In what, specifically, are Americans investing this unblinking faith? Popular mind/body methods include:
THERAPEUTIC TOUCH. The theory here is that myriad conditions can be cured by correcting disruptions in the energy field that supposedly surrounds us. Therapists wave their hands over the patient without ever contacting skin. The catch: No such aura has ever been documented. Therapeutic touch is a favorite with nurses, who, as one knowledgeable observer puts it, “like to feel more personally involved in patient care and recovery.” Practitioners typically charge $200 to $300 for the first visit and $125 to $150 for follow-ups. Incidentally, therapeutic touch is among the psychic phenomena covered under debunker James Randi’s “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge,” which offers the sum to anyone who can prove the existence of one of the disputed anomalies on Randi’s list.
DISTANCE HEALING (ALSO KNOWN AS REMOTE HEALING OR REMOTE PRAYER). Patients agree to be prayed for by “experienced healers,” usually clustered in far-flung healing communities like Taos, New Mexico, or Perth, Australia. Skeptics—which is to say, scientists—liken it to voodoo. The cost ranges from nothing (when done as “value added” to other alternative therapy) to several hundred dollars per session.
ART THERAPY, DANCE THERAPY, MEDITATION, CHANTING, AND GUIDED IMAGERY (“NOW PICTURE YOUR BODY CASTING OFF THE TUMORS . . .”). Sally Satel, the author of PC, M.D., labels this category of prescriptives “Kumbayah medicine,” a sly reference to the chantlike hippie anthem. “Sure, some of it may make you feel better,” Satel told me, “but so will lots of things. As therapies, they’re no more medicinal than shopping or sex.”
FENG SHUI. This fast-growing wing of alternative medicine would have you believe that improved health and other benefits can be had simply by rearranging the furniture. The American Feng Shui Institute teaches its followers how to “manipulate your surroundings such that you make an impact on your finances, health, and emotions.” Devotees tout miracle cures for everything from Alzheimer’s disease to weight problems. Feng shui is particularly popular in “enlightened” corporate settings.1
Note that none of these “methods” involves an actual device, drug, or other physical implement beyond what was originally present in the patient or his or her surroundings. “Could there be a more ingenious way of making money than by selling people a medicinal product that’s intangible if not invisible?” asks Dr. Wallace Sampson, the editor of Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and a former chairman of the National Council Against Health Fraud.
That’s not to say there aren’t legions of entrepreneurs trotting out catalogs full of New Agey products and practices designed to tap into today’s unquenchable desire for self-management of health and well-being. Some of the favorites include:
MAGNET THERAPY. This hot fad purports to alleviate pain and enhance tissue vitality by attracting more blood to treated areas. Some athletes and Hollywood celebrities swear by it. Magnets for do-it-yourselfers retail for as little as $5; magnetic mattresses or car seats can cost upward of $1,000. Outpatient treatment runs $100 an hour and up. All this, even though University of Maryland researchers found in 2002 that magnets had no effect whatsoever on blood flow or pressure; the Maryland study echoed the findings of about a dozen previous small-scale trials. Such studies led California attorney general Bill Lockyer to file in 2002 a seven-figure lawsuit against Florida-based European Health Concepts, a major manufacturer of magnetic mattress pads and seat cushions, for making false claims about its products. The Sacramento Superior Court ultimately assessed $1.5 million in civil penalties against the company and ordered full restitution for the California consumers who purchased magnetic mattress pads and/or seat cushions from the company. Also in 2002, James Gary Davidson was convicted of criminal fraud for employing a fake treatment on terminally ill cancer patients. Posing as a doctor, Davidson ran makeshift cancer clinics in Mexico and Tennessee, ultimately pronouncing a number of his patients “cancer-free” after treating them with magnets. That did not stop them from dying. Davidson was sentenced to eighty-eight months in federal prison and ordered to pay $675,000 in restitution (a figure that testifies to the kind of money up for grabs in the world of alternative medicine).
MAGNETIZED WATER. The Internet is awash in companies selling magnetized water and the $60 cups in which to magnetize it. The extravagant promises made for the liquid encourage buyers to use it to treat liver, circulatory, and autoimmune diseases; gallstones and kidney stones; urinary infections; ulcers; allergies; diarrhea; rashes; arthritis; bursitis; tendinitis; sprains; strains; and sciatica. Oh yes, it can also stimulate extra-special growth in plants.
DETOXIFICATION THERAPY. This therapy, one of the handful of new treatments that incorporate some facets of traditional medicine, assumes that our bodies have been ravaged by poisons in food and the environment. Though the concept may have merit in isolated cases—such as families who drink well water contaminated by industrial runoff—not a shred of evidence exists for universal contamination. Costs vary with the practitioner’s favored method for extracting those toxins. A full sequence of intravenous chemical flushes can run between $3,000 and $5,000.
These and other products are featured at major exhibitions like Whole Life Expo or in megacirculation magazines like Prevention. They may be given the stamp of approval by big-name sponsors, like Andrew Weil, MD, who straddle the border between self-actualization and health care and wield tremendous clout in both. Some of the questionable methods have even found their way into the curriculum at such leading schools as the University of California at San Francisco’s Center for Integrative Medicine.
This cross-pollination between traditional self-help and alternative medicine is seen most clearly in products that position themselves at the nexus of mind and body, and essentially promise to cure . . . well, just about everything. The One Brain System, developed by Three In One Concepts of Burbank, California, “is a new and unique approach to locate and correct stressors that may be causing dyslexia, fears, or anything that is limiting you from creating what you want for yourself,” according to the company’s Web site. Three In One president Gordon Stokes writes that by locating the experience that created the “emotional issue” and defusing it, you can rid your body of the limitations that stand in the way of many life goals. A product called Hemi-Sync promises to synchronize your brain waves in a way that will help you control your pain, boost your immune system, strengthen your circulation, combat autism, alleviate depression, sleep, wake again full of vigor and vim, lose weight, rid yourself of addictions, and so on.
“It’s faith healing for the masses,” Sampson told me. “It’s a blend of New Age mysticism, cultlike schemes, and outright quackery masquerading as ‘freedom of choice.’ ” Adds Dr. Stephen Barrett, the chairman of Quackwatch and a thirty-year crusader against medical quackery, “In this industry you have thousands of people working together to promote something where there’s absolutely nothing there.”
In addition to pseudotherapies, the alt-med craze has resulted in a proliferation of support groups for people connected by a common disease or physical complaint. A September 2000 report by a Canadian panel of health-care experts, entitled “An Overview of Self-Help Initiatives in Health Care,” characterized the growth of support groups during the 1990s as “exponential” (adding that such groups inevitably produced a heightened interest in alternative medicine as a genre). In its February 2000 issue, American Psychologist estimated that health-care support groups now constitute roughly 40 percent of self-help’s Recovery movement, with the other 60 percent consisting of the groups discussed in chapter 8 (which, as noted, tend to link those who share an imagined and/or psychological disease).
“In one sense the groups could be helpful, because they give people other people to talk to about their troubles,” says Barrett. “My concern is that it can give people a way of coping with their illness that postpones other action. Comparing notes about cancer is not the same as being treated for cancer.” Ameri
can Psychologist observes that one of the primary functions of these groups is to provide a sense of stability; patients may emerge from their meetings with an illusion of good feelings that masks the silent progress of their disease. The Canadian report on medical self-help also describes “sharing” sessions for diabetes sufferers during which members swap stories about having cheated on their strict diets, and details how voicing such stories “gave a feeling of legitimacy to minor acts of noncompliance.” Would their doctors really want such acts to gain legitimacy? Or, as Satel suggested with regard to alcoholism, is it better that they remain stigmatized?
Do we want people feeling better? Or getting better?
The downsides of health support (not unlike the downsides of SHAM as a whole) are seldom weighed, or even looked at, the Canadian report concludes: “A review of the support group literature reveals that almost all accounts relate only to successful group experiences. Although some evaluations of support groups have been conducted, most studies measure only the positive outcomes and tend to ignore negative effects.”
We are reminded, again, of the rose-colored prism through which society tends to view self-help: By definition, it’s a good thing. At worst, it’s innocuous.
Not so with alternative medicine, whose problems really begin with its name. “There is no alternative medicine” was how Dr. Arnold Relman, onetime editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, put it in a landmark 1998 article for the New Republic. “There is only scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine supported by solid data, or [there is] unproven medicine, for which scientific evidence is lacking.” The claims made for alt-med are anchored in a stew of pseudoscience, questionable testimonials, invented jargon (“geopathic stress”), and seductive buzzwords borrowed from self-help (“personal empowerment”).
“They claim that science does not have all the answers, and that’s true,” Barrett told me. “But quackery has no answers. It caters to hope and preys on fear. It will take your money and break your heart.”
What’s more, the heartbreak isn’t confined to the starry-eyed and medically naive. Debbie Benson, whose tragic story opened this chapter, was herself a registered nurse.
THE MEDICAL SHAM
The self-help movement cannot be directly blamed for alternative medicine, which has been with us since the dawn of orthodox medicine (and even has won a measure of respectability in some circles thanks primarily to acupuncture and chiropractic). But alternative medicine could hardly have been a more natural fit with self-actualization. SHAM catalyzed alt-med by establishing a climate wherein people not only felt “empowered” to “take charge of their lives” but also honestly believed that the cure to all things physical resided somewhere in the psyche and was under their conscious control—that the physical body operates at the behest of the will. “It’s this postmodern notion that denies absolutes and objective reality, and puts it all up to the individual,” says Sampson.
Believe it, achieve it.
The Canadian health-care panel that issued the September 2000 report on medical self-help made observations that apply just as well to a course of events throughout America and much of the free world. “During the 1970s,” the panel stated in the report’s introduction, “a strong self-help movement evolved which not only premised that it is reasonable for individuals to perform for themselves many of the tasks associated with health care, but that people with similar health conditions may be able to provide as much guidance and insight into how to live with certain health problems as can health professionals.” The report went on to state that “these beliefs, which challenge the exclusivity of knowledge and competency of professionals, are basic to the self-help movement [emphasis added].”
It’s a perceptive observation. By its nature, SHAM represents distrust of structure and orthodoxy. After all, the basic unit of social structure is the family, which, in Victimization, is the wellspring of so much adult malaise. Victimization thus urges its acolytes to throw off the shackles of oppressive, hierarchal thinking and to make their own decisions in their own self-interest. You know what’s best for you. At the same time, we have Empowerment extolling the limitlessness of human potential, preaching that people can overcome anything if they simply believe in themselves and act on that belief.
Overall, SHAM strongly implies that people have been patronized and victimized by the herd mentality—this, even though the human-potential movement has its own orthodoxies that are just as dogmatic as anything in mainstream life. Much like early feminism, which told women, “It’s OK to chart your own course—as long as you decide not to be a housewife”—SHAM preaches individual decision making and the pursuit of private truth but is openly contemptuous of the individual whose personal truth leads him to take the conventional path. Nowhere is this distrust of orthodoxy more dangerous than in the area of health care. Ken Spiker told me that Debbie Benson, his deceased friend, “lived in a Portland, Oregon, community which was a vestige of the counterculture.” He emphasized her “deep, almost paranoid distrust of conventional medicine,” adding that for Debbie, and for her like-minded cohorts, self-help represents “a wholesale rejection of conventional wisdom in favor of the primacy of personal feelings.”
The alt-med mind-set thus promotes a bizarre, inverse credibility wherein the further something strays from mainstream approval, the more cachet it achieves among alt-med subscribers. Can a substance be administered in such minute/dilute dosages that (a) it cannot possibly have adverse side effects and yet (b) it magically realizes its full therapeutic action? The ability to believe simultaneously in (a) and (b) is what underlies the growing “field” of homeopathy. In just slightly oversimplified form, homeopathy employs trace dosages of substances (some of them toxic, like mercury or lead) to energize the body’s immune system against diseases whose symptoms mimic an overdose of the curative substance. Similar pretzel logic guides cancer patients who “swear off chemotherapy because it’s ‘too toxic’ but willingly swallow cyanide,” says Dr. William Jarvis, the president of the National Council Against Health Fraud. (Cyanide is found in the alt-med anticancer agent lactrile.)
The relative handful of serious, formal inquiries into alternative medicine have produced damning results. In one eight-year retrospective study of 515 cancer patients conducted by a team of Scandinavian researchers and published in 2003 in the European Journal of Cancer, alt-med therapies as a class yielded higher mortality rates than those found among nonusers—79 percent versus 65 percent. Far from giving cancer patients new hope, researchers concluded, alternative medicine actually might worsen the prognosis, even for patients simultaneously receiving conventional treatment. In 1998 the University of California at San Diego looked at 172 childhood deaths from faith healing (in effect the same as distance healing) over a twenty-year period and concluded that 140 of the deaths were from conditions with a 90 percent survival rate when treated conventionally. Many other alt-med therapies are so lacking in protocols, controls, and any kind of consistent application, says Quackwatch’s Barrett, that “there’s just no way to reliably test them. You either believe it or you don’t.”
When confronted, alt-med proponents often fall back on the argument that such therapies don’t lend themselves to clinical rigor or peer review in the first place. As Sally Satel says of the high priests of therapeutic touch, “They’ll tell you, ‘If you don’t do it right, you can get a backup of energy—it flows back into the practitioner—so you won’t see the expected results.’ I mean, really.” Other alt-med proponents claim that the tests are rigged. They allege a Machiavellian conspiracy on the part of the American Medical Association, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Cancer Society, and other institutional interests to keep the public sick and dependent.
Alt-med apologists can point to high-profile cases like the pharmaceutical giant Merck’s 2004 recall of its top-selling arthritis drug, Vioxx. Merck summarily yanked the drug from pharmacy shelves after a new study revealed a disturbing pattern of sudden
cardiac deaths among Vioxx users. More disturbing still were intimations, linked to Merck internal discussions, that the drugmaker had known for some time about the drug’s cardiotoxicity but had tried to downplay the gravity: Vioxx had generated $2.5 billion in worldwide revenues in 2003. The story offered alt-med supporters proof positive that at the same time the medicine establishment was warning consumers away from “untested” therapies, it was selling them billions of dollars’ worth of products and services it already knew could kill them. Dr. D. Edwards Smith, the president of the Maharishi College of Vedic Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky, which trains alt-med practitioners, told the Lexington Herald-Leader, “When you ask patients out there, they’ve sort of had it up to here with harmful drug side effects.” Smith went on to say that he expected the Vioxx incident to be a boon for alt-med acceptance.
Still, even if malfeasance on Merck’s part eventually is documented in court, such regrettable episodes hardly settle the score for alternative medicine’s excesses and failures. And when it comes to rigging tests, the alt-med community has its own stable to clean. In December 2002 Wired magazine reported that advocates of remote healing had snagged $1.5 million in federal grant monies by massaging data they had submitted to the government, selecting only the results that supported their claims. In a sad postscript to the episode, Dr. Elizabeth Targ, the woman who so vigorously championed the bogus results, died of a brain tumor, despite a concerted prayer vigil by healers worldwide.
But if alternative medicine doesn’t work, what keeps “satisfied customers” coming back? “For one thing, people use it for problems that are inherently time limited,” Sally Satel told me. “In other words, whatever was wrong with them was going to get better by itself. Plus, there’s always the placebo effect.”
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