Posted: Friday, June 1, 2001
LETTER
Publication Date: June 1, 2001
"Hack Job"?
I've seen Nada Mangialetti's article slamming Dr. Julian Whitaker [PfH, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1999] elsewhere on the Net. She's a psychologist. She practices a profession in the healing arts that, in tandem with its big brother, psychiatry, has the greatest record of failure and incompetence of any healing art. I recognize the kind of hack job she is doing.
I wonder if she is tied to the psychiatric drug industry, of whom I presume Dr. Whitaker is critical (I have read his criticisms of a couple of psychiatric drugs). The psychiatric drug industry is worth tens of billions of dollars. I could imagine that the psych drug industry wants to protect its market share. Or perhaps it is someone else's pocketbook that Whitaker is threatening.
I have zero respect for Mangialetti. I recommend taking her off of your site.
Rick Schott
aerospace engineer
rschott802@earthlink.net
How imaginative you are!
—J.R.
Dr. Mangialetti responds:
I have no ties whatsoever to the psychiatric drug industry or to any other industry. As a psychologist, I do not prescribe drugs, as that is in the purview of psychiatrists. I do believe that psychiatric drugs are often needlessly prescribed and that their effectiveness is overblown in the literature. However, psychiatric drugs do help some patients. Patients suffering from psychoses, in particular, have no hope of normalcy without psychiatric drugs. The decision about what drugs to prescribe for a particular patient and at what dosage is more an "art" than a "science" and involves a good deal of trial and error. (This may change as scientists start to make sense out of the recently mapped human genome.) Whenever psychiatric drugs are prescribed, their effect can be increased if the patient also receives counseling. But with the advent of managed care, more and more patients are simply given psychiatric medication without counseling—usually by a general practitioner, not a psychiatrist—thus increasing belief in the "magic pill" cure.
As to the record of failure in psychology, I agree with my critic. My profession is saddled with so much pseudoscientific nonsense passing as "therapy" (Eye Movement Desensitization Therapy, play therapy, Sand Tray Therapy, and Thought Field Therapy, to mention only a few) that I am embarrassed to admit I'm a psychologist. I have been thinking of co-writing a book with a fellow skeptic-psychologist on all the wacky "therapies" that have come down the pike over the years. There are dozens of psychologist counterparts to Julian Whitaker, M.D.
Still, I think that people can be helped by talking to someone with a sympathetic and noncritical ear, someone who has a lot of information about the person's disorder, and, most of all, someone who keeps his or her feet on the ground and does not subscribe to magical-sounding, too-good-to-be-true cures touted by messianic leaders. In the end, psychotherapy is all just down-to-earth common sense.
As for Whitaker, the only persons whose pocketbooks he is threatening are those who buy his products and services.
back to top
Conspiracy?
I recently read your article entitled "Homeopathy and Its Founder" [PfH, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1999]. Having been involved with homeopathy for six years, I found your article very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I no longer practice homeopathy.
I have a question: Who is Steven Ransom?
gab333@juno.com
Steven Ransom, a self-styled researcher who lives in East Sussex, England, is the primary author of the article in question. He is also the author of its basis: Homoeopathy—What Are We Swallowing? (Uckfield, East Sussex, England: Credence Publications, 1999). This is both readable and reliable. But Ransom is also the coauthor, with Phillip Day, of a dubious Credence Publications title—World Without AIDS—and a spokesperson for the publisher. In promoting this book on its website (http://credence.org/), Credence Publications flatly denies both the finding that AIDS arises from HIV infection (a finding almost universally accepted in the biomedical community) and the observation that AIDS is devastating the Third World. It further states that "medical science" cannot find HIV. Ransom and Day—described on that website as investigative reporters—state thereon: "Because of unscrupulous media and political fear-mongering campaigns, all of us have had no choice but to live under the shadow of this awesome medical error for the past twenty years. Be confident that this book will remove the unwarranted fear of AIDS from your life once and for all." In his July 2000 newsletter (http://users.kua.net/~rstone/ AIDS.html), Ransom stated: "We can put a stop [to] these AIDS myth propagators."
—J.R.
"Character Attack"?
This query is slightly belated, but I just read a 1997 ACSH journal interview you had with a Swissair spokesperson about their recent addition of organic food to the menu ["'Organic' Hype Comes Naturally to Swissair," Priorities, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1997]. There was such a clearly biased tone to the article—you might as well have not included the few interview responses—but without any explanation. For example, you could have backed your last line ["And avoiding meat consumption is, at best, a very unreliable means of increasing vitamin intake."] up with some facts. Instead, you just left it as a character attack on vegetarians. What is your problem? Raised on meat and can't think outside a box? Or was someone dear to you run over by an organic produce truck? Since that article was written a few years ago, I hope for your sake and the sake of others (like people who trust and listen to you) you have not remained ignorant on the subject of organics and vegetarianism. (By the way, meat is gross and pesticides kill people.)
boywonder@applesinstereo.com
The paper was indeed biased—toward science and reason. It was meant to be humorous and informative—but not voluminously informative, as ACSH had recently published papers dealing in much more detail with organic farming and vegetarianism. To the extent that the article was an attack, it was an attack not on vegetarians (nor on advocates of organic foods), but on Swissair's publicly making unfounded health claims and on the lameness of Swissair spokes-person Ulrich Wohn's replies to our questions, for example: "Well, anything grown naturally is better for you."
I have many problems, but none of them relates to tunnel vision, any truck, organic food, or my having consumed meat in childhood.
—J.R.
Appreciative?
I appreciate that you work with the intention to protect and inform the public. However, this is only as effective as the accuracy and integrity of your own research. Please note: the "triple warmer" referred to in Chinese medical ontology is not as you suggest, a missing organ. It is the "body cavity" or inner part of the torso that supports and contains the vital organs. I am certain that biologists can easily locate this. The inner torso has been loosely classed an "organ" in English translations of the Chinese literature. I agree that the word is insufficient to describe the interior structure of the body from ribs to pelvis, but let's give attention to problems of translation and semantics instead of discrediting an established medical tradition on false grounds.
Also, in regards to semantics, the eptemological [sic] link from voodoo to homeopathy is suffering badly from hyperextension. Please continue to do this work, but please do it well. Insulting the intelligence of your readership points to one of our current medical establishment's poorest vices. As I'm sure you agree, intelligent information enhances the well-being of medicine's public. Good luck in your work toward this and I hope to see healthier research performed in the future.
Jennifer Lea Dorscher
jldorscher@YAHOO.COM
jldorsch@ucalgary.ca
To my knowledge, there is no generally established definition in English for the expression "Triple Warmer"—whose synonyms evidently include "burner," "energizer," "heater," "San Jiao," "thermoregulator," "Three Burning Spaces," "Triple Burner," and "Triple Heater." Descriptions in English of this theoretical construct are inconsistent, but to my recollection I was never aware of any description of the Triple Warmer as a mere cavity until I received your message.
At least some English-language writers who favor Chinese medicine depict the Triple Warmer as analogous to an organ. For example, according to the Dragon Black Belt Academy International, in the United Kingdom, "the Chinese" locate "three burners" in the thorax.1 Glenn Grossman, L.Ac., of Integrated Health, in Okemos, Michigan, describes the Triple Warmer as a "mysterious triple system" and as a "fu organ" without an anatomical counterpart.2 He states:
The question of its location in Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as well as its identifiable western counterpart is problematic. TCM literature makes reference to the San Jiao by its function rather than its location. . . . In the Nei Ching the function of the three burning spaces is compared to that of a sewage system of the body, while their location is not described. Some sources maintain that the burning spaces exist not in form but only in name, while others attributed to them a definite location and the consistency of fatty membranes. The most explicit theory about the three burning spaces considers them as a link between the universe and man . . . .
In "A Bird's-Eye View of Chinese Medicine" (Priorities, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1997), I stated "The 'diagnostic' methods of Chinese medicine appear unreliable—and only partly because conventional Chinese-medicine theory posits both 'Organs' (the 'Triple Burner,' for example) and 'Substances' (such as Shen, or 'Spirit') that anatomists and biologists do not recognize." I capitalized the word "organs," and placed it within quotes, to suggest that its referents were not necessarily organs in the biological sense.
You implicitly called Chinese medicine "an established medical tradition." But Chinese medicine has been evolving for decades and many of its methods are neither widely established nor traditional.
There are indeed difficult semantical problems in describing Chinese medicine, but I very much doubt that successfully dealing with them would make Chinese medicine scientifically more palatable.
As for your statement concerning voodoo and homeopathy (an allusion to an entry in my alternative-medicine dictionary), perhaps the hyperextension was in your inference. My alt-med dictionary3 remotely suggests that vitalism is common to these systems, but I have never specified a link between them. I mention homeopathic magic in that dictionary, but homeopathic magic is not a form of homeopathy, and I have never described it as such. This mention is under the headword "image magick." Of image magick, I state: ". . . [I]t is a form of homeopathic magic (mimetic magic) that includes doll magic. Practitioners typically use "image dolls" (e.g., "voodoo dolls"): small clay, cloth, straw, waxen, or wooden representations of their targets."
—J.R.
Chiropractic—The Definition
I've been wondering for a long time why your Alt-Med Dictionary leaves out chiropractic. Do you have plans to include it?
Paul Lee, P.T.
pglee@mail1.stofanet.dk
At least one online version of my dictionary includes a definition for "chiropractic" and for "traditional chiropractic." Although my dictionary was first published in August 1996, I did not compose a dictionary definition for chiropractic until late last year (preparing "Pseudoscience and Antiscience in Alternative Medicine" for our special issue on junk science prompted my doing so). The delay had two reasons: (1) I have since the early 1990s been aware that chiropractic is not invariably mystical, supernaturalistic, and/or vitalistic, and my dictionary has centered on such methods since its inception. Hundreds of chiropractors reject the doctrines of chiropractic's founder and his son and have promised to restrict their treatment of patients to nonsurgical neuromusculoskeletal conditions. (2) The prospect of encapsulating as complicated an art as chiropractic did not tempt me.
—J.R.
1 http://www.dbbai.co.uk/triplewarmer.htm
2 http://users.med.auth.gr/~karanik/english/articles/sanjiao.html
3 http://www.canoe.ca/AltmedDictionary/home.html
Source Notes:
Priorities Volume 13 Number 2
