X-Message-Number: 2575
Subject: CRYONICS and Quackery
From:	 (Ben Best)
Date:	Wed, 26 Jan 1994 23:33:00 -0500


   Thomas Donaldson stated that cryonicists are not taken to be
crackpot with his statement: "Nor does anyone put us in the same
box as the faith healers, the homeopaths, the people with some
new cancer cure ... "

   Another view is suggested in the book A CONSUMER'S GUIDE TO
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE by Kurt Butler (published by PROMETHEUS BOOKS).
Butler quotes William T. Jarvis, Ph.D., President of The National
Council Against Health Fraud, as calling cryonics "quackery's last
shot at you." This quote of Jarvis was also quoted in TIME magazine
about 2 years ago -- and is, in fact, the only reference to cryonics
I have seen in TIME magazine in the last five years.

   Jarvis is also quoted as saying, "Cryonics might be a suitable
subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method
to the public is quackery." This is very close to the wording used
by British Columbia bureaucrats in defending their ban against cryonics
in that Canadian Province. Having spoken to David Oliver, the bureaucrat
who wrote Section 57 (the anti-cryonics clause), I know that his view
was that cryonics is quackery.

    Butler's comments following his quotation of Jarvis are of some
interest (poignantly THIS MONTH), so I will quote them:

      "Despite all this, promoters apparently do a brisk business.
  Sure, there's a scandal now and then about a head perhaps being
  removed before the person was quite dead, but liquid nitrogen vault
  are being contracted for at a steady clip. People and their estates
  are paying to have their head or body maintained reasonably intact
  (can a severed head ever be reasonably intact?) until the Scientific
  Millenium arrivea and the dead are made to live again. Not
  surprisingly, the center of cryonics is southern California, a
  significant consolation should the Great California Earthquake
  finally hit."

   William Jarvis himself lives in Southern California, not far from
Alcor. He is a Professor at the School of Medicine at Loma Linda
University. His NCAHF Newsletter is also published in Loma Linda
($15/year from P.O.Box 1276; Loma Linda, Calif. 92354). I have
subscribed to Jarvis' newsletter and I find the man reprehensible.
He is a Seventh Day Adventist -- an authority addict for God and the
State. "Power to the FDA" is his banner, or perhaps, "FDA Knows Best".
Anybody who thinks differently than the FDA is by definition a
"quack". I have little use for people whose guide to Truth and Justice
is Authority.

                     -- Ben Best (ben.best%)

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