The Voodoo Priestess attends classes all over the country to learn how to feel the lumps on one’s head, how to feel the energy flow in the spine, etc. She’s just all about it! The classes are expensive and I’m sure she gets “certified”, but I don’t see what’s stopping anyone from doing the same thing and calling themselves an expert. There’s no medical training…She may be a masseuse, but that’s as much “license-able” training as she has (as far as I know).
She has special, gifted hands.
You could try the old Pigeon Drop. Fill his pockets with pigeons, and drop him off a cliff.
All I can add is, don’t let crystalboy come between you and your SILs. (I’m new here – what’s a SIL? I assume you’re talking about sisters. Right?) Whatever you do, don’t think you can turn either of them against him. You’ll lose, and you’ll lose a lot more than money.
A fast-talking crystal merchant and a gullible fairy-lover sounds like a match made – well, somewhere. He says exactly what she wants to hear. He knows what she wants to hear because she pretty much telegraphs it to him all the time. Fantasize all you want about Ogre’s suggestion, maybe even act it out with an effigy if it makes you feel better. But if you actually try to confront or physically harm him, you’ll end up with attorney fees – and your SILs won’t be goin’ your bail.
Personally, I don’t blame the guy. If he can make money doing the crystal cha-cha, more power to him. If people believe it, well, caveat emptor (sp?). Likewise though, when the con is found out, I wouldn’t blame some family member (to be named later) for giving said con man a stout thrashing in a vacant building at the edge of town.
But the skeptics have a long history of being right on their side, and so does science because of skepticism. What people are jumping on you for is that you seem to be (but are not, I think) equating the junk woo-woo ‘science’ with real science, simply by saying that there are closed-minded people in both groups.
Of course, all claims of there being a ‘war’ are greatly exaggerated. On the one hand, we have woo-woos existing in their own little world, tilting at the largely illusory ‘Establishment’. On the other hand, we have the legitimate scientists existing in the real world, barely having time to even notice the woo-woos, much less oppress them. The closest it comes to a fight is when the FDA cracks down on some of the more egregious medical charlatans, the USPTO rejects the millionth perpetual motion device, or a bunch of geeks take on a group of especially visible woo-woos online. Science proceeds (or, in the case of woo-woo junk science, fails to proceed) apace, regardless.
(When the woo-woos get into the government, however, it’s all over.)
I truly hope that your sil#1 stays well and cancer free.
As for the charlatan…
My oldest daughter’s mil is a practicing kairos “healer”. I do not believe that her “certification” is worth any more than the paper it is printed on. Although she is a self proclaimed Christian, she has crystals on her headboard to help her sleep and to give her “healing dreams”. She has laid her hands on me once (in a healing manner) in a social situation in which I would have been boorish if I had objected, but she continues to urge me to take sessions from her, and now wants to get my two youngest kids on her table, in order to "heal my daughter’s “depression"and my son’s ADHD”. (My daughter is 14 and we just had to have her cat put down,
and since I manage my son’s ADHD with behavior management instead of medication, why would I want her to mess with his “energy” and his “chi”. (Not to mention that if she can cure ADHD, why doesn’t she cure her own son?)
Crystals are very pretty rocks, I have been collecting them long before than the New Age made them magical and I resent the fact that when I display mine someone inevitably starts going off on how wonderful their healing properties are, and how do I cleanse mine, etc.
I doubt if you sil#1 will see her money again, unfortunately. the law does not protect us from making unwise choices. Even more unfortunately the law does protect charlatans from receiving a crystal suppository.
While I don’t dump all alternative medicine in the garbage, it’s obvious that this guy is a liar who takes financial advantage of serious ill people. He sounds like pond scum.
If this is your wife’s sister, you and your wife should consider letting your sister know what he said. If she wants to persue something legally, that is her decision to make. If I were she, I would let it go for at least a while. Her mind and body have been through enough stress and this situation is going to cause plenty.
As for what is revealed to SIL #2, I would leave that up to SIL#1. She was the damaged person. She was the one who was lied to. And she knows her sister better than you do.
This just really isn’t your business. As much as you love your sisters-in-law, they are grown women, aren’t they? You may bring more stress and hardship on the family by acting out your anger. Go slowly and trust your wife’s judgment about what should be revealed.
The fight is not yours.
SIL = Sister-in-law
According to an article that was in the New York Times in 2002, the availability of alternative medicine procedures in hospitals is on the increase. The number of hospitals offering alternative medical treatments doubled from 1998 to 2000. By the time the article was written, 15.5% of all hospitals offered some kind of alternative medical therapy.
I didn’t see any mention of the use of crystals. But I could see the benefits of tai chi classes, meditation instruction, aromatherapy, and relaxation techniques (which I was introduced to in the hospital in the 1970’s).
FWIW, the clinic I go to has all the tai chi, relaxation classes, etc. It doesn’t quite sound right to me to throw all that in the same box with the faith-healing crystal folk. At my clinic, at least, it seems to be presented as a way to prepare yourself for serious medical procedures and deal with the psychological issues of having big medical problems. I consider that to be on a completely different level from the people who play Jesus by laying hands on your skull or putting crystals in your navel or whatever; you can call both ‘alternative medicine’, but that’s kind of like “alternative rock”–alternative to what? What’s alternative, and what’s mainstream?
I don’t know the law, but morally this guy should be liable for practicing medicine without a licence.
I’m not aware of actual scientific studies ( or what, precisely, a relaxation class is ), but I’ve heard good things about tai chi for some problems involving coordination and balance. More importantly, the idea isn’t blatantly stupid; it’s perfectly plausible that physical training can help you deal with tremors or balancing difficulties; there’s just no plausible way that waving a crystal could help you with cancer.
Then there’s the idea of using animals to relieve stress, and therefore speed recovery. In fact there are quite a few alternative medical ideas that are at least worth looking at; crystal healing and homepathy aren’t included.
Personally, I blame the hell outta him. He’s a fucking remora, feeding off human fright. A life-threatening disease doesn’t make anyone a mark for con men, much less pressures from idiot family members. That panicked feeling of “Shit! Something has to make this go away!” is a pretty natural response. Bargaining, denial, all that. It’s not a free pass for con artists or even gullible twits.
I’m impressed that you haven’t exploded, jjimm. Being controlled and civilized, not to mention mindful of family, maybe you can play off those strengths. You feel loyalty to your sisters, even the ditzy one. She’s misguided but basically sincere and well-intentioned. The real problem is the predatory boyfriend. You can’t solve your sister’s ditziness and the money’s gone. So the main goal is to remove, or at least neutralize, the predator’s influence in your family. So undermine him. Use his own tools against him. It might work because nobody, especially your family, would expect or believe it from you.
Be cordial to him, almost indifferent, but never showing any undue attention. He’s just background, your sister’s boyfriend, right? Blah. No big deal. Prepare-- pump your sister for info about the jerk. You’re just interested. She sounds guileless enough to spill all kinds of things about him. Scope out his background, maybe even check up on some of the bodies he’s left buried. But identify his weaknesses and fears.
At some point draw him aside–or ideally, let him corner you privately–then detail in graphic terms what you will do to him if he ever fucks over anyone in your family again. Make it vicious and believable–but do it with a bland, empty face.
Then deny it ever happened. Be polite, puzzled and completely bumfoozled. You don’t know what in the world he’s going on about. Work in a faint tinge of concern–for him. So much anger, it can’t be healthy…fill in the blanks. Look at him like he’s crazy but you’ll humor him because he’s your sister’s boyfriend. Avoid looking at her much, unless it’s a glance of concern. When in doubt, underplay it because you’re pitching to your family, not the predator. Be yourself…but more so. And keep the pressure on. Even if he’s sincere, too bad. He did actual damage, financial and medical, to your sister. He needs to be gone from your family sphere.
It’s just an idea, jjimm. I’m Walter Mitty over-socialized but this actually worked when a similar predator targeted my father when he was dying of cancer. Amazing what ruthless inventiveness can be revealed by hard times. After almost 20 years, I still feel…okay about it. Not good, but okay.
Veb
In whose experience alternative therapies fit rather well as adjuncts to traditional treatments but weren’ t touted as replacements, at least by responsible practicioners.
I think you should let this guy know that you have found a very large supply of crystals which can be had for extraordinary prices. Huge discounts off of any per crystal price you have seen advertised.
Talk it up. Tell him you can now afford to install eight crystals (one each for the cardinal points) in every room of your house!
Heck, I will even pay you a nickel for some of them, so you can tell him you are getting a thousand percent mark up, selling them on the Internet! Well, maybe a ten thousand percent markup, I don’t really want all that big a bag of sand.
Offer to sell him some, for the same price he charged your SiL.
Tris
Ah, well, that’s what threw me! I’m not close to my sisters-in-law – best just shut up now.
What, no voodoo doll? :eek: If a voodoo priestess wanted to do any sort of healing on me, I’d insist that she use a voodoo doll. That way, I’d at least get some entertainment value out of it…
Agreed, but it’s not my impression that said history is perfect
Sure. But perfect…maybe not, though. Batting .990, I doubt I’d argue with. Batting 1.000, on the other hand, doesn’t quite seem to be the case.
I thank you for the nod, as you are right, but I didn’t mean to accuse anyone of jumping on me in this thread (nor do I think they are). There (to be totally fair) SEEMS to be closed-minded people at both ends of the spectrum: those who will believe anything and those who won’t. Both ends seem capable of being blinded by their persepectives. Does skepticism have a better record of being right? Probably. But I have seen what I perceive to be skepticism and what I perceive to be science come into conflict, and I’m putting my money on science.
The hard-core closed-minded skeptics that I was referring to seem to have replaced science with skepticism, which leads them to mistakes, just as the aforementioned “woo-woo” does.
James Randi seems to have always had a beef with Uri Gellar (don’t know if he still does, but he did for a long time). UG, of course, claimed he could bend things with his mind…mostly spoons. Randi didn’t buy it for a second, and I saw (don’t have a link at present, may have been a Randi book) Randi’s refutation of Gellar’s claim.
“Here is how you can fake spoon bending.” was pretty much his approach. Okay, fair enough, you can. No argument there. “Therefore, Gellar is a fake.”
Erm…not quite. Does showing how to fake it prove Gellar could be a fake? You betcha. That’s science. Is claiming that it proves he IS one science? Nope, it doesn’t. He could still be real (although I personally doubt it very seriously…but then I have no proof…just a lot of evidence that it’s extremely unlikely).
Remember Bob and Doug, the crop circle guys? Everybody wondered where these things were coming from, and B&D came forward and said, “We did it. Here’s how.” The scientists said, “Wow, obviously they can be faked, but that doesn’t prove that they all ARE, so more research is needed.” The skeptcs said, “They CAN be faked, so they ALL ARE. END OF STORY!”
The rest of us said: “If you want to claim that they are ALL faked, then prove it.”
The skeptics said: “Screw that! We’ve declared that they’re all faked and we’re going home.”
I saw Carl Sagan interviewed once (presumable before he died, I’m guessin’…he looked reasonably spry, but his eyes were all bloodshot…
I’m KIDDING!), where he said, “There is no reason to go back and look at the Face on Mars, because we have no proof that it is anything but a pile of rocks.”
I about fell out of my chair. Sure, we have no proof. THAT’S WHY WE GO LOOK! True science wants to find out. Skepticism sits in it’s armchair and sniffs down its nose dismissively at what it does not already believe. The pyramids are piles of rocks. Are they not interesting? Would it not have been interesting to find out the Face was artificial? How would we find out if we don’t go look because we don’t already know?
Science wants to KNOW stuff. Hard-core closed-minded skepticism wants to believe stuff. You know, like the woo-woos. So there ARE closed minds on both ends, criticism of me or not.
(Just to be clear, I don’t believe Uri Gellar can bend spoons with his mind. But I am intellectually honest enough to admit that I dont know. I think it’s much more likely that he’s faking it (as Randi has shown, he could be), but I never saw a performance, and thus remain undecided. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my philosphy, and all that.
I also don’t believe crop circles are created by aliens. I think the vast majority are created by humans (as the evidence suggests). Whether they all are has not been proven to my knowlege, so I remain open-minded. Skeptical, but not blind.)
Face on Mars: No evidence thus far of artifical construction, but the operative phrase from a scientific standpoint is “thus far.” That, to my mind, is why we look for such. There’s no proof for life on Mars, either, but we’re still looking evidence of it, anyway. THAT is what science is supposed to do; not blindly decide ahead of time.
[sub]Yoish, what a screed![/sub]
My SIL, who’s got a small business that she can barely manage to make ends meet on and can’t even afford health insurance, is shelling out $60 a pop to a “medical intuitive,” which as far as I can tell is a faith healer under a fancier name. She even sent us the book by this quack. We let it sit for a week and then forwarded it on to the next family member on the list; we couldn’t stomach even cracking it open.
But nobody can get through to her that this woman will intuit out of her of one thing and one thing only: any available cash she has to spend. And we live clear across the country, so it’s not like we can easily get in the quack’s face and get her to back off. I honestly don’t know what to do about it except cringe.
What he did was very bad, but at least this scumbag didn’t manage to convince her to stop getting medical care from her doctor and rely only on him.
That does happen in some cases. The woo-woo “healers” who do that are dog fuckers. They are the scum of the earth.
To Dijon Warlock: I see what you’re saying, and I agree, but there comes a point when there’s just very little point in pursuing that slim possibility. I accept that it’s possible that the computer I’m typing this on is powered by tiny demons who’ve enslaved an even smaller set of yeti’s to push tiny light boxes around to create the picture before me. But I’m certainly not going to take it apart to find out because it’s vanishingly unlikely and, more importantly, it doesn’t make any difference if the computer works as I expect.
It’s the same with crop circles, sure some of them might be right but there’s much better things in the world to pursue. Nobody claims that graffiti is of extraterrestrial origin, isn’t it much more likely that they’d communicate that way, let’s study that …
I dunno about the Sagan bit, I dunno if he was speaking after the later set of photos that show – pretty clearly – that the face is a pile of rocks. If he was speaking after them then there was no point in going to see it, we already had. If not, then he was wrong, it was worth checking out again if only to shut every one up.
I do see what you’re trying to say, but it’s really up to the people with the extraordinary claims to back it up with extraordinary evidence and I think it’s right for the skeptics to wait until they do so. So it’s not up to people to examine each crop circle, crystal healer or homeopath, if they’re claiming something outwith science then they should have to prove their position rather than saying that we should assume they might be right and prove them wrong.
As to the OP, I don’t often advocate legal action but if it ever becomes possible I’d sue the crystal fucker. It might be worth taking legal advice now to see if there’s anything that could be done now in case you want to pursue legal action in the future. I guess it might be worth talking to him, just outright asking for the money back, you never know.
Apart from that all we can hope to do is to educate people not to trust unproven treatments, from any sector of health care (or anywhere).
SD
(Heh-heh…I’m not entirely sure she didn’t use one on me behind the scenes. Owwww! My back!!)