A friend of mine (no, it really IS a friend of mine!) wants to go to this guy to quit smoking, “in one hour.” I found an article on him, quoted in part below. He sounds totally full of banana oil to me. Has anyone heard of him? Have any skeptical sites done an expose on him?
"Yefim Shubentsov isn’t a doctor but claims his method of curing tobacco, alcohol and other addictions is 98 percent effective. And as we’ll see, he keeps the secret in the palm of his hand. He’s called the Mad Russian, the poof doctor. With the wave of his hands and what sounds like a sneeze, this man called Yefim is said to be able to erase in just minutes the bad habits people have formed over a lifetime.
He says, ‘I remove desire. I can erase in your mind whatever you want.’ In his thick Russian accent Yefim insists that in one three hour session in his Brookline, Massachusetts classroom will cure anyone of what ails them… overeating, smoking, phobias, even chronic pain. And he does it all with words and his hands but those hands never actually touch you. Mary Sicord lost fifty pounds after a visit to Yefim. She says, ‘He has this power to erase these particular foods that were a weakness for me.’ The healer helped chef Robin Holly quit smoking after forty years. She says, ‘He sort of radiates an energy through his hands, almost like a magician.’
Yefim claims there’s nothing mystical about his methods. He credits a science called bio-energetics. He says he’s able to physically manipulate the invisible electric force field that surrounds every person’s body. He says he even transforms the energy in the brain back to it’s original form, the way it existed before a person, say, became addicted to cigarettes. He tells us, ‘I can feel it physically, so I give a more strong signal back.’"
The “bio-energetics” junk sounds suspiciously like “theraputic touch” (which doesn’t actually involve touching the patient, btw).
He’s using a lot of the same gibberish about “invisible” (and unmeasurable) “energy fields”
I think this part is crap, but I remember seeing an story on him on 20/20 or some other TV news program. His method is actually humiliating people into feeling really stupid for doing the bad habit that they are there to cure. I would probably question his success rate as well, but could only find references to his book for sale on google.
Granted, most of the doctors I know are straight, but is that distinctive enough for a nickname. Like “The Mad Russian,” it doesn’t seem to narrow it down enough.
Your friend sounds like a sucker. Perhaps you can use this fact for your own financial improvement.
