Journal retracts paper by ‘miracle doctor’ claiming life force kills cancer cells

A “miracle doctor” in China and his colleagues have lost a 2007 paper on the ability of the martial art qigong to treat cancer after the journal that published the work said it failed to properly vet the findings.

Well, the first part of that is true. The second part is implied. We’ll explain. 

The paper, “External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong induces G2/M arrest and apoptosis of androgen-independent prostate cancer cells by inhibiting Akt and NF-B pathways,” appeared in December 2007 in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, a Springer Nature journal. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The first author on the study was Yan Xin, whose biography states that he is a “miracle doctor” and one of the world’s experts in the healing properties of qi — the universal life force in traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy. His co-authors include researchers at Harvard, McMaster University in Canada, and the New Medical Science Research Institute in New York City.

The paper is one of at least seven articles by Yan and colleagues that caught the eye of Elisabeth Bik, who in 2019 raised questions about the findings, as Stephanie Lee of BuzzFeed reported:

In Bik’s view, her rabbit hole research revealed serious flaws in the system that is supposed to ensure science is transparent.

“Seven sets of peer-reviewers and editors who were not doing their jobs,” she tweeted.

In addition, as Bik noted, some of the studies acknowledge funding from the National Institutes of Health. The dozens of federal grants listed total at least $31 million, according to the agency’s website. It is unclear how much of the money, which included large grants that spanned multiple projects, actually funded the external Qi experiments. At least some amount went to other costs associated with the project, according to Michael Centola, a researcher involved with one of the studies.

The new retraction comes about 23 months after Bik began asking questions about Yan’s papers, which isn’t exactly a land speed record but is hardly the slowest of slow trains, either. On the other hand, to our knowledge it’s the only one of the seven articles — one of which appeared in the same journal in 2011 — to have been removed so far. 

According to the notice: 

The Editor has retracted this article [1] due to concerns about the scientific validity and reproducibility of the findings. Post-publication peer review has concluded that there is no information on or plausible molecular mechanism which explains what the External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong is, how it is produced, and how it could be reproduced by others.

All authors disagree with this retraction.

The editor of the journal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

To be sure, we’re huge fans of post-publication peer review around here. But we find this notice disingenuous. After all, the authors made no efforts to hide their conclusions from the pre-publication peer reviews, who would have read sentences like this one from the article: 

Long-term clinical observations and ongoing studies have shown antitumor effects of external Qi of Yan Xin Qigong (YXQG-EQ) that originated from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

That passage included references, too — references that could have been checked for validity. 

In other words, it’s one thing to say that problems with data emerged during a post-publication review. But saying it took such an assessment to discover flaws in an article that were hiding in plain sight is a bit like the IRS saying its crack team of auditors found red flags in the taxes I successfully filed on a cocktail napkin.

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