I read an article by Dr. Mehmet Oz from the Saturday Evening Post. It was entitled “The Healing Power of Energy.” In this article I feel Dr. Oz is using deductive reasoning. He points out that “In the West, we have adapted a biomedical understanding of illness.” He then infers that because of that, we tends to think that there is no other method with merit. If you can't prove it through research, don't bother with it.

It's interesting that he starts off the article with a personal experience of coming into the room of one of his patients, that he had just operated on, to find an energy healer working on him. He describes her appearance, leading the reader to think this lady must be, at best, eccentric, at worst, a lunatic. A surprising way to start for someone wanting to convince people they need to be more open to energy work.

He then continues throughout the article showing why the medical community needs to be more open towards alternative modalities, usually coming from the Far East, that deal with the body’s energies. To back this up, he refers to the Framingham study, one of the largest, and longest, studies on heart health. Despite everything that they have learned from the study, “half of the heart attacks in this country occur in individuals without traditional risk factors...”

He reassures his colleagues that he has not fallen off the deep end. He is a physician and proud of it. Then he starts asking a bunch of questions, trying to motivate people to take a look at their beliefs. He never makes any outlandish claims like energy medicine is the answer to all our health problems. He’s saying, “If we have all the answers, why do we still have so much that we don’t know and can’t fix?” Over and over he is saying, "Be open, be open. Be willing to look at something that truly might have some merit." In the end, he likens the argument over energy medicine to the argument over the reality of God. If one continues to search for solid, empirical evidence, they will be disappointed.

I think his thesis statement is that we need to be open to alternative health treatments, even though we can't look at them through the same biomedical eyes. He wants people to ask themselves what they are so afraid of. As far as questions from the opposition the only thing I can see is that they might say that what Dr Oz has suggested is simply a waste of time.