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.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
We are living the beta of our lives, the untested, slightly buggy, first draft version. Or not. We might be living the perfect version of our lives, getting everything right, even though we might not know this until some time in the future. There’s an expression, “If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather,” usually rendered in Yiddish and followed by a scornful bark of a laugh. You can’t grasp what might have been. Or can you?
Dr. J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who likes to ask questions about time such as, “What if you could time-travel into the past?”
Say you did that and killed your grandmother and therefore were never born. Dr. Gott believes you would cause the universe “to branch off into a parallel universe with a time traveler and a dead grandmother.” Of course, there would also be a universe where your grandmother lived and you were born.
To use Dr. Gott’s analogy, it’s like a railway switching yard with lots of trains running on parallel tracks. This concept is called the Multiverse.
It’s the kind of concept that makes me want to gently close the door and listen to Bach until the concept goes away. But it’s not going to go away.
Not only are filmmakers exploring it in movies like “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run” but scientists are exploring life as a set of coexisting pathways. A multiverse instead of a universe. Could be there’s a world where World War II never happened. A world where Tom Cruise admits he’s gay. A world where Madonna is a good singer.
Quantum theory has come up with some strange stuff: Protons and electrons act like both waves and particles. They can be teleported from one place to another without passing through space. A single particle seems capable of appearing in many places simultaneously.
Physicist David Deutsch says that “everyone agrees” that quantum theory is “outlandish.” That might be why many physicists only want to discuss quantum theory in reference to photons and electrons. But Deutsch takes a bigger risk, insisting that quantum theory must apply to something larger than subatomic particles – he says to be valid it has to apply to people. When you do that it generates some unsettling outcomes.
All possible variations of us must exist. Every possible option we’ve ever encountered is being acted out in some universe by at least one of our other selves.
Just when I thought life couldn’t become messier, with its moodiness and alternate side of the street parking regulations, now I have to consider that there could be other versions of us leading their own messy lives. What to make of that?
“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard. He may have been gloomy but he was right. We’re all time travelers into the 
future. But it’s good to know there’s a parallel life train running somewhere, an on-time train that could be getting everything right. Does anybody know how to transfer at the next station?
500 Words on Thursday by Lee Schneider
Bookmark this because it has the solution to the banking crisis. I’ve just found out that fish can count and monkeys can subtract.
People are worried about the exodus of Wall Street talent, but we can hurry up and hire the best fish and monkeys to fill those fat cat positions. Fish are honest and those who can count eat mosquito larvae– no eight-figure bonuses required. Monkeys are a little excitable but they get around just by swinging from tree to tree instead of using limos and corporate jets – a smaller carbon footprint! Both species seem to be more honest and socially aware than our current crop of bankers.
I make that bold, pro-fish, pro-simian statement because I watched Jon Stewart last night. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, told us what’s happened to at least half of the TARP funds bestowed on bankers by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
The deal was that for every dollar we taxpayers gave the banks, the banks would give us a dollar’s worth of stock and warrants. Fair enough. But the bankers, according to Warren, only gave us 66 cents on the dollar, and the value of those stocks and warrants has dropped even more since the trade.
Well, this would never happen if fish were in key banking positions because fish know how to count. Mosquitofish, a North and Central American freshwater species, successfully counted geometric shapes in a study conducted by psychologists at the University of Padova in Italy.
The fish were taught to associate a door in their tank with a certain number of shapes. They recognized the right number even though researchers varied the size, brightness and distance of the shapes counted. Since Mosquitofish are social animals, scientists believe that being able to count might help them seek safety in numbers.
On Jon Stewart’s show, Elizabeth Warren also mentioned that she doesn’t quite know how much of the TARP funds have actually been distributed.
If monkeys were in charge of that distribution there wouldn’t be a problem, because monkeys know how to subtract. In a test of their subtraction skills at Duke University, Rhesus macaques were able to solve a simple subtraction problem on a touch screen. They didn’t need to count, they just relied on their sense of missing shapes.
The qualities present in fish and monkeys, being social and caring about their fellows, have gone missing in some bankers. While fish seek companionship and protect each other in schools, bankers enjoy purchasing multiple homes while their customers lose the only homes they’ve got. Monkeys and even ravens have been shown to care for their communities.
Maybe it’s not just the bankers who are bonkers, maybe it’s clawing to the top of the food chain that has messed with the human mind. Masters of the Universe, we eat anything that moves, screw over weaker species, profit whenever possible. I lust after profit as much as anyone else (if you want to send me money, please do) but I certainly don’t want to be bettered by a bunch of animals who can count, subtract and are more socially aware than some of the bankers who watch over my money.
Something to consider as we monkey around, fishing for answers.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Taking risks. Going on a hunch. These are not words I’d associate with university or corporate science. In those often male dominated labs everybody seems to be on tenure track or fretting about funding.
Change is coming … and it’s female. According the New York Times, women constitute about half of today’s medical students, 60 percent of the biology majors and 70 percent of the psychology Ph.Ds. Though women remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering that doesn’t mean there are not female superstars in those fields.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s employee number 20, was the company’s first female engineer and its current VP of Search Products & User Experience. She seems to be doing ok, with a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons in San Francisco. But she has taken some flak for being female, liking clothes, cupcakes and parties.
There’s lots of bias out there. It’s documented in blogs like Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Women, Science and Writing. A scientist known as Dr. Isis writes another influential science blog and I emailed her to ask about all this. She directed me to some data about women in science: While more than 50% of chemistry bachelors degrees are awarded to women, less than 32% of Ph.D’s and 22% of assistant professorships are. Those careers hit the wall, some believe, because women are expected, pressured, conditioned or driven by biology to become mothers or pursue other non-career-advancing activities.
We know that men come from that planet over there and women come from the other one. The differences start early, with a shot of testosterone for male fetuses that helps them be competitive and assertive, and a shot of oxytocin for females that can help them read people’s emotions. Studies have shown that men are better at spatial relations – like assembling Ikea furniture. Women are better at communicating. They are more likely to trust their intuition.
Shall I argue that these differences carry into adult life and change the way males and females do science? Touchy subject.
Lawrence Summers, past president of Harvard and current head of the White House’s National Economic Council, got himself in hot water a while back for saying that innate differences between men and women may explain why lower proportions of women succeed in math and science careers. He set off a firestorm and later apologized – sort of.
Intuition is at the core of the risk-taking nature of science. Guys like to call intuition “a hunch.” Thomas Edison was famous for hunches. But those making a career of intuition – placing it center stage – are more likely to be women.
Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz has a doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Boston School of Medicine and is the author of “Awakening Intuition.” Dr. Candace Pert, formerly a section chief at the National Institutes of Health, is looking at the unconscious and its influence on illness, happiness and wellness.
DocuCinema is developing a series about integrative medicine. We’re finding that a majority of the scientists involved are female. Why? They seem more willing than male scientists to invite intuition into the lab. They are the risk takers, making them more likely to be discovery makers. I am going out on a limb with that – just a hunch.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Comments on last week’s 500 Words ran the spectrum from “you freaked out Dad,” to “I’m concerned about your mental state.” It got me thinking about which side I was on in the science-spirit game.
Say you’re on West 4th Street in NY. You’re choosing sides for a pickup ball game between the New York Logics and the California Intuitives. The guy leaning on the fence has a great jump shot and is obsessed with hard data. He goes to the Logics. The guy in three point land always makes the right move without thinking about it. He’ll play for the Intuitives. Easy choices? Before I push the basketball metaphor and tear a ligament, consider a crossroads I found myself in a few years ago.
I was making a documentary for the History Channel about the Shroud of Turin, interviewing investigators who wanted proof that the Shroud was the true burial cloth of Jesus. One reputable researcher told me, “if you do the experiment that way, you don’t get the result you want.” The result you want? I realized the guy was no longer a scientist even though he called himself one. He wasn’t playing for the Logics. He’d been traded to the Believers. Thing is, however, other Believers have been pretty good scientists. Francis Bacon, originator of the scientific method, was a Believer. Isaac Newton worked on biblical numerology when he wasn’t working with calculus. This is where the dividing line gets fuzzy.
Charles Darwin was cozy with the Church. According to a piece in Seed Magazine Darwin was close friends with his local pastor, John Brodie Innes. They served on various committees and church-funded groups, including the Sunday School. “We often differed,” Darwin wrote to Innes, “but you are one of those rare mortals, from whom one can differ & yet feel no shade of animosity.”
Innes wrote of Darwin: “He is a most accurate observer, and never states anything as a fact which he has not most thoroughly investigated … He follows his own course as a Naturalist and leaves Moses to take care of himself.” Walking in this crossroads of science and spirit you might encounter Deepak Chopra, who seems a little pissed off at science lately. Dr. Chopra recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, an article reprinted on intent.com, about what he calls science’s “diabolical creativity.” The atom bomb, Thalidomide, DDT and hormone-injected meat are all on Dr. Chopra’s “Bad Science” list. He says scientists shouldn’t act like they are above morality.
That’s a tough one. You place limits on research and the free flow of ideas isn’t so free any more. This sort of action produces not Bad Science but Bad Religion: Believers vs. Infidels, Crusades, Holy Wars, regimes that suppress the rights of women. Moral absolutes might feel good to some but do they help investigators get at the truth?
Maybe, in truth, the truth is blurry. Creationists hate Darwin, but in truth he was involved in Church affairs because he knew it was good for the community. Truth is Chopra thinks from the heart, but he has years of medical training and has a scientific mind.
What team do you play for? Or do we need to choose up sides at all?
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
