Killing Us Softly (5 page)

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.

I
n 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 copies; by the end of the week it was 400,000.

I
n 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.

A
lthough 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 relies on alternative medicines; in Hong Kong, 14 percent; and in Japan, even less. In China, acupuncture is embraced almost solely by the rural poor. “It's easy for the well-fed metropolitan with time and money on his hands to talk about dealing with chronic symptoms with ayurvedic medicine or Chinese herbal therapies or ancient African or Native American remedies,” writes John Diamond in
Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations
. “But if you go to the countries where those remedies are all they have, you'll find them crying out for good old Western antibiotics, painkillers, and all the rest of the modern and expensive pharmacopoeia. When the government of South Africa complains that not enough is being done to help the 10 percent of its population which is HIV-positive, it isn't asking for help with preparing ‘natural' remedies: it wants AZT.”

Traditional healers also offer something else. Where modern medicine is spiritless and technological, they argue, alternative medicine is spiritual and meaningful. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” wrote Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, “the more it seems pointless.” Although modern science offers the prospect of longer lives, it doesn't offer the prospect of more meaningful lives. Alternative medicine, on the other hand, offers something greater: better health imbued with a deeper sense of purpose. Oz, Weil, and Chopra proffer their remedies with a spirituality that borders on mysticism. “Nothing is more dangerous than science without poetry or technical progress without emotional content,” wrote Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a German philosopher. In a culture that doesn't understand technology, and is often frightened and disappointed by it, spiritualism is an easy sell.

Finally, practitioners of alternative medicine appeal to the popular notion that you can manage your own health, that you don't need doctors to tell you what to do. “Alternative medicine is at the grass roots level,” says Oz. “And because of that, nobody owns it. Alternative medicine empowers us. And if it does work for you, don't let anybody take it away.” The offer of control in a health-care system where patients feel little or no control is irresistible. “The lure of alternative therapies won't end,” says Harriet Hall, a former flight surgeon and a regular contributor to
Skeptical Inquirer
magazine, “until you take the ‘human' out of human nature.”

A
t the heart of our distrust of modern medicine is the notion that we've rejected nature at our own peril—that big pharmaceutical companies, by synthesizing products in laboratories, have led us away from the natural products that allow us to live longer. And what could be more natural than vitamins.