“For the past year, more than 140 New York City firefighters, some ailing from their work in the ruins of the World Trade Center, have walked into a seventh-floor medical clinic just two blocks from the former disaster site. Once inside, some have abandoned the medical care and emotional counseling provided to them by their own department’s doctors, and all have taken up a treatment regimen devised by L*. R*o*n H*u*b*b*a*r*d, the late science fiction writer and founder of the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y.

The firefighters take saunas, engage in physical workouts and swallow pills— all of which together constitute what for years has been known, amid considerable dispute*, as Mr. H*u*b*b*a*r*d’s detoxification program, one meant to wash the body of poisons or toxins. The firefighters are not charged for their trips to the clinic, called Downtown Medical.”—NY Times

*There is not really ‘considerable dispute’ about the merits of H*u*b*b*a*r*d’s program. The consensus is that it is quackery, plain and simple. If it works, it works as faith healing does, and at considerable expense to the patient in the sense that they must give up conventional medical treatments such as antidepressants or asthma inhalers. The paradigm of “sweating out toxins”, or otherwise purging them, has often been used in alternative healing regimens, with no believable basis. I watched a friend of mine, a medical student with two young children and what would have been a curable cancer if treated with a conventional oncological approach, die slowly and horribly because he would accept no treatment other than coffee enemas to purify himself and remove the toxins causing the tumor growth. Sheesh, a medical student! That wasn’t a S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y treatment but it might just as well have been. [thanks. abby]