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Jan. 13, 2009 - Skeptoid
16:25
Skeptoid #136: Student Questions: Light Therapy, the Bermuda Triangle, and Isaac Newton

Skeptoid answers another round of questions submitted by students. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Light Therapy Quack Cures 00:04:06
Gather everyone on the planet to the northern hemisphere and then crowd them all into Europe.
That's a lot of weight and conceivably it might be enough to provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the planet if they all move simultaneously.
Now at the count of three, we're going to have everyone jump at exactly the same moment.
What's going to happen?
Student questions are coming up next on Skeptoid.
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Student Questions, Light Therapy, The Bermuda Triangle, and Isaac Newton.
I'm taking student questions again today, so everyone please take your seats and let's get started.
Today's topics cover light therapy, the Bermuda Triangle, jumping to throw the Earth off its axis, vaccinations and autism, and environmental estrogens.
Someone asked me why I only take student questions and not questions from just anyone.
The reason is that by reaching out to students, I imply an educational mission, thus endowing Skeptoid with apparent authority via the argumentum ad vericundium logical fallacy.
And I'll take any that I can get.
Shall we proceed?
Hi, Brian.
I go to school at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
There's a lot of discussion around here about seasonal affective disorder.
What are your thoughts on light therapy as a treatment for this kind of depression?
Seasonal affective disorder is basically a depression that some people get during dark winter months, but there's more to it than that.
In many cases, it's not a purely psychological condition.
Some evidence suggests one cause could be an imbalance in melatonin, which is produced by the pineal gland during darkness, an actual biochemical response to the strained schedule of daylight and darkness.
Light therapy, which exposes the patient to bright, short-wavelength blue light at a carefully timed interval each day, usually in the morning, has proven to be an effective treatment for most sufferers.
Whether it's just a mild clinical depression caused by all the darkness or an actual hormone imbalance caused by the interruption of the circadian rhythm, light therapy does make rational sense as a treatment.
However, most patients report that it's inconvenient and few stick with it on their own.
Other treatments include melatonin supplementation, antidepressants, and cognitive therapy.
Light therapy is also employed by alternative practitioners for a whole range of conditions for which it has no plausible clinical value.
No matter what illness or new age energy imbalance some naturopath tells you you have, somebody offers light therapy as a quack cure for it.
Don't confuse light therapy's actual benefits with its fraudulent, pseudo-scientific misuse.
As you might suspect, seasonal affective disorder incidence is strongly correlated with latitude.
Endocrine Disruptors and Vaccines 00:10:12
But with one interesting exception, for reasons not well understood, people in Iceland or with Icelandic heritage seem virtually immune to the condition.
A cheerful group in the wintertime, those Icelanders.
Hi, Brian.
I'm Sonia.
I go to James Madison University in Virginia, and I wanted to know what's really behind the strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle.
The same causes that are behind disappearances anywhere else.
Sometimes planes crash and ships sink.
And although writers of scary books and producers of creepy TV shows like to adorn those in the Bermuda Triangle with mystery, the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board treat them the same as any other accidents.
For every allegedly mysterious disappearance dramatized on television, there's generally an NTSB accident report detailing the actual cause determined.
That's not to say some aren't unexplained.
Sometimes wrecks are never found and investigators are unable to determine a cause, as happens everywhere in the world.
However, the Coast Guard does say, The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes.
In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes.
No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.
Whether accidents actually do happen in this area at a higher rate than in other places is known with certainty.
They do not.
Lloyds of London, the largest insurer of shipping traffic, confirms this in its records, as does the U.S. Navy.
So to directly answer your question, what's really behind the Bermuda Triangle mystery is just a lot of pop fiction.
You've probably heard stories about mysterious fogs in the Bermuda Triangle or compasses going crazy or rogue waves or mysterious upwellings from the deep.
These are the types of tales that the sea has always produced all over the world.
Anyone who thinks the Bermuda Triangle has a monopoly on mysterious stories of the sea has not traveled or read very much.
Like most stories, probably a lot of these have some basis in fact, but it is well established by a century of modern seafaring and oceanic surveying that no unexplained anomalies exist in the Bermuda Triangle.
Hi, my name is Will, a university student in England.
I was wondering if there's actually any truth in the idea that if everyone jumped at the same time, the world would end or go off its axis.
Although it would be fun if this were the case, Newton's first law makes it simply not so.
Even if you gathered everyone together on one side of the planet and they all jumped, they would indeed push the Earth away with a force equal to that which launched them into the air.
But gravity would pull them and the Earth together again and they'd be right back where they started, in the same state of motion and with the same angular momentum.
Only an external force, like an asteroid collision, could have the effect you describe.
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This is Dan from North Carolina.
My wife and I just had a baby girl, and we have to decide if we want to give her immunization shots.
I've heard rumor that some people believe that autism is directly related to immunizing a child too early.
Is this true?
It is true that some people believe that, which is tragic because there's a growing trend among misinformed parents to refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated, and new outbreaks of potentially fatal diseases like measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, hepatitis B, and polio have been the direct result.
Among the worst offending communities is Ashland, Oregon, where 30% of kindergartners have been granted personal belief exemptions from the state, thus effectively eliminating herd immunity from the population.
Only two U.S. states require you to have a medical reason if you want to be exempted from the vaccination requirement to attend public school.
A number of epidemics have broken out in communities with low vaccination rates of diseases that had been otherwise largely eradicated by childhood vaccination.
The so-called link between autism and vaccines is a particularly bizarre superstition.
It's an unfounded supposition depending on a chain of connections in which every single link is conclusively broken.
Mythical link number one is that autism can be caused by mercury.
Autism is genetic.
It has no environmental causes, at least none after the first trimester of gestation.
Mythical link number two is that mercury is found in the preservative timerosol.
In fact, timerosol contains ethylmercury, which is not absorbed by the body and is harmless, not methylmercury, which is the form responsible for mercury poisoning.
Mythical link number three is that timerosol is found in vaccines.
In fact, timerosol has not been an ingredient in childhood vaccines for over a decade.
Some parents have also been convinced that vaccination presents a dangerous immunological challenge, and so it's risky regardless of autism.
This is a question that you should ask your pediatrician, not Jenny McCarthy.
It's just not true.
Even the common cold is a greater immunological challenge to the body than the full spectrum of early childhood vaccinations.
And as you know, your child gets colds all the time and always manages to pull through.
But you shouldn't get your children's medical advice from some random podcast any more than you should get it from deluded, uneducated celebrities.
All you need to do is look at the data of disease rates among vaccinated and non-vaccinated children to answer any questions about what you should do.
There's no correlation between autism and vaccination rates.
But there's huge correlation between vaccination and rates of diseases that the vaccines prevent.
Hi, Brian.
My name is Jack Friedman from Nanao BC Canada.
I'm 15 and my question is what are environmental estrogens?
Environmental estrogens, more properly called endocrine disruptors, are compounds that chemically bind to a living cell's hormone receptors, thus taking the place of the body's natural hormone that would normally bind there.
This interferes with the body's normal hormone action.
Endocrine disruptors are found throughout nature and the environment, but recent years have seen the internet come alive with alarmist articles that they are all around us at dangerous levels, often in household chemicals or everyday products.
These articles tend to mention all the, quote, usual suspects, dioxin, DDT, BPA, PCBs, etc. and often blame these as a cause of breast cancer, ADHD, autism.
Again, all the usual suspects.
Virtually the only case you ever hear cited is one in Florida where alligators in Lake Epopka were found to have abnormal genitalia linked to endocrine disruptors in the water.
These reports often neglect to mention that the lake is an EPA Superfund site, meaning it's a known, heavily contaminated, toxic waste site.
But if you don't live in and drink heavily contaminated toxic wastewater, what kind of exposure to endocrine disruptors do you really have?
Well, to put it in perspective, you get more from a single serving of sunflower seeds, soybeans, or alfalfa sprouts than you do from a lifetime use of water bottles containing BPA.
Endocrine disruptors are in the environment.
Most that humans and animals do now and always have consumed come from normal dietary and environmental exposure, such as the vegetables just mentioned.
You would need to have a dose orders of magnitudes higher than that for it to have any adverse effect, and these consumer products mentioned in the headlines simply don't have that.
Yes, endocrine disruptors are found in these products, but at dosages orders of magnitude below safe levels.
The same can be said of virtually any dangerous compound you like.
There have yet to be any documented cases of humans being affected by endocrine disruptors in consumer products.
Skeptoid Premium Support 00:02:03
So until there are, you can chalk it up to more sensationalist reporting on an otherwise slow news day.
If you're a student and would like to have your question answered on Skeptoid, please come to skeptoid.com and click on student questions.
I'm ready to tackle all the stories you've heard from urban legends to consumer frauds to the paranormal to conspiracy theories.
So keep them coming.
The only stupid question is the one you didn't ask.
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