Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O [Paperback]

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.

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.

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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