July/August 2008
the enlightened tourist

by Marc Ringel, MD

Woo-Woo versus Scientism

When people ask about “Zen of Science,” I usually respond that I’m the token straight doctor who writes a column for this alternative medicine magazine. It’s fun playing the straight man for a change because I’m seen by many of my physician colleagues as sort of a free-thinking hippie. The truth is that, except for a little hypnosis here and there, most of the alternative medicine that I do is delivered to my rural patients in a plain manila envelope. You’ll have to open the envelope to see how this allopathic family doctor works to employ the lessons about compassion, healing and spirituality he’s learned over the course of his own eclectic quest for wisdom.

The spiritual portion of that quest has been more along Buddhist lines than along any other. I don’t exactly teach meditation as meditation, but I do encourage my patients to practice what puts them in touch with their most genuine selves (or non-selves, to put it in the sort of paradoxical language that Buddhists developed about two-and-a-half millennia ahead of quantum physics). In the context of treating their sprained ankles, diabetes and snotty noses, I quietly practice and teach prayer, exercise, relaxation and right living in pursuit of health and happiness.

My main goal for these Nexus pieces is to examine the complex border between the modern scientific medicine that I’ve been trained in and the alternative medicine that Nexus does such a fine job of presenting. Areas where the line blurs or disappears have held special interest for me ever since, as an undergraduate philosophy major, I studied the history of science, with special emphasis on which questions science was not good at answering and why.

This spring I learned a lesson about what happens when you cross the imaginary line between science and spirit. I have been doing an every-other-week radio commentary for KUNC radio station for about twice as long as I’ve been writing for Nexus. One piece, which aired in March, was about a mind-blowing study published in 2005 by Dr. Jeanne Achterberg in The Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine. The report, entitled “Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Functions of Recipients,” describes an experiment that blended spiritual healers with the highest tech, a functional MRI (f-MRI) machine which images metabolic activity in body structures from moment to moment.

Dr. Achterberg chose 11 healers and asked each of them to pick a partner with whom they had a strong connection. Subjects placed their heads in an f-MRI scanner while the healer member of the duo stayed in the control room, out of sight and out of contact. Sessions lasted 24 minutes, divided into 12 two-minute intervals, in a randomly assigned sequence of intending to reach the subject and not intending to.

One pair was disqualified for technical reasons so, with 12 sets of images taken on each of the 10 remaining subjects, there were 120 three-dimensional f-MRI images to compare. Analysis of these images with a sophisticated computer program demonstrated highly significant differences in the areas of brain activation between the intention-to-reach and the non-intention-to-reach intervals. Calculations showed the chances to be 1-in-10,000 of this being a strictly random result.

I must admit that when I wrote my commentary, which I entitled “The Science of Woo-Woo,” I was asking for a fight. It had happened before. When I’d talked about things spiritual and dared to mingle them with things scientific, I’d provoked all sorts of outraged responses from pure scientists in my audience. So, I threw down the gauntlet when I referred to the “Outraged critics, self-anointed representatives of pure science” whom I expected to respond to my piece. And respond they did. A couple dozen: some damning everything I’d ever said as specious; many with ad hominem attacks; and a few even threatening to withdraw their memberships to the public radio station that sullied the airwaves with my pieces for four minutes per fortnight. I even found myself on a couple of blogs as the featured topic of disdain.

In a second commentary I apologized for my inflammatory rhetoric but went on to examine the level of emotionality in so many of my critics. I introduced the term “scientism,” a sort of scientific fundamentalism, defended with the same judgmental, take-no-prisoners attitude and rhetoric that religious fundamentalists employ to uphold their own constricted worldviews.

In a rebuttal aired on KUNC the following week, delivered by a professor of biochemistry, I was taken to task for not engaging in a detailed scientific debate about the merits of Achterberg’s study, instead of asking my audience to try to open their minds a crack. If I had to do it all over again, the one thing I’d change would be to cut out the provocative intro. Then, I’d go on, as I did before, to describe this study which, despite criticism, still is mind-blowing. And, if faced by the same strident critics, I’d again address the issue of scientism.

I’d strive, though, to maintain a calmer attitude, similar to how I am with my patients. After all, fundamentalists, whether religious or scientific, are just as deserving of compassion as everybody else is. Still, it’s going to be a while before I am so enlightened as to be freed of the instinct to sock anyone in the nose who hostilely insists that theirs is the only way to the truth.

Marc Ringel has spent the majority of his career as a family doctor working in rural communities, including the last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has written extensively, for lay and professional audiences, about rural health, medical informatics and healing. Marc lives in Greeley with his wife and many pets.