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by Robert Todd Carroll * est. 1994

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IRIDOLOGY

> I believed that the human body was some sort of remarkable collection of
> intelligent organs and systems that worked together almost magically to create
> a healthy unit. --Confessions of a Former Iridologist

Iridology is the study of the iris to diagnose disease. It is not part of the
curriculum of any medical school and its practitioners are not usually medical
doctors. (Naturopaths are not medical doctors.) According to Wikipedia,
iridology is not regulated or licensed by any governmental agency in either
Canada or the United States.

Iridology is based on the questionable assumption that every organ in the human
body has a corresponding location within the iris and that one can determine
whether an organ is healthy or diseased by examining the iris rather than the
organ itself.

Medical doctors see the iris as the colored part of the eye that regulates the
amount of light entering by a contractile opening in the center, the pupil. The
lens brings the light rays to a focus, forming an image on the retina where the
light falls on the rods and cones, causing them to stimulate the optic nerve and
transmit visual impressions to the brain. Medical doctors and optometrists
recognize that certain symptoms of nonocular disease can be detected by
examining the eye. If a problem is suspected, these doctors then refer the
patient to an appropriate specialist for further examination. However,
recognizing symptoms of disease by looking in the eyes is not what iridology is
about. In fact, when iridologists have been tested to see if they could
distinguish healthy from sick people by looking at slides of their eyes, they
have failed. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association (1979, vol. 242, 1385-1387), three iridologists incorrectly
identified nearly all of the study slides of the irises of 143 healthy and
diseased people. “In fact, they often read the irises of the sickest people as
being healthy and vice versa. They did not even agree with each other.” Similar
results involving five Dutch iridologists were published in the British Medical
Journal (1988, vol. 297, 1578-1581) (Lisa Niebergall, M.D.).

Iridology goes way beyond the claim that the eyes often provide signs of
disease. Iridologists maintain that each organ has a counterpart in the eye and
that you can determine the state of the organ's health by looking at a
particular section of the eye. The markings and patterns in the iris are
compared to an iris chart, which maps zones of the iris and links them to parts
of the body. No scientific investigation led to these charts; instead, they are
the work of intuition.





 

 

 

 

 

 

Ignatz von Péczely, a 19th-century Hungarian physician is usually credited with
inventing iridology. He got the idea for this novel diagnostic tool when he saw
a dark streak in the eyes of a man he was treating for a broken leg and it
reminded him of a similar dark streak in the eyes of an owl whose leg he had
broken years earlier. Von Péczely then went on to document similarities in eye
markings and illnesses in his patients. (According to Wikipedia, von Péczely's
nephew, August von Péczely, dismissed the story about the dark streaks as
apocryphal. The Wikipedia article also notes: "Iridology is not supported by any
published studies and is considered pseudoscience by most medical practitioners
and eye care professionals." Even if the story is apocryphal, I like it because
it illustrates the magical thinking of practitioners and patients.) Others
completed the map of the eye. A typical map divides the eye into sections, using
the image of a clock face as a base. So, for example, if you want to know the
condition of a patient's thyroid gland, you need not touch the patient to feel
for any enlargement of the gland. Nor do you need to do any tests of the gland
itself. All you need to do is look in the iris of the right eye at about 2:30
and the iris of the left eye at about 9:30. Discolorations, flecks, streaks,
etc. in those parts of the eyes are all you need concern yourself with, if it is
the condition of the thyroid you wish to know. For problems with the vagina or
penis, look at 5 o'clock in the right eye. And so on. An iridologist can do an
examination with nothing more than an iridology map, a magnifying glass, a
flashlight, and a vivid imagination.

If von Péczely's reasoning is typical, we can surmise that he and other
iridologists deceived themselves by looking for and finding correlations between
eye markings and illness (confirmation bias). They were working with vague
notions of "markings" and "illness." Diseases may not have been precisely or
accurately diagnosed  in many cases. They were able to validate iridology by
finding many correlations that in fact were not established as causal
relationships by rigorously defined controlled studies. Some of their
correlations may be accurate, but many are undoubtedly bogus, due to very broad
interpretations of "markings" and "disease." They found patterns where in fact
there are no patterns (apophenia). They misinterpreted data and gave
extraordinary significance to confirmations, while ignoring or not seeking
disconfirmations. Many of their confirmations may have been matters of
subjective validation. We do not know how much the power of suggestion played in
their patients' illnesses. Many diagnoses were probably wrong, but no objective
tests were done to check out the validity of the diagnoses. Some diagnoses may
have been correct but the iridologists may have been using other signs besides
eye markings to make their diagnoses. Finally, much of the success of iridology
is due to the same factors that account for the success of acupuncture,
homeopathy, and other forms of so-called "alternative" medicine: placebo
effects.

What is most peculiar about the iris is that each is unique and unchangeable, so
much so that many claim that the iris is a better identifier of an individual
than fingerprints.

See also acupuncture and reflexology.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

reader comments

further reading

websites

"Confessions of a Former Iridologist" by Joshua David Mather Sr.

Iridology by Stephen Barrett, M.D.

Iridology's Blind Side by George Nava True II

books and articles

Barrett, Stephen and William T. Jarvis. eds. The Health Robbers: A Close Look at
Quackery in America, (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993).

Ernst, Edzard. 2000. Iridology: not useful and potentially harmful. Arch
Ophthalmol. Aug;118(8):1141. 77 papers were reviewed. None of the studies
examined found any benefit from iridology. "As iridology has the potential for
causing personal and economic harm, patients and therapists should be
discouraged from using it."

Gilovich, Thomas. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in
Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1993).

Hines, Terence. "Iridology," in Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1990).

Gardner, Martin. "Medical Cults/Quacks," in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of
Science (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957).

Raso, Jack. "Alternative" Healthcare: A Comprehensive Guide (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1994).

Worrall, Russell S. "Iridology: Diagnosis or Delusion?" in Science Confronts the
Paranormal, edited by Kendrick Frazier. (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books,1986).

Last updated 12-Sep-2014




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