My mum knows I’m suffering with both physical and mental health issues. Every now and then she’ll suggest stuff, intending to be helpful (I suppose?), some of which I have real issues with.
One such occasion, years ago, involved her gifting me a book by Louise Hay. I’ve blogged about this elsewhere. Sadly, another similar instance has come up, just yesterday.
This time it’s ‘earthing’.
This relatively recent fad is based on the idea that modern life disconnects us from nature, and that that’s bad for us. In some ways I agree with this. But as we unpack the ideas peddled under the concept of earthing, we’ll get into separating the wheat from the chaff.
I’ll start with something about modern life that undoubtedly does illustrate how we have learned to manipulate nature such that we can be said to deviate from the natural order: light.
Our ability to control elements of our environment such that we can create light when naturally it’s dark have masses of implications. Some obviously beneficial (we can do stuff at times we couldn’t before, thereby getting more done), some potentially harmful (we might do too much, or at the wrong time, damaging our health by not getting enough or the right kinds of sleep).
I recently read Why We Sleep, which discusses some of the science around these ideas, and how light relates to our sleeping patterns, health, etc. So far so good.
But the trouble with pseudoscience, which we’ll come on to now, is that it conflates genuine science (or sometimes just vocabulary borrowed from science) with pure ‘woo’, or – to be more blunt – bullshit.
And earthing very much falls into this category, along with homeopathy, and the aforementioned Hay’s lunatic ideas on the mental causes of disease.
When I got my mum’s message, suggesting I look into earthing, I did. And this is what I found.
I’m not a scientist, by profession. But I am a rational materialist. And when it comes to attempts to explain reality, I trust science in a way that I don’t trust appeals to the supernatural or pseudoscience.
If my car breaks down, I take it to a garage, not a faith healer. If my body is malfunctioning, I look for help to medical science, not witches, shamans or priests.
This philosophy applies to mind/psychology too. I try to ‘heal myself’ by recourse to hard won knowledge, not airy-fairy superstition.
Language can be used to clarify. Or to confuse and obscure. Specialist languages have the potential to do both simultaneously; they may clarify for the initiated, whilst bamboozling the layman.
Public figures like Deepak Chopra – who is one of the folk billed on the promo material for the film whose poster tops this blog entry – strike me as being fashionable quacks. They borrow the language of contemporary science to peddle ideas that, in actual fact, fly in the face of genuine science.
And earthing is one such idea. Sure, barefoot contact with natural surfaces, as pictured, is a lovely experience. But the pseudoscience of earthing is pure bullshit, as science minded debunkers of the idea make clear.
I can’t be arsed to run the arguments I’ve read over again myself, here. Hence my use of links, to folk who’ve actually done that hard work already.
Speaking of links, and the subject of this post, here’s a more general one on pseudoscientific woo.
NB – A good rationalist review of the movie promoted by the image atop this post can be read here.