This week’s Newsweek cover article is a slap at Oprah Winfrey for crazy talk about complementary and integrative medicine. Oprah does cover some fringe stuff that is wacky and sometimes wrong. But I think she’s right to do it. Here’s why.
The history of medicine is smeared with snake oil. It was once believed that drinking oil – not olive oil, but the black stuff that comes out of the ground – had healthy properties. Even today, some swear that drinking apple cider vinegar helps digestion and whacks infections, but it may actually damage tooth enamel and sear the esophagus.
Newsweek slaps Oprah for going out on a slippery snake oil limb, promoting people like Suzanne Somers and her aggressive program of hormone replacement therapy. Somers, 62, takes 60 vitamins and supplements and also gives herself a shot of estrogen directly into her vagina. Newsweek portrays her as laughable, but I agree with Oprah – Somers might be a pioneer. Self-experimenters have often advanced science. 
At the age of 22, Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself by staring at the sun in a mirror because he wanted to study the after-images it left on his retinas. 
Australian physician Barry James Marshall swallowed some foul-smelling bacterial crud to show that Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Sir Issac ended up with marks on his eyelids; but Marshall ended up with a 2005 Nobel Prize for linking the bacterial crud, H. pylori, to ulcers. I’m not saying Suzanne Somers is going to surprise us with a treatise on gravity, but she has courage.
“Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” — Barry James Marshall
The line between courage and dumbness, however, can be slim. Jenny McCarthy, another frequent Oprah guest, believes that her son Evan contracted autism because he received a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination. So far researchers haven’t found a link between vaccinations and autism. We do know, as Newsweek points out, that the vaccinations have saved the lives of thousands of children who otherwise might have died.
Facts like that don’t seem to change McCarthy’s belief. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Speaking of belief, look at “The Secret.” Oprah led the charge for it, and it has some good stuff, reminding us that we are all fields of energy in a larger field of energy. But it also stated that all diseases can be cured by the power of thought alone. That’s going too far. Even super-Secret supporter Oprah had to caution a guest on her show who had breast cancer and who was thinking of forgoing surgery against the advice of her doctors. Said Oprah, “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science, and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.”
Yet Oprah knows people can heal themselves with Qi Gong, meditation, yoga, acupuncture. She’s not afraid to promote this “new” medicine, a medicine that is actually old, embracing the best of East and West.
Newsweek is going backward, contributing to the backlash against new medicine. Oprah is going forward by supporting medical pioneers. While looking into the sun, drinking crud or shooting up in the vagina may not seem so brilliant, breakthroughs come from acts of courage or folly and sometimes both.
Bob Ellal // Jun 4, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Hi Lee,
I have very mixed feelings about Oprah’s approach. On one hand, I feel books like The Secret and The Power of Now are at best naive and at worst shams written to make money. A great deal of the New Age movement is guilty of taking ancient ideas from meditative traditions, grossly oversimplifying them, then marketing them to a spiritually-deprived modern world. People want easy answers; they don’t realize that to achieve “living in the now” or powers of healing you have to spend years in a monastery meditating and undergoing mind training.
But, as you know, I am a longtime practitioner of qigong and I have experienced its power in beating numerous relapses of cancer. All the meditative arts have great power, but it takes time and dedication to tap into it.
Best regards,
Bob
Lee Schneider // Jun 4, 2009 at 9:23 pm
The question for me, Oprah or not, is how to introduce people to ideas, methods and modalities that might help and heal them. If people want easy answers (they do) that makes oversimplification very tempting. There’s a lot of static and backlash out there as well that might inhibit people or even prevent them from seeking the things that might help them. When I lived in NY I probably never would have tried yoga because it was too kooky. Living in California has made many “crazy” things accessible to me – and I’ve found some that I would have once thought strange to be quite worthwhile – yoga, acupuncture, etc.
Ingrid // Jun 5, 2009 at 3:17 am
I too think that people who take risks in the name of science deserve their credit. Thanks for bringing it up. Fantastic!
Bob Ellal // Jun 5, 2009 at 7:28 am
Lee,
From that perspective, I’d have to say Oprah is doing more good than harm by introducing different modalities. I guess people have to be exposed to new–or ancient–ideas to try them. Then it’s up to them to put in the time to make them effective. I just wish there was less of an emphasis on celebrities and some of their harebrained ideas. There is a cult of celebrity in this country, and some people will blindly emulate a celebrity’s actions and endorse their opinions. I mean, does Paris Hilton, a skinny rich girl of no apparent talent and limited intelligence, have anything of importance to say?
Regards,
Bob
adeger // Jun 5, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Wow, I think this is a strong mischaracterization of the issue.
The issue is not whether people with revolutionary medical/scientific ideas shouldn’t be listened to. It is rather: are the claims of those with revolutionary medical/scientific ideas repeatable and are the relationships believably from cause and effect? You touch on this here and there but it should be the central thesis. An important secondary thesis is “What is the motivation of those promulgating this information?”
If you use these criteria, it’s actually pretty easy to evaluate most any claim as having one of these four states: 1) Probably true 2) Probably false 3) Inadequately tested 4) Untestable. For the second thesis, it’s pretty easy to see the possible motivations.
Oprah simply needs to be very, very careful that she’s not covering, recommending, or otherwise promoting stuff that is probably false, untested or untestable especially if the ‘remedy’ is potentially harmful. And wasting a collective amount of time and money is a real harm in my book.
It’s also pretty hard to determine if Oprah is motivated by a genuine concern for her unquestioning followers or if she’s interested in “the latest thing” to keep her viewership up–or some combination of the two. I’m cynical and, based on the the number of “the latest things” she’s covered and the limited amount of followup I’ve seen, I’m guessing it’s mostly the second one.
A brilliant idea can come from within or without traditional medicine/science by dint of genius, inspiration, luck or even sheer craziness. Yes, there is probably some reluctance of the traditional to test that discovered by the a-traditonal but, when the claims become prevalent, they almost always get tested…eventually,…AND if the testing process is based only on science (and not, for example, politics). The FDA can’t keep up with testing the claims of the makers of stuff in nutrition and supplement stores, but they seem to be working at it.
Please don’t put Somers into the same class as Barry James Marshall. They are alike only in that they are self-experimenters which again isn’t the real issue. Marshall was willing to do the followup science to put his (inspired but not that hard to believe) theory into the “probably true” category. Somers is only willing to do the followup exploitative infomercials on her extremely inadequately-tested, not-that-inspired and far more tenuous claims. And, to make a comment for entertainment purposes only, I think Somers was courageous to appear on Three’s Company with her acting skills at the time; right now she’s just ignorant and/or greedy.
I’m all for investigating kooky, inspired, and accidental discoveries. They should just be probably true before they’re trotted out (remembering that a little less than half have < 100 IQs) and exploited for, and by, the “discoverers”.