Crystal healing still is questionable

On February 5, 2017 I blogged about Can turquoise and other crystals heal fear of public speaking? and concluded it is likely we are fooling ourselves. Recently there has been more on crystals and healing.

At The Guardian there was an article describing where crystals are mined by Tess McClure on September 17, 2019 titled Dark crystals: the brutal reality beyond a booming wellness craze. At Science-Based Medicine on September 18, 2019 there was a serious article by Steven Novella about Crystal Healing which said:

“….Crystal healing has many of the hallmarks of alternative medicine pseudoscience, and is just another manifestation of many common themes. It is a form of energy medicine. Proponents claim that different types of crystals either contain, amplify, attract, or repel different kinds of energy. Like energy medicine in general, we are not talking about any kind of real energy that can be identified or measured by physicists. This energy is not predicted by the standard model of particle physics, and don’t expect the Large Hadron Collider to find any force carrying particles related to crystal energy. There is no Higgs Boson of energy medicine.
The ‘energy’ referred to in energy medicine is purely metaphorical and mythical. Proponents generally claim that it is ‘spiritual’ energy, which is just a way of saying that the energy has no physical properties that can be detected, and is therefore outside the realm of scientific discovery. But at the same time they claim that this mysterious ‘energy’ can affect living things, which is the inherent contradiction at the core of this belief.
Invoking undetectable ‘energy’, without defining it in any testable way, as an explanation is a common tactic of pseudoscience. Types of energy medicine include straight chiropractic, Reiki, acupuncture, therapeutic touch, healing touch, and is a good fallback position for any other treatment lacking a plausible mechanism….”

Also this year there was an episode of The Simpsons about crystal healing titled Crystal Blue-Haired Persuasion. Marge sold crystals at a store called Murmur (whose competitor was a mall kiosk called Plop) before realizing they don’t work. You can read a transcript here and watch video in pieces at YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

My cartoon was Photoshopped from this one of a man and an image of blue lace agate at Wikimedia Commons.