the new age dinner guest

The Northwest is a hotbed of new age baloney. This is what happens when the Beatles go to India and hang out with a guru and add some sitars to their music; a whole generation of Westerners throw off the yoke of Christianity, only to rush headlong into the supernatural juju of other continents. Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism, that sort the usual favorites. And the idolizing of the native, an unsubstantiated respect for indigenous "knowledge" and other forms of "traditional" knowledge, the sort born of thousands of years of tradition or simple intuition- "women's" knowing another that need not be beacked by any evidence to be asserted around here. And most often, this insidious snake oil slides by in a way that is not convenient to question- it's just part of the general lahar of granola that washed over this region years ago and is still choking innocent babies in its uber-natural wake (I refer here to the anti-vaccine hippies, and Steve Jobs' non-invasive 'treatment' choices).

Here's how it rolled out at dinner recently. A Seattle guest, vegetarian, lets drop that some years back she had a friend who was diagnosed with cancer. The tumor was enormous, running from the brainstem past all major organs to the stomach. Doctors gave the woman a 1 in 10 chance of survival. That's the setup. Are you ready for the new age cure?

New Age dinner guest quit her job to care for her (this establishes a moral high ground in terms of commitment to the patient), and put her on a special diet. The doctors thought this diet was nuts (establishes her radical anti-establishment cred). And, lo and behold, the cancer goes into remission, and the woman is still with us 17 years later.

This turd dropped into the punchbowl of conversation with a murmuring of 'wow', but not much else. It wasn't my house, and I had previously endangered my friendship with the host by pointing out that many traditional Chinese medicines are laced with heavy metals and pharmaceuticals and by the way the diagnosis and treatment is completely inconsistent and based on an unproven theories of Qi energy and Yin and Yang, so I kept my lips zipped. But I was shocked at the uncritical response.

She inferred that the diet was the cure without coming out and saying it; which is all for the better. Because the other distinct possibility is that the woman in question was the lucky 1 in 10 who survives. What I wish I had done: ok, 10 dinner guests, ok, I have a secret number in my head between 1 and 10. Eveyone pick a number between 1 and 10, and tell me your number- no repeats. No, no, no, no, YES! You survived, all the rest of you are dead. Oh, and what are you eating tonight? Looks like some meat on the plate there. Repeat after me: correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation.

What an incredible case study. Let's assume all the facts are straight and we verified all the details. What you have is a single case study. Let me give you another case study: my mom. My mom wanted to quit smoking. She heard acupuncture could help. She went to an acupuncturist, and the quack put needles in her ears and wherever the magical meridians are for the nerves and arteries that allegedly connect to that 'wanna smoke' part of your brain, or your Qi energy, or whatever. My mom still smokes. Proof that acupuncture is a bunch of hooey? It is if you base your conclusions on anecdotes. All it takes for a lot of people is a good narrative; we like stories. We learned for thousands of years through stories; then we figured out how to do systematic, controlled research. We figured out that our intuition is often wrong.

Nobody even asked what the miracle diet consisted of. Was it of her own invention? Then she should publish it! Did she borrow it from other sources? Then give them credit! Meat is known to raise risk of developing cancer; veggies and fiber and fruits known to lower it. But what research has been done on remission in this regard? Any double-blind studies with thousands of cases?

I'm not disregarding the notion that a vegetarian diet has great health benefits- the evidence on that is solid. But don't waltz into dinner claiming you cured cancer. It makes anything else you say harder to swallow than the charbroiled meat.