Do You Believe in Magic? (book)

Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine

Hardcover edition, 2013
Author	Paul Offit
Language	English
Subject	Alternative medicine
Genre	Nonfiction
Published	2013 20 June 2013 (UK)
Publisher	HarperCollins (U.S.) Fourth Estate (UK)
Pages	255
ISBN	0062222961

Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, also called Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine in the United Kingdom, is a 2013 book about alternative medicine by Paul Offit, an American expert of infectious diseases and vaccines. It was published in the United States by HarperCollins (255 pages) and in the UK by Fourth Estate (20 June 2013, 336 pages).^[1]

Content

The book criticizes alternative medical treatments as ineffective, particularly vitamins and dietary supplements. Among the supplements of which Offit is critical in the book is the use of Vitamin C to treat the common cold,^[2] which also leads him to criticize Linus Pauling for promoting vitamin C for this purpose.^[2] In the book, Offit also attributes much of alternative medicine's effectiveness to the placebo effect, which is the subject of one of the book's chapters.^[3] He also notes that alternative medical treatments can have serious side effects, such as paralysis resulting from chiropractic and viral infections caused by acupuncture.^[4] Among the individual doctors Offit criticizes in the book are Joseph Mercola and Rashid Buttar,^[5] as well as Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra.^[6] Offit has said that he wrote the book as a result of an experience in which he had surgery on his left knee, and his doctor recommended that Offit take glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate. Offit then looked for scientific studies on the efficacy of these supplements and found some that indicated they were no more effective than placebo.^[7]

Reception

Do You Believe in Magic? was reviewed in the Boston Globe by Suzanne Koven^[1] and by Gail Ross in Publishers Weekly. Ross concluded that the book was "a bravely unsentimental and dutifully researched guide for consumers to distinguish between quacks and a cure."^[8] Another review appeared in The New Republic, where Jerome Groopman wrote that Offit "writes in a lucid and flowing style, and grounds a wealth of information within forceful and vivid narratives."^[9] Victoria Maizes, the director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, criticized the book's claim that St. John's wort is not an effective treatment for depression, citing a 2008 review that found that it was more effective than placebo. Offit responded in an interview with NPR that the point he was trying to make in the book was only that St. John's wort was not effective for severe depression, and that there have been "some studies of value" with respect to treating moderate depression.^[10]

References