A holistic medicine guru had a sucker customer patient with a pesky issue that couldn't be solved with the usual alternative and complementary medicine routine - eliminating gluten or adding whatever Miracle Vegetable is in the New York Times this week or "testing" for some non-specific autoimmune disease...Vitamin D levels all the rage for the last two years and will be until a few supplement salespeople poison someone so that was asked about also.

It turns out the woman didn't need advice at all, she found her own nocebo by regularly checking Environmental Working Group for new stuff to be panicked about:

My patient was savvy about environmental chemical exposures; she regularly consulted the skin deep website and carried around a stainless steel water bottler filled with water she filtered at home.

That sentence alone tells you reason and evidence are not welcome at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. If you have read the guru's handout and regularly check the EWG for the latest things to assume made you sick, you are qualified to self-diagnose and get featured in a blog post.

The customer discovered that by giving up her coffee maker, the problem was solved. The speculation by Victoria Maizes, Executive director of University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine? Well, it must be BPA or phthalates or something else that has been getting publicity on environmental sites, because her customer switched to a French press and the problem went away.

That is what passes for science in Integrative Medicine. Their office must be next to the Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, who think stored memory in tubes are a quantum vibrations theory Of consciousness.

And I hadn't read Quartz before but if you are in science media and need humor blogging fodder, they must be a pretty good place to get inspiration. They claim to "publish bracingly creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview" and if "bracingly creative" means "made-up nonsense" with no fact-checking or evidence or journalism needed, their mission is accomplished.

This isn't the first time coffee has been implicated in a culture war with only anecdotal evidence required. UK women worried it made British men too French. And to British women that had to be far worse than anything BPA might do.


Image credit: NPR