Eyes open for NZ pseudoscience

I’ve only once witnessed water divining in action. It was on a farm north of Auckland nearly 20 years ago. The owner, by no means a hippie or alternative type, was walking around his paddock with what appeared to be a straightened coat hanger in each hand.

He looked ridiculous in his gumboots, squinting at the swivelling rods in his hands, waiting for the twitches that would indicate underground water for a new well.

No water was found that day. But ‘‘water dowsing’’ as it is also called, is still in vogue, as Gold, the mononymous former chairman of the New Zealand Skeptics Society discovered when he recently popped out for lunch in central Wellington.

He saw a contractor for roading company Downer with copper divining rods looking for water pipes buried beneath Willis St. As an arch sceptic, you can imagine Gold’s reaction, especially given the Downer crew was working for the Wellington City Council.

For the record, there’s no established evidence to suggest water dowsing is a reliable means of detecting water underground. But at least my farmer friend was financing his own fantasy rather than the taxpayer.

You don’t have to look far, however, to see where else the public purse is funding pseudoscience.

The Accident Compensation Corporation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars subsidising patient treatments from osteopaths, chiropractors and acupuncturists, $54 million in 2015 alone. Many of these treatments have dubious efficacy, at best. But patients are increasingly asking for them, leading to growing government subsidy of alternative therapies.

Even if they aren’t definitively effective, some argue the treatments have a sufficient placebo effect to ease pain or improve the wellbeing of patients.

But we are on a slippery slope, financially and ethically, when we start buying into treatments not sufficiently backed by evidence.

Famous physicist Richard Feynman once said that ‘‘science is a way of trying not to fool yourself’’. We need to follow Gold’s example and keep our eyes open to the use of pseudoscience, particularly when the taxpayer is footing the bill.

We are on a slippery slope when we start buying into treatments not sufficiently backed by evidence.