Customer Reviews

Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O (Wiley Bad Science Series)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have been fascinated reading the reviews of this book, which seem to focus almost entirely on one small chapter on alternative medicine. No one seems to refute the funny "Hollywood" chapter, where we learn that getting knocked out with a bottle over the head can lead to a lifetime of neurological problems. No one says a word about the informative chapters on aging, the nature of disease, nutrition, the body, and how science is conducted. Do I sense a bit of defensiveness from the alternative medicine crowd?

I do not think the author suggests that that which is unproven by science is therefore wrong, as so many of these reviews claim. (This must be a standard defense with that crowd.) The author seems fascinated by acupuncture and sees promise in it. He explains that herbal medicine is not alternative; the science of pharmacology is based on creating medicine from plants. He explains that yoga and tai chi are useful because they are forms of exercise, just like running and stretching. These aren't alternative; they're common sense. What the author, Christopher Wanjek, dismisses is psychic healing, which is always proven to be fraudulent. He dismisses astrology. He laments the fact that children die because their parents rely on the power of prayer instead of medicine or because they don't "believe" in vaccination. He lashes out at "ancient" mind-body cures that, for example, claim to eliminate childbirth complications when it should be obvious that childbirth ultimately killed so many women in the ancient world. He seems annoyed by all the people who refuse useful treatment for "natural" cures (like the apricot pit cancer cure scam) when there's no such concept as "natural" anyway -- a chemical is a chemical, be it from "natural" hemlock or salt water. And he takes pains to explain how this recent push that "natural equals good" fools people into thinking that life long ago was somehow healthier... and thus you too can deliver babies at home because that's what our great-grandparents did. Six of my grandmother's 10 siblings did before age 10 in turn-of-the-century rural Italy. The same is true for most of the older folks I know. No amount of traditional cures could save them.

Believe what you want, but let's not create a health system based on distance healing, magic touch therapy, incantations, herbs that only work when Mars is aligned properly, cures that dismiss the germ theory of disease, and well-intentioned healing arts that have since been proven illogical and useless now that we have the tools (microscopes, imaging) to see how the body works. I can only hope my home country of Italy doesn't follow America's lead (with distance healers and psychics advising the White House!)

Not only did I enjoy the 30-page chapter on alternative medicine (called The Return of the Witchdoctor), I enjoyed the other 230 pages of Bad Medicine as well.

This book is a wide-ranging explanation of most people's health concerns written in most people's terms. It is especially good at reinforcing time and again that proper diet, nutrition, and exercise throughout life are the surest and cheapest keys to good health. Along the way Mr. Wanjek dispatches no end of windmills, from the myth of racial exceptionalism to where, exactly, does the tongue taste sweetness and saltiness. The tiny little appendix (the one inside us, not the somewhat more commodious one at the end of the book) really does have a use after all and shouldn't be willy-nilly snipped out whilst the belly is open for other reasons. Kidneys, liver, skin, hair, the resident populations of microbes-all these get a fair hearing and an even better explanation. As a periodic refresher on why it is a great idea to take care of oneself, this book is about as good as they come.

Mr. Wanjek gives thoughtful explanations when to take health claims at their word and when to look deeper. Chapter 24, entitled "Organic Food," starts off with a appetite-vaporizing set of facts about the secretive industry that calls itself "Organic". Milk sold under that rubric is in fact produced by cows penned up in the same ghastly poop-palace conditions as the more traditional variety. They are simply fed organic food (whatever that might be) instead of the truly dangerous stuff the industrial-food lads have dreamed up. If we take off the rose-colored glasses with the word "organic" silk-screened on the surface, we find many similarities in the minds of "Organic" corporate nutrition designers and the minds of the tetracycline-and-ground-brains designers. Corporate, after all, is corporate. So organic cows are penned up like their less well-fed sisters in row-stalls, mouth in a trough and teats in a machine that sucks them dry three times a day. They just get a nicer label for their fate. Soya milk, anyone?

You'll probably not want to keep this in mind next time at the McChicken place, but "free range" chickens range freely over a pecked-to-death enclosure with thousands of others, their beaks sometimes removed so they won't go on a murderous frenzy at the spark of something scary.

There are many similar examples of gut-spasming truth-telling, but Mr. Wanjek sticks to facts and graciously stays out of rubbing our noses in it. He also lays low some foot-soldiers of popular mythology that health-products industry generals use to scare the wits out of everybody. Remember the bottled Perrier scare a decade ago? To quote Mr. Wanjek, "Perrier mineral water comes from a variety of sources beyond France, such as Texas and New Jersey. Somewhere, somehow, in 1990, unacceptable levels of benzene, a known cancer-causing chemical, made their way into the stylish green bottles. The benzene level was far from deadly or even cancerous. You would have had to drink a couple hundred bottles a day to get to a level that would significantly increase your lifetime risk of getting cancer; and by that time, at $2 a bottle, you would have died of poverty."

He gets into tougher territory in Chapter 32, "Herbs as Alternative Medicine." Here the line between boon and bunk is as greasy as a butcher's doorknob. On the one hand he gives full credence to proven herbal medicaments like European milk thistle, the only known counter to a certain poisonous mushroom (and many similar examples of like kind). On the other he says things like, ". . . the herbal field us undermined by untrained herbalists, aromatherapists, astrologers, and New Age healers who blindly recommend herbal remedies with no clue how dangerous they can be." When two people who believe the same thing talk about what they believe, the one thing of which you can be certain is the exclusion of everything else.

Some of his examples are hilarious: "What good is the stress-relieving herb kava-kava when it is bound to a chocolate bar?" And for those of you who are more than a little dubious about the efficacy of whatever ingredients have the ability to enhance males by large inches in small weeks, you might want to check the pages of the teen magazines where a product called "Bloussant" will "wake up your body's growth process" and "actually stimulate the inner-cell substance in the breast.... Your confidence level will soar." Note that the ad doesn't directly state that the boobs will actually swell; they will merely be stimulated to do so. What really does swell is the profit margins of WellQuest International (Bloussant's makers) for their blend of don quai, black cohosh, fennel seed, and saw palmetto, which, in the industrial quantities WellQuest orders them, go for pennies the pound.

There is a certain progression in Mr. Wanjek's book, like looking at the pictures drawn by a schizophrenic during the descent into irrationality. By the time he gets us to Chapter 38, "I'm Not a Reporter, But I Play One on TV," we've reached a sort of health industry "Last Exit to Brooklyn". He sums up the condition of health reportage on mainstream TV, "When cable television became mainstream-with its endless choice of the marvelous, mawkish, and mundane-network television took a belly punch. The challenge was to make news even more entertaining to attract viewers who could just as easily switch to cable without ever leaving the comfort of the sofa."

Mr. Wanjek's is an excellent book. Knowledgeable, fair, even-handed, clearly written. And above all, non-polemical. He has a point to make and he makes it well: There is bunk in the health industry as everywhere, but there are also some musts you have to know along with the must-nots. Those musts he reinforces time after time in the simplest possible language: balanced diet, moderate amounts of stretching and exercise as long as you live, skip the noxious weed, treat alcohol with respect, and above all, moderation, moderation, moderation. Heck, the Buddha said this and people STILL don't get it.

Actually some of the medicine debunked here is merely not effective beyond the placebo. Homeopathy is a case in point. Wanjek includes it because he believes that people relying on such medicines tend to deprive themselves of real medicine. This may indeed be the case sometimes, but more often people turn to alternative medicine when conventional medicine fails. Clearly if one has an affliction that can be cured by conventional medicine and instead flies to the Philippines for some fake surgery, this is not good. On the other hand if the medical profession has stopped treating somebody's cancer, it is understandable that one might try anything. Still even this is sad since such desperation rewards quacks and charlatans.

But this book is about much more than bad medicine. Wanjek actually takes on a wide range of phoniness from bad TV health reporting to urban witch doctors, from why we go gray to why the Rambo-like violence in movies is unrealistic and dangerously misleading In fact, Wanjek's book is the widest ranging book of its kind that I have read and I've read a few; furthermore as far as I can tell he is right on the money.

Some things I learned with interest: what the appendix actually does, and where the silly idea that we only use ten percent of our brain comes from, and why "Vitamin O" (oxygen) is just so much bunk. Also: how health studies are conducted well and not so well and how they can be fudged, and why it is highly unlikely that Julius Caesar was born of a Caesarean section since his mother lived on and in those days nobody, but nobody ever survived such an operation.

There is also of course a lot that I already knew including the fact that the black plague is still with us, and that cold weather does not cause colds, and that antibiotics are useless against viruses (such as flu or cold viruses), and that radiation used in radiating food does not contaminate the food anymore than baking the food in a conventional oven does.

Wanjek even changed my mind on a couple of things, and for these old eyes to see new light is a rarity. I used to give Chinese medical practice and India's ancient ayurvedic treatments the benefit of the doubt believing that all those many centuries of experience counted for something. However, Wanjek makes the very excellent point that such medical traditions existed not because they were effective but because there was nothing else. He adds that conventional medicine is largely replacing these practices in their very countries of origin. Wanjek adds in implication that the entire history of medical practice up to (and to some very real extent) including modern times has been one long exercise in malpractice and painful ignorance. What horrors are we practicing on our patients today, one might ask, horrors to compare with bloodletting and Mayan brain surgery? Try chemotherapy for cancer, Wanjek suggests.

The only fault I could find with the book is that in his discussion of why we are getting so fat and in his eagerness to nail the Atkins diet to the wall he failed to mention so-called "carbohydrate intolerance." (Maybe he doesn't like the phrase.) I want to therefore remind him that in the prehistory there were not only no fatted calves or choice cuts of beef but no amber waves of grain either. Humans have little tolerance for living with a lot of easily gotten carbs anymore than they have genes for resisting fat-laden foods. Before the rise of agriculture, gathering wheat and other grain plants was such a labor-intensive process that not even Momma Cass could get fat from eating grass seeds.

Bottom line: the most comprehensive book on pseudoscience that I have read in recent years and one of the most readable.

After seeing countless "feel good" health books stacked up high in bookstores, I was pleased to see Bad Medicine. Here's the first book I saw that counters this silly notion that all "natural" medicine is safe. This book explains why so many alternative medicines don't work. Some have potential, like acupuncture. But so many others are based on ancient ideas based on astrology and superstition. Germs cause disease. We learned this in the 20th century, and now people live longer. Disease doesn't come from being "out of balance" or having "negative energy".

The book also has interesting trivia about the body -- like how that saying that "you only use 10% of your brain" was just a marketing scheme from the 1930s. I learned that the liver doesn't store toxins and that the tongue map (sweet, sour, etc.) is wrong.

Two chapters were a little too sarcastic -- like the chapter about magnet therapy, which is based on the false notion that blood is magnetic because of the iron inside. The author can be a little too sarcastic at times, which comes across as mean sometimes. Other chapters are very funny, though. I laughed out loud after reading Woody Harrelson's connection to oxygen bars.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what alternative medicines really work.

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Some reviewers were a little skeptical about the author, but a quick search on google will show that he is indeed qualified to write about medicine.

But about the book: I found this book to be written in a very readable and easy to understand way. Many times I chuckled outloud at the authors sarcasm.

While most people know why homeopathic medicine is bunk, he goes onto explain why it is bunk. He also has an interesting chapter on diets and on milk.

This book is full of interesting information, and i highly reccomend it to everyone who is interested in real medicine.

What a great concept, and the author really pulls it off. I especially enjoyed the entertaining and informative chapter on "memory loss and aging." Or, at least, I think I recall liking it. Also, the chapter about the dangers of obesity was reminiscent of another excellent tome, "Fast Food Nation." In fact, overall, I'd rank "Bad Medicine" right up there with that book. Christopher Wanjek is a great find -- I look forward to reading more of his books in the future.

I didn't have any particular expectations about "Bad Medicine" when I purchased it, except what the title (and the subtitle) told me. In fact, the subtitle was somewhat misleading - it had led me to expect that this book was an encycopdeia of bad ideas in medicine or healthcare (a bit like "the Skeptic's Dictionary"), but it isn't.

"Bad Medicine" is a series of short chapters covering such topics as common myths about physiology and diet, and ineffective alternative medicine. The very first chapter is an introduction that provides a history of medicine from the dawn of recorded history to the modern day. This introduction, in itself, is facinating and worth the price of the book.

The information presented in this book is drawn from reputable scientific sources - a bibliography for each chapter is provided at the end. In addition, internet sources are also listed for interested readers to pursue the topics in the book further.

Although drawn from science, the material in the book is presented in a truely understandable format. For example, when talking about theraputic magnets (and how they don't attract the iron in blood) the author used a good analogy to Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI). He points out that the if the theory behind theraputic magnets were correct the very strong magnets used in MRI should rip the blood from your body - but they don't.

After about 10 pages of "Bad Medicine" it dawned on me that not only was the content interesting and well written, the author was also very funny, so I wanted to know more about him. Turning to the back cover, I discovered that not only had Christopher Wanjek written for major newspapers and university publications, he's also written jokes for tv comedy shows. As such, if you read "Bad Medicine" I expect you'll find yourself amused, as well as well informed.

This book is about so much more than bad medicine. As well as covering, in good but not overwhelming detail, many 'alternative medicine' topics (such as homeopathy which he gleefully destroys) it also covers a wide range of simple misunderstandings, 'old-wives tales' and folk hokum to do with the human body - ranging from the classic, "Don't sit too close to the TV or you'll damage your eyes!" to why we go grey/get fat/go bald/etc/etc.

Wanjek writes with flair and gentle humour. On that note, however, I have noticed in some reviews posted here that people who actually hold any of the pseudoscientific beliefs that Wanjek so neatly destroys may take his humour more seriously. Personally I am heartened by this - Wanjek has clearly touched a nerve.

This book provides an excellent overview of the current state of play in alternative medicine, excellent refutations of AM's sacred cows and, most importantly, some damn good advice. It is hard to overstate the harm done by people's unquestioning belief in alternative medicine - the number of treatable cancers that don't get detected early enough because of someone's misplaced trust in an iridologist, the masses of beneficial medication that never get prescribed because people would rather take water endowed with mystical 'quantum memories' of some unproven herb that used to be there before getting diluted into practical non-existence, ... Wanjek, through this book, provides a serious and valuable tool for sufferers of serious illness to cut through the haze of crap on offer from every late night infomercial peddling false hope.

For those of us fortunate enough to NOT be suffering serious illness, and for those less fortunate who ARE, the book is thought provoking, funny, interesting and informative. And hey - sooner or later we all know someone who gets taken for a ride by some medical scam - this book will definitely come in handy.

I can see that the reviews have become much more positive since I first wrote in 2003. I was hoping the publisher would have the next book in the series out, called Bad Weather, but no such luck.

I did see some reviews questioning Christopher Wanjek's background. A quick Internet check reveals he is a Washington Post health writer with a masters in public health from Harvard School of Public Health. So although he isn't a PhD like the author of Bad Astronomy, I do think he has creditials.

The real question is why the publisher didn't include this information on the book's back cover. They seem to promote his joke writing instead. (He's a contributing writer to the Leno show.) I think more readers would trust his arguments if they understood that he does have academic and professional credentials.

As a health professional with some background in conventional and alternative medicine, I can tell that there are many books out there that promote pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and dangerous diets. Christopher Wanjek's witty style puts all the myths, misconception and inflated fears in perspective. And he does it remarkably well, making this book not just enlightening and informative, but entertaining as well.

However, the first couple of chapters aren't very impressive. Most of us already know those myths about using only 10% of our brains and masturbation causing blindness. Then, Wanjek goes into the myth of liver detoxification - a concept readily accepted by most people in the field of wellness. It also seems rather easy to fool people into parting with plenty of cash to breathe pure oxygen for a few minutes. The author tells us (and it's true) that this may do more harm than good.

The book starts to get interesting when the author talks about battling aging and obesity, heart disease and cancer. In a few short paragraphs, he debunks the Atkins diet. He also uncovers some of the myths and lies in unconventional cancer treatment like using shark cartilage.

He also touches on our obsession with organic food and "clean" bottled water, showing us how organic and healthy our organic produce really is and how most bottled water come from the tap and not some melting glacier in the European Alps.

Then comes a section devoted to decrediting aromatherapy, homeopathy, touch therapy, herbal treatment. Wanjek seems reasonably well informed of oriental medicine, what they can do and what they can't do. He is careful not to rule out everything but merely highlights some of the bizarre and unscientific claims from today's hardsell practitioners who appeal to today's sophisticated, new age consumer curious about the exotic East and the glorious when few people lived beyond 25.

Wanjek also takes an insider's view of how studies are conducted, why the results are so confusing and how sponsors may affect the results of these studies in their favour. My favourite part has to be the way he takes a shot at Deepak Chopra the guru.

When toxicity is concerned, Wajek brings out the things that frighten consumers, be they pesticides, pollutants, chlorine and fluoride in drinking water and even vaccines. Sensational examples give rise to sensational science. There are cults which believe that vaccines are a conspiracy by the government to poison people. Others wage wars against "toxins" which do more good than harm to almost all people. The author draws a comparison between people who smoke and yet complain about pollutants in the air. Without water purification and vaccines, many people will die each year. The risks from poisoning are negligible compared to the benefits.

There is a chapter on Hollywood's medical myths, but I think most people already know that you if hit a bottle hard enough on a person's head to break the bottle, the guy can't just get up and run after the baddies.

It's a very well-written, easy-to-read book that is easily understood even by those without much background knowledge. However, I find the articles too short and too varied. I would have preferred a book with a more central theme. Too many topics have been included. Some chapters should have been taken out and some should have been expanded.