Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine. Dr Offit Paul

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СКАЧАТЬ Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Weil fit right in, choosing to study hallucinogenic drugs. In 1972, he published his first book, The Natural Mind, in which he claimed that hallucinogens can “unlock” the brain and—in a chapter titled “A Trip to Stonesville”—that “stoned” thinking makes people more insightful. He even celebrated psychosis. “Every psychotic is a potential sage or healer,” he wrote. “I am almost tempted to call psychotics the evolutionary vanguard of our species.”

      After completing one year of a two-year program at the National Institutes of Health, Weil continued to promote his belief that hallucinogenic drugs are good for you. In 1983, he wrote From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs. Weil even has a hallucinogenic mushroom, Psilocybe weilii, named after him. But Weil’s apotheosis came in 1995 with the publication of Spontaneous Healing, in which he claimed that health and illness are “manifestations of good and evil, requiring the help of religion and philosophy to understand and all the techniques of magic to manipulate.” The public ate it up. Weil lectured to packed audiences and appeared frequently on Oprah and Larry King Live. His books became international best sellers, and his face appeared on the cover of Time—twice. Publishers Weekly described Weil as “America’s best-known complementary care physician,” the San Francisco Chronicle as “the guru of alternative medicine,” Time as “Mr. Natural,” and his own books as “America’s most trusted medical expert.” Andrew Weil is one of America’s most famous, most influential alternative healers.

      Another of Mehmet Oz’s “Superstars” is Deepak Chopra. Chopra was born and raised in New Delhi, where he attended the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and later moved to the United States to complete residencies in internal medicine and endocrinology. As chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital, Chopra “noticed a growing lack of fulfillment.” He asked himself, “Am I doing all I can for my patients?” So he visited onetime Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who persuaded Chopra to found the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine and become the director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. Ayurvedic medicine, founded in India two thousand years ago, is based on the ancient Greek notion of balancing humors. However, unlike Hippocrates’s four humors, ayurvedic medicine balances three humors, or doshas: wind (vata), choler (pitta), and phlegm (kapha). To determine whether doshas are out of balance, healers take a patient’s pulse.

      Chopra became a national guru on Monday, July 12, 1993, when he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. Within twenty-four hours he had sold 137,000 copies; by the end of the week it was 400,000.

      In addition to Old Testament and ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian remedies, Oz also promotes the relatively modern concepts of homeopathy and chiropractic manipulations, both of which represent a kind of devolution in medical thinking.

      Homeopathy was the creation of Samuel Hahnemann, who practiced in Germany and France between 1779 and 1843. Hahnemann was disturbed by the brutality of nineteenth-century medicine, which included bloodletting with leeches, poison-induced vomiting, and skin blistering with acids. He wanted a safer, better way to treat people. His epiphany came in 1790. While ingesting powder from the bark of a cinchona tree, Hahnemann developed a fever. At the time, it was known that cinchona bark, which contained quinine, could treat malaria. Hahnemann believed that because he had fever, and because fever was a symptom of malaria, medicines should induce the same symptoms as the disease. For example, vomiting illnesses should be treated with medicines that cause vomiting. (Homeopathy literally means “similar suffering.”) To be on the safe side, Hahnemann also believed that homeopathic medicines should be diluted to the point that they aren’t there anymore. Although the active ingredient was gone, Hahnemann believed, the final preparation would be influenced by the medicines having once been there.

      Like homeopathy, chiropractic manipulations are also the brainchild of one man: Daniel D. Palmer. Palmer was a mesmerist who used magnets to treat his patients. But in 1895, when a man who had been deaf for seventeen years walked into his office, Palmer tried something else. Believing that deafness was caused by a misaligned spinal column, which he called “subluxation,” Palmer pushed down on the back of the man’s neck, hoping to realign his spine. It worked; the man recovered his hearing immediately. (The event is often referred to as “the crack heard round the world.”) Most miraculous about Palmer’s cure is that the eighth cranial nerve, which conducts nerve impulses from the ear to the brain, doesn’t travel through the neck. Palmer then took the next illogical step, arguing that all diseases were caused by misaligned spines. Because this isn’t true, it shouldn’t be surprising that studies have shown that chiropractic manipulations don’t treat many of the diseases they are claimed to, such as headaches, menstrual pain, colic, asthma, and allergies.

      Although Oz promotes therapies born before scientists had determined what caused diseases and why, he’s enormously popular—for many reasons.

      First, Oz and his Superstars provide an instruction book for something that doesn’t come with instructions: life. Collectively, books written by Oz, Weil, and Chopra tell people exactly what to eat and when to eat it; how to be a friend; how to sustain a loving relationship; how and when to exercise; which shampoos, cleaning fluids, laundry detergents, and baby foods to use; how to prepare meals (including “Dr. Weil’s Favorite Low-Fat Salad Dressing”); and how to treat almost every possible illness. It’s reassuring to know that there’s a right and wrong way to do everything. And because these books are so definitive, so clear about how to handle almost any disease, they inspire a cultlike devotion among their followers. Do it our way and you’ll live longer, love better, and raise happier, healthier children. Given life’s arbitrary, capricious, and unpredictable nature, these books can be quite comforting.

      Another lure of alternative medicine is that it’s personalized. Practitioners of modern medicine can appear callous and insensitive. Patients feel more like a number than a person. That’s where alternative healers come in: they provide individual care, because they care. “Doctors are trapped in this system,” says Andrew Weil. “A ravenously for-profit system.” But Weil isn’t trapped: “I listen to them,” he says. “I take sixty minutes on a first visit.” “My advice for everybody,” says Mehmet Oz, “is to customize therapy for yourself.”

      The promise of ancient wisdom is also appealing. When Mehmet Oz discussed acupuncture on The Dr. Oz Show, he made a rather surprising statement. “It’s the basis of ancient Chinese medicine,” he insisted. Oz was arguing that we should trust ancient medicine because it’s ancient. Today’s culture is filled with this sentiment. For example, in the movie 2012, starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet, the world is coming to an end—something that apparently had been predicted by the Mayan calendar. “All our scientific advances,” laments one scientist, “all our fancy machines—the Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.” The writers of 2012 knew their audience. Many people believe that ancient healers and soothsayers, free from confusing modern technologies, possessed a clearer, wiser view of things. “One of the arguments mobilized by alternative medicine practitioners against orthodox medicine is that the latter is constantly changing while alternative medicine has remained unaltered for hundreds, even thousands of years,” wrote Raymond Tallis in Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents. “The lack of development in 5,000 years can be a good thing only if 5,000 years ago alternative practitioners already knew of entirely satisfactory treatments. If they did, they have been remarkably quiet about them.” Modern medicine is carved by centuries of learning. It continues to evolve because it continues to generate new information. It isn’t fixed in time. But the fluidity of modern medicine can be unsettling. Alternative medicine’s certainty, on the other hand, can be quite reassuring.

      Ironically, while alternative remedies are embraced in the developed world, they’re often rejected in the countries where they originated. In mainland China, for example, where both traditional and modern therapies are available, only 18 percent of the population СКАЧАТЬ