My last missive about alternative medicine and the Susan Strasberg tragedy brought many mixed responses so let me add this caveat: I know that not ALL claims that get put under the umbrella of so-called "alternative" or "complementary" or "integrative" medicine are in the same category as the Russian psychic healer. And yes there is much in Andrew Weil I agree with, like exercise is beneficial, certain diets are better than others, etc. Those claims, of course, are not what make Weil controversial. But more on Weil another time. In the mean time, Steven B. Harris, M.D., a member of the Skeptics Society advisory board, wrote what I thought was a useful and interesting response from a medical doctor's perspective who deals with cancer patients.

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.

Comment: Well, if she had a biopsy, they probably did a lumpectomy. So if the tumor had grown quickly and was in terminal stage, where was it? Still at the site? Metastasized? How badly and to where?

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.

Well, sure, if they cut the lump out to do the biopsy. But if the terminal diagnosis was based on stuff like bone scans and liver tumors seen on CT, a mammogram may well have been negative, because the primary was gone. A negative mammogram is only interesting if she had lost local control of the primary breast tumor, and had a huge breast tumor before, and NOW it was gone. But, as you have the records, you should be able to tell if that's true or not. I'll be glad to review them for you, if you like.

Her New York doctors had no interest in hearing about the Russian healer Susan described to them.

No, I'll bet not. Because the cancer was inside her and she probably said she felt fine, and wouldn't let them do any more bone scans and CT's. So why should they be interested? Obviously she's on a trip up that great mental river that runs through the temples of immortality in Egypt (DeNial), and there's no getting people off that trip unless they want to come home.

Nicolai Levashov came to the attention of Unsolved Mysteries through a woman named Barbara Koopman, M.D., Ph.D., a close friend of Susan Strasberg. She wrote Unsolved Mysteries a letter recommending that they do a story on him. (I have copies of the letter, all medical reports for Strasberg and the other patients, the Unsolved Mysteries script, etc.) I called Koopman to get a statement about this affair. At first she was very reluctant to speak to me, but since I was friendly and genuinely inquisitive she warmed up and then opened up. She still completely believes in Levashov. Strasberg, she says, lived four years longer than she should of thanks to the psychic's healings of her.

Nonsense. The median life span of people from small tumor to death in breast cancer is about 10 years. It's a slow disease. I recently saw a woman with a tumor that had eaten half her chest already (due to her own trip down DeNial before telling her daughter she was ill) last another YEAR. And she did it essenti- ally without any really good treatment, because none was possible by then (she got anti-hormones, and ONE dose of chemo that put her in the hospital with pneumonia, and very nearly killed her-- and surely didn't lengthen her life). Yet a month from the end, she was out gambling in the casinos of Las Vegas. She spent a reasonably happy year, too. Hard to believe, but the world you live in, is the world of your mind. That's the only world we ever have. Death is not an experience, because to experience something you have to be alive. And while you are alive, you can consider yourself immortal, if you like, and cannot be proven wrong and know it. A conundrum.

Strasberg had the happiest final four years of her life. She should have been dead within months but instead lived years.

Again, nonsense. You REALLY ought to talk to some oncologists on this point, for the show.

Her death came suddenly and was a complete surprise to Dr. Koopman and, she says, to others as well.

Well, sure. If you don't follow the labs, you often have no idea when a cancer patient is going to die. Sometimes even if you do follow the labs and scans. A patient with almost no liver will suddenly get jaundiced over a week, take to their beds, and die of infection. Before that, they often feel reasonably well if they have no anxiety. The pain of cancer is over-rated if you don't have bone metastases. Sometimes even if you do.

Koopman feels that regardless of the cause of death (the Los Angeles Times obit said it was from cancer), her final years were still a miracle.

She can feel anything she likes. Let's see her statistics, by tumor stage.

She continued to stress over and over that this outcome should not be considered a tragedy, because Strasberg was so happy...

Ha! Well, there, perhaps, she's got you. Breast cancer is a long, drawn-out thing. You can spend 5 or 10 or 15 years in a constant agony of anxiety about having a fatal disease, or you can find a lie and be happy for the same time. Which is better? That's the conundrum facing all skeptics. Lies allay anxiety-- and too much anxiety, particularly about the future and death and pain, which are inevitable, is one of the things that makes life not worth living. Skepticism aims to find out the truth in all things. The lie which skeptics tell themselves is that the truth always, in the end, makes things better. Always. That lie is to relieve the anxiety THEY have that sometimes, occasionally, what they're doing AS skeptics, is not the kindest thing they can be doing. It's recursive and VERY ironic.

I find that a little skepticism about skepticism is occasionally in order, especially when it comes to health, death, and thinking about the human condition. As a doctor myself, I find myself quite often taking a position which is just a little more optomistic than the straight facts will completely justify. I'm not Levashov, but neither am I a computer. The placebo effect is real and beneficial-- that's been scientifically proven, and is not a subject for skepticism. And yet it's not available to complete practicing skeptics as a therapy, either on one side of the doctor's desk or the other. Another conundrum.

Steve Harris, M.D.

To lighten things up after this heavy subject of cancer and death, here's a little skeptical humor being bandied about the net:

Great Imponderables!

1. When an agnostic dies, does he go to the "great perhaps"?

2. Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?

3. Do you think Houdini ever locked his keys in his car?

4. Why is there a road sign that says "Braille Institute, Next Exit"?

5. Can atheists get insurance for acts of God?

6. If procrastinators had a club would they ever have a meeting?

7. If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2?

8. Have you ever wondered why just one letter makes all the difference between here and there?

9. When you go into a hotel you always see reception. Why do you never just see ception?

10. If time heals all wounds, how come the belly button stays the same?

11. If a lawyer and an IRS agent were both drowning, and you could only save one of them, would you go to lunch or read the paper?

12. Isn't it strange that the same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously?

13. If genetic scientists crossed a chicken with a zebra would they get a four-legged chicken with its own barcode?

14. If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice?

15. Why is there always one in every crowd?

16. If all the world is a stage, where does the audience sit?

17. Is it possible to have deja vu and amnesia at the same time?

18. Why do hair shampoo instructions say "Lather. Rinse. Repeat"? If you did this, would you ever be able to stop?

19. Who decided "Hotpoint" would be a good name for a company that sells refrigerators?

20. How do you know when it's time to tune your bagpipes?