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Russian politicians fight to legislate against “false science”
World Report
Russian politicians fight to legislate against “false science” Many Russians are shunning the country’s health services and turning instead to clairvoyants, witches, and faith healers, who claim to cure everything from impotency to cancer. Politicians are worried enough to push for laws to stop this practice damaging health. Tom Parfitt reports.
www.thelancet.com Vol 366 November 5, 2005
turned up in St Petersburg selling photographs of himself for 200 rubles (US$7) each as part of his miracle cure. Prosecutors are investigating Grabovoy and several newspapers have scorned the return of Kashpirovsky. But while there is revulsion surrounding such characters, healers’ associations are nervous of legal restrictions, arguing that their methods are legitimate and deeply rooted in Russian culture. One of their adversaries is Ludmila Stebenkova, head of the Moscow city parliament’s public-health committee, who is leading the campaign to alter the 1993 Law on Citizens’ Health Protection which allows faith healers to practice. Stebenkova wants loopholes closed to stamp out a market in “occult services”, which she estimates to be around US$120 million per year in Moscow alone. For patients, the result of such “interference into the human psyche” can be lasting psychological damage, she says. By law, practitioners of alternative medicine need a license but many “pseudo-healers” avoid that necessity by claiming they are only providing consultation, according to Stebenkova. “This is a niche for abuse”, she says. “Every year, hundreds of people are admitted to Moscow clinics after suffering at the hands of such charlatans. An unscrupulous wizard is as dangerous as a scalpel in the hands of a fake surgeon.” Last month, the city parliament forwarded her proposal to tighten licensing to the State Duma as a legislative initiative. It is a move that has rattled some in the healing community. At his office in northern Moscow, Yakov Galperin sits at a desk surrounded by talismans and religious icons. Around his neck hangs a heavy metal amulet, a nine-pointed star formed from three overlapping trian-
gles with an eye symbol embedded in the middle. As director of the AllRussian Scientific Research Institute for Traditional People’s Medicine, Galperin is one of the country’s most famous healers. While Stebenkova and other supporters of emboldened legislation have been careful to warn that traditional techniques of “narodnaya meditsina” (people’s medicine) such as massage, physiotherapy, and herbalism must not be criminalised, Galperin is wary of any legal changes. He argues that honest healers have been tarred with the same brush as impostors, and do not need further regulation. “People’s medicine is healthy but around it are many black weeds”, he stresses. Healing in Russia, says Galperin, is an ancient art that derives from pagan tra-
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal
AP
In a darkened room, a middle-aged woman with straggly black hair is passing two tall candles around the head of a seated man in great circling motions, muttering an incantation. A voice resonates in the background: “The unique capabilities of Madame Lyuba’s energetic powers can free you forever from the influences of all kinds of curses and the Evil Eye.” It is a scene from Russian television last week: one of the scores of advertisements for clairvoyant, witches, and healers who peddle their services on popular channels. While state health-care services remain sparse and under-funded, many Russians are turning to such practitioners, with their claims to cure everything from impotency to cancer. The situation is prompting growing concern among politicians and academics who say that charlatans are threatening the nation’s health. In response, a group of MPs is pushing for changes to legislation that would tighten restrictions on faith healers, while the Academy of Sciences has enlarged its Commission for the Struggle against False-Science. Their campaign was given new impetus with the reappearance in September of two notorious healers who rose to fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One, Grigory Grabovoy, is a self-styled “saviour from catastrophes and illness” whose purported extrasensory skills were once used to check government aircraft for faults. He popped up in Moscow offering to resurrect children killed in the Beslan siege. Undercover reporters discovered his representatives marketing the service to victims’ mothers for thousands of dollars. The other, Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a former TV psychic who was exposed as a conman before moving to the USA,
One healer marketed a “resurrection service” to mothers of children killed in Beslan
1597
World Report
Getty Images
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal
dition and survived the middle ages because Orthodoxy was more lenient than other forms of Christian faith. Russian traditional medicine has four main schools, he says: herbal therapy with plants and grasses; cures that harness the influence of natural factors like stones, water, and wood; manual therapy such as massage; and the use of protective amulets. Indeed, campaigners will need to tread a fine line if they are to avoid upsetting Siberian regions such as Buryatia and Tuva, where shamans are revered cultural figures. Galperin says healers are not a threat and dismisses plans for tightened legislation, saying he stifled recent attempts at change by rallying the country’s top healers to lobby the Kremlin in August. “There was a move by people around [health minister Mikhail] Zurabov to get rid of article 57 from the 1993 legislation—the one that lets healers practice”, he says. “But that’s all over now.” His tone is one of bullish optimism. “Healing has an emphasis on prophylactic care that was lost in Russia with the fall of the Soviet system”, he says. “We are now lobbying for our work to be incorporated into state health services.” Yet Galperin’s spirited defence of “people’s medicine” does little to dispel fears that legitimate—or at least, harmless—alternative therapies are often bundled together with patent claptrap. During an interview with The Lancet, the septuagenarian healer advanced several elaborate theories, including one that healers’ perceive an “informational field” formed from minute parti1598
cles beamed from other galaxies and another that the “crystalline makeup” of a body of water (when frozen) would be affected if two people stood next to it and had an argument. Such ideas are targets of scorn for Eduard Kruglyakov, chairman of the Commission for the Struggle Against False-Science. Kruglyakov, a nuclear physicist, makes no bones about branding many healers as “swindlers” and “cheats” whose only aim is to part innocent people from their money. In September, his commission was enlarged from 12 members to 40, while announcing plans to open regional offices tasked with seeking out fraudsters who promote “so-called phenomena and wonder-drugs”. Pseudo-science is a worldwide phenomenon, he says, but an acute problem in Russia where certainties were swept away with the fall of the Soviet Union. “People were left with no money, impoverished—what was there to rely in such a situation, but miracles?” Sects, witches, magicians, and psychics all sprouted on fertile ground after perestroika. One popular star was Allan Chumak, a psychic who “charged” jars of water held next to television sets when he appeared on screen, so they could be drunk to cure diseases. Such high-profile cases are now less common, but “people’s healers” remain very popular, especially in the countryside. Kruglyakov says: “Today, this socalled alternative medicine could bury classical medicine because it offers panaceas for everything much cheaper than the real medicines that really cure illnesses cost.”
At the root of this flourishing business, he says, is corruption among state officials. “The bacchanalia of para-scientific delirium has even begun to affect the highest echelons of power”, is how Kruglyakov put it acidly in a 2002 magazine article. Several of Russia’s most famous quacks gained access to senior state bodies, including the Kremlin. Grabovoy, the “extrasens” who wants to resurrect Beslan’s victims, got close to former President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle via the leader’s security chief, General Georgy Rogozin, who professed a fascination with “paranormal phenomena”. And last month, reporters discovered that Grabovoy has a valid security pass stamped by the presidential administration. On a more mundane level, it is clear that well-placed bureaucrats are bribed by healers who depend on protection—or a blind eye turned—to continue their business. In one recent case, the commission discovered that 64 healers in St Petersburg who promised to “correct a patient’s biofield” had acquired licenses from corrupt health officials. The licenses were withdrawn by a court. Stebenkova, the Moscow parliament MP, fears the biggest obstacle to her campaign for stricter legislation is opposition from several high-ranking lobbyists. “These are people who either fell under the influence of a clairvoyant themselves or who stand to gain from it financially,”, she says. “This occultism is a shady business.”
Tom Parfitt www.thelancet.com Vol 366 November 5, 2005
Russian politicians fight to legislate against “false science” Many Russians are shunning the country’s health services and turning instead to clairvoyants, witches, and faith healers, who claim to cure everything from impotency to cancer. Politicians are worried enough to push for laws to stop this practice damaging health. Tom Parfitt reports.
www.thelancet.com Vol 366 November 5, 2005
turned up in St Petersburg selling photographs of himself for 200 rubles (US$7) each as part of his miracle cure. Prosecutors are investigating Grabovoy and several newspapers have scorned the return of Kashpirovsky. But while there is revulsion surrounding such characters, healers’ associations are nervous of legal restrictions, arguing that their methods are legitimate and deeply rooted in Russian culture. One of their adversaries is Ludmila Stebenkova, head of the Moscow city parliament’s public-health committee, who is leading the campaign to alter the 1993 Law on Citizens’ Health Protection which allows faith healers to practice. Stebenkova wants loopholes closed to stamp out a market in “occult services”, which she estimates to be around US$120 million per year in Moscow alone. For patients, the result of such “interference into the human psyche” can be lasting psychological damage, she says. By law, practitioners of alternative medicine need a license but many “pseudo-healers” avoid that necessity by claiming they are only providing consultation, according to Stebenkova. “This is a niche for abuse”, she says. “Every year, hundreds of people are admitted to Moscow clinics after suffering at the hands of such charlatans. An unscrupulous wizard is as dangerous as a scalpel in the hands of a fake surgeon.” Last month, the city parliament forwarded her proposal to tighten licensing to the State Duma as a legislative initiative. It is a move that has rattled some in the healing community. At his office in northern Moscow, Yakov Galperin sits at a desk surrounded by talismans and religious icons. Around his neck hangs a heavy metal amulet, a nine-pointed star formed from three overlapping trian-
gles with an eye symbol embedded in the middle. As director of the AllRussian Scientific Research Institute for Traditional People’s Medicine, Galperin is one of the country’s most famous healers. While Stebenkova and other supporters of emboldened legislation have been careful to warn that traditional techniques of “narodnaya meditsina” (people’s medicine) such as massage, physiotherapy, and herbalism must not be criminalised, Galperin is wary of any legal changes. He argues that honest healers have been tarred with the same brush as impostors, and do not need further regulation. “People’s medicine is healthy but around it are many black weeds”, he stresses. Healing in Russia, says Galperin, is an ancient art that derives from pagan tra-
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal
AP
In a darkened room, a middle-aged woman with straggly black hair is passing two tall candles around the head of a seated man in great circling motions, muttering an incantation. A voice resonates in the background: “The unique capabilities of Madame Lyuba’s energetic powers can free you forever from the influences of all kinds of curses and the Evil Eye.” It is a scene from Russian television last week: one of the scores of advertisements for clairvoyant, witches, and healers who peddle their services on popular channels. While state health-care services remain sparse and under-funded, many Russians are turning to such practitioners, with their claims to cure everything from impotency to cancer. The situation is prompting growing concern among politicians and academics who say that charlatans are threatening the nation’s health. In response, a group of MPs is pushing for changes to legislation that would tighten restrictions on faith healers, while the Academy of Sciences has enlarged its Commission for the Struggle against False-Science. Their campaign was given new impetus with the reappearance in September of two notorious healers who rose to fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One, Grigory Grabovoy, is a self-styled “saviour from catastrophes and illness” whose purported extrasensory skills were once used to check government aircraft for faults. He popped up in Moscow offering to resurrect children killed in the Beslan siege. Undercover reporters discovered his representatives marketing the service to victims’ mothers for thousands of dollars. The other, Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a former TV psychic who was exposed as a conman before moving to the USA,
One healer marketed a “resurrection service” to mothers of children killed in Beslan
1597
World Report
Getty Images
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal
dition and survived the middle ages because Orthodoxy was more lenient than other forms of Christian faith. Russian traditional medicine has four main schools, he says: herbal therapy with plants and grasses; cures that harness the influence of natural factors like stones, water, and wood; manual therapy such as massage; and the use of protective amulets. Indeed, campaigners will need to tread a fine line if they are to avoid upsetting Siberian regions such as Buryatia and Tuva, where shamans are revered cultural figures. Galperin says healers are not a threat and dismisses plans for tightened legislation, saying he stifled recent attempts at change by rallying the country’s top healers to lobby the Kremlin in August. “There was a move by people around [health minister Mikhail] Zurabov to get rid of article 57 from the 1993 legislation—the one that lets healers practice”, he says. “But that’s all over now.” His tone is one of bullish optimism. “Healing has an emphasis on prophylactic care that was lost in Russia with the fall of the Soviet system”, he says. “We are now lobbying for our work to be incorporated into state health services.” Yet Galperin’s spirited defence of “people’s medicine” does little to dispel fears that legitimate—or at least, harmless—alternative therapies are often bundled together with patent claptrap. During an interview with The Lancet, the septuagenarian healer advanced several elaborate theories, including one that healers’ perceive an “informational field” formed from minute parti1598
cles beamed from other galaxies and another that the “crystalline makeup” of a body of water (when frozen) would be affected if two people stood next to it and had an argument. Such ideas are targets of scorn for Eduard Kruglyakov, chairman of the Commission for the Struggle Against False-Science. Kruglyakov, a nuclear physicist, makes no bones about branding many healers as “swindlers” and “cheats” whose only aim is to part innocent people from their money. In September, his commission was enlarged from 12 members to 40, while announcing plans to open regional offices tasked with seeking out fraudsters who promote “so-called phenomena and wonder-drugs”. Pseudo-science is a worldwide phenomenon, he says, but an acute problem in Russia where certainties were swept away with the fall of the Soviet Union. “People were left with no money, impoverished—what was there to rely in such a situation, but miracles?” Sects, witches, magicians, and psychics all sprouted on fertile ground after perestroika. One popular star was Allan Chumak, a psychic who “charged” jars of water held next to television sets when he appeared on screen, so they could be drunk to cure diseases. Such high-profile cases are now less common, but “people’s healers” remain very popular, especially in the countryside. Kruglyakov says: “Today, this socalled alternative medicine could bury classical medicine because it offers panaceas for everything much cheaper than the real medicines that really cure illnesses cost.”
At the root of this flourishing business, he says, is corruption among state officials. “The bacchanalia of para-scientific delirium has even begun to affect the highest echelons of power”, is how Kruglyakov put it acidly in a 2002 magazine article. Several of Russia’s most famous quacks gained access to senior state bodies, including the Kremlin. Grabovoy, the “extrasens” who wants to resurrect Beslan’s victims, got close to former President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle via the leader’s security chief, General Georgy Rogozin, who professed a fascination with “paranormal phenomena”. And last month, reporters discovered that Grabovoy has a valid security pass stamped by the presidential administration. On a more mundane level, it is clear that well-placed bureaucrats are bribed by healers who depend on protection—or a blind eye turned—to continue their business. In one recent case, the commission discovered that 64 healers in St Petersburg who promised to “correct a patient’s biofield” had acquired licenses from corrupt health officials. The licenses were withdrawn by a court. Stebenkova, the Moscow parliament MP, fears the biggest obstacle to her campaign for stricter legislation is opposition from several high-ranking lobbyists. “These are people who either fell under the influence of a clairvoyant themselves or who stand to gain from it financially,”, she says. “This occultism is a shady business.”
Tom Parfitt www.thelancet.com Vol 366 November 5, 2005