University of Michigan Purposes of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Discussion

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  • My essay main argument points: 
  • Stop use wild animal elements in TCM is good because there are many substitutions use in TCM and policies help protect wild animals so that make people more participate in protecting them.
  • Muse use at least 2 resources from here:

reading 1: Qiu, Jane.“When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 21st Century.” National Science Review, vol. 2, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2015, pp. 377–380.  https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/2/3/377/1429424

reading 2: Michael. "What It's Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom." The Atlantic, June 2018. (see attached file)

reading 3:Mike. “American Exorcism” The Atlantic, December 2018 (see attached file)

reading 4: "Science, Pseudoscience, and Nonsense." Journal of College Science Teaching, vol. 45, no. 5, 2016, pp. 61-65 (see attached file)

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4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic American Exorcism Priests are elding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a centuries-old practice is nding new footing in the modern world. My Account Give a Gift Clay Rodery Story by Mike Mariani L DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE RELIGION    to be having a panic attack. It was March of 2016, and Louisa, a 33year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, was having a regular weekly session with her chemicaldependency counselor in Tacoma, Washington. Louisa had recently separated from her husband, Steven. When the counselor asked about her marriage, she said she wasn’t ready to talk about it. The counselor pressed, and again Louisa demurred. Eventually the conversation grew tense, and Louisa started to hyperventilate, a common symptom of a panic attack. TheAtlantic – Why Are Exorcisms on the Rise? - The Atlantic - Mike Mariani To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. The counselor rushed down the hall to get Louisa’s therapist, Amy Harp. Together they moved Louisa to Harp’s office, where they felt they could better calm her. But once Louisa was there, Harp recalls, her demeanor transformed. Normally friendly and open, she started screaming and pulling out clumps of her hair. She growled and glared. Her head flailed from side to side, cocking back at odd angles. In jumbled https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 1/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic bursts, she muttered about good and evil, God and the devil. She told the counselors that no one there could save “Louisa.” According to Harp, Louisa seemed to vacillate between this unhinged state and her normal self. One minute she would snarl and bare her teeth, and the next she would beg for help. “It definitely had this appearance where she was fighting within herself,” Harp told me. Harp had never seen this kind of behavior before, and wasn’t sure what to do. But she knew that Louisa had occasionally experienced episodes in which she felt something indescribably dark overtake her, and that she would read scripture to beat back these states. “You need to read Bible verses,” Harp said. Her bearing still frantic, Louisa picked up her smartphone and began looking up passages. As she read, she started to calm down. Her flailing diminished; her frenzied affect ebbed. She vomited in a trash bin, and after that she was her old self again, full of apologies, her eyes wet, her face red. The encounter left Harp baffled about what she’d just witnessed. For Louisa it had a more profound effect, prompting a search for answers that would ultimately lead her away from modern medicine and its well-worn paths for mental-health treatment, and toward the older, more ritualized remedies of her Catholic faith. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 2/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic Louisa Muskovits experienced a series of troubling episodes that her therapists couldn’t explain. These incidents led her to seek spiritual help. (Ian Allen) T    demons exist—and that they exist to harass, derange, and smite human beings—stretches back as far as religion itself. In ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonian priests performed exorcisms by casting wax figurines of demons into a fire. The Hindu Vedas, thought to have been written between 1500 and 500 .., refer to supernatural beings—known as asuras, but largely understood today as demons—that challenge the gods and sabotage human affairs. For the ancient Greeks, too, demonlike creatures lurked on the shadowy fringes of the human world. But far from being confined to a past of Demiurges and evil eyes, belief in demonic possession is widespread in the United States today. Polls conducted in recent decades by Gallup and the data firm YouGov suggest that roughly half of Americans believe demonic possession is real. The percentage who believe in the devil is even higher, and in fact has been growing: Gallup polls show that the number rose from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 3/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic The official exorcist for Indianapolis has received 1,700 requests so far in 2018. Perhaps as a result, demand for exorcisms—the Catholic Church’s antidote to demonic possession—seems to be growing as well. Though the Church does not keep official statistics, the exorcists I interviewed for this article attest to fielding more pleas for help every year. Father Vincent Lampert, the official exorcist for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, told me in early October that he’d received 1,700 phone or email requests for exorcisms in 2018, by far the most he’s ever gotten in one year. Father Gary Thomas—a priest whose training as an exorcist in Rome was documented in The Rite, a book published in 2009 and made into a movie in 2011—said that he gets at least a dozen requests a week. Several other priests reported that without support from church staff and volunteers, their exorcism ministries would quickly swallow up their entire weekly schedules. The Church has been training new exorcists in Chicago, Rome, and Manila. Thomas told me that in 2011 the U.S. had fewer than 15 known Catholic exorcists. Today, he said, there are well over 100. Other exorcists I spoke with put the number between 70 and 100. (Again, no official statistics exist, and most dioceses conceal the identity of their appointed exorcist, to avoid unwanted attention.) In October of last year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had Exorcisms and Related Supplications —a handbook containing the rite of exorcism—translated into English. The rite had been updated in 1998 and again a few years later, but this was the first time it was issued in English since it had been standardized in 1614. “There’s been a whole reclaiming of a ministry that the Church had set aside,” one exorcist from a midwestern diocese told me. The inescapable question is: Why? Or rather: Why now? Why, in our modern age, are so many people turning to the Church for help in banishing incorporeal fiends from their body? And what does this resurgent interest tell us about the figurative demons tormenting contemporary society? I  , a German psychologist named Traugott Oesterreich collected historical eyewitness accounts in his book Possession: Demoniacal and Other. One incident that crops up again and again involves a young woman named Magdalene in Orlach, Germany. Born into a family of peasant farmers, Magdalene was an industrious child, “threshing, hemp-beating, and mowing” from dawn until after dusk. Late in the winter of 1831, Magdalene began seeing strange things in the barn where she tended cows. By the following year, she was being tormented by voices, sensations of physical assault, and, according to witnesses, spontaneous outbursts of flames. That summer, Magdalene complained of a spirit that had “flown upon her, pressed her down, and endeavored to throttle her.” Soon, she would fall victim to full possessions: An entity she referred to as the “Black One” would descend and supplant her consciousness with its own. “In the midst of her work she sees him in human form (a masculine shape in a frock, as if issuing from a dark cloud; she can never clearly describe his face) coming towards her,” a contemporary observer wrote. “Then she sees him approach, always from the left side, feels as it were a cold hand which seizes the back of her neck, and in this way he enters into her.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 4/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic One witness to Magdalene’s possessions was dumbfounded. “The transformation of personality is absolutely marvelous,” he wrote. The girl loses consciousness, her ego disappears, or rather withdraws to make way for a fresh one. Another mind has now taken possession of this organism, of these sensory organs, of these nerves and muscles, speaks with this throat, thinks with these cerebral nerves, and that in so powerful a manner that the half of the organism is, as it were, paralyzed. The case studies Oesterreich collected served as one of the chief inspirations for William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, which was adapted into the 1973 horror film of the same name—it was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and is considered by many to be one of the most frightening films ever made. Another inspiration for The Exorcist was the 1949 case of a teenage boy known by the pseudonym “Roland Doe.” He was an only child who developed a strong attachment to his aunt, a spiritualist who showed him how to use a Ouija board. After she died, Roland and his parents reported strange phenomena in their house—furniture moving on its own, scratching noises coming from Roland’s mattress, objects levitating. The paranormal occurrences, Roland’s parents observed, always seemed to happen around their son. According to some accounts, a priest conducted an exorcism on Roland at Georgetown University Hospital, a Jesuit institution in D.C., during which the boy managed to snap off a bedspring from underneath his mattress and use it to slash the priest’s arm. Roland and his parents eventually left their home in Maryland to stay with extended family in St. Louis. There, priests carried out at least 20 exorcisms over the course of a month. Witnesses claimed that Roland spoke in a deep, unrecognizable voice and spouted Latin phrases he’d never learned. He reportedly vomited so profusely that the exorcist performing the rite had to wear a raincoat, and he fought so violently that 10 people were required to hold him down. One of the priests said that at a certain point he saw the word hell appear as though etched into Roland’s flesh. In April 1949, several hours into an exorcism, Roland finally surfaced from his trancelike state. “He’s gone,” Roland told the priests. Several researchers have since cast doubt on whether anything supernatural took place during the exorcisms, but none has been able to definitively contradict the priests’ accounts. Part of The Exorcist’s appeal may have been the faint but unmistakable sense that it was drawn from real events. One Catholic exorcist I spoke with who was around for the film’s release believes that its success revealed a latent aspect of the American character. “It confirmed something deep in the popular imagination,” the priest, who asked that I not use his name so as to keep his identity as an exorcist private, told me. “Very visceral, very irrational, beyond science, far buried underneath medicine and psychology: this huge fear that these things are true.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 5/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic Louisa’s grandmother, who was an American Indian and a devout Catholic, warned her about evil spirits. (Ian Allen) L ’  had started long before that late-winter session with her chemical-dependency counselor. In 2009, at age 26, she’d had an experience in the middle of the night that had left her badly shaken. She was living in Orlando with Steven, and she’d just fallen asleep. Louisa had recently given birth to their first child, a son, who was tucked between his parents in bed. At one point during the night, she awoke and found herself paralyzed. “There was something holding me down,” she remembers. “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to die.” She desperately wanted to wake up Steven, but her body was inert, pinned to the mattress. All she could move were her eyes, and they darted around the room in horror. When Louisa told friends and family about the episode, most shrugged it off. Some suggested that it might have been a lingering effect of having just undergone a strenuous delivery (she had needed a cesarean section). Louisa decided they were probably right. In 2011, she was finishing up her undergraduate degree in women’s studies at Washington State University. For a required internship that fall, she chose to travel to Kathmandu, Nepal, to work for an organization that provides aid to impoverished women and children in the region. After a month in Kathmandu, Louisa became infected with E. coli and had to be hospitalized for two days. When she was discharged, she debated flying home right away. She’d completed her internship, but her scheduled flight wasn’t for another four weeks. She’d been looking forward to making the famous Annapurna Base Camp trek. But now she was drained and weary of her surroundings. The other interns https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 6/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic had left the apartment complex where she was staying, and the city’s streets had been shut down because of political protests. The night after she left the hospital, Louisa locked the door to her apartment, secured the window with a wooden bar, and went to bed. As Louisa tells it, she awoke in the darkness to the sound of someone’s breathing. It seemed close: She could feel the hot exhales on the back of her right ear and her neck. There’s no way anybody could get into the room, she thought, lying motionless in her sleeping bag. How is this possible? Thoughts of evil spirits rushed to Louisa’s mind. Her grandmother, who was both an American Indian and a devout Catholic, had warned her about them. If Louisa ever encountered evil spirits, her grandmother had told her, she should do her best to ignore them, because they feed on attention. Louisa tried, but the breathing continued, a heavy, rhythmic rasp. Then, after a minute or so, she felt a hand brush against her collarbone. At that sensation, which to this day she cannot account for, Louisa leapt out of her sleeping bag and ran to turn on the light. She swears that as soon as she flipped the switch, she heard a pack of stray dogs break out in wild yelps. By dawn Louisa had cleared out, walking several miles to the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu. She took the next flight back to Orlando. Louisa had yet another incident in 2013, just after giving birth to her second child, a daughter. This episode was more like the first—she woke up abruptly, only to find her body locked in place—but with the added shock of what seemed to be visual hallucinations, including one of a giant spider crawling into her bedroom. Louisa was so jolted that she barely ate or slept for three days. “I didn’t feel safe,” she said. “I felt violated.” She’d been seeing a psychiatrist in Orlando. “This is the third time this has happened,” Louisa remembers telling her. “Am I crazy?” The doctor flashed a look of surprise but offered no satisfying insights. So Louisa turned to the internet. Sleep paralysis seemed like a promising explanation. A phenomenon in which sufferers move too quickly in and out of  sleep for the body to keep up, sleep paralysis causes a person’s mind to wake up before the body can shake off the effects of sleep. Hovering near full consciousness, the person can experience paralysis and hallucinations. But Louisa didn’t think this could account for the hand on her collarbone, which she swore she’d felt while she was completely awake. She started to wonder whether something was pursuing her. Amid consuming fear, she waded into some darker internet waters: elaborate descriptions and YouTube testimonials of people who claimed that a demon or some other evil entity had dragged them down to hell. She pored over artists’ renderings of hell—naked bodies writhing like snakes, being consumed by orange flames. “I became obsessed with this topic,” she told me. On the Sunday after her third incident, in the grips of these new fears, Louisa attended Mass in Orlando, at Saint James Cathedral. After the service, she recounted all three of her experiences to the priest, who immediately asked whether she’d ever dabbled in the occult. When she told him that she had used a Ouija board after her grandfather had passed away a couple of years earlier, he told her to get rid of it, along https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 7/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic with anything else that could be construed as occult: tarot cards, amulets, pagan symbols, even healing crystals and birthstones. Any of these things, he told her, could serve as a doorway for a demon. I    some Catholics to learn just how literally the modern Church interprets Satan and his army of demons. While many people today understand the devil as a metaphor for sin, temptation, and unresolvable evil in the world, the pope consistently repudiates such allegorical readings. In sermons, interviews, and occasionally in tweets, Pope Francis has declared that Satan—whom he has referred to as Beelzebub, the Seducer, and the Great Dragon—is a literal being devoted to deceiving and debasing humans. In an apostolic exhortation released in April, he wrote, “We should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea,” but rather as a “personal being who assails us.” Exorcisms also occur in some Protestant and nondenominational Churches, but the Catholic Church has the most formal, rigorous, and long-standing tradition. The Church sees the influence that demons and their leader, the devil, can have on human beings as existing on a spectrum. Demonic oppression—in which a demon pressures a person to accept evil—lies on one end. Demonic possession—in which one or more demons seize control of a person’s body and speak through that person—lies on the other end. Catholic priests use a process called discernment to determine whether they’re dealing with a genuine case of possession. In a crucial step, the person requesting an exorcism must undergo a psychiatric evaluation with a mental-health professional. The vast majority of cases end there, as many of the individuals claiming possession are found to be suffering from psychiatric issues such as schizophrenia or a dissociative disorder, or to have recently gone off psychotropic medication. Father Thomas said that as many as 80 percent of the people who come to him seeking an exorcism are sexualabuse survivors. For some, being told they do not suffer from demonic possession can be a letdown. Father Vincent Lampert, the exorcist from Indianapolis, remembered a young man who came to him seeking an exorcism but was told he was experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. “You can tell me that I’m schizophrenic, but you can’t tell me why,” Lampert recalled the young man saying. “If it’s demonic, at least I have my why.” If neither the mental-health evaluation nor a subsequent physical exam turns up a standard explanation for the person’s affliction, the priest starts to take the case more seriously. At this point he may begin looking for what the Church considers the classic signs of demonic possession: facility in a language the person has never learned; physical strength beyond his or her age or condition; access to secret knowledge; and a vehement aversion to God and sacred objects, including crucifixes and holy water. Only a very small number of exorcism requests make it through the discernment process. The Catholic exorcists I interviewed—each with more than a decade of experience in the role—had worked on only a https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 8/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic handful of cases deemed to be true possession. “The Church wants to tread lightly and be skeptical” when examining possible cases of demonic possession, Lampert said, and thus treats exorcism “like a nuclear weapon”—a countermeasure that is important to have in the arsenal but that should be used only when no other explanation can be found. The ritual begins with the exorcist, who is typically assisted by several people, sprinkling holy water on the possessed person. The exorcist makes the sign of the cross and kneels to recite the Litany of the Saints, followed by several readings of scripture. He then addresses the demon or demons, establishing the ground rules they must abide by: to reveal themselves when called, give their names when asked to identify themselves, and leave when dismissed. Because the exorcist is working with the full authority of God and Jesus Christ, Catholic doctrine stipulates, the demons have no choice but to obey. At the rite’s climax, sometimes an hour or more into the ritual, the exorcist calls on the devil directly: “I cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every Satanic power of the enemy, every specter from hell, and all your fell companions.” Sessions typically end with a closing prayer and a plan to continue. For those few people the Church believes are truly possessed, a half-dozen or more exorcisms may be carried out before the priest is confident that the demons have been fully expelled. A    , in order to take possession of a person in the first place, demons rely on doorways—what the priest in Orlando warned Louisa about. These can include things like habitual sin and family curses—in which an act of violence or iniquity committed by one generation manifests itself in subsequent generations. But the priests I spoke with kept coming back, over and over, to two particular doorways. Nearly every Catholic exorcist I spoke with cited a history of abuse—in particular, sexual abuse—as a major doorway for demons. Thomas said that as many as 80 percent of the people who come to him seeking an exorcism are sexual-abuse survivors. According to these priests, sexual abuse is so traumatic that it creates a kind of “soul wound,” as Thomas put it, that makes a person more vulnerable to demons. The exorcists—to be clear—aren’t saying sexual abuse torments people to such an extent that they come to believe they’re possessed; the exorcists contend that abuse fosters the conditions for actual demonic possession to take hold. But from a secular standpoint, the link to sexual abuse helps explain why someone might become convinced that he or she is being menaced by something sinister and overpowering. The correlation with abuse struck me as eerie, given the scandals that have rocked the Church. But it doesn’t seem to answer the “why now?” question behind exorcism’s comeback; no evidence exists to suggest that child abuse has increased. The second doorway—an interest in the occult—might offer at least a partial explanation. Most of the exorcists I interviewed said they believed that demonic possession was becoming more common—and they cited a resurgence in magic, divination, witchcraft, and attempts to communicate with the dead as a primary cause. According to Catholic teaching, engaging with the occult involves accessing parts of the spiritual realm that may be inhabited by demonic forces. “Those practices become the engine that allows the demon to come in,” Thomas said. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 9/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic In recent years, journalists and academics have documented a renewed interest in magic, astrology, and witchcraft, primarily among Millennials. “The occult is a substitution for God,” Thomas said. “People want to take shortcuts, and the occult is all about power and knowledge.” One exorcist pointed to Harry Potter. The books and films “disarmed Americans from thinking that all magic is darkness,” he said. After listening to the priests and poring over news articles, I started to wonder whether the two trends— belief in the occult and the rising demand for Catholic exorcisms—might have the same underlying cause. So many modern social ills feel dark and menacing and beyond human control: the opioid epidemic, the permanent loss of blue-collar jobs, blighted communities that breed alienation and dread. Maybe these crises have led people to believe that other, more preternatural, forces are at work. But when I floated this theory with historians of religion, they offered different explanations. A few mentioned Pope Francis’s influence, as well as that of Pope John Paul II, who brought renewed attention to the exorcism rite when he had it updated in 1998. But more described how, during periods when the influence of organized religions ebbs, people seek spiritual fulfillment through the occult. “As people’s participation in orthodox Christianity declines,” said Carlos Eire, a historian at Yale specializing in the early modern period, “there’s always been a surge in interest in the occult and the demonic.” He said that today we’re seeing a “hunger for contact with the supernatural.” Adam Jortner, an expert on American religious history at Auburn University, agreed. “When the influence of the major institutional Churches is curbed,” he said, people “begin to look for their own answers.” And at the same time that there has been a rebirth in magical thinking, Jortner added, American culture has become steeped in movies, TV shows, and other media about demons and demonic possession. Today’s increased willingness to believe in the paranormal, then, seems to have begun as a response to secularization before spreading through the culture and landing back on the Church’s doorstep—in the form of people seeking salvation from demons through the Catholic faith’s most mystical ritual. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 10/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic Louisa sought help from a priest at Saint Stephen the Martyr Church in Renton, Washington. (Ian Allen) W     talking with Louisa, she recounted the three nighttime episodes in great detail, giving me the impression that they were the only precursors to the incident in Amy Harp’s office. But just after my visit to Tacoma in March, I spoke by phone with Steven, with whom Louisa had recently reconciled, and he told me that she had been suffering for years from daytime episodes, too. The incidents in the middle of the night frightened Louisa more and felt, to her, more supernatural, but Steven found these daytime experiences much harder to explain. One of these episodes occurred on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2014. Louisa had followed the instructions of the priest at Saint James Cathedral, throwing out her Ouija board and some healing crystals. She and Steven had moved back to Washington State with their two children, hoping that proximity to family and friends would do her good. They settled into a routine—Steven worked at a https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 11/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic nearby warehouse; Louisa looked after the children—and for a while, Louisa all but forgot the nighttime incidents in Orlando. When Steven first started witnessing Louisa’s episodes, he assumed they were symptoms of a psychiatric disorder. On that November Saturday in 2014, Louisa spent a few hours at a friend’s house in Tacoma. She came home in the early evening and spent some time upstairs in her bedroom. She eventually returned to the living room and spoke briefly with Steven. Then she fell silent. When she began talking again, a new persona emerged. Normally an affable, meandering conversationalist, Louisa assumed a slow, measured tone. Steven had seen these transformations before, at least half a dozen times during the decade or so he’d known Louisa, who could never remember them afterward. Recognizing the signs of what was happening, he told me, he grabbed his tablet and began filming. The footage is dark and the sound quality poor. The camera is pointed directly at Louisa. The video lasts for about 20 minutes. “You humans have your own sense of time,” Louisa tells Steven at one point. “I have plenty of time. I have all the time in the world.” She then shifts into a staccato whisper. “It’s your wife I want,” she says, “not only her body, but her soul.” As she speaks, she jerks her head from side to side, at first quickly, like a marionette, then slowly, like a viper swaying to the sounds of a snake charmer’s pungi. Halfway through the video, Louisa leans toward Steven and freezes, her face just a few inches from his. “God can’t save her,” she tells him. “Do you understand that? She’s mine.” After a period of tense silence, she suddenly arches her spine, and her face goes through a series of contortions. As I watched, I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. The grating static and long, empty silences lent an air of both amateurism and authenticity—I didn’t get the feeling that the video had been faked. All I could settle on, though, was that the camera had captured Louisa in some kind of dissociative state in which her emergent identity believed itself to be inhuman. When Steven first started witnessing these episodes, he assumed they were symptoms of a psychiatric disorder. Louisa certainly had had her share of struggles: In addition to these unexplained incidents, she also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had a history of alcohol abuse. But Steven changed his mind when, he claims, strange things began happening alongside Louisa’s episodes—electronic devices abruptly turning on, lights he was sure were broken suddenly illuminating. The things he’s seen since knowing Louisa, he told me, “disturb your reality.” Wynonna Gehrke, who became close friends with Louisa at Washington State University, recalls witnessing something similar. One night, they were hanging out at Gehrke’s house along with another friend when Louisa slipped into a persona her friends didn’t recognize. The emergent identity told them it was a demon that wanted to hurt Louisa. “Her facial expression,” Gehrke told me—“it didn’t seem like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 12/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic her. It creeped me out so bad.” Fearing for both her own safety and Louisa’s, Gehrke wrestled her friend to the ground and eventually managed to calm her. She gave Louisa her bed that night, and she slept on the couch. O   ,   in late March, I made plans to meet Louisa at Saint Stephen the Martyr, a Catholic church in Renton, Washington. It was Palm Sunday, and parishioners began pouring in long before the start of the 8:30 Mass. I found a seat in one of the back pews and waited for Louisa. Midway through the service, I felt a hand brush my shoulder. It was Louisa. She’d arrived late and was listening to the Mass from the foyer with her third child, a 1-year-old daughter. A few minutes later I slipped out to join them. Louisa pushed the baby back and forth in a stroller while her eyes strained toward the altar. She’d told me that the Catholic churches she’d spent time in as a child had always been a source of calm for her—the readings, rituals, and silent prayer ineffably soothing. Although this wasn’t the church she regularly attended, she knew the priest, Father Ed White, well. After her experience with her chemical-dependency counselor in 2016, she’d become convinced that she was being harassed by a demon and had started looking for a Catholic exorcist. A woman she’d met online suggested she contact White. He wasn’t the designated exorcist for the Archdiocese of Seattle, but he had experience in deliverance ministry—the work of helping people overcome different kinds of spiritual difficulties through prayer. In his first session with Louisa, in early 2017, White began by encouraging her to discuss the problems she was experiencing. He then left for a few minutes, returning with the purple stole around his neck that priests wear for both confessions and exorcisms. At that point the session took on the more structured feel of a Christian ritual. In his deliverance ministry, White often asks the person he’s counseling to renounce evil spirits. But when he gave Louisa a piece of paper with renunciation prayers to recite, she froze. Struggling to read the words in front of her, she began moaning and then dry-heaving. Moments later, she slipped into guttural babbling. Louisa’s upper body began contorting, her neck swinging at unnatural angles. White remembers her appearing as though she was in agony. “It didn’t strike me as voluntary or concocted,” he told me. At one point while he was praying aloud, she broke out in hysterical laughter. After the first session, White considered starting the discernment protocol for an exorcism. He invited Louisa back for a second session, which went more smoothly. The two talked and prayed, and Louisa read the renunciation prayers without a problem. “Because I saw progress with what I was doing,” White told me, “I thought it was debatable as to whether she needed an exorcist.” Eventually, because she seemed to be responding to the prayers, White made the determination that Louisa’s case was one of demonic oppression, not possession. She would not have an exorcism. A  ,    at her home in Tacoma, a two-story clapboard house 10 minutes from the Puget Sound, where she described the larger arc of her life and the torments she’d endured. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 13/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic Louisa’s parents separated when she was 3 years old. Her mother eventually remarried and settled with Louisa and her older brother in Fife, a small city just east of Tacoma. Louisa’s childhood and adolescence were marked by abuse: She was molested by a family member, which has caused lifelong post-traumatic stress. She still has nightmares about the experience. “It’s like I’m back there again,” she said. “Thirty years ago, all over again. And then I wake up and I’m like, I’m okay. I’m not there.” But the dreams are saturated with the same sense of helpless dread that pervaded her childhood, which she compares to being “in hell, almost.” As we talked, the baby, quietly tucked in the crook of Louisa’s arm, fell asleep. With her other hand, Louisa dabbed her eyes. To this day, specific triggers—including certain music genres and foods—will send her into a gale of rage and despair. “Walking by a store and it’s playing ’60s music, like Beach Boys or something, I would lose it,” she said. Hamburger Helper, too, has permanently absorbed some residue of her abuse: She thinks her abuser must have made it shortly before or after a molestation episode. Some abused children are subjected to such agonizing experiences that they adopt a coping mechanism in which they force themselves into a kind of out-of-body experience. As they mature, this extreme psychological measure develops into a disorder that may manifest unpredictably. “There is a high prevalence of childhood abuse of different kinds with dissociative disorders,” Roberto Lewis-Fernández, a Columbia University psychiatry professor who studies dissociation, told me. In certain countries, including the U.S., Lewis-Fernández explained, the prevalence of physical and sexual abuse among people with a dissociative disorder is particularly pronounced. Several psychiatrists I’ve asked about Louisa’s case felt that some type of dissociative disorder—whether dissociative identity disorder or a subtype linked to PTSD—could be a plausible clinical explanation for what has been happening to her. But Amy Harp, Louisa’s former therapist, was less certain. “I see a lot of trauma, and it manifests in a lot of different ways,” she told me. Louisa’s, though, was “the most extreme I’ve ever seen.” She ultimately found Louisa’s episodes ambiguous—“possibly trauma, possibly something else.” Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of Columbia’s psychiatry department, told me that if you conducted a survey of the population seeking exorcisms, a great majority would likely suffer from a known psychiatric condition, and dissociative identity disorder would be “at the top of that group of conditions.” But Lieberman also acknowledged the possibility that a small percentage of these cases could be spiritual in nature. Over the course of his career, he’s seen a couple of cases that “could not be explained in terms of normal human physiology or natural laws.” The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM5, seems to recognize this still-mystifying dimension in abnormal psychology: It lists a “possession-form” subtype of dissociative identity disorder and notes that the “majority of possession states around the world” are an accepted part of specific spiritual practices—whether they be trances, shamanic rituals, or speaking in tongues. The DSM-5 is not saying that possession is a scientifically verifiable phenomenon, but rather is acknowledging that many people around the world understand their abnormal mental experiences and behaviors through a spiritual framework. Lewis-Fernández, who was on the committee that made this change, explained that Western psychiatry had long failed to accommodate widespread spiritual traditions. There are “societies where the supernatural is a daily occurrence,” he said. “It’s really https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 14/15 4/11/2021 Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic modern Western societies that draw a sharp line between experiences attributed to the spiritual or the supernatural, and the material, daily world.” Pore over these spiritual and psychiatric frameworks long enough, and the lines begin to blur. If someone lapses into an alternate identity that announces itself as a demon bent on wresting away that person’s soul, how can anyone prove otherwise? Psychiatry has only given us models through which to understand these symptoms, new cultural contexts to replace the old ones. No lab test can pinpoint the medical source of these types of mental fractures. In one sense, the blurry shadow-selves that surface in what we call dissociative states and the demons that Catholic exorcists believe they are casting out are not so different: Both are incorporeal forces of ambiguous agency and intent, rupturing a continuous personality and forever eluding proof. L     a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. And she’s always had a bracing faith in the Catholic Church. When I visited her, she told me she hoped to make another appointment with Father White sometime soon. She also talked about possibly reconnecting with Amy Harp, whom she’d stopped seeing last year but with whom she’d seemed to have had a strong, trusting relationship. I didn’t know which path to healing, if any, she would choose. She seemed torn between the avenues of faith and psychology, uncomfortably astride two roads that ran alongside each other but never quite converged. About a month after I visited her, I got a call from Steven, who told me that Louisa had had another incident. At first he’d thought she was having a seizure—several years had passed since he’d seen one of her dissociative episodes—and he’d considered calling an ambulance. But as he watched, an alternate identity once again took over Louisa, referring to her in the third person and threatening her life. The episode lasted only a few minutes, but it shook Steven. “When you’re witnessing it, it seems like it’s going on forever,” he told me. Whatever was tormenting Louisa wasn’t finished with her yet. When I texted her the next day to see how she was doing, she told me she was managing as best she could. Earlier that morning, she said, she’d made another appointment with Father White. This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “Why Are Exorcisms On the Rise?” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ 15/15 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic My Account Give a Gift S CIENCE What It’s Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom "I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the rst time." MICHAEL POLLAN JUNE 4, 2018 IMAGES ETC LTD / GETTY Paul Stamets, a mycologist I had come to visit in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula to go mushroom hunting, had a gift he wanted to give me. We were in his office, looking at some images on his computer, when he pulled off the shelf a small pile of amadou hats, made of felt pressed from mushroom bers. “See if one of these ts you.” Most of the mushroom hats were too big for me, but I found one that sat comfortably on my head and thanked him for the gift. e hat was surprisingly soft and almost weightless, but I felt a little silly with a mushroom on my head, so I carefully packed it in my luggage. Early Sunday morning we drove west toward the Paci c Coast and then south to the Columbia River, where it ows into the Paci c, stopping for lunch and camping provisions in the resort town of Long Beach. is being the rst week of December, the town was pretty well buttoned up and sleepy. Stamets requested that I not publish the exact location where we went hunting for Psilocybe azurescens, a variety of “magic mushroom” rst identi ed and named by Stamets, and the most potent ever found. But https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 1/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic what I can say is that there are three public parks bordering the wide-open mouth of the Columbia—Fort Stevens, Cape Disappointment, and the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park—and we stayed at one of them. Stamets, who has been coming here to hunt “azzies” for years, was mildly paranoid about being recognized by a ranger, so he stayed in the car while I checked in at the office and picked up a map giving directions to our yurt. As soon as we unloaded and stowed our gear, we laced up our boots and headed out to look for mushrooms. Which really just meant walking around with eyes cast downward, tracing desultory patterns through the scrub along the sand dunes and in the grassy areas adjoining the yurts. We adopted the posture of the psilocybin stoop, except that we raised our heads every time we heard a car coming. Foraging mushrooms is prohibited in most state parks, and being in possession of psilocybin mushrooms is both a state and a federal crime. RECOMMENDED READING This post is adapted from Pollan’s new book. Do Psychedelic Drug Laws Violate Human Rights? ROC MORIN A Psychedelic Can Cure Heroin Withdrawal JESSA GAMBLE e weather was overcast in the high 40s—balmy for this far north on the Paci c Coast in December, when it can be cold, wet, and stormy. We pretty much had the whole park to ourselves. It was a stunning, desolate landscape, with pine trees pruned low and angular by the winds coming off the ocean, endless dead- at sandy beaches with plenty of driftwood, and giant storm-tossed timbers washed up and jack-strawed here and there along the beach. ese logs had somehow slipped out from under the thumb of the lumber industry, oating down the Columbia from the old-growth forests hundreds of miles upriver and washing up here. Stamets suspects that Psilocybe azurescens might originally have ridden out of the forest in the esh of those logs and found its way here to the mouth of the Columbia—thus far the only place the species has ever been found. Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 2/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat. I saw plenty of LBMs—little brown mushrooms—that might or might not be psilocybin and was constantly interrupting Stamets for another ID, and every time he had to prick my bubble of hope that I had at last found the precious quarry. After an hour or two of fruitless searching, Stamets wondered aloud if maybe we had come too late for the azzies. And then all of a sudden, in an excited stage whisper, he called out, “Got one!” I raced over, asking him to leave the mushroom in place so I could see where and how it grew. is would, I hoped, allow me to “get my eyes on,” as mushroom hunters like to say. Once we register on our retinas the visual pattern of the object we’re searching for, it’s much more likely to pop out of the visual eld. (In fact the technical name for this phenomenon is the pop-out effect.) It was a handsome little mushroom, with a smooth, slightly glossy, caramel-colored cap. Stamets let me pick it; it had a surprisingly tenacious grip, and when it came out of the ground, it brought with it some leaf litter, soil, and a little knot of bright-white mycelium. “Bruise the stipe a bit,” Stamets suggested. I did, and within minutes a blue tinge appeared where I’d rubbed it. “at’s the psilocin.” I never expected to actually see the chemical I had read so much about. e mushroom had been growing a stone’s throw from our yurt, right on the edge of a parking spot. Stamets says that like many psilocybin species, “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of consciousness.” At this point, Stamets, who when it comes to mushrooms is one serious dude, made the rst joke I had ever heard him make: “You know one of the best indicator species for Psilocybe azurescens are Winnebagos.” We’re obviously not the rst people to hunt for azzies in this park, and anyone who picks a mushroom trails an invisible cloud of its spore behind him; this, he believes, is the origin of the idea of fairy dust. At the end of many of those trails is apt to be a campsite, a car, or a Winnebago. We found seven azzies that afternoon, though by “we,” I mean Stamets; I only found one, and even then I wasn’t at all certain it was a Psilocybe until Stamets gave me a smile and a thumbs-up. I could swear it looked exactly like half a dozen other species I was nding. Stamets patiently tutored me in mushroom morphology, and by the following day my luck had improved, and I found four little caramel beauties on my own. Not much of a haul, but then Stamets had said that even just one of these mushrooms could occasion a major psychic expedition. at evening, we carefully laid out our seven mushrooms on a paper towel and photographed them before putting them in front of the yurt’s space heater to dry. Within hours, the hot air had transformed a mushroom that was unimpressive to begin with into a tiny, shriveled gray-blue scrap it would be easy to overlook. e idea that something so unprepossessing could have such consequence was hard to credit. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 3/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic I had been looking forward to trying an azzie, but before the evening was over, Stamets had dampened my enthusiasm. “I nd azurescens almost too strong,” he told me when we were standing around the re pit outside our yurt, having a beer. After nightfall, we had driven out onto the beach to hunt for razor clams by headlight; now we were sautéing them with onions over the re. “And azzies have one potential side effect that some people nd troubling.” Yes? “Temporary paralysis,” he said matter-of-factly. He explained that some people on azzies nd they can’t move their muscles for a period of time. at might be tolerable if you’re in a safe place, he suggested, “but what if you’re outdoors and the weather turns cold and wet? You could die of hypothermia.” Not much of an advertisement for azurescens, especially coming from the man who discovered the species and named it. I was suddenly in much less of a hurry to try one. e question I kept returning to that weekend is this: Why in the world would a fungus go to the trouble of producing a chemical compound that has such a radical effect on the minds of the animals that eat it? What, if anything, did this peculiar chemical do for the mushroom? One could construct a quasi-mystical explanation for this phenomenon, as Stamets and Terence McKenna have done: Both suggest that neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us, and it’s trying to tell us something important by way of psilocybin. But this strikes me as more of a poetic conceit than a scienti c theory. e best answer I’ve managed to nd arrived a few weeks later courtesy of Paul Stamets’s professor at Evergreen State College, Michael Beug, the chemist. When I reached him by phone at his home in the Columbia River Gorge, 160 miles upriver of our campsite, Beug said he was retired from teaching and hadn’t spent much time thinking about psilocybes recently, but he was intrigued by my question. I asked him if there is reason to believe that psilocybin is a defense chemical for the mushroom. Defense against pests and diseases is the most common function of the socalled secondary metabolites produced in plants. Curiously, many plant toxins don’t directly kill pests, but often act as psychostimulants as well as poisons, which is why we use many of them as drugs to alter consciousness. Why wouldn’t plants just kill their predators outright? Perhaps because that would quickly select for resistance, whereas messing with its neurotransmitter networks can distract the predator or, better still, lead it to engage in risky behaviors likely to shorten its life. ink of an inebriated insect behaving in a way that attracts the attention of a hungry bird. But Beug pointed out that if psilocybin were a defense chemical, “my former student Paul Stamets would have jumped on it long ago and found a use for it as an antifungal, antibacterial, or insecticide.” In fact Beug has tested fungi for psilocybin and psilocin levels and found that they occur only in minute quantities in the mycelium—the part https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 4/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic of the organism most likely to be well defended. “Instead the chemicals are in the fruiting bodies, sometimes at over 2 percent by dry weight!”—a stupendous quantity, and in a part of the organism it is not a priority to defend. Even if psilocybin in mushrooms began as “an accident of a metabolic pathway,” the fact that it wasn’t discarded during the course of the species’ evolution suggests it must have offered some bene t. “My best guess,” Beug says, “is that the mushrooms that produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely disseminated.” Eaten by whom, or what? And why? Beug says that many animals are known to eat psilocybin mushrooms, including horses, cattle, and dogs. Some, like cows, appear unaffected, but many animals appear to enjoy an occasional change in consciousness, too. Beug is in charge of gathering mushroom-poisoning reports for the North American Mycological Association and over the years has seen accounts of horses tripping in their paddocks and dogs that “zero in on psilocybes and appear to be hallucinating.” Several primate species (aside from our own) are also known to enjoy psychedelic mushrooms. Presumably animals with a taste for altered states of consciousness have helped spread psilocybin far and wide. Such a notion would not strike Paul Stamets as the least bit far-fetched. As we stood around the re pit, the warm light ickering across our faces while our dinner sizzled in its pan, Stamets talked about what mushrooms have taught him about nature. He was expansive, eloquent, grandiose, and, at times, in acute danger of slipping the surly bonds of plausibility. We had had a few beers, and while we hadn’t touched our tiny stash of azzies, we had smoked a little pot. Stamets dilated on the idea of psilocybin as a chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we had been elected, by virtue of the gift of consciousness and language, to hear its call and act before it’s too late. “Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand.” Why us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.” ese were riffs I’d heard Stamets deliver in countless talks and interviews. “I think psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can nd solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. What strikes me about both Stamets and many of the so-called Romantic scientists (like Humboldt and Goethe, Joseph Banks, Erasmus Darwin, and, I would include, oreau) is how very much more alive nature seems in their hands than it would soon become in the cooler hands of the professionals. ese more specialized scientists (a https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 5/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic word that wasn’t coined until 1834) gradually moved science indoors and increasingly gazed at nature through devices that allowed them to observe it at scales invisible to the human eye. ese moves subtly changed the object of study—indeed, made it more of an object. Instead of seeing nature as a collection of discrete objects, the Romantic scientists—and I include Stamets in their number—saw a densely tangled web of subjects, each acting on the other in the great dance that would come to be called coevolution. “Everything,” Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” ey could see this dance of subjectivities because they cultivated the plant’s-eye view, the animal’s-eye view, the microbe’s-eye view, and the fungus’s-eye view—perspectives that depend as much on imagination as observation. I suspect that imaginative leap has become harder for us moderns to make. Our science and technology encourage us in precisely the opposite direction, toward the objecti cation of nature and of all species other than our own. Surely we need to acknowledge the practical power of this perspective, which has given us so much, but we should at the same time acknowledge its costs, material as well as spiritual. Yet that older, more enchanted way of seeing may still pay dividends, as it does (to cite just one small example) when it allows Paul Stamets to gure out that the reason honeybees like to visit woodpiles is to medicate themselves, by nibbling on a saprophytic mycelium that produces just the right antimicrobial compound that the hive needs to survive, a gift the fungus is trading for ... what? Something yet to be imagined. You are probably wondering what ever happened to the azzies Stamets and I found that weekend. Many months later, in the middle of a summer week spent in the house in New England where we used to live, a place freighted with memories, I ate them, with my wife Judith. I crumbled two little mushrooms in each of two glasses and poured hot water over them to make a tea; Stamets had recommended that I “cook” the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach. Judith and I each drank half a cup, ingesting both the liquid and the crumbles of mushroom. I suggested we take a walk on the dirt road near our house while we waited for the psilocybin to come on. However, after only about 20 minutes or so, Judith reported she was “feeling things,” none of them pleasant. She didn’t want to be walking anymore, she said, but now we were at least a mile from home. She told me her mind and her body seemed to be drifting apart and then that her mind had own out of her head and up into the trees, like a bird or insect. “I need to get home and feel safe,” she said, now with some urgency. I tried to reassure her as we abruptly turned around and picked up our pace. It was hot and the air was thick with humidity. She said, “I really don’t want to run into anybody.” I assured her we wouldn’t. I still felt more or less myself, but it may be that Judith’s distress was keeping me from feeling the mushrooms; somebody had to be ready to act normally if a neighbor happened to drive by and roll down his window for a chat, a prospect that was quickly taking on the proportions of nightmare. In fact shortly before we got back to https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 6/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic home base—so it now felt to both of us—we spotted a neighbor’s pickup truck bearing down on us and, like guilty children, we ducked into the woods until it passed. Judith made a beeline for the couch in the living room, where she lay down with the shades drawn, while I went into the kitchen to polish off my cup of mushroom tea, because I wasn’t yet feeling very much. I was a little worried about her, but once she reached her base on the living room couch, her mood lightened and she said she was ne. I couldn’t understand her desire to be indoors. I went out and sat on the screened porch for a while, listening to the sounds in the garden, which suddenly grew very loud, as if the volume had been turned way up. e air was stock-still, but the desultory sounds of ying insects and the digital buzz of hummingbirds rose to form a cacophony I had never heard before. It began to grate on my nerves, until I decided I would be better off regarding the sound as beautiful, and then all at once it was. I lifted an arm, then a foot, and noted with relief that I wasn’t paralyzed, though I also didn’t feel like moving a muscle. Whenever I closed my eyes, random images erupted as if the insides of my lids were a screen. My notes record: fractal patterns, tunnels plunging through foliage, ropy vines forming grids. But when I started to feel panic rise at the lack of control I had over my visual eld, I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normality was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I am learning how to manage this experience.” Much happened, or seemed to happen, during the course of that August afternoon, but I want to focus here on just one element of the experience, because it bears on the questions of nature and our place in it that psilocybin seems to provoke, at least for me. I decided I wanted to walk out to my writing house, a little structure I had built myself 25 years ago, in what is now another life, and which holds a great many memories. I had written two-and-a-half books in the little room (including one about building it), sitting before a broad window that looked back over a pond and the garden to our house. However, I was still vaguely worried about Judith, so before wandering too far from the house, I went inside to check on her. She was stretched out on the couch, with a cool damp cloth over her eyes. She was ne. “I’m having these very interesting visuals,” she said, something having to do with the stains on the coffee table coming to life, swirling and transforming and rising from the surface in ways she found compelling. She made it clear she wanted to be left alone to sink more deeply into the images—she is a painter. e phrase “parallel play” popped into my mind, and so it would be for the rest of the afternoon. I stepped outside, feeling unsteady on my feet, legs a little rubbery. e garden was thrumming with activity, dragon ies tracing complicated patterns in the air, the seed heads of plume poppies rattling like snakes as I brushed by, the phlox perfuming the air with its sweet, heavy scent, and the air itself so palpably dense it had to be forded. e word and sense of poignance ooded over me during the walk through the garden, and https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 7/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic it would return later. Maybe because we no longer live here, and this garden, where we spent so many summers as a couple and then a family, and which at this moment seemed so acutely present, was in fact now part of an irretrievable past. It was as if a precious memory had not just been recalled but had actually come back to life, in a reincarnation both beautiful and cruel. Also heartrending was the eetingness of this moment in time, the ripeness of a New England garden in late August on the verge of turning the corner of the season. Before dawn one cloudless night very soon and without warning, the thrum and bloom and perfume would end all at once, with the arrival of the killing frost. I felt wide open emotionally, undefended. When at last I arrived at the writing house, I stretched out on the daybed, something I hardly ever took the time to do in all the years when I was working here so industriously. e bookshelves had been emptied, and the place felt abandoned, a little sad. From where I lay, I could see over my toes to the window screen and, past that, to the grid of an arbor that was now densely woven with the twining vines of what had become a venerable old climbing hydrangea, a petiolaris. I had planted the hydrangea decades ago, in hopes of creating just this sort of intricately tangled prospect. Backlit by the late-afternoon sunlight streaming in, its neat, round leaves completely lled the window, which meant you gazed out at the world through the fresh green scrim they formed. It seemed to me these were the most beautiful leaves I had ever seen. It was as if they were emitting their own soft, green glow. And it felt like a kind of privilege to gaze out at the world through their eyes, as it were, as the leaves drank up the last draughts of sunlight, transforming those photons into new matter. A plant’s-eye view of the world—it was that, and for real! But the leaves were also looking back at me, xing me with this utterly benign gaze. I could feel their curiosity and what I was certain was an attitude of utter benevolence toward me and my kind. (Do I need to say that I know how crazy this sounds? I do!) I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the rst time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about—having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we’re too selfregarding to appreciate—had taken on the esh of feeling and reality. I looked through the negative spaces formed by the hydrangea leaves to x my gaze on the swamp maple in the middle of the meadow beyond, and it too was now more alive than I’d ever known a tree to be, infused with some kind of spirit—this one, too, benevolent. e idea that there had ever been a disagreement between matter and spirit seemed risible, and I felt as though whatever it is that usually divides me from the world out there had begun to fall away. Not completely: e battlements of ego had not fallen; this was not what the researchers would deem a “complete” mystical experience, because I retained the sense of an observing “I.” But the doors and windows of perception had opened wide, and they were admitting more of the world and its myriad nonhuman personalities than ever before. Buoyed by this development, I sat up now and looked out over my desk, through the big window that faced back to the house. When I sited the building, I carefully framed the main view between two very old and venerable trees, a stolidly vertical ash on the https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 8/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic right and an elegantly angled and intricately branched white oak on the left. e ash has seen better days; storms have shorn several important limbs from it, wrecking its symmetry and leaving some ragged stumps. e oak was somewhat healthier, in full leaf now with its upturned limbs reaching into the sky like the limbs of a dancer. But the main trunk, which had always leaned precariously to one side, now concerned me: A section of it had rotted out at ground level, and for the rst time it was possible to look clear through it and see daylight. How was it possibly still standing? As I gazed at the two trees I had gazed at so many times before from my desk, it suddenly dawned on me that these trees were—obviously!—my parents: the stolid ash my father, the elegant oak my mother. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, except that thinking about those trees became identical to thinking about my parents. ey were completely, indelibly, present in those trees. And so I thought about all they had given me, and about all that time had done to them, and what was going to become of this prospect, this place (this me!), when they nally fell, as eventually they would. at parents die is not exactly the stuff of epiphany, but the prospect, no longer distant or abstract, pierced me more deeply than it ever had, and I was disarmed yet again by the pervasive sense of poignancy that trailed me all that afternoon. Yet I must have still had some wits about me, because I made a note to call the arborist tomorrow; maybe something could be done to reduce the weight on the leaning side of the oak, in order to prevent it from falling, if only for a while longer. My walk back to the house was, I think, the peak of the experience and comes back to me now in the colors and tones of a dream. ere was, again, the sense of pushing my body through a mass of air that had been sweetened by phlox and was teeming, almost frenetic, with activity. e dragon ies, big as birds, were now out in force, touching down just long enough to kiss the phlox blossoms and then lift off, before madly crisscrossing the garden path. ese were more dragon ies than I had ever seen in one place, so many in fact that I wasn’t completely sure if they were real. (Judith later con rmed the sighting when I got her to come outside.) And as they executed their ight patterns, they left behind them contrails that persisted in the air, or so at least it appeared. Dusk now approaching, the air traffic in the garden had built to a riotous crescendo: the pollinators making their last rounds of the day, the plants still signifying to them with their owers: me, me, me! In one way I knew this scene well—the garden coming brie y back to life after the heat of a summer day has relented—but never had I felt so integral to it. I was no longer the alienated human observer, gazing at the garden from a distance, whether literal or gural, but rather felt part and parcel of all that was transpiring here. So the owers were addressing me as much as the pollinators, and perhaps because the very air that afternoon was such a felt presence, one’s usual sense of oneself as a subject observing objects in space—objects that have been thrown into relief and rendered discrete by the apparent void that surrounds them—gave way to a sense of being deep inside and fully implicated in this scene, one more being in relation to the myriad other beings and to the whole. “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the rst time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 9/10 4/19/2021 Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic nature.” is post is adapted from Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/what-its-like-to-trip-on-the-most-potent-magic-mushroom/561860/ 10/10 CASE STUDY Science, Pseudoscience, and Nonsense By Clyde Freeman Herreid If we teach only the findings and products of science—no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be—without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? —Carl Sagan (1996, p. 21) A favorite pastime of academicians is to bemoan the scientific literacy of the American public. When we listen to politicians who claim that climate change is a hoax, there is good reason to be concerned. So it is no surprise to learn that 93% of American adults and 78% of those with college degrees are scientifically illit­ erate (Hazen, 2002). Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in a poll disclosing that the United States is next to the bottom of the list of 34 nations in the public acceptance of evolution (Miller, Scott, & Okamoto, 2006). According to Science and Engineering Indicators 2002 (National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2002), 30% of the American public thinks that UFOs are alien spaceships, 40% believe that astrology is scientific, 60% believe in extrasensory perception (ESP), 70% accept magnetic therapy as credible, and 88% accept alternative medicine. Education by itself doesn’t offset the problem. Belief in ESP hardly decreased from 65% in high school graduates to 60% in college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy dipped from 71% in high school graduates to 55% in college grads. As far as belief in alternative medicine went, the college graduates actually gave it higher approval (92%) than high school graduates (89%) did. But the most disheartening part of the survey was the fact that 70% of the American public doesn’t understand the scientific process. Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 (National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2014) reveals that only 65% could correctly answer this probability question: A doctor tells a couple that their genetic makeup means that they’ve got one in four chances of having a child with an inherited illness. (1) Does this mean that if their first child has the illness, the next three will not have the illness? (No); and (2) Does this mean that each of the couple’s children will have the same risk of suffering from the illness? (Yes). It gets worse: Merely 34% could correctly answer a question about an experiment: (1) Two scientists want to know if a certain drug is effective against high blood pressure. The first scientist wants to give the drug to 1,000 people with high blood pressure and see how many of them experience lower blood pressure levels. The second scientist wants to give the drug to 500 people with high blood pressure and not give the drug to another 500 people with high blood pressure, and see how many in both groups experience lower blood pressure levels. Which is the better way to test this drug? and (2) Why is it better to test the drug this way? (We know, of course, that the second way is better because a control group is used for comparison.) And even worse—only 20% could correctly answer this: (1) When you read news stories, you see certain sets of words and terms. We are interested in how many people recognize certain kinds of terms. First, some articles refer to the results of a scientific study. When you read or hear the term scientific study, do you have a clear understanding of what it means, a general sense of what it means, or little understanding of what it means? and (2) In your own words, could you tell me what it means to study something scientifically? (The failure to correctly answer this clearly indicates that people do not understand the principles that underpin formulating a theory/hypothesis and designing an experiment to test it or the role of control groups and the need for rigorous and systematic comparison.) A research article in Skeptic by Walker, Hoekstra, and Vogl (2002) concluded: Students that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think. (p. 26) Given that lots of people do not understand the way science works, Vol. 45, No. 5, 2016 61 CASE STUDY what do we do to fix the problem? One solution suggested first by Carl Sagan (1996) and later by Shermer and Linse (2001) is that we provide students (actually everyone) with a Baloney Detection Kit. We want them to automatically ask 10 questions whenever they hear an unusual claim: 1. How reliable is the source of the claim? 2. Does the source make similar claims? 3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else? 4. Does this fit with the way the world works? 5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? 6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point? 7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science? 8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence? 9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory? 10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim? But how can we tuck these habits of mind into normal classroom exercises? To achieve this end, improved education and creativity at the K–16 level is important; this is where state and national standards and core curricula come into play. How that scenario will end up is yet to be determined. What about those of us in higher education? Is there anything that we can do to improve the situation? It appears that we have at least three populations of students. One group is our STEM majors. We tend not to worry about them. It is true that there is evidence that suggests that the more science courses and lab experiences 62 Journal of College Science Teaching they have, the more they understand the facts as well as the process of the scientific enterprise. But here is a caveat: The process of indoctrination to the canons of science takes a long time, and there are many dropouts along the way. How much do our graduates really understand about how to evaluate the “science” of today as it is filtered by the modern media? What about our preservice science teachers headed for the K–16 classrooms? They will be in the front lines, but many of them are poorly prepared to grapple with STEM subjects they have only taken one course in, which most likely was delivered by a traditional lecture. Unfortunately, 86% of most introductory science courses are still delivered this way, a medieval presentation method created at a time when we didn’t have textbooks, film, or the internet. STEM majors may survive this indoctrination with their enthusiasm intact, but many others who may end up teaching our children may not. Again, just more science doesn’t make someone immune to pseudoscientific claims (Walker et al., 2002). Here is the big question: How do we deal with the overwhelming number of students who take science courses because they have to? I have the impression that many of my colleagues are really dismissive of these students; they are not potential graduate students. We usually have only one shot at nonmajors, one or two semesters in a general education course, and then they are free to roam the media world littered with alien abductions, Sasquatch sightings, homeopathic remedies, probiotics, magnetic bracelets, and the latest health benefits they just heard about on the Dr. Oz Show. The faculty at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, has come up with a promising antidote to the lack of critical thinking by designing a course for nonmajors that seems to fit the bill (Rowe et al., 2015). This general education and interdisciplinary course, called Foundations of Science, “emphasizes the nature of science along with, rather than primarily, the findings of science; incorporates case studies, such as the vaccine-autism controversy; teaches the basics of argumentation and logical fallacies; contrasts science with pseudoscience; and addresses psychological factors that might otherwise lead students to reject scientific ideas they find uncomfortable” (Rowe et al., 2015, p. 1). Their approach is to try to inculcate in students the operation­al approach to critical thinking provided by Bernstein, Penner, Clarke-Stewart, and Roy (2006). When presented with claims such as vaccines cause autism, global warming is a hoax, and there are no transitional fossils, one should ask: (a) What am I be­ing asked to accept? (b) What evidence supports the claim? (c) Are there alternative explanations/hypotheses? and fi­ nally, (d) What evidence supports the alternatives? Sam Houston State University chose to focus on pseudoscience because the topics are inherently interesting even to science-phobic students: astrology, homeopathy, Bigfoot, and intelligent design. They adopted a textbook that emphasizes the same approach: How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age (Schick & Vaughn, 2014). A key feature in their curriculum is the use of two case studies. The first deals with the claim that vaccination is a cause of autism (Rowe, 2010). The students work in small groups and analyze the data provided in a study by Wakefield et al. (1998). Then they are asked to design a better study and in the process learn about experimental design and sample size, replication, double-blind studies, and scientific honesty. In another case study published recently in the Journal of College Science Teaching (Rowe, 2015), the authors apply ecology theory to evaluate the credibility of finding a plesiosaur moonlighting as the Loch Ness Monster. This case is especially interesting because it integrates traditional scientific facts and principles along with a skeptical approach to fantastic claims, illustrating how important it is to consider alternative hypotheses to unproven claims, especially those that verge on the incredible. So here is my pitch: We need to do a much better job of teaching everyone how science actually works. This is the same sentiment that James Conant carried with him back to Harvard at the end of World War II, after his term of service as science advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. While in this position, Conant became convinced that the American public just didn’t understand the process of science. He set out to remedy this, at least with Harvard students, by teaching a course, Natural Science 4, “On Understanding Science.” Four years later, he began teaching another undergraduate course, Philosophy 150, “A Philosophy of Science,” which led to the famous text published in 1957 titled Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science. As far as I know, this was the first formal attempt to use the case study approach to teach basic STEM topics. We have no record of how the students at Harvard in Conant’s classes received this new approach telling the detailed history of the major scientific discoveries. Surely, the subject matter was better digested than the previous method of delivering endless facts to nonscientists. However, Conant’s case studies were all delivered via the lecture method, the least effective method for teaching (Lord, 2007). Unfortunately, the lecture is still favored by STEM teachers today in spite of a mountain of evidence, suggesting the method is a major reason that 60% of students who enter college intending to major in a STEM field fail to graduate with a STEM degree (see, e.g., Gates & Mirkin, 2012). There are hundreds of studies concluding that active learning strategies like cooperative and collaborative learning produce greater learning than the lecture method (see, e.g., Hake, 1998). But we faculty appear too set in our ways to easily give up the technique where we ourselves excelled. It is a Darwinian process. We managed to learn via the lecture method and so we expect our students to do the same. We are the survivors, the ones who stayed in the system. What about the crowd of students who dropped by the wayside, not necessarily because they didn’t do well, but as Sheila Tobias (1990, 1992) wrote long ago and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2012) declared recently, they quit STEM disciplines because of uninspiring introductory courses, the math requirement, and an academic culture that is unwelcoming (Gates & Mirkin, 2012). All of this then gives me a strong platform from which to argue that the methodology of science is best taught via active learning using the case study method. Using stories (true ones are best) puts the science in context (Herreid, 2007). There are two obvious ways to do this. One is to showcase scientists actually going about their daily business of making discoveries—detailing their mishaps and struggles to solve a problem. The website iBiology (www.ibiology.org) attempts to fill that need. They have a growing collection of more than 275 videos by scientists talking about real cutting-edge scientific research and topics related to science. Another approach is to use written case studies, a method championed in this column and promoted by the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science (http://sciencecases.lib. buffalo.edu/cs/). Our collection has over 600 STEM case studies, many emphasizing scientific methodology: Watson and Crick puzzling over how DNA replicates, Warren and Marshall battling to convince the medical establishment that bacteria are the major cause of ulcers, epidemiologists hunting for the reservoir of the Ebola virus, and citizens debating the legalization of marijuana are just a few examples. Further, we are treated with mini-mysteries such as when statistician Ronald Fisher was confronted by a woman who claimed she could taste whether tea was prepared by adding milk before or after the tea was poured in the cup and a little puzzle about a spa that advertised that their foot bath would remove the toxins from customers’ bodies (McCallum & Prud’homme-Généreux, 2016). Big or small, these tales are the stuff of challenging classroom exercises. Case studies have the potential to correct many misconceptions that a layperson might have about science. One common false impression is that scientists are lonely recluses working out the wonders of the world in a dingy laboratory waiting for the “aha” moment to rush out into the street shouting “Eureka.” If that were ever true, it certainly isn’t true today, when research teams and joint publications are the rule. We can have 45 authors contributing to the discovery and analysis of the fossil Ardipithecus Vol. 45, No. 5, 2016 63 CASE STUDY ramidus or in physics publications with over a thousand authors. Even teachers may neglect the role that scientific society as a whole plays in the discoveries, especially the part that peer review plays. This is a vital point for students to learn, and a case study can illustrate the process powerfully. Only by understanding the checks and balances in the scientific enterprise can the public get a sense of how seriously researchers take their jobs and can they gain confidence in science. So when 97% of climate scientists say that climate change is upon us (Stern, 2015), we would hope that the public would accept this is a fact that we had better act on. Perhaps the best way that the scientific process is in full display is when misconduct is discovered. Seldom is it an outsider that pulls back the curtain on inappropriate conduct; it is scientists themselves who normally discover unsavory business. One of the best examples is when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have discovered cold fusion, a process of energy production with a promise to satisfy the world’s insatiable desire for cheap energy (Taubes, 1993). In a laboratory at the University of Utah, these respected investigators asserted they produced a nuclear reaction on a table top. Before publishing their findings, they bypassed the usual vetting of their experiment in a journal review process and held a press conference touting their spectacular claims instead. Then they delayed giving important details of how their work was accomplished. This created a firestorm of criticism. Many investigators tried to replicate their work. All failed. Soon it became apparent that their claims were more than doubtful. Pons and Fleishmann’s careers took a nose dive. They had not followed the usual canons of science 64 Journal of College Science Teaching and as a result payed a personal price. The story did not have to end this way. If they had followed normal protocol and submitted their findings to their colleagues, criticism would have been confined to the scientific community and reviewers would have been able to identify the possible errors before going public. That is one moral of the story: There is a good reason that we have the critical and analytical process that we have, to prevent just these kinds of errors. Case studies like these are an ideal way for students to get a true taste of what goes on with us scientists. These are cautionary tales. Rather than showing the fallibility of scientists, they illustrate how hard we try to find out the truth. Criticism is one of the safeguards of the process and is a key part of the self-correcting nature of science. Case studies are an ideal way to showcase the beauty of the process. Whatever techniques we teachers choose to use, we have an obligation to help rectify the problem of scientific illiteracy in our students before they head into the world of Loch Ness Monsters, astrology, chiropractors, and acupuncture. ■ Acknowledgments This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos. DUE-0341279, DUE-0618570, DUE0920264, DUE-1323355 and a Higher Education Reform Grant from the PEW Charitable Trusts. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF and PEW Charitable Trusts. References Bernstein, D., Penner, L., ClarkeStewart, A., & Roy, E. (2006). Psychology. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Conant, J. (1957). Harvard case studies in experimental science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gates, S. J., Jr., & Mirkin, C. (2012). Engage to excel. Science, 335, 1545. Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A sixthousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66, 64–74. Hazen, R. (2002). Why you should be scientifically literate. Actionbioscience. Retrieved from http://www.actionbioscience.org/ education/hazen.html#primer Herreid, C. (2007). Start with a story. Arlington, VA: NSTA Press. Lord, T. (2007). Revisiting the cone of learning—is it a reliable way to link instruction method with knowledge recall? Journal of College Teaching, 37(2), 14–17. Miller, J. D., Scott, E. C., & Okamoto, S. (2006). Public acceptance of evolution. Science, 313, 765–766. Available at http://tnjn.org/content/ relatedmedia/2009/03/03/Science_ evolution_2006.pdf McCallum, G., & Prud’hommeGénéreux, A. (2016). Feeling detoxified: Expectations, effects, and explanations. Journal of College Science Teaching, 45(4), 72–77. National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (2002). Science and engineering indicators 2002 (Chap. 7, Table 7-9). Arlington, VA: Author. Available at http://www.nsf.gov/ statistics/seind02/pdf/volume1.pdf National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (2014). Science and engineering indicators 2014 (Chap. 7, Table 7-9). Arlington, VA: Author. Available at http://www.nsf.gov/ statistics/seind14/ President’s Council of Advisors on Science Technology. (2012, February). Engage to excel: Producing one million additional college graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/ default/files/microsites/ostp/pcastengage-to-excel-final_2-25-12.pdf Rowe, M. P. (2010). Tragic choices: Autism, measles, and the MMR vaccine. In C. F. Herreid, N. A. Schiller, & K. F. Herreid (Eds.), Science stories: Using case studies to teach critical thinking (pp. 237– 246). Arlington, VA: NSTA Press. Rowe, M. P. (2015). Crazy about cryptids: An ecological hunt for Nessie and other legendary creatures. Journal of College Science Teaching, 45(2), 54–58. Rowe, M. P., Gillespie, B. M., Harris, K. R., Koether, S. D., Shannon, L. Y., & Rose, L. A. (2015). Redesigning a general education science course to promote critical thinking. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 14, 1–12. Sagan, C. (1996). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. New York, NY: Ballantine. Schick, T., & Vaughn, L. (2014). How to think about weird things: Critical thinking for a new age. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Shermer, M., & Linse, P. (2001). Baloney detection kit. Agawam, MA: Millennium Press. Stern, G. (2015). Fifty years after U.S. climate warming, scientists confront communication barriers. Science, 350(6264), 1045–1046. Taubes, G. (1993). Bad science: The short life and weird times of cold fusion. New York, NY: Random House. Tobias, S. (1990). They’re not dumb, they’re different: Stalking the second tier. Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation. Tobias, S. (1992). Revitalizing undergraduate science: Why some things work and most don’t. Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation. Wakefield, A. J., Murch, S. H., Anthony, A., & Casson, D. M., Malik, M., Berelowitz, M., . . . Walker-Smith, J. A. (1998). Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet, 351, 637–641. Walker, R., Hoekstra, S. J., & Vogl, R. J. (2002). Science education is no guarantee of skepticism. Skeptic, 9(3), 24–27. Clyde Freeman Herreid (herreid@ buffalo.edu) is a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. He is also the director of the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science (http:// sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/) and editor of the Case Study column in the Journal of College Science Teaching. Column Editors If you are interested in submitting a manuscript to one of JCST’s columns or have a question or comment regarding an article, please contact the appropriate editor at the following addresses: The Two-Year Community Apryl Nenortas anenorta@cccemail.net Please submit directly to JCST’s electronic submission system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nsta) The Case Study Clyde F. Herreid Department of Biology State University of New York Buffalo, NY 14260-1300 herreid@buffalo.edu Research and Teaching Ann Cutler Editor acutler@nsta.org Please submit directly to JCST’s electronic submission system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nsta) Vol. 45, No. 5, 2016 65 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Proposal : Based on this week’s reading "When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 21st Century" by Qiu Jane, I find the topic of TCM is quite interesting and based on reading this article I think we need to better understand the TCM since TCM is not all bad for wild animals, in fact, there are many policies try to protect and stop use wild animals in Chinese medicines, and I also find that there are many substitutes elements of wild animals, so that today’s the ingredients of wild animals are usually replaced. Also, I think better understanding of TCM can learn the cultural values as well as better understanding the importance of protecting wild animals. So my main argument is that TCM can protect wild animals. My enthymeme is that: Herbal treatments ingredients should use in TCM and they are not harmful to environment because there are many substitutions use in TCM and policies help protect wild animals so that make people more participate in protecting them. Or Stop use wild animal elements in TCM is good because there are many substitutions use in TCM and policies help protect wild animals so that make people more participate in protecting them. One real life example is that the majority parts of Chinese medicines are gain from plants that Chinese medicine uses approximately 1,000 species of plants and 36 species of animals. The animals in medicines usually come from planation. Supported of wild animal policies also help control and protect the wild animals. For example, in 1993, China banned domestic trade of tiger bones, and Chinese medicine deleted tiger bones from its official pharmacopoeia. Many practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine now refuse to use medicines containing tiger parts and prefer alternative treatments. And there is a China’s Tiger Restoration Program (CTRP) will last until 2022. It aims to increase the area and quality of tiger habitats; establish monitoring and patrol systems; balance tiger protection with the local economy; and crack down on poaching, smuggling, and illegal tiger products trade. Person who kill or trade tiger will face at least 13 years jails. It is effective way to help protect wild animals. Two course reading that I would use include is that I did a lot of research on this topic and I find this topic is very interesting to me. I will use Qiu Jane paper as well as Michael's What It's Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom to discussion how plants such as mushroom can impact people and benefit or influence people. This can refer to the plants ingredients use in TCM. Mushroom is also used in TCM. I would think those people who have little know about TCM would disagree with me. And those wild animals protectors will disagree with me. I would response to them that as the technology development today, TCM has replaced a lot of wild animals ingredients and a lot of strict polities to help protect wild animals. This is no longer the issue. Outline First body paragraph: Traditional Chinese Medicine, commonly referred to as TCM, is a healthcare system that dates back to the third century BC. It originated from the writings of ancient therapists who began to record their observations of the body, its functions, and responses to various therapies and treatments including herbal medicine, massage, and acupuncture. Over the past 2000 years, generations of therapists and scholars have supplemented and improved this knowledge. The result is a classic document on almost all health issues-from the common cold to cancer, from pregnancy to old age. I will use "When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 21st Century" by Qiu Jane’s artilce and give a brief introduction of TCM. Second body paragraph: Many people in the Chinese medicine community are trying to discourage the use of animal therapy. In 1993, rhino horn and tiger bone were deleted from the Chinese Traditional Pharmacopoeia. In 2010, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies issued a statement urging members not to use tiger bones or other endangered species. In addition, although some shops and restaurants still sell animal products, many well-known Chinese medicine practitioners are now prescribing alternatives to animal therapy. I will use "When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 21st Century" by Qiu Jane’s artilce and give a brief introduction of TCM. I will also use Michael's What It's Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom Third body paragraph: In February, the National People’s Congress of China completely banned any terrestrial wildlife trade until the country’s Wildlife Protection Law and subsequent regulations for related industries can be fully updated. The world is also taking action to stop the use of endangered wild animals in traditional medicine. Three Chinese NGOs and two global organizations have recently proposed that all members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) support stopping the use of threatened species in traditional medicine. Forth body paragraph: Chinese medicine has proven that it can cope with the plight of threatened animals. In the 1980s, rhinos were on the brink of extinction because poachers killed rhinos for rhino horns. At that time, China was still a poor country, so the largest markets for rhino horn were Taiwan and Hong Kong, two booming but relatively small markets. After a public outcry, the rhino was removed from the official Chinese Pharmacopoeia and included in the CITES Index I-the strongest level of protection. Coupled with strict d...
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Explanation & Answer

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1

Writing Question

Student’s Name
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Assignment Date

2
Introduction
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) involves the use of plants and animal species for
medical purposes. TCM medical system dates back to the 3rd century BC and includes massage,
herbal medicine, and acupuncture. But unfortunately, the practice endangers more than 36
animal species, including rhinoceros, sea horse, tiger, and black bear. Besides, rhinoceros, tigers
and sea horses are the most vulnerable among the animal species that TCM uses (Qiu, 2015).
Therefore, it is good to stop using animal elements in Traditional Chinese Medicines because
there are many available substitutes in TCM (approximately over 1,000 plant species), which
provide better policies to protect wildlife, making people more participative in wild animal
protection. Moreover, herbal treatment ingredients are better substitutes for wild animals in TCM
because they do not harm the environment.
According to a study by Qiu Jane, “When the East Meets the West: The Future of
Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 21st Century”, the TCM topic is quite exciting and compels
us to try to get a clear understanding of its elements. The concept is bad for animals, but it goes
against policies to protect and stop wildlife in Chinese medicines. Also, Jane’s study reveals that
many elements can substitute for wild animals in Chinese medicine. These substitutes can
replace today’s ingredients of wild animals in TCM. As a result, a better understanding of TCM
can facilitate learning of cultural values to allow the change to protect wild animals. Here, the
critical argument is that TCM can assist in protecting wild animals. According to Michael Pollan
on “What It’s Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom” mushroom impacts people’s
lives (Pollan, 2018). Besides, the mushroom is one of the critical plant ingredients in Traditional
Chinese Medicine and can ...


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