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Water companies use dowsing to find leaks

Today's Daily Mirror reports that an engineer working for the Severn Trent water company used dowsing to search for a leak at a property. The property owners' daughter, who is studying for a Ph.D in evolutionary biology at Oxford University, contacted the water company; they confirmed that some of their engineers practise dowsing and they have no objection. She then wrote to other water companies and found that nine of them used dowsing.

Dowsing is generally regarded as pseudo-science. Wikipedia lists a number of scientific studies of the practice that have been conducted since the early twentieth century; they have almost uniformly found the results were no better than chance.

A number of homeopaths use dowsing, usually with a pendulum, to choose their medicines. In the 1980s, when I was a physician at The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (now The Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine), I contacted a dowsers' society to ask if their members were willing to take part in a trial to see if they could distinguish real homeopathic medicines from placebos. They agreed to do this and I started to set up the trial, but unfortunately they then backed out.

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