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May 15, 2007
And Another Thing!
So long as I'm being cranky about pop culture, The Secret sucks too. Probably even more than the Lavigne song. As Emily Yoffe says, "The Secret is not only drivel—it's pernicious drivel. The obvious question that arises from its claim that it's easy to get what you want, is: Why do so many people get what they don't want? As Byrne writes, 'Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness.' Yes, according to The Secret, people don't just randomly end up being massacred, for example. They are in the wrong place because of their own lousy thinking."
Jerry Adler --father of Ben Adler -- recently took to Anderson Cooper to talk through the book's awfulness. [O]ne
of the women in the [Secret] cures herself of cancer by visualizing herself
healthy and not taking medical treatment. I don't think that's --
that's good medical advice, and I don't think it's good psychological
advice for all the people who don't get cured of cancer." The hack on the other end replies that"the thing that's new about this secret
is that there's a lot of new evidence that's coming up in quantum
physics and neuroscience that's really showing that our thoughts do
control the vibration of our body in every cell in our body...And so we're
dealing with science now, which is a lot better than what we had in the
past, which was through the sages or the mystics of the time. And so
we're dealing with a much better prepared information-gathering that's
happening through science." Adler replied: "Well,
look, you know, the science gives us the scientific method. And if you
-- if you want to prove that this is -- that this scientific, there's
an easy way to do it. It's called a controlled experiment. Take
100 women with cancer and tell them to visualize themselves getting
healthy and not to see a doctor. And then take another 100 women and
give them medical treatment. And at the end of three years let's see
who does -- who does better. That's an experiment. And that will tell
you whether it's scientific or not."
Which leads me to my actual question: Take someone gullible, in need of hope, and scared of surgery, and you may have a preventable death on your hands. So what are the liability issues here? Does the book have a disclaimer? Can the author be held responsible for those tricked by her quackery?
May 15, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
i would like to present to you my own brief critique of "The Secret", here.
Posted by: r@d@r | May 15, 2007 1:25:14 PM
Johann Hari: "This is the real Secret - that the book is a pure expression of Bushism: a slop of rancid aspiration-speak masking selfishness, social collapse and religiose myth-making."
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1095
Posted by: moo-cow | May 15, 2007 1:32:47 PM
Jerry Adler's comment that we have an easy way to test the validity of "The Secret" is correct, but it would probably be completely unethical.
Posted by: Clark | May 15, 2007 1:35:07 PM
I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the book has the standard disclaimer at the beginning that it is not intended to replace medical advice, etc.
Regarding the woman with breast cancer who cured herself by thinking happy thoughts, nowhere does she say she received that as medical advice. She merely says that she believed she was healed, and her healing occurred without chemo or surgery. She doesn't go into what advice she got, only that she had decided to do it her way.
Her husband's story is also profiled and is quite interesting.
Posted by: DianeB | May 15, 2007 1:41:25 PM
Falwell: Dead. Or so ABC News tells me.
http://abcnews.go.com/
Posted by: jimmmm | May 15, 2007 1:44:33 PM
Years ago, after a particularly bad bout of anxiety and depression, I started therapy. One of the first things my therapist did was to have me carry around a small notebook and every time I found myself saying something bad about myself internally, I was to stop and write it down.
After a few days, I started to realize that when I had those negative thoughts, I was also experiencing physical symptoms -- increased feelings of stress, sadness, etc. That was a real wake-up moment for me, becasue for the first time it made me realize that my depression was not some random event that I was not in control of -- I was doing things that contributed to the problem, and that meant that i could also do things that would help fix the problem.
Now, realizing that did not make my depression go away. But it did help me to be kinder to myself, and more aware of the connection between what I thought and how I felt.
All of that is a long-winded way of saying that buried in all the bullsh*t, there's a small kernel of truth to "The Secret". That doesn't make the rest correct, though.
Posted by: Sprezzatura | May 15, 2007 1:47:39 PM
Sounds like warmed-over Calvinism to me.
Posted by: hamletta | May 15, 2007 1:54:22 PM
I think Sprezzatura has it exactly right. Yes, positive thinking can make a difference in your life. If you percieve everything negatively, you probably will be miserable.
But this point is too tame and obvious, so the lunatic who wrote this book has to turn it into this monstrous, sweeping, preposterous claim. And as Ezra, Emily Yoffe, Johann Hari and many others have pointed out, the Secret is not just silly, it's horribly pernicious and destructive.
Posted by: moo-cow | May 15, 2007 2:12:51 PM
I think Sprezzatura has it exactly right. Yes, positive thinking can make a difference in your life. If you percieve everything negatively, you probably will be miserable.
But this point is too tame and obvious, so the lunatic who wrote this book has to turn it into this monstrous, sweeping, preposterous claim. And as Ezra, Emily Yoffe, Johann Hari and many others have pointed out, the Secret is not just silly, it's horribly pernicious and destructive. So much so that I can't believe anyone would take it seriously.
Posted by: moo-cow | May 15, 2007 2:13:34 PM
Christian Scientists. Pentecostals of various denominations.
Posted by: TJ | May 15, 2007 2:50:41 PM
"the thing that's new about this secret is that there's a lot of new evidence that's coming up in quantum physics and neuroscience that's really showing that our thoughts do control the vibration of our body in every cell in our body"
1. *headdesk*
2. repeat as necessary.
Sometimes I wish that every time people babbled some woo involving quantum physics they would experience a harmless but unpleasant electric shock.
Perhaps if I think really hard about it?
Posted by: Dan S. | May 15, 2007 2:58:40 PM
On Nightline (I think it was) the man representing the The Secret empire said that if he had cancer he would seek the best medical treatment, and that the video might give the wrong idea to some that The Secret is intended as a substitute for treatment.
There is a wave like this from time to time. The power of positive thinking, as it used to be called, keeps coming back in ways so extreme as to mix some harm in with whatever good there is in it. And it never dies out. There's always an undercurrent of this kind of thing.
Posted by: Sanpete | May 15, 2007 3:04:51 PM
The "quantum mechanics" reference probably borrows from the giant steaming pile of crap that is "What the bleep do we know", which is a very slick video that sounds awfully smart but is built on deep misunderstandings of basic scientific principles.
Posted by: JoeF | May 15, 2007 3:50:31 PM
There are some clearly unexplained things in medicine. Why do placebos work?
There's an excellent article in the May 2007 Harper's: Manufacturing Depression, by Gary Greenberg (subscription required), which I recommend. I believe that depression is a medical condition, but Greenberg almost persuades that the drugs to 'cure' it are based on circular reasoning: the tests to measure outcomes were devised to measure changes in mood, and new drugs are approved when the tests say they do so. But the tests were devised to get drugs approved. So much for science.
That said, if authors or publishers were liable for the 'advice' they contained, the Bible, the Koran, and similar documents would be unpublishable because of the liability outcomes.
[I hasten to add that I do believe in science, not faith or hope when it comes to medical conditions]
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | May 15, 2007 3:57:31 PM
The proposed experiment would never be approved. It's unethical and not allowed to withhold validated treatment from sick people. As for The Secret, anyone seeking an antidote from its sort of nonsense might want to read Barbara Eirhenreich's Bait and Switch. She tells of people who've been downsized out of their jobs, and can't get re-employed at comparable wages. They go to "career counseling" sessions at which they're endlessly told that they're to blame for their predicament (the counselors blithely ignore the structural changes in the economy). This struck me as a good way to turn an adjustment disorder (unhappiness at being unemployed) into a full-blown clinical depression. Eirhenreich is quite scathing in response. As progressives, we should be seriously worried about this stuff. The more people believe that they (and others) have total control over, and responsibility for, their fates, the less they'll support any kind of collective action to address real social problems.
Posted by: beckya57 | May 15, 2007 4:23:10 PM
So many ways to blame the victim, and yes, it is fads/"philosophies" like these that keep Bushian ilk in power; if you are all wrapped up in visualizing peace and health, well, you don't have to leave your couch and go out and fight for said peace or health.
None of this is new; like the DaVinci Code, this is warmed-over 19th-century mystical claptrap. The only reason they flourish is that what causes depression or happiness is still largely mysterious. We don't really understand how our brains work, not because of quantum physics, but because brain science is in its infancy. And may be for a very long time. Religion does make some people happy. Others it drives to flying planes into buildings. We don't completely understand why either way.
Posted by: emjaybee | May 15, 2007 4:43:36 PM
I think Adler knows his experiment would be unethical. He was just using it to make a point.
What's offensive about The Secret isn't the mere suggestion that positive thoughts can be benficial. Instead, it's the Chopra-esque pseudo-scientific blather (quantum physics!?), it's packaging (it's *the* secret!), and its violation of the notion of disprovability. If the book doesn't work for you, it's your failing, not the book's.
Posted by: Gorgle Erf | May 15, 2007 4:46:35 PM
Fake medicine stuff always pisses me the hell off. I think I got into a fight with a professor at college who was peddling acupuncture.
And people, there are plenty of ways to have perfectly ethical experiments about the power of positive thinking over disease. You could try it for benign tumors, or against influenza or the common cold (I presume that these idiots don't claim that magical disease-curing ONLY works on breast cancer, right?). Give one group sugar pills, and the other lectures on curing yourself psychically, and see which group recovers faster (hint: neither).
A somewhat more problematic issue for debunking this kind of stuff is blinds: you can't really effectively set up a double-blind test of these things, because the magical crap can't be given blind -- both the patients and the people administering the "therapy" will be pretty clear what's going on. But that's not insurmountable. I mean, I presume that surgical techniques can't be tested double-blind, either.
Homeopathy can, though! So, yay.
Anyhow, the reason that these charlatans don't put their therapies up for scientific study isn't that you can't ethically test it, and it's not that you can't validly test it, either. It's that they're pretty clear what the results of the test would be.
Posted by: Michael B Sullivan | May 15, 2007 5:08:58 PM
JoeF, I thought the same thing about this sounding an awful lot like "what the bleep..." -- which I too thought was a steaming pile of crap. Whether it was a steaming pile of horseshit or bullshit I couldn't quite nail down though... it seemed to keep switching from one to the other, defying any attempt at certainty.
Posted by: Glenn | May 15, 2007 5:21:48 PM
It's a little surprising to see some associating this stuff with Bush and conservatism. There's not much correlation. The New Agey side of this is huge and has a decidedly liberal base.
Last I heard, acupuncture had been shown to be effective in some ways, not others.
Posted by: Sanpete | May 15, 2007 5:50:28 PM
right, sanpete, you just keep thinking positive thoughts about bush and he will turn into a good president. and iraq will turn into a glorious victory.
plus that giant wart on your forehead will shrink, too.
just channel that positive, green lantern energy!
Posted by: fab | May 15, 2007 6:39:57 PM
don't put green lattern into this.
Posted by: akaison | May 15, 2007 6:53:56 PM
Fab, is there some connection to what I said, or is this just random fun?
Posted by: Sanpete | May 15, 2007 7:01:29 PM
Sanpete,
Yeah The Secret is the secular/liberal version of feel good snake oil. There is plenty of it on the Conservative side as well, go check out the best sellers at Christian book stores. It is basically the same self help con game, just a few Bible verses thrown in.
Posted by: Eric | May 15, 2007 7:11:54 PM
Very true, Eric. I see I didn't express my thought well: meant that this kind of thing isn't particular to conservatives. There's plenty of it across the board. I think there's as much here in the conservative parts of Utah as in the liberal parts of California. I don't object to some milder forms, but like others here see some harm in the extreme versions.
Posted by: Sanpete | May 15, 2007 7:28:27 PM
