Debunking Medical Miracles.

I happened to glance through a supplement (on healthcare) inserted with today’s paper – a respected national newspaper- and it was filled with advertisements touting miracle cures. That got my attention. If these people are taking such big ads out in papers it seems to reason that they have loads of gullible people who fall for these ads and shell out big bucks. Being trained in allopathy makes me obviously biased in favor of it, I agree- but some of these treatments are far too provoking to keep my mouth shut. I am going to take a superficial look at some (a few) of the ads which took my eye:

1)    Faith Healing (including Pranic Healing/Theta Healing/Crystal Healing/Pyramid Healing etc)….I literally burst out laughing seeing these full page ads of people who have obviously watched far too many Hollywood-produced Biblical movies and patterned themselves on Old Testament Prophets…big beard/long gown/bushy eyebrows etal..They promise to heal all ills with just the power of their “touch”… (Ladies beware of touching/touching)…and they justify their treatment by the passage of invisible energy rays through them to the patient….I wouldn’t be surprised if they even say “I am channeling the Higgs Boson through my body to yours”. For your information….our body (nervous system) is run by electro-chemical energy, but the electricity we produce is too minuscule to be broadcast out wirelessly…we don’t produce any other type of energy….we are not fusion/fission generators…to produce high energy particles.

2)    Volcanic Stones: This one is a personal favorite- the idea that placing volcanic stones will absorb toxins from our body through the stones. For your information- that’s what we have kidneys for- to filter out those toxins from our body. For your information- volcanic stones are just solidified lava flow and made of ash and pumice and there is no way a stone (any stone) is going to channel and absorb anything from your blood, through the vessels/capillaries/skin etc..merely by its miraculous properties.

3)    Fish Therapy : this is a hilarious one- the idea that live fish swallowed with a medicine stuffed inside them can reach the lungs and cure asthma…for your basic information when we swallow – the path to our lungs is closed. When the food pathway (oesophagus) is open/the air pathway (trachea)is closed and vice versa. When we swallow a live fish it is going to swim straight to the acid filled stomach pouch and get digested..That’s all…and asthma is a multi-factorial disease (with many suspected causes) with the prime suspect being a disturbed immune (hyper-immune) condition of our own body- where our bodies own defense systems are hyper-sensitive and act against us. No fish is capable of curing that….

4)    The other fish therapy : the one about the fish doing a pedicure..Seriously? our entire skin is being shed/flakes off every single minute….but it’s not a problem because our skin being made of four layers with the outermost three being dead layers (with no blood supply) – is being shed continuously to get rid of the great clouds of bacteria and other micro-organisms which colonize it and try to overwhelm our body defenses and in that sense if the fish really eat those skin cells, they are just going to end up getting our diseases. You would be better off using a loofah or a pumice stone to get rid of those hard cornified areas rather than feed it to those poor fish.

5)    100% Infertility Cures: this is the latest mushrooming specialty- offering treatments for infertility with 100% guaranteed results. The people who advertise this- promise to use the latest scientific treatments (with big sounding acronyms) but end up using unauthorized (unannounced) donor eggs/sperms. To make the premise easier to understand - when a horse wins a race it is not usually due to new shoes, for the glittery, shiny gold shoes which catch our eyes, diverts us from the fact that the one racing with them on is not the horse we bet on….and sometimes “accidents” happen in the lab…enough said? And this is quite a pity, as there are lots of genuine infertility treatments available from qualified doctors with strict treatment protocols – but they cannot guarantee you 100% success like those quacks do. And hence a lot of honest but gullible couples in their anxiety get cheated by those fly-by-night infertility specialists who rarely practice in a single area/city for more than a year at a stretch- any longer and they will be exposed and get a public thrashing. So they make a quick buck from anxious couples and escape before getting caught- giving a bad name to genuine doctors.

There were lots of other advertisements about alternative form of treatments, but as I am running late (to work) here, I will restrict myself to these few. Readers are requested to post their queries about other treatments to the comments column and I will answer them one by one. I leave you with this legal maxim… Caveat Emptor…buyer beware.