Some friends who saw me with this book imagined that I was studying spells and sorcery, but the sub-title cleared things up: the road from foolishness to fraud.

"The line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, I use the term voodoo science to cover them all: pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience and fraudulent science." (p.10)

The book is a very welcome and worthwhile discussion of various subjects and sagas, from cold fusion to parapsychology to fears about power lines causing cancer. The concerns are the down-to-earth issues of public health and public money, and the author charts the interplay of gullibility, misinformation and fraudulence across this range.

On homeopathy, Parks repeats a joke I'd not heard:

"The standard homeopathy joke concerns the patient who died of an overdose after taking ordinary water by mistake." (p.57)

Here's some perspective on homeopathic dilutions:

"Oscillococcinum, the standard homeopathic remedy for flu, is derived from duck liver, but its widespread use in homeopathy poses little threat to the duck population - the standard dilution is an astounding 200C. The C means the extract is diluted one part per hundred and shaken, repeated sequentially two hundred times. That would result in a dilution of one molecule of the extract to every 10⁴⁰⁰ molecules of water - that is, 1 followed by 400 zeros. But there are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire universe. A dilution of 200C would go beyond the dilution limit of the entire visible universe!" (p.53)

Park then raises the awkward question of how we might ensure that a given remedy wasn't fraudulently devoid of ingredients:

"if a government agency was required to certify to the truthfulness of homeopathic labelling, what would it test for? It would be like trying to prove that holy water had been blessed." (p.58)

Amidst the misguided multitudes, one person stands out: a 9-year old girl called Emily Rosa. She figured out a test for a school science project, and spent $10 on materials. Therapists who claimed to be able to detect energy fields emanating from people were asked to put their hands through holes in a screen, behind which the unseen Emily would place her hand under one or other of the therapists' hands, according to a coin toss.

"Once the procedure was explained, many of the therapists expressed confidence that they would be able to sense the presence of Emily's hand with 100 percent accuracy. The entire procedure was captured on videotape. In 280 trials, the therapists scored 44 percent. The therapists were stunned." (p.210)

For those who honestly wish to figure out what's what in a culture swamped by commercially-inspired nonsense, this book is recommended reading.