Thanks, Homeopathy!

“Arrian was 15 years old. She ran track at Parma Middle School. 


In June 2012, she got food poisoning.

She vomited so badly she ruptured her esophagus.



She slipped into unconsciousness and went into cardiac arrest.



She died.”

“My brother was on his deathbed because my parents practiced faith healing, which a lot of children would die from. His throat was so swelled that he was unable to eat and he had to be given drops of water through a straw.”

As Silicon Valley tech companies boom (with heady talk about paradigm shifts and disruption), the Bay Area's yogis, natural healers, therapists and philosophers want in.

As the action of the book starts, children in Oregon City’s Followers of Christ Church had been dying mysteriously for years, and several more reportedly were facing blindness, disability and death.

His readers will enter the houses of faith healers who anoint cooking oil on their sick children rather than go to the hospital for an easy fix to prevent suffering and death. Dr. Larry Lewman, the chief medical examiner for Clackamas County, is credited as an early advocate for prosecuting faith healers in the 1990s, when it seemed that religious-protection laws handcuffed district attorneys from bringing justice to Followers.

I’ve really come to detest Dr. Mehmet Oz.

You remember Dr. Mehmet Oz, don’t you? How can you escape him? He is, after all, Oprah Winfrey’s protege, and of late he’s really been living up (or down) to the example set by his television mentor, who of late apparently thinks nothing of promoting faith healing quack John of God on her show. Following in the footsteps of his much more famous and well-known mentor, this season on his television show, The Dr. Oz Show, Dr. Oz has in some ways imitated Oprah and in some ways gone her one better (one worse, really) in promoting the Oprah-fication of medicine. And this season has been a particularly bad one for science-based medicine on The Dr. Oz Show. Apparently Dr. Oz felt that he had to surpass what he did last season, which included inviting a man whom I consider to be one of the foremost sellers of quackery on the Internet, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Prior to that, Dr. Oz had done an episode touting the glories of that form of faith healing known as reiki. In between, he made appearances at various panels of woo-friendly physicians trying to coopt President Obama’s health insurance reform initiative to cover more “holistic” care (i.e., “integrative medicine”).

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of folks like Camille Paglia, positive this is the truth, that NewAge ended a long time ago:

  I wrote a long piece for Arion at Boston University a couple of years ago called “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s” trying to give reasons—trying to sketch this combination of things with poetry, religion, spirituality that would produce the New Age movement. And then trying to diagnose why the whole thing collapsed,...

Meanwhile, my impression of the current landscape - as a "spiritual" minefield - is confirmed even as it's denied:

  The Theos survey discovered that 40% of the sample (and a small majority of women) had at some time engaged in a "New Age" activity - for example, a Tarot card reading or a Reiki healing session. These activities seem to be equally popular with those who describe themselves as religious and those who do not,…

Which is how and why atheists are doomed to end up alone - as "compassionate" NewAgers  love to point out:

We're not part of their cult,...