breast cancer is adherent to the chest wall (it doesn’t look like it to me) and then one after treatment in which it is claimed that the film “Clearly shows that the oval Cancer structure has shrunk and receded away from the muscle wall. This mass is now easier to resect and remove. Response was after four weeks of Dr. Chachoua’s therapy.” To me the cancer looks roughly the same size and any differences in appearance look like differences in mammographic technique.
Indeed, if there’s one thing that these “case histories” have in common it’s that the images of scans are such poor quality that it’s hard to say much about them one way or the other. Another thing is that frequently we’re not looking at the same thing. For instance, Chachoua shows a “before and after” image of a liver tumor and claims that the “image below it clearly shows the disappearance of one of the metastases (black hole) with shrinkage of the other after four weeks of therapy.” No, it doesn’t. Bad film quality aside, it looks as though these films were taken at two different levels, and the contrast is so different that it’s hard to say much of anything. Ditto the case with lung CTs. Another set of breast cancer “before and after” images shows no clear effect due to differences in technique of the mammograms. “Before and after” films of breast cancer metastases to the liver were taken at different levels.
At the bottom of the page, it states, “The slides and exhibit references all refer to evidence presented to the judge during Dr. Chachoua vs. Cedars Sinai. This is why they may seem non sequential.” No kidding.
Then, in the testimonials section, there are a bunch of testimonials of the type that regular readers have no doubt become familiar with, such as a thyroid tumor disappearing after a biopsy (small ones sometimes do; sometimes the biopsy is enough to remove them); a melanoma not completely excised by shave technique that hasn’t come back (this happens sometimes; incomplete excision increases the risk of recurrence greatly but the tumor doesn’t always come back); and the like. As is the case with such testimonials, it’s difficult or impossible to tell if Chachoua’s treatment had any effect.
Chachoua has, however, added a section on Charlie Sheen to his website. In it, he seems to mistake regular statistical “noise” you’ll see in any test of a very low to undetectable viral titer for actual effects, for instance mistaking a decline from 34 to undetectable as significant (anything under 50 is considered undetectable). There are some real howlers in it too:
It doesn’t matter if Cedars played with the numbers or not when they found out what Charlie was going to say on air. And nothing in Charlie’s history or life style would have taught him how viruses grow and spread. But if 700 is a true representation of what his counts were like after stopping Dr. Chachoua’s treatment for a week, then the virus was still being controlled otherwise, it would have been in the hundreds of thousands or millions. When Charlie stopped conventional therapy for a day, his count went up to 34.
In other words, if it weren’t for my woo, the viral load would have been hundreds of times higher! Of course, there’s no way to know that. Also:
1.) Again, when he stopped Dr. Chachoua’s medicines for two or three days, the virus remained non detectable and only went up after he abstained for a week. This makes it better than the conventional therapy.
Um, no. Just no.
2.) During the two months or so he was on this treatment, there was no detectable virus even though he was not taking any conventional medicine and was only taking Dr. Chachoua’s treatment. The virus was at lower counts i.e. non detectable to the more sensitive tests. He had not been able to achieve this in 5 years of normal treatment. This makes it better than conventional treatment.
Except that during much of that time period Sheen appears to have been still taking his antiretrovirals, and it’s not clear at all that Chachoua’s treatment had anything to do with this. Admittedly, it’s unclear exactly when Sheen stopped his HIV medications, but it doesn’t appear to have been for more than a month or so.
To me, the bottom line is that Chachoua is a quack, and Bill Maher sure does love him some quackery, so much so that he irresponsibly promoted Chachoua, lips planted firmly on Chachoua’s posterior, on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday.
Bill Maher: Credulously promoting alternative medicine quackery
So I suppose it’s not that surprising that Maher went full quack. I just never expected him to embrace so quacky a quack so credulously. My bad.
The first thing that bothered me about the interview was just how unethical it all was. Sure, I was a bit skeeved out by the things Dr. Huizenga revealed, but Sheen was right there and the doctor clearly had Sheen’s permission to discuss his case. There was no such deal in the case of Chachoua, who gleefully started disclosing private medical information about Sheen (and did so on his website as well, as discussed above), in clear violation of HIPAA law and medical ethics in general. For instance, he claims that Sheen had severe encephalitis, which, if true, would indicate that he needed to be hospitalized, not treated by a quack. After Chachoua’s description of Sheen keeping his house all dark, Maher quipped that that was because of the hookers. (Stay classy. That’s all I can say.) Chachoua also claimed that Sheen had liver failure, which is certainly possible given his history of alcohol abuse.
Maher, for his part, does inject a little “skepticism” when he asks, in essence, how come nobody else knows about this if it’s so great? Interestingly, as is so often the case (I’m talking to you, Stanislaw Burzynski), Chachoua has a lovely conspiracy theory in which he claims UCLA and Cedar-Sinai Medical Center “came courting” him to test out his work in the mid 1990s, which might actually be true given that the NIH was at the time being politically pressured to examine alternative cancer cures. As is the usual case, this collaboration, if it ever happened, didn’t turn out well. If you believe Chachoua, “they published it on their own and buried it.” Well, certainly there are no publications by Chachoua about it. Searching PubMed didn’t turn up anything. There is another Chachoua who has published about AIDS, but it obviously isn’t Samir Chachoua.
So what is Chachoua’s claim? Maher played an excerpt from this old news clip (the video quality stinks, unfortunately):
It’s a story about a $10 million judgment against Cedar-Sinai for Samir Chachoua for allegedly taking or losing cultures of many of the microorganisms that Chachoua claimed to be able to use to treat and cure cancer and AIDS. (It was at this point that I asked: What kind of idiot gives anyone all of his cultures and doesn’t save aliquots for himself?) It’s a very credulous report. Of course, Maher neglects to mention a very important bit of follow-up information about that lawsuit, namely that it was dismissed (more on that in a moment), instead choosing to let Chachoua blather on about how he studied spontaneous remission and that led him to his ideas. Meanwhile, Maher waxes poetic about “groupthink” in Western medicine (irony meter destroyed—again) and how it’s usually individuals not working for institutions who discover things (maybe 150 years ago, but not anymore, and of course, many of the examples cited did work for hospitals or universities).
He also let Chachoua outright lie. I’m sorry, but it’s hard to see how I can characterize what Chachoua said when he claimed that all of Sheen’s great tests were during his treatment, not his conventional doctors, any other way. Of course, the plummeting of Sheen’s viral load happened in 2011, four years before he ever met Chachoua. Yet Maher never challenged even that blatant of a lie. Instead, he climbed up on his own cross, prefacing his question with an observation about how he would be attacked for featuring Chachoua (consider it done) and Chachoua had been called a quack (which he is). His question was: Does it last? In response, Chachoua claimed that his vaccine had eradicated HIV in a small country (Comoros). It was the sort of obscure claim that most wouldn’t be able to check, but someone on Twitter did:
What’s wrong, Bill? Couldn’t your fact checkers have bothered to Google?
Finally, what really happened with the Cedar-Sinai lawsuit? The judge tossed it out on appeal, stating that the award was based on speculative testimony. Chachoua only received $11,250. HIV activist Peter Staley points out:
The $10 million case that “Doctor” Sam Chachoua claims he won from L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was another lie he told to Bill Maher. The court immediately reduced the “breach of contract” damages to $11,250 (in 2001). Cedars then successfully sued for recovery of their own court costs, in excess of that amount, and Chachoua started missing court dates after that. His own lawyer quit the case at that point. Cedars never paid him a dime.
I paid small amounts to look at the case reports, which are endless, starting in 1997, and ending in 2004. One of the court’s orders called it “the longest case in this court’s history.” If any of my legal friends want to provide a fuller account of these record [sic], which are accessible with a PACER account, you can find them all here:
http://ift.tt/1P47Iju
The central reason listed for dismissing the case was:
[Chachoua’s] consistent refusal to comply with court orders regarding representation; his pattern of using medical excuses as a device to prolong the action unnecessarily, avoid appearances for deposition or other court proceedings, and obtain continuances at the last minute; and his pattern of substituting counsel in order to secure deadline extensions or continuances of potentially dispositive proceedings.
In the past, I’ve said that nothing Maher could say or do would surprise me anymore. I was mistaken. As highly critical as I’ve been of his promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience and outright quackery, even I never thought he’d fall for such an obvious cancer quack hook, line, and sinker like this or that he’d let this quack repeat such obvious misinformation, all while admiringly lapping it up. I mention destruction of irony meters, but at the end of his show, the rest of which was fairly standard issue Maher-led political commentary and snark, Maher declared that “Lies are the new truth” thanks to the Internet:
Now there’s an irony meter so well and truly fried that it’s been vaporized. Bill Maher just doesn’t realize it, so far down the rabbit hole of antivaccine pseudoscience and cancer quackery he’s fallen.
Oddly enough, Charlie Sheen seems less credulous now than Bill Maher. Once burned, he’s now blasting Chachoua on Twitter, calling him, in essence, a liar.
