Brain Gym SA: Have they done the right thing?

Brain Gym South Africa has just had a national conference in Cape Town. Have they come clean and done the right thing? Did the bigwigs of the quacking granfalloon inform the rank and file of the organisation, as well as their unsuspecting customers, of the crisis of scientific legitimacy they're facing? If not, I would suggest that they now have a serious ethical problem.

Brain Gym has long been controversial and many observers have held it to be pseudoscientific nonsense and to lack evidence for effectiveness. The scientific evidence against core Brain Gym theories and claims is now very convincing. The past year has been an annus horribilis for Brain Gym International, it being exposed to be quackery by Dr. Ben Goldacre in the British press and its founder, Dr. Paul Dennison, being humiliated on British television. I've described the whole affair fully a previous post, Brain Gym faces a Perfect Storm!, links included.

The press exposé forced Brain Gym in Britain to make the following admission on its website:

"The UK Educational Kinesiology Trust makes no claims to understand the neuroscience of Brain Gym®. The author has advised that the simple explanations in the Brain Gym Teachers Edition about how the movements work are hypothetical and based on advice from a neurobiologist at the time the books were written."

The admission, however, now seems to have been removed from their website and I could find no indication on any Brain Gym affiliated website of these and other admissions and the events that preceded them. Brain Gym seems to be lying low and hoping that the storm will pass.

This is another admission published in the British Times Online:

"The creators of an educational exercise programme used in hundreds of schools in England have agreed to withdraw unsubstantiated scientific claims in their teaching materials. ... Paul Dennison, a Californian educator who created the programme, admitted that many claims in his teacher’s guide were based on his “hunches” and were not proper science."

Some years ago I challenged a Brain Gym practitioner at the then Witwatersrand Technikon, to reveal to students who were being subjected to Brain Gym, the pseudoscientific nature of its claims. He declined and admitted that any positive effect of Brain Gym was due to placebo and Hawthorne effects; also that suggestion played a role in any positive effect. He could thus not agree to my challenge. Predictably, he ascribed placebo and Hawthorne effects to the "unpredictable and mystical" influence of quantum physics. I questioned the ethics of bullshitting the students of a university of technology about scientific facts, but never received an answer.

I suspect that Brain Gym is now in the same quandary, it can't reveal its true pseudoscientific nature, as that would destroy any placebo-based positive effects. Its credibility is at stake as well. That's the price it is paying for quacking and for mispresenting itself as a science, when in fact it is very much an alternative and controversial form of therapy.

I've probably spent too much time on Brain Gym on the blog - hopefully this will be the last for a while. It was necessary because it is the most widespread and influential form of quackery in South African education. I shall continue checking Brain Gym websites to see whether they come clean, but I won't hold my breath.