Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight – three women who went missing over a decade ago and were presumed dead – have been found to be alive. This item especially interested me because in 2004, on the totally irresponsible Montel Williams Show, “psychic” Sylvia Browne told Amanda Berry’s mom that her daughter was dead, causing her great shock and sorrow. And the mother, Jouwana Miller, went to her grave believing – only on Browne’s word – that her daughter had been murdered. She died in March of 2006, and friends were of the opinion that her passing was hastened by Browne’s totally uninformed and callous guess…

The gravel-voiced talk-to-the-dead woman (born Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker, 1936) who says that she sees and hears ghosts, used to be “Brown.” She added the “e” in an attempt to distance herself from her former husband, Kensil Dalzell Brown, known as “Dal,” with whom she was involved back in 1988 in a $1.3 million loan scheme involving a gold mining operation using the “psychic’s” magical powers, a plot that sent Dal to jail and Sylvia to probation.

Literally for decades now, I have been directing attention to the fact that Browne has been a continual, proven, failure. This is only the most recent example.

Early in 2010, an article in Skeptical Inquirer provided an extensive study of Sylvia Browne's predictions about missing persons and murder cases, along with her messages and visions “from beyond the grave.” It examined every episode of the Montel Williams TV show after 2002, when she began to be featured there regularly, and explored older cases in newspapers, finding 115 examples of these appearances and articles, and comparing them with the actual facts and Browne’s oft-repeated claim that her accuracy rate, to quote her exactly:

     …is somewhere between 87 and 90 percent, if I'm recalling correctly.

Sylvia’s recollection – strangely – is very, very, poor. It was shown that in not one of those 115 records – some of which had to be recovered from data that had been deleted from video records and/or published documents – was she correct!

THREE giant disappointments this week in the paranormal circles. First, the UFO circle didn't fare too well. The alien humanoid find is a bust. 

The Citizens Disclosure Hearing on UFOs is fantasy theater.  

And, as usual, the White House is covering it all up, so say our former lawmakers. 

Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo-woo in medicine.  

“Alternative” cancer cures in 1979: How little things have changed (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/alternative-cancer-cures-in-1979-how-little-things-have-changed/ Three magazine articles from 1979 issues of Penthouse show that little has changed over the years. Gary Null wrote a broadside against conventional cancer care, using the same faulty arguments he uses today and promoting Laetrile. In another article he praised Stanislaw Burzynski, saying he had a cure for cancer that was being suppressed. A third article was a tour of alternative cancer therapies; every dubious and unproven therapy they espoused in 1979 is still being practiced today.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/a-skeptics-guide-to-the-mind/ A new book by neurologist Robert Burton investigates how a brain creates a mind, and the limitations on what we can learn about consciousness and free will. It describes the latest research in neuroscience, fascinating experiments that raise more questions than they answer.  

Coffee is a popular drink – 54% of Americans drink coffee daily, resulting in $4 billion in annual coffee imports. I’ll admit up front I am not a coffee drinker myself. This probably has something to do with the fact that I am in the 25% of the population known as supertasters. Coffee is unpalatably bitter to me. As a headache specialist I also have a bit of a bias against daily intake of caffeine, a very common migraine trigger.

The majority of people, however, do not share my tastes. Historically coffee is popular in the US particularly since the Boston Tea Party. Coffee became a more patriotic drink, a thumb in the eye of our English overlords and their tea.

I also think that coffee’s popularity is at least partly due to the fact it is a legal drug delivery system, and that drug (caffeine) is somewhat addictive. The particular property of caffeine that hooks people is known as tolerance – after about 6 weeks of regular caffeine consumption your brain becomes tolerant to the stimulant effects of caffeine and instead experiences significant withdrawal symptoms if too much time goes by since your last mocha latte. Daily coffee drinkers end up chasing this withdrawal with more coffee, struggling just to get back to their baseline alertness, and convinced that they cannot function without their Frappuccino. If you have headaches then caffeine becomes a very effective treatment – for caffeine withdrawal headaches.