The mind, the body and the puzzle of alternative medicine

THE MAGIC FEATHER EFFECT: THE SCIENCE OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE AND THE SURPRISING POWER OF BELIEF

IF YOU were ever tempted to try acupuncture or energy healing but weren’t ready, Melanie Warner’s new book may be just for you.

In The Magic Feather Effect: The Science of Alternative Medicine and

the Surprising Power of Belief, Warner explores the fertile middle ground between enthusiastic disciples and killjoy sceptics. With persuasive prose, she skilfully navigates the alternative-medicine landscape with an open mind and a strong bias for the scientific method.

Her goal is not an exhaustive review of all options but an examination of those with the best potential. Sifting the wheat from the snake oil chaff, she considers acupuncture, chiropractic, energy medicine, meditation and even faith healing. But she also delves into the nuances of the placebo effect.

Interwoven throughout the chapters are interviews. Ian has fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), an extremely rare condition that slowly turns tissue into bone. This genetic mutation is incurable and progressive, but since working with an energy healer, Ian lists 18 positive “body changes”.

Danila Castelli experienced the 69th miracle healing at Lourdes, France, officially verified by the Catholic Church. After taking a bath there in 1989, she was spontaneously cured of pheochromocytoma, a noncancerous adrenal gland tumour.

Perhaps most impressive is Joe Pinella, who broke his neck in a crash that left him a quadriplegic for years before he made a complete recovery with the advice of a qigong master.

Like a good sleuth, Warner looks into their medical files, and what she discovers adds more to the picture.

But with more than 1 000 published academic papers, including double-blind studies, acupuncture offers one of the best windows to understanding how alternative therapies actually work, with tantalising clues.

Warner pieces together the evidence to make her case, block by block, puzzle piece by puzzle piece, until the reader can see the larger picture. If the big question is, Do alternative medicines work?, then the answer is frequently yes, but for a specific set of identified health problems, under certain conditions and mostly for the symptoms rather than the disease.

Dumbo the elephant believed he could fly when his friend Timothy gave him a “magic feather.”

The small miracle of Warner’s entertaining and highly useful book is that it gives you the tools to understand how alternative medicine works, so you can make up your own mind.

Chances are you will come away convinced such treatments can help.