Killing Us Softly (26 page)

But when it comes to cashing in on alternative medicine, few have benefited more than Mehmet Oz's “Superstars,” all of whom have done quite well for themselves. Andrew Weil has his own brand of supplements under the name Dr. Weil's Select. Visitors to Weil's website can buy his Memory Support formula, containing ginkgo, for $56.10, his Joint Support formula, containing glucosamine, for $72, and his Energy Support formula, containing large quantities of vitamins, for $72.60. In 2003, Weil signed a deal with Drugstore.com that paid his company $3.9 million.

Deepak Chopra uses a different business model. He promotes ayurvedic supplements, oils, massages, and herbs under the brand name Chopra Center. He also sells books, videos,
clothes, aromatherapies, jewelry, gifts, and music. Customers can attend courses run by Dr. Chopra titled “Journey into Healing,” “Free to Love, Free to Heal,” and “Summoning the Sacred,” for between $1,000 and $5,000 each. If customers want to participate in a sacrificial ceremony to please the Vedic gods, it costs between $3,000 and $12,000. One year of anti-aging medicines can cost as much as $10,000. If CEOs want Deepak Chopra to speak at a corporate event, it costs $25,000. (The Atlantic Richfield Company has employed Chopra for more than a decade.) Chopra's center grosses about $20 million a year.

Because Chopra charges a lot of money for his medicines and seminars, he has to appeal to a well-heeled clientele. At this he is a master. Chopra has helped wealthy businessmen, celebrities, and politicians like Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Debra Winger, Madonna, Mikhail Gorbachev, Michael Milken, and Hillary Clinton find their inner space without feeling bad about being rich. Chopra writes that he “will give you the ability to create unlimited wealth with effortless ease” and that “money is really a symbol of the life energy.” He has written a book titled
Golf for Enlightenment
. Chopra's unusual marriage of ancient Indian healing with unbridled capitalism is easily parodied. In 1998, in response to Chopra's
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
, Christopher Buckley, John Tierney, and Brother Ty wrote
God Is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth
, which includes advice such as “God loves the poor but that doesn't mean he wants you to fly coach,” “As long as God knows the truth, it doesn't matter what you tell your customers,” and “Money is God's way of saying thanks.” The book also includes “A Prayer for Untroubled Wealth.”

Joe Mercola is also a phenomenal salesman.
BusinessWeek
described Mercola's aggressive marketing practices as giving “lie to the notion that holistic practitioners tend to be so absorbed in treating patients that they aren't effective businesspeople. While Mercola [claims to be free] from ‘all the greed-motivated hype out there in healthcare land,' he is a master promoter, using every trick of traditional and Internet direct marketing to grow his business … an unfortunate tradition made famous by old-time snake oil salesmen of the 1800s.”

Mercola sells:

• A one-ounce bottle of Organic Sea Buckthorn Anti-Aging Serum for $22.
  
• A pack of sixteen “worry free” organic cotton tampons for $7.99, arguing that your tampon “may be a ticking time bomb.”
  
• The Mercola Vitality Home Tanning Bed for $2,997 (“Incredible Deal!”)—remarkable, given that UV radiation is a known cause of skin cancer.
  
• An eight-ounce bottle of Natural Sunscreen with Green Tea for $15.97.
  
• And krill oil, probiotics, coenzyme Q10, multivitamins, astaxanthin, “Joint Formula,” protein powder, “Purple Defense,” vitamin K, chlorella, vitamin B
  ₁₂
  spray, vitamin D spray, melatonin sleep spray, “eye support,” “immune support,” “prostate and bladder support,” organic skin care, bath care, organic body butter, organic cocoa cassava bars, whey protein bars, tulsi teas, ceramic cookware, shampoo and conditioner, “cardiovascular support,” acai berry, BioTHIN, CLA supplement,
  digestive enzymes, wool bedding, “dental care,” Greener Cleaner, water filters, Soft Spray Bidet, pet products, fitness products, summer survival kit, tanning systems, Fiber Harmony with psyllium, herbal supplements, Chyawanprash herbal jam, “New Start,” pure gold raw honey, royal matcha green tea, coconut oil, vitamin E, Himalayan salt lamps, Himalayan cooking and bath salt, fish oil, D-Mannose, Healthy Chef sixteen-piece cutlery sets and Turbo Ovens, lightbulbs, air purifiers, juicers (even though he recommends against fruit juices), fruit and vegetable wash, kefir and vegetable starters, ferrite beads, coconut flour, sleep masks, a sun alarm clock, and massage tools, most under his own brand name.
  

Mercola's products gross about $7 million a year. Ironically, when asked about criticism from mainstream physicians and warning letters from the FDA, he responded, “It's very simple. There's this huge collusion between government and industry.” This from a man who has
become
an industry. When Mehmet Oz questioned Mercola about his sales tactics on
The Dr. Oz Show
, Mercola said, “We only sell natural products,” which presumably justifies hefty profits based on unsupported, potentially dangerous claims.

Sadly, mainstream physicians are also cashing in on the alternative medicine craze. Many academic institutions now have divisions of alternative, integrative, and holistic medicine, and the medical marketplace is starting to resemble an Arabian bazaar. “The more medicine nuzzles up to non-evidence-based alternative products,” says Art Caplan, “the more you damage medicine in the long run. Many doctors believe a false premise
that the patient is king. It's what I sometimes refer to as the restaurant model of medicine. Well, medicine isn't a restaurant, and the patient is not a patron, and the doctor is not a waiter. I understand that medicine is a business and that alternative medicine is a business; but part of the difference in medicine is that we're supposed to have professional norms, professional values, and professional commitments. If you keep telling people that it's just a marketplace and that they're just clients and that autonomy of the patient is what must be served to make them happy customers, then you have a collapse of professionalism in the face of consumer demand. We have this image that patients aren't vulnerable. But they are. It's hard to be a good patient unless you have an advocate who's guided by professionalism to help you. Otherwise, there are plenty of healers who will rip you off.”

T
he fourth way alternative healers cross the line is by promoting magical thinking, which, sadly, is everywhere you look. For example, take America's favorite pastime.

In addition to their uniforms, gloves, high socks, and cleats, many baseball players wear something else: titanium necklaces. Made by Phiten, a Kyoto-based company, titanium necklaces are purported to cause “longer lasting energy, less fatigue, shortened recovery time, and more relaxed muscles.” How do they work? “Everybody has electricity running through their bodies,” explains Scott McDonald, a Seattle-based sales representative. “This product stabilizes that flow of electricity if you're stressed or tired. Pitchers are seeing that they aren't as sore. Injured players are seeing that they recover faster from
their workouts. People are always skeptical, but when they try it, they become believers.” “I think I have a little more energy with it,” said Endy Chávez, an outfielder on the Baltimore Orioles.

Electricity is the flow of electrons. Flow in one direction is called direct current; in two directions, alternating current. For electrons to flow, they need to be displaced from atoms. Some metals, like gold, silver, and copper, give up their electrons easily (and are therefore excellent conductors of electricity). Others, like titanium, hold on to their electrons more tightly. Independent of the metal, one fact about electricity is clear: electrons
cannot be displaced without force
, usually in the form of chemical energy (batteries) or mechanical energy (generators). Although titanium, like most metals, can conduct electricity to some extent, it cannot generate electricity without force. Absent this force, titanium necklaces are inert, no different than wearing a necklace made of wood or garlic. Perhaps most amazing is that these same athletes routinely climb into MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines. The magnet in one of these machines generates
sixty thousand times
the energy found in the earth's magnetic field. If titanium necklaces evoked the kind of energy athletes believe, an MRI would make their heads explode.

Titanium necklaces can be purchased on the Internet for about $40.

Unfortunately, magical thinking isn't harmless. There's a price to pay. “I don't want people running around saying that because I waved a black cat in front of them that black cats have curative power,” says Caplan. Robert Slack, writing for the Center for Inquiry, agrees: “The gaps in medical knowledge
we all dread are not likely to be filled by energy fields, meridians, and astrology but by the purposeful pursuit of knowledge under a single set of standards we call science. The way forward is through a careful and purposeful pursuit of scientific truth, even if it means leaving some of our most romantic fallacies behind.” Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful,” wrote Douglas Adams, author of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
, “without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it, too?”

Encouragement of scientific illiteracy—or, beyond that, scientific denialism—can have a corrosive effect on patients' perceptions of disease, leaving them susceptible to the worst kinds of quackery.

A
lbert Schweitzer was a musician, philosopher, theologian, and physician. In 1912, using his own money, he established a clinic in Lambaréné, Gabon, in western Africa. Within nine months, more than two thousands natives had come to see him. Schweitzer gave them quinine for malaria, digitalis for heart disease, and salvarsan—the first antibiotic—for syphilis. When patients came to him with strangulated hernias or abdominal tumors, he anesthetized them with chloroform and treated their pain with morphine. Albert Schweitzer brought modern medicine to a small part of Africa.

Toward the end of both of their lives, Norman Cousins, author of
Anatomy of an Illness
, met Albert Schweitzer. “At the dinner table of the Schweitzer Hospital at Lambaréné,” wrote Cousins, “I had ventured the remark that local people were lucky to have access to the Schweitzer clinic instead of having
to depend on witch-doctor supernaturalism. Dr. Schweitzer asked me how much I knew about witch doctors. I was trapped by my ignorance. The next day the great doctor took me to a nearby jungle clearing where he introduced me to an elderly witch doctor.”

“For the next two hours, we stood off to one side and watched,” recalled Cousins. “With some patients, the witch doctor merely put herbs in a brown paper bag and instructed the ill person in their use. With other patients, he gave no herbs but filled the air with incantations. A third category of patients he merely spoke to in a subdued voice and pointed to Dr. Schweitzer.” On the way back, Schweitzer interpreted what they had seen. The first group of patients had minor illnesses that would resolve on their own or for which modern medicine offered little. The second group had psychological problems treated with “African psychotherapy.” The third had massive hernias or extrauterine pregnancies or dislocated shoulders or tumors—diseases the witch doctor couldn't treat—so he directed them to Dr. Schweitzer.

Schweitzer described the value of the witch doctor. “The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason the rest of us succeed,” he said. “Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.”

In Gabon, both Albert Schweitzer's modern medicine and the witch doctor's ancient medicine had their place. Schweitzer offered specific treatments for treatable diseases, and the witch doctor offered placebo medicine when nothing more was necessary or available. Both recognized the value of the other. Such is
the case with today's mainstream and alternative healers: both have their place. The problem comes when mainstream healers dismiss the placebo response as trivial or when alternative healers offer placebos instead of lifesaving medicines or charge an exorbitant price for their remedies or promote therapies as harmless when they're not or encourage magical thinking and scientific denialism at a time when we can least afford it.

As consumers, we have certain responsibilities. If we're going to make decisions about our health, we need to make sure we're not influenced by the wrong things—specifically, that we don't give alternative medicine a free pass because we're fed up with conventional medicine; or buy products because we're seduced by marketing terms such as
natural
,
organic
, and
antioxidant
; or give undeserved credence to celebrities; or make hasty, uneducated decisions because we're desperate to do something, anything, to save ourselves and our children; or fall prey to healers whose charisma obscures the fact that their therapies are bogus. Rather, we need to focus on the quality of scientific studies. And where scientific studies don't exist, we should insist that they be performed. If not, we'll continue to be deceived by therapies whose claims are fanciful.

Making decisions about our health is an awesome responsibility. If we're going to do it, we need to take it seriously. Otherwise we will violate the most basic principle of medicine: First, do no harm.

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