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Welcome! Just like Raw Food, just like Twitter, there are many new creations sweeping the world. I am one of them. So is this blog. So - I’m wagering - are you. As the world changes, we discover ourselves more deeply and a new, more personalized spirituality emerges. The new spirituality may or may not involve a church, a mosque, a synagogue, or even a yoga studio. What it does do is ignite the creative spark within. It inspires us to move in large and small ways into new territory. This territory is more loving, authentic, expansive, and innovative. This blog is devoted to an exploration and celebration of this new spirituality, its promise and the rejuvenation it brings.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Book Review - Dr. Ersnt Draws his Sword: a Duel Begins – Correspondence with the Authors (Post 3 of 4)

Dr. Edzard Ernst, M.D., author of Trick or Treatment: the Undeniable Truth about Alternative Medicine, discusses with me, over email, whether he will accept my offer of free healing.  In the next part of our exchange, Dr. Ernst, gets a little personal.

(click here for post 1, click here for post 2)

I explained to Dr. Ernst what my offer of free healing would involve as follows: 

..........As with any client, modalities would be determined through a two-step process. Step 1: I consult spiritual beings to determine what is needed, Step 2: you and I would discuss the information received, your comfort with recommendations, and how to implement recommendations in a way that is consistent with experiment design. Through this we would develop a kind of treatment plan that would guide our work for remaining sessions.

I hope this provides you with the desired information. I am interested in what objective monitoring you suggest.

Ahnday

Perhaps it was the specter of getting spiritual beings involved in his personal life, or the idea of publically sharing his experience that threw him for a loop.  Whatever the cause, in his next email, gone was the open-minded, visionary Dr. Ernst, the man who is also known as the world’s first professor of Complimentary Medicine.  On April 1, he dashed my hopes when he declared that he had no interest in partnership…

interesting!

i am not interested in proving nor in creating a partnership.i want to test a hypothesis.this is how i understood you very first email.youe experiment is not a conlusive test:even if i feel better after you intervention,how do we know that i would not have felt exactly the same way without it?

regards

The handwriting was on the wall. I could see that more than likely I would never be blending flower remedies for Dr. Ernst, nor would we work together to solve the mysteries of Chi. Nonetheless, I wanted to him to know that I was still open and that I believed partnership would be productive.  I wrote back,

I understand that... that's why I suggested objective and subjective testing ... for the objective testing we create a hypothesis for testing and for the subjective part we record your experience, and in this way we create a well-rounded experiment. Aren't you even a little bit interested in discovering why people are healing with alternative methods even though your analysis says they won't? Think of yourself as a latter day Marie Curie, although I guarantee that distance healing won't give you radiation poisoning!

My offer's on the table. If your pluck returns, let me know.

Ahnday

I’m not sure what happened and why he responded again - maybe he wanted the last word.  Whatever his motivations, he wrote back this same day, telling me that among other things I didn’t really understand trial design. Amazingly, he also stated that he understood why people are healing with alternative medicine.  He wrote,

objective tests do also improve due to the natural history of the condition or the placebo effect etc.i'm beginning to suspect that you fail to understand the essentials of trial design.i do understand why people are healing,believe me.but this is not how you approached me in the first place.you suggested a rigorous test of youe healing method.where is it?
regards
e Ernst

WAIT! Did he just say that?  Did Dr. Edzard Ernst, MD, - the guy with a million abbreviations trailing along after his name and staunch advocate of conventional medicine – did he just say, “I understand why people are healing, believe me.”  Did he just admit that alternative healing works!?.. OMG!

Whatever he was or was not admitting to, I could tell he didn’t want any healing sessions.  I replied, letting him know that I was still open.  I tried also to give him a way out, with this email,


Do you have any suggestions for trial design - I am more than open to hearing about them and incorporating them into any experiment.

Edzard, I sense that your enthusiasm for this experiment may be waning.  (Just know that your arguments in Trick or Treatment would carry more weight with readers - that is you would have more credibility - if you were willing to submit to the methods you criticize).

If you have something specific in terms of trial design, please let me know.  For the time being, I will tell my readers that you are not interested in working with me.  My offer remains on the table.  Perhaps in the future you will change your mind.

Best to you,
Ahnday

Though I fully expected never to hear from him again, he wrote back, informing me that I had failed him.  “You [Ahnday] failed to produce the good you had initially envisioned,” he states officiously in this reply,...

(for more, see next post)

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