Transcript
Lads, I’ve done it, I’ve cured my colorblindness, it is gone. I’m mad excited that I can see all the colours, and all I had to do was spend 3 months rinsing my eyes with this simple house-hold clean…
Stop… who do you think you are, Joe Rogan? Guys, do not pour anything in your eye. There is currently no cure for colorblindness, and it can suck, but please do not go chasing after alternative medicine that only tells you what you want to hear. *snap*
Today on Chromophobe, I’m going to be ranking the top 12 pseudosciences for treating colorblindness from mostly useless to mind-numbingly bonkers and taking a look at how they can be so successful at defrauding the colorblind.
A pseudoscience cure is one that promises to help you, but doesn’t, has no proof, or at least no proof that has been subject to scientific rigor.
The defining characteristic of Pseudoscience relative to other alternative medicine like prayer or faith healing, is Pseudoscience is posing… as science.
It will use all sorts of sleight of hand to hoodwink your critical mind into believing it’s scientific, and it does that, by employing several informal logical fallacies: things that make sense to the irrational part of your mind, but should get tripped up if it spends enough time in the critical part. So for each treatment, I’ll also pick out one fallacy that it relies on.
Once called alternative medicine, these treatments have rebranded to complementary medicine, as they no longer intend to replace standard medicine, just to take the credit from real medicine when, for example, your chemo sends your cancer into remission but you tell your instragram followers that it must have been the beaver anal gland extract!
If you have an ailment, there exists and has always existed a cure being peddled by some unscrupulous poser who will use science buzzwords to lend legitimacy to their product and take advantage of you.
- Bleach cures autism
- Mercury cures syphilis
- Radium cures impotence
All crazy talk, but it can be important to remember, that no matter how insane alternative medicine sounds, lots of people will believe it, and watching fools be parted from their money is all in good fun until it happens to someone you love.
Desperate people are most prone to fall for pseudoscience cures and while colorblindness is not life threatening, it certainly is livelihood threatening, which can make people almost as desperate.
After all, when you look through the comments on youtube videos promising a cure, the majority of them have the same general structure “just found out I’m colorblind when I got rejected for my dream job… FML… please take my life savings.”
Not all my research is on youtube though… actually, I had a hell of a time researching this topic on Google… It seemed like they were actively steering wayward “researchers” away from being scammed… so I switched to Bing, and I found all the cures.
We’re gonna get started with the least ridiculous of them and work towards the most laughable, but here is number 12, Vitamins:
12. Vitamins
As a kid, someone undoubtedly told you that if you ate carrots, it would help your vision.
Like all pseudoscience – including old wives’ tales – there is a kernel of truth, literally.
You may recall that the *kernel* of a photoreceptor – the chromophore – is retinal, a form of Vitamin A.
Your body DOES need vitamin A to make the cones in your retina, and an extreme deficiency can result in tritan colorblindness, but your CVD almost definitely doesn’t come from a Vitamin A deficiency and packing your body with more Vitamin A just means your body can more readily create cones you don’t need, and cones that use the same mutated recipe of your opsins, which doesn’t help your CVD.
Even in the 1940’s scientists were already disproving that Vitamin A improved color vision. But we still see Vitamin A as a central component to many nutritional “treatments” because it “makes sense” despite the fact that prolonged usage of Vitamin A supplements can cause intracranial hypertension, which ironically, includes CVD as a common symptom.
Put plainly, if carrots cured colorblindness, do you think Bugs Bunny would be colorblind?
Modern versions of vitamin treatment will instead push lutein and zeaxanthin, hyping them as cure-all antioxidants, perhaps because of their resemblance to 80’s comic book villains… but probably because of their relation to Vitamin A and loose link to some aspects of eye health.
Sellers of Zeaxanthin supplement cite some legitimate studies that have shown that these vitamins may be able to slow macular degeneration or even reverse diabetic retinopathy, both of which are causes of acquired CVD… therefore… Zeaxanthin is a treatment for colorblindness.
Well, this is our first logical fallacy, an Illicit Minor… which I know… sounds like the legal term for jailbait, but in the scope of formal logic, just means that if A treats B, and B can cause C, does not mean that A always treats C. In the case of Zeaxanthin, A almost never treats C.
If you are younger than 50, and don’t have diabetes, Zeaxanthin and Lutein are very unlikely to do anything for you, not to mention, you can also get plenty of Lutein and Zeaxanthin by eating common foods like eggs and corn.
Nutrition is obviously a very important part to a healthy lifestyle *says the guy who just ate a half-pound of liquid cheese*, but it is definitely not going to improve your CVD.
11. Stem Cells
You’ve probably heard of stem cells. These special biological building blocks – typically from your own body – can potentially turn into any kind of cell you want them to, which can be pretty useful for healing damaged tissues.
According to the headline hype of the past 20 years stem cells seem like they can cure just about anything, from diabetes to HIV and from deafness to blindness, although… stem cell therapy has actually CAUSED more blindness in humans than it has cured.
The problem is, when you have medical buzzwords like ‘stem cells’ that have permeated mainstream news, and yet are too complicated for mainstream understanding, they are going to be picked up by fraudsters and used along with the “Appeal to Novelty” fallacy to sell you high-tech bullshit cures that could, well… GIVE you colorblindness.
And people love novelty. Hell, I’m surprised I couldn’t find someone claiming that blockchain could cure colorblindness… Oh come on…
It should be no surprise then that there have recently been some high profile cases of doctors selling stem cell therapy for COVID, but I did also find one purveyor of stem cell therapy as a cure for colorblindness, with testimonials like:
“I went to see Dr. Obi and had the Stem Cells done. After the first 3 weeks… miraculously, I started seeing COLORS! I used to never be able to see pinks, and oranges, and purples and now I can’t stop staring at everything.”
So what, you… just sprinkle the stem cells on your eyeball… and presto?
Not quite, the closest we have gotten to a stem cell cure was a 2021 study that injected cone cells derived from human stem cells into mice with macular degeneration and saw some returned function.
This is in the right direction for curing genetic CVD but still soooo far off and it’s highly unlikely this will ever be more useful than gene therapy for us run-of-the-mill deutans and protans.
You definitely can’t just stick stem cells in your eyes and cross your fingers, especially when those stem cells are extracted from your own body with your own DNA… How’s your own DNA supposed to cure a genetic disease exactly?
Okay, so then what’s up with that testimonial earlier? Is he lying? Is he getting paid? Does he even exist!? Probably something less nefarious.
CVD is a common target of pseudoscience because it involves personal perception, so is highly susceptible to the placebo effect. Not objective placebo effect, where belief in a placebo can lead to actual measurably better physiological outcomes; but the subjective placebo effect, where you can think your color vision has improved when objectively it has not.
10. Acupuncture
Next, let’s look at the art of self-voodoo called acupuncture. Acupuncture uses small needles to stick in your skin, not to inject medicine, but to facilitate the flow of your qi, or life energy.
The needles are stuck in specific acupuncture points or meridians, and depending where you stick ‘em, acupuncture can ostensibly cure just about anything, including colorblindness. Want to cure your CVD?
- Well, according to one source, just stick needles in these acupoints.
- Or, according to another source, just stick needles in these acupoints.
- Or, according to another source, just stick needles along these meridians.
Which I hope demonstrates that it is an art, masquerading as a science.
But… its traditional, owing its existence to thousands of years of practice as a part of traditional Chinese medicine. To many, the longevity of the treatment proves that it is effective, but that is just the “appeal to tradition” fallacy coming into play.
There are several academic papers on therapeutic acupuncture for CVD, but only one I could find translated to English. It presents some strong findings, but, it is not double-blind or even single-blind*.
Additionally, the study’s patient recruitment suffers heavily from the regression to the mean bias and the results are a textbook example of survivorship bias, since the findings presented are based mostly on the 5 individuals who remained in the treatment for the *120* sessions of needling, which… surprise! are those who were perceiving the greatest benefit.
But all of this could have been excused, if there was a control group, i.e. people who took the same CVD tests, but didn’t themselves get shishkebab’d.
Without a control group, low-quality papers like this can ignore the fact that colorblindness tests can be “trained” to a degree, in that you will usually get better with practice despite not actually developing better color vision…
The study can then attribute the improvement to their treatment and using some “creative” statistics make that small improvement look like a significant benefit of acupuncture. Control Groups… It’s literally Science 101.
9. Acupressure
Or are you afraid that your patients may be scared off by you sticking needles in them? After all, you may be trying to embed 5G microchips in them without their consent!
Not a problem, you can simply use acuPRESSURE, where everything is identical, except instead of inserting needles, you just… push on the skin.
Acupressure proponents are really good at Appealing to Fear, our next logical fallacy. They not only make acupuncture look scary, but also evoke the image of needles in your eyeball, to promote fear of the only legitimate cure for colorblindness: gene therapy. Relatively, acupressure is definitely safe, but safe doesn’t mean it works.
In fact, acupressure is a popular technique with fraudsters because unlike the previous 3 pseudosciences, there can be zero side effects with acupressure and therefore no liability, unless you are exceptionally stupid and press on your patients’ eyeballs which can actually cause glaucoma, one symptom of which is… wait for it… *daltonism* colorblindness.
But maybe your patients don’t even want to be touched? Not a problem, you can simply use COLORPUNCTURE, which I am not kidding you, uses colored lights to stimulate acupuncture points in order to
“…release an emotional blockage and heal any condition, allowing patients to devote themselves to their individual spiritual purpose.” Ooooh… so kooky.
Sometimes you get a synthesis of these different techniques, such as with “Vision Yoga”, which may appear like a cult, but describes itself as a synthesis of acupressure, massage and the methods of Dr. Bates. Who is Dr. Bates? I’m glad you asked.
8. Bates Method
Coming in at #8 on the list is the Bates method, which was a popular century-old method for training your eyes out of whatever ailed you.
The original Bates Method only applied to myopia, postulating that nearsightedness was due to stressed eyeballs and destressing your eyeballs would allow you to ditch eyeglasses.
It promised to improve your visual acuity with 4 simple methods:
- Palming – placing your palms over your eyes to relax them, which relieves the strain
- Visualization – thinking of pure black to relax the mind and therefore likewise the eyes;
- Movement – training the eye muscles by moving your eyes around
- Sunning – staring at the sun… or even using a “burning glass” to shine light on the white of one’s eye.
And I think we have already established many times on this channel that staring at the sun is a surefire way to give yourself colorblindness…
The Bates Method was not effective at all at treating myopia, but it didn’t stop proponents from picking up that torch and marketing it to more and more diseases.
Today, these hucksters claim the Bates Method (or their individual synthesis thereof like Vision Yoga) can cure anything from glaucoma to colorblindness… and they continue to promote it because of its creator Dr. William Horatio Bates, a real medical doctor with two very important letters before his name that lends credence to so much bullshit.
The Bates Method is a classic example of the “Appeal to Authority”. This guy is a doctor, he must be legit. But do you know what they call someone who graduated from medical school at the bottom of their class? Dr.
7. Chiropractic
Actually, you can find doctors that didn’t go to medical school at all, they are called chiropractors, and number 7 on our list is Chiropractic: the art of cracking one’s back to relieve them of back pain, or pretty much any other ailment.
Chiropractic is the poster child of pseudoscience because it can be presented as quite reasonable, but empirically fall flat.
It achieved mainstream success thanks to a Chiropractor defeating the American Medical Association in court in the 80’s when the AMA said, “hey, these guys are quacks, like… don’t use them, K?” and the courts said “they may be quacks, but like… freedom n stuff”.
With that judicial validation, these charlatans started applying their business to any disease that crossed their minds, including of course colorblindness.
This paper describes a case study of a woman with colorblindness stemming from macular degeneration, where spinal manipulation ostensibly improved blood flow to her retina, improved her macular degeneration and fixed her colorblindness. So ignore the fact that one of the types of Macular Degeneration is literally from too much blood supply to the retina,
Does this single published scientific paper of a case study mean that Chiropractic works? Not quite, but Chiropractic hasn’t been shown NOT to cure colorblindness, which… as long as we use the “Argument from Ignorance” fallacy, means that it therefore DOES work.
Want to try it out yourself? This chiropractor in New Jersey will gladly twist your spine to release you of the toxins that have been making you colorblind.
6. Veganism
Did you know that going vegan can help you see color? At least according to this great book on Amazon:
Speaking of which, VEGAN is actually an anagram of GANEV? An archaic American-English word for swindler. As in someone who sells vegan workbooks for reversing colorblindness? …Yeah I play scrabble. What?
This book clearly rests heavily on the Appeal to Nature logical fallacy, insinuating that your CVD is a toxic side-effect of your unnatural youtube-fueled lifestyle…
Naturally, there is nothing inherently healthy about “natural” remedies, or we would all live shorter, sadder lives than our 20k year old ancestors.
It all seems quite hokey, right, like “oh no, the vegans are up to mischief again, better eat a steak”, but its actually a lot sadder than that.
This book is one of 40’000 procedurally-generated books published on amazon that all have the exact same title with a different disease in place of colorblindness, promising that Veganism can cure anything from Broken Bones to Brain Cancer. And amazon allows this to happen… just another reason to hate Jeff Bezos, I guess.
5. Ayurveda
The south asian equivalent of Traditional Chinese Medicine is Ayurvedic medicine, which is a huge umbrella of treatments from herbal remedies to yoga. Anything can call itself Ayurveda in order to take advantage of that buzzword as long as it has some loose connection to India. So let me introduce Drishti Eye Drops:
“A miraculous Ayurvedic medicine which can help cure several eye disorders like, poor vision, eye allergies, glaucoma, cataracts, double vision, colorblindness, etc.”
On Amazon, they have a better rating than Pilestone Glasses and all the reviews confirm that these drops are indeed miraculous, but also mention that they burn like hell. So what’s in them? According to their packaging:
- 5.00 mL of Honey
- 1.68 mL of Allium cepa
- 1.66 mL of Citrus aurantifolia – and
- 1.66 mL of Zingiber officinale
Which introduces the next logical fallacy: Appeal to Precision. Rounding your recipe arbitrarily to the nearest ten MICROliters, and using latin names for everything doesn’t make it work any better. Actually, if we rewrite this recipe in language we all understand, we find out exactly why Drishti Eye Drops burn your eyes.
Onion juice… lime juice… That top one is ginger by the way… which I guess is a joke that doesn’t really work on a colorblind channel.
These ingredients don’t make medicine, but, if you just add 2.78mL of Vodka, you’ve got yourself a tiny cocktail.
4. More
There is only so much you can charge for 10mL of anything though. Hell, 10mL of printer ink is only $35. If you want to charge more, you have to give more. Lots more. So let’s look at remedy number 4… MORE.
Dr. Basu Eye Hospital has a veritable cornucopia of eye drops and medicines in their 2-month colorblindness cure… including a bunch of familiar faces like Vitamin A and medicines to treat non-genetic forms of colorblindness, like Macular Degeneration, that you don’t have. All that for only $350, but it’s 5 kinds of medicine, so it’s worth it…?
Artificial Eye Co. also offers a very broad treatment plan that includes:
- Random Eyedrops
- Zeaxanthin
- Diet Chart
- Exercise Instructions
- Tinted glasses & contacts
And something called ‘advanced training’, which must have something to do with this scary looking contraption that I can only imagine is some sort of electroshock therapy for your eyes…
I contacted this company to inquire about shipping this package to Switzerland and they informed me I would have to fly to India because they need to make sure I am following the treatment correctly, because if I don’t do absolutely everything right, it won’t work.
And that… is logical fallacy number nine… No True Scotsman.
Does someone not respond to your treatment? Well, it’s not because the treatment is ineffective, it’s just because you weren’t doing right.
3. Homeopathy
Next, at #3 is Homeopathy, one of the most common punching bags of scientists. It has been debunked, ridiculed and exposed as pure placebo… but whenever I think that everyone must know the truth about homeopathy, I remember that it’s mandatory in Switzerland to have health insurance with full coverage of homeopathy, so clearly people still think it’s legitimate.
If you’re not familiar with homeopathy, allow me to explain… say you want to treat your color vision deficiency. You start by finding some substance that is known to cause CVD. According to homeopathicmedicine.info, a website with super expensive graphics, phosphorus causes CVD.
I had never heard of that, so I looked it up and it’s true, phosphorus causes CVD as in CardioVascular Disease… but not Color Vision Deficiency… Not like it matters though.
So we mix the phosphorus in water,
then take a drop of that, and put it in a beaker of water, mix vigorously,
then take a drop of that, and put it in a beaker of water, mix vigorously,
then take a drop of that, and put it in a beaker of water, mix vigorously.
Then repeat this another 27 times until it is beyond impossible that there is any trace of phosphorus left in the solution, and all you have is a beaker of water, which you then sell for slightly cheaper than real medicine.
And people will buy it because the water supposedly has ‘memory’, such that once you ingest it, the phosphorus shaped holes in the water absorb the thing that is causing YOUR colorblindness, thereby curing it.
Of course, if this were true, since your colorblindness is caused by your genetics, the homeopathy must get rid of your… DNA? That doesn’t sound good.
Homeopathy wasn’t such a stupid idea when it came out 225 years ago. In fact, the creator was a huge critic of bloodletting, which is absolutely much worse for a patient than just giving them some harmless water. But this was all before we knew what genetics, atoms, germs or modern medicine was.
Look, this isn’t supposed to be a takedown of homeopathy, but I can’t directly answer the question “Why can’t Homeopathy cure Colorblindness” without accepting the presupposition that some things can be cured by Homeopathy… which they can’t.
That question is therefore a Loaded Question, a logical fallacy where a question makes presumptions that are untrue. I have to therefore refute the presumption, which means a general refutation of homeopathy, which, look, there are smarter people than me that have already made videos on that.
2. Hypnosis
Number 2 is Hypnosis, which is not another Loaded Question because hypnosis does indeed have “proven” applications in medicine, but as you can imagine, one of those is not colorblindness.
Despite that, you can also find several hypnosis based cures for colorblindness, such as this Scottish arse Thom, who… you know, I’ll just let him explain what he does.
“Apparently you cannot cure colorblindness… its impossible say the experts… i did it in 5 minutes”
Oooh, what a compelling scoundrel, how does HE think he does it?
“I asked her unconscious… do you know how to fix your colorblindness? Her hand twitched and said yes. I said can you fix it now, and her hand twitched and said yes. And I lifted up her hand and asked the hand to move at the rate and speed which made her see full color again”
Now clearly this wouldn’t work against colorblindness as the genetic, physiological condition as we know it, but this guy offers an alternative hypothesis on where colorblindness comes from…
“It may not be a genetic condition, it may be a learned behaviour… as a child you copy your father, you copy his physiology, and generation after generation after generation were colorblind.”
Even if we knew NOTHING about biology, we know strictly from heredity that boys almost always get CVD only through their mothers. This guy is just so easy to refute, but this Raconteur makes his living by weaving captivating stories and relying solely on the Argument from Anecdote fallacy, or as he says:
“I tell a bunch of stories and I’m just watching who responds to the stories that I tell”
1. Crystals
Anyway, our last form of pseudoscience… the number one most ridiculous cure that I came across… Crystals!
“[Crystals] transform negative energy into positive energy and back it into the universe… It also helps to soothe, calm, and connect people with a higher level of consciousness…
“[it is] beneficial for peaceful as well as protection vibration…. Amethyst is the best stone for colorblindness because it is linked to the third eye chakra and has metaphysical properties to cure… color blindness.”
First, what sicko chose the purple gemstone to heal colorblindness…
Second, its gonna be hard to pick a logical fallacy here since there is not much effort to really be scientific at all besides throwing in words like vibration and energy, so let’s just go with the good old “magical thinking” fallacy, where someone essentially pulls some absurd cure out of their…
Infomercial
Woah, see what you did there? You just committed the “Appeal to the Stone” fallacy, which states that you cannot dismiss an argument just by stating it is absurd.
Oh damn, it sounds like you are learning…
‘Course I have! Check this out…
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Outro
Quick announcement… I just released my website chromaphobe.com. The first big bit of content on there is a glossary of all things relating to my videos, colorblindness and color theory. Hopefully this will prevent me from having to redefine technical terms in every video and people won’t have to post comments like “what’s a protan”?
So check it out, and since you’ve made it to the end of the video, I would really appreciate it if you would make the clicky clicks on those subscribe-y like-y and comment-y buttons.
And if you comment, keep in mind that I have literally never had anyone request a topic before… its almost like I’d be obligated to do my next video on whatever popped up in the comments here… anyway, This is Chromaphobe.
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