The Magic of Reality

The other night before we drifted off to sleep, Meg mentioned that she wanted to visit Boulder.
“You’re always talking about how hot it is here in Tucson. Maybe we should move back to Colorado?”
“Well, we are in a desert,” I pointed out. Memories fluttered through my mind of Boulder’s climate; scraping snow and ice off my windshield in winter. After a while, I said, “I think you’d miss your family too much.”
“True,” Meg agreed.
“I’d miss your family too much,” I added. “I like your family a good deal more than mine.”
Meg laughed.
“They never call me,” I continued, referring to my family. “I haven’t talked to my siblings for what, a year? I haven’t even talked to my parents for months.”
“You can’t always be the one to call,” Meg said. “They’ve got to make an effort too.”
I drew patterns on Meg’s smooth skin with my fingertip. “Well, at least I have you. And your family’s great.”
* * *
The next day, with some amount of coincidence, my mother called me for the first time in months.
Typically, she only calls me with computer questions, but we usually catch up afterwards. This time, her mouse wasn’t working. After going over the obvious—is the USB receiver plugged in, are the batteries fresh—I had her restart her computer. Problem fixed.
“Your dad’s been having trouble sleeping lately, and we were looking for help,” she said at some point into the conversation. “We heard about this book called Earthing. It was written by a friend of our homeopathic doctor.”
Inwardly I rolled my eyes and tried to contain myself. My mom is susceptible to any book that comes along that touts “natural” cures using pseudoscience. Throughout my life she’s been a proponent of homeopathic remedies. Homeopathy is the belief that amounts of particles diluted enough times in water can cure disease when consumed. It has long been disproved by actual science, but my mother is convinced of its efficacy due to its powerful—err—placebo effect it provides.
I didn’t see a real medical doctor until I broke my wrist when I was ten, but I wasn’t given any pain killers other than arnica, a homeopathic remedy, which doesn’t do anything to actually reduce pain.
My mom went through other phases too, from whatever pseudoscience book was popular at the time. She bought a juicer and consumed vast amounts of liquefied fruit and vegetables. She would read that partially hydrated vegetable oil was evil, and suddenly the kitchen would be devoid of potato chips and anything else tasty. She read a thick book that, by the end, had her convinced that even tap water was bad. Dad installed a reverse osmosis tap in the sink.
Other crazy schemes were trucked out over the years. Vaccines are poison. Bach’s flower remedies cure anxiety. Eucalyptus oil should cure my skin rash. I gulped down a spoonful of semen-like cod liver oil every day for a month. Electric blankets were bad because it messed up my body’s electrical fields. Drinking coffee was out because it aggravated my Dad’s gout and was an anecdote to homeopathic medicine. I was given a “constitutional” homeopathic remedy to cure my frequent joint itchiness. All fresh food had to be organic, because pesticides were bad. The bed has to be put on an East-West direction to align the body with the earth’s magnetic fields. She ordered a giant supply of vitamins to take every day. She believes in the power of positive thinking and affirmations.
My dad was no different. He doesn’t read my mom’s books, but he listens to everything she says and encourages her. He’s an electrical engineer with little critical thinking skills left. My dad built a device to cure skin rashes with a hundred LED lights, because of something my mom read NASA was experimenting with in space. You can’t have any ambient light in the room when you sleep at night or else your body doesn’t produce enough melatonin, so he put up thick blackout curtains in their bedroom. He also tried to cure his detaching retinas by running low electric currents through his eyeballs with a device he bought over the Internet.
This isn’t to mention all of the religious “woo woo” that my parents believe and shared with their children, either. When I was a boy, I was convinced the house was visited by demons and ghosts and that I struggled with Satan in the form of a wolf once during a vivid nightmare. I was afraid I was going to be destined for hell because of some thought or sin I committed, and lived in constant fear from the “unseen forces” watching me. I prayed every day and believed that prayer actually worked.
And this also isn’t to mention the political leanings of my parents either. They were members of the John Birch Society. Copies of the magazine The New American lay on the coffee table. The “Conspiracy” was always scheming to take over America and the rest of the world to establish the “New World Order,” a one-world communist-type government. My parents and my brothers would talk for hours in hushed tones about the United Nations, the Council of Foreign Relations, and about the evil men in the Conspiracy.
I started to use real medicine when I became a Type I diabetic at age 18 since, lo and behold, homeopathy has no cure for real diseases like diabetes. If I didn’t get real insulin, I would die. My mom made me drive us to our homeopathic doctor, who told us that he couldn’t do anything and that I’d need to go to a real doctor.
My first college girlfriend Stephanie gave me a Tylenol when I had a headache when I was eighteen. I was used to having a headache for days, to call in sick, to suffer through it. This was the first time I’d ever taken a pain killer to end a headache within minutes. After that, I didn’t tell my mom, but I stopped believing homeopathy worked.
Meg is convinced that I never get colds because my immune system is so strong from all the illnesses I endured in my childhood. I’m still irrationally afraid of going to the doctor and probably should do more in the way of preventative medicine and exercise. Since I became an autonomous thinking adult, I have had to reexamine nearly everything I was taught in my childhood and learn the actual facts about nearly everything.
* * *
My mother continued talking on the phone. “So this man discovered that we don’t really walk around barefoot enough, and the body is being effected by all of the electrical fields out there with modern technology. And he designed this device to keep you grounded in bed. So we built an earthing grid on our bed and plugged it into the grounding plug in the wall. And ever since Dad has been sleeping better!”
“Uh huh,” I said, leaning my phone on my shoulder and typing “earthing” into Google.
“You should really read the book. And if you want an earthing grid for your bed, we’ll buy you one for Christmas,” she said.
I scanned the official website, http://www.earthing.com. “Earthing: Get Connected and Feel Vibrant.” Uh oh. One of the common words that pseudoscience likes to truck out is anything to do with vibrations. Another one is “quantum physics” (à la Deepak Chopra), “crystals,” or “energy.”
“This sounds like ‘woo woo’ pseudoscience,” I told my mom.
“But it really works—there are so many people that have been helped with earthing. The first thing I did was search for ‘earthing’ on the Internet and I found nothing but positive stories about it working.”
“Anecdotal evidence is not science,” I said.
“I know that it sounds like one giant placebo, but it really works,” she insisted. “Your dad is sleeping so much better now.”
* * *
After we ended the call, I returned from pacing the living room and looked at my Internet search of “earthing” again. The sixth result was from NeuroLogica Blog, which began: “Have you heard of earthing? This is just one of many pseudosciences that fits into the ‘just make shit up’ category.” My mom apparently didn’t search very hard for negative responses about earthing, since this one article summed up the problems with earthing. Well, that’s no surprise.
Really, I don’t need to write a five-page essay as to why earthing is complete and utter pseudoscience. Anyone with a brain knows that it’s nonsense. I’m not going to read the book and suddenly change my mind. I’m not going to write my mom an email trying to convince her to give up her foolishness. She’s 68 years old. She will continue being conned by whatever fad that is selling the most at the time. Her gullibility saddens me, but I have moved on.
I don’t need to disprove every idiotic belief that people have. I don’t need to rail against the establishment, to convince the world that religion, homeopathy, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and all the rest is false.
What I do need to fight against—and anyone with any sense—is when the people in charge try to force the rest of us to believe their crazy, unfounded beliefs. When politicians try to ban abortion because of their religious beliefs, or when parents kill their children by not allowing them to get the medicine necessary to live, or when they try to ban the teaching of evolution and other science in public schools, we should all fight against them tooth and nail.
Still, I am thankful I don’t live under the oppression of my parents’ susceptibility anymore. As Richard Dawkins says, “The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”