Football has corrupted our universities. Time for it to leave.

The University of Maryland, College Park began their first
game of the season by honoring their teammate Jordan
McNair, number 79, who died during a May 2018 practice.

The University of Maryland, where I was a professor for six years, is embroiled in a football scandal that started with the tragic death of a young player, Jordan McNair, who died of heat stroke during practice. On an especially hot day in late May, the coaches were driving the players too hard, and when McNair collapsed, they failed to immerse him in cold water, which might have saved his life.

This past week, as the results of a 192-page inquiry were being leaked to the press, the university's Board of Regents has been meeting this weekend to decide what actions to take. According to the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, the board is considering whether to fire the coach, DJ Durkin (who has been on administrative leave since early September), the president of U. Maryland, Wallace Loh, and the athletic director, Damon Evans.

The University of Maryland has made one mistake after another with its football program, as I've pointed out again and again. Let's look at a timeline:

2010: in virtually his very first major decision as president, Wallace Loh approved the hiring of a new coach (Randy Edsall) and a $2 million payout to the old coach (Ralph Friedgen), who was pushed out a year early. This was at a time when the entire university system was in the midst of a 3-year hiring and salary freeze, which included unpaid furloughs (basically, pay cuts) for almost all employees. Not for football, though.

2011: UMD doubled down: in order to invest more in football, the university eliminated 8 other varsity sports, all of them sports that are healthy for students and that don't carry any risk of permanent brain damage. Here's what they cut: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo. Loh's argument at the time: "should we have fewer programs so that they can be better supported and, hence, more likely to be successful at the highest level? Or, should we keep the large number of programs that are undersupported compared to their conference peers?"

It pains me to read these words again. Is this what "successful" means for a major university? That its football team wins a few more games? Meanwhile, hundreds of students who played those other sports, all of which likely enriched their lives and their health, were left without teams.

2012: Maryland left the ACC, to which it had belonged for over 50 years, and joined the Big Ten conference, a move that was supposed to make more money. Never mind that it would require the players to travel much longer distances for games at other schools in the Big Ten. Never mind the $50 million exit fee to leave the ACC.

2015: Deja vu! Maryland football was still losing, so they fired the coach again, giving him a $4.7 million payout from state funds, to hire another new coach, DJ Durkin. The coach they fired, Randy Edsall, was the guy who was supposed to take the Terrapins "from good to great." That worked out well, didn't it?

2017: How is that team doing, anyway? Overall record 4-8, tied for dead last in the Big Ten's eastern division. What was it that president Loh said again about being successful at the highest level?

2018: Under coach DJ Durkin, a team practice on a very hot day causes the tragic death of a young player, Jordan McNair.

This slow-moving disaster illustrates what I've pointed out before:

• Universities have no business trying to run a big-time sports entertainment business–and make no mistake, that's what NCAA Division I football is.
• They're often very bad at it, as Wallace Loh and UMD have illustrated.
• Universities treat players as indentured servants: they refuse to pay the players for their work, and they often spit them out after four years without even providing a proper education. This undermines their core mission, which is educating and nurturing their students. (Read Taylor Branch's compelling exposé in the Atlantic for much more on this topic.)
• Making matters even worse, we now know that there's a serious risk that football players will suffer chronic traumatic encephalopathy later in life, a permanently disabling form of brain damage.

The bottom line: football is corrupting our universities, and it needs to go. This doesn't necessarily mean that fans must lose their favorite college teams. Here's one possible solution.

Football fans, including state legislators and university administrators, like to claim that football makes a profit. Let's suppose that's true: then it will do just fine as an independent business. Get football out of the universities, and make it a privately-run minor league for the NFL (which it already is, in effect). Let each team pay fees for use of the university's name, the stadium, practice fields, and parking on game days. Then the football club can pay its coaches whatever it wants, and it will have to pay the athletes, who are disgracefully paid nothing right now. And the university will still have its team, but without the corrupting influence of money. Even better, universities won't have to pretend that they are providing a first-class education to the players, while padding their coffers at the players' expense.

Let's end the farce of having university presidents try to manage large, commercial sports programs. Let them get back to focusing on research and education, topics on which they actually have some expertise.

I'm not naive: I don't think any major university is going to get rid of football any time soon, despite the growing evidence that football carries a major risk of brain damage to the players. This has only happened once, when the University of Chicago eliminated its football program in 1939, and brought it back in decades later as much-reduced program, now in NCAA Division III. The university itself has remained a powerhouse, routinely ranked in the top universities in the country academically.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Board of Regents is trying to decide what to do. If they read the timeline above, they'll know what I think: get rid of the whole lot, including the football program, and get the university back to its real mission.

A dubious homeopathy study made its way into a scientific journal. Will it be retracted?

Homeopaths did it again–they snuck a dubious study into a respectable journal. Well, sort of. Let's quickly look at the study, and then look at the journal that published it.

The paper has a very science-y sounding title, which likely helped it sneak under the radar: "Ultra-diluted Toxicodendron pubescens attenuates pro-inflammatory cytokines and ROS-mediated neuropathic pain in rats." It seems they were studying pain in rats, but what else is hiding inside this title?

The first warning here is the phrase "ultra-diluted." In the world of homeopathy, substances are diluted until there is literally nothing left, not a single molecule. Some of the dilutions in this paper were indeed extremely dilute, down to 10^-30, which means that they were just water. So they can't possibly have any therapeutic effect, at least no more effect than plain water.

You might also be wondering what Toxicodendron pubescens is. That's poison oak! Here's what homeopaths claim about poison oak: that if you dilute it down sufficiently, it reduces itching and pain. This is one of the basic principals of homeopathy, that "like cures like"–that if you want to treat a symptom, using a substance that causes the same symptom, only dilute it way down. Feeling itchy? Rub some poison oak on that! I'm not kidding–here's a link to a product you can buy that really makes this claim.

Of course this is utter nonsense, as I and many others have written before. Homeopathy doesn't work for anything at all, as a massive Australian study concluded back in 2015.

Now let's look at where this dubious study appeared: in a journal called Scientific Reports. Scientific Reports is a mega-journal that publishes 25,000 papers per year, making it the largest journal in the world. What's also interesting is that it is published by the Nature publishing group, which also publishes the highly prestigious journal Nature and many other related, high-quality journals. (Full disclosure: I've published many papers in those journals.) PLoS ONE was the first mega-journal, and it was so successful (i.e., it made so much money for its publishers) that Nature decided to imitate it. They've managed to steal a lot of the "customers" from PLoS ONE because the Nature brand is, apparently, more appealing to many authors.

It's tempting to argue that everything in Scientific Reports is just low-quality stuff, so one more bad paper doesn't mean anything. But it's not so simple. Scientific Reports is trying to be a decent journal, one that has a very high acceptance rate (59%, according to their website) but that nonetheless publishes only valid science. Last year I was involved in a kerfuffle with them over a plagiarized paper, and after lots of pressure, we did get them to retract the paper. It wasn't easy, but the Editor in Chief corresponded with me at the time, and he really does seem to be trying to enforce some decent standards.

When you publish 25,000 papers a year, though, some garbage is going to slip through. To their credit, Scientific Reports has now issued a note of concern on this homeopathy paper, as reported by the alert team at Retraction Watch. Here's the note in its entirety:

"Editors’ Note: Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this paper are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the editors. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved."

The right thing to do would be to retract this paper, because its results are simply not valid. We'll see if that happens.

Meanwhile, when reading the paper, I noticed that no less than eight of its references are to a journal called Homeopathy, published by Elsevier, one of the biggest and most profitable academic publishers in the world. Unlike Scientific Reports, Homeopathy is not even trying to publish valid science; its entire existence is premised on a nonsensical set of beliefs.

The good folks over at Retraction Watch wrote about this journal two years ago, in an article called "Does a journal of homeopathy belong in science?" Spoiler alert: it doesn't. As Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus wrote then:

"the issue is that science publishers, even legitimate global corporations like Elsevier, will accept something patently unscientific if it might make them money."

So while Nature does deserve criticism for letting bad science slip into its mega-journal, Elsevier has a lot more explaining to do. At least Nature is trying.

World Health Organization endorses TCM. Expect deaths to rise.

Mother and young rhinoceros killed for their horns.

Image credit: Wikipedia

A few days ago, a news story in the journal Nature reported that the World Health Organization, which is supposed to be devoted to improving the health and medical care of people around the globe, will for the first time endorse a belief system called "traditional Chinese medicine." I'm labeling TCM a belief system because that's what it is–but the WHO will be endorsing it as a set of medical practices.

The Nature writer, David Cyranoski, presents this news in a classic two-sides-of-the-story format, describing the "endless hours" that TCM proponents spent on such important topics as the "correct location of acupuncture points and less commonly known concepts such as ‘triple energizer meridian’ syndrome." Later in the article (but much later), he points out that scientists have argued that qi and meridians simply don't exist.

Cyranoski also falls into the trap of using the phrase "Western medicine" as if it were just an alternative point of view. An apt response is this comment from a biology Ph.D. student, who goes by @astrelaps on Twitter:

"What a weak, equivocal article from the world's preeminent scientific journal. "For those steeped in Western medicine..." is like writing "For those steeped in climate science" or "For those steeped in evolutionary biology" when reporting on climate change denial or creationism."

Well put. On the other hand, Cyranoski does point out that the major motivation for TCM is money:

"[China] has been aggressively promoting TCM on the international stage both for expanding its global influence and for a share of the estimated US$50-billion global market."

Were you thinking this was about health care? Afraid not. Cyranoski goes on to point out some serious problems with TCM, for example:

"Critics view TCM practices as unscientific, unsupported by clinical trials, and sometimes dangerous: China’s drug regulator gets more than 230,000 reports of adverse effects from TCM each year."

Actually, it's much worse than this.  Here's what TCM really looks like: the horrific slaughter of the last remaining rhinoceroses in Africa in order to hack off their horns, which are sold to become part of elixirs that some people mistakenly think confer strength or virility. Last year, National Geographic ran a heart-wrenching photo essay showing some of the awful results of rhinoceros poaching in Africa; take a look at these photos here.

TCM also looks like this: black bears kept in grotesquely cruel "farms" with a permanent tube inserted into their abdomens so that their bile can be harvested. Despite a growing movement to end this inhumane practice (see this NY Times story), it persists today, with thousands of bears kept in cages so small they can barely move. No one can view photos such as these and say that TCM is a good thing.

And TCM is behind the slaughter of the last remaining wild tigers, which are virtually extinct now in Asia, so that men can foolishly eat their bones, claws, and genitals in the mistaken belief that tiger parts will make them virile. Here too, National Geographic has details and photographs that are almost too painful to look at.

And don't get me started on pangolins, the beautiful, peaceful mammal that's now perilously endangered because TCM practitioners think its scales have some sort of medicinal value. (They don't.) For more on these gentle creatures, see the article I wrote last year.

I can almost hear the counter argument: but what about artemisinin? That's a plant extract derived from Artimisia annua, an herb that was traditionally used in China to treat malaria. Turns out that it really works, and artemisinin is now the basis of a number of modern malaria treatments.

Well, great. If an herb has the potential to treat disease, we should (and can, and do) study it, figure out what the active ingredient is, develop a controlled process for delivering effective doses, and use it. That's what happened with artemisia, and it also happened with taxol, an effective cancer chemotherapy derived from the Pacific yew tree, and common aspirin, derived from the willow tree.

But one success doesn't excuse hundreds of bogus claims that are based on little more than magical thinking.

There's no legitimate reason to use terms such as "Chinese" medicine, or American, Italian, Spanish, Indian, or [insert your favorite nationality] medicine. There's just medicine–if a treatment works, then it's medicine. If something doesn't work, then it's not medicine and we shouldn't sell it to people with false claims. The same is true for alternative, holistic, integrative, and functional medicine: these are all just marketing terms, with no scientific meaning. They merely serve to disguise sloppy, unscientific thinking at best, and in a less charitable interpretation, outright fraud.

As the Nature article points out, TCM has been a scam for decades: it was revived and heavily promoted in China by former dictator Mao Zedong, who didn't believe in it himself, but pushed it as a cheap alternative to real medicine. I won't go over that again here, but see these stories from Alan Levinovitz in Slate and David Gorski at Science-based Medicine.

Finally, why would the World Health Organization start pushing a set of unscientific practices that are likely to harm people's health? Support for TCM grew during the tenure of former WHO director Margaret Chan, who ran the WHO until 2017 and who had close ties to China. When Nature tried to contact Dr. Chan, the WHO responded that Chan "is not answering questions on matters related to the WHO."

By endorsing TCM, the WHO is taking a big step backwards. Let's hope that the current leaders of the WHO will realize that this step undermines their core mission. The WHO should not advocate treatments that not only have no evidence to support them and that can cause real harm to patients, but also are the primary reason that humans are hunting rhinoceroses, tigers, pangolins, and other animals to extinction.