Media attack natural healers in wake of Karadzic arrest

Last week's Celeb-Reiki, war crimes defendant Radovan Karadzic, continues to make headlines, and many of them have little to do with the former Yugoslavia or the crimes with which he has been charged. So we're holding him over as a Celeb-Reiki again this week. In his case, it's not an honor, just an acknowledgement of his notoriety.

For some reason, the fact that Karadzic, a medical doctor, hid in plain sight for years passing himself off as a natural healer has spawned plenty of opinion pieces about the evils of natural healing, but none about medicine. That leaves us puzzled, or as one famous news anchor might say, scratching our heads.

Karadzic is a real doctor -- he may no longer have a license, but he was a legitimate psychiatrist before he went into politics. He was passing himself off as a natural healer, with Reiki among the modalities he practiced. So why criticize natural healing because of that? Wouldn't it make more sense to criticize medicine instead, since that was the man's actual profession? Actually, blaming an entire field for the actions of one of its members is ludicrous.

Still that didn't stop the Financial Times, which published an opinion piece headlined, "Alternative therapy for evil homeopaths," (apparently with little understanding of what a homeopath is). That piece is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it does give us this week's other notorious Celeb-Reiki, a world famous fugitive who still hasn't been caught:

"How long can it be," asks write Robert Shrimsley, "Until the National Security Agency, operating undercover in Greenwich Village, finally pinpoints the precise location of Osama bin Laden's reiki parlour?"

Puh-leez! The first Reiki Precept is "Do not anger." Anger is bin Laden's raison d'etre, so he is about as far from Reiki as you can get.

The Guardian jumped into the fray early on, with a piece headlined "A bad week for alternative medicine." By the time that item made its way to professional atheist Richard Dawkins' web forum, the headline had changed to "alternative medicine is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Where is all this hostility coming from? Anger toward Karadzic is understandable, but. . .

In Scotland, the Sunday Herald features a piece suggesting that all dictators should become alternative healers in "A hairy answer to tyranny."

Meanwhile, a real alternative healer, Petar Glumac, claims Karadzic stole his "likeness and energy." If the war-crimes suspect had pretended to be an accountant instead of a healer, would that have led to editorial outbursts against financial advisors?