Feeding on Despair
Although I am sure that there is a special place in Hell for people who coat sugar pills with their own secretions and sell them at Jean Coutu for $14.95, there is an even warmer place for those that prey on the despair of others. If you’re willing to waste a few dollars for a placebo against the common cold, how much would you pony up to save your dying child from an incurable disease?
How about $5000 for a machine that can cure cancer? After all, it come with page after pages of technical jargon and it’s even approved by Health Canada, they say so on their web page. You should also try a bottle of extra-potent herbal supplements. I understand that they cost 10-times more than the regular kind but a lot of research went into choosing just the right color.
Tonight at 9 PM, you can see the second part of a Zone Libre investigation on the seedier aspects of the alternative medicine industry. You will hear about the desperate efforts of a family as they struggled to save their son from a growing brain tumor. In doing so, they bought a machine from a Vancouver company, a Rife Generator, whose specific radio and light waves is supposed to cure pretty much anything, including cancer and fungal infections.
That’s where my lab was brought in. Although we’ve done some work on pediatric brain tumors (our first paper in the field is currently under review), we have a much greater expertise in the study of a fungi called Candida albicans which is the most common causative agent of fungal infections. We thus set-up a series of experiments to determine if this instrument can affect the viability of fungal cells. I have been writing about our collaboration over the past three days and the final results will be posted tonight. Alternatively, you can tune in to Radio-Canada where you will be able to see how ugly I look on TV.
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Oh great! They wrote the name right but said Jacques Nantel who’s a professor at the HEC. Needless to say, my girls have been calling me Jacques all night.