I have enjoyed reading Offit's books. They are very enjoyable and easy to read. I have to admit I've given into some of the quackery in this book, but overall it shows how horrible (and deadly) alternative "medicine" can be. ( )

Nothing really new. I already knew, from news stories and other books, that "alternative medicine" was fake. The tone is annoying, know-it-all whom you must believe unquestionably. It was also a bit repetitive and could have used footnotes instead of endnotes. ( )

This is a fairly brief survey of alt-med/pseudoscientific quackery. It covers a bunch of the Greatest Hits of Woo: Suzanne Somers, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Oz, cancer quackery (Burzynski, laetrile), the lack of regulation of the supplement industry, autism, and the placebo effect.

The only real flaw of the book is that it could easily have been twice as long, if not longer. In only 250 pages, Dr. Offit only gets to touch on a lot of the issues surrounding alternative medicine. If you've been a regular reader of blogs such as Respectful Insolence, a great deal of the material will be familiar to you. (I read the bibliography and went "know him, woo, woo, read that, read that, woo, woo, woo...." - Let no one accuse Dr. Offit of not having read the material he criticizes.)

I have two specific criticisms of the book: First, he attributes Steve Jobs' death to his decision to delay traditional cancer treatment. Other physicians have taken issue with this interpretation. Second, his chapter on harnessing the placebo effect is a bit of a mishmash and doesn't take the time to explore how this can be done ethically and the implications of encouraging quackery, particularly homeopathy.

If you're just dipping your toes into learning about alternative medicine and quackery, this is a good intro. Also read Trick or Treatment (Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh) which goes into greater depth on several topics, with a more rigorous focus. ( )

Listened to audiobook version ( )

This book was very well done. In Do You Believe in Magic Paul A. Offit describes various alternative therapies and how they managed to become popular in more prosperous countries. With celebrity advocates and other nutcases supporting their causes, supplements alone are a $34 Billion industry as of the writing of the book. What makes it worse is that lobbyists have reduced the power of the FDA to intervene in this industry, allowing charlatans and other hucksters into a lucrative position.

For instance, there are situations where people can actually die from taking too many multivitamins. How can I have not heard of this before? Are supplements really that dangerous? I don't know, and I don't have the time to go and study massive treatises on medicine. We trust people because of stupid reasons. It might be because they can throw a ball in a manner that is pleasing to a large audience, perhaps they can run really well, maybe they acted in the hit 1980s television series Three's Company. Whatever the situation may be, it is not reasonable to go and support something that has no evidence to substantiate it.

Now there are several ways that alternative therapies do work. This is primarily through the placebo response for pain relief and other stuff. In some cases, a person is capable of eliciting their immune responses to either fight off or remove a disease completely. However, there is a large caveat in that. When the disease is an aggressive but treatable cancer, the result can be quite tragic.

There are other cases like in the instance of Autism Spectrum Disorder. I understand that people are crushed when they find that their child has it, but to blame it on vaccines is unconscionable. Vaccines are a topic that can cover an entire book, but when people refuse them for spurious reasons, it becomes dangerous to the community and mankind as a whole. Take Smallpox for instance. Smallpox was eliminated from the face of the Earth. It is effectively extinct. It was a huge step for mankind. I never even got a Smallpox inoculation since I was born after 1977. The idea that people would prefer Measles, Mumps, or Rubella to getting a tiny poke in the arm sickens me.

Anyway, the book was fantastic, and I really wish there was something one could do about all this, but as they say; Ignorance is Bliss. ( )