I'll be lecturing on at various venues next week. Here's the schedule and contact information if you are interested in attending any of these events (the first and forth events are worth attending in and of themselves if you are so inclined).
Monday April 5. Council on World Affairs. University of Colorado, Boulder (Contact: 303/492-2526).
2:00-3:30 DENYING HISTORY: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do they Say It?
4:00-5:30 WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS
These are both panel discussions in which I will speak for about 30-40 minutes then chair a round table discussion followed by Q & A.
This conference is an amazing collection of scholars, scientists, writers, etc. from all fields and walks of life who get together once a year to debate the great issues of the day. Apparently there will be about 200 speakers and panelists, and about 3,000 attendees. The conference runs from Monday to Friday.
Tuesday April 6. Yale Law School. Room 127 (Contact: Ernest Miller, ernest.miller@yale.edu or 203/436-2562, sponsored by the Yale Law and Technology Society, the Yale Skeptics Society, and The Information Society)
4:30-6:00 Masters Tea, Morse College
6:30-8:00 "Junk Science in the Courtroom" (Creationism, Holocaust Denial, Recovered Memories, Silicon Breast Implants, Facilitated Communication, etc.) Lecture in Room 127, Yale Law School
Wednesday April 7. MIT, Room 10-250. New England Skeptics Society (Contact NESS Chairchick Sheila Gibson at skepchik@hotmail.com or 781/891-1122)
7-9pm WHY "DO" PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS?
Saturday April 10. I-Con 18 (Science Fiction Convention) at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (Long Island) (Contact: Carl Fink, scitech@iconsf.org or carlf@panix.com or 516/656-3079)
10:30-Noon: Panel discussion with myself, Harlan Ellison, Dr. Reaven of Stony Brook, and magician Vincent Furnier on "What we Believe that Isn't So."
Noon-1:00: Why People Believe Weird Things lecture. This Science Fiction conference goes April 9-11 and is a veritable who's who in that world, in case you are interested in just attending generally.
Remember that Russian psychic fellow I told you about a few months ago, Nicolai Levashov? (I've appended that posting below for your convenience.) This is the guy who "cured" actress Susan Strasberg's breast cancer, upon which she abandoned her medical treatment and died this past January of breast cancer. Well, Unsolved Mysteries, who produced a segment on Levashov (for which I appear as the token skeptic), is finally airing it a week from today, Friday, April 9, on CBS. After Strasberg died I called the producers and asked what they were going to do in light of Levashov's recent failure. The answer was that they were just going to leave Strasberg out of the segment. If they do I'm going to make a public stink about it since this borders on criminal negligence in promoting someone as being able to cure cancer knowing that someone who attended him just died.
In the next couple of months CBS's Unsolved Mysteries will be airing a program on a "Russian Psychic Healer" named Nicolai Levashov, who claims he has created medical miracles and that "the results have mystified the very doctors who had written their patients off as incurable," according to the pre-production report given to me by the producers of this segment. I was consulted by the segment producer, Janet Jones, and was asked to comment on film about this healer. I was not going to comment on this until the show aired, but recent events compel me to finally say something.
Nicolai Levashov says he heals people by going inside their body psychically and tweaking with the damaged cells and tissues. The story segment focuses on two cases: (1) Isabelle Pritchard, who was born with a brain tumor and had four surgeries and numerous chemo and radiation treatments; (2) Susan Strasberg, the actress, diagnosed with breast cancer, was allegedly healed by Levashov. The second case is now another tragedy of Alternative Medicine, since Strasberg recently died of cancer. Here is the Unsolved Mysteries script that was going to be used for the show (they sent me a copy), but will be changed, no doubt, before it airs, since Strasberg was filmed extensively for the program. The script:
"Actress Susan Strasberg, the daughter of famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg, calls her involvement with Nicolai's psychic healing 'the great adventure of my life.' At age 57, she had felt a tiny lump in her breast. A biopsy confirmed her worst fears. She had malignant cancer and needed a double mastectomy. 'My mother had died of cancer at 58. I didn't want that to happen to me. I'm 60 now and feeling better than I ever have in my life. I owe it all to Nicolai.' Susan refused surgery. A longtime believer in alternative healing methods, she sought help from Nicolai in San Francisco. By the time she went there, her tumor had grown quickly and was considered in a terminal stage. For nearly ten months, she went to Nicolai's office every day for 15 minutes. When she had to go to Europe, he continued the sessions via telephone twice a week. [Psychic healing can allegedly be done over the phone.] Susan had a mammogram a year after the initial diagnosis of cancer. It showed no signs of the tumor. Her New York doctors had no interest in hearing about the Russian healer Susan described to them. She gratefully acknowledges Nicolai's skill by saying, 'This must be the medicine for the future. He knows anatomy, biology, chemistry and can diagnose sickness so well. My essence knew this was the right thing to do, to put my life in Nicolai's hands.'"
Strasberg died of cancer. Her final statement sums up the problem succinctly and tragically. The future of medicine is not in the so-called "alternative" or "complementary" medicine fields. The reason is that almost every claim made in these fields are based on the types of "essences" Strasberg felt as the "right thing to do." As pattern-seeking animals we all tend toward subjective feelings about what "feels" or "seems" right. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong. The only way to find out is to test the claim with science. Modern medicine has developed a reasonably reliable method to test such claims (not perfect, of course, but the best method we have). Strasberg chose to ignore science and she paid with her life. (Of course, we will never know how the experiment would have come out with traditional methods of treatment, since people still die of cancer, but we DO know how this one came out.)
Will Nicolai Levashov be held accountable for Strasberg's death? Of course not. Will Unsolved Mysteries run the piece and then end it explaining that she died anyway? I seriously doubt it (my guess is that it will be eliminated from the segment so as not to dampen the enthusiasm for the psychic healer's amazing skills--disconfirming evidence is rarely presented on such programs).
Of course, countless people are taken in by such hucksters as Levashov, and pay with their lives, but because they are not celebrities we do not hear about them. And the alternative medicine gurus like Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil are not about to pen a statement saying that perhaps they are wrong about the nonsense they peddle. Tragedies like Strasberg are either ignored, or tallied up to negative thoughts on her part, or by healing methods on the part of this ONE psychic (but the other methods are still acceptable). This whole mess sickens me. You are going to see more on alternative medicine in the pages of Skeptic in coming issues. This is a problem of grave concern.