Up to 139 times in one week, Kevin Trudeau pitches late-night viewers about his self-published book, Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, a rambling farrago of uninformed opinions, conspiracy theories, and cheeky jabs at medical, pharmaceutical and governmental authorities (“they”). The book is so risibly ridiculous that even the most desperately ill would not take it seriously — would they?

Apparently they would, to the tune of millions of copies sold, elevating the book to the New York Times best-seller list. If readers had purchased Trudeau’s Mega Memory System, perhaps they would have remembered that he spent two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to credit-card fraud and that the Federal Trade Commission banned Trudeau “from appearing in, producing, or disseminating future infomercials that advertise any type of product, service, or program to the public, except for truthful infomercials for informational publications. In addition, Trudeau cannot make disease or health benefits claims for any type of product, service, or program in any advertising, including print, radio, Internet, television, and direct mail solicitations, regardless of the format and duration.” Trudeau had to pay $500,000 in consumer redress for his bogus infomercials and another $2 million to settle charges against him for claiming that coral calcium cures cancer (it doesn’t) and that an analgesic product called Biotape permanently relieves pain (it doesn’t).

Amazingly, Natural Cures is exempt from this injunction. “Books are fully protected speech. He can author a book and voice his opinions,” says Heather Hippsley, assistant director for the division of advertising practices at the FTC who investigated Trudeau’s infomercials, “The line is: Informational materials, OK. Products and services, banned.”

So Trudeau is free to dole out in print such opinions as these: “Medical science has absolutely, 100 percent, failed in the curing and prevention of illness, sickness, and disease.” (Smallpox is not a disease?) “Get all metal out of your dental work.” (Won’t this help the medical cartel?) “Sun block has been shown to cause cancer.” (References?) “Don’t drink tap water.” (Wrong: studies show it is as safe as bottled water.) “Animals in the wild never get sick.” (No need to worry about avian influenza.) “Get 15 colonics in 30 days.” (Can I bring a friend?) “Wear white. The closer you get to white, the more positive energy you bring into your energetic field.” (Why is Trudeau wearing all black on the book cover?) “Stop taking nonprescription and prescription drugs.” (Including insulin for diabetes?) “This includes vaccines.” (Welcome back, polio.) “Have sex.” (Without prescription Viagra?)

This 600-page medical advice book contains no index, no bibliography and no references. In their stead are testimonials for the audio edition and a sequel in the works about “weight loss secrets ‘they’ don’t want you to know about.” As for the “natural cures” themselves, some are not cures at all but just obvious healthy lifestyle suggestions: eat less, exercise more, reduce stress. Some of the natural cures are flat-out wrong, such as oral chelation for heart disease, whereas others are laughably ludicrous, such as a magnetic mattress pad and crocodile protein peptide for fibromyalgia. Worst of all are the natural cures that the book directs the reader to Trudeau’s Web page to find. When you go there, however, and click on a disease to get the cure, you first have to become a Web site member at $499 lifetime or $9.95 a month. It is a classic con man’s combo: bait and switch (the book directs them to the Web page) and double-dipping (sell them the book, then sell them the membership).

Why don’t “they” want you to know about these natural cures? “Money and Power,” Trudeau says. “Most people have no idea just how powerful a motivating force money and power can be.” Kevin Trudeau certainly does, and this book is a testimony to that fact.

There is one lesson that I gleaned from this otherwise feckless author, well expressed in an old Japanese proverb: “Baka ni tsukuru kusuri wa nai desu” — “There is no medicine that cures stupidity.” Domo arigato, Mr. Trudeau.

As a skeptic, I am often asked my position on immortality. “I’m for it, of course,” is my wiseacre reply.

Unfortunately, every one of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived has died, so the outlook does not bode well. Unless you follow the trend line generated by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman in Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale, 2004): “The rate of technical progress is doubling every decade, and the capability (price performance, capacity, and speed) of specific information technologies is doubling every year. Because of this exponential growth, the 21st century will equal 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress.” Within a quarter of a century, the authors say, “nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence,” then “soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge.” Biotechnologies, such as designer drugs and genetic engineering, will halt the aging process; nanotechnologies, such as nanorobots, will repair and replace cells, tissues and organs (including brains), reversing the aging process and allowing us to live forever.

To make it to this secular Second Coming (2030 by their calculation), you need “Ray and Terry’s Longevity Program,” which includes 250 supplements a day and weekly rounds of intravenous “nutritionals.” To boost antioxidant levels, for example, Kurzweil suggests a concoction of “alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, grape-seed extract, resveratrol, bilberry extract, lycopene, silymarin, conjugated linoleic acid, lecithin, evening primrose oil (omega-6 essential fatty acids), n-acetyl-cysteine, ginger, garlic, 1-carnitine, pyridoxal-5-phosphate, and echinacea.” Bon appétit.

Kurzweil is a brilliant and creative mind—the inventor of the first optical character-recognition program and CCD flatbed scanner, creator of the first reading machine for the blind with a text-to-speech synthesizer, recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Technology, and inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. His books The Age of Intelligent Machine and The Age of Spiritual Machines significantly influenced the field of artificial intelligence. Thus, when Ray Kurzweil speaks, people listen. But my baloney-detection alarm went off in three areas of his work.

One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements. When I was bike racing in the 1980s, I went through a period of megadosing vitamins and minerals that produced brightly colored urine but no noticeable performance difference. The testimonials behind such nutritional claims are powerful, but the science is weak. The fact that the field is fraught with fads and ever changing claims for “X” as the elixir of health and longevity does not bode well. Nutritional science says that we get virtually all the vitamins and minerals we need through a balanced diet and that more is not better (see www.nutriwatch.org). These diets help us live longer lives, but no one can exceed the maximum human life span of 120 years. The 56-year-old Kurzweil declares that his program has reduced his biological age to about 40. I’m no aging expert or carny barker, but if I had to guess his age from his author photo I’d say, uh, 56.

Two, I question the idea of extrapolating trend lines very far into the future. Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable. Plus, in my opinion, the problems of creating artificial intelligence and halting aging are orders of magnitude harder than anyone has anticipated. Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

Three, I am doubtful whenever people argue that the Big Thing is going to happen in their lifetime. Evangelicals never claim that the Second Coming is going to happen in the next generation (or that they will be “left behind” while others are saved). Likewise, secular doomsayers typically predict the demise of civilization within their allotted time (but that they will be part of the small surviving enclave). Prognosticators of both religious and secular utopias always include themselves as members of the chosen few. Hope springs eternal.

After being poked, scanned, drugged and radiated, your doc tells you nothing more can be done to cure what ails you. Why not try an alternative healing modality? What’s the harm?

I started thinking about this question in 1991, when my normally intelligent mother presented to a psychiatrist symptoms of cognitive confusion, emotional instability and memory loss. Within an hour it was determined that she was depressed. I didn’t buy it. My mom was acting strangely, not depressed. I requested a second opinion from a neurologist.

A CT scan revealed an orange-size meningioma tumor. After its removal, my mom was back to her bright and cheery self — such a remarkably recuperative and pliable organ is the brain. Unfortunately, within a year my mom had two new tumors in her brain. Three more rounds of this cycle of surgical removal and tumor return, plus two doses of gamma knife radiation (pinpoint-accurate beams that destroy cancer cells), finally led to the dreaded prognosis: there was nothing more to be done.

What is a skeptic to do? An ideological commitment to science is one thing, but this was my mom! I turned to the literature, and with the help of our brilliant and humane oncologist, Avrum Bluming, determined that my mom should try an experimental treatment, mifepristone, a synthetic antiprogestin better known as RU-486, the “morning after” contraception drug. A smallsample study suggested that it might retard the growth of tumors. It didn’t work for my mom. She was dying. There was nothing to lose in trying alternative cancer treatments, right? Wrong.

The choice is not between scientific medicine that doesn’t work and alternative medicine that might work. Instead there is only scientific medicine that has been tested and everything else (“alternative” or “complementary” medicine) that has not been tested. A few reliable authorities test and review the evidence for some of the claims — notably Stephen Barrett’s Quackwatch, William Jarvis’s National Council Against Health Fraud, and Wallace Sampson’s journal The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.

Most alternatives, however, slip under the scientific peer review radar. This is why it is alarming that, according to the American Medical Association, the number of visits to alternative practitioners exceeds visits to traditional medical doctors; the amount of money spent on herbal medicines and nutrition therapy accounts for more than half of all out-of-pocket expenses to physicians; and, most disturbingly, 60 percent of patients who undergo alternative treatments do not report that information to their physician — a serious, and even potentially fatal, problem if herbs and medicines are inappropriately mixed.

For example, the September 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association reported the results of a study on St. John’s wort. The herb, derived from a blooming Hypericum perforatum plant and hugely popular as an alternative elixir (to the tune of millions of dollars annually), can significantly impair the effectiveness of dozens of medications, including those used to treat high blood pressure, cardiac arrhythmias, high cholesterol, cancer, pain and depression. The study’s authors show that St. John’s wort affects the liver enzyme cytochrome P450 3A4, essential to metabolizing at least half of all prescription drugs, thereby speeding up the breakdown process and shortchanging patients of their lifesaving medications.

But there is a deeper problem with the use of alternatives whose benefits have not been proved. All of us are limited to a few score years in which to enjoy meaningful life and love. Time is precious and fleeting. Given the choice of spending the next couple months schlepping my mother around the country on a wild goose chase versus spending the time together, my dad and I decided on the latter. She died a few months later, on September 2, 2000, three years ago to the day I penned this column.

Medicine is miraculous, but in the end, life ultimately turns on the love of the people who matter most. It is for those relationships, especially, that we should apply the ancient medical principle Primum non nocere — first, do no harm.

As a long-time public defender of modern scientific medicine, I have commonly labeled medical scientists as wise of mind, and alternative medical practitioners as fools. The wind of quackery we have inherited, I reasoned, is surely the result of an uneducated public duped by the otherwise risible tactics of flimflam artists praying on the unsuspecting masses. I am no longer sure that this is the source of the headlong rush toward these New Age medical alternatives. “The fault,” Shakespeare correctly identified in another context, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Indeed, the data contradicts my “fools” hypothesis: studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association reveal that the typical complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) patient is white, college-educated, with an annual income exceeding $50,000. Despite the miracles that traditional allopathic medicine (TAM) has produced — the cumulative results of which have led to a doubling of the average lifespan from just a century ago — by the late 1990s the number of visits to CAM providers exceeded the number of visits to TAM providers. By the end of the decade total payments to CAMers averaged a staggering $27 billion per year, 58% of which was out-of-pocket payments. CAM sells.

In rejecting the “fools” hypothesis we must consider the possibility that people are going alternative because their needs are not being met by traditional medicine. Before the 20th century this certainly was the case. Medical historians, in fact, are in agreement that until well into the 20th century it was safer not to go to a doctor, thus leading to the success of such nonsense as homeopathy — a totally worthless nostrum that also did no harm, thus allowing the body to heal itself. Since humans are pattern-seeking animals we credit as the vector of healing whatever it was we did just before getting well. This is also known as magical thinking.

What are CAMers offering that TAMers are not? The answer is that all-important component so highly developed in pre-20th century medicine: TLC. By this I do not just mean a hand squeeze or a hug, but an open and honest relationship with patients and their families that provides a realistic assessment of the medical condition and prospects. People are going alternative because physicans have become highly skilled technicians — cogs in the cold machinery and massive bureaucracy of modern medicine.

The shift in my thinking about this problem developed over the past eight years as I became intimately involved in my mother’s recurring and malignant meningioma brain tumors. She finally succumbed, but in the process I gained a deeper understanding of why people turn to alternative medicine. Don’t get me wrong — my mother’s doctors were brilliant, her care the very best available, and we have no regrets about what might have been. And that’s the point. Even under such ideal conditions I found the whole experience frustrating and unfullfilling: it was nearly impossible to get honest and accurate information about my mom’s condition; neither my father nor I could get doctors to return our calls; misinformation and (usually) no information was the norm; and despite my best efforts, the relationship with her physicians (with one exception — her oncologist whom I befriended), could not have been more detached.

I found it rather telling, for example, that when I identified myself as “Dr. Shermer” I got faster results at the hospital than when I was merely “Mr. Shermer” (a lie of omission, not commission, since I do have a Ph.D.), but I still could not get calls returned. Even worse, when my mom’s oncologist (one of the country’s best-known and well-respected in his field) called her surgeons, he too could not get a return call. If physicians show such a remarkable lack of professional courtesy with their own colleagues, what are the rest of us to expect?

More than anything patients want information. They want to know what is really going on. They don’t want jargon. They don’t want false hope or unnecessary pessimism. Studies show that patients do better when they know in detail all the steps they will have to take in their recovery process — probably because it allows them to anticipate, plan, and pace themselves. Knowledge is power, and physicians are the modern-day shamans. Patients want the power that knowledge brings, and that empowerment cannot be given in the 8.5 minutes the average doctor spends with a patient on any given visit. Patients want a relationship with their primary caretaker that allows them to ask the important questions and expect honest answers.

Since I have a doctorate in the history of science, professional training in statistics and research methodologies, and some internet skills, I was able to answer a lot of questions on my own by doing research. But how many people are so equipped to conduct their own medical investigations? And isn’t this what physicians are trained to do?

Yes, of course; but, tragically, they are not trained to communicate that research. And herein lies the problem…and the solution. Physicians tend to have monologues when they should be having dialogues. The reasoning process of diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment all goes on inside their heads, and what comes out is a glossed telegram of truncated lingo. The physician-patient connection is a one-way street, an authority-flunky relationship top heavy in arrogance and off-putting to anyone with a modicum of self-esteem and social awareness. If I could reduce all this into a single request, it is this: Talk to patients as if they are thoughtful, intelligent people capable of understanding and deeply curious about their condition.

The real tragedy in this health care crisis is that CAMers lack much medical knowledge and (especially) scientific reasoning, making them dangerous. Studies show that 40% of patients going to CAMers do not tell their primary care physicians, thus leading to possibly deadly mixtures of drugs and herbs. It is not a matter of everything to gain and nothing to lose by going alternative (even if your doc offers no hope), because quack medicines cost money, cause harm, and, most importantly, take away valuable time that could and should be spent with loved ones in this already too-short of a stay we have with each other.

Physicians are wise of mind. They must also become wise of heart so as not to inherit the alternative wind, for as Solomon continues in the next passage: “The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.”

This opinion editorial was originally published in Toronto Globe & Mail.