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Made by Stephen Rush, Working Individually

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Definition:

The red flag Ancient Wisdom is one that refers to ancient knowledge, ancient people or beings and ancient practices. It is often used to claim that something is better than conventional or modern products or practices, since it has been used since ancient times.

Connection:

There is the practice of bloodletting that certainly fits the category of ancient wisdom. The practice of bloodletting is an ancient form of “medicine” that can be traced back as far as the ancient Egyptians over 3,000 years ago. The practice involves withdrawing a patient’s blood, either through the use of blades from a physician or leeches, with the expectation that the withdrawal of extra blood would aid in curing the illness. The use of bloodletting is believed to help cure many forms of disease, even small ailments such as minor infections, nose bleeds, sore throats and many others. There are those who still use this practice with the belief that they can essentially extract the disease or illness out of them by releasing enough blood. There are many things that are far better to cure you than bleeding, but sine the idea that it has been used for thousands of years, there are still those who believe that because it has lasted so long it must be correct on some level and must be better than many modern medicines.

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Several thousand years ago, whether you were an Egyptian with migraines or a feverish Greek, chances are your doctor would try one first-line treatment before all others: bloodletting.

The doctor would open a vein with a lancet or sharpened piece of wood, causing blood to flow out and into a waiting receptacle. If you got lucky, leeches might perform the gruesome task in place of crude instruments.

Considered one of medicine's oldest practices, bloodletting is thought to have originated in ancient Egypt. It then spread to Greece, where physicians such as Erasistratus, who lived in the third century B.C., believed that all illnesses stemmed from an overabundance of blood, or plethora. (Erasistratus also thought arteries transported air rather than blood, so at least some of his patients' blood vessels were spared his eager blade.)

In the second century A.D., the influential Galen of Pergamum expanded on Hippocrates' earlier theory that good health required a perfect balance of the four "humors"-blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. His writings and teachings made bloodletting a common technique throughout the Roman empire. Before long it flourished in India and the Arab world as well.

In medieval Europe, bloodletting became the standard treatment for various conditions, from plague and smallpox to epilepsy and gout. Practitioners typically nicked veins or arteries in the forearm or neck, sometimes using a special tool featuring a fixed blade and known as a fleam.

In 1163 a church edict prohibited monks and priests, who often stood in as doctors, from performing bloodletting, stating that the church "abhorred" the procedure. Partly in response to this injunction, barbers began offering a range of services that included bloodletting, cupping, tooth extractions, lancing and even amputations-along with, of course, trims and shaves. The modern striped barber's pole harkens back to the bloodstained towels that would hang outside the offices of these "barber-surgeons."

As hairdressers lanced veins in an attempt to cure Europeans' ailments, in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica bloodletting was believed to serve a very different purpose. Maya priests and rulers used stone implements to pierce their tongues, lips, genitals and other soft body parts, offering their blood in sacrifice to their gods. Blood loss also allowed individuals to enter trance-like states in which they reportedly experienced visions of deities or their ancestors.

Bloodletting as a medical procedure became slightly less agonizing with the advent in the 18th century of spring-loaded lancets and the scarificator, a device featuring multiple blades that delivered a uniform set of parallel cuts. Respected physicians and surgeons extolled the practice, generously prescribing it to their most esteemed patients.

Marie-Antoinette, for instance, seemed to benefit from a healthy dose of bloodletting while giving birth to her first child, Marie-Thérèse, in 1778, 14 years before the guillotine would shed more of the queen's blood. As an excited crowd thronged her bedchamber, hoping to witness a dauphin's arrival, the mother-to-be fainted, prompting her surgeon to wield his lancet. Marie-Antoinette immediately revived after the bloodletting-perhaps because the windows were simultaneously opened to let in fresh air.

America's first president was less fortunate than France's most infamous queen. On December 13, 1799, George Washington awoke with a bad sore throat and began to decline rapidly. A proponent of bloodletting, he asked to be bled the next day, and physicians drained an estimated 5 to 7 pints in less than 16 hours. Despite their best efforts, Washington died on December 14, leading to speculation that excessive blood loss contributed to his demise. Bloodletting has also been implicated in the death of Charles II, who was bled from the arm and neck after suffering a seizure in 1685.

By the late 1800s new treatments and technologies had largely edged out bloodletting, and studies by prominent physicians began to discredit the practice. Today it remains a conventional therapy for a very small number of conditions. The use of leeches, meanwhile, has experienced a renaissance in recent decades, particularly in the field of microsurgery.

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A Brief History of Bloodletting | HISTORY

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As researchers announce that bloodletting might have some benefits after all, find out more about this ancient treatment's long history.

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Definition:

The red flag Confirmation Bias is when people tend to seek out or only pay attention to results and news that confirms the beliefs they already hold, despite there at times being lots of information contradicting their ideas.

Connection:

Psychics are people whose businesses thrive off of confirmation bias. The people who visit these psychics are people who are already convinced that they will get the answers that they are looking for. Most times when people go, they will only remember what the psychic got right during their session and ignore what they didn’t, as the ones they got right were the answers that the client was looking for and the ones they were sure they would get already.

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Definition:

The red flag of Ideological Support is the use of a set of ideas or beliefs that a person or group of people already hold that they use to justify their opinions. A prominent example and one that this is often tied to is religious beliefs.

Connection:

There are many people who don’t believe that they should seek out many kinds of medical treatments due to their religious beliefs. This website goes into some detail into what some religions believe they can’t accept as far as medical treatment. They vary from simple things like not getting flu shots or just normal everyday medicine, saying that prayer is their medicine, to not doing more substantial procedure like surgery, transfusions or transplants.

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'Inoculate yourself with the word of God': How religion can limit medical treatment | CNN

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Evangelical Christian Gloria Copeland, who proclaimed "Jesus himself gave us the flu shot," is not the first to call for a rejection of conventional medical treatment.

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Definition:

The red flag of mystical energy is using the claims that things like aura, crystals and other supernatural things have an effect on us and can benefit us through proper use.

Connection:

In my experience, one of the most common things that I have heard of that are connected to the red flag of mystical energy is the use of healing crystals. Below I have attached an image of a handful of different crystals that may be used for this practice, there are many, many more types of them out there all with different uses. The idea is that all the moods, emotions and even how we handle ourselves on a daily basis is connected to various energies in our body and how they interact with the energies in our environment. You can supposedly use these crystals to boost your mood, better your emotions and maybe even change how your day would go. This whole practice seems very vague and relies mostly on the idea that there exist “energies” that we can’t actually see or even really explain, but we can feel them if we really try and they control who we are and how we act. This also seems like a way to fool people into buying these things as they look for a simple solution to what might otherwise be larger problems affecting them in their lives and promising a quick solution.

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Red Flag #5: Confusion of Correlation and Causation

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Red Flag #5: Confusion of Correlation and Causation

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Definition:

The red flag Confusion of Correlation and Causation is misinterpreting or claiming that something that has nothing to do with and issue is actually the cause of the issue.

Connection:

The website that I that I have found for this goes into a bit of detail about how the anti-vax movement is essential fueled by these red flags, such as confirmation bias and most notably the confusion of correlation and causation. It briefly touches on the idea that are brains will naturally try to connect two events that are otherwise totally unrelated. This comes into play as often the age a child will start to shows symptoms of autism also tends to happen around the same age as they would be getting vaccines. Parents will see this happen at around the same time and be very confused or upset about the situation and will connect the fact they just got their vaccines, so it must have caused this.

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You would have to be harder hearted than I to ignore the anguished search of parents of autistic children for the cause of their child's condition. "I saw it," they say; "one shot, and then the child who had talked and laughed started retreating into himself." It's hard to argue with someone's pain.

Nonetheless, I'm going to. Our brains are designed to learn by associating events that happen at the same time, or in close sequence. When you were a little kid, that's how you learned that if you touched the stove, you got burned, long before you understood how combustion worked. We have other ways of learning as well, but that temporal link is the strongest, most primal association. We go through our whole lives looking for those connections.

This is not a bad heuristic, but of course, it often leads one astray, which is why there are so many ridiculous "cures" for hiccups. The fact that your child regressed after having a shot doesn't mean that the shot caused the regression. It suggests a theory . . . but that theory has been tested, and found wanting.

The anti-vaccination websites sustain their belief by systematically excluding anyone offering counterevidence from the domain of acceptable sources. Pharma studies can't be trusted because they have a profit motive. The CDC is in hock to big business. The "medical establishment" wants to make money giving your children unnecessary shots. In fact, the only person you can trust is the guy writing the website.

This is the sure sign of a crank. It is possible that all these people are wrong--science has had much more spectacular failures in the face of clear evidence. But there is no such thing as a multi-million person conspiracy.

Those sites pick apart the studies that show no link between vaccinations and autism, while ignoring much more glaring problems with the studies supporting that link. The state of medical research is indeed pretty horrifying to people who do other kinds of research, thanks to a combination of human subject problems and generally abysmal statistical practice. But the problems are even more likely to be found in the poorly funded, inadequately staffed, and usually ineptly designed studies purporting to show a link between vaccination and autism.

A doctor who has been working with autistic children for decades offers a very interesting paper on the topic, which I found via Blissful Knowledge. He reports that well before the vaccine theory, parents always identified something to causally link with their child's late onset autism:

On the Children's Unit at WMHI we had both forms of Autistic Disorder. In some children the clinical signs and symptoms of autism had been present from birth. In others, the child was quite normal (neurotypical) at birth and reached developmental milestones, including language acquisition at the usual times and in the usual manner. But then at age two, three or four, a conspicuous regressive process began robbing the child of all of that natural progress. Interestingly, in these late onset cases the parents all had some sentinel event that, in their mind, accounted for the cause of this dreadful regressive pattern: "ever since he fell off the pier and nearly drowned"; "the time he got trapped in the silo"; or "ever since he went into the hospital to have his tonsils removed".

The point is that there is a natural tendency on the part of parents to seek out and blame some event or procedure for the onset of such startling regression in a child who has otherwise been developing normally. Dr. Down called that regression the "loss of wonted brightness". Dr. Down attributed this regression to the "second dentition". Obviously, in seeking causes, one has to separate out temporal relationship to causal relationship.
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I saw cases of late onset autism well before there was an acceleration of vaccine schedules to their present levels. And in each of those cases the parents pointed toward some special event that in their mind was responsible for the onset of the regression. A full century earlier Dr. Down described cases of late onset autism well before there were any vaccination schedules at all. As I pointed out above, he ascribed that regression, temporally at least, to the 'second dentition'.

Looking for those links is entirely natural. But fingering vaccines has real and terrible consequences. Millions of children die worldwide every year from childhood diseases that we've eliminated here through vaccination. Now, because these websites are frightening people about vaccination, we're seeing a resurgence of those diseases. People are dying from them again, and others are being left with permanent health impairment. Leaving children unvaccinated means going back to

Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)

Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s)

Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy.

Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US before vaccines).

Encephalitis and pulmonary hypertension for people with whooping cough--thanks to people who don't vaccinate their kids, in 2001, 17 people, mostly infants, died of pertussis (200,000 cases in 1940).

Cardiac arrest and paralysis for people with diptheria (207,000 cases and about 15,000 deaths in 1920).

The vaccines scare us because the diseases don't. And they don't because of the vaccines.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Megan McArdle is a columnist at Bloomberg View and a former senior editor at The Atlantic. Her new book is The Up Side of Down.

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You would have to be harder hearted than I to ignore the anguished search of parents of autistic children for the cause of their child's condition. "I saw it," they say; "one shot, and then the child who had talked and laughed started retreating into himself." It's hard to argue with someone's pain.

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Definition:

The reason for belief of Simplicity is the idea that we will try to seek out or explain things we don’t understand with a simple easy to understand answer, even if its wrong and there is a reasonable or scientific answer to the unexplained.

Connection:

We tend to look for easy answers to things in life and when it comes to the paranormal, we are looking for an answer to be able to easily explain what is going on. It can happen with simple things even, we might have been thinking of something, like a particular person and suddenly we see them, so the simple answer is maybe we’re a little bit psychic and must have been able to sense they were coming. Really all these coincides are just that, coincidences. While unlikely they are bound to happen, they aren’t paranormal and this ties into the confirmation bias, as you have probably thought of this person many times before but not then seen them. You only remember the time they coincidently showed up at the same time and attribute it to potentially having some sort of sense they were coming. The below link is a story about a woman who has exactly these experiences and wonders if she is psychic or if its coincidence it seems to show perfectly how the simple answer is appealing and how we often just confirm the things we think or dream of.

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My name is Eleanor, I'm twenty years old and I'm pretty normal in most instances, but things lately, perhaps within the last four or five years have been a little odd, and well, I can't explain it.

So the story; as I have stated, I'm twenty, and I go to university. These things are pretty normal, but there are things I can't quite explain. I live in Australia, and have a good family, all of which have no gifts, and are very much no nonsense. As such it's only recently that I have begun questioning some of the strange things.

In high school I used to find things running particularly smooth. But the odd thing I found was I knew sometimes what people were going to say, or do before it happened. Sometimes I would have dreams months and months in advance, and then something would happen, pretty much exactly as I had seen it, or conversations were exactly the same. As I didn't keep dream diaries until the start of this year, I shrugged it off as coincidence or weird déjà vu.

Another thing I find weird is that for some reason really disturbed people ALWAYS seem to come to me. I don't know if this is like an aura or just because of my personality. Either way, since I was a kid people just come to me; even those that I have only known for a moment or less than a day and talk to me about their problems.

Another thing is that I can usually guess what somebody is thinking before they say it, again it could be just intuition, but I got a friend to test me, and well, I got about 80 percent of them right.

.though the one on the computer I couldn't really guess properly.

I also sometimes see shadows and shapes, and sometimes can feel if something bad will happen. I was at university one day, and well, sad story, but I felt really sick all of a sudden, and my head felt all weightless. Anyway I went outside, and walked towards the front building towards the university, and there were these people crowded around a building to the side of the university, ignoring it, I went to the building I was heading and a lady started yelling to a security officer, that a boy had just jumped from the building and was dead.

Another odd thing that has happened was when I was a kid, (about 6) I noticed this strange black shape on my door, and started freaking out for no reason, it was where this funny little crystal charm and dream catcher was. I don't know why I was so scared, I have never been afraid of the dark at all, not even as a kid.

Anyway I just wanted to know anybody's opinion. Am I just good at reading people, or is this just coincidence. If so, could you perhaps recommend some things I could do to try and either enhance these abilities, or some other tests I could try?

Regards,

Eleanor

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Am I Psychic, Or Is It Just Coincidence? from Psychic Experiences

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My name is Eleanor, I'm twenty years old and I'm pretty normal in most instances, but things lately, perhaps within the last four or five years have been a little odd, and well, I can't explain it. So the story; as I have stated, I'm twenty, and I go to university.

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Definition:

The reason for belief of Unknown means that we really don’t know what the cause of something was so we attempt to try and explain in ourselves.

Connection:

This reason for belief is one that I know I definitely still do a lot. I think that we even may do this one unintentionally at times. When faced with someone that we can see or find no immediate explanation for we tend to start thinking up our own explanations as to what it could be. This most notably would happen with experiences relating to ghosts or UFOs. Often times people will hear or see things that they wouldn’t think are normal or they may be seeing something that rarely happens or a set of things just line up perfectly to make something appear paranormal. Since they don’t know what the actual cause is, and especially in some cases could be freaked out or scared of the experience, they jump to the conclusion that it is something paranormal.

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Definition:

Patternicity is the tendency people have to find patterns in noise.

Connection:

We have a natural tendency to look for patterns where there otherwise may not be any. One great example of this is in the phenomenon known as pareidolia. Its when people tend to see things, especially faces in everyday objects or their environment. The below image is an example of this, it shows various objects that appear to have faces on them and even when you know what it actually is you still can’t help but see the faces in them. This makes it easy to see why people might incorrectly see people, faces or other “paranormal” things around them, their brains have a tendency to do this even when they know what they are looking at couldn’t possibly be something paranormal.

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Extraordinary Claim

Do vaccines cause autism?

Gather Information:

This is an article written by The Atlantic. It is an article written briefly describing the problem of people refusing to vaccinate their children and how many parents seem to incorrectly connect their child’s diagnosis of autism to vaccinations.

Evaluate Evidence:

The evidence supporting that vaccines cause autism is brought forward by parents who have no medical background and often try to discredit the claims from real medical professionals and scientists by saying that they must be wrong because they are working with “Big Pharma” to cover it up. While real medical experts are urging them that this way of thinking is very dangerous to their child and that no study has found a real connection between these two things.

Recognize Assumptions, Emotions, Biases:

Many of these claims are coming from parents who have seen their child’s autism begin to present itself around the same time they get their vaccinations, so with such a dramatic diagnosis some parents may think that the easiest thing to do is say that they were fine before this and the vaccinations are what caused it. They have a strong emotional connection to what happens to their child and want to believe that something caused this instead of their child being born this way.

Synthesize Evidence, Identify Alternatives:

Alternative Solution #1: Vaccines do cause autism; this is supported by parents’ personal beliefs and numerous of poorly conducted and disproved experiments to prove it.

Alternative Solution #2: Vaccines do not cause autism, this is supported overwhelmingly by the medical and scientific community and multiple studies that followed the scientific method.

Select Bets Alternative:

The best conclusion after reviewing alternatives and the evidence is that vaccines do not cause autism.