Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine

by Paul A. Offit

In a sense, everyone uses the placebo effect, no one more than parents. “I have a four-year-old son,” writes John Diamond in Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations, “who, as is the way with four-year-old sons, climbs on things and then falls off them, losing chunks of skin and blood on the way down to the ground. And whenever this happens—about four times a week on average—and he runs to me crying and pointing to the latest graze, I apply strictly alternative remedies. I don’t give him strong drugs to kill the pain or stanch the flow of blood but I clean the tiny wound, ask him what happened, sympathize with him about the fickleness of gravity and the harshness of brick, sit him on my lap with a glass of water, kiss him and rub the hurt better. And it works, every time.” Diamond tried to label his not-so-unique brand of healing. “So what do you think I should call the technique?” he writes. “Fatherotherapy? Dynamic parentesiology? Because dealing with minor problems by calm talking, sitting down quietly and rubbing it better seems to be just what much of alternative therapy is about.”