But that's the thing, there is no other possible physical mechanism than placebo/suggestion.
B, I don't know, and apparently Charlie doesn't know either how it works, and yet the "patients" report drastic positive changes...Somewhere there I'm baffled by the whole thing...How are these people reporting such positive things? It doesn't make any logical sense...
This is why we have the scientific method. Science is an all round pain in the backside - it's often expensive, it's frequently difficult, and it's very tempting to cut corners, and to treat anecdotes or poorly designed studies as though they might be producing useful information - But they do not, and they cannot.
As Richard Feynman said, "
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."
The rest of humanity comes a close second. It's very easy for a sick person to feel better, not due to effective treatment, but due to the placebo effect, suggestion, anticipation, and/or simple shifts of attention. Lying in a hospital bed, with nothing to do but suffer, pain can seem vastly worse than when lying in the same bed, interacting with an interesting and charismatic person. So people probably do genuinely feel better when this guy is around.
But if we are to claim that he is doing something more effective than just chatting to bored patients, then that thing must be testable and repeatable in properly blinded and controlled trials - because if it isn't, then
it doesn't really exist. Science is the only way we have of finding out true things about reality - and human beings are very bad at it. We take lots of mental shortcuts, which, while they were effective for survival as a hunter-gatherer, are totally ineffective when trying to determine in detail how reality works. It turns out that reality is very counterintuitive; The real world is not much like we tend to assume it to be. Such non-obvious truths as 'The world is roughly spherical, and is not flat', or '
velocities can't be combined by simple arithmetic addition', can only be discovered by diligent application of the scientific method.
Testimonials are, despite their popularity, NOT an indicator of the reality of the phenomenon being attested to. Belief (no matter how strongly held, or widespread) is not evidence of truth. Seven billion people CAN be wrong, and frequently are.
Charlie doesn't know how it works; and if he can't replicate the effect in controlled, blinded trials,
or hasn't done so YET, then he has got exactly bupkis. There's literally nothing to see here, until and unless he produces properly reviewed results from a properly designed trial - and those results have been repeated by others.
That's how we know what works for pain relief. We don't hand out Tylenol to a pre-selected, non-random group of patients, and then ask them how they feel, and when they say "much better, thank you" declare that Tylenol is effective at relieving pain. We don't then write articles with glowing praise from patients who took Tylenol, in which they are effusive about how wonderful it is. Doing those things would not tell us ANYTHING about whether or not Tylenol actually works.
Instead, we make fake tablets with no acetaminophen in them; and randomly provide either the real or the fake pills to each patient in our study, and ask how they feel. Only after the results are recorded do we let anyone (patient or researcher) know which patients got the real drug - and if the patients in that group reported better results than the ones who got the fakes, then (and ONLY then) we can say that Tylenol probably has analgesic effects.
Now that kind of double-blind controlled trial is a bit more difficult to set up than the simple collection of testimonials; But it's not impossible, nor particularly difficult, and it's routinely done in hospitals all over the world. It wouldn't be particularly difficult to design such a trial for this claimed effect - all you need to do is hire an actor who has no "healing" abilities, and have him exactly mimic what Charlie does; Then assign patients randomly to be "treated" by the "healer" or the actor - tabulate the results, and see if the healer performs significantly better than the actor who has no healing powers.
Why hasn't this been done?
Until it is, the rules of science say that we must reject the claims made by Charlie (no matter how much he or anyone else believes them to be true). So it's in his interest to get this done. And, indeed, the ethical rule is that he needs to do this
FIRST, before "treating" (or attempting to treat) patients with his untested method.
So what he is doing is ethically wrong, and scientifically wrong. It's unethical for him to claim that he can do something to help sick people, unless and until he can PROVE (not hint at, not persuade people to believe, not believe in himself, but PROVE) that he actually does have a bigger effect than any random dude showing up and having the same chat with the patients.
It is even more unethical for him to use patients to promote his "ability" on a TV show, before he has done the simple things needed to PROVE that the purported ability really exists. He says that he doesn't charge for his services - which he (and you) hold up as some kind of virtue. But morally, he shouldn't even DREAM of charging for any service until he has demonstrated that it actually exists; So his failure to charge a fee is not a virtue - it's the bare minimum human decency demands of him. He is already behaving unethically, before we even consider whether he charges a fee for doing whatever it is he does. And 'not charging a fee' is not the same thing as 'not accepting donations', nor is it the same thing as 'not profiting from his activities' - the TLC presumably don't expect him to star in their show without being paid.
Establishing fake virtue by not billing patients (but accepting donations if they are happy with the outcomes) is an old established con - it makes it very hard for the authorities to prove fraud, and it has surprisingly little impact on the total income that can be derived from the scam (there's another of those counterintuitive realities). After all, with no overheads (he doesn't even need to buy any snake-oil), the worst he can do is earn $0, so he has nothing to lose. Every cent you gain from doing nothing, is a cent you didn't have to sweat to earn. This kind of scam is largely a popularity contest - you want to keep the testimonials flowing, to build up a reputation that makes people believe in you, and never sending out invoices is a great method for achieving that.
There is nothing baffling about patients believing that there is an effect where in fact none (beyond the well known placebo effect) is present. It's a well understood and historically commonplace human cognitive failure; People are SHIT at assessing the truth value of claims, even those that relate to their own personal experiences - and as Feynman points out, that is why we need the scientific method. Because without it, we cannot spot the difference between reality and fakery; or between truth and fiction.
"Nobody knows how it works" is not reassuring; It's the 21st Century, and we have found the Higgs Boson. We know how almost everything works, and we rely on that knowledge to underpin all of the infrastructure and technology of the modern world. A phenomenon without even a hint of an explanation is a HUGE red flag - There's no excuse for the mechanism of action for any real phenomenon to be completely mysterious. The most parsimonious explanation for why nobody knows how it works is that it simply doesn't work at all.
Right now, we have a bunch of people who believe, but cannot prove, that Charlie has an effect that we have no hard evidence for, with an unknown mechanism of action. That's a very long-winded way to say 'we've got nothing'.
