QUACK

by Jerry Oltion

When you ask a question, be sure you want to know the answer. Stage lighting always made Dustin sweat. At least that’s what he blamed for the sudden burst of perspiration whenever he found himself on a sound stage, facing yet another fraud practitioner of “alternative medicine.”

* * * *

It couldn’t be the competition. These guys were idiots. They could barely tie their shoes, much less debate medicine on national television. Take tonight’s offering, for example: a homeopath. Doctor—though how he had acquired a medical degree Dustin could hardly imagine—Nathan LeTourneau, MD, CCH, DHPh. He and other practitioners of his particular brand of quackery claimed that medicine could be diluted millions of times—diluted so much, in fact, that not a single molecule of the original remained in the final concoction. Yet they claimed that their oil-less snake oils were as beneficial as the real thing, that somehow they were more beneficial after dilution, though the final result was 99.999999 and as many nines as you cared to add percent distilled water. Total nonsense.

LeTourneau seemed a pleasant enough man. He had shaken Dustin’s hand and said, “I’m very happy to meet you,” when he arrived at the studio, and he engaged the technicians in small talk as they snaked his microphone up through his shirt and clipped it to his lapel. He said, “Check, check . . . check please,” for the sound check, then added, “Garcon, l’addition s’il vous plait” and smiled and said, “It’s nothing, a little joke,” when the technicians looked at him in puzzlement. He had no facial tics or other obvious nervous quirks that so many proponents of alternative medicine displayed when faced with the scrutiny of scientific inquiry. It was almost a shame that Dustin would have to tear him apart in public.

“It’s interesting to see the part of the studio that the cameras don’t show you, isn’t it?” he said to Dustin.

“Gives you a new perspective on the ‘glamour’ of show business,” Dustin admitted.

They were seated at an angle to one another on either side of the empty chair that Shelly Nguyen, the show’s host, would sit in during their debate. The chairs were plushly upholstered, their wood trim stained a deep brown. The glass coffee table in front of them gleamed, not a speck of dust on it. The floor was carpeted in an understated tan twill that complemented the upholstery and the woodwork, and the backdrop behind them was a translucent panel upon which the evening view of the city from some distant hilltop was being projected from behind. The whole set was bathed in brilliant white light from eight or ten spotlights, four of which were bouncing off big white umbrella-shaped diffusers to cut down on shadows. Yet just to the side, outside the range of the cameras, stood a battered metal cart with an equally battered television on it, facing them so the people on stage could see how they looked on screen. Wires snaked from that to the control board, a four-foot-wide panel of switches and sliders on a 2 x 4 frame that looked more like a garage workbench than a high-tech information center. A nest of wiring below the bench served as a foot rest for the operator.

The floor was concrete with a few throw rugs scattered here and there to deaden echoes. Plywood panels braced with more 2 x 4’s stood at angles around the stage, also hung with carpet.

Noting Dustin’s gaze, LeTourneau said, “I expected Sonex. The pointy, egg-cartony foam stuff.”

Dustin snorted. “Sonex is expensive.”

“Ah.” LeTourneau seemed disappointed by that revelation.

It had surprised Dustin, too, when he’d done his first talk show. He’d imagined riches showering down upon every aspect of television production, but he’d soon learned that the money went to the owners and the stars. The studios got enough to function, nothing more. And people like him, the occasional guests, got nothing at all, save the satisfaction of speaking out for true science in the face of vast public ignorance.

Shelly swept into the studio, perfection in motion. Her black hair was cut in layers that looked casually windblown, but Dustin knew each lock had been carefully placed. Her dark brown pants were tight enough to show off the curve of her legs, her lavender blouse was cut low to show more curves, with the tiny black microphone nestled just off center like a beauty mark against the pale white mound of her left breast.

“Two minutes, gentlemen,” she said. She sat and plugged her microphone wire into the jack dangling over the side of her chair, then tucked the wire out of sight behind her. “Everyone comfortable?”

“Fine,” Dustin said.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” said LeTourneau.

“Remember, look at each other or at me, not at the cameras,” she said.

Dustin glanced outward at the two cameras, ridiculously tiny things the size of personal camcorders atop wheeled pedestals big enough to hold research-grade telescopes, with wide motorcycle-style handlebars sticking outward so the operators could swivel the cameras smoothly as they panned this way and that.

He looked back to LeTourneau, sweating under the lights.

“Good luck, doctor,” he said.

The sound tech stood beside the monitor on the cart and said, “Ready in fifteen. Ten. Five.” Then he switched to hand signals and silently waved four fingers, three, two, one, and a closed fist.

“Hello, and welcome to The Second Opinion,” Shelly said. “I’m Shelly Nguyen, and with me tonight are Doctors Dustin Wegner of the Centers for Disease Control and Doctor Nathan LeTourneau of the Institute for Holistic Naturopathy.” She nodded at each in turn, then looked directly at the camera on the left. The host, apparently, could get away with that. “Let’s get right to it. Dr. Wegner believes in what we’ve come to call conventional medicine. Dr. LeTourneau believes in what we often call alternative medicine. His specialty is homeopathy, the treatment of disease with medicines that are so incredibly diluted that scientists would be hard pressed to tell them apart from distilled water. Dr. LeTourneau, would you care to elaborate a little on how homeopathy works?”

LeTourneau laughed. “I wish I could, but any explanation I could give would be nonsense. The simple fact of the matter is that neither I, nor anyone practicing homeopathy, knows how it works. Anyone who says they do is a fraud.”

Dustin felt his pulse quicken. “Hey, you’re stealing my lines,” he said. He laughed for the camera, but he wasn’t laughing inside. What was this guy up to?

“My apologies, doctor,” said LeTourneau. “Believe me, there is much more to say in the same vein, and I would not presume to debate you on the science, or lack thereof, in a field of medicine that relies almost entirely upon anecdotal evidence. So I would like to skip over all that, concede that the science is sorely lacking, and move on to a more interesting and perhaps more fruitful topic of discussion.”

“What topic might that be?” asked Shelly, just a touch of frost in her voice. She didn’t like having her show hijacked.

“The fact that homeopathy does work.”

Dustin smiled. “I can debate that.”

“I’m sure you can,” replied LeTourneau. “So I will concede to all your arguments in advance. It certainly doesn’t work in a vast number of cases. Its efficacy is perhaps only a tiny bit better than the placebo effect. As a scientific method of medical treatment, it is at best a cruel joke. It—”

Dustin leaned forward. “Are you sure you even need me here?”

LeTourneau nodded vigorously. “I need you desperately, Doctor. I need you to help me understand why it does work when it does, and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t work because it’s not science,” Dustin said. He leaned back in his chair, once again on familiar ground, but before he could launch into his canned spiel on what science was, Shelly interrupted.

“That sounds like a challenge,” she said. “Dr. LeTourneau, are you seriously asking Dr. Wegner to collaborate with you on a scientific study of homeopathic medicine?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what homeopathy—indeed, all of the so-called ‘alternative’ methods, need. We know so li—”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Dustin said. “I’m not going to get drawn into some kooky attempt to legitimize fringe medicine by waving the chicken entrails of science over it.”

That type of statement usually tipped a true believer over the edge, provoking a righteous rant that Dustin could refute point-by-point for the rest of the hour, but LeTourneau merely nodded as if Dustin had agreed with him and said, “Without someone of your stature taking an active role in the study, chicken entrails are all it will ever be. If I, as a practitioner of this miserably misunderstood art, performed the most perfect double-blind study in the history of medicine, my results would still be suspect. But if you join me in designing the experiments, and in collecting the data, and in interpreting the data we collect, perhaps we can truly understand what is—or is not—actually happening.”

Dustin sat back in his chair, stunned by the sudden reversal of roles. How had this . . . this charlatan . . . outflanked him?

Shelly leaped on the freshly wounded with the instincts of a broadcast journalist. “That’s an incredible offer,” she said. “How about it, Dr. Wegner? Are you game to put your money where your mouth is, as the saying goes?”

Thank you, Jesus, Dustin thought. Aloud, he said, “Speaking of money, how do you propose to fund this study of yours? Real science takes money.”

LeTourneau nodded. “Indeed it does, which is why studies of homeopathy and other naturopathic remedies have been so poorly executed, if you will pardon the pun. And which is why I propose that the producers of this very program, The Second Opinion, fund our joint venture. You can make medical history, Ms. Nguyen. You can either prove or disprove the value of an entire branch of alternative medicine once and for all.”

Shelly turned white. “You want us to pay for the study?”

Dustin couldn’t help himself. He said, “That sounds like a challenge. Are you game to put your money where your mouth is? As the saying goes?”

Shelly looked at him as if he’d just suggested she take her clothes off on camera. Then she burst out laughing. “Do you have any idea how much money this show makes? Or doesn’t make, I should say.”

“It takes in two point three million dollars in advertising revenue per installment,” LeTourneau said. “I took the liberty of looking it up. And your salary is seventy-six thousand per episode, somewhat over a thousand dollars a minute. The study I propose should—”

“Cut!” Shelly shouted. She stood up from her chair. Her microphone cord snagged on the chair’s arm and tugged her blouse downward, momentarily exposing a great deal more of her breast than she had intended. “Cut the feed. Go to commercial.”

The technician at the control board slapped switches and turned to face Shelly. “I cut it at ‘minute.’ Sorry; we’ve been on short delay since the space station snafu.”

She scowled at him, then at LeTourneau. “Who the hell do you think you are, giving out my salary on the air?”

“I’m a medical practitioner who needs your help. And yours,” he added, nodding toward Dustin.

“You’ve got a damned strange way of asking for it,” said Dustin.

LeTourneau shrugged. “Would either of you have helped me any other way?”

“You’re not getting any help, buster, except out the door. Sammy, show this kook to his car.”

One of the camera operators stepped forward, but the tech at the control bench said, “Uh, Shel? Phones are lighting up. We’ve got all eight lines stacked. I don’t think you want to come back to an empty set and take these phone calls for forty more minutes.”

Shelly considered that. “You’re right, I don’t.” She unplugged her microphone and stepped down off the set, but the tech said, “Ninety seconds,” and she paused, thinking. Dustin did the math in his head: two point three mil in advertising revenue, call it two-thirds of that that wouldn’t run if the show went dark for the rest of the hour; she was looking at a potential loss of over a million and a half dollars if she threw a tantrum. Even at seventy-six thou per episode, she’d be working off that debt for the rest of the year.

“Use the phone callers,” LeTourneau said. “Take the challenge to them.”

* * * *

Two and a half minutes later, after an additional minute of public service announcements while Shelly and the show’s producer argued over the phone, they were back on the air.

“Live in fifteen, ten, five,” and the silent countdown.

Shelly was seated in her chair, once again perfect. A big red prop phone rested on the glass table in front of her.

“Welcome back to round two of The Second Opinion,” she said. “For those of you who might have just joined us, this is Dr. Dustin Wegner on my right and Dr. Nathan LeTourneau on my left. Dr. LeTourneau has laid down an interesting challenge, to say the least: He has challenged Dr. Wegner to assist him in a scientific study of homeopathic medicine, to be conducted under the rigorous standards of the Centers for Disease Control—and funded by The Second Opinion. While I’m not exactly happy with his announcing my salary over the air, I have to admit he’s made his point: I can afford to put my money where my mouth is. So I hereby agree to donate my earnings from today’s entire program to Dr. LeTourneau’s project.”

She grinned and looked directly into the camera again. “But only if you do the same. So now I issue the challenge to each and every one of our listeners: Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? How about it? There are hundreds of you on the phone right now, calling in to tell me we should fund this study. Dr. Wegner has agreed to do it if the funding is adequate to do the job right. So it’s up to you. Are you willing to put a day’s wages into science to clear up one of the biggest mysteries in medical history?”

When, exactly had Dustin agreed to this cockamamie scheme? He didn’t recall saying he would, but then he supposed his challenge to Shelly could easily count as such. And to be honest, he was starting to like the idea of proving homeopathy wrong once and for all. If Shelly could swing the bucks, he’d happily run the double-blind tests.

Shelly picked up the phone. “Hello, you’re on the air,” she said. “Are you willing to support our effort to answer this question once and for all? We’re asking one day’s salary from every caller. One day for science. Are you with us?”

There was a long silence. Dustin wondered if the caller had hung up, or if the phone patch to the studio monitor had been switched off, but then the caller’s hesitant voice said, “Well, I don’t make much at McDonald’s, but, sure, I guess I could do that.”

* * * *

They took two million dollars in pledges by the end of the show. Money up front, largely paid by credit card. When the technician waved his four-three-two-one and zero-fingered hand at them, Shelly leaned over and kissed LeTourneau full on the lips.

“You have no idea how much you just helped this network,” she told him. “Viewership will double when news of this gets out.” Then, to Dustin, she said, “I want you to squash homeopathy like a bug. You’re back on in three months with your report.”

“Three months isn’t enough time to investigate a stubbed toe,” Dustin said.

“It should be enough time to put the final nail in the homeopathy coffin,” she replied.

“Not scientifically,” said LeTourneau. “We’re talking more like a year to determine how it works. Maybe two. If it can be done at all.”

Shelly unplugged her microphone and stood up. “Six months, then. And a sixty-second progress report once a week suitable for airing on the show. Otherwise the audience will forget who you are.”

Dustin nodded. He could do that. Compared to some grant conditions he had worked under, this was a free lunch.

He walked with LeTourneau to the parking lot. “No offense, he said, “but I feel like I’ve just been conned into voting Republican. How the hell did you do that?”

LeTourneau grinned. “Voodoo puppetry. I have a little doll of you on strings in my office.”

“Yeah, right.” But as he drove home, he had to wonder.

* * * *

They met in that office three days later. If there was a voodoo doll, it was nowhere in evidence. In fact, the entire clinic in which LeTourneau worked looked like any legitimate outpatient facility might: two receptionists out front, nurses and PAs ushering patients in and out and taking vital signs, other doctors bustling from appointment to appointment. As he watched LeTourneau in action, though, Dustin noticed one significant difference between him and his mainstream counterparts: He took more time to talk with his patients about the treatments they were receiving.

“You’ve got tension in your muscles,” he told one woman who complained of jaw pain after a dental visit over a month ago. “So I’m going to make you an infusion of a substance called Nux Vomica, which is a powerful muscle constrictor. At full strength it can make muscles tighten so hard and so quickly that it can break bones. But I’m going to dilute it by a factor of millions. In fact, by the time I’m done there won’t be any of the Nux left in the solution at all. But the water I dilute it with will retain the memory of the compound’s ability, and when I inject it into your jaw muscles, it will seek out whatever is making your jaw muscles clench and it will dilute that agent as well.”

Dustin snorted. LeTourneau shot him a pained look, and Dustin said, “Sorry. Must be my allergies.”

“I could help you with that,” LeTourneau said. He turned back to his patient. “The important thing to remember is that the medicine I’ll be giving you will relax your jaw muscles, and you’ll feel better by morning.”

He’s counting on the placebo effect, Dustin thought. If a patient with a subjective ailment believed that they were being treated, their symptoms often disappeared. He said as much to LeTourneau when they were alone. He expected LeTourneau to deny it, but the homeopath simply nodded and said, “That’s the only logical explanation for what’s happening. What I want to know is whether that’s the only actual explanation, and if so, how to make it more reliable. Because this only works about seventy percent of the time.”

“How often?”

“Seventy percent.”

“You mean 20 percent over random chance, not to 70 percent of your patients.”

“No, I mean 70 percent of my patients get better. Random chance would give me something like a 5 or 10 percent success rate.”

“I can’t believe you have that kind of success.”

LeTourneau smiled. “I would be as skeptical as you if I hadn’t seen it demonstrated over and over again. So let’s design a study that will convince you, or reveal me as a self-deluded quack.”

Designing a double-blind study—a study in which neither the experimenter nor the subjects knew whether they were in the control group—was a simple process. Implementing it was considerably tougher. Human ailments didn’t come in standardized units, nor were there an infinite supply of similar complaints to compare against one another. Dustin finally decided on a simple qualitative analysis of pain: Patients either felt that they’d been relieved of their pain or they didn’t. Half the participants in the study would get real homeopathic remedies, while half would get normal saline solution that had been nowhere near Dr. LeTourneau or any of his colleagues until LeTourneau gave it to them. Half of each group would be told that the remedies were genuine, and half would be told that they were getting saline. They would be asked several other questions to mask the ones Dustin and LeTourneau were most interested in, so they would be less likely to give the answers they thought the doctors wanted to hear.

Dustin expected the results to be in perfect harmony with established placebo trials, in which about thirty percent of the patients perceived an improvement in their symptoms even when not given any real medication, but right from the start he was proven wrong. Wildly wrong. If anything, Dr. LeTourneau’s estimate of a 70 percent success rate was low. The number was closer to seventy-seven, just over three-quarters of the time. Intensity of pain didn’t correlate with the success rate, either: The most intractable conditions responded as well as the simplest.

They wouldn’t open the records and learn which patients had received what until after the data were all collected. But just the overall success rate was enough to astound both doctors.

“Something’s not right here,” Dustin said when the data became irrefutable.

“My thought exactly,” said LeTourneau. “It should be more like 90 percent if there’s something real going on. Or 30, like normal placebo studies, if there’s not.”

“Three-quarters. That’s significant. What are we doing three-quarters of the time?”

They sifted through the data yet again, but until they opened up the records and discovered who received what, and who had been told what, they were stuck scratching their heads.

So they shot a sixty-second video of themselves scratching their heads and gave it to Shelly to air at the tail end of her program. Ratings went up by 30 percent.

The more Dustin watched the homeopath in action, the less he understood. With some of his concoctions, LeTourneau would rap the flask against the table during one or another of the intermediate dilution steps, explaining that the process was called “succussion.” Supposedly the water would remember its infinitely diluted solute better that way.

“This makes no sense, you know,” Dustin said. “Less than no sense.”

“I know,” LeTourneau said. “But I also know that I have more positive results when I do this than when I don’t. Only with some preparations, however.”

“You need another double-blind test to see if that’s really true.”

“Of course. Once this study is done, I’d love to try it. Of course I’d have to try it for every preparation I make, and vary the procedure at each stage of the dilution. The combinations are almost infinite.” He held a yellowish tincture up to the light, then tapped it on the table half a dozen more times. “Which explains why this field is basically a hand-me-down series of processes that have worked for other people at some time in the past. It’s so difficult to isolate all the variables, most practitioners just go with what’s been shown to work.”

“Provided you trust the source,” Dustin said.

“There’s always that factor to consider,” LeTourneau said. “Some of us, I’m sure, are quacks. An additional complication.”

A month ago, Dustin would have said something snide. Now he just nodded and said, “You’re not alone there. We have them in my field too. They’re just easier to expose.”

He wondered how many people were attempting to do just that to him. Word was spreading that he had gone off the deep end. Colleagues were sending him e-mails with “WTF?” in the subject line. Others were calling him a sellout and a fraud. Treating him, in fact, pretty much like he had treated practitioners of alternative medicine until now.

He couldn’t ignore the data, though. The results spoke for themselves. Dr. LeTourneau—and he used that term now without wincing —was clearly doing better than chance or mere placebo effect. The only thing now was to figure out exactly how what he was doing worked. Once they did that, and could reproduce it reliably, Dustin could have the last laugh.

They had to run the trial for six months to gather enough data to be meaningful. Dustin and LeTourneau both waited with all the patience of a boiling teakettle, and their weekly reports to The Second Opinion became more and more frenetic as they speculated wildly about what might be going on. Viewership rose week by week until Shelly decided they should unseal their data live on the air.

“Er . . . think again,” Dustin told her. “It’ll take days to crunch the numbers, and weeks to understand what they mean, if there are any meaningful correlations at all.”

“I’ll give you an hour,” she said. “You can unseal it at the beginning of the show, and we’ll cut to you in an inset every couple of minutes during a debate between two of your colleagues to keep the audience in suspense. Then at the end of the hour you’ll announce whatever preliminary conclusions you can come to by then.”

“This isn’t how science is done,” he protested, but she merely shook her head and said, “This is how journalism is done, and we’re the ones footing the bill. We want to show you crunching the numbers, and we want to see results at the end of the hour.”

“And I want those results to be genuine. My professional reputation is on the line.”

“So is mine,” Shelly replied coolly. “Need I remind you who owns the data? If you won’t analyze it on my program, I’ll find someone who will.”

That got Dustin’s attention. To get this close and not be allowed to crunch the data would be the worst possible scenario, worse even than learning that homeopathy was genuine. And he had no doubt Shelly would give it to someone else if he pushed her. She wasn’t in this for science; she was in it for the ratings.

Dustin continued his protest out of form, but in truth, he had enough suspicions about what the data would show that he could prepare in advance. And if it didn’t go the way he expected, that would tell him plenty too. Whichever way it went, he could have a ready-made hypothesis to explain it.

On the night of the great unveiling, he and LeTourneau sat side by side at the desk in the advertising director’s office, the only space in the studio besides Shelly’s set that looked professional enough to show on the air. A camera in the doorway covered both the doctors and the widescreen monitor hooked to Dustin’s laptop computer. It didn’t take a supercomputer to crunch statistical data; it simply took a spreadsheet and a little insight.

The lights were on. The camera was on. Shelly and her two guests were on the sound stage down the hallway, with audio and video piped into a monitor just to the side of Dustin and LeTourneau’s computer screen. The cameraman in the doorway counted down from fifteen just like the sound tech in the main studio, then Shelly said, “Hello, and welcome to The Second Opinion, where tonight we’re going to prove once and for all whether there’s anything to alternative medicine. Doctors Dustin Wegner and Nathan LeTourneau are at their computer where they will unlock the data they’ve been collecting for the last six months and will do the analysis while my guests for tonight, Doctor Frederick Helms of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation for Claims of the Paranormal, and Doctor Diane Westmoreland of the Northwest Coalition of Naturopathic Healers, speculate on what the data will reveal. At the end of the hour, one of these fine doctors will wind up with egg on his face . . . or her face, as the case may be. Doctors, are you ready?”

How did this become a horse race? Dustin wondered, but he heard himself say, “Ready,” just as LeTourneau and Helms and Westmoreland said the same.

“Then let’s get started,” Shelly said. “Go!”

Dustin clicked on the spreadsheet he and LeTourneau had prepared, then imported the data from the file their assistants had assembled from the sealed treatment records. The spreadsheet’s cells filled with information: patient code numbers, control group numbers, treatment options, and so on. The automated data controls that Dustin had worked on for the last month color-coded the trials and the success versus failure rates, and Dustin could immediately see that the data were not random. There were major clumps of color, indicating that certain tests were much more successful than others. They clearly had a real phenomenon here. The trick would be figuring out what it was.

“Put the most successful treatments at the top,” LeTourneau said, and Dustin ran the macro that did that. The clumping of the colors became even more evident in some columns. Dustin expected those columns to be the ones in which the patient was given the homeopathic remedy, as opposed to the saline control, but those columns hardly correlated at all. The biggest correlation was with the column labeled “patient confidence.” That wasn’t even one of the major controls; it was just one of the outliers that they had tacked onto the form to help identify the placebo effect in their samples. They expected the standard 30 percent increase in success rate among this group, but what they saw was more like 99. Nearly every positive outcome also had a high patient confidence in homeopathy.

“Holy shit,” Dustin said when he saw that. “It’s the placebo effect on steroids.”

“How many of the people who were told they were getting a placebo reported a positive effect?” asked LeTourneau.

Dustin looked for the color-coding on that variable. Down at the bottom of the chart. “Almost none,” he said. “But look at this: There’s almost no correlation between success and what they actually got. It’s only what they were told that matters.”

LeTourneau shook his head. “So you were right. All the dilutions and succussion is quackery. It’s the patient’s own belief in the cure that matters.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions here,” Dustin said. “There could be plenty of other interpretations.” But the more they examined the data, the more likely their first impression became.

“Belief,” said Dustin. “That’s all it comes down to. You’re doing faith healing. And very damned effectively, too, pardon my French.”

“Faith,” LeTourneau said, a tone of distaste in his voice. “Merde, and pardon myfrancais. I had thought I was doing science. Fringe science, perhaps, but science.”

“You are! Look at these numbers. Pfizer would kill for correlations as strong as these. It’s just not the kind of science you expected.”

Dustin heard a commotion from the studio monitor and saw Dr. Helms and Dr. Westmoreland red faced and shouting at one another while Shelly tried to calm them down. He heard her say, “Let’s cut to Doctors Wegner and LeTourneau. How are you two doing in there?”

“Should we tell her?” whispered LeTourneau? “It will kill any last hope for alternative medicine.”

“Nonsense,” Dustin said aloud. “It’ll bring it into the mainstream.”

“Bring what into the mainstream?” Shelly said. Along with her voice came the sound of her guests still bickering. Something banged, like a chair tipping over, but the studio monitor showed only Dustin and LeTourneau. Facing the wrong way.

Dustin swiveled around on his chair to face the camera and tugged LeTourneau to do the same. “Homeopathy. Naturopathy. Reiki. Hell, probably even voodoo. We’ve got a correlation here that’ll knock your socks off.”

“Don’t,” LeTourneau said. “Think of your career.”

“Think of everyone’s,” Dustin countered. “This is revolutionary. When the dust settles, medicine will be light-years beyond where we are today.”

“What?” Shelly said. “What have you found?”

Dustin swiveled back and pointed to the screen. “Zoom in on this,” he said to the camera operator in the doorway. “This is nothing short of mind over matter.”

* * * *

The headlines read, “Doctor Loses Mind Over Nonsensical Matter” and “Second Opinion: He’s a Quack.” Dustin didn’t care. This was repeatable. This was science. And it blew everything practically everyone thought they knew about medicine right out of the water.

Trouble was, most people had enough vested in the status quo to dismiss his and Dr. LeTourneau’s findings out of hand. Within seconds of their announcement, Shelly Nguyen’s feuding guests had joined forces to denounce both Dustin and Dr. LeTourneau, accusing them of fraud, chicanery, and general malfeasance, and they were just the tip of the iceberg.

He and LeTourneau wrote up their results and shopped for a publisher anyway, weathering rejections from the Journal of the American Medical Association,Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Not even The Lancet would take them.

Shelly Nguyen took pity on them—or simply knew an audience draw when she saw one—and had Dustin back on her show, but Dustin found himself on the other side of the debate now, trying to convince a skeptical mainstream doctor that his data were real while enduring the ad hominem attacks on his integrity and intelligence that he had enjoyed laying on others not so long ago.

Finally, he had had enough. Interrupting his tormentor in mid tirade, he said, “Do you know what science actually is?”

“Of course I do,” said Dr. Warren Morgan of the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence. “It’s you who has apparently forgotten.”

“What would you do if you had incontrovertible proof that faith healing worked?”

“You don’t have such proof. That’s what I’ve been—”

“That’s not what I asked you. I asked what you would do if you had such proof. What would you, as a scientist, do with that data?”

* * * *

“That’s a nonsense question. Such data doesn’t exist. It can’t. It—”

“So you admit you’re so closed-minded that you can’t even speculate on what you would do if you encountered data that conflicted with what you currently believe to be true.”

“I admit no such thing,” Dr. Morgan spluttered.

“Then answer the question. If you had proof that faith healing works, what would you do?”

Dr. Morgan said, “Certainly not what you’re trying. By going public with this poorly designed study of yours, you’re undermining belief in established medicine.”

“That’s your problem?” Dustin said. “I’m causing people to lose their faith?” He laughed. “So it’s not the act of believing that bothers you; it’s what people believe in?” He pressed ahead over Morgan’s objection. “You would suppress data that conflicts with your world view because it might lead to people losing their faith in the system. You call that science? I’ll show you science.” He turned directly to the camera and held the manuscript for his article out before him. “I’ve got data here that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that a person’s belief in a cure is what actually cures them up to 99 percent of the time. It doesn’t matter what—”

“Nonsense!” shouted Morgan.

“—what you believe in, so long as you actually believe it. I could tell you that holding your hand on your television set while I wave this study in front of the camera will cure your insomnia, and as long as you actually believe it, it will.”

“You can’t prove that,” Dr. Morgan growled.

“Ah, but I can. Let’s give it a try. Here’s the deal: I’ll bet you a thousand bucks that at least 80 percent of the people who try this tonight will call this show tomorrow and report having a good night’s sleep. I’d claim 99, except some poor misguided souls are going to believe you rather than me. But I’ve got the real science right here, and I’m betting that the public is quicker to accept the truth than any number of supposed scientists who stick their heads in the sand at the first sign of data they don’t like.”

Shelly said, “You’re going to perform a faith healing? Right here? Right now?”

“Why not? I believe it’ll work. The data says it will. And I’m betting enough people out there believe it’ll work too. I could potentially help more people tonight than I’ve cured in my entire medical career.”

Dr. Morgan snorted. “That might not be something to brag about.”

“We’ll see who’s bragging in the morning,” said Dustin. “So here’s the deal,” he said to the camera and the millions of people watching through it. “If you suffer from insomnia, then get up and come to the television set. If you can’t get up, then reach out to it. I’m going to wave this manuscript three times in the air, and because you believe it’s going to work—because a scientifically designed double-blind study says it will work—your insomnia will be cured.”

“This is ridiculous!” Dr. Morgan said.

“This is the future of medicine,” Dustin shot back. “Adapt or admit you’re a dinosaur. Ready? Hands on your televisions! Reach out to the power of science! On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three!” He waved his manuscript up and down. “Your insomnia is gone. Now go to bed and have a good night’s sleep and call me in the morning to tell me how well it worked.”

He heard a soft rustle to his side and looked over just in time to see Shelly slip downward in her chair, her head lolling to the side. Both he and Dr. Morgan leaped toward her to steady her before she hit her head on the arm of her chair. Had she had a stroke? A heart attack? Years of training helped Dustin assess her condition in a few short seconds, and he realized she was fine. She had simply fallen asleep.

“Well, doctor,” he said to Morgan. “What more proof do you need?”

Dr. Morgan looked at Shelly, who began to snore. Then at the manuscript in Dustin’s hand. “I think,” he said, “I’d like to have a closer look at your data.”