The above advice is first recorded as having come from Hippocrates, or at any rate one of the ancient medical sages. If you thought that this sort of thing was out of fashion in the age of psychotherapy and Paxil, think again - it’s being endorsed in the Science section of today’s New York Times (“Watching A Faith Healer At Work”).
The author of this travesty is Amir Afkhami M.D.
“I came to Iraq deeply skeptical of its traditions of religious folk treatment.”
This is a dead giveaway*. Anytime you hear a physician (or other presumably educated person) introduce their endorsement of woo with a declaration of what a hardened skeptic they were, it is bullshit. Actually they’re predisposed to credulousness and hoping to give their remarks credibility by assuring you what hard-headed realists they are.
“To my surprise, I found a concerned faith healer who was sometimes more successful in treating the mentally ill than the few medically trained psychiatrists and general practitioners in the country.”
You’ll be surprised too, when you find out that Afkhami’s “evidence” for this claim is a single anecdote about the treatment provided to an Iraqi woman who’s brought to the faith healer because she’s displaying profound anxiety over her upcoming (arranged?) marriage to a relative.
The faith healer (a mullah who moonlights) chants a Koranic verse into the woman’s right ear (the left presumably is unclean), tells her she is possessed by a jinn (evil spirit) and that she should bathe daily, anoint herself with rosewater and definitely go ahead and get married because it’s the “responsible” thing to do.
An evil reductionist Western-style psychiatrist might have deduced that this woman is deeply unhappy about a marriage she wants no part of, and counseled her about her options. But Dr. Afkhami is enthusiastic about the faith healer/mullah’s solution (as I’ll bet the parents are). Will marriage cure this woman’s ills? Will she wind up as an Iraqi Andrea Yates? Who knows?
Who was the jackass who decided that this article belonged in the Science section of the Times? Would they have printed this tripe if the author had been an evangelical Christian physician touting the skills of a Pentecostalist faith healer who convinces a troubled young woman to marry Cousin Jesse from over in the next holler?
So I am pitting 1) woo-worshippers who pretend to be skeptics, 2) people who use religion to abuse women, and 3) the New York Times Science section editor, who’s an idiot.
*another example of the faux skeptic is described in this article about CNN’s feature on “John of God”, another self-styled faith healer. In this case it’s a pseudo-skeptical psychiatrist, one Dr. Rediger (Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who doesn’t fare much better, takes his lumps too).
