Since the earthquake in Haiti last month, the country has been receiving a lot of foreign aid, including food, clothing, medical supplies and other things the country sorely needs.   It has also received its share of items with little or no worth, which only take up valuable space on transports and cause unnecessary logistical strain.   One thing that the country definitely does not need is quacks.   The medical system of the country was lacking even before the quake and now, with many injured and the danger of disease in the country, real medical personnel are in short supply, but quacks are something they really don’t need more of.

Sadly, it seems that at least a few first-world quacks are seeing this as a great opportunity to gain some publicity by pushing their snakeoil on some of the most desperate in the world.

Via the Globe and Mail (Canada):

Toting a 100lb suitcase stuffed with donated supplies, , who is based at the Canadian Clinic for Integrative Medicine Windsor, Ont., was the first and only naturopathic doctor to arrive here. As part of the Canadian charity team sent by Hearts Together For Haiti, his aim was to apply the homeopathic treatment philosophy to his post-quake relief work, something he tried for the first time in 2005, with Sri Lankan tsunami survivors.

The goal of homeopathic relief work, he explained to me outside a clinic near Jacmel the other day, is to use non-medicinal remedies to treat the mind so it can “give the body the information it needs to heal the physical.”

He learned quickly that’s easier said that done in a place where everyone is focused on their physical injuries.

“When they see a Western doctor they want to say, ‘Here’s this physical thing, give me medicine,’ ” Dr. Marier said. “Any time I’ve done this, people aren’t going to just jump up and start talking about the grief or the depression.”

Still, he began trying to see patients at the clinic in Cayes Jacmel one by one for assessments. Here’s a description of the process from his blog:

I “set up shop” down in triage with my homeopathic remedies and a translator. Jo-Dee, an amazing nurse with our group, referred several patients who were complaining of depression and fear since the earthquake. Unfortunately, as I’ve experienced on previous missions, the local community is arriving at a free “medical clinic” expecting medications, not homeopathic remedies to help with post-traumatic stress from the original disaster. And, working with a young male translator inexperienced with asking for a differentiation between sadness, grief, and depression made things more difficult.

After he saw two patients the lineup just melted away, he told me, frustrated, towards the end of his final day, Before he left, he disposed of the leftover injectable Vitamin C he brought with him from Canada (it’s a new-ish remedy, apparently, to stimulate tissue healing) because he was worried that, in his absence, it would be used improperly. When I left him, he was also contemplating disposing of a huge load of traumeel, a homeopathic anti-inflammatory.

Beneath the brim of that Superman hat, Dr. Marier looked defeated for the first time in days. But the feeling wasn’t permanent – nor was it entirely unexpected.

Integrating medical relief work with homeopathy is an approach that’s only in its infancy.

Well it seems the Haitians are more sophisticated than one might think. After seeing two patients the line “melted away” once most of them realized he was not dispensing real medicine at all.  It’s worth noting that “Dr. Marier” is not a doctor at all – he’s not an MD, DDS or even DVM.   He’s a “naturopathic doctor,” which means he doesn’t have any training at all in any real kind of medicine.   If there’s one thing to be thankful for, it’s the fact that he’s the only one thus far to prey on the people of Haiti.

Some might be prone to write off this kind of fraud as harmless.  After all, homeopathic medicine doesn’t kill anyone directly and “naturalistic” remedies are only fatal on rare occasions.  However, it’s important to consider the broader implications.   For one thing, in a country like Haiti, resources are strained to the breaking point, with most avaliable personel working without sleep for days on end to try to treat the ill and rebuild vital infrastructure.   One thing that they DO NOT need is another western yuppie with nothing to contribute taking up valuable space aboard aircraft, drinking valuable water and using up food, electricity and other things that are plentiful and rare back home.

As he states on his blog:

Just finished eating some really yummy goat, chicken, and pork after a long bus drive from the Dominican Republic. We’re all still working to find our cohesiveness, but the 48 hours of travel just to get to this point has played a big factor. Despite some challenges, everyone’s spirits and demeanour have survived intact. We’re in Petionville, just outside of Port-au-Prince. In the morning we get on another bus and drive down to Jacmel, where we’ll set up camp and begin the medical relief work.

Jeez, I wonder how many people in the area were thankful to get half of an MRE to eat while he was eating “some really yummy goat, chicken, and pork.”

The real damage is what his quack medicine can do to the people of Haiti. The one supply that he mentions bringing, which might be of use is inter-venous vitamin-C. Vitamin C is crucial to the body’s ability to repair tissue, and those in Haiti who are deficient in it could experience problems healing or in the worst cases, scurvy. However, it’s of no use in those who already have sufficient amounts in their body. In either case, whether a person needs additional vitamin C to supplement a lacking diet is something a real doctor needs to determine and no person without proper training has any buisiness giving an IV to anyone.

This brand of medical fraud can also cause harm by displacing proper care. As he states in this blog entry:

After starting several IV’s for the overworked MD’s today, and administering homeopathic remedies to several children with scabies (Psorinum), I “set up shop” down in triage with my homeopathic remedies and a translator.

Scabies is a persistent and very unpleasant condition where the skin is invaded by a parasitic mite. These mites burrow into the skin and cause swelling, inflammation and itch. The condition compromises the skin’s ability to act as a barrier and therefore commonly leads to secondary infections that are much more serious than the initial condition. Considering the sanitation issues that follow in the wake of an earthquake, scabies can be a potentially dangerous condition to have.

There is one bright side to scabies, however. It is fairly easy to treat by modern medical standards. Permethrin, applied topically, is the preferred treatment, and can eliminate the infection in about a day. The symptoms will subside after the mites have been killed off. Other topical treatments exist as well, and in severe cases, an orally administered treatment Ivermectin is also effective, although it may take much longer to kill all the mites.

Homeopathic treatment, however, is never effective, and although there are various “natural” remedies that have been used to treat scabies, their effectiveness tends to be hit-or-miss compared to modern pharmaceuticals. Thus someone treated by a quack doctor could easily be left with the false belief that their condition had been treated, when it had really not. Since treatment does not generally relieve symptoms immediately, this person may return home believing that their problem had been cured and their symptoms would soon diminish, only to die of a fatal staph infection a few days later.

Some might also claim that people like Marier help, if only by providing a person to talk to or provide company to those with depression or PTSD.   My response to that is that while this may be the case, it does not justify the fact that they endanger lives and health through administration of fake medicine.   Right now, Haiti has a critical need for life saving medicine and anything that takes away from that is intolerable.   Certainly, there are those suffering from depression and anxiety due to the devastation of the region, but the mediate priority needs to be helping those with immediate life-threatening conditions and working to stop the spread of disease.  Without diminishing the suffering that psycological depression can cause, a severely depressed person is still a much lower priority than someone with severe crush injuries, loss of blood and a collapsed lung.

Denis Marier calls himself a “Humanitarian” but he’s anything but.  The only thing worse than a quack is one who will go so far as to defraud the most despite people in the world to further their own reputation.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that anyone who feels the need to put the title “humanitarian” on top of their blog to let everyone know how great they are is anything but. (It’s a bit like “Great Thinker” – real great thinkers don’t feel the need to constantly tell everyone that they are.)

Hopefully this fraud won’t have killed anyone by the time he leaves Haiti.

---

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Events, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

---

View blog reactions