An Introduction to Modern Skepticism
By Eric McMillan

V: Magical Meds

Among the most serious claims examined by skeptics are those concerning health. People who are misled by false claims of miraculous cures or fraudulent therapies risk losing their health, even their lives, by using these ineffective treatments in place of treatments supported by medical science — not to mention losing large amounts of money that are often squeezed out of them by practitioners of these services.

Such a wide range of suspect beliefs and practices are at work in the health field that it may be useful to sort them out in this fashion:

These are only a few of the dozens of fraudulent or misconceived health-related activities.

By "Religious", under the Paranormal heading, is meant that the practitioners in this category claim to be working within established religious traditions — not that all established churches support all these activities, although some do. In the Paranormal/Non-religious category are treatments supposedly involving other supernatural, psychic or unexplained powers.

The practices under Pseudoscientific are often referred to as examples of "alternative medicine" or "complementary medicine".

The most famous exposure of a faith-healer in modern times was probably that of Peter Popoff by a team of skeptics headed by James Randi. The whole scam was revealed by Randi, complete with damning tape, on the Tonight Show in 1986.

Popoff at the time was one of the leading money-raising televangelists specializing in spectacularly curing ailments at big rallies.

We know from investigations the various tricks used by these so-called men of God to seemingly perform miracles. 

Folks who are never seriously disabled in the first place are given wheelchairs to sit in and watch the show; then they are brought up on stage, have the preacher's hands laid on, and dramatically get up out of their wheelchairs to walk as if they are suddenly cured of lameness. Hypochondriacs are "healed" of their imaginary diseases. Seriously ill people may enjoy a few moments of relief in the hysteria of the moment — or at least convince themselves they are healed — only to continue their decline afterwards. There is no evidence anyone is ever really cured, and many sick people end up suffering more greatly as a result of falsely raised and later dashed hopes, and from discarding medical means that might have helped them. But the money keeps pouring in for the "faith healers". Few con men are as despicable.

Part of the "healing" performance often involves the preacher seeming to call out members of the audience with particular maladies, as if God were leading him to cure chosen individuals. Popoff would call out specific names and addresses.

But the skeptics revealed Popoff had collaborators, including his wife, who gathered information from the audience and broadcast it electronically to a tiny receiver in Popoff's ear. Randi's team captured one of these broadcasts and presented on TV synchronized with a videotape of Popoff's performance to show that all the time Popoff was pretending to receive messages from his divine "Gift of Knowledge", he was getting the information by radio from very earthly sources. 

A full account of this and other investigations is found in Randi's book The Faith-Healers. 

Popoff was disgraced and his ministry was ruined. For a few years anyway. Recently he and his wife have been back on late-night television, "healing" and hawking "miracle healing water".

Miracles are generally not claimed in the area of alternative or so-called complementary medicine. Proponents of these practices tend to charge that their favourite treatment or therapy would be accepted if the medical establishment were not biased against it. Their claims do not explicitly invoke supernatural or paranormal powers.

Chiropractors, homeopathic "doctors", therapeutic touch nurses, and others, claim to take their evidence from clinical experience. That is, their patients report improvement due to the treatment. Therefore the treatments must work.

But anecdotal evidence is notoriously unreliable. Placebo effects are rampant. Self-delusion is possible. Spontaneous remissions, in which diseases go away regardless of treatment, may occur.

The only way the validity of alternative treatments can be accurately tested is the same way conventional drugs and therapies are tested. Experiments must be carried out, in which one group is given the treatment and another (the control group) is not. To rule out placebo and other effects, including bias, it is better if neither the subject nor the experimenter knows which group each subject is in, until the results are tabulated. This is the model of the controlled, double-blind test identified with the scientific method.

Even after a test is completed, we cannot be certain of the efficacy of the treatment. A single experiment may have contained flaws. For the results to be accepted by the scientific community, others must be able to find similar results when they replicate the experiment.

When such experiments are carried out, alternative or complementary treatments almost always flunk the test. Subjects who do not receive the treatment usually fare as well or better than those who do receive it.

If a treatment should happen to show positive results and the results hold up through replication, the treatment may become part of mainstream medical practice. This has happened very seldom though.

Open-minded skeptics and scientists are in favour of testing the claims of alternative or complementary medicine. Here's an example of such testing: 

England's world-famous Bristol Cancer Help Centre was founded in 1980 to provide an "holistic approach" to cancer care and healing. Its Web site even carries an endorsement from Prince Charles. 

The centre may perform useful work in providing emotional support and quality-of-life improvements for its patients. But its claims that its treatments — including a whole-food and high-fibre diet, prayer, vitamins and laetrile — improve the recovery rate of cancer patients were sorely tested by a scientific study.

The study results, published in The Lancet in 1990, showed that in fact Bristol patients were more likely to have relapses and less likely to survive their cancers than patients who did not get the Bristol treatments. This caused a storm of controversy, with Bristol supporters claiming the centre tended to receive patients in more desperate circumstances than those in the control group. But the results held up when only patients at the same stages of the disease were compared. 

Apparently no follow-up studies have been allowed. This entire story is recounted in the book Magic or Medicine? An Investigation of Healing and Healers, by Robert Buckman and Karl Sabbagh.

One of the Bristol centre's founders, Penny Brohn figures in another example of a willingness to mislead oneself and others about healing. Brohn wrote a best-selling book, Gentle Giants, in which she extolled the virtues of alternative treatments in curing her own breast cancer. However, Robert Buckman in an interview with her for a television program learned that for several years Brohn took tamoxifen, the most effective anti-cancer drug known to medical science at the time. Tamoxifen is barely mentioned in her book. In the interview, Brohn appeared surprised that the fact she took this powerful cancer-fighting drug should be considered significant. The desire to attribute her recovery to alternative medicine was obviously greater than her wish to know or report the more likely conventional explanation.

How many cancer sufferers were misled by the book into neglecting proven cancer treatments that might have saved their lives? Over the years, how many cancer sufferers might have fared better if they did not take the Bristol course?

We cannot know without testing. That's the skeptical approach.

Next: But isn't most paranormal or pseudoscientific belief harmless?