Visionary or Voodoo? - Page 15


For researchers like Mayberg, Amen is anathema--a leap-frogger to the nth degree. His disregard for professional politesse can make even his friends and defenders cringe. Jerry Rodos, a psychiatrist in the Chicago area, who regularly refers difficult patients for scans, remembers taking a younger colleague to hear him lecture. "We walked into the conference room, my friend took one look at the Amen concession--tapes and books and CDs, advertisements for his clinics, posters, etc.--and was completely turned off before he even sat down. I think Dan has done a lot of neat work, and what he is saying is very valuable, but he's not a traditionalist and hasn't spent a lot of effort trying to get refereed journals to review his material. If you have something important to say, you submit it to peer-reviewed journals, rather than just run off and start four clinics and write popular books about it. Dan Amen is a big promoter of Dan Amen, and that offends many of his colleagues."

Partly in response to critiques like this, even from allies, Amen has hired a statistician-researcher and is preparing several studies, including one on predicting treatment response in AD/HD patients based on their different scan subtypes. But Amen doesn't believe his opponents will come to like him anytime soon, no matter what kind of studies he publishes. "A friend of mine told me I was like somebody under an old Romanian curse--doomed to know something that's true, but nobody believes him," he says gloomily.

The Client's Experience

Meanwhile, anathema or not, Amen's clinics do 400 to 500 scans a month, and, according to follow-up questionnaires given one month and six months after treatment, 85 percent of this patients think they received "significant benefit" from the process. According to therapy researcher Jay Lebow, however, this isn't unusually high--about 90 percent of psychotherapy users report being satisfied with their treatment, which can simply mean they liked the therapist and felt understood and cared for.

At least some of Amen's patients, however, clearly feel that the experience transformed them, even saved their lives. Whole families get scanned, and then refer their friends and acquaintances and fellow church-members. Some of Amen's most convinced champions are evangelical Christians, who believe that Amen is doing God's work and want to help him do it. Linda and Gaylen Bronson, a California couple who are committed Christians, were so delighted with Amen's treatment of their family that they started the Recovery Assistants Foundation, a tax-exempt, charitable organization that helps people who couldn't otherwise afford it to get and pay for SPECT scans, therapy, and medications.

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