There Are Four Lights

I live in a small northern Ontario town and this was the view from our balcony the other day. Snow is nice, as long as you stay indoors looking out at it. We have much more snow now than what is in this picture. November is just the first month of snow, which will continue right on until March/April. Fortunately, in the middle of this northern Ontario winter I will be escaping all the snow for Long Beach, CA; I’ve been invited as a fellowship member to the TED 2009 conference. Lucky!

TED (Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual idea conference in California. Its moto is Ideas worth spreading. They chose 20 individuals to attend as fellowship members and I’m so excited to be one of them. I’ll be heading to LA for the first week in February, which surprisingly seems just around the corner. More info about TED can be found on their website here.

I have a member profile you can check out which includes some of my favourite TED talks. Each week day, a new video of a TED talk is posted and I’m pretty much addicted to it; I can’t wait to see who will be speaking at TED 2009. Here is one of my favourite talks, which is by Michael Shermer from TED 2006.

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If there was a prize for the pseudo-science, paranormal, or new age belief which was most harmful, most immoral, or most disgusting it would have to go to alternative medicine. No contest. Any faith based idea has the potential to be dangerous, but faith healing, cleverly marketed with the secular disguise of ‘alternative medicine’ seems to be the most successful, most deceptive, most dangerous, and especially the most profitable. I recently came across a preview for a movie promoting a form of this garbage, Gerson Therapy. The film, titled “The Beautiful Truth” (barf), is a perfect example of the bag of tricks these charlatans use to take advantage those made desperate by illness.

Gerson Therapy is a so-called alternative cancer treatment which uses “…organic foods, juicing, coffee enemas, detoxification and natural supplements to activate the body’s ability to heal itself”. Wow, even Oprah’s wacky Dr. Oz knows that detox diets don’t rid the body’s system of toxins. Diet has no effect on how effectively your body deals with toxins. Now, apparently, it’s supposed to cure cancer.

The movie trailer doesn’t explain what Gerson Therapy is, but it’s full of the typical jibber jabber nonsense of alternative medicine proponents. The most prevalent argument would seem to be that which claims drugs (all drugs?) don’t work and companies are only concerned with making money. I have several problems with this claim. The first would be the huge logical fallacy red flag-you cannot use a company’s motive for profit as evidence that their product doesn’t work. The validity of any treatment must be established through empirical data. Another problem of this argument is how a company is supposed to make huge profit from a product which doesn’t work. It seems we are supposed to believe in some sort of grand conspiracy where researchers, doctors, and medical experts all keep patients in the dark about the complete ineffectiveness of pharmaceuticals so they can scam everyone out of their money.

The idea that the entire pharmaceutical industry is a giant get-rich-quick scheme that the general public is unaware of is, frankly, ridiculous. Huge investments in decades of research are required to get just one drug to the stage where it can be evaluated for its effectiveness and safety. This is not an easy way to make a quick buck. This is where alternative medicine quacks become most infuriatingly deceptive; it is the alternative and natural health product industry which is cheaply and easily making its investors rich. Regulations, certifications, and basic upfront cost to produce these products and services are nearly nonexistent.  I could literally step outside to the nice little forested area across from my northern Ontario home, gather up random leafy-grassy-forest junk, put it through a blender and label it Aunt Sara’s All Natural Organic Energy Supplement and easily sell it. I don’t have to do any research, I don’t have to do expensive trials, and I don’t even have to prove it does anything. The same goes for most of the alternative service industry as well. No one is going to come arrest me if I practice reiki or homeopathy without a license. There is plenty of profit to be made in faith healing without the need to prove your product or service works.

A major red flag when listening to arguments, not just from pseudo-science, but just plain any kind of argument is when the proponent does nothing but attack conflicting arguments. Creationists don’t argue creationism or intelligent design, they argue against evolution. Natural/Organic food proponents don’t point out proven benefits of their products; they highlight fears of genetic modification. Alternative medicine has to attack real medicine because they don’t have any evidence of their own to promote. The major flaw in alternative medicine is that any treatment which can be proven to work as it claims (through controlled trials and proper double-blinded tests) then it becomes accepted as medicine. The requirement for treatments in the alternative health care industry is that they are methods which are unproven. This is not science based medicine; it is religion disguised as health care.

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This (first) manga break is of my absolute favourite manga series, NANA. The series creator is Ai Yazawa and it’s still ongoing and serialized in Cookie (a monthly manga magazine in Japan). NANA is a hugely popular shoujo series; Volume 19, released last May, broke 2008 sales record by selling 780 000 copies in one week (the previous record was held by Naruto Vol. 42, which sold 505 000 copies in the week of May 2^nd). The series gets its name from the two main characters; both named Nana, which means ‘seven’ in Japanese. The two girls end up living together in apartment 707, in Tokyo, and become good friends despite their opposite personalities.

One of the Nanas is the vocalist in a band called The Black Stones (or Blast). She nicknames the other Nana “Hachiko” which is the name of a famous loyal pet dog in Japan (and ‘hachi’ also means ‘eight’). Hachiko is your typical girly 20 year old who jumps from relationship to relationship and from one job to another. Among the many contrasts between the two is Hachi’s lack of focus and her seemingly endless boyfriend hopping, compared to Nana’s passion to be a singer and her history with the one man she loves.

Yazawa’s artwork is gorgeous-the details in the changing hair and clothing is wonderful and really suites each individual character. But what I most admire about Yazawa’s work is her writing; the story is a beautiful mix of fantasy (the glamour of famous musicians, dating a celebrity, plentiful designer fashion) and realism (falling out of love, leaving home, struggling to find your life’s focus). No matter what situation the characters are placed in, Yazawa makes it all seem believable. In some manga, sometimes it can seem like a character is making a certain choice solely because it serves the story-but in NANA, every character responds to the situations in a manner which is true to their personality. The interactions that go on between the various characters make you believe that they all really could be living out their lives this way, somewhere in Tokyo.

NANA is more mature than the typical shoujo series you might find licensed here in North America. Personally, I would consider NANA more of a “josei” manga-geared more towards young adults than teens. I can imagine American promoters comparing it to popular teen TV dramas like the O.C. or Dawson’s Creek to try and market to the audience of those kinds of shows, but I don’t think that comparison would do it justice. The story deals with breakups, cheating, drugs, pregnancy, and other familiar drama themes, but none of it feels like it’s been dumped in-nearly everything that occurs in the plot feels necessary to the story-everything feels natural and, again, believable.

NANA was licensed by Viz, here in the US and Canada, and was serialized in their Shojo Beat magazine. It was dropped from the magazine once the story started to outgrow the Shojo Beat age demographic with its increasingly mature content. Viz continues to release the series in graphic novel format, which currently runs to about Volume 14. An anime adaptation was produced and aired in Japan in 2006. The license for the anime has apparently been acquired by Viz, but I haven’t heard any recent news about when it will be released.

I don’t often get the chance to watch or read new anime and manga series, so most of my favourite series are from the late 90s. NANA is one exception. I know I’m not the only one who finds themselves re-reading older chapters and getting sucked in all over again. The balance, flow, and emotion in both artwork and story make NANA one of those great manga series that remind me of why I fell in love with this type of storytelling.

Sara drawn as a Yazawa character?

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