Way Beyond Ignorance

In the Medical Sunday section of the Portsmouth Herald, was an article about Joseph Carringer who runs an enterprise called "Ancient Voices Harmonic Therapy" in Portsmouth, NH. 

Seems Mr. Carringer, a refugee from "the eco-fashions industry" and a former manager of a bar, has found a new calling. Having geared up his street cred by attending a "holistic workshop in Denver" and now he administers "sound therapy" using a didgeridoo, which, he says produces ultrasonic frequencies "similar to the frequencies used by medical practitioners for a wide range of muscular skeletal therapies."  He adds, "A second level is clearing of emotional and energetic stagnation...For instance if someone has a deficiency in their third chakra, I will do specific work in the key of E." The reporter, Suzanne Laurent, tells us, rather breathlessly, "There are seven charkas, or energy centers, in the body." 

And furthermore:  "The unique sound of the didgeridoo lets the person achieve deep meditative brainwave states."  Mr. Carringer treats arthritis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, stress and insomnia, "to name a few conditions." 

Mr. Carringer is in good company on the seacoast: Right across the Piscataqua River, in Kittery, Maine is a chiropractor who does thyroid hormone tests no endocrinologist can even understand. His patients pay him $700 for salivary cortisol tests and other exotic laboratory investigations, which somehow always seem to indicate an imbalance in the adrenal glands, or, alternative, the thyroid gland. Seven thousand dollars later, the patients almost always feel lighter, if not better.

What is it about Americans who seek out these shamans?  What is the psychology? The Phantom asks not about the chiropractor or about Mr. Carringer--their motivations are pretty obvious. But what of those "patients" who are displayed in color photographs on the pages of the Herald, lying on their backs on the floor, while Mr. Carringer blows his didgeridoo at them?

This is not Merin County, California, after all. This is New Hampshire and Maine!

Cyra McFadden wrote a wonder novel called The Serial in the 1970's, when alternative medicine and whacked out Californians with more money than brains were doing scream therapy and exploring their unreleased cosmic energy, usually with the help of Mary Jane and other reliable helpers.

Right here in Portsmouth, we have "naturopaths" and Holistic medicine practices. 

These people are right out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn, the snake oil salesmen, the hucksters and charlatans of those pre scientific times, when American doctors were men who had bought diplomas from diploma mills, before the advent of the university medical school, before Johns Hopkins medical school, when "doctors" spurned the idea of germ theory and probed wounds with fingers used at autopsies.

But what draws modern, 21st century Americans, who have access to the internet, to the man with the long horn or the naturopath? It's not that they are inexpensive. Quite the contrary. Do these customers not understand they are being taken? Or do they understand, but something is driving them to be taken?

What drives the editors of an otherwise respectable newspaper to provide the didgeridoo man with a free stage to hawk his goods is another question.

This is not about simple ignorance, which is an empty vessel awaiting filling with sound thinking and information. This is about a vessel possessed by an owner who empties out whatever water or broth was there and fills it instead with fetid milk gone very bad.

Why would you want to take a deep drink of that?