In-Depth Inquiry into an Anti-Cult Commission: The Harms of Façade Rationalism and of Scientism

In-Depth Inquiry into an Anti-Cult Commission: The Harms of Façade Rationalism and of Scientism

By the CICNS (January 2013)

Four months after its constitution, the Senate commission of inquiry into the influence of movements of a cult character in the field of health has achieved the “feat” of not having heard publicly and on video a single practitioner of the NCPTA (Non-conventional practices with a therapeutic aim) targeted by this inquiry. Should it turn out that its intention is to do so later, the fact of having invited in the first place only the cream of the little anti-cult world remains a problematic orientation. This state of affairs is all in all consistent with the theme of the inquiry and its title, which by themselves constitute an obvious bias.

The conduct of this commission illustrates the harms of an obtuse rationalist posture and of scientism in the conduct of public affairs.

The veneer of rationalism over human affects

Many participants in the commission of inquiry present themselves, in words and in deeds, as “rational” people: their remarks claim to be considered and reasoned; the unavoidable imperative of scientific proof in matters of health is recalled throughout the exchanges. Yet most are, probably like many of us, steered in large part by their affects, often unconsciously and, in the present case, by negative affects directed against the groups and practices targeted by this commission. The overall “rational posture” is only a false front, a screen for the multiple fears, frustrations and personal ambitions that come to the surface. A few examples:

Georges Fenech (former president of the MIVILUDES, see our commentary on his hearing): his rational posture consists in claiming to take up the defence of objective “victims” and in setting himself up as the enlightened defender of individual integrity. In fact, asserting without proof that 13 million people have been victims of dérives sectaires and are therefore victims of their own choice of life is an aggravated form of contempt for those citizens. Contempt is not a mark of intelligence or of rationality; it is a destructive affect.

Serge Blisko (new president of the MIVILUDES, see our commentary on his hearing): his verbal hesitations, his evasions before the many questions he cannot answer, contrast singularly with his peremptory assertions about cults invading the social fabric. A little attention is enough to see that the facts contradict the assertions of the MIVILUDES’s new president. To ignore the facts so patently is the opposite of an honest rational approach and the probable sign that other inner forces are at work.

Hervé Machi (secretary-general of the MIVILUDES, see our commentary on his hearing): he adopts the assured and trenchant tone of a person who knows what he is talking about. But what are the concrete elements behind this assurance? Is it the methodical and honest work of a magistrate? Or a series of hasty conflations allowing him to compare alternative medicine to mafia practices? Does wanting to “win” a public debate on the alleged dangerousness of cults by spreading disinformation in this way resemble rational argument? To ask the question is to answer it. What then is Hervé Machi’s true motive?

Alain Milon and Jacques Mézard (senators, respectively president and rapporteur of this commission of inquiry): the two senators question Serge Blisko on the number of minor victims of dérives sectaires. They obtain no coherent answer. Live on air, Georges Fenech admits to them that he has no statistical data to support the figure of 60,000 that he has nevertheless been broadcasting for more than six years across all the media. What inhibitions end up rendering the two senators completely toneless before the revelation of this systematic disinformation on the part of a senior civil servant attached to the Prime Minister?

Jean-Luc Harousseau (Haute Autorité de Santé): he confides that he does not know the subject of dérives sectaires. His work consists in assisting decision-making, and therefore in particular in weighing the pros and cons on each health question falling within his field of action. By what intellectual laziness, fear of shocking or fear of being disavowed does he come to adopt complaisantly the anxiety-inducing anti-cult theses shared by the members of the commission, after having in effect declared himself incompetent in the matter?

There is, in most of the interventions mentioned, a remarkable capacity to cover over real motivations with remarks that appear considered and detached. None of this is original. The philosopher Spinoza, in particular, described in detail the place of the affects in man’s life: “The nature of the feelings, their impulsive force and, conversely, the mind’s moderating power over them, no one, to my knowledge, has determined” (taken from “Of the origin and nature of the feelings”, a text in which he sets about disentangling this skein).

The postulate of rationality of many participants is all the more deceptive in that the inner landscape of the affects seems to lie fallow, for want of having been seriously visited. This commission is no exception. When, in a televised or radio debate, a participant attempts to question the deep motives of an opponent, it does not take long for him to be rebuffed in his pretension to “psychologise” the debate. Above all the exchanges must be left at the superficial and supposedly “rational” level of the intellect, for fear of polluting them with the more obscure motivations of one and another! To believe in this possible detachment, without serious ad hoc work, is an illusion.

The observation of the pre-eminence of the affects over many apparently rational arguments is not a judgement, nor the expression of an inevitability. It is quite possible that the participants in this commission, at least some of them, “sincerely” think what they say. But one expects a little more perspicacity from public officials. Namely: to investigate honestly their personal motivations, their affects, so visible in some cases, beyond surface sincerity, and then to observe more objectively the reality of the cult question, so as to avoid building slapdash public policies, discriminatory and sometimes tragic, once again on the basis of fears, frustrations or personal ambitions.

A scientific medicine to the point of scientism

Everyone, through his own experience, is in a position to admit that the process of healing has two components: the effectiveness of the care given and the state of mind of the patient, an expression which, it will be agreed, encompasses the spiritual dimension of each person, where applicable. The first component can be evaluated scientifically and statistically, the second to a lesser extent, since each human being has a different lived experience which escapes any “hard” science today, except for extremist materialists who would like to reduce the inner life to a succession of chemical processes, but who are far, very far from any credible theory relating to the nature and action of human consciousness. In any event, these two components exist and it is not possible to measure their relative share today. More and more patients expect a global, holistic accompaniment which is not reduced to a medical technique (see in particular “Sacrée médecine – Histoire et devenir d’un sanctuaire de la raison”, Jean Baubérot, Raphaël Liogier, Entrelacs).

Even the public health institution recognises this reality, but with a very restrictive nomenclature and practice. Agnès Buzyn, president of the INCa (Institut National du Cancer) and heard by the Senate, states: “It is accepted that supportive care which helps to take charge of the person in his globality is now an integral part of cancer treatment, but (…) one notices that the field of application of this supportive care is sometimes the object of certain drifts of interpretation: there are integrated into supportive care forms of medicine which are of the order of complementary medicine or even of alternative medicine”. She specifies what she means by supportive care: nutrition, dietetics, physiotherapy, psycho-oncology, management of pain and palliative care, social support where appropriate. The second category of so-called complementary medicine is accepted: “Acts of care which will not be opposed to conventional treatments (…), which do not endanger people”, such as sophrology, music therapy, but with reservations, for “it must all the same be borne in mind that these are not evaluated forms of medicine”. The third category, that of alternative medicine, is to be proscribed: “[Forms of] medicine which will be opposed to conventional medicine and which will endanger people either through delay in diagnosis or delay in treatment, or even contradictions owing to the side effects of treatments. The main problem is obviously alternative medicine, which for us is often medicine that falls within the framework of dérives sectaires”. No example belonging to this category is given by Agnès Buzyn.

The president of the INCa sums up perfectly the dilemma of the public health institution in observing that: “These (…) forms of medicine are all the same quite popular with patients. If one looks at complementary/alternative medicine as a whole, 75% of the population has recourse to it at least once in their life (…) and 30% of patients suffering from cancer, or perhaps even half (because some do not mention it to their doctor) will call on complementary or alternative treatments. So it represents a real public health issue.”. As to the reasons for which the 30% of cancer patients chose an alternative medicine, Agnès Buzyn specifies: “85% to better tolerate the treatments they are given; 27.5% to treat the cancer itself and therefore not in a complementary but indeed in an alternative way (…), which for us is a warning signal”.

The aforementioned nomenclature is a way of responding superficially to patients’ demand while claiming to protect them (which is laudable in itself) but also a method of excluding therapies which do not fit within current scientific paradigms. We do not identify the whole body of practitioners, whose diversity of viewpoints is assuredly great, with the health institution which adopts, unsurprisingly in France, a Jacobin mode of thought and functioning (with, for example, the definition of protocols applicable without possible discussion to all patients and an Ordre des médecins which decides without sharing on medical orthodoxy).

Conventional medicine (a very powerful lobby ever since Napoleon legislated on the illegal practice of medicine in 1803, at a time when medical practice itself resembled charlatanism — see Baubérot, Liogier, ibid.) does not seem ready to acknowledge — in the sense of a serious questioning and diversification of its lines of research — its very average level of effectiveness for certain pathologies, a denial which shifts its approach from scientific to scientistic. Failures are hidden beneath an aggressive marketing vaunting the state of the art and the progress of research (which is not to be denied in certain cases) and through appeals for public donations, most often in an emotional register (Telethon and the like). Moreover, this technicised so-called cutting-edge medicine can no longer be borne by any social security system, given its prohibitive cost.

In the matter of cancer, everyone can form his own opinion by counting, among those close to him, those who, suffering from cancer and conventionally treated, died of the disease well before a reasonable average age, and by assessing their quality of life during the treatment. In many cases, the observation is likely to be damning, even without denying some progress and the intention to do better (and this without speaking of deaths directly related to the taking of medicines, which fall within the quota of admissible losses, as in the army). In this observation, no criticism is made of the nursing staff, who are, most of the time, conscientious and devoted and try to bring the human element of which medical technique itself is often devoid.

Conventional medicine must broaden the spectrum of the forms of medicine it qualifies as “complementary”, without engulfing or denaturing them, but it must also accept innovative lines of research, even if they do not fit into the box “conforming to established paradigms”. In this respect, it is interesting to note the opinion of Ivan Krakowski, Director of the interdisciplinary supportive care service in oncology at the Centre Alexis Vautrin (CLCC of Nancy), heard by the senators: “The absence of proof is not the proof of the absence of effectiveness”. The difficulty of proving scientifically the effectiveness of a practice is of little importance if it produces results in certain patients. If prayer or meditation are effective for some, then they are, full stop (all the more so when, conversely, certain actors in the anti-cult struggle claim that their struggle would be justified “even if there were only one case”). It is unproductive and disrespectful to attempt to discredit these practices by qualifying them as “belief or superstition”. During the hearings, alternative therapies, designated as cult practices, were judged on several occasions to be without any therapeutic effectiveness (an assertion by Serge Blisko, for example); when results are nevertheless observable, some speak of the placebo effect. “The placebo effect” is the “scientific” label with which are classified a portion of the recoveries corresponding to no “active” medical act and therefore disturbing; it ought on the contrary to be a line of research for making progress on the second component of the healing process. Describing the placebo effect, Ivan Krakowski specifies: “It can be extremely powerful. In cancerology, it is quite frequent in therapeutic studies to observe a placebo effect of more than 60% even against entirely established therapies”.

A steamroller crushes those who try to bend the fixed course of things, like Professor Mirko Beljanski, designated as a “cult” all by himself by the public authorities on account of his avant-garde research on the treatment of cancer, authorities who launched a disproportionate and unworthy police raid on his home. More recently, Doctor Moulinier was sentenced to a ban on practising because he thinks it useful to adapt care protocols to each patient and to combine them with complementary medicine judged too alternative. The scientistic and commercial lobby defends itself tooth and nail.

Through the intermediary of the MIVILUDES, the public health authority has now found the best warhorse it could dream of: the anti-cult struggle, even if, very fortunately, one senses in a few of the health practitioners heard a certain prudence about adopting anti-cult rhetoric. Any therapeutic practice which departs from the beaten track may be declared cultic, without proof, and put out of a position to harm the monopoly of conventional medicine. According to Serge Blisko, it is the Ordre des médecins which communicated to the MIVILUDES the number of practitioners belonging to the “cult sphere”, despite that Order’s total incompetence to define what is or is not a dérive sectaire; one is requested to believe that the members of the Order used a proven “scientific” method to arrive at the number of about 3,000….

When it comes to evaluating dérives sectaires in the health field, the personnel of the domain, even among those most formatted by the MIVILUDES such as Agnès Buzyn (the INCa distributed several tens of thousands of copies, in partnership with the MIVILUDES, of a prevention leaflet against dérives sectaires), remain totally evasive. Questioned by Senator Stéphane Mazars on the disciplines most likely to give rise to unscrupulous practitioners, she replies: “As of today, I have no objective data to report to you. We have a few patient testimonies (…) but which are relatively unalarming, since there are very few of them all the same. (…) The problem is that I think the people who slide towards these alternative forms of medicine do not talk about it”. As for Professor Bernard Leclercq, Director-General of the Centre Oscar Lambret (CLCC of Lille), also heard, he specifies: “In 33 years of experience against cancer, I have never personally been directly confronted with a problem of dérives sectaires in the cancer treatment centres. There may have been some, but I did not see them; they were discreet and they did not touch me directly in my practice”.

This anti-cult rearguard action, retrograde and typically French, concerns, one must hope, fewer and fewer care staff who, on the ground, observe the inadequacies of conventional medicine (it is among this personnel that one observes a low vaccination rate, for example). It is with patients and their new expectations that they will be able to orient medical practice towards a more scientific approach (that is to say, one actually capable of calling hardened paradigms into question by examining innovative ideas) and a more holistic one (a blasphemous word in the scientistic world, commonly replaced by the less polemical expression “integrative medicine”) (see an Arte report on the subject).

It would not do, however, to leave the field too long to the apparatchiks of anti-cultism, given their capacity to do harm. That is the start of lucidity one awaits from the senators in their final report.