Albert Schweitzer and the Witch Doctor
A Parable
Albert Schweitzer was a musician, philosopher, theologian, and physician. In 1912, using his own money, he established a clinic in Lambaréné, Gabon, in western Africa. Within nine months, more than two thousands natives had come to see him. Schweitzer gave them quinine for malaria, digitalis for heart disease, and salvarsan—the first antibiotic—for syphilis. When patients came to him with strangulated hernias or abdominal tumors, he anesthetized them with chloroform and treated their pain with morphine. Albert Schweitzer brought modern medicine to a small part of Africa.
Toward the end of both of their lives, Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness, met Albert Schweitzer. “At the dinner table of the Schweitzer Hospital at Lambaréné,” wrote Cousins, “I had ventured the remark that local people were lucky to have access to the Schweitzer clinic instead of having to depend on witch-doctor supernaturalism. Dr. Schweitzer asked me how much I knew about witch doctors. I was trapped by my ignorance. The next day the great doctor took me to a nearby jungle clearing where he introduced me to an elderly witch doctor.”
“For the next two hours, we stood off to one side and watched,” recalled Cousins. “With some patients, the witch doctor merely put herbs in a brown paper bag and instructed the ill person in their use. With other patients, he gave no herbs but filled the air with incantations. A third category of patients he merely spoke to in a subdued voice and pointed to Dr. Schweitzer.” On the way back, Schweitzer interpreted what they had seen. The first group of patients had minor illnesses that would resolve on their own or for which modern medicine offered little. The second group had psychological problems treated with “African psychotherapy.” The third had massive hernias or extrauterine pregnancies or dislocated shoulders or tumors—diseases the witch doctor couldn’t treat—so he directed them to Dr. Schweitzer.
Schweitzer described the value of the witch doctor. “The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason the rest of us succeed,” he said. “Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.”
In Gabon, both Albert Schweitzer’s modern medicine and the witch doctor’s ancient medicine had their place. Schweitzer offered specific treatments for treatable diseases, and the witch doctor offered placebo medicine when nothing more was necessary or available. Both recognized the value of the other. Such is the case with today’s mainstream and alternative healers: both have their place. The problem comes when mainstream healers dismiss the placebo response as trivial or when alternative healers offer placebos instead of lifesaving medicines or charge an exorbitant price for their remedies or promote therapies as harmless when they’re not or encourage magical thinking and scientific denialism at a time when we can least afford it.
As consumers, we have certain responsibilities. If we’re going to make decisions about our health, we need to make sure we’re not influenced by the wrong things—specifically, that we don’t give alternative medicine a free pass because we’re fed up with conventional medicine; or buy products because we’re seduced by marketing terms such as natural, organic, and antioxidant; or give undeserved credence to celebrities; or make hasty, uneducated decisions because we’re desperate to do something, anything, to save ourselves and our children; or fall prey to healers whose charisma obscures the fact that their therapies are bogus. Rather, we need to focus on the quality of scientific studies. And where scientific studies don’t exist, we should insist that they be performed. If not, we’ll continue to be deceived by therapies whose claims are fanciful.
Making decisions about our health is an awesome responsibility. If we’re going to do it, we need to take it seriously. Otherwise we will violate the most basic principle of medicine: First, do no harm.