In a development that has sent the British medical establishment into a paroxysm of spluttering indignation, a self-styled ‘Liver Doctor’ in India has become a global sensation, peddling a concoction of dubious herbs and unlicensed bravado that has somehow managed to upstage the hallowed halls of Harley Street. My own liver, pickled in gin for decades, quivers with a sort of jealous recognition. The man in question, one Dr.
B. S. Rawal (the initials stand for ‘Barely Scientific’, I suspect), has amassed a following that would make any influencer weep into their green juice.
His clinic, a glorified shack on the outskirts of Jaipur, offers a ‘miracle cure’ for cirrhosis that involves a lot of beetroot juice, chanting, and a plausible denial of all evidence. The nation is divided: half the population hails him as a saint, the other half as a charlatan. Meanwhile, the British Medical Journal has issued a statement so drenched in passive-aggressive fury that it could pickle a cucumber.
‘We note with concern the proliferation of unsubstantiated claims,’ they intone, as if their own record on treating the human body with anything other than expensive placebos was spotless. I, for one, am delighted. At last, the pretension of Western medicine has been given a run for its money by a man who probably sells snake oil on the side.
The sheer audacity, the pin-sharp irreverence, the glorious lack of any regulatory oversight: it is a parody of medicine, and it is magnificent. Imagine it: a nation of patients, their livers glistening with hope, queuing for hours to see a man whose primary qualification appears to be a certificate of attendance at a weekend seminar on ‘Holistic Healing’. The British response, predictably, has been a snort of derision followed by a flurry of letters to the Times.
'This is what happens when you let the colonies get above themselves,' harrumphed one retired surgeon in Tunbridge Wells. 'They start believing their own press releases.' But the Liver Doctor’s followers are unswayed.
'He cured my uncle of jaundice with a single carrot,' a devotee told me, her eyes shining with the light of the truly deluded. 'The British doctors gave him pills that made him vomit.' And there, in a nutshell, is the conundrum.
Pills that make you vomit, versus a carrot that might not do anything at all. Which is the greater sham? I am not a medical man, but I know a metaphor when I see one.
This Liver Doctor, this magnificent fraud, has exposed the fragile ego of Western medicine. For decades, we have been told that our system is the best, the most evidence-based, the one true path. But here is a man in a smock offering a cure for the incurable, and the masses are lapping it up.
Is it the placebo effect? Of course it is. But the placebo effect is a genuine phenomenon, and our precious NHS has never managed to bottle it.
The Liver Doctor has. He sells hope, and hope, unlike a liver, is a renewable resource. So let the dividing lines be drawn.
On one side, the sober rationalists clutching their NICE guidelines. On the other, the rainbow coalition of the desperate and the hopeful. I know which side I’d rather be on.
At least the drinks are cheaper.
