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

Rosa.

      Rosa asked twenty-one therapeutic touch healers to sit behind a large partition with two holes at the bottom; she couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see her. Then she asked the healers to put their hands, palms up, through the holes. After flipping a coin, Rosa put her hand slightly above each healer’s right or left hand, asking them to pick which she had chosen. If healers could truly detect her energy field, they would have picked the correct hand 100 percent of the time; if not, about 50 percent of the time. Rosa found that healers were right 44 percent of the time—no different than chance. She concluded, “Their failure to substantiate therapeutic touch’s most fundamental claim is unrefuted evidence that [their beliefs] are groundless and that further professional use is unjustified.”

      In 1999, Emily Rosa published her paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was titled “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch.” Unlike Mehmet Oz, Rosa wasn’t a cardiovascular surgeon. In fact, she had never graduated from medical school. Or college. Or high school. Or elementary school. When it came time to write her paper, she had asked her mother, a nurse, to help. That’s because Emily was only nine years old. Her experiment was part of a fourth-grade science fair project in Fort Collins, Colorado.

      Emily didn’t win the science fair. “It wasn’t a big deal in my classroom,” recalled Rosa, who graduated from the University of Colorado at Denver in 2009. “I showed it to a few of my teachers, but they really didn’t care, which kind of hurt my feelings.” Emily’s mother, Linda, recalled that “some of the teachers were getting therapeutic touch during the noon hour. They didn’t recommend it for the district science fair. It just wasn’t well received at the school.” The press, however, felt differently. Emily appeared on the news on ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS and was featured in specials by John Stossel, the BBC, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Nick News, Scientific American Frontiers, the Discovery Channel, NPR’s All Things Considered, the Today show, and I’ve Got a Secret. Her story was reported by the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Time, and People magazine and appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. When she was only eleven years old, Rosa spoke at Harvard University in place of the absent Dolores Krieger, the inventor of therapeutic touch and winner of Harvard’s tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Prize for her claim that human energy fields felt like “warm Jell-O or warm foam.” The next day, Emily gave her Harvard speech at MIT. Emily Rosa is listed in Guinness World Records as the youngest person to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal.

      Mehmet Oz’s fascination with supernatural forces didn’t end with faith healers and therapeutic touch. Later, when he picked John Edward to educate his audience, Oz entered the world of the occult.

      Edward is a psychic who communicates with the dead (like the Whoopi Goldberg character in Ghost, except without the crystal ball and robes). Oz featured Edward on a show titled “Are Psychics the New Therapists?” “We’ve had more requests [from our viewers] to join this show than any other we’ve ever done,” gushed Oz. “More than weight loss, more than cancer, more than heart disease. The topic? Do you believe we can talk to the dead?” Oz explained that Edward claimed to have helped thousands of people communicate with loved ones in the afterlife. “A session with a medium can be extremely therapeutic,” said Edward.

      Oz’s interest in the occult came from his experiences in the operating room: “As a heart surgeon, I’ve seen things about life and death that I can’t explain and that science can’t address.” To Mehmet Oz, John Edward had a gift that was beyond the reach of science. “I want you to know that your mom is okay,” Edward told an audience member. “She has a dog with her.”

      Although Oz promotes Edward’s powers, James Randi—a stage magician—doesn’t buy it. Randi has appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as well as Penn & Teller: Bullshit! In 1986, after receiving the MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, Randi decided to use the money to expose psychics. He now offers $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate clear evidence of paranormal, supernatural, or occult powers. Edward has never taken Randi up on his offer.

      Edward may have utter conviction in his own powers; however, according to James Randi, some psychics employ two basic strategies: “hot reading,” which uses information obtained from the audience before the show, and “cold reading,” which fishes for information during the show. Randi calls this “hustling the bereaved.” When their readings are wrong, they claim they have been confused by “energies” emanating from different families. When they have had enough wrong guesses, they claim that the “energy is being pulled back.” Oz, who is either remarkably trusting, painfully naive, or simply pandering to a gullible public to enhance advertising revenue, never questioned Edward’s special gift. “What happens when you start hearing voices,” he enthused.

      In addition to touting therapies born of the Old Testament notion that supernatural forces caused disease, Mehmet Oz promotes thousand-year-old natural remedies rooted in ancient Greece, China, and India, featuring two men he calls his “Superstars of Alternative Medicine”: Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra, both of whom recommend a variety of therapies (such as acupuncture, plants, herbs, oils, and spices) originally designed to balance humors and restore energies.

      Andrew Weil is a balding, white-bearded, slightly overweight man with the demeanor of a guru. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Weil did an internship at Mount Zion, in San Francisco—a hospital located next to Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. In the spirit of Ken Kesey (the subject of Tom Wolfe’s The 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