Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O (Wiley bad science series) (Paperback)

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.

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.

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.