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”.

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

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