The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  Respite comes during Ramdev’s long lectures, which are delivered in Hindi. As he speaks, my concentration breaks. I notice that the hall is filled with subtle contradictions. Ramdev goes to great lengths to tell his fans that he is no quasi-god, but his promotional banners seem to imply a different message. There is the Swami floating on water with the sun coming out of his head; there is the Swami levitating on the sunset with his stomach hollowed out; there is the Swami parting the clouds to reveal a celestial white glow; there is the Swami with the sun shining out of his backside. And there he is beseeching his faithful to enjoy the benefits of ‘the world’s best basmati rice.’

  Pushing myself painfully upwards, when the session is over, I decide to seek out someone who can speak to the truth of Ramdev’s claims. I find Aasha, who has taken two weeks’ holiday from her job as a tax inspector to be in charge of Ramdev’s volunteer workforce. She gives the impression of embodying the very spirit of prim, precise orderliness. Her hair is soberly cut and perfectly symmetrical; her dead-straight fringe frames neat, circular spectacles.

  ‘I am a rational person,’ she says. ‘I am very sceptical by nature. But there’s no mumbo jumbo here. I would have walked out if there was any hint of mumbo jumbo.’

  She tells me that it was the death of her brother that inspired her journey into pranayama.

  ‘He got Legionnaire’s disease and was put on a ventilator,’ she tells me, plainly. ‘I made the decision to switch off the machine. I had to be strong for the whole family. I went into a depression. Very, very dark.’ Her expression lifts into one of brightness and smiles. ‘But when I saw Swamiji on the Asatha Channel he almost immediately took me out of it. I wanted to live for that. I wanted to be alive.’

  ‘And is it true that he’s cured cancer?’ I ask.

  ‘It is true,’ she nods. ‘It has been found that cancer cells cannot thrive in a highly oxygenated environment. When you do this type of exercise you flood your system with oxygen and this brings about huge biochemical changes. One of the exercises is the equivalent of chemotherapy and one is the equivalent of radiotherapy.’

  Aasha walks me over to a table near the busy merchandise stalls and introduces me to sixty-three-year-old Harita from Ilford in East London. Over the last decade, Harita has had cancer in her bowels, bladder and spine. She has had her uterus and half her bladder removed. She sits poised and upright in her cushioned seat, her hands squarely placed on her lap. Her weakness only becomes apparent when she speaks. She twists and pulls at an old paper handkerchief and her sentences tremble and break.

  ‘Now is the fourth time cancer has come to me,’ she tells me. ‘They said they couldn’t give me chemotherapy because it’s not working any more and now they want to give me radiotherapy. But I said, “No. Give me one month. I want to see Swamiji. I will be better with this. Swamiji can cure everything.”’

  That night, in the chaotic Muswell Hill hotel that I have put myself up in, I lie in bed with a copy of the official Ramdev book Yog: In Synergy With Modern Science. Written by his colleague Acharya Balrishna, it makes for extraordinary reading. ‘He has a dream of a disease free world,’ it says. ‘This, he plans to achieve with the science of Yog which he feels will bring an end to the unethical business of weapons and allopathic [i.e. conventional, Western] medicines.’ Much of the text seems to be oppressively scientific – full of graphs, anatomical diagrams and dense paragraphs containing words such as ‘neuro- endocrine system’, ‘limbic-hypothalamic’ and ‘spondylitis’. Mixed in with the jargon, though, are some fantastical-sounding claims. ‘The person who follows celibacy with complete austerity develops incredible physical, mental and spiritual abilities’; ‘The person who recognises the value of pranayam and makes it the very base, certainly wins over enemies’; and my own favourite, ‘The slower the breath, the longer the life. This is the secret behind the long life of the tortoise.’

  I also read some press cuttings that concern the controversies that have struck Ramdev, back in India. He owns a factory that manufactures over a hundred and sixty herbal treatments, including syrups, tablets and powered potions. In 2006 a senior politician accused him of using human bones and the testicles of an otter in his medication. This led to angry denials from Ramdev. His furious supporters gathered on the streets of New Delhi and burned effigies. During the disorder, twenty were arrested. Now officially exonerated, he blames a sinister conspiracy of multinational pharmaceutical companies who were threatened by both his commercial empire and his frequently stated ambitions for a world free of Western-style medicines.

  The empire of the Swami suffered more significant trouble over claims that pranayama can cure AIDS – a statement Ramdev denied ever making after he was threatened with legal action by medical NGOs and brought under pressure by the Indian government, who took the extraordinary step of publicly censuring him. It is an episode that seems not to have harmed his standing much. Ramdev remains, according to the biography in his book, ‘famous for his medical research, practical approach to yoga and services in the field of cow breeding.’

  I spend the next five days rising in the darkness, picking my way to my small square of tartan in the Alexandra Palace, doing my breathing exercises and feeling exactly as ‘amazing’ as you might expect after three hours of pre-dawn nose yoga and speeches delivered in Hindi by a man sitting very far away. I also spend a good deal of time badgering and whining at the organisers for a personal audience with the Swami. Their puckered smiles and dipping chins tell me everything I need to know about my chances. But then, unexpectedly, it pays off. I am finally granted ten minutes with Ramdev. We are to meet in a back room where the ‘Founder Members’, who have each paid more than £6,000 for their rarefied status, are queuing to meet their hero.

  When the occasion arrives, I am made to wait for hours. We are in a messy fluorescent-lit area behind a large closed door that is strewn with wipe-clean tables and stackable chairs. I am watching an elegant lady in a sparkling sari and a golden, diamond-encrusted watch take her turn with the barefoot ascetic, when I see Aasha.

  I say, ‘Bearing in mind how he speaks out against divided India …’

  ‘There is no division here,’ she interrupts, smiling thinly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘but it seems to me that the more money you spend, the closer you get.’

  The elegant woman kneels before Ramdev. An expensively heeled foot pokes out of her silken robe.

  ‘It might seem that way,’ Aasha replies. ‘But this is a family and once you enter, you are engulfed by his love.’

  ‘You’ve only got to look at how much money these people have spent, compared to everyone else.’ I give Aasha a doubtful look. ‘Maybe that’s a coincidence?’

  Aasha considers the scene for a moment. She lowers her voice.

  ‘To be honest, I’m not too happy with it myself,’ she whispers. ‘But I can see why he’s doing it. Medical science will not accept anything unless clinical trials are carried out. That is what he’s currently seeking to do and these trials are tremendously expensive. He needs to raise large amounts of money.’

  More time passes. And then more. I find myself sitting next to the most beautiful woman in the room. Shipra is a clinical nurse and she informs me that, if I do eventually receive my promised audience, she will be translating. We watch in silence as Ramdev listens to a family’s woes with an intense, hawkish expression that peers through the no-man’s-land of skin between his beard and hair. Occasionally he breaks into an unsettling kind of laugh, which involves him throwing his head back as far as it will go while making absolutely no sound at all. Shipra, I notice, is finding it difficult to restrain her gaze.

  ‘He’s very charismatic,’ she says. ‘Spiritual people have their own aura. He’s also very funny. He says, “You eat vegan food when I’m looking and then you go home and eat fried food.” Ha! Ha!’

  She looks at me and carries on laughing. ‘Ha ha ha.’

  I smile and nod politely as Shipra beams, and
leans in towards me.

  ‘You know,’ she whispers, ‘he’s a sworn celibate.’

  ‘That must be disappointing for his fans.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, gazing directly at his mouth. ‘Yes, it is.’

  When the time finally comes, I settle down on a seat adjacent to Ramdev. Seeing the Swami treated as a kind of godhead for the previous few days seems to have had an unconscious effect on me, and I am surprised to find myself nervous. I begin by asking, just to confirm, that pranayama really can cure all diseases. He nods deeply, his beard pushing against his orange robe.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘So it can cure cancer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘AIDS?’

  ‘Yes … er, no!’ he says, suddenly looking panicked, his eyes shining wide and white from the shadows of their hairy dens. ‘No AIDS!’

  ‘So it can cure every disease in the world except AIDS?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But even in AIDS it can help the immuno-suppressive system and lymphocytes.’

  I move on to the reports that I have read in the Indian press of Ramdev telling children that Coca-Cola will turn their skin dark, a powerful message for vanity-conscious youngsters to whom pale complexions are desirable – and a statement that is unarguably wrong. I am curious to see if Ramdev will admit to saying this as, presumably, he is smart enough to realise that I know it to be untrue.

  ‘Did you once claim Coca-Cola darkens the skin?’ I say.

  His eyes slide sideways, towards Shipra.

  ‘Even in the USA, the government has banned it in schools,’ he says.

  ‘But did you claim it darkens the skin?’

  ‘There has been scientific research that says it can be harmful to health.’

  I put down my pen.

  ‘But did you say it darkens the skin? I just want to establish, for the record, if you’ve ever claimed this.’

  He looks towards Shipra once more. I watch as a hot conference takes place between them in Hindi. Eventually, she tells me, ‘Swamiji just says that to the kids. It’s not necessarily true.’

  I decide to tell Ramdev about my meeting with Harita, and how she has put her faith in him, over conventional medicine, by delaying her cancer treatment.

  ‘He never tells people to stop their treatment if they’re not well,’ Shipra says.

  ‘But you do campaign for a world free of Western medicines,’ I say.

  Ramdev smiles delightedly. He says, in English, ‘I want this!’

  ‘But it would cause massive suffering,’ I say.

  The guru gives his mane a serious shake.

  ‘Western medicines are very expensive and they do not cure diseases, they only control them. They have only existed for two hundred years. Before this people were still being cured and they actually lived longer.’

  Just as I begin to dispute this, I am interrupted by another extended exchange between Shipra and the Swami.

  ‘Swamiji is asking, how did you get these questions?’

  I show him my notepad.

  ‘I wrote them,’ I say.

  Shortly afterwards, the interview is terminated, my time apparently up.

  The next morning, as I am walking into the arena for my final session with the Swami, I am stopped by an official who tells me that she has heard all about me. ‘You were asking questions you shouldn’t have,’ she says.

  *

  A couple of weeks later, I am back in the warm arms of Sydney, Australia, where I am currently living and working. I decide to send a kind of greatest hits package of Ramdev’s claims to Dr Rosanna Capolingua, who chairs the Ethics Committee of the Federal Australian Medical Association.

  One claim is: ‘It is an undisputed fact that people [who practise pranayama] get cured of diseases that are normally considered terminal. The evidence comes from the clinical examination of patients of cancer, hepatitis and other serious diseases performed before and after pranayama.’

  Another: ‘The presence of cows wards off many ailments; the touch and contact of one increases our vision and betters the eyesight. Every part of the cow, from its pure milk to its urine has healing and beneficial qualities.’

  Another: ‘The celibate is never unhappy.’

  Dr Capolingua emails me back, saying that the statements that she has seen are ‘surreal’ and ‘not based on science.’ When I speak to her on the telephone, she says, ‘His claims are potentially dangerous to patients because he suggests breathing provides cures to a whole range of diseases, which we know is not the case. Targeting a market of patients who are frightened and seeking some form of miracle is very unethical. It’s exploitation.’

  Capolingua says that, contrary to what Harita told me, breathing deeply in an ordinary environment doesn’t, in fact, raise oxygen saturation. And when I tell her about Harita and her radiotherapy, she says, ‘That’s dangerous. To delay that sort of treatment can have a very significant adverse outcome on the patient.’ Of the book’s claim that out of 1,233 new Western medicines developed since 1975, only thirteen are useful in hot, arid countries she splutters, ‘Oh God, no, that’s rubbish’; when I read her a passage in which he describes how food we have eaten comes into contact with oxygen, she actually starts laughing. ‘That’s not how it works at all,’ she says. ‘These processes are well understood and he’s getting them wrong.’

  All of which is useful to hear, but not entirely surprising. What intrigues me more is the remarkable scene that I witnessed on my final day at the Alexandra Palace. One ordinary middle-aged person stood up and joyfully announced, ‘I had severe arthritis and now I’m better!’ Another, ‘I had severe diabetes and now I’m better!’ Another, ‘I had high blood pressure for twenty-six years and I am cured!’

  This went on for some time.

  I was witnessing something that my experiences with the creationists and the UFO-spotters did not offer. Results. Something that, at least in essence, is testable. And yet the miraculous proofs boasted of by Ramdev’s London followers – claims of healing that are reflected in the testimony of many thousands of Ramdev acolytes all over the world – cannot have been born of his science-bereft breathing. So what is the truth? What has really happened to these people to make them so convinced that pranayama was the agent that made them feel so dramatically recovered? I was to find my answer in some invisible forces whose nature came as a surprise: in the phenomenon known as the placebo effect.

  *

  The seemingly magical powers of placebos were first effectively noted during the Second World War by a Harvard professor of anaesthesiology who found himself in Southern Italy. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beecher was working in a field hospital when he was astounded to witness a nurse who, having run out of morphine, instead injected salt water into a badly injured soldier – who apparently failed to notice any difference, feeling very little pain, and not suffering from the cardiovascular shock that might be expected of a man in his state. Months later, Beecher had the opportunity to dispense a placebo to one of his own patients. It worked. He made an ad hoc survey of more than two hundred gravely wounded men and was amazed to find 75 per cent of them bravely declined the offer of morphine even though, before hostilities began, he had known them to be as sensitive as anyone else to even minor pain. Beecher formed a theory. Perhaps, after experiencing the violent trauma of the battlefield, these fighters had developed a new psychological perspective. Maybe their blasted limbs and shrapnel-spattered torsos didn’t seem like such a big deal, after they had witnessed the grotesque deaths of so many including, very nearly, themselves. To Beecher, it seemed as if pain was affected, somehow, by perception. In 1955 he published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association on ‘The Powerful Placebo’. Although it has since been demonstrated that Beecher’s interpretation of the data contained within the study was, at best, highly careless, it would go on to affect the practice of medicine forever.

  Since the turn of the twenty-first century, placebo has been studied mo
re than ever. It has been discovered that the anxiety dampener diazepam – also known as the multibillion-selling superhit Valium – only actually works when the patient knows that they are taking it. Experts such as psychiatrist Patrick Lemoine have asserted that between 35 and 40 per cent of all dispensed medications are actually ‘impure placebos’ – that is, they contain just enough genuine active ingredient so that doctors don’t have to lie about what they have prescribed, but not enough that will have an effect. A 1998 study by researchers at the University of Hull found that up to 75 per cent of the effect of brand-name antidepressants such as Prozac might be down to placebo; Professor David Wootton of the University of York has written of one estimate that indicates that ‘a third of the good done by modern medicine is attributable to the placebo effect’; while an acknowledged world expert, the University of Turin’s Professor Fabrizio Benedetti, has gone so far as to state that ‘Placebo is ruining the credibility of medicine.’

  An individual’s placebo response is dependent on their conditioning (their experience of similar past events) and on their perception – their expectation of what will happen. This is why expensively packaged brand-name headache pills work better than their supermarket equivalents, even when the cheap ones are identical in their ingredients; why zero per cent ‘alcohol’ can make you feel drunk; why completely fake drugs can benefit the symptoms of Parkinson’s, arthritis, ulcers, hypertension, depression, panic disorders, sexual dysfunction and angina; why fake drugs can make athletes go faster, for longer and with less pain and convince asthma sufferers they’re better, even when they’re not. It is why four sugar pills work more effectively than two; why sham injections work better than sham capsules, capsules work better than pills, big pills work better than small pills; and why healing effects can be summoned from complicated but useless electrical equipment, pointless electrodes in the brain and an application of smelly brown paint. One study has even indicated that the unspoken thoughts of your doctor can alter the efficacy of pain-relief drugs.