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"Keep it simple" is a saying much favoured by folk dowsers - even one
quoted in English by French dowsers. I don't doubt that many people
have difficulty thinking about, or dowsing, complicated propositions,
but there are some things in life that are not simple and while
pretending that they are may well keep the sweat from your brow and
your heart beats steady, it may well land you with the wrong story,
or at best only half the right one.

It's one of the things I always thought that "scientific" chaps were
being so foolish about when they praised "Ockham's razor", or the
parsimony principle: that the best policy when looking for
explanations is to choose the simplest possible theory. This would
get a bushman picking up a transistor radio (still playing) precisely
nowhere, since the simplest theory would be that it's a box with a
spirit in it.

A case in point which I wish to examine here is the well-known
tendency of dowsers to come badly adrift when placed under test. This
is so marked that from time to time the Society is moved to warn
members against participating in trials unless they know what they
are at. It's not a universal problem - there are certain
water-diviners who positively relish stuffing their results up the
noses of drillers who scoff at their work, and there is no doubt that
the nearer a test can be manoeuvred to a dowser's normal practice,
the better the prospect will be for a normal set of good results.

In Internet discussions on this matter, I often quote the now
celebrated success of dowsers when subjected to a very few onerous
tests by the conjuror James Randi in his series "Psychic
Investigator" for ITV in 1992. Randi is a prominent "skeptic" (the
American spelling has become usual for this reverse-believing variety
of sceptic, thanks to the journal Skeptical Inquirer which seeks not
to enquire but to scoff behind impregnable walls of inaction) and for
the best part of two years hosted these programmes in which psychics
and seers became bewildered and distressed as their usual faculties
departed from them, Randi remaining impassive and jovially dismissive
as his own prejudices were repeatedly "proven".

Surely, I thought, reading a Psychic News account of one such
disaster in 1991, he is going to get round to dowsers before long. We
can't let this happen to us !

And nor did "we" - or rather Bob Harris and Michael Cook, who when
that duly occurred were two of the chosen dowsers. Before taking
part, they held a short affirmation invoking "protection" from Randi
and his powers. There's not room here to tell the whole very jolly
story, alas - but to summarise, three of the four dowsing exercises
were successful and when Bob Harris tried to suggest to Randi that
Professor Hans-Dieter Betz's trials validating dowsing
qualified for his (then) $10,000 reward, Randi ordered the cameras
to be turned off and was barracked by the studio audience. After
filming, Randi tried to have the programme cancelled, without
success.

Now, when dowsers discuss failure under trial, in my experience they
almost invariably blame overt or unconscious hostility on the part of
the experimenters. What they don't know is that over in another neck
of the woods, some others are getting worked up about failure in
trials too - the complementary medicine workers. I run a natural
health clinic in the famous "commuter town with strange energies"
East Grinstead and take an intense interest in research worldwide
into natural medicine. There's something seriously skewed about that
too. If you run a clinic you know perfectly well that healers and
therapists would not stay in the game if they got "success", however
you like to pitch that, with fewer than around 75% of clients. Yet
these studies, diligently reported by the Exeter University research
digest FACT, repeatedly show astonishingly poor results with
herbalism, homoeopathy and healing, down to
pretty well nothing in some cases. What was happening ? Were there
clinics out there that genuinely had practitioners who regarded these
figures as acceptable ? If so, it was not surprising some doctors
were remaining antagonistic to CAM (as the acronym now is -
complementary and alternative medicine).

Our homoeopath made the dowsers look like doves. He was certain in
his gut the researchers were deliberately falsifying the results. He
was so disgusted he never read such things. But I did read them, and
in many cases the trials were being run by the practitioners
themselves - and still shooting the therapy dead in the water !

An extreme case arose in September 2002, when FACT reported a trial
of dowsing at the Glasgow homoeopathic hospital, entirely conducted
by the medical homoeopaths there. Dowsing is a touchy subject in
medical (which is to say, medically-qualified) homoeopathy, partly
because it steers the user away from classical homoeopathy in which
single remedies are applied to carefully noted cases to achieve
"provings" and so benefit the homoeopathic world as a whole; and
partly because it is associated with the "rag-tag-and-bobtail" (as
perceived there) of the radiesthetic homoeopaths and worse, the
radionic and "vibronic" homoeopaths who dispense blank tablets that
have been charged up in machines. Be that as it may, dowsing must
have made huge headway in medical homoeopathy for this trial to have
been staged at all.

The trial was far from being a true trial of dowsing in homoeopathy.
It was more of a party trick thing. The homoeopaths, running the
trial themselves, had repeatedly to identify unlabelled bottles some
of which contained blank tablets (of lactic sugar) and some the
remedy Betony. They failed to do better than chance.

Now, FACT does a very balanced judgement of trial procedures in its
reports but lately, to be still fairer, it has been inviting the
original study authors to comment on its own comments. In this case,
the homoeopaths remained silent. I suspect, if they (or an
influential few) had been using dowsing satisfactorily for some time,
they were too devastated to think of anything useful to say.

So I thought I would say it for them, as it was time the whistle was
blown on the whole business of trials destroying what is being tried.
I admit now, I didn't do a global check of all the suspect trials I
had read, I concentrated on this one study. Could it be that the
homoeopaths, or some of them, were unwittingly, unconsciously,
hostile to their own
dowsing ? What did a dowse say ?

After giving a couple of examples of verified medical dowsing, here's
what I said in my letter, which was published in FACT's issue for
December 2002:-

        What is different about trials, then ? Dowsers always impute
        failure to interference in
        the presumed unconscious mental realm in which dowsing operates
        by unconscious
        hostility on the part of investigators. However, while the
        outcomes of isolated
        cases where supposed measures of "protection" were taken before
        the trial appear to
        support this idea, the intuitive faculty can be used to arrive at
        a less emotive
        conclusion.
 
        This is that intuitive "mindstuff" operations such as dowsing and
        mental healing are
        conducted in, and require, a spirit of calm acceptance that the
        faculty works. Trials are
        conducted for the express purpose of finding out if it works; and
        the neutrality of the
        intent conflicts with the positive spirit the exercise might
        otherwise have. Experienced
        dowsers are very happy to have tests conducted on them in terms
        of audits of their
        normal work, where they are mentally geared to providing a
        service for a client and the
        exercise is conducted under their implicit control.
 
        In the particular instance of this study, the homoeopaths were
        engaged in an academic
        exercise of identifying bottles whose purpose was neutral
        enquiry. Without taking
        dynamic and proactive precautions to maintain positive project
        "ownership" - or in
        esoteric language, "protect" themselves - they were fated to
        fail.
 
        This effect can be detected as extending also to many, many
        orthodox-"owned" trials of
        CAM reported in FACT. Allopathic medicine operates under a belief
        system in which it is
        generally supposed that chemicals alone perform the healing. I
        was recently astonished to discover one doctor at least who had
        never heard of the term _vis medicatrix naturae_ (natural healing
        energy) and when introduced to it, even mocked it. This
        mechanistic outlook unwittingly insulates allopathy from mental
        interference. CAM in contrast explicitly acknowledges a mental or
        psychological dimension to its power; and for any activity where
        the predominating group expectation can influence the outcome,
        experimenter effect can become its Achilles heel. CAM
        proponents beware !
 
Now, it might have been quite a coup to get any kind of discussion of
this sort into an avowedly orthodox journal, and perhaps for a first
stab it did help to have kept things really simple, but alas, they
are not. Shortly after this, some tests were brought to my attention
where nothing so straightforward, if dowsing was correct, was
happening. The dowsers were plainly being thrown off their stride by
more than an enforced neutral intent. After all, did not the
experienced dowsers in Betz's now famous "plank-walking" experiment
come and complain to him about the difficulty of it all ? (Details of
that, by the way, are in Tom Williamson's book Dowsing: New Light on
an Ancient Art, 1993, Robert Hale, London ISBN 0-7090-5060-7.)

So only then did I sit down and look at all the tests of dowsing and
healing, of which there are now a large number, and draw up a list of
significant interfering or disturbing factors with their order of
importance:-

Factor                                       Percentage influence

1 Lack of affirmative purpose of exercise                   48
2 Unconscious hostility of exercise "owners"                32
3 Fear on part of testee of failure/ridicule                22
4 Lack of client to create a need to know and to
  "gear" the purpose                                        20
5 Testee forced by conditions of trial off usual
  successful field or mode of work                          15
6 Personality clash between tester and testee
  other than factor 2                                       12
7 Background resistance to success from society              8
8 Fear on part of testee of success (see below)              3
9 Other disturbing factors (noise, interruptions etc.)       2

These categories have been defined by dowsing and both merge into and
magnify each other, so are fuzzy in the extreme and result in a total
greater than 100. Dowsers may care to check them, but they are
unlikely to agree closely thanks to the different meanings given to
words by different people (a major bugbear of that other soiled
candidate for investigation, group dowsing).

Trials by "The Amazing James Randi" (to give him his full honorific)
touch most of these buttons. He is overtly hostile to "paranormal"
occurrences (2), he acts as a major figurehead for the "skeptical"
sector of society (7), he guarantees an argument about success
equating to proof for any testee so unfortunate as to succeed (8)
and, most interestingly of all, his intense fear of anomalous
occurrence undoubtedly guides him unconsciously to try and ensure the
testee (5) does not perform in his or her chosen and familiar field
of work - a vitally useful
proclivity to possess when you have a million dollars to lose and the
dowser is accepting your
much trumpeted challenge. This last factor was even in evidence in
the television trial when he successfully persuaded archaeological
dowsers to pronounce on the supposed "cancer influences" in some
streets in York, work which they pointed out they didn't normally do.
(In the event they seemed to have been correct, all the same. The
streets were safe and Randi was pretending they weren't.) And on top
of all that, he has working for him the proven fragility of dowsing
when subjected to the other trial abnormalities.

What is the way forward ? Maybe for those aroused by a challenge, it
will be the development of affirmations like that of Harris and Cook,
but I prefer a certainty and would nail my flag to the mast of
"audit" - being tested where I know I am strong, in my normal work
for clients where a duty is created and where in some cases such as
serious injuries sensed at a distance I must get it right first time
every time - or else ! Indeed, to undertake such apparently risky
tasks at all is a kind of affirmation in itself. Really, this is the
edge of a big subject, in which trials play only a small part.

© Dan Wilson 2003