Sneezing-- For Science!

Writer's Note: When I wrote this post, I thought this was just a funny, weird thing that happened to me. What I realized later was that I had been scammed, and the scammer is still out there targeting other people. He was pretty convincing-- enough so that I didn't realize what had happened until a few months later when I noticed this was my most popular post, and that most of the traffic was coming from a "sneeze fetish forum", from a thread about how this guy is tricking people into filming themselves sneezing, then selling the videos. (To their credit, everyone in the forum was pretty disgusted with the situation) I'm keeping this post as it is so that anyone who comes here trying to find out if it's a scam can get this message: It is 100% a scam, don't videotape yourself sneezing for this guy and cut ties with him ASAP. Best regards. 

Wednesday morning, as I'm just getting settled in to begin another day of job searching, I received a phone call from a source that apparently had no actual number, just "unknown". My first hopeful thought was that this might be from someone I'd submitted a resume to, so I leaped on the phone.

However, the speaker proved to be a psychologist I'd never heard of. In Canada. Who had been referred to me (I don't know by whom) as a music therapist that might have interest in participating in a research study.

Which is true.

Especially when I found out that I would be compensated for a flat rate of $5,500. When you are unemployed, that is nothing to sneeze at.

So what was the study on?

This is where it starts to get weird.

The psychological and physical benefits of sneezing.

He had a different way of expressing it, and ethically I can't tell you all of the details anyway-- this is new research that won't even be published until September (though it has been accepted by the American Psychology Association Journal), but the short version is that in women, sneezing multiple times apparently decreases cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone, which among other things makes it harder for you to loose weight. So the study was about using sneezing therapeutically, to decrease stress and anxiety and to promote weight loss.

They were recruiting practitioners in the medical and psychological fields-- some more traditional types such as PhD doctors, some more "holistic" such as music therapists-- to take part in this study, which continues in August. I was told I'd be doing exercises that induced sneezing for about fifteen minutes three times each week. This sounded incredibly reasonable for that compensation, to the point where I was starting to wonder if this was some kind of scam. But, no, it's an actual study that's being done right now. So I said, sure, what the heck, I've probably done weirder things for money.

No. No I haven't.

The first part of my "training" (which was all over the phone, and took almost the entire day) was to learn how to properly inspect navels. This guy kind of has a thing for navels-- he decided that I really needed to hear some relationship advice on navels-- apparently the navel is the most alluring part of the female anatomy to a male, and, pro!tip, if the man that you are romantically involved with isn't interacting with your navel that means there is an emotional disconnect. (Male readers-- do I even have any male readers-- I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.) Anyway, apparently I have a very unique and attractive belly button that I should be proud of and confident in because it is very feminine. And I can now tell just by looking at a belly button which of a person's abdominal muscles are stronger or weaker and how much stress they are under. (File that away in my list of useless talents, right there with being able to write my name on a whiteboard using my toes).

He then told me that I was very overweight, though not morbidly so. Gee, thanks, what a charmer. (I'm actually really curious about this guy's love life. Does he choose his dates based on their belly buttons? Does he actually date real human women?)

The Doctor then tells me that it's not my fault. None of the weight I'm carrying is my fault.

I think back to three weeks of holiday junk food and insufficient exercise. "No, I think some of it is probably my fault."

Well, he explains to me that the fault lies with cortisol. It's all that stress I'm under that's making me overweight and making it so people can't appreciate my amazing navel. But if I do these sneezing exercises as directed, by August I'll weigh 130 pounds, and that's a conservative estimate. (And getting to a point where people would start worrying I'm anorexic, but that's neither here nor there)

He then starts asking me "how I feel about that", which is how you know you're talking to a hybrid between a psychologist and a guy trying to sell you on some kind of dieting pill.

He asks me some demographic questions, in which I mention that my mother is also overweight, so he asks if she'd be interested in participating in the study. Since I'm currently living with my parents, I just walked into the next room to ask her. She was about as skeptical as I was about some of these claims, though more vocal about it, so we sat there for a while with the phone on speakerphone while he attempted to explain all of this and predict her potential weight loss. But Mom was willing to give it a try, so he got her information too, and explained that if I worked with Mom to help her do the exercises and collect data I could be a "practicioner" instead of just a humdrum participant, and make $8,000 or more. Which was starting to sound like a pyramid scam, but hey, I was already on this crazy train, let's see where it went next.

Where it went next was the broom cupboard.

You see, the first step was to create an "applicator", or a tool for inducing sneezing. How do we do this? But cutting the bristle off of a broom with synthetic bristles, trimming it down to the length of my index finger, and then washing it really well. And then, (no, seriously, this is a thing that I did to myself for money) I proceeded to stick the "applicator" up my nose and poke around at the membranes in order to induce sneezing.

I'm not even joking.

Also, apparently I have the cutest sneeze this doctor has ever heard. Yeah, I'm sure he tells that to all the girls.

Having practiced this on myself, I was given the task of doing this to my mother.

Except, she wasn't sneezing. In fact, she was starting to bleed when we called it off. The psychologist had some sort of explanation involving mental blocks, but Mom and I figured it had to do with some of the medications she's on.

So the next step to try to get a sneeze?

Dish soap.

OK, specifically-- you know those dishwasher packs that are in vogue now, the ones that are part powder and part liquid? The powdery stuff is powdered calcium. The doctor had us cut open one of those packs to get a bunch of the powder, and then had me help my mom sniff some granules of the powder. This did prove more effective, so that was what I did for the rest of the times I needed to make myself sneeze that day.

Yes. I spent almost an entire day snorting dishwasher powder and sneezing. This is not what I was expecting to do with my day.

So the next step-- the whole stress relief bit. We were going to do something called an "emotional release". How it went was that the doctor had me stroke my navel with one finger in a counterclockwise pattern for a while (apparently this is an acupressure thing and is supposed to be relaxing? Mom and I just found it obnoxious, but, whatever, it's For Science) while telling him about negative emotions that I keep to myself. Then, while I'm thinking about just how horrible my life is, I snort the powder and sneeze. The idea is that after sneezing I should feel better. And I kind of did a little.

So apparently I (and my mother, and he's making a case for me to recruit my sister and anyone else I can think of who is female and sneezes) need to do the sneezing + ab exercises three times a week, and to the emotional release three times a week. OK, so far so good. But then comes the truly miserable part-- filming.

Three times a week minimum, each participant needs to make three films. For all films, they stand, sit, or lay down in front of the camera while exposing a truly shocking amount of abdomen. They then sneeze and do some other things while the camera focuses on the navel and on the crown chakra. (whut) These films are uploaded to youtube, but using a special code so that the videos can only be found by a computer. A computer in South Korea then analyzes these videos for things like how much your muscles are moving and what the sneeze sounds like.

I did a couple of videos as a test. The doctor on the phone could not see the videos because of HIPAA (and thank heavens, because when I say "shocking amount of abdomen" I mean that it's not much better than nudity), and the computer in South Korea sent him some faxes telling him all the things I did wrong in the video-- bad angles, pants up too high, reflection off of metal, etc. (Yes. The computer faxed him. Geeze, what is this, the stone era?) He told me I needed to redo all my videos and get the videos for Mom that night, and he'd call me at 9AM the next morning. I agreed and he let me go.

My Mom was starting to feel more gung ho about this because my short time working with her had left her feeling like she'd had a good workout-- and just from sneezing a few times! I was feeling exhausted, though, and dreading doing all the videos. But I called my sister, who thought the study was ridiculous but really liked the idea of getting that $5500 compensation. Not to mention that as part of the deal, the doctor explained that if I was working with two participants besides myself, at the end of the study the institution would pay for me to take classes to get some sort of counseling certification. So she said she'd be down with it, though we agreed that it'd be easiest if I went to her place in person to walk her through everything the first time. Which, with 15 inches of snow up in Logan that day, might just take a while for me to get up there.

During dinner, the doctor called again to say that he was almost out of the office, but why hadn't I put the videos up yet? I said I'd do them that night. He told me all the instructions again, then hung up. I went back to eating. Five minutes later he called again to ask what time I was going to upload the videos specifically, and would I please tell my sister that sneezing will increase the good that her breast milk will do for her baby? Also, he wanted to read the fax to me about what was wrong with my videos so that I could help him decipher it because he's bad at technology. Then, finally, he left me alone.

So. Filming.

It was truly miserable.

I did Mom's videos first. I'd started out just filming with my iPad, but we had so many problems getting it at the right angle that Mom suggested we just use the digital camera and then I could upload the files with my computer. Fine and good for the first video, but on the second video things got complicated. First off, that video the camera had to be farther away, which was complicated because the battery was dead so we had to have the camera plugged into the charger while we worked. Secondly, this video was supposed to be an "emotional release" with sneezing. So I did my best to talk my mom through a bad experience she'd been struggling with while doing that weird navel stroking thing. But... ugh, I feel terrible about this. The fact is, however much I know about psychology, however well I paid attention to the shrink on the phone, however much I "impressed him with my professional manner while working with my mother", the fact is that I'm not a talk therapist. I'm a music therapist. So the way that I help people deal with emotions is very different from what he was asking me to do, and I made a complete hash of it. Basically my Mom just cried for a while. And then when I put the calcium in her nose-- she didn't sneeze. I added more calcium. She didn't sneeze. I added more calcium. It was starting to burn and be painful, and her nose was dripping so much that we couldn't actually put any more calcium in. We took a break to let her blow her nose. We tried again with identical results. I couldn't let it go there because here I'd taken her to an awful place and done nothing to release those emotions (a big therapeutic no no) and because there was no way I was going to make her do all of that again so we could try a second film. So I told her to fake the sneeze for the computer in South Korea, then we took a long break to recover from that twenty-minute ordeal.

The third video was pretty straightforward, though again it took multiple sets of multiple tries to induce sneezing.

And then the fourth video required her lying down underneath the camera.

The psychologist had suggested balancing the camera on a table and lying on the floor under the table for this one, but with my mom's back problems there was no way she was lying on the floor. So I had her lie down in bed. But no matter what crazy stuff we did with the tripod (at one point she was holding the tripod up with her toes), we couldn't get the camera angle right. Finally Dad helped me set up a folding ladder over the bed so we could put the camera on that, which finally was effective. But by this point I felt like this was turning into an awfully big production to be doing three times a week in addition to the other exercises and emotional releases that were happening off the camera.

But we finished that and I did myself. For the second time. And I was starting to get sneezed out. The calcium powder would just stick in my nose and burn and hurt and I had a headache and a sore throat and was feeling increasingly irritated with everything. To make matters worse, on the sitting one I managed to knock over the container of calcium dust, getting it all over me and my bedroom floor. I had to cut open yet another package of dishwasher detergent. And it turns out that balancing a camera on a table while you lie under the table is not any easier than filming a person in bed from above. At this point I was so frustrated and tired that I was almost in tears (not to mention that it was midnight), but after almost giving up I managed to wedge the tripod between some pillows and have the camera hanging from off my bed, resulting in an almost straight shot of my very feminine navel. Oh, also, sneezing while lying on the ground is gross. You, um, get sprinkled. And during this whole thing I was producing enough snot that you could bottle it.

So, after spending a few hours getting these videos filmed, I proceeded to start uploading them to youtube. Except the videos had taken so long to make (with all the repeat trials in order to properly induce sneezing), each video was taking over an hour to upload. And then my computer crashed. And then the video of me attempting to help my mom have an emotional release ended up being so long that youtube wouldn't let me upload the video without verifying the account--something I couldn't do without breaking HIPAA laws even if I wanted to. Around 2AM, after a chat with my Mom that was much more therapeutic for both of us than anything this psychologist had asked us to do, I gave up and went to bed.

Remember how the doctor said he'd call me at 9AM? We actually never discussed time zones (he never asked where I live, just if I lived in a temperate zone or not) but from some comments he made I knew that 9AM his time was 10AM my time.

He started calling me at 7:30. Of course, I slept through that one. I did hear the call at 8:00AM but was unable to answer it because my alarm clock was also going off and it's the kind where you have to get up and take a photo of something to get it to stop (because anything less than that and I'll go back to bed. Alas, I don't appear to have inherited my father's morning person genes; in the morning I crash into things like a slightly drunk zombie). I couldn't call him back because I was never given any contact information for anyone involved in the study. But, lucky me, he called again at 8:30AM. Which, remember, is 7:30AM on his time, an hour and a half before he said he'd call me. I didn't even try to sound friendly when I answered the phone.

As I had guessed, he called to ask why the videos weren't all up. I started explaining the issue with uploading the videos to youtube, and my concerns about the time requirements for this study that had supposedly just been 45 minutes a week. He, somewhat peevishly, told me that all the other participants can get the videos done and uploaded in less than half an hour, and that the time requirements "are exactly as described." I explained about the increasing difficulty in inducing sneezes. He told me I needed to get a different brand of dishwashing powder (Cascade, specifically) which had a higher concentration of calcium in the powder. Was there somewhere I could go get some? Well, yes, I live a few minutes away from a Smiths. Would I go get some now?

That did it.

After everything I'd been through putting those videos together, for him to call me that early and have me go run errands on his beck and call in 2 degree weather when I was so tired I could barely see straight-- this just wasn't reasonable. (What this says about me, that because a stranger on the phone promised me money I willingly stuck a broom bristle up my nose, snuffed dishwasher soap, discussed my navel, made embarrassing films of myself, and recruited my mother and sister to do the same-- but I drew the line when he asked me to get out of bed and go to the grocery store on a cold morning-- I'll let you decide). After a moment of stunned silence, I said, "I'm sorry, you've put an awful lot of time into this, but this just isn't going to work."

Then I hung up.

I half expected him to call back to try to change my mind, but he didn't. So, yeah, no $8,000. It's just as well, I wouldn't get the money until September anyway, and I need to find a job that can pay the bills in February.

I can't say I really regret the experience, now that it's over, even though I won't be receiving any compensation for my dedication to the cause of science. I learned some interesting things, some of which are more useful than others.

Also, would I have more success at finding dates if I subscribed to a online dating site where instead of uploading photos of your face, you uploaded photos of your belly button? Do we need to make that website a thing?