I just learned that someone I know was at the Autism Society of America’s annual conference, and got to experience the joys of a major seizure, because the society allows quacks to be exhibitors. This particular quack, Bioharmonic Technologies
, was happily blasting attendees, a group they ought to have expected to consist of a large number of known non-neurotypical individuals, with their magic music. I had to look these guys up. You want to see New Age nonsense? They’ve got it for you.
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You can listen to excerpts from these magic tunes, or you can buy MP3s: $3.30 per track, or $30 per album. I listened to some — it’s all crap. It’s repetitive electronica, basically lots of throbbing, pulsing beats that will put you to sleep, give you a headache (my response), or possibly trigger a seizure, if you’re at risk for that. I guarantee you it won’t wiggle your vertebrae, purge toxins, promote healing of the upper or lower extremities, regenerate bones, or make you rich, or any of the other absurd exaggerated claims they make. It might make Bioharmonic Technologies rich, if there are enough gullible people to buy into their junk.
This is pure evil bullshit.
But, you might say, they have a web page documenting evidence that their magic noise actually works. Go ahead, look at it. It’s amazing.
They used something called Gas Discharge Visualization photography, which sounds impressively sciencey. What it actually is is a new name for an old phenomenon called Kirlian photography, long the domain of pseudoscientific loons. They aimed their magic camera at people’s chakras and saw changes in brightness when they played their music.
So they used a crappy pseudoscientific technique to ‘measure’ a mystical point on people’s bodies when they played magic music, and they’re calling it “evidence”. Of what, I don’t know. That bullshit amplified by more bullshit is still bullshit?
All the New Age buzzwords and bogus promises and outright lies about their “product”, as well as the extravagant prices they charge, make it really obvious that Bioharmonic Technologies is a con. So the real question here is…why is the Autism Society even letting these frauds and exploiters in the door? Have they no standards? They even have a warning about how sensory phenomena can overload individuals on the autism spectrum, but they allow exhibitors to have sonically garish displays? Are they serious about sponsoring research in autism spectrum disorders, or are they more about profiting from phonies who take advantage of people with autism?
Hey, Autism Society: kick the con artists out, or watch your reputation plummet. This is shameful.
Oh, man, this is terrible stuff. Listen to this “Dr Schwartz”, explaining what his magic music does.
You know that all of that was utter nonsense, right?
By the way, here’s “Dr Schwartz’s” qualifications. He’s a chiropractor.
Gas Discharge Visualization? Do they mean igniting farts, like Boy Scouts on campouts?
Is this the sort of autism society that contains actual autistic people? Because if so, the quacks also ought to have expected it to contain a large (-r than normal) number of people who have memorized the reasons why this is bullshit and they are quacks. And who are less likely than average to moderate their voices when speaking. And who are probably already grumpy just from being in the middle of a crowd. It sounds like they couldn’t have come up with a better way to embarrass themselves if they’d tried…
*clicks link*
Oh, wait, never mind.
I will not ever trust medical claims from anyone who doesn’t know that the singular of “vertebrae” is “vertebra”, given that such knowledge is pretty basic human anatomy.
Who needs fancy woomusic to vibrate each spinal vertebrae? Just go stand next to one of those cars with the 1000 watt subwoofers installed.
Too bad this crank figures he can sell some all right electronic music for an inflated price because he associates some nonsense with it.
@2 Robert B
‘people who have memorized the reasons why this is bullshit and they are quacks. And who are less likely than average to moderate their voices when speaking. And who are probably already grumpy just from being in the middle of a crowd.’
Sounds like my kind of people.
It’s okay. Your cellular receptors just aren’t vibrating in an energetically favorable way. They invented low G for the mass market, but they have dozens of sacred geometers working around the clock to develop other wares for people like you who have specialized needs.
re @3:
you’d think a chiropractor would know the proper usage of that Latin word for those spinal bones.
maybe that’s why he in the woo-music buzzieness now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this stuff was recorded using A tuned to 432 hertz instead of 440 hertz. A lot of people have bought into the idea of the wonderful powers of A=432Hz, and some of the fringier claims are that A=440Hz was the doing of the Nazis.
Vibrational cellular network what? I don’t know how these people can write paragraphs and paragraphs of made-up nonsensical word salads like this. Does it make sense in their heads?
Not necessarily bad. I can enjoy some minimalist electronica kind of stuff once in a while and minimalist music in general*. Those “Sonic-Ceuticals” are not doing much for me, though. I guess it’s the “scientific frequencies” in them.
Wow. Must be the “scientific frequencies” too. That stuff ain’t cheap, you know.
*Not electronica, but incidentally I was just listening to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians earlier today.
Send a very large Brown Note in his direction….
Pz:
There’s no limit to how long quacks will keep farting around with the same old hot air.
timgueguen:
There were various sliding/microtonal bits in the excerpts I heard, so I don’t get what the point would be. If lots of your notes are wobbling all over the place, with some cheap synth garbage on the default settings, “tuning” a note differently is basically meaningless. But okay … “Bioharmonic Technologies” … enough said, I guess.
yup: https://www.facebook.com/BioharmonicTechnologies/posts/883312925045684
But does it kill viruses and their eggs?
Because I know a chiropractor who has a little box with a battery inside that kills viruses and their eggs.
It’s the only virus egg killer I’ve ever seen anywhere.
Take that, traditional medicine!
and btw, they are now straightup lying about what happened, calling it “a woman at the conference who felt as if my music created a problem for her”; pretty sure the person in question didn’t “feel as if” the noise caused seizures. :-/
Are you sure that Gas Discharge Visualization is really just another name for Kirlian photography? It sounds like something entirely new, like taking photographs of someone lighting farts.
Kirlian photography was pretty damn cool when I was 19 and had some good weed.
The thing about A=432Hz is that much of it is classical numerology crankism. Pick a specific number, claim it’s important somehow, then find some interesting numeric relationships to that number and claim they’re important. It’s just like nonsense such as the pyramid inch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_inch
Clearly bullshit. He didn’t mention “quantum” even once.
Clear, cleared, clearing… careful, the CoS loves to sue people.
It’s not nonsense! It’s marketing!
Hey look – he posted a study to his facebook that suggests that his type of therapy could do physiological damage. Cute. https://twitter.com/MAMelby/status/619664816790048768
Isn’t “gas visualization” another name for clouds?
Good job M. A. Melby. I think it’s important that it’s always reiterated that the science is against them and that what they’re doing is harmful. I just don’t have that specific knowledge or confidence to say anything so definite. You’re absolutely right they’re willfully harming people for profit and this shit needs to be regulated just like any other medical treatment. Or not. I’m not sure if regulating would lend an air of credibility or not, or whether the benefit outweighed the harm.
Use alternative medicine that has been proven by rigorous scientific techniques. Or, as we like to call it: MEDICINE!
I am a physician. It never fails to amaze me the preposterous claims made by pseudoscientific quacks, particularly chiropractors. Some claim that chiropractic manipulation can ‘stimulate the immune system’ to make vaccines unnecessary. Others use chiropractic manipulation to ‘treat’ asthma. Still others claim ear infections are caused by a malfunction in one of the cervical spinal nerves, and that manipulation of the neck can be used instead of antibiotics.
On one occasion, I saw a person who had 2 months of neck pain after a car accident. She had been seeing a chiropractor (to no avail), and she had told her that this kind of problem can be hereditary, and that she should bring her children in for spinal manipulation.
And yet every time I use the term ‘chiroquacktic’ I’m told I’m being reactionary.
Go figure.
I thought it was neon signs.
Come to think of it, car accidents seem to run in my family too.
@14 – Wow. Their eggs.
Of all the scams in existence, nothing disturbs and infuriates me more than medical quackery. The ASA claims to “educate” parents that vaccines/thimerosal have caused an “explosive autism epidemic.” They insist that the first cases of autism in history were linked to thimerosal, present in a diphtheria vaccine given to children in Baltimore in 1930. They claim that this vaccine caused the very first case of autism in 1931. They further claim that some “credible and unbiased” studies need to be done, implying that none has been to date.
So it’s no surprise that they advertise this sort of worthless – and expensive – “treatment.” At least Bioharmonic bullshit won’t permanently harm children, unlike putative chelation therapy, extreme diets, megadoses of nutritional supplements and untested exotic plant derivatives, fever induction, and other potentially dangerous treatments. Jenny McCarthy says she cured her son’s autism with such ju-ju, and Oprah Winfrey provided the platform for her.
It was a sad day when insurance companies began covering “chiroquacktic” manipulation/treatments.
dougthebox, thanks for the new word. :)
Actually, in the spirit of literal, Autistic truth I have no idea if that video was nonsense. For all I could make out it could be a perfectly viable cookie recipe in an obscure tribal language…
On the plus side, whatever he is selling, it will probably do much less harm than bleach enemas (any doubt is due to the cumulative possibilities of the massed, non consensual imposition factor) and cost a great deal more, thereby leaving less disposable income available for further sorties into the wonderful world of snake oil with an innocent child in tow.
Most prices are not listed (ominous sign in a restaurant), but a mere $17.50 gets you a black elastic bracelet with a “programmable” piece of metal (hmmm, could my car’s engine block be programmed to cure my Autism? And what would that cost?) , and to download a brain bursting “Son et Lumiere” extravaganza will cost $6.
As scams go if it wasn’t for attracting so much unintended negative attention (needs work that) it would be a pretty slick operation…
But I saved the best for last…take a look at the domain for their “Chakra Shopping Channel” http://www.asabalance.com/asa-technologies-products/ – how in the world did ASA miss that?
while doing some experiments with tones and beat frequencies panning up and down and right to left- left to right in a system with very good stereo separation noting how the beat frequency would change I did find one set of tones and panning back and forth that did induce the beginning of motion-sickness nausea very surprising.
I did a demonstration of a Theremin I built to an electronic music class and was surprised when I got questions about whether it had a medical/curative properties. I had said absolutely nothing about any health benefits but got the questions any way.
uncle frogy
mysteriousqfever @ 28,
Please don’t forget that epilepsy kills.
Estimates of how often this happens seem to cluster about 1 in 1,000, peaking in young adults and more common among young men. There may at this age be social factors – stigma, risk taking, lack of someone at hand who knows how to help – but death seems to occur at a very similar rate to patients in hospital.
Even if the rate of death were much lower it would still be a horrible thing to do to induce a seizure or even risk doing that.
A good friend of mine is MC-ing a gig just down the road this evening and I’m not there. Why? Because one of the acts on the bill uses lights and, though I’m well out of the danger zone age-wise, that’s not the sort of risk I take.
It just has to be unethical to take that risk with someone else’s health or refuse to listen to warnings.
As the drummer Han Bennink observed “new age music is music that sounds exactly the same, whether you play it forwards or backwards.”
Yeah, as an adult with autism, can I just say that we really don’t need you NTs worrying about whether a bit of music is going to set off a seizure. Thanks, but keep your concerns to yourself.
Just to make it totally clear, I agree that the music cell cleaning thing is very likely to be hokum. What I resent, however, is the condescending approach of someone who firstly suggests that autistic people are less capable of making informed choices than their NT peers and then goes onto talk about autistic people as if we are a bunch of fucking hand grenades that just “go off” at the slightest provocation.
It’s clear from what you’ve written that you see the fact that this autistic association has permitted these cell washers a space to share their ideas as worse than if, say, an organisation for black people interested in science did the same thing. You didn’t write a general article about supposedly reputable organisations allowing these pseudo scientists a voice as a general criticism. It was more from the angle of “autistic people are less capable of making informed decisions so it’s worse that these people are allowed to interact with them because their music and long, crazy words might get them all riled up and/or brainwash them”. This shows your poor expectations of autists, as well as a general lack of understanding of autism itself.
Just imagine saying that it’s worse when spiritual healers share their ideas with black people because we know they are less able to grasp that it’s not supported by scientific evidence and we know that black people have tantrums when they feel confused or slighted. So it’s altogether best that black organisations prohibit those sorts of people from sharing their views in their spaces. On one hand, it’s a valid debate about whether people should be able to share scientifically refuted views in reputable spaces; it’s a completely separate (and fucking offensive) argument to imply that it’s “worse” to allow this in a space primarily for black people due to their lesser ability to rationalise and evaluate information.
I haven’t listened to the cell washing music, but from your description, it seems to be similar to a bunch of the electronic club new age “music” the youths and hipsters are putting out now. Have you campaigned against house music on behalf of the few autistic people who may experience a sensory overload listening to it? PProbably not. The reality is that many of the things that you NTs take in your stride trouble us autists. Whilst it’s lovely when people try not to provoke a sensory overload, the reality is that you’d have to prohibit so many things for all autists to be comfortable that it would be ridiculous. Thus, part of being an independent adult with autism is you learning what sorts of things may trigger an overload and taking steps to counteract them, either through avoidance or coping mechanisms. It’s more likely that the way someone smells, talks, interacts, or breathes is more troubling to me than some annoying music. It could literally be your presence that “triggers” me. Shall we ban you from being in public spaces in case a few autists show up and you provoke an overload? No, that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?
Right, so, kindly refrain from your assumptions about autists just because someone you know has it. We have enough people trying to speak for us. Let us do the talking. We are perfectly capable of doing so.
Ellianna McGhie @ 33,
You seem to have missed several of the key point here.
* PZ is a friend of the person who had a series of seizures triggered by this bullshit and is concerned
* the organisation which allowed this person a booth was clearly not either working to support people with autism nor willing to listen to one of them
* the silly man is now running a campaign to discredit the person who was made ill
And don’t you dare call me “an NT” as an insult. First, because its not true and second because there’s no way you’re more entitled to instruct me about one condition than I am to advise you about a different one, especially when the person at the heart of this has both. Or have you forgotten her?
One autistic person had a seizure so nobody with autism should be exposed to these harmful sounds?! Fuck that. “Helping” doesn’t mean sheltering or deciding what information that person is allowed to have. If the person in question has such severe epilepsy, it’s up to them to avoid triggers. Most people with autism do not have epilepsy although the prevalence of epilepsy amongst autists is higher than that of the normal population. That person has a health issue they need to deal with. His friends misfortune does not mean that you get to put all autists in the special box and shelter them from everything. Sorry, but I’m glad they dismissed those objections outright.
As I said, a general rant about supposedly reputable organisations allowing a platform for hokum is one thing but gross assumptions and stereotypes which perpetuate stigma is quite another.
As for calling you NT,you are neither the author nor a person I knew existed, so it’s safe to say I wasn’t calling you anything. Jog on.
No-one is “sheltering” any one. This is about people, whoever they are, deciding how much risk THEY are prepared to take and having that decision respected?
Organisation like ASA are a disaster for people with autism if they are unaware of this risk. What level of risk are you prepared to impose on someone you don’t know? Besides, shouldn’t ASA know the level of co-morbidity for autism and epilepsy? Or are they just in it for the money?
As for not attacking me personally, you were making broad-brush statements about just about everyone.
If anyone happens to know of a good study on the prevalence of sound sensitivity in people on the autism spectrum relative to the general population, that would be useful. It certainly gets mentioned frequently as associated with autism, but I don’t know what the numbers are. Me, I would be happy if the level of added unnecessary noise (music and so forth) in the environment were lower, but even large gatherings that are supposed to be fun* tend to stress me excessively, so it’s not as if I’m the Autism Society of America’s target conference audience.
There are two issues here: the exhibitor having no therapy of value to offer, and the possibly detrimental effect of the music on attendees. If the music was of a sort that is known to increase the incidence of seizures in susceptible individuals, then it should not have been playing in an area that conference attendees could casually walk into. If the therapy is worthless, the exhibitor shouldn’t have been there. I’m not sure how the person who had the seizure was supposed to avoid this particular trigger without any warning that it existed.
*Picked up son from camp, a camp for kids on the spectrum, yesterday. Spent rest of day in room. Too many people.
Oh, fuck off.
I wrote a specific article about a specific event at a specific conference. I learned about it from the discussions of an autistic person who was affected by it. The complaint is not about autistic people, or in lieu of autistic people, but about a neurotypical (I presume) fraud exploiting autistic people, with the assistance of an organization largely run by neurotypical people.
And you clearly don’t know me very well if you think I’d give a pass to New Age bullshit if it were taking advantage of any other group.
The point that you’re not understanding is any that any form of sensory stimulation can trigger an autist or an epileptic for that matter. Why do you think their music is more of a problem to autistic people (as a whole) than any other form of audial stimulation?
“If the music was of a sort that is known to increase the incidence of seizures in susceptible individuals, then it should not have been playing in an area that conference attendees could casually walk into.”
Agreed. Purely from the personal perspective of an autist, the type of music described might annoy me but it wouldn’t fuck my shit up like some types of music can. I’m not epileptic, but it can cause a sensory overload/meltdown. I just make sure I avoid that.
I think that’s part of the issue – the music appears to have been difficult to avoid. If they wanted people to be able to hear the music, why couldn’t they have had headphones/earbuds? Then the people who hear it are exactly the ones who want to hear it. Many people have their own earbuds anyway, so if the samples are available on a device that people can use their own earbuds on, that avoids any possible issues from earbuds going into multiple ears.
Come to think of it, there’s at least three issues here; the basic impoliteness of unavoidable music, especially loud music; the question of particularly avoiding such at a conference where attendees may be on average more sensitive to such (as I mentioned above, I would like to see hard data on that); the question of whether the promotion of quackery should be allowed at this conference. The area of “treatment” for autism is one that’s attracted a lot of harmful nonsense, and I would argue that this means there’s an additional responsibility on the part of the organizers to act as gatekeepers.
PZ, I can see how it is possible to take the lines “I just learned that someone I know was at the Autism Society of America’s annual conference, and got to experience the joys of a major seizure, because the society allows quacks to be exhibitors. This particular quack, Bioharmonic Technologies, was happily blasting attendees, a group they ought to have expected to consist of a large number of known non-neurotypical individuals, with their magic music” in isolation as suggesting a direct connection between autism and epilepsy. The rest of the post makes it clear that that’s not what is meant, though. I tried to search on autism-epilepsy connections just to cover the bases, and found an article claiming that “up to” one-third of individuals on the spectrum have epilepsy. “Up to” has to be one of the finest weasel-phrases in existence.
I apologize for any typos. They swarmed this morning. I swatted all I saw.
My biggest issue with this is that organizations like AHA should be a place to go for vetted information on treatment, not a grab bag of any random crap that asks to be included. I’ve worked with children with autism and I’m aware of the massive amount of claims for treatments/cures that their parents have to navigate through. The often feel guilty if they don’t try everything, on the chance that it might help. When you throw the weight of an organization like AHA behind garbage, it lends it considerable credibility. Do anti-vaxxers also get to do presentations? (I’m too scared to Google that)
It’s the same as if a cancer society let a juice cleanse company present at a conference. They have a responsibility to ensure that there is some potential value to the treatment, before giving con artists access to the people they’re supposed to be helping.
I have Epilepsy and my son has Aspergers/Autism. I get what Ellenna is saying.
1)no, it’s not actually the responsibility of a disabled person to avoid all spaces that might negatively affect their disability; see also; the reason the ADA even exists.
2)The person whose epilepsy was triggered was someone who had a table in the exhibition room; it is entirely unreasonable to make an exhibition area inaccessible to actual exhibitors.
3)excluding 1/3 of all autistics because YOU aren’t bothered by the triggering noise is ableist discrimination.
4)any organization that puts on an autism conference which then privileges a dangerous quack over an actually autistic exhibitor is being ableist and dangerously unethical.
oh yeah, and
5)there was no warning that the exhibition area would be flooded with seizure-triggering noise. since a warning was lacking, there’s literally no way for ppl with audiogenic seizure triggers to “decide for themselves” ahead of time. So shove off with that libertarian “chill girl” nonsense.
I feel I should remind some people about the direct action that helped get the Americans with Disabilities Act – 1990 passed.
It was the Capitol Crawl. Many physically disabled people got out of the scooters, crutches, wheelchairs, walkers, and crawled up all 100 steps of the Senate building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueQ0TfVGxU4
This is how seriously getting the act passed was taken. So you have to wonder, if you will, what exactly life was like before the ADA?
Getting a ramp in a public building usually only happened if the owner had a disabled relative, or was disabled themselves. Getting access measures put in place in schools depended hugely on the kindness of individual teachers and administrators.
This is the problem with Ellena’s argument. People with epilepsy can’t just avoid triggers. It has to be the other direction. Accommodations should be made by society for the disabled, not the disabled making accommodations for society.
Because then disabled people don’t get to participate in society. They don’t get to be a part of every day life. They get excluded and ostracized by a simple lack of accommodations. That is unjust and unfair.
Further, Ellena, seems confused about the conference and the society. The society is not autistic people – it is largely caretakers and parents and assistants and doctors. The conferences ASA holds are (in)famously inaccessible for non-NT people.
In addition, epilepsy is co-morbid with autism. If someone is autistic, they stand a higher chance of having epilepsy than someone who is not autistic. If you’re marketing a product or service at the ASA, it is that person’s professional and moral responsibility to do this research and know that. Further, the ASA should be much better about giving accommodations for epileptic triggers given that co-morbid probability.
For chrissake – someone with a booth at a gaming convention playing music would probably be asked to cut it out. So – wth?
The people more directly involved are making official complaints and voicing their disgust. I don’t think anyone here is attempting to speak for them – but to support their efforts.
From my perspective – I’m also livid because (as trinioler said) these types of conferences (which I have been to none) often are organized by and attempt to appeal to people similar to me. [fyi: My son does not have an ASD diagnosis (though it was offered to him at one point). He has a TBI.]
Parents are their target audience and I am this low-life piece-of-shit’s potential cash cow. His facebook is full of pictures of children and his youtube is full of happy anecdotes of adults – none of which have anything to do with autism – but allergy relief and various other random stuff. He seems to want to branch out into the “treating autism” business.
I think I understand some of what Ellena is saying, that it’s patronizing to think autistic people need to be “saved” from things like this by allistic people, as if they can’t see through bullshit.
I highly doubt that adults with autism are this person’s intended mark, though – the “music” is irritating by all accounts. The intended mark are allistic parents – and yes, I do think that group of people is particularly susceptible to swallowing a bunch of woo – to the detriment of their children and to themselves.
Conferences like this shouldn’t be places where families are preyed upon when they are looking for real information to help them make good choices. They shouldn’t be places where the conference can’t even get “reasonable accommodation” right for the people they supposedly are supporting.
That’s enough to get angry about.
But this conference put someone’s “right” to capitalize on harmful bullshit targeted at parents – literally over the life of an autistic attendee. I hope it’s a wake-up call for them to start prioritizing correctly.
I am an autistic woman, mother and grand mother of Autistic children. I was at the ASA Conference and spent a great deal of time with the woman who had multiple seizures triggered by the inexcusable actions of the bioharmonic “magic machine” and I have a great deal to say about it.
First, It has been inferred by some that the woman who had the seizures [ I’ll call her S] had unreasonable expectations and could have avoided seizures had she steered clear of the area where this “doctor” was blasting his “healing music.” S traveled hundreds of miles and hundreds of hours preparing for this event where she also had an exhibition table. All of the exhibits were in one enormous room. wherever a person was in that room, the sounds could be heard. Had S left the room, she would also have had to leave her table unattended.
Second, S was NOT the only Autistic person who was negatively affected by this humming, droning, sound. There were a number of persons, myself included, who suffered migraines, dizziness and nausea. There were Autistic people I asked who actually found the sounds relaxing. But S was not the only one who had major problems [though hers were the worst…I hope]
Third, S did ask for help in remediating the situation and was basically accused of lying by the “doctor.” It all ended fairly horribly, with S needing to leave before even a full day of the conference.
Last, and not related to S’ personal experience, I detest when vulnerable people are taken advantage of. I live in a travel trailer in the mountains of Colorado. It is an incredible location and I love it. This is a good thing because , really, we can not afford to live anywhere else. My husband and I were preparing for an early retirement when a member of our family developed a horrific neurological illness [ NOT related to being Autistic] that caused him such pain that he would pass out hundreds of times a day. We were told by the neurologists that there was NOTHING that could alleviate the ice pic, tazer like pains. So, we went outside of Western medicine. Some things we tried I still believe made sense, but others were the ridiculous and expensive [ hundreds of thousands of dollars] promised cures by quacks. because when a person is desperate to help someone they love they will stop at nothing.
I do not believe that Autistic people need to be fixed. We are not broken. Parents have been brainwashed into believing that their Autistic children are tragedies that need to be fixed though, and believing that crap, will, in desperation, fall for the wares of every snake oil salesman.
I believe that there could have been some miscommunication between S and ASA staff. I do not know. But I do know that the doctor who supposedly wanted to help Autistic people seemed to have NO problem with injuring one.