Joseph A. SchwarczCritiques

An interesting collection of little science stories. Rather reminded me of a more serious take on "Uncle John's Bathroom Readers". You can read the book from cover to cover, or just pick out the stories that interest you. Not a hard read. Could have used a good proofreader.

Trivia galore. Now if I could just figure out how to retain it. Spring 2009½

I have had to set this aside for now. I got about 1/3 of the way into it but it became overdue at the library and I was unable to renew. Nonfiction is a slog for me these days, although this is very interesting and I even read some aloud to my boyfriend. I do plan to pick it back up sometime, but for now, it remains Partially Read.

While this was entertaining at times, and I did (potentially ) learn new things, this book did not add at all to my, or any reader's, ability to discern the truthfulness of any claim. In fact, the author made claims in the same manner and tone as many of the sources that he debunks.
So while I may trust him as a source over others, I still feel the need to verify his claims independently, as I cannot do that based on his quoted research.

This is a wonderful coffee table book. Someone can pick this up, flip through it, and find something interesting to read and then put it down. It's got history, basic science, chemistry, and the author's style is humorous (a bit sarcastic but I like that).

I used to assign it over 10 years ago to my General Chemistry I students as required reading and they enjoyed it. There were a few grumblings about the chemical terminology but I don't believe it onerous. It's educational!

For fifty years now, Dr. Joe Schwarcz has been lecturing, going on tv, radio and magazines, hosting a radio show and writing books – all about the frauds of alternative medicine. He checks out every single one he learns about. He’ll buy anything that’s offered. He’ll trace the maker of it and its history. He runs McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, which patiently examines every little thing that comes along, hoping to one day find something that actually works. So far, nada. Quack Quack is his latest book.

The book is one long chapter, broken into 73 one to three page stories about products and services that make their developers rich and do nothing for their customers (though sometimes they kill them, mostly by diverting them from real healthcare). That is unless you consider performing as well as a placebo a mark of success. Because that is all they ever accomplish.

In some ways, nothing has changed - ever. Fake cures have been around since the time of shamans. But today’s hustlers have glommed onto tech lingo, which has enabled them to promote massive new varieties of worthless products. Magnetism and magnetic fields can be employed to cure anything. So can copper and the fields it generates. Attaching the word bio to anything gives it new appeal. Same for electro, detox, energy, vibrating, and of course, smart. It is astonishing (and honestly, wearying) to read all the ways people market bogus cures.

There is no question readers will recognize many from commercials, infomercials and ads. There is something for everyone in this book, from bogus supplements to bogus pipes that return water to its normal, cure-all, agitated state (Straight pipes kill it, you see). Schwarcz says: “Today, the traveling medicine show with its fascinating mix of fun and flimflam is gone. But not forgotten. If you get a chance, take in a Psychic Fair or a Health Food Expo at a hotel or convention hall and experience a throwback to the past. I did. There were crystal healers, astrologers, and dietary supplements galore. Some of the claims sounded like they came straight from the mouths of the Kickapoo pitch doctors.”

Magnets are still big: “There are magnetic mattresses, pads, bandages, insoles, rings, and bracelets.
You can even buy magnetized water. A remarkable website sells magnetic immortality rings that claim to increase life span.”

But high tech water seems to be the most popular cure. It’s cheap, can be colored inexpensively, and there are lots of new words to pump up its pretended medicinal effects. Alkaline, electro, vitamin, smart, live, raw – water is the superfood for our time. Scammers love to claim they can alter the actual chemical composition of water’s molecules, giving it new and better powers, or just refreshing its old ones. Which it never had. But at least it won’t kill you. It’s just really expensive.

They love conspiracies, too. Many of the products employ a line about how Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about this. Better buy it right now before they force it off the market. Etc.

There are lots of unmeasurable waves too. Some claim to mentally transmit cures anywhere in the world with just a photo in front of them. Some can cure by just passing their hands over someone else. Malaria goes away in just four hours! There are innumerable scammers who cure cancer by leveraging auras, meridians and chakras, high frequency and low frequency waves, moonbeams, magnetic fields and on and on.

And they love mixing scientific sounding words into long sentences that make their product sound like cutting edge technology. But reading them clearly shrieks – meaningless garbage: “The human body has a resonant frequency and coherence is its natural state.” Or “Chimps and humans have similar DNA, so that couldn’t explain the difference between them, the explanation is the morphogenetic field that informs which parts of DNA the body will access for its development.” Needless to say, Schwarcz adds, healers can restore health by altering this “morphogenetic field,” a totally fictional and meaningless term. Nonetheless, such products come emblazoned with messages like “As seen on the Dr. Oz Show!” giving them the ring of authenticity.

Schwarcz goes after the detox people fiercely. He defends the human body as having great detox functions, from the likes of the liver, the kidneys and the gut microbiome. It does not need bizarre diets to try to remove residues of anything; they’ve already been handled. Not that the detox recipes can have any salubrious effect anyway; they have no basis in science and no way to detoxify a human body.

Similarly, dietary supplements are a huge scam, with totally unprovable benefits. Rubbing vitamin C on skin can have no effect. Swallowing vitamin A does not improve eyesight. Ingesting vitamin E does not restore memory, and on and on. But because they are not marketed as drugs, Congress has seen fit to exempt them from testing, allowing them to be promoted in all kinds of immoral ways. They don’t really do anything. But they’re a multibillion dollar business anyway.

Possibly my favorite story in this collection is on candling. For just $25, Schwarcz bought two simple white candles, with hollow centers. You stick one in your ear and light it, creating a chimney effect, sucking ear wax out and into the candle. The clerk proves it by then cutting open the candle and showing you all the brown guck collected inside. But Schwarcz took his second candle, lit it and placed it over a scrap of tissue on the counter. The “chimney” couldn’t even hold onto the tissue, so how could it scrape and lift ear wax? Then he cut open the candle, and what do you know? It was filled with “ear wax”.

Schwarcz is a pain because he always wants proof. He wants to try the product in laboratory conditions, run tests, and somehow prove it will do better than a placebo. He wants to understand the chemistry (his profession), the physics and even the magic (he is an amateur magician). He is continually bombarded with products the gullible want to market or at least recommend. This makes him a busy man: “Whenever you think you have seen the ultimate in absurdity, something else comes along and reaches even loftier heights.”

And finally, in answer to why more research and authentication isn’t being done, Schwarcz says it is. “The Office of Alternative Medicine was created in 1991 and given a budget of two million dollars. It was later converted to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) and had a budget of $151.9 million for 2020. The center will even award grants and organize clinical trials. Perhaps we can look forward to some interesting results; but so far since 1991 not much has happened. Not a
single alternative treatment was found to be highly effective and not a single one was completely debunked.” In other words, everyone truly wants one of these miracle products to be for real. But so far… nada.

Schwarcz is chatty. He likes to talk directly to the reader. He tries to keep it light, despite the worrying fraud and risks. He is sarcastic, ironic and cutting. And very serious about getting readers to stay away from these scams. He likes to tie his stories up with a pun or snarky comment linking the conclusion to the intro over some key word. It helps break up the sordid nature of this whole enterprise and helps make Quack Quack most readable.

David Wineberg

I was all kinds of excited when I was browsing Netgalley and came across Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, the director at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. The book aims to convince people of the importance of separating sense from nonsense, and it’s packed with plenty of examples of the kind of quackery that people are promoting and making lots of money off of.

The book’s main focus is the nonsense of the present, but it begins with a look at some of the quackery of the past. For example, “In the late 1800s, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was unquestionably the place to be for people who needed to be cured of diseases they never had.”

You might recall that drinking one’s own urine was one of the bizarre ideas people came up with for supposedly curing COVID. There’s a chapter devoted to autourine therapy (i.e. drinking one’s own urine), and apparently, there was a World Conference on Urine Therapy.

Then there’s the woman who thought fermented cabbage juice could cure anything and everything, let you regrow missing limbs, and let you live 400 years. Regarding that, Dr. Joe says, “Never before have I heard such concentrated hogwash in such a short time.” He writes that her claims are “full of baloney. Or bunkum. Or balderdash. Take your choice. I have other words too.”

A fair bit of the book is devoted to debunking the weird and wacky claims that people make about water. For example, there’s alkaline water, and Dr. Joe points out that even if it did change the pH of the blood (which it doesn’t), “you would not have to worry about illness because you would be dead.” There’s also the notion of double helix water, as opposed to regular water, which is supposedly weakened by flowing through straight pipes. Then there’s raw water, which can actually harm you depending on what bacteria happen to be contaminating it (I can’t even begin to tell you how not fun it is to have a Giardia infection, quaintly known as “beaver fever“).

The author points out how companies that make these dodgy products will often string together a bunch of words that sound scientific but are actually meaningless. Regarding a device that’s claimed to energize water, he says, “In all my years of wading through swamps of claptrap I don’t think I have come across anything to match the stew of random, garbled, meaningless words cooked up on behalf of Alpha Spin.”

Dr. Joe explains that the most prevalent myth that he’s come across is that “natural” substances are somehow inherently superior to synthetic ones. He points out that chemicals are made out to be a bad thing, but all atoms are chemicals, so the notion of chemical-free doesn’t even make any sense. And if you thought homeopathic remedies were just another kind of herbal product, they’re not, Dr. Joe will explain to you just how wacky the idea behind homeopathy is (trust me, it’s really out there).

The book concludes with a chapter with tips on evaluating information/misinformation, like “nonsensical lingo can sound very scientific”, “nature is not benign”, and “education is not a vaccine against folly.”

This book is hilarious. The things the author is talking about are funny, but it’s the way he talks about them that is absolute gold. I love his word choices, including mountebank, “mind-numbing claptrap”, poppycock, “mindless twaddle”, “woo-isms”, mumbo jumbo, balderdash, malarkey, puffery, and gobbledygook. There were plenty of bits that had me laughing, such as this after being urged not to knock a product before trying it: “Well, I’m knocking. We do not live in a scientific vacuum. We do not concoct ways to trap the tooth fairy.” It was rather difficult to limit myself when it came to the number of quotes I included in this review, since there were just so many great lines.

I loved this book. I think anyone with a science background will find it highly amusing, and I hope that it will convince some people to keep their money to themselves rather than hand it over to hucksters trying to make them think that they need a magic carafe to make double-helix water. Our world is desperately in need of more sense, and hopefully Dr. Joe’s book will help to put a bit of a dent in the shortage thereof.

This book is a good and easy read. Schwartz clearly knows his science. The overall point he makes about science being a process of uncovering new incremental discoveries is a great idea which cannot be emphasized enough. What left me wanting more, though, was that he rarely described the evidence science has to back up its claims. In an effort to reach the general public, he leaves out the details that makes science what it is: a continual quest for knowledge of how the universe works. I wanted less scientific facts and more description of how we know what we know.

Essentially a lot of interesting trivia with a little too much dad humour. Guy sounds really friendly and a lot of those topics are important, making these almost PSAs, but in the end it's not going to rock your world view (I hope).

La alimentación, las terapias alternativas, los peligros de los alimentos transgénicos o de los plásticos en nuestro día a día son solo algunos de los muchos temas que se tratan en Monos, mitos y moléculas. ¿Por qué conviene comerse las manzanas con piel? ¿Quién y cuando inventó el retrete? ¿Contienen los helados petróleo? ¿Qué método de vigorización testicular se hizo aplicar Sigmund Freud? ¿Quién inventó el Napalm? ¿Sirve de algo la homeopatía? Joe Schwarcz nos da respuestas científicas y rigurosas a todas estas preguntas y muchas más. Nunca habrías imaginado que la química fuera tan vital y apasionante.

This was a great book. I'll admit, I didn't learn as much new trivia as I had hoped, but I definitely refined information I already knew. And I certainly gained more respect for chemistry than I had. While I've always understood inherently that it was all around us, this really drove it home. All that being said, the presentation of this book makes it a quick read. Almost along a similar line of an Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, though with more intelligent content.

* I was granted access to an ARC of this book for review.

177 Fascinating Questions & answers about the chemistry of everyday life

Interesting , fun

Interesting and fun, but needs much better layout and editing ( surprising to find a book published in 2010 that refers to ' black people ' and not ' African Americans )

Short, highly readable pieces about a vast array of issues of chemistry in modern life. Many, not surprisingly, are about how things can't possibly work, like homeopathy. Other pieces consider new science discoveries, the worthlessness of all those "miracle food" stories (and the very thin research behind them), and how to critically evaluate some forms of risk. A good introduction to the subject for those who aren't already skeptically literate, and a fun browse for those who are.

Library copy

Somehow I'd gotten the impression this was going to tie together a lot of pseudo-science ideas and make a big point, make it easier to spot the hoaxes, easier to remember the truths Dr. Joe teaches us... But it's not.  It's a collection of short essays (radio casts?), just the latest in a long list of Dr. Joe's books.  And a long list of similar books I've read.  I honestly can't rate this perfectly objectively because I am kinda burnt out on them.  I do recommend this, or any other book by Schwarcz, or a number of similar books, titles avl on request, for anyone who gets their science from bloggers, Dr. Oz, homeopaths, or 'health food' stores.

This is the first book in a long time I didn't finish - not worth my time.

Interesting , fun

The "PhD" on the cover sets the antennae tingling, but in fact this is a very jolly collection  of essays -- Martin Gardner-style -- on science and more particularly pseudoscience by the chemist, broadcaster and columnist whose day job is as Director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society. Obviously I was more concerned with the latter two-thirds of the book, where the prime focus was on pseudoscience, especially quack medicine and crank nutritionism, but the first part was fascinating too: more than once I found myself stumbling through to Pam's workplace saying, "Do you know what I've just learned?" The writing style is smooth and very readable, and I chuckled a lot. My only real gripe is the lack of basic citations and of a bibliography; in a few cases Schwarcz discussed things I wanted to follow up on, and my task was made far more difficult by the fact that I didn't have any names or titles with which to start my internet searches.

Schwarcz goes through a litany of scientific and pseudo-scientific claims in this work which reads like a collection of blog posts (but that is not necessarily a bad thing.) Reminded me somewhat of Proofiness.

Fun and quirky, this book debunked some beliefs of mine (DDT= unmitigated evil, for one), and told some riveting tales I'd never dreamt could be true. Direct and immediate writing style, big ol' sense of humor.

Joe Schwarcz has done it again. This host of a science call-in show in Montreal and Toronto has put together another collection of his commentaries on the science of everyday life. All four of his previous books have been "Hal's Picks", and you can find all of them in the Index. As usual, most of the science is chemistry. In this collection, he again devotes a lot of space to issues of health and nutrition, favorite topics of his listeners. He dispels some myths about dangers associated with cooking in Teflon pans, and does an especially good job of discussing the pros and cons of DDT and DDE, including his confession that his opinion of Rachel Carson and "Silent Spring" has undergone drastic reversal in light of evidence. Alzheimer's disease is still largely shrouded in medical mystery, and I appreciated his frank remarks about what is known, and what might be true about this scourge. His description of the advice given freely (and worth every penny) by the clerks in "health food" stores is a cautionary tale. Schwarcz mixes good story-telling, accurate science,some history, and a sympathetic yet skeptical attitude to guide his readers to understanding the scientific world around them.

Joe Schwarcz's books are irresistible for me because they constitute just the kind of morsels that I look for - the connections between what we teach in chemistry courses and the world in which our students (and we) live. My only surprise in this book was that Prof. Schwarcz was able to come up with so many additional high-quality essays. One would think that his previous two compilations (which were Hal's Picks in May and July of this year) would have gotten him to near the bottom of the barrel, but there is no sign of a letup here. This compilation is heavy on health issues (which are the chemistry topics of greatest interest to students, in my experience). It includes 35 essays totaling 163 pages on those subjects. As usual, he brings chemical sense to topics such as the claim that mercury amalgams in dental fillings are a health hazard and the much more complex issues surrounding genetically modified foods. The other three sections of "That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles" are devoted to Everyday Science, Looking Back (history of science), and Poppycock (frauds and pseudoscience).

Joe Schwarcz is the director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society, and he also hosts a popular radio show in Canada, in which he answers questions about science he has posed to his listeners. "Dr. Joe and What You Didn't Know" is the fourth in a series of books in which his answers are compiled. (The previous three have also been Hal's Picks.) Professor Schwarcz found that, at the time this book was being compiled, the quality of the answers his listeners were providing indicated that they had suddenly become more science-literate. This coincided with the availability of Internet search engines such as Google. Of course, he was asking his questions of the collective wisdom of the Internet, rather than his listeners. Consequently, he began to construct the questions in a way not conducive to Google searches. For example, he might ask "What common metal was once more valuable than gold?", rather than "Why did aluminum fall a hundred times in value during the 19th century?" His books are very attractive to me, both as a chemist interested in science in everyday life and as a teacher of chemistry. Like Hal's Picks, Professor Schwarcz does not limit himself exclusively to chemical topics, but his little essays consistently bring the insights of a chemist to the question at hand, and he does not hesitate to get into the chemical details of an answer that are necessary for a proper explanation. I still wish that he would include a few molecular structures in his books, and I ought to compile my own list of essays that would enhance the courses I teach, so that I would not neglect to bring them up when they fit.