If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is - anybody heard of Mike Mcinnes MRPS

[Amari]

I did think about taking part but keep forgetting to enrol

 

[pargyle]

Have you ever tried dowsing blind folded with someone to see the response? If so did it work?

Yes and yes .... even had them turn me round a couple of times so I didn't know which way I was pointing when I set off.

I also would dispute the ideomotor response in relation to dowsing for energy lines ... if you are in a field with no landmarks or other indicators is it just an arbitrary quirk of the mind that makes the rods move ?

I accept the ideo-motor effect as it was originally deternined... ie: subconsciously tapping your foot to a tune in the distance or homing in on a lost earring -- which you could not see on the floor as your eye averages out images but your brain actually saw the glint that was there. It was not originally intended to disprove dowsing ...

I further accept (as in all things) there are charlatans and those who claim ridiculour powers - the no-sayers take great delight in muddying the water with exposed examples that these rogues perpetrated. There are frauds and fakers who claim to dowse for anything ... I don't believe everything I see, read or hear ... the internet is full of falsehoods - you have to extract the genuine from the slight of hand and magickry.

The human brain has sensory abilities that we do not yet fully comprehend - how often have you thought of a friend or relative only to have the phone ring and they are on th end - or switch on the radio to find you are already humming the tune that comes on. Why when driving across country to a particular place (prior to the advent of GPS) did I find myself stoppinng to ask for directions only to find I was a stones throw from my destination ? It happens to me all the time - Coincidence ? Ideo-motor effect ? Random number theory ? Explain it as you see fit ... I just accept that, sometimes, things work or happen and they cannot be explained, at present, by science.

Animals, birds, insects, fish, even microbes and spores have sensory abilities that we cannot currently explain - whilst it would be terribly arrogant to suggest that Humans are superior in intellect to some of these creatures it does beg the thought that, as we are descended from creatures that appear to have superior senses to humans now, whether in the process of Darwinian development, we left some of these abilities behind but retain vestiges of them that are there but latent ? Perhaps in some people who are nearer in gene development to our ancestors than those further along the Darwinian path ? I certainly claim no superior powers ... just the opposite in fact - a regressive brain perhaps open to channelling senses I cannot control or even consider functionally ?

Who knows ? Why do drones and queens fly to Drone Congregation areas ... nobody has yet put a definitive explanation together for it ... but we know it happens - some in the same place every year for hundreds of year ... and we accept it as an unexplained phenomena ....

 

[OldFarm]

I'm only going to say this once and don't bother replying because I'm not going to give you any more oxygen to continue your rude dismissal of something that, whilst not fully understood, works.

Dowsing has been around for centuries ... it works for many things including finding lines of energy which do have an effect on and must be detectable by the bees. Just because you don't believe it there is no need to disparage those of us who have tried it and found that it does work.

There are plenty of previous threads that you can go through for your entertainment- no need to waste time polluting this one.

There is a chap in a village near us, he practices healing with the dowsing method and has been running his practice for over 40 years. His results are astonishing.

 

[Sayle]

The human brain has sensory abilities that we do not yet fully comprehend - how often have you thought of a friend or relative only to have the phone ring and they are on th end - or switch on the radio to find you are already humming the tune that comes on. Why when driving across country to a particular place (prior to the advent of GPS) did I find myself stoppinng to ask for directions only to find I was a stones throw from my destination ? It happens to me all the time - Coincidence ? Ideo-motor effect ? Random number theory ? Explain it as you see fit ... I just accept that, sometimes, things work or happen and they cannot be explained, at present, by science.

Animals, birds, insects, fish, even microbes and spores have sensory abilities that we cannot currently explain - whilst it would be terribly arrogant to suggest that Humans are superior in intellect to some of these creatures it does beg the thought that, as we are descended from creatures that appear to have superior senses to humans now, whether in the process of Darwinian development, we left some of these abilities behind but retain vestiges of them that are there but latent ? Perhaps in some people who are nearer in gene development to our ancestors than those further along the Darwinian path ? I certainly claim no superior powers ... just the opposite in fact - a regressive brain perhaps open to channelling senses I cannot control or even consider functionally ?

I can account for the phone ringing or radio switch very easily - firstly that if the phone rings it might be your friend or if the radio is on a song might come on, and secondly that human memory works by archiving interesting experiences, not all experiences. Thinking of a friend and then the phone ringing and it being that friend is pretty memorable, so it gains outsized importance compared to the literally thousands of other times in your life that you've had your phone ring.

[Edit: Here I would say that as a child I was often stunned by how whenever I was browsing the channels and saw that Scooby Doo was on and actually tried to watch it, it was always the same episode! This happened three times in a row, and struck me as pretty incredible! It was, I'm sure you would agree, quite unlikely and also quite memorable. So memorable that even though I can't remember almost any of the TV that I watched as a child, even the name or content of the shows, I still remember that quite remarkable anecdote, which I have now shared with you.]

When you are driving across the country, have you considered that when you are most uncertain about where you are is related to the finer details of the map? You're more likely to feel lost on a country road than a motorway, and if you look for it and finally give up and ask for directions, why is it surprising that you're quite close to where you mean to be?

As for your comments about the arrogance of assuming that humans are superior in intellect, it isn't much of a stretch to think that the dominant race on the planet is in fact the most intelligent. It might be helpful to think of it as intellect and knowledge. Intellect is your ability to engage with the world in complex ways, like with consciousness. Knowledge is accumulated information and experience. Humans indisputably have a superior intellect to animals, but the simple reality of and lived experiences means that animals have a very different set of knowledge! I'd also caution you against the very common tendency to imagine evolution as either a straight line of increasing advancement or having a will. These often creep into our perceptions of it despite 'knowing' intellectually that it is not the case. Humans have a lot of senses (far more than the traditional five) that all have quite complex mechanisms. Those being selected against to the point of being undetectable but still functional in some people would be quite out of the ordinary and I can assure you the focus of some very interested researchers!

Anyhow, I'm not going to ever not challenge dowsing. It's a belief in magic. You can say magic works for you, and I can say that magic performed in a controlled setting has literally never worked, ever (there's substantial money prizes if somebody can!), and you can say that you're right and not the assembled scientific practice of the entire planet because your experience is special and so you're right.

You can make appeals to ignorance all you like - we don't know what it is specifically so it might work this way in defiance of all the evidence rather than any other way that's equally likely as your particular superstition - but thems the breaks. If you look at all the evidence that it doesn't work that isn't "well it works for me", then your opinion is the same as the people who say "well human experience says the Earth is flat" and refuse to believe otherwise. Human experience doesn't make them right.

I'm sorry you feel my dismissal is rude. That's not sarcasm, I am. Because being told you're wrong when you feel that you're right because you know you are does feel hurtful, like you're not being listened to or your opinion isn't being valued. I do value your opinion, and I'm not sneering at you from behind the screen like you're some kind of terribly misguided idiot.

But it doesn't make you right. You say there are things that can't be explained by science. Sure, you're not wrong. You say maybe dowsing works by some method that can't be explained by science. Which could also be true if people hadn't sat down with lots of dowsers who were as absolutely convinced as you that it worked and actually tested them. But people have done that. The effectively unanimous consensus isn't that dowsing works by some unknown mechanism. It's that dowsing doesn't work. Period. Full stop. And if you say that's wrong, then you're going to have to question literally everything in modern science that you otherwise take on faith, like medicine or literally anything else you haven't personally tested.

If you can answer to that "well I'm still not changing my mind" or "actually dowsing is real", I'm not going to keep hammering the point. It's okay to say that you don't believe in a scientific view of the world. It'll put you at odds with the vast majority of the planet, but it is okay to say that. I think it's wrong, but at that point we're in the twisty forest of philosophy rather than data and experiment, and it's not my place to say your philosophy is wrong. I won't be able to convince you if our outlooks on the world are fundamentally different.

But if you do believe that science works and helps us understand and predict how the world works, then all I ask is that you ask yourself the hard question as to why it may be that science has conclusively decided that dowsing doesn't work. Not that it doesn't know how dowsing works, but that dowsing. Doesn't. Work. Ask yourself if there's any more likely reasons related to the fallibility of human experience (which you yourself have mentioned!) for why there's this difference between what has been found to be true beyond reasonable doubt and what you feel.

That's all I ask.

 

[Erichalfbee]

That's all I ask.

All I ask is that we respect each other's opinions without attempting to dissect them ad nauseam.
Things have happened to all of us that we can't explain. Some things "work" for some and not for others and there is little point trying to convert others to your opinion. It is what it is.
If you are that keen on protracted discourse try THIS THREAD

 

[Erichalfbee]

There is a chap in a village near us, he practices healing with the dowsing method and has been running his practice for over 40 years. His results are astonishing.

Who knows?
Take acupuncture. The Chinese have been using this for centuries. We westerners are fairly new to it

 

[pargyle]

That's all I ask.

You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink ... why do you need to challenge, so vehemently, what those of us who have EXPERIENCED what you define as impossible. Science cannot answer everything and your 'explanations' are no more than plausible platitudes. I don't intend to pollute this thread with any more comments - believe what you wish to believe, it's a free world.

 

[pargyle]

Who knows?
Take acupuncture. The Chinese have been using this for centuries. We westerners are fairly new to it

And there is still no scientific explanation as to why it works ... the nearest I've seen is this:

" Each acupuncture needle produces a tiny injury at the insertion site, and although it’s slight enough to cause little to no discomfort, it’s enough of a signal to let the body know it needs to respond,” Kempisty says. “This response involves stimulation of the immune system, promoting circulation to the area, wound healing, and pain modulation. Contemporary research on acupuncture relies mainly on this theory. "

But... it is a theory ... so a little bit of pain causes the body to completely ignore an awful lot of pain ?

Same principle as homeopathy - where a tiny dose of something that is causing the problem causes the body to react with a sledgehammer response ...

So much we really don't know enough about and we have to face the nay-sayers crying 'never mind the evidence where is the proof ?' ad infinitum.

 

[Erichalfbee]

And there is still no scientific explanation as to why it works ... the nearest I've seen is this:

" Each acupuncture needle produces a tiny injury at the insertion site, and although it’s slight enough to cause little to no discomfort, it’s enough of a signal to let the body know it needs to respond,” Kempisty says. “This response involves stimulation of the immune system, promoting circulation to the area, wound healing, and pain modulation. Contemporary research on acupuncture relies mainly on this theory. "

But... it is a theory ... so a little bit of pain causes the body to completely ignore an awful lot of pain ?

Same principle as homeopathy - where a tiny dose of something that is causing the problem causes the body to react with a sledgehammer response ...

So much we really don't know enough about and we have to face the nay-sayers crying 'never mind the evidence where is the proof ?' ad infinitum.

I have explored acupuncture. I have seen it in use on animals who are not open to much auto suggestion I would hazard.
I went into my first session open minded I must say I didn’t resist the idea that it would help but on the other hand I wasn’t expecting it to. To my astonishment the effects were almost instantaneous. So I go for top up treatment once a month. The needles go absolutely nowhere near the area in question. I don’t care why it helps to be truthful. I’m not so arrogant to think that science has to explain everything.

 

[Erichalfbee]

And there is still no scientific explanation as to why it works ... the nearest I'v


Same principle as homeopathy - where a tiny dose of something that is causing the problem causes the body to react with a sledgehammer response ...

Ah now I do have a problem with some of that. It’s the “memory of water” aspect and that the smaller the dose (even none) the more effective it is.
Every drop of water in the planet has been all over the place since the Earth came into being. That cup of coffee you’re drinking has been through a good few people already. It must have a great deal of memory.

 

[Arfermo]

Great minds think alike!

I'm not. Too bloody old for anybody to be interested in anything I write. My kids are like that too and so is my current car insurance company, AXA, who received a claim by an idiot last September that I had bumped them and injured somebody over 40 miles away where I haven't ever been in my life let alone in lockdown. Now I can't get quotes for renewal until the data base record of my misdemeanor is corrected - except from AXA of course who seem intent of giving the other party even more time to submit the evidence they don't have and have bumped my renewal premium up by £50 or so and still asking me to prove my innocence!! Bar-stewards. Not submitting to their blackmail even if car is off the road for a while and so have made a case to the Insurance Ombudsman so watch this space. Can always use my thumb to get a lift from neighbours.

 

[pargyle]

Ah now I do have a problem with some of that. It’s the “memory of water” aspect and that the smaller the dose (even none) the more effective it is.
Every drop of water in the planet has been all over the place since the Earth came into being. That cup of coffee you’re drinking has been through a good few people already. It must have a great deal of memory.

I accept that some of the homeopathy extremes are hocus pocus but I've seen super results in my dogs from Chris Day .. who practices a wide range of alternative treatments ... and the ones he used on my dogs had remarkable effects when traditional steroid and other veterninary treatments just made matters worse. He has such a wide range of case studies over the many years he has been practising that it is difficult to argue with some of the treatments he uses. (Including acupuncture)

https://www.alternativevet.org/

 

[Erichalfbee]

I accept that some of the homeopathy extremes are hocus pocus but I've seen super results in my dogs from Chris Day .. who practices a wide range of alternative treatments ... and the ones he used on my dogs had remarkable effects when traditional steroid and other veterninary treatments just made matters worse. He has such a wide range of case studies over the many years he has been practising that it is difficult to argue with some of the treatments he uses. (Including acupuncture)

https://www.alternativevet.org/

Yes I used to send dogs and cats with Atopy to Chris. Nice to hear he is still practicing

 

[pargyle]

Yes I used to send dogs and cats with Atopy to Chris. Nice to hear he is still practicing

He is a super bloke, he has a remarkable way with animals - one of our dogs loathed visits to a conventional vet to the point where we had to try and find different routes to get there - when we took him to Chris he used to treat Chris as a long lost friend. When we first went to Chrsi it was with a high degree of sceptism ... we had a labrador with a dreadful skin condition that a number of vets and a specialist could not cure .. indeed, some of the things they did made matters much worse.

It took a couple of months to get the right homeopathic treatment - although within a few days of us giving him the tiny pills things started to improve and within a month virtually all the bare patches of fur and the dog's continual scratching had stopped. We once ran out of the pills and he was without his treatment for about a week and in that short time his skin had started to flake and he was scratching like mad. Back on the pills - right as rain in a few days.

Chris used acupuncture on one of our other labradors that had spinal arthrities - he had already had an operation a couple of years earlier and a screw and washer inserted into his vertebrae. The condition reapperared and our orthopaedic vet said a second operation may not altogether help and recommended euthanasia. Chris used acupuncture and a dog that had to be lifted out of the car happlly leapt back into the back of the car after the acupuncture. We went back every 8 weeks for a top up as the effect seemed to wear off as Chris predicted but the dog lived comfortably for another 18 months before we had to let him go.

You just have to believe when you see it for yourself ....

 

[Arfermo]

Memo to self - must get a dog, cat, lion, leopard, elephant for him to inspect!!

 

[Amari]

I'm not. Too bloody old for anybody to be interested in anything I write. My kids are like that too and so is my current car insurance company, AXA, who received a claim by an idiot last September that I had bumped them and injured somebody over 40 miles away where I haven't ever been in my life let alone in lockdown. Now I can't get quotes for renewal until the data base record of my misdemeanor is corrected - except from AXA of course who seem intent of giving the other party even more time to submit the evidence they don't have and have bumped my renewal premium up by £50 or so and still asking me to prove my innocence!! Bar-stewards. Not submitting to their blackmail even if car is off the road for a while and so have made a case to the Insurance Ombudsman so watch this space. Can always use my thumb to get a lift from neighbours.

Infuriating! Do you pay an extra premium for 'legal protection'? That's meant to help you in these circumstances. I've coughed up for legal protection on car and house insurance for umpteen years but never used it.

 

[Arfermo]

Infuriating! Do you pay an extra premium for 'legal protection'? That's meant to help you in these circumstances. I've coughed up for legal protection on car and house insurance for umpteen years but never used it.

I think I did but am not interested in letting AXA loose on anything now. They have been fiddling around fort over 6 months after assurances by mail and phone that they would ensure that they would " protect my interests" in the dispute (what dispute - I haven't done anything?) and so RENEWAL WITH THEM IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. I have analysed my mileage against my credit card statement and Google Maps mileages covering the period in question and am happy that my car cannot possibly have flown that distance without me being there. In any case I have some far better offers waiting for me to accept when AXA get their fingers out and correct the adverse notation about me.

 

[madasafish]

I think I did but am not interested in letting AXA loose on anything now. They have been fiddling around fort over 6 months after assurances by mail and phone that they would ensure that they would " protect my interests" in the dispute (what dispute - I haven't done anything?) and so RENEWAL WITH THEM IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. I have analysed my mileage against my credit card statement and Google Maps mileages covering the period in question and am happy that my car cannot possibly have flown that distance without me being there. In any case I have some far better offers waiting for me to accept when AXA get their fingers out and correct the adverse notation about me.

Write to the Daily Telegraph /Daily Mail Agony Aunts - the DT's Finance one is very good - that should put a rocket under AXA.

Link to DT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/katie-investigates/katie-morley-investigates-contact-form/

 

[Amari]

Write to the Daily Telegraph /Daily Mail Agony Aunts - the DT's Finance one is very good - that should put a rocket under AXA.
Link to DT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/katie-investigates/katie-morley-investigates-contact-form/

Or, if you don't like the right-wing press, try the Guardian. The Times is also acceptable.

 

[Arfermo]

Or, if you don't like the right-wing press, try the Guardian. The Times is also acceptable.

Thanks everybody - I am enjoying this fracas with AXA actually - bar stewards. keeps me ticking over.