Reality Bites

In a better sort of world, a book like Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations (Vintage; 285 pages) wouldn’t exist. For a start, it would have been a completed book: author John Diamond, a popular Times columnist and the husband of the TV culinary goddess Nigella Lawson, died of cancer in March after writing just six chapters of an “uncomplimentary view of complementary medicine.” That unfinished text — cut off, spookily, almost in midthought — is rounded out by an anthology of Diamond’s newspaper columns, which show off his first-class deadline wit. (A story about being forced by his Hassidic computer repairman to say the Shema is a classic of the columnists’ form.) Even Diamond’s accounts of life with cancer can be darkly funny as well as harrowing. But as with all such collections, those stories, written to be read on the Tube or at the lunch counter, can’t quite add up to a book you’re likely to read straight through.

No matter, because the first six chapters alone are worth the cover price. Diamond’s brutal debunking of alternative therapies such as homeopathy, reflexology and herbalism doesn’t dwell on the scientific particulars. But why should it? You could have read a thousand times — perhaps in magazines like this one — that there’s little or no scientific evidence for the promises made for many alternative therapies. And yet plenty of educated people regularly buy unproven “natural” remedies. (It’s a multi-billion-dollar, multinational industry.) Diamond instead carefully defuses the anti-intellectualism that makes it possible to ignore the good science that questions such cures. “[Science] isn’t one particular way of ascertaining a physical truth,” Diamond writes. “By definition it is the way of ascertaining physical truth.”

Such as the truth that painful chemo-therapy shrinks tumors, and happy thoughts and magic crystals don’t. In that better world, this wouldn’t need pointing out. But it does. All the more remarkable that the one saying so here had every reason to wish otherwise.