Dealing With Charlatans

The Seattle Times on  misguided witch hunt.

The November 2007 Seattle Times series on "Energy Medicine" purported
to uncover fraud and deception. Yet, the article itself made many
misleading statements based on conjecture rather than facts.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004020583_miracle18m2.html

The article asserts that William Nelson was ordered to"quit selling
his machine and making false claims" and suggests that Mr. Nelson was
indicted on "felony fraud charges" related to the machine. This is
wholly inaccurate. Mr. Nelson was not ordered by the FDA to quit
selling his machine in the 1990s. And while he was indicted on felony
fraud charges, these charges were for postal fraud, not medical fraud,
totally unrelated to his machine.  And the charges were thrown out of
court by Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch of Denver.  The
reporter had copies of the indictment and must have known that the
felony fraud case had nothing to do with Mr. Nelson's invention, yet
the reporter neglects to mention this and prefers to mislead the
public. Why?  Because the reporter has a point to make whether or not
the facts support his argument.

The article goes on to say Nelson has sold upwards of 10,000 devices
in the US and has recruited a huge sales force, attracted to easy
money, to sell his/her device.  Pharmaceutical companies have
incredible sales teams, great ad campaigns to move their products and
pay doctors incentives to prescribe the drugs.  Accidental death from
prescription drugs is now the fourth leading cause of death in America
but this is considered business as usual in the drug industry.
According to the FDA's own reports 100 000 Americans die from adverse
reactions to prescription drugs.

The aim of the Seattle Times article is to debunk energy medicine,
describing it as the belief that illness results from disturbances in
the energy fields in the body and that these energy fields can be
manipulated to improve health. But acupuncture, a widely accepted
therapy reimbursed by many insurance carriers, is defined as "an
ancient oriental healing technique using needles to balance energy
meridians and encourage self-healing."  Sound familiar? Acupuncture is
just a form of energy medicine, and if you negate all of energy
medicine, you negate a healing art that has been successfully
practiced for thousands of years.

The article then relates how desperately ill people who have put faith
in the EPFX but eventually died. The article goes into great detail
about an couple both diagnosed with leukemia, suggesting that it was
the EPFX the ultimately did them in. The survival rates for this
terminal cancer are extremely low. The chances were against this
couple from their diagnosis, regardless of what type of treatment they
pursued. Moreover, the husband only turned to the EPFX after
experiencing painful side effects from the chemotherapy.

The article asserts that  EPFX benefits from the "placebo effect",
where the physician's belief in the treatment and the patient's faith
in the physician exert can create a powerful remedy for the patient.
It is not just the EPFX but many medical treatments whose efficacy
may be augmented by the placebo effect. For example, Irving Kirsch, a
psychologist at the University of Connecticut, believes that the
effectiveness of antidepressant drugs may be attributed almost
entirely to the placebo effect. His studies assert that the desire to
heal, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 percent of
the drugs' effectiveness.

Prescription drugs kill approx 100,000 Americans yearly. In addition,
violent killings, violent acts and suicides attributed to
antidepressant use. http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/casualties.htm
 These are drugs widely touted by the modern medical society while
snubbing alternative methods such as the EPFX that many people have
found health benefits from. In contrast to prescription drugs, not one
death has been attributed to the EPFX.

The article relays stories of people who were unhappy with the EPFX.
But were are all the contented and healed patients? Why only one side
of the story? Many people all over the world have gained benefit from
the EPFX, and the stories of these people should also be told.