A Scientist's Weird Hope About Extraterrestrials

In his new book Life 3.0 MIT physicist Max Tegmark confesses a strange hope he has about the search for extraterrestrial life: that it finds nothing. Below is his reasoning on page 245 of the book:

Although I'm a strong supporter of all the ongoing searches for extraterrestrial life, which are shedding light on one of the most fascinating questions in science, I'm secretly hoping that they'll all fail and find nothing! The apparent incompatibility between the abundance of habitable planets in our Galaxy and the lack of extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Fermi paradox, suggests the existence of what the economist Robin Hanson calls a “Great Filter,” an evolutionary/technological roadblock somewhere along the developmental path from the non-living matter to space-settling life. If we discover independently evolved life elsewhere, this would suggest primitive life isn't rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development – perhaps because space settlement is impossible, or because almost all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they're able to go cosmic. I'm therefore crossing my fingers that all searches for extraterrestrial life find nothing: this is consistent with the scenario where evolving intelligent life is rare but we humans got lucky, so that we have the roadblock behind us and have extraordinary future potential.

Tegmark presents here rather concisely an argument similar to the argument presented by philosopher Nick Bostrom in this paper. The argument can be stated like this:

1. There must be some Great Filter which makes it very unlikely that planets produce civilizations that spread throughout the galaxy – something such as an unlikelihood of life originally appearing, an unlikelihood of intelligence ever appearing, an unlikelihood of interstellar travel, or an unlikelihood of a civilization surviving for long.
2. Such a Great Filter can either be in our past or our future (for example, if the Great Filter is the unlikelihood of life ever appearing on a planet, then the Great Filter is in our past, and we have already leaped over this hurdle).
3. If the Great Filter is in our future, we should be very sad, because it will mean our civilization will probably not last very long.
4. But if the Great Filter is in our past (some hurdle we have already jumped over), then we are in good shape, and our future is bright (the whole galaxy might be ours for the taking).
5. If we discover life on another planet, it is evidence that life commonly evolves in our galaxy, and this shows that the Great Filter must be in our future, and that we won't last very long.
6. Therefore, it is bad news if we discover any extraterrestrial life.

There are multiple problems involved in this line of reasoning. The first is the problem of assuming that extraterrestrials have not spread throughout the galaxy. We do not know that such a thing has not occurred. UFO sightings may provide evidence against such an assumption. The fact that Earth has not been colonized by extraterrestrials is no proof that some other civilization has not spread throughout the galaxy. It is quite possible that a civilization spreading throughout the galaxy would not colonize every habitable planet, but leave some planets as kind of zoos or nature reserves. When descendants of Europeans spread throughout North America, they did not fill the whole continent with settlements, but preserved quite a bit of North America as nature preserves. A similar conservation principle could be observed by some galactic civilization spreading across a galaxy. Or it might be impractical to colonize every habitable planet, for any number of technical or logistical reasons.

Another problem with the line of reasoning cited above is that it commits a fallacy along the lines of stating: if we discover extraterrestrial life, that would show the Great Filter is in the future, not our past. The discovery of any type of life other than civilized intelligent life would not at all do such a thing. Let's consider various possible candidates for a Great Filter:

Now after reviewing all of these possible candidates for a Great Filter, it should be clear that the mere discovery of some type of extraterrestrial life would not by any means show that this Great Filter is something that mankind has not yet overcome. For example, if some very simple prokaryotic microscopic life were to be discovered on Mars or a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, that would still leave standing the last seven of these candidates as possibilities, including the “Multi-cellular Life” filter that it is too hard for multi-cellular life to appear from microscopic life. And if we were to discover signs of oxygen in the atmosphere of a distant planet, suggesting that photosynthesis had occurred, that would still leave standing the filters such as the “Intelligence” filter and the “Language and Civilization” filter. It would still be perfectly possible that the Great Filter is that it is too hard for intelligent language-using tool-making life to appear.

So Tegmark is very much in error when he states, “If we discover independently evolved life elsewhere, this would suggest primitive life isn't rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development – perhaps because space settlement is impossible or because all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they're able to go cosmic.” Discovering primitive life would do no such thing, as it would still leave standing as candidates for the Great Filter such possibilities as the “Intelligence” filter and the “Language and Civilization” filter. Discovering primitive life would still leave standing the possibility that it is very unlikely that life would ever evolve to a state of intelligence, language-use, tool-making and civilization, and that such a difficulty is the Great Filter.

And, similarly, Nick Bostrom committed the same error when he stated the following:

And if we discovered the fossils of some very complex life form, such as of some vertebrate-like creature, we would have to conclude that the probability is very great that the bulk of the Great Filter is ahead of us. Such a discovery would be a crushing blow. It would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover.

This is completely wrong. From such a discovery, it would not by any means be true that “we would have to conclude that the probability is very great that the bulk of the Great Filter is ahead of us.” For there would still be standing the “Intelligence” filter and the “Language and Civilization” filter. It would still be perfectly possible that it is exceptionally rare for life to evolve to a state of intelligence, language-use, tool-making and civilization, and that such a difficulty is the Great Filter. If you think that intelligence, language-use, tool-making and civilization automatically follows once large-scale life exists, consider the fact that humans have a whole range of mental characteristics (including spirituality, artistic creativity, mathematical ability, philosophical reasoning, intellectual curiosity, imagination, and language use) that cannot be explained by appealing to natural selection, as these are things that do not increase an organism's chance of surviving until reproduction. Some evolution experts have argued that the appearance of something like humanity was extremely improbable. Until we discover some extraterrestrial civilization, it is still a very viable possibility that it is incredibly rare for life to evolve into civilized language-using life.

The only discovery that might allow us to reasonably say that the Great Filter is in our future and not our past would be the discovery of civilized life elsewhere in space. Would that be something that would be a cause for grief and sorrow, along the lines Tegmark and Bostrom have suggested? Would such a discovery tell us something negative about our future?

No, simply because the very moment such a discovery was made, the very idea of a Great Filter would be discredited. In our current state of knowledge, lacking any proof for extraterrestrials, this idea of a Great Filter has significant weight. But at the very moment we discovered proof of an extraterrestrial civilization, the idea of a Great Filter would be discounted and discredited. People would start saying: evidently this idea of a Great Filter isn't very sound, if we have already discovered an extraterrestrial civilization. They would also start saying: if we have already discovered one extraterrestrial civilization, there must be many others in our galaxy. The discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization would be a crippling blow to the very idea of a Great Filter.

We can therefore imagine no circumstances under which it would make sense to lament and grieve over a discovery about extraterrestrial life, on the grounds that it told us something negative about our future. Discovering anything less than civilized intelligent life would do nothing to prove the idea that the Great Filter is in our future and not our past. And if we did discover civilized intelligent life, the very idea of a Great Filter would instantly be so discredited that it would at that point not make sense to be drawing conclusions about our future based on such a concept.

Consciousness Is More Than Just Information

Some thinkers have gone overboard about the concept of information. Some have suggested that the whole universe can be described as being fundamentally information. Such thinking seems to involve a too-broad definition of “information.”

An example of sloppy inconsistent claims about information can be found on page 234 of the book The Hidden Secrets of Water by Paolo Consigli. Consigli states the following:

Information operates at every level of existence....The ordered structures of crystals are information. The more elaborate structures of all living things are information...Information is not be confused with mere data. It is rather the transmission of messages endowed with meaning.

This account of information is inconsistent. If information is “the transmission of messages endowed with meaning” (not actually a good definition of information), then how could a crystal structure be information, when it involves no such transmission?

Let us consider a rock that has this crystal structure. Is there any information in the rock? No, there actually is not. Those who think there is information in a rock with a crystal structure are confusing information and information potential, or are confusing order with information.

When I do a Google search for a definition of information, I get two definitions:

1. Facts provided or learned about something or someone.
2. What is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

It is certainly true that each cell has information, because each cell uses DNA, which does use a symbolic system of representations known as the genetic code, in which certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs stand for particular amino acids. If any thing uses any “x stands for y” arrangement, we should say it is information or that it uses information.  

But a rock does not have information in either of these senses. I can find out some facts about a rock by measuring it or weighing, but until I do that there are no facts provided or learned about the rock. Nothing at all is conveyed or represented by the arrangement of atoms in a rock. It is true that I can scratch some words on a rock, or smash the rock into 100 pebbles, and then out spell out words with those pebbles. But that is information potential (the potential to make information), not information itself. It seems a rock has no information, particularly if that rock is buried far underground or if that rock is found on some distant lifeless moon or planet revolving around some other star, where it is most unlikely that anyone will ever make any observation or measurements involving the rock.

The orderly lattice structure in a crystal is not an example of information. Consider this example. I go to a web site with a random number generator. When I press a button, I get a 9-digit sequence of numbers. Suppose that after many times pushing the button, I witness the rare occurrence that instead of a random-looking number such as “235257032,” I get the sequence “123456789.” That sequence is orderly, but it would not seem that information has somehow appeared merely because of the orderly sequence.

If a rock buried far underground doesn't have information, it seems to make no sense to describe a physical universe as “just information.”

Others support a less vaunting conclusion, and try to assert that consciousness is just information. There is a theory called integrated information theory, which maintains that consciousness is just information that has become integrated to a sufficient degree. Such a theory seems to be endorsed in the recent book Life 3.0 by the MIT physicist Max Tegmark. 

Tegmark goes all gaga over a neuroscientist named Giulio Tomoni who has advanced this integrated information theory. On page 301 of his book, Tegmark tells us that Tomoni is the “ultimate renaissance man” and a “fearless intellect” with “incredible knowledge.” Tegmark says, “I'd been arguing for decades that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways,” and that the integrated information theory fits in with this claim.  But information doesn't feel.

Tegmark says, “In summary, I think that consciousness is a physical phenomenon that feels non-physical because it's like waves and computations: it has properties independent of its specific physical substrate.” But it does not make sense to be describing consciousness as something physical. A Google search for the definition of “physical” produces two definitions:

1. Relating to the body as opposed to the mind.
2. Relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete.

Consciousness does not fit either of these definitions of “physical.”

What about the idea that consciousness is just information? There are some thought experiments you can try that suggest this idea is not correct.

Experiment 1: Imagine yourself standing under a waterfall, not thinking about anything, but simply seeing the water drops fall around you. You are unable to see anything but the water falling around you. At such a time you are conscious, but you are not creating or using information. Some might argue that raw visual data is information, but it isn't according to the two definitions previously cited. Seeing disordered raw visual data whiz by in such a place does not involve using information created using some system of representations (unlike reading, in which you do process information created using the systems of representations known as the alphabet and the English language). And while you can create information by processing visual data and drawing conclusions or stating facts, when you are simply viewing a stream of visual data without processing it or thinking about it or speaking about it, there would seem to be no information involved in such an activity. It would seem that at such a time you have consciousness, but there is no information involved.

Experiment 2: Imagine yourself dreaming. During your dream you have consciousness, but there is no information involved. The random visuals you see in your dream cannot be called “information.”

Experiment 3: Imagine yourself lying awake on your bed, with your eyes closed as you day-dream some wild fantasy about living on an extraterrestrial planet. This activity is consciousness, but it does not involve information. The imaginary elements that you use to populate your fantasy cannot be called information. While you might be able to use information if you made such a fantasy have realistic elements drawn from your memory, if you let your mind run loose, you could easily think of some really wild and crazy fantasy not based on any facts or information you had learned. (Conversely, if you were to write your wild fantasy down on paper, that would be information, because there would be a symbolic system of representations involved – the English language and the English alphabet. The instant you have an “x stands for y” situation, there is semantic information. So if I write “I flew to Mars,” then when I write down “M-A-R-S” to stand for the planet Mars, there is an “x stands for y” situation.)

Experiment 4: Turn off the television and lie on your bed, with your eyes closed. Repeat to yourself over and over again a meaningless sound such as “oooooooooooooooo.” While you were doing that, you were quite conscious. But your mind was not using information. A meaningless Mantra-type phrase such as “oooooooooooooooo” cannot be called information. And don't bother claiming that you were still getting information from your ears or skin, because you can just as easily imagine this occurring while you are floating in one of those fancy sensory-deprivation tanks in which there would be no sensory inputs.

These examples all seem to show that you can have consciousness without information. It would seem, therefore, that mind is much more than information, and cannot be reduced to merely “integrated information.”

I can think of another thought experiment to try. Let us imagine a source of information such as an online encyclopedia. Imagine a server farm stores this information in multiple computers. Now imagine a computer program that processes this information, creating all kinds of information links and hyperlinks. Imagine after 1000 hours of such processing, the degree of integration in the information is increased a billion-fold. So, for example, whenever you come to some text using the word “cow,” there is a link you can use to navigate to any of a million other places where the encyclopedia text refers to “cow.” Now, would we expect that all this additional integration of information would cause this encyclopedia to become conscious, so that the encyclopedia would start living a kind of encyclopedia life? Certainly not. Given a body of information, we should not expect that any level of increased integration would cause consciousness to appear. So we cannot describe consciousness as being integrated information.

Tomoni and Tegmark are off the mark in their thoughts about consciousness, which cannot be reduced to information. But their thoughts are at least much more intelligent than the ludicrous thoughts on this topic recently published by psychologists David Oakley and Peter Halligan. They recently published a paper with the nonsensical title, “Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being.” In their paper the psychologists repeatedly use the term “consciousness” in quotes, as if it was something that only allegedly exists. They state, “Personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them.” Which is, of course, an absurd thing to say, seeing that there are obviously 1001 ways in which our personal awareness can influence physical processes (as scientists frequently remind us when they tell us to live a more green lifestyle to reduce global warming).  When academics in ivory towers try to throw doubt on whether consciousness exists, their prose ends up sounding sillier than the credo of a flat earth believer. 

When a Physicist Got Good Evidence for Dowsing

A recent article on medium.com is entitled In 2017, UK water companies still rely on “magic.” The article is about the practice called dowsing. Practiced for centuries, dowsing involves holding a forked branch, and trying to wait for some branch movement indicating where water is underneath the ground. The practice is dismissed by skeptics as superstition. The problem is that a scientific paper by a physicist has actually presented very good evidence that some people can perform dowsing with very good effectiveness, achieving a level of success that is currently inexplicable.

The author of the article on medium.com, an evolutionary biologist named Sally Le Page, was originally surprised to find that two United Kingdom water companies actually use this practice of dowsing. Her article has been updated, and now states that 10 out of 12 of United Kingdom water companies use dowsing to help find water.

Le Page suggests that the feeling of the branch pointing one way comes from the user's mind itself. But such an explanation does nothing to debunk dowsing. It may simply be that an idea about the water's location could be originating in an anomalous way in the dowser's mind, causing his arm to move and then causing the branch to move. That still leaves standing the possibility that dowsing could stem from clairvoyance in the dowser's mind, which makes more sense than any type of “magic of the branch” type of explanation.

Le Page misleads us by telling us, “Every properly conducted scientific test of water dowsing has found it no better than chance.” That is not at all true. In fact, one of the three studies Le Page refers us to has the following statements, citing or quoting conclusions in another scientific study:

Some few dowsers, in particular tasks, showed an extraordinarily high rate of success, which can scarcely, if at all, be explained as due to chance...In every sort of test conducted, there were some few people who showed location-dependent responses, some with good and some with extraordinarily good reproducibility, which, in

their departure from chance expectations, were highly significant...A real core of dowser-phenomena can be regarded as empirically proven.

The most extensive scientific study about dowsing was one done in the 1990s, a study conveniently not mentioned by Le Page. It was a massive 10-year study involving more than 2000 drillings. The study was summarized as follows in an article by Popular Mechanics:

Researchers analyzed the successes and failures of dowsers in attempting to locate water at more than 2000 sites in arid regions of Sri Lanka, Zaire, Kenya, Namibia and Yemen over a 10-year period. To do this, researchers teamed geological experts with experienced dowsers and then set up a scientific study group to evaluate the results. Drill crews guided by dowsers didn't hit water every time, but their success rate was impressive. In Sri Lanka, for example, they drilled 691 holes and had an overall success rate of 96 percent. "In hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well to within 10 percent or 20 percent," says Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, who headed the research group. "We carefully considered the statistics of these correlations, and they far exceeded lucky guesses," he says. What's more, virtually all of the sites in Sri Lanka were in regions where the odds of finding water by random drilling were extremely low. As for a USGS notion that dowsers get subtle clues from the landscape and geology, Betz points out that the underground sources were often more than 100 ft. deep and so narrow that misplacing the drill only a few feet would mean digging a dry hole.

The study in question, finding very strong evidence that dowsing can be effective, was vastly larger in scale and scope than two irrelevant studies Le Page cites (neither of which even dealt with dowsing to search for underground supplies of water). In his extremely detailed and lengthy paper, the physics professor Betz stated, “Now, however, extensive field studies...have shown that a few carefully selected dowsers are certainly able to detect faults, fissures and fractures with relative alacrity and surprising accuracy in areas with, say, crystalline or limestone bedrock.” A press release on the study notes the following:

An overall success rate of 96 percent was achieved in 691 drillings in Sri Lanka. Based on geological experience in that area, a success rate of 30-50 percent would be expected from conventional techniques alone. 

An arid area in Sri Lanka

  
You can use the Vassar binomial probability calculator to compute the chance of such a rate of success, using a chance success rate of 50 percent on each drilling. The results are shown below. According to the Vassar calculator, such a rate of success has a chance probability of less than <0.000000000001. 

The standard deviation here is 13 sigma, vastly greatly than the 5 sigma used as a standard in physics for considering an experiment result to be a discovery. When I use my own binomial probability calculator, which I have tested successfully against benchmarks, I get a probability of 3.8926168636233847E-156, which is less than the chance of you guessing the full telephone numbers of 14 strangers on the first guess. 

Le Page attempts to argue against dowsing by saying “there was even $1 million up for grabs for anyone who could provide rigorous evidence that you can find water using dowsing techniques.” That, of course, was the Randi Prize, run by arch-skeptics who would never accept previously produced evidence, but always demanded that something be quickly proven in front of them – which isn't practical with anything (such as dowsing) that could only be proven effective by a long study involving many trials and attempts. Of course, the Randi Prize was always run by people so avowedly hostile to all paranormal claims that people soon figured out it was a waste of time to participate, since it was all-but-certain that the judges would always rule that no evidence had been found, no matter what they observed.

We can ask: why would ten out of twelve United Kingdom water companies use dowsing if it had no effectiveness? What we have in the case of Le Page's article sounds like what goes on frequently in regard to massive evidence (discussed here, here, here, and here) for extrasensory perception (ESP): mainstream scientists refusing to acknowledge very strong evidence for a phenomenon, and falsely telling us there is no evidence for such a phenomenon, when there is actually very good and abundant evidence for it. The scientists who make such pronouncements are typically ignorant about the phenomenon they are telling us is impossible, and they typically show no signs of having seriously researched the relevant evidence.  Sadly we have an academic conformity culture in which it is considered politically correct to say there is no evidence for any phenomenon considered taboo, regardless of how high a mountain of evidence has accumulated. 

When I look at some of the skeptic articles on dowsing, I am not impressed by the reasoning used. We are told we should think dowsing cannot be effective because Chris French and James Randi did negative studies on the topic.  These two are anti-paranormal crusaders who we can hardly expect to have produced objective studies on the topic. Moreover,  you never discredit the idea that some people can produce a paranormal effect by doing a study in which some other people do not produce that effect.  For example, if you test 100 people for ESP, and get chance results, that does nothing to discredit very impressive results produced by other people you did not test.  

Dowsing is something which seems like an unthinkable possibility when we consider it in isolation. But when we consider dowsing within the context of the very many strange observations of the paranormal made by humans, the idea of dowsing does not seem so unthinkable. There is good evidence that humans have quite a few abilities beyond the understanding of physicists and evolutionary biologists. Our conclusions about such matters should be based on the actual empirical evidence, not based on a priori assumptions about whether something is possible.

Dowsing could simply be a form of clairvoyance, an anomalous ability of the human mind to perceive external physical reality in a way not involving the senses. There is abundant evidence for clairvoyance accumulated by parapsychologists such as Joseph Rhine, and more recently by the US government in tests of remote viewing. That some humans might have an ability for clairvoyance is not something that will be admitted by someone maintaining that the mind is simply a by-product of the brain. But if humans have a soul we should not at all be surprised that some humans may have psychic powers that reach beyond the body.

 

Chemical Reductionism Prospers as the Morgues Fill Up

The United States is in the midst of a frightening opioid crisis. A story in the New York Times this year states that last year more than 59,000 died from drug overdoses. The story has a graph showing drug overdoses skyrocketing, growing from only 20,000 a year around the year 2000 to more than 59,000 last year.

A CDC site says, "We now know that overdoses from prescription opioids are a driving factor in the 15-year increase in opioid overdose deaths."  Why are so many opioids being prescribed?

Let's consider a viewpoint that is popular among many in the mainstream, a viewpoint that we may call chemical reductionism. The idea is that a person is little more than a bag of chemicals. Chemical reductionism is popular among many doctors and psychiatrists. Psychiatrists sometimes push the idea that mental problems are caused by chemical imbalances. The evidence for this claim is weak.

 Thankfully only a minority of doctors think like this

Let's imagine a doctor has been trained to think along the lines of chemical reductionism. What is he going to do when a patient comes in complaining of some pain? His first inclination will be: prescribe some powerful chemicals to treat the pain.

But there are quite a few alternate techniques for treating pain, techniques that do not involve the risks of prescribing opioids. They include the following:

• Surgery. Some types of pain (such as dental pain) can be reduced by permanently dulling nerves.
• Meditation.
• Hypnosis.
• Acupuncture. The World Health Organization says acupuncture can be effective in reducing pain.
• Marijuana. Many states now allow medical marijuana for pain relief. People using it sometimes say they still have the pain, but it doesn't bother them when they use marijuana.
• Chiropractic care. Chiropractic care can be effective in reducing lower back pain.
• Massage. Massage can be effective in reducing muscle pain.
• Exercise.
• Biofeedback.
• Guided imagery.
• Music therapy.
• Yoga.

With so many non-opioid pain techniques, why have so many doctors tended to prescribe addictive opioids as soon as a patient complains of pain?  One reason is that such an approach is convenient from a profit standpoint. A doctor can write a prescription in just a minute, a much shorter time than the many minutes that might be needed to explain some non-drug program of pain treatment.  The more patients handled in a day, the greater the profit for a clinic.  Another reason is that pharmaceutical companies are constantly influencing doctors, to help keep them thinking that pills are the solution to almost any medical problem not requiring surgery  -- largely because the more medicine is chemistry-centered, the higher the profits of pharmaceutical companies.

The enormous influence that pharmaceutical companies have on doctors is documented in the book “White Coat Black Hat” by Carl Elliott. We learn about the enormous number of pharmaceutical sales reps who often arrive at doctor's offices offering free samples or minor gifts like a box of donuts or perhaps a pizza for the staff. Then there are the pharmaceutical companies that pay for doctors to attend conferences or meetings that may have free food and luxury lodging, which often amount to a kind of bribe to the doctor in the form of a paid travel junket.

Then there are the pharmaceutical companies that pay for “ghost-written” research articles. A doctor may put his name on a scientific paper that was conceived and largely written by some “medical ghost-writer” funded by a pharmaceutical company. The benefit for the doctor is that it is an easy way of increasing his number of published papers (the more published papers, the more prestige for the doctor). A 2009 New York Times article guessed that 11% of New England Journal of Medicine articles used medical ghost-writing. The worst abuse occurred when medical ghost-writing was used to help gin up research studies for the pain-killing drug Vioxx. An NPR article says, “Research published in the medical journal Lancet estimates that 88,000 Americans had heart attacks from taking Vioxx, and 38,000 of them died.”

All these bribes and conditioning from the pharmaceutical companies help reinforce in many a doctor's mind the idea that pills are the only non-surgical way to treat pain. The result has been a great excess of prescriptions for opioid medications, which in turn has led to massive cases of addiction, and tens of thousands of overdose deaths per year. 

Given this situation, it would seem sensible for the government to fund additional research into alternative methods of relieving pain, and for doctors to give greater consideration to such non-chemical alternatives when first hearing a patient's complaint of pain. You will hear some people argue the opposite. They will tell us: just because so many thousands are dying of opioid overdoses, that's no reason for us to pay more attention to alternative medicine or integrative medicine. The question we must always ask such people is: are you receiving any money or benefits from the pharmaceutical industry?