Remember Dr. Oz? Remember when he was dragged in front of Congress for selling a “magic weight loss cure for every body type”—his green tea “miracle” pills that “burn fat fast”?
If confirmed, he will be Trump’s head of Medicare and Medicaid. In that administration he would (again, if confirmed) be joined, fittingly, by a surgeon general, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, who sells proprietary supplements to “boost and strengthen your immune system,” and wrote Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine, which mixes biography with tales about the healing power of faith.
How is it that people continue to fall for the same old magic and miracles schtick (always with supplement sales in the background)? And how do those making the promises consistently escape accountability?
To understand why, join me on my visit to a popular charlatan in Florida, whose false promises led to the death of an 11-yr-old Canadian girl named Makayla Sault.
Brian Clement runs the Hippocrates Health Institute, a retreat where sick people go to cure themselves with fresh wheatgrass shots, “cold laser therapy,” vitamin C injections, and a raw vegan diet. Needless to say, these failed to cure Makayla’s treatable leukemia. But, as I learned five years ago, that failure had absolutely no effect on the faith of Clement’s current clientele—and, perhaps more surprising, it had no effect on the faith of Makayla’s parents, who vehemently defended Clement after their daughter’s death.
Why? Why didn’t they feel betrayed? After all, when mainstream physicians make big false promises or engage in medical malpractice, people get angry. They sue. Surely Maykala Sault’s parents would feel the same way, right?
The answer is simple: Mainstream experts and institutions demand our trust. They tell us they are reliable; that they are the default approach. When they fail us, we naturally feel betrayed.
But when it comes to faith healers and con artists we give our trust. It isn’t the default. It’s a choice. Which means that admitting they betrayed us is a tacit admission we betrayed ourselves.
This is a version of what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy.” When you’ve invested money—in a movie ticket, for example—the sunk cost of the investment causes you to make irrational decisions, like watching the movie all the way through, hoping it will improve, even when it’s clearly terrible. You waste even more of your time, along with the money you spent.
In the case of faith healers and con artists, the sunk cost isn’t financial. It’s your dignity, your sense of self, your worldview. Unscrupulous healers know this, and they take advantage of it.
First, they victimize desperate, suffering people—typically those who already have good reason to be suspicious of the status quo. Makayla Sault and her family are First Nations Indigenous Canadians, a group that has suffered unimaginable atrocities at the hands of the Canadian government. Their children were taken away by the state, their lifeways mocked as ignorant savagery.
And then Clement comes along and says he has the real cure to their daughter’s illness. There’s no need for the grueling chemotherapy; no need to submit to the authority of sneering government officials and their physician lackeys. Instead, they can come to the Hippocrates Institute, which occasionally sponsors Indigenous healing workshops. It’s their choice.
So they raised $18,000 from friends and family and poured it directly into Clement’s pockets.
The sunk cost fallacy explains why the Sault’s will never turn against Clement. But what about all the other people who continue to believe in Clement’s nonsense? Why doesn’t the story of Makayla Sault make them doubt the Hippocrates Health Institute?
Consider a related question that comes up in traditional Christian faith healing: If God has promised people physical health and healing, then why do faith healers and prayer so often fail to secure it?
It’s a fraught theological issue, but for fraudulent faith healers the answer is poisonously simple, and insulates completely from accountability. Here’s a characteristic response from the enormously influential Pentecostal missionary and healer John G. Lake:
I want to tell you that when Christians are not healed, as a rule, you get digging around and get the Holy Ghost to help you; and when they have vomited out all the stuff, they will get the healing. […] There is something that gets into your spirit or into your body that is obstructing the free flow of the Spirit of God.
If you aren’t healed, the fault is in you: Your faith is too weak, your body too rotten with sin.
The same trope recurs in every cultural iteration of this grift, like an iron law of successful charlatanry. Ancient Daoist healing texts warn readers not to share the secret teachings with skeptics, or the teachings will fail.
People accept this answer because it gives them hope. When faith healers fail and prayers go unanswered, the most comforting explanation is a deficiency in those who sought to be healed. If the failure was their fault, then your faith and purity can still guarantee success.
In the case of Makayla Sault’s parents—or anyone who’s failed by the faith healer—they avoided blaming themselves by shifting the problem to mainstream medicine. The evil establishment pumped their daughter so full of its poisons that even the strongest alternative approach couldn’t help her. Had they only believed more in Clement, from the beginning, had they only turned away from mainstream physicians at the start, she would be alive, saved by wheatgrass and vegan smoothies. This approach makes sense of the failure, while protecting their existential investment in Clement.
I’ve seen so many people like Clement, and so many victims like the Saults, that you’d think I’d be used to it by now. But it still horrifies and shocks me every time, watching the victims protect the predators, because failing to do so would only make their suffering worse.
But there’s a lesson to be learned. We must recognize that holding con artists accountable is difficult. Unlike the promises of faith healers, we must recognize there are no magical, miraculous, easy solutions. Fact checking and critical thinking can’t inoculate us against the temptation of false hope.
Instead, we need to make sure that mainstream institutions don’t create the conditions in which con artists thrive. Slowly but surely we must change the relationship between experts and laypeople. We need more transparency, more accountability, and less sneering. And all of these initiatives must come from within the institutions. Otherwise, the con artists will come along and promise to do it for us.
Just ask Dr. Oz.
