r/badscience • u/NotARealBlacksmith • 20d ago
How would you describe this article?
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/1/449
Hello, I was reading some discussion of what I believe to be total pseudoscience about schumann resonance healing human ailments, but was having a hard time actually articulating my problems with this article that I saw suggested.
For those who read literature frequently, how would you describe this article? I found it to be written in the same tone that a high schooler would write a paper.
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u/mfb- 20d ago
Looks like there is quite a bit of pseudoscience in there, maybe mixed with good studies. Lots of vague statements in the introduction.
Even if there is a relevant effect, that wouldn't mean some random "quantum medicine pill" (or whatever the snake oil is called now) is doing anything, of course.
Thus, the Earth’s magnetic field is formed through electromagnetic interactions between the Earth’s surface and cosmic radiation.
This is an example of a statement that is obviously wrong. The author list doesn't include any physicist or related experts. Why are they trying to do physics?
Besides listing 52416 frequency values, there is essentially no quantitative statement in the "Results" section. Surely you would look at the strength of the Schumann resonances, and compare them to other sources of electromagnetic fields?
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u/EebstertheGreat 20d ago
The Schumann resonance is indeed produced by this interaction, ultimately. Proximately, it is caused by lightning, but the charge separation in the first place comes from cosmic rays (primarily).
The geomagnetic field of course is enormously stronger and is produced deep within the Earth, but that's not what they are talking about.
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u/EebstertheGreat 20d ago
Apart from the fact that the premise is fundamentally ridiculous given our understanding of physics and biology, there are numerous specific problems with the paper. The worst section must be methods.
That is the entire methods section. The first sentence is completely meaningless. "My method in this study was reading and thinking and stuff." They don't give any single specific method. Other systematic reviews and the like will explain how they found papers (e.g. the databases searched and the keywords used), what criteria they used for inclusion, how many papers were found, how many were excluded (and how many for each reason), how many were included, an assessment of the quality of each included paper and the criteria for that, and so on and so forth. Then it will explain how the studies were aggregated and weighed. But here, they can't do that, because their lit review is not systematic, and they did no statistics. What they are saying is "I read existing studies and this is how I understood them." That's not what counts as new research. It certainly cannot explain how they reached different conclusions from experts in relevant fields.
The first sentence in the results section is similarly meaningless and cites a paper published in a Frontiers Media journal on integrative medicine. The rest continues to uncritically cite ultra-fringe research, such as this:
Needless to say, no mainstream source refers to the EM field as "matter." And it would be especially hard to argue that neutrino and gravitational wave radiation are "electromagnetic." It's irrelevant anyway, because the ubiquity of electromagnetism does nothing to prove that the Schumann resonance of the Earth's magnetic field is relevant in any way to human health.
The article says "electromagnetic r adiation from the Sun is the source of energy for all metabolic processes that occur on planet Earth," which is false. Some chemosynthetic organisms ultimately get energy from reduced chemical species escaping from deep within the Earth, such as chemautotrophic bacteria and archaea on hydrothermal vents.
I won't go over every error. The main problem is that there is no novel research here at all, and the research cited is fringe and wrong. In particular, it relies on the "Magnetoelectrochemical Theory of Metabolism," a pseudoscientific concept deriving from reflexology of all things with no actual support. It makes extremely implausible claims without explanation, like that solitons make biopolymers "come alive" and that biophotons are a component of intercellular signaling.
Most importantly, the entirety of the argument seems to be "electricity and magnetism are important to the Earth and the human body, therefore the peak resonant frequency of the Earth's magnetic field is important to the human body." But that obviously does not follow. Gravity is important to both Jupiter and the human body, but that doesn't mean the orbital period of Jupiter is relevant to human health.
The article acknowledges that the resonance is many orders of magnitude weaker than the Earth's static geomagnetic field but insists that stochastic resonance should be relevant anyway. No explanation is given for why, nor any established examples. You just have to accept that, and then the hypothesis is, in the authors' words, "logical."
[To be continued]