The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Gina Green traces the history of the Facilitated Community (FC) movement’s rapid growth and widespread adoption—a movement whose validity was accepted largely on faith, with little objective evaluation. Green discusses how scientifically controlled observations have been used to determine authorship in FC, weaving a cautionary tale about the obvious and serious legal, ethical, and practical implications of these findings.

Gina Green traces the history of the Facilitated Community (FC) movement’s rapid growth and widespread adoption—a movement whose validity was accepted largely on faith, with little objective evaluation. Green discusses how scientifically controlled observations have been used to determine authorship in FC, weaving a cautionary tale about the obvious and serious legal, ethical, and practical implications of these findings.

Michael Shermer on “The Quack of the Gaps Problem: Facilitated Communication, Autism and Patients’ Rights”; MonsterTalk episode 109: Blake Smith interviews James Randi’s about his late-night AM radio show: Long John Nebel “Party Line”; plus, Mr. Deity: The Bourne Again Identity, an episode in which a couple takes in a young believer suffering from dissociative amnesia.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Dr. Lawrence Norton reviews a recent Time magazine article that touted the virtues of facilitated communication, and Michael Shermer shares with us the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.