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Catholic Exorcisms Are Gaining Popularity in the U.S. - The Atlantic
American Exorcism
Priests are elding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a
centuries-old practice is nding new footing in the modern world.
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Clay Rodery
Story by Mike Mariani
L
DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE
RELIGION
to be having a panic attack. It was March of 2016, and Louisa, a 33year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, was having a regular weekly session with her chemicaldependency counselor in Tacoma, Washington.
Louisa had recently separated from her husband, Steven. When the counselor asked about her marriage,
she said she wasn’t ready to talk about it. The counselor pressed, and again Louisa demurred. Eventually
the conversation grew tense, and Louisa started to hyperventilate, a common symptom of a panic attack.
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The counselor rushed down the hall to get Louisa’s therapist, Amy Harp. Together they moved Louisa to
Harp’s office, where they felt they could better calm her. But once Louisa was there, Harp recalls, her
demeanor transformed. Normally friendly and open, she started screaming and pulling out clumps of her
hair. She growled and glared. Her head flailed from side to side, cocking back at odd angles. In jumbled
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bursts, she muttered about good and evil, God and the devil. She told the counselors that no one there
could save “Louisa.”
According to Harp, Louisa seemed to vacillate between this unhinged state and her normal self. One
minute she would snarl and bare her teeth, and the next she would beg for help. “It definitely had this
appearance where she was fighting within herself,” Harp told me.
Harp had never seen this kind of behavior before, and wasn’t sure what to do. But she knew that Louisa
had occasionally experienced episodes in which she felt something indescribably dark overtake her, and
that she would read scripture to beat back these states. “You need to read Bible verses,” Harp said. Her
bearing still frantic, Louisa picked up her smartphone and began looking up passages. As she read, she
started to calm down. Her flailing diminished; her frenzied affect ebbed. She vomited in a trash bin, and
after that she was her old self again, full of apologies, her eyes wet, her face red.
The encounter left Harp baffled about what she’d just witnessed. For Louisa it had a more profound
effect, prompting a search for answers that would ultimately lead her away from modern medicine and its
well-worn paths for mental-health treatment, and toward the older, more ritualized remedies of her
Catholic faith.
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Louisa Muskovits experienced a series of troubling episodes that her therapists couldn’t explain. These incidents led her to seek
spiritual help. (Ian Allen)
T
demons exist—and that they exist to harass, derange, and smite human
beings—stretches back as far as religion itself. In ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonian priests
performed exorcisms by casting wax figurines of demons into a fire. The Hindu Vedas, thought to
have been written between 1500 and 500 .., refer to supernatural beings—known as asuras, but largely
understood today as demons—that challenge the gods and sabotage human affairs. For the ancient
Greeks, too, demonlike creatures lurked on the shadowy fringes of the human world.
But far from being confined to a past of Demiurges and evil eyes, belief in demonic possession is
widespread in the United States today. Polls conducted in recent decades by Gallup and the data firm
YouGov suggest that roughly half of Americans believe demonic possession is real. The percentage who
believe in the devil is even higher, and in fact has been growing: Gallup polls show that the number rose
from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007.
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The official exorcist for Indianapolis has received 1,700
requests so far in 2018.
Perhaps as a result, demand for exorcisms—the Catholic Church’s antidote to demonic possession—seems
to be growing as well. Though the Church does not keep official statistics, the exorcists I interviewed for
this article attest to fielding more pleas for help every year.
Father Vincent Lampert, the official exorcist for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, told me in early October
that he’d received 1,700 phone or email requests for exorcisms in 2018, by far the most he’s ever gotten in
one year. Father Gary Thomas—a priest whose training as an exorcist in Rome was documented in The
Rite, a book published in 2009 and made into a movie in 2011—said that he gets at least a dozen requests
a week. Several other priests reported that without support from church staff and volunteers, their
exorcism ministries would quickly swallow up their entire weekly schedules.
The Church has been training new exorcists in Chicago, Rome, and Manila. Thomas told me that in
2011 the U.S. had fewer than 15 known Catholic exorcists. Today, he said, there are well over 100. Other
exorcists I spoke with put the number between 70 and 100. (Again, no official statistics exist, and most
dioceses conceal the identity of their appointed exorcist, to avoid unwanted attention.)
In October of last year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had Exorcisms and Related Supplications
—a handbook containing the rite of exorcism—translated into English. The rite had been updated in
1998 and again a few years later, but this was the first time it was issued in English since it had been
standardized in 1614. “There’s been a whole reclaiming of a ministry that the Church had set aside,” one
exorcist from a midwestern diocese told me.
The inescapable question is: Why? Or rather: Why now? Why, in our modern age, are so many people
turning to the Church for help in banishing incorporeal fiends from their body? And what does this
resurgent interest tell us about the figurative demons tormenting contemporary society?
I
, a German psychologist named Traugott Oesterreich collected historical eyewitness accounts
in his book Possession: Demoniacal and Other. One incident that crops up again and again involves a
young woman named Magdalene in Orlach, Germany. Born into a family of peasant farmers,
Magdalene was an industrious child, “threshing, hemp-beating, and mowing” from dawn until after dusk.
Late in the winter of 1831, Magdalene began seeing strange things in the barn where she tended cows. By
the following year, she was being tormented by voices, sensations of physical assault, and, according to
witnesses, spontaneous outbursts of flames.
That summer, Magdalene complained of a spirit that had “flown upon her, pressed her down, and
endeavored to throttle her.” Soon, she would fall victim to full possessions: An entity she referred to as the
“Black One” would descend and supplant her consciousness with its own. “In the midst of her work she
sees him in human form (a masculine shape in a frock, as if issuing from a dark cloud; she can never
clearly describe his face) coming towards her,” a contemporary observer wrote. “Then she sees him
approach, always from the left side, feels as it were a cold hand which seizes the back of her neck, and in
this way he enters into her.”
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One witness to Magdalene’s possessions was dumbfounded. “The transformation of personality is
absolutely marvelous,” he wrote.
The girl loses consciousness, her ego disappears, or rather withdraws to make way for a fresh
one. Another mind has now taken possession of this organism, of these sensory organs, of
these nerves and muscles, speaks with this throat, thinks with these cerebral nerves, and that
in so powerful a manner that the half of the organism is, as it were, paralyzed.
The case studies Oesterreich collected served as one of the chief inspirations for William Peter Blatty’s
1971 novel, The Exorcist, which was adapted into the 1973 horror film of the same name—it was
nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and is considered by many to be one of the most frightening films
ever made.
Another inspiration for The Exorcist was the 1949 case of a teenage boy known by the pseudonym
“Roland Doe.” He was an only child who developed a strong attachment to his aunt, a spiritualist who
showed him how to use a Ouija board. After she died, Roland and his parents reported strange
phenomena in their house—furniture moving on its own, scratching noises coming from Roland’s
mattress, objects levitating. The paranormal occurrences, Roland’s parents observed, always seemed to
happen around their son. According to some accounts, a priest conducted an exorcism on Roland at
Georgetown University Hospital, a Jesuit institution in D.C., during which the boy managed to snap off a
bedspring from underneath his mattress and use it to slash the priest’s arm.
Roland and his parents eventually left their home in Maryland to stay with extended family in St. Louis.
There, priests carried out at least 20 exorcisms over the course of a month. Witnesses claimed that Roland
spoke in a deep, unrecognizable voice and spouted Latin phrases he’d never learned. He reportedly
vomited so profusely that the exorcist performing the rite had to wear a raincoat, and he fought so
violently that 10 people were required to hold him down. One of the priests said that at a certain point he
saw the word hell appear as though etched into Roland’s flesh.
In April 1949, several hours into an exorcism, Roland finally surfaced from his trancelike state. “He’s
gone,” Roland told the priests. Several researchers have since cast doubt on whether anything supernatural
took place during the exorcisms, but none has been able to definitively contradict the priests’ accounts.
Part of The Exorcist’s appeal may have been the faint but unmistakable sense that it was drawn from real
events. One Catholic exorcist I spoke with who was around for the film’s release believes that its success
revealed a latent aspect of the American character. “It confirmed something deep in the popular
imagination,” the priest, who asked that I not use his name so as to keep his identity as an exorcist private,
told me. “Very visceral, very irrational, beyond science, far buried underneath medicine and psychology:
this huge fear that these things are true.”
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Louisa’s grandmother, who was an American Indian and a devout Catholic, warned her about evil spirits. (Ian Allen)
L
’ had started long before that late-winter session with her chemical-dependency
counselor. In 2009, at age 26, she’d had an experience in the middle of the night that had left her
badly shaken. She was living in Orlando with Steven, and she’d just fallen asleep. Louisa had
recently given birth to their first child, a son, who was tucked between his parents in bed. At one point
during the night, she awoke and found herself paralyzed. “There was something holding me down,” she
remembers. “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to die.” She desperately
wanted to wake up Steven, but her body was inert, pinned to the mattress. All she could move were her
eyes, and they darted around the room in horror.
When Louisa told friends and family about the episode, most shrugged it off. Some suggested that it
might have been a lingering effect of having just undergone a strenuous delivery (she had needed a
cesarean section). Louisa decided they were probably right.
In 2011, she was finishing up her undergraduate degree in women’s studies at Washington State
University. For a required internship that fall, she chose to travel to Kathmandu, Nepal, to work for an
organization that provides aid to impoverished women and children in the region.
After a month in Kathmandu, Louisa became infected with E. coli and had to be hospitalized for two
days. When she was discharged, she debated flying home right away. She’d completed her internship, but
her scheduled flight wasn’t for another four weeks. She’d been looking forward to making the famous
Annapurna Base Camp trek. But now she was drained and weary of her surroundings. The other interns
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had left the apartment complex where she was staying, and the city’s streets had been shut down because
of political protests.
The night after she left the hospital, Louisa locked the door to her apartment, secured the window with a
wooden bar, and went to bed. As Louisa tells it, she awoke in the darkness to the sound of someone’s
breathing. It seemed close: She could feel the hot exhales on the back of her right ear and her neck. There’s
no way anybody could get into the room, she thought, lying motionless in her sleeping bag. How is this
possible?
Thoughts of evil spirits rushed to Louisa’s mind. Her grandmother, who was both an American Indian and
a devout Catholic, had warned her about them. If Louisa ever encountered evil spirits, her grandmother
had told her, she should do her best to ignore them, because they feed on attention. Louisa tried, but the
breathing continued, a heavy, rhythmic rasp. Then, after a minute or so, she felt a hand brush against her
collarbone.
At that sensation, which to this day she cannot account for, Louisa leapt out of her sleeping bag and ran
to turn on the light. She swears that as soon as she flipped the switch, she heard a pack of stray dogs break
out in wild yelps. By dawn Louisa had cleared out, walking several miles to the U.S. Embassy in
Kathmandu. She took the next flight back to Orlando.
Louisa had yet another incident in 2013, just after giving birth to her second child, a daughter. This
episode was more like the first—she woke up abruptly, only to find her body locked in place—but with
the added shock of what seemed to be visual hallucinations, including one of a giant spider crawling into
her bedroom. Louisa was so jolted that she barely ate or slept for three days. “I didn’t feel safe,” she said. “I
felt violated.”
She’d been seeing a psychiatrist in Orlando. “This is the third time this has happened,” Louisa remembers
telling her. “Am I crazy?” The doctor flashed a look of surprise but offered no satisfying insights. So
Louisa turned to the internet.
Sleep paralysis seemed like a promising explanation. A phenomenon in which sufferers move too quickly
in and out of sleep for the body to keep up, sleep paralysis causes a person’s mind to wake up before
the body can shake off the effects of sleep. Hovering near full consciousness, the person can experience
paralysis and hallucinations.
But Louisa didn’t think this could account for the hand on her collarbone, which she swore she’d felt
while she was completely awake. She started to wonder whether something was pursuing her. Amid
consuming fear, she waded into some darker internet waters: elaborate descriptions and YouTube
testimonials of people who claimed that a demon or some other evil entity had dragged them down to
hell. She pored over artists’ renderings of hell—naked bodies writhing like snakes, being consumed by
orange flames. “I became obsessed with this topic,” she told me.
On the Sunday after her third incident, in the grips of these new fears, Louisa attended Mass in Orlando,
at Saint James Cathedral. After the service, she recounted all three of her experiences to the priest, who
immediately asked whether she’d ever dabbled in the occult. When she told him that she had used a Ouija
board after her grandfather had passed away a couple of years earlier, he told her to get rid of it, along
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with anything else that could be construed as occult: tarot cards, amulets, pagan symbols, even healing
crystals and birthstones. Any of these things, he told her, could serve as a doorway for a demon.
I
some Catholics to learn just how literally the modern Church interprets Satan and his
army of demons. While many people today understand the devil as a metaphor for sin, temptation,
and unresolvable evil in the world, the pope consistently repudiates such allegorical readings.
In sermons, interviews, and occasionally in tweets, Pope Francis has declared that Satan—whom he has
referred to as Beelzebub, the Seducer, and the Great Dragon—is a literal being devoted to deceiving and
debasing humans. In an apostolic exhortation released in April, he wrote, “We should not think of the
devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea,” but rather as a “personal being
who assails us.”
Exorcisms also occur in some Protestant and nondenominational Churches, but the Catholic Church has
the most formal, rigorous, and long-standing tradition. The Church sees the influence that demons and
their leader, the devil, can have on human beings as existing on a spectrum. Demonic oppression—in
which a demon pressures a person to accept evil—lies on one end. Demonic possession—in which one or
more demons seize control of a person’s body and speak through that person—lies on the other end.
Catholic priests use a process called discernment to determine whether they’re dealing with a genuine case
of possession. In a crucial step, the person requesting an exorcism must undergo a psychiatric evaluation
with a mental-health professional. The vast majority of cases end there, as many of the individuals
claiming possession are found to be suffering from psychiatric issues such as schizophrenia or a
dissociative disorder, or to have recently gone off psychotropic medication.
Father Thomas said that as many as 80 percent of the
people who come to him seeking an exorcism are sexualabuse survivors.
For some, being told they do not suffer from demonic possession can be a letdown. Father Vincent
Lampert, the exorcist from Indianapolis, remembered a young man who came to him seeking an exorcism
but was told he was experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. “You can tell me that I’m schizophrenic, but
you can’t tell me why,” Lampert recalled the young man saying. “If it’s demonic, at least I have my why.”
If neither the mental-health evaluation nor a subsequent physical exam turns up a standard explanation
for the person’s affliction, the priest starts to take the case more seriously. At this point he may begin
looking for what the Church considers the classic signs of demonic possession: facility in a language the
person has never learned; physical strength beyond his or her age or condition; access to secret knowledge;
and a vehement aversion to God and sacred objects, including crucifixes and holy water.
Only a very small number of exorcism requests make it through the discernment process. The Catholic
exorcists I interviewed—each with more than a decade of experience in the role—had worked on only a
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handful of cases deemed to be true possession. “The Church wants to tread lightly and be skeptical” when
examining possible cases of demonic possession, Lampert said, and thus treats exorcism “like a nuclear
weapon”—a countermeasure that is important to have in the arsenal but that should be used only when
no other explanation can be found.
The ritual begins with the exorcist, who is typically assisted by several people, sprinkling holy water on the
possessed person. The exorcist makes the sign of the cross and kneels to recite the Litany of the Saints,
followed by several readings of scripture. He then addresses the demon or demons, establishing the ground
rules they must abide by: to reveal themselves when called, give their names when asked to identify
themselves, and leave when dismissed. Because the exorcist is working with the full authority of God and
Jesus Christ, Catholic doctrine stipulates, the demons have no choice but to obey.
At the rite’s climax, sometimes an hour or more into the ritual, the exorcist calls on the devil directly: “I
cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every Satanic power of the enemy, every specter from hell, and all
your fell companions.” Sessions typically end with a closing prayer and a plan to continue. For those few
people the Church believes are truly possessed, a half-dozen or more exorcisms may be carried out before
the priest is confident that the demons have been fully expelled.
A
, in order to take possession of a person in the first place,
demons rely on doorways—what the priest in Orlando warned Louisa about. These can include
things like habitual sin and family curses—in which an act of violence or iniquity committed by
one generation manifests itself in subsequent generations. But the priests I spoke with kept coming back,
over and over, to two particular doorways.
Nearly every Catholic exorcist I spoke with cited a history of abuse—in particular, sexual abuse—as a
major doorway for demons. Thomas said that as many as 80 percent of the people who come to him
seeking an exorcism are sexual-abuse survivors. According to these priests, sexual abuse is so traumatic that
it creates a kind of “soul wound,” as Thomas put it, that makes a person more vulnerable to demons.
The exorcists—to be clear—aren’t saying sexual abuse torments people to such an extent that they come to
believe they’re possessed; the exorcists contend that abuse fosters the conditions for actual demonic
possession to take hold. But from a secular standpoint, the link to sexual abuse helps explain why
someone might become convinced that he or she is being menaced by something sinister and
overpowering.
The correlation with abuse struck me as eerie, given the scandals that have rocked the Church. But it
doesn’t seem to answer the “why now?” question behind exorcism’s comeback; no evidence exists to
suggest that child abuse has increased. The second doorway—an interest in the occult—might offer at
least a partial explanation.
Most of the exorcists I interviewed said they believed that demonic possession was becoming more
common—and they cited a resurgence in magic, divination, witchcraft, and attempts to communicate
with the dead as a primary cause. According to Catholic teaching, engaging with the occult involves
accessing parts of the spiritual realm that may be inhabited by demonic forces. “Those practices become
the engine that allows the demon to come in,” Thomas said.
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In recent years, journalists and academics have documented a renewed interest in magic, astrology, and
witchcraft, primarily among Millennials. “The occult is a substitution for God,” Thomas said. “People
want to take shortcuts, and the occult is all about power and knowledge.” One exorcist pointed to Harry
Potter. The books and films “disarmed Americans from thinking that all magic is darkness,” he said.
After listening to the priests and poring over news articles, I started to wonder whether the two trends—
belief in the occult and the rising demand for Catholic exorcisms—might have the same underlying cause.
So many modern social ills feel dark and menacing and beyond human control: the opioid epidemic, the
permanent loss of blue-collar jobs, blighted communities that breed alienation and dread. Maybe these
crises have led people to believe that other, more preternatural, forces are at work.
But when I floated this theory with historians of religion, they offered different explanations. A few
mentioned Pope Francis’s influence, as well as that of Pope John Paul II, who brought renewed attention
to the exorcism rite when he had it updated in 1998. But more described how, during periods when the
influence of organized religions ebbs, people seek spiritual fulfillment through the occult. “As people’s
participation in orthodox Christianity declines,” said Carlos Eire, a historian at Yale specializing in the
early modern period, “there’s always been a surge in interest in the occult and the demonic.” He said that
today we’re seeing a “hunger for contact with the supernatural.”
Adam Jortner, an expert on American religious history at Auburn University, agreed. “When the influence
of the major institutional Churches is curbed,” he said, people “begin to look for their own answers.” And
at the same time that there has been a rebirth in magical thinking, Jortner added, American culture has
become steeped in movies, TV shows, and other media about demons and demonic possession.
Today’s increased willingness to believe in the paranormal, then, seems to have begun as a response to
secularization before spreading through the culture and landing back on the Church’s doorstep—in the
form of people seeking salvation from demons through the Catholic faith’s most mystical ritual.
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Louisa sought help from a priest at Saint Stephen the Martyr Church in Renton, Washington. (Ian Allen)
W
talking with Louisa, she recounted the three nighttime episodes in great
detail, giving me the impression that they were the only precursors to the incident in Amy
Harp’s office. But just after my visit to Tacoma in March, I spoke by phone with Steven, with
whom Louisa had recently reconciled, and he told me that she had been suffering for years from daytime
episodes, too. The incidents in the middle of the night frightened Louisa more and felt, to her, more
supernatural, but Steven found these daytime experiences much harder to explain.
One of these episodes occurred on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2014. Louisa had followed the
instructions of the priest at Saint James Cathedral, throwing out her Ouija board and some healing
crystals. She and Steven had moved back to Washington State with their two children, hoping that
proximity to family and friends would do her good. They settled into a routine—Steven worked at a
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nearby warehouse; Louisa looked after the children—and for a while, Louisa all but forgot the nighttime
incidents in Orlando.
When Steven first started witnessing Louisa’s episodes, he
assumed they were symptoms of a psychiatric disorder.
On that November Saturday in 2014, Louisa spent a few hours at a friend’s house in Tacoma. She came
home in the early evening and spent some time upstairs in her bedroom. She eventually returned to the
living room and spoke briefly with Steven. Then she fell silent. When she began talking again, a new
persona emerged. Normally an affable, meandering conversationalist, Louisa assumed a slow, measured
tone.
Steven had seen these transformations before, at least half a dozen times during the decade or so he’d
known Louisa, who could never remember them afterward. Recognizing the signs of what was happening,
he told me, he grabbed his tablet and began filming.
The footage is dark and the sound quality poor. The camera is pointed directly at Louisa. The video lasts
for about 20 minutes. “You humans have your own sense of time,” Louisa tells Steven at one point. “I
have plenty of time. I have all the time in the world.” She then shifts into a staccato whisper. “It’s your
wife I want,” she says, “not only her body, but her soul.” As she speaks, she jerks her head from side to
side, at first quickly, like a marionette, then slowly, like a viper swaying to the sounds of a snake charmer’s
pungi.
Halfway through the video, Louisa leans toward Steven and freezes, her face just a few inches from his.
“God can’t save her,” she tells him. “Do you understand that? She’s mine.” After a period of tense silence,
she suddenly arches her spine, and her face goes through a series of contortions.
As I watched, I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. The grating static and long, empty silences
lent an air of both amateurism and authenticity—I didn’t get the feeling that the video had been faked.
All I could settle on, though, was that the camera had captured Louisa in some kind of dissociative state in
which her emergent identity believed itself to be inhuman.
When Steven first started witnessing these episodes, he assumed they were symptoms of a psychiatric
disorder. Louisa certainly had had her share of struggles: In addition to these unexplained incidents, she
also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had a history of alcohol abuse. But Steven changed
his mind when, he claims, strange things began happening alongside Louisa’s episodes—electronic devices
abruptly turning on, lights he was sure were broken suddenly illuminating. The things he’s seen since
knowing Louisa, he told me, “disturb your reality.”
Wynonna Gehrke, who became close friends with Louisa at Washington State University, recalls
witnessing something similar. One night, they were hanging out at Gehrke’s house along with another
friend when Louisa slipped into a persona her friends didn’t recognize. The emergent identity told them it
was a demon that wanted to hurt Louisa. “Her facial expression,” Gehrke told me—“it didn’t seem like
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her. It creeped me out so bad.” Fearing for both her own safety and Louisa’s, Gehrke wrestled her friend to
the ground and eventually managed to calm her. She gave Louisa her bed that night, and she slept on the
couch.
O
, in late March, I made plans to meet Louisa at Saint Stephen the
Martyr, a Catholic church in Renton, Washington. It was Palm Sunday, and parishioners began
pouring in long before the start of the 8:30 Mass. I found a seat in one of the back pews and waited
for Louisa.
Midway through the service, I felt a hand brush my shoulder. It was Louisa. She’d arrived late and was
listening to the Mass from the foyer with her third child, a 1-year-old daughter.
A few minutes later I slipped out to join them. Louisa pushed the baby back and forth in a stroller while
her eyes strained toward the altar. She’d told me that the Catholic churches she’d spent time in as a child
had always been a source of calm for her—the readings, rituals, and silent prayer ineffably soothing.
Although this wasn’t the church she regularly attended, she knew the priest, Father Ed White, well.
After her experience with her chemical-dependency counselor in 2016, she’d become convinced that she
was being harassed by a demon and had started looking for a Catholic exorcist. A woman she’d met online
suggested she contact White. He wasn’t the designated exorcist for the Archdiocese of Seattle, but he had
experience in deliverance ministry—the work of helping people overcome different kinds of spiritual
difficulties through prayer.
In his first session with Louisa, in early 2017, White began by encouraging her to discuss the problems
she was experiencing. He then left for a few minutes, returning with the purple stole around his neck that
priests wear for both confessions and exorcisms. At that point the session took on the more structured feel
of a Christian ritual.
In his deliverance ministry, White often asks the person he’s counseling to renounce evil spirits. But when
he gave Louisa a piece of paper with renunciation prayers to recite, she froze. Struggling to read the words
in front of her, she began moaning and then dry-heaving. Moments later, she slipped into guttural
babbling.
Louisa’s upper body began contorting, her neck swinging at unnatural angles. White remembers her
appearing as though she was in agony. “It didn’t strike me as voluntary or concocted,” he told me. At one
point while he was praying aloud, she broke out in hysterical laughter.
After the first session, White considered starting the discernment protocol for an exorcism. He invited
Louisa back for a second session, which went more smoothly. The two talked and prayed, and Louisa read
the renunciation prayers without a problem. “Because I saw progress with what I was doing,” White told
me, “I thought it was debatable as to whether she needed an exorcist.” Eventually, because she seemed to
be responding to the prayers, White made the determination that Louisa’s case was one of demonic
oppression, not possession. She would not have an exorcism.
A
, at her home in Tacoma, a two-story clapboard house 10 minutes from the
Puget Sound, where she described the larger arc of her life and the torments she’d endured.
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Louisa’s parents separated when she was 3 years old. Her mother eventually remarried and settled with
Louisa and her older brother in Fife, a small city just east of Tacoma. Louisa’s childhood and adolescence
were marked by abuse: She was molested by a family member, which has caused lifelong post-traumatic
stress. She still has nightmares about the experience. “It’s like I’m back there again,” she said. “Thirty years
ago, all over again. And then I wake up and I’m like, I’m okay. I’m not there.” But the dreams are saturated
with the same sense of helpless dread that pervaded her childhood, which she compares to being “in hell,
almost.”
As we talked, the baby, quietly tucked in the crook of Louisa’s arm, fell asleep. With her other hand,
Louisa dabbed her eyes. To this day, specific triggers—including certain music genres and foods—will
send her into a gale of rage and despair. “Walking by a store and it’s playing ’60s music, like Beach Boys or
something, I would lose it,” she said. Hamburger Helper, too, has permanently absorbed some residue of
her abuse: She thinks her abuser must have made it shortly before or after a molestation episode.
Some abused children are subjected to such agonizing experiences that they adopt a coping mechanism in
which they force themselves into a kind of out-of-body experience. As they mature, this extreme
psychological measure develops into a disorder that may manifest unpredictably. “There is a high
prevalence of childhood abuse of different kinds with dissociative disorders,” Roberto Lewis-Fernández, a
Columbia University psychiatry professor who studies dissociation, told me. In certain countries,
including the U.S., Lewis-Fernández explained, the prevalence of physical and sexual abuse among people
with a dissociative disorder is particularly pronounced.
Several psychiatrists I’ve asked about Louisa’s case felt that some type of dissociative disorder—whether
dissociative identity disorder or a subtype linked to PTSD—could be a plausible clinical explanation for
what has been happening to her. But Amy Harp, Louisa’s former therapist, was less certain. “I see a lot of
trauma, and it manifests in a lot of different ways,” she told me. Louisa’s, though, was “the most extreme
I’ve ever seen.” She ultimately found Louisa’s episodes ambiguous—“possibly trauma, possibly something
else.”
Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of Columbia’s psychiatry department, told me that if you conducted a
survey of the population seeking exorcisms, a great majority would likely suffer from a known psychiatric
condition, and dissociative identity disorder would be “at the top of that group of conditions.” But
Lieberman also acknowledged the possibility that a small percentage of these cases could be spiritual in
nature. Over the course of his career, he’s seen a couple of cases that “could not be explained in terms of
normal human physiology or natural laws.”
The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM5, seems to recognize this still-mystifying dimension in abnormal psychology: It lists a “possession-form”
subtype of dissociative identity disorder and notes that the “majority of possession states around the
world” are an accepted part of specific spiritual practices—whether they be trances, shamanic rituals, or
speaking in tongues. The DSM-5 is not saying that possession is a scientifically verifiable phenomenon,
but rather is acknowledging that many people around the world understand their abnormal mental
experiences and behaviors through a spiritual framework. Lewis-Fernández, who was on the committee
that made this change, explained that Western psychiatry had long failed to accommodate widespread
spiritual traditions. There are “societies where the supernatural is a daily occurrence,” he said. “It’s really
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modern Western societies that draw a sharp line between experiences attributed to the spiritual or the
supernatural, and the material, daily world.”
Pore over these spiritual and psychiatric frameworks long enough, and the lines begin to blur. If someone
lapses into an alternate identity that announces itself as a demon bent on wresting away that person’s soul,
how can anyone prove otherwise? Psychiatry has only given us models through which to understand these
symptoms, new cultural contexts to replace the old ones. No lab test can pinpoint the medical source of
these types of mental fractures. In one sense, the blurry shadow-selves that surface in what we call
dissociative states and the demons that Catholic exorcists believe they are casting out are not so different:
Both are incorporeal forces of ambiguous agency and intent, rupturing a continuous personality and
forever eluding proof.
L
a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. And she’s always had a
bracing faith in the Catholic Church. When I visited her, she told me she hoped to make another
appointment with Father White sometime soon. She also talked about possibly reconnecting with
Amy Harp, whom she’d stopped seeing last year but with whom she’d seemed to have had a strong,
trusting relationship. I didn’t know which path to healing, if any, she would choose. She seemed torn
between the avenues of faith and psychology, uncomfortably astride two roads that ran alongside each
other but never quite converged.
About a month after I visited her, I got a call from Steven, who told me that Louisa had had another
incident. At first he’d thought she was having a seizure—several years had passed since he’d seen one of her
dissociative episodes—and he’d considered calling an ambulance. But as he watched, an alternate identity
once again took over Louisa, referring to her in the third person and threatening her life. The episode
lasted only a few minutes, but it shook Steven. “When you’re witnessing it, it seems like it’s going on
forever,” he told me.
Whatever was tormenting Louisa wasn’t finished with her yet. When I texted her the next day to see how
she was doing, she told me she was managing as best she could. Earlier that morning, she said, she’d made
another appointment with Father White.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “Why Are Exorcisms On the Rise?”
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Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic
My Account
Give a Gift
S CIENCE
What It’s Like to Trip on the Most
Potent Magic Mushroom
"I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the rst
time."
MICHAEL POLLAN JUNE 4, 2018
IMAGES ETC LTD / GETTY
Paul Stamets, a mycologist I had come to visit in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula
to go mushroom hunting, had a gift he wanted to give me. We were in his office,
looking at some images on his computer, when he pulled off the shelf a small pile of
amadou hats, made of felt pressed from mushroom bers. “See if one of these ts you.”
Most of the mushroom hats were too big for me, but I found one that sat comfortably
on my head and thanked him for the gift. e hat was surprisingly soft and almost
weightless, but I felt a little silly with a mushroom on my head, so I carefully packed it
in my luggage.
Early Sunday morning we drove west toward the Paci c Coast and then south to the
Columbia River, where it ows into the Paci c, stopping for lunch and camping
provisions in the resort town of Long Beach. is being the rst week of December, the
town was pretty well buttoned up and sleepy. Stamets requested that I not publish the
exact location where we went hunting for Psilocybe azurescens, a variety of “magic
mushroom” rst identi ed and named by Stamets, and the most potent ever found. But
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what I can say is that there are three public parks bordering the wide-open mouth of the
Columbia—Fort Stevens, Cape Disappointment, and the Lewis and Clark National
Historical Park—and we stayed at one of them. Stamets, who has been coming here to
hunt “azzies” for years, was mildly paranoid about being recognized by a ranger, so he
stayed in the car while I checked in at the office and picked up a map giving directions
to our yurt.
As soon as we unloaded and stowed our gear, we
laced up our boots and headed out to look for
mushrooms. Which really just meant walking
around with eyes cast downward, tracing
desultory patterns through the scrub along the
sand dunes and in the grassy areas adjoining the
yurts. We adopted the posture of the psilocybin
stoop, except that we raised our heads every time
we heard a car coming. Foraging mushrooms is
prohibited in most state parks, and being in
possession of psilocybin mushrooms is both a
state and a federal crime.
RECOMMENDED READING
This post is adapted from Pollan’s new
book.
Do Psychedelic Drug Laws Violate
Human Rights?
ROC MORIN
A Psychedelic Can Cure Heroin
Withdrawal
JESSA GAMBLE
e weather was overcast in the high 40s—balmy for this far north on the Paci c Coast
in December, when it can be cold, wet, and stormy. We pretty much had the whole
park to ourselves. It was a stunning, desolate landscape, with pine trees pruned low and
angular by the winds coming off the ocean, endless dead- at sandy beaches with plenty
of driftwood, and giant storm-tossed timbers washed up and jack-strawed here and
there along the beach. ese logs had somehow slipped out from under the thumb of
the lumber industry, oating down the Columbia from the old-growth forests hundreds
of miles upriver and washing up here.
Stamets suspects that Psilocybe azurescens might originally have ridden out of the forest
in the esh of those logs and found its way here to the mouth of the Columbia—thus
far the only place the species has ever been found. Some mycelium will actually
insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic
relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune
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system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal
compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment
and habitat.
I saw plenty of LBMs—little brown mushrooms—that might or might not be
psilocybin and was constantly interrupting Stamets for another ID, and every time he
had to prick my bubble of hope that I had at last found the precious quarry. After an
hour or two of fruitless searching, Stamets wondered aloud if maybe we had come too
late for the azzies.
And then all of a sudden, in an excited stage whisper, he called out, “Got one!” I raced
over, asking him to leave the mushroom in place so I could see where and how it grew.
is would, I hoped, allow me to “get my eyes on,” as mushroom hunters like to say.
Once we register on our retinas the visual pattern of the object we’re searching for, it’s
much more likely to pop out of the visual eld. (In fact the technical name for this
phenomenon is the pop-out effect.)
It was a handsome little mushroom, with a smooth, slightly glossy, caramel-colored cap.
Stamets let me pick it; it had a surprisingly tenacious grip, and when it came out of the
ground, it brought with it some leaf litter, soil, and a little knot of bright-white
mycelium. “Bruise the stipe a bit,” Stamets suggested. I did, and within minutes a blue
tinge appeared where I’d rubbed it. “at’s the psilocin.” I never expected to actually see
the chemical I had read so much about. e mushroom had been growing a stone’s
throw from our yurt, right on the edge of a parking spot. Stamets says that like many
psilocybin species, “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at
the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of
course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of consciousness.” At this point, Stamets,
who when it comes to mushrooms is one serious dude, made the rst joke I had ever
heard him make: “You know one of the best indicator species for Psilocybe azurescens are
Winnebagos.” We’re obviously not the rst people to hunt for azzies in this park, and
anyone who picks a mushroom trails an invisible cloud of its spore behind him; this, he
believes, is the origin of the idea of fairy dust. At the end of many of those trails is apt
to be a campsite, a car, or a Winnebago.
We found seven azzies that afternoon, though by “we,” I mean Stamets; I only found
one, and even then I wasn’t at all certain it was a Psilocybe until Stamets gave me a smile
and a thumbs-up. I could swear it looked exactly like half a dozen other species I was
nding. Stamets patiently tutored me in mushroom morphology, and by the following
day my luck had improved, and I found four little caramel beauties on my own. Not
much of a haul, but then Stamets had said that even just one of these mushrooms could
occasion a major psychic expedition.
at evening, we carefully laid out our seven mushrooms on a paper towel and
photographed them before putting them in front of the yurt’s space heater to dry.
Within hours, the hot air had transformed a mushroom that was unimpressive to begin
with into a tiny, shriveled gray-blue scrap it would be easy to overlook. e idea that
something so unprepossessing could have such consequence was hard to credit.
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I had been looking forward to trying an azzie, but before the evening was over, Stamets
had dampened my enthusiasm. “I nd azurescens almost too strong,” he told me when
we were standing around the re pit outside our yurt, having a beer. After nightfall, we
had driven out onto the beach to hunt for razor clams by headlight; now we were
sautéing them with onions over the re.
“And azzies have one potential side effect that some people nd troubling.”
Yes?
“Temporary paralysis,” he said matter-of-factly. He explained that some people on azzies
nd they can’t move their muscles for a period of time. at might be tolerable if you’re
in a safe place, he suggested, “but what if you’re outdoors and the weather turns cold
and wet? You could die of hypothermia.” Not much of an advertisement for azurescens,
especially coming from the man who discovered the species and named it. I was
suddenly in much less of a hurry to try one.
e question I kept returning to that weekend is this: Why in the world would a fungus
go to the trouble of producing a chemical compound that has such a radical effect on
the minds of the animals that eat it? What, if anything, did this peculiar chemical do
for the mushroom? One could construct a quasi-mystical explanation for this
phenomenon, as Stamets and Terence McKenna have done: Both suggest that
neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us, and it’s trying
to tell us something important by way of psilocybin. But this strikes me as more of a
poetic conceit than a scienti c theory.
e best answer I’ve managed to nd arrived a few weeks later courtesy of Paul
Stamets’s professor at Evergreen State College, Michael Beug, the chemist. When I
reached him by phone at his home in the Columbia River Gorge, 160 miles upriver of
our campsite, Beug said he was retired from teaching and hadn’t spent much time
thinking about psilocybes recently, but he was intrigued by my question.
I asked him if there is reason to believe that psilocybin is a defense chemical for the
mushroom. Defense against pests and diseases is the most common function of the socalled secondary metabolites produced in plants. Curiously, many plant toxins don’t
directly kill pests, but often act as psychostimulants as well as poisons, which is why we
use many of them as drugs to alter consciousness. Why wouldn’t plants just kill their
predators outright? Perhaps because that would quickly select for resistance, whereas
messing with its neurotransmitter networks can distract the predator or, better still, lead
it to engage in risky behaviors likely to shorten its life. ink of an inebriated insect
behaving in a way that attracts the attention of a hungry bird.
But Beug pointed out that if psilocybin were a defense chemical, “my former student
Paul Stamets would have jumped on it long ago and found a use for it as an antifungal,
antibacterial, or insecticide.” In fact Beug has tested fungi for psilocybin and psilocin
levels and found that they occur only in minute quantities in the mycelium—the part
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of the organism most likely to be well defended. “Instead the chemicals are in the
fruiting bodies, sometimes at over 2 percent by dry weight!”—a stupendous quantity,
and in a part of the organism it is not a priority to defend.
Even if psilocybin in mushrooms began as “an accident of a metabolic pathway,” the
fact that it wasn’t discarded during the course of the species’ evolution suggests it must
have offered some bene t. “My best guess,” Beug says, “is that the mushrooms that
produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely
disseminated.”
Eaten by whom, or what? And why? Beug says that many animals are known to eat
psilocybin mushrooms, including horses, cattle, and dogs. Some, like cows, appear
unaffected, but many animals appear to enjoy an occasional change in consciousness,
too. Beug is in charge of gathering mushroom-poisoning reports for the North
American Mycological Association and over the years has seen accounts of horses
tripping in their paddocks and dogs that “zero in on psilocybes and appear to be
hallucinating.” Several primate species (aside from our own) are also known to enjoy
psychedelic mushrooms. Presumably animals with a taste for altered states of
consciousness have helped spread psilocybin far and wide.
Such a notion would not strike Paul Stamets as the least bit far-fetched. As we stood
around the re pit, the warm light ickering across our faces while our dinner sizzled in
its pan, Stamets talked about what mushrooms have taught him about nature. He was
expansive, eloquent, grandiose, and, at times, in acute danger of slipping the surly
bonds of plausibility. We had had a few beers, and while we hadn’t touched our tiny
stash of azzies, we had smoked a little pot. Stamets dilated on the idea of psilocybin as a
chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we had been elected, by virtue of the gift
of consciousness and language, to hear its call and act before it’s too late.
“Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the
environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand.” Why
us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some
plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a
consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us
biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.” ese were riffs I’d heard Stamets
deliver in countless talks and interviews.
“I think psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and
speed fungal evolution so that we can nd solutions to our problems.” Especially in a
time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at
its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time.
What strikes me about both Stamets and many of the so-called Romantic scientists (like
Humboldt and Goethe, Joseph Banks, Erasmus Darwin, and, I would include,
oreau) is how very much more alive nature seems in their hands than it would soon
become in the cooler hands of the professionals. ese more specialized scientists (a
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word that wasn’t coined until 1834) gradually moved science indoors and increasingly
gazed at nature through devices that allowed them to observe it at scales invisible to the
human eye. ese moves subtly changed the object of study—indeed, made it more of
an object.
Instead of seeing nature as a collection of discrete objects, the Romantic scientists—and
I include Stamets in their number—saw a densely tangled web of subjects, each acting
on the other in the great dance that would come to be called coevolution. “Everything,”
Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” ey could see this dance of
subjectivities because they cultivated the plant’s-eye view, the animal’s-eye view, the
microbe’s-eye view, and the fungus’s-eye view—perspectives that depend as much on
imagination as observation.
I suspect that imaginative leap has become harder for us moderns to make. Our science
and technology encourage us in precisely the opposite direction, toward the
objecti cation of nature and of all species other than our own. Surely we need to
acknowledge the practical power of this perspective, which has given us so much, but
we should at the same time acknowledge its costs, material as well as spiritual. Yet that
older, more enchanted way of seeing may still pay dividends, as it does (to cite just one
small example) when it allows Paul Stamets to gure out that the reason honeybees like
to visit woodpiles is to medicate themselves, by nibbling on a saprophytic mycelium
that produces just the right antimicrobial compound that the hive needs to survive, a
gift the fungus is trading for ... what? Something yet to be imagined.
You are probably wondering what ever happened to the azzies Stamets and I found that
weekend. Many months later, in the middle of a summer week spent in the house in
New England where we used to live, a place freighted with memories, I ate them, with
my wife Judith. I crumbled two little mushrooms in each of two glasses and poured hot
water over them to make a tea; Stamets had recommended that I “cook” the
mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach. Judith and I each
drank half a cup, ingesting both the liquid and the crumbles of mushroom. I suggested
we take a walk on the dirt road near our house while we waited for the psilocybin to
come on.
However, after only about 20 minutes or so, Judith reported she was “feeling things,”
none of them pleasant. She didn’t want to be walking anymore, she said, but now we
were at least a mile from home. She told me her mind and her body seemed to be
drifting apart and then that her mind had own out of her head and up into the trees,
like a bird or insect.
“I need to get home and feel safe,” she said, now with some urgency. I tried to reassure
her as we abruptly turned around and picked up our pace. It was hot and the air was
thick with humidity. She said, “I really don’t want to run into anybody.” I assured her
we wouldn’t. I still felt more or less myself, but it may be that Judith’s distress was
keeping me from feeling the mushrooms; somebody had to be ready to act normally if a
neighbor happened to drive by and roll down his window for a chat, a prospect that was
quickly taking on the proportions of nightmare. In fact shortly before we got back to
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home base—so it now felt to both of us—we spotted a neighbor’s pickup truck bearing
down on us and, like guilty children, we ducked into the woods until it passed.
Judith made a beeline for the couch in the living room, where she lay down with the
shades drawn, while I went into the kitchen to polish off my cup of mushroom tea,
because I wasn’t yet feeling very much. I was a little worried about her, but once she
reached her base on the living room couch, her mood lightened and she said she was
ne.
I couldn’t understand her desire to be indoors. I went out and sat on the screened porch
for a while, listening to the sounds in the garden, which suddenly grew very loud, as if
the volume had been turned way up. e air was stock-still, but the desultory sounds of
ying insects and the digital buzz of hummingbirds rose to form a cacophony I had
never heard before. It began to grate on my nerves, until I decided I would be better off
regarding the sound as beautiful, and then all at once it was. I lifted an arm, then a foot,
and noted with relief that I wasn’t paralyzed, though I also didn’t feel like moving a
muscle.
Whenever I closed my eyes, random images erupted as if the insides of my lids were a
screen. My notes record: fractal patterns, tunnels plunging through foliage, ropy vines
forming grids. But when I started to feel panic rise at the lack of control I had over my
visual eld, I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normality was
to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I
am learning how to manage this experience.”
Much happened, or seemed to happen, during the course of that August afternoon, but
I want to focus here on just one element of the experience, because it bears on the
questions of nature and our place in it that psilocybin seems to provoke, at least for me.
I decided I wanted to walk out to my writing house, a little structure I had built myself
25 years ago, in what is now another life, and which holds a great many memories. I
had written two-and-a-half books in the little room (including one about building it),
sitting before a broad window that looked back over a pond and the garden to our
house.
However, I was still vaguely worried about Judith, so before wandering too far from the
house, I went inside to check on her. She was stretched out on the couch, with a cool
damp cloth over her eyes. She was ne. “I’m having these very interesting visuals,” she
said, something having to do with the stains on the coffee table coming to life, swirling
and transforming and rising from the surface in ways she found compelling. She made
it clear she wanted to be left alone to sink more deeply into the images—she is a
painter. e phrase “parallel play” popped into my mind, and so it would be for the rest
of the afternoon.
I stepped outside, feeling unsteady on my feet, legs a little rubbery. e garden was
thrumming with activity, dragon ies tracing complicated patterns in the air, the seed
heads of plume poppies rattling like snakes as I brushed by, the phlox perfuming the air
with its sweet, heavy scent, and the air itself so palpably dense it had to be forded. e
word and sense of poignance ooded over me during the walk through the garden, and
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it would return later. Maybe because we no longer live here, and this garden, where we
spent so many summers as a couple and then a family, and which at this moment
seemed so acutely present, was in fact now part of an irretrievable past. It was as if a
precious memory had not just been recalled but had actually come back to life, in a
reincarnation both beautiful and cruel. Also heartrending was the eetingness of this
moment in time, the ripeness of a New England garden in late August on the verge of
turning the corner of the season. Before dawn one cloudless night very soon and
without warning, the thrum and bloom and perfume would end all at once, with the
arrival of the killing frost. I felt wide open emotionally, undefended.
When at last I arrived at the writing house, I stretched out on the daybed, something I
hardly ever took the time to do in all the years when I was working here so
industriously. e bookshelves had been emptied, and the place felt abandoned, a little
sad. From where I lay, I could see over my toes to the window screen and, past that, to
the grid of an arbor that was now densely woven with the twining vines of what had
become a venerable old climbing hydrangea, a petiolaris. I had planted the hydrangea
decades ago, in hopes of creating just this sort of intricately tangled prospect. Backlit by
the late-afternoon sunlight streaming in, its neat, round leaves completely lled the
window, which meant you gazed out at the world through the fresh green scrim they
formed. It seemed to me these were the most beautiful leaves I had ever seen. It was as if
they were emitting their own soft, green glow. And it felt like a kind of privilege to gaze
out at the world through their eyes, as it were, as the leaves drank up the last draughts
of sunlight, transforming those photons into new matter. A plant’s-eye view of the
world—it was that, and for real! But the leaves were also looking back at me, xing me
with this utterly benign gaze. I could feel their curiosity and what I was certain was an
attitude of utter benevolence toward me and my kind. (Do I need to say that I know
how crazy this sounds? I do!)
I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the rst time and that
certain ideas I had long thought about and written about—having to do with the
subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we’re too selfregarding to appreciate—had taken on the esh of feeling and reality. I looked through
the negative spaces formed by the hydrangea leaves to x my gaze on the swamp maple
in the middle of the meadow beyond, and it too was now more alive than I’d ever
known a tree to be, infused with some kind of spirit—this one, too, benevolent. e
idea that there had ever been a disagreement between matter and spirit seemed risible,
and I felt as though whatever it is that usually divides me from the world out there had
begun to fall away. Not completely: e battlements of ego had not fallen; this was not
what the researchers would deem a “complete” mystical experience, because I retained
the sense of an observing “I.” But the doors and windows of perception had opened
wide, and they were admitting more of the world and its myriad nonhuman
personalities than ever before.
Buoyed by this development, I sat up now and looked out over my desk, through the
big window that faced back to the house. When I sited the building, I carefully framed
the main view between two very old and venerable trees, a stolidly vertical ash on the
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Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic
right and an elegantly angled and intricately branched white oak on the left. e ash
has seen better days; storms have shorn several important limbs from it, wrecking its
symmetry and leaving some ragged stumps. e oak was somewhat healthier, in full leaf
now with its upturned limbs reaching into the sky like the limbs of a dancer. But the
main trunk, which had always leaned precariously to one side, now concerned me: A
section of it had rotted out at ground level, and for the rst time it was possible to look
clear through it and see daylight. How was it possibly still standing?
As I gazed at the two trees I had gazed at so many times before from my desk, it
suddenly dawned on me that these trees were—obviously!—my parents: the stolid ash
my father, the elegant oak my mother. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, except
that thinking about those trees became identical to thinking about my parents. ey
were completely, indelibly, present in those trees. And so I thought about all they had
given me, and about all that time had done to them, and what was going to become of
this prospect, this place (this me!), when they nally fell, as eventually they would. at
parents die is not exactly the stuff of epiphany, but the prospect, no longer distant or
abstract, pierced me more deeply than it ever had, and I was disarmed yet again by the
pervasive sense of poignancy that trailed me all that afternoon. Yet I must have still had
some wits about me, because I made a note to call the arborist tomorrow; maybe
something could be done to reduce the weight on the leaning side of the oak, in order
to prevent it from falling, if only for a while longer.
My walk back to the house was, I think, the peak of the experience and comes back to
me now in the colors and tones of a dream. ere was, again, the sense of pushing my
body through a mass of air that had been sweetened by phlox and was teeming, almost
frenetic, with activity. e dragon ies, big as birds, were now out in force, touching
down just long enough to kiss the phlox blossoms and then lift off, before madly
crisscrossing the garden path. ese were more dragon ies than I had ever seen in one
place, so many in fact that I wasn’t completely sure if they were real. (Judith later
con rmed the sighting when I got her to come outside.) And as they executed their
ight patterns, they left behind them contrails that persisted in the air, or so at least it
appeared. Dusk now approaching, the air traffic in the garden had built to a riotous
crescendo: the pollinators making their last rounds of the day, the plants still signifying
to them with their owers: me, me, me! In one way I knew this scene well—the garden
coming brie y back to life after the heat of a summer day has relented—but never had I
felt so integral to it. I was no longer the alienated human observer, gazing at the garden
from a distance, whether literal or gural, but rather felt part and parcel of all that was
transpiring here. So the owers were addressing me as much as the pollinators, and
perhaps because the very air that afternoon was such a felt presence, one’s usual sense of
oneself as a subject observing objects in space—objects that have been thrown into
relief and rendered discrete by the apparent void that surrounds them—gave way to a
sense of being deep inside and fully implicated in this scene, one more being in relation
to the myriad other beings and to the whole.
“Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much
the case, and so, for the rst time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with
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Michael Pollan on What It's Like to Trip on Mushrooms - The Atlantic
nature.”
is post is adapted from Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of
Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
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CASE STUDY
Science, Pseudoscience, and Nonsense
By Clyde Freeman Herreid
If we teach only the findings and
products of science—no matter
how useful and even inspiring they
may be—without communicating
its critical method, how can the
average person possibly distinguish
science from pseudoscience?
—Carl Sagan (1996, p. 21)
A
favorite pastime of academicians is to bemoan the
scientific literacy of the
American public. When
we listen to politicians who claim
that climate change is a hoax, there
is good reason to be concerned. So
it is no surprise to learn that 93% of
American adults and 78% of those
with college degrees are scientifically
illit
erate (Hazen, 2002). Nowhere
is this better demonstrated than in
a poll disclosing that the United
States is next to the bottom of the
list of 34 nations in the public acceptance of evolution (Miller, Scott,
& Okamoto, 2006). According to
Science and Engineering Indicators
2002 (National Science Foundation,
National Center for Science and
Engineering Statistics, 2002), 30% of
the American public thinks that UFOs
are alien spaceships, 40% believe that
astrology is scientific, 60% believe in
extrasensory perception (ESP), 70%
accept magnetic therapy as credible,
and 88% accept alternative medicine.
Education by itself doesn’t offset
the problem. Belief in ESP hardly
decreased from 65% in high school
graduates to 60% in college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy
dipped from 71% in high school graduates to 55% in college grads. As far
as belief in alternative medicine went,
the college graduates actually gave
it higher approval (92%) than high
school graduates (89%) did. But the
most disheartening part of the survey
was the fact that 70% of the American
public doesn’t understand the scientific process. Science and Engineering
Indicators 2014 (National Science
Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2014)
reveals that only 65% could correctly
answer this probability question: A
doctor tells a couple that their genetic
makeup means that they’ve got one in
four chances of having a child with an
inherited illness. (1) Does this mean
that if their first child has the illness,
the next three will not have the illness? (No); and (2) Does this mean
that each of the couple’s children will
have the same risk of suffering from
the illness? (Yes).
It gets worse: Merely 34% could
correctly answer a question about an
experiment: (1) Two scientists want
to know if a certain drug is effective
against high blood pressure. The first
scientist wants to give the drug to 1,000
people with high blood pressure and
see how many of them experience lower blood pressure levels. The second
scientist wants to give the drug to 500
people with high blood pressure and
not give the drug to another 500 people
with high blood pressure, and see how
many in both groups experience lower
blood pressure levels. Which is the better way to test this drug? and (2) Why
is it better to test the drug this way?
(We know, of course, that the second
way is better because a control group
is used for comparison.)
And even worse—only 20% could
correctly answer this: (1) When you
read news stories, you see certain sets
of words and terms. We are interested
in how many people recognize certain
kinds of terms. First, some articles
refer to the results of a scientific
study. When you read or hear the
term scientific study, do you have a
clear understanding of what it means,
a general sense of what it means, or
little understanding of what it means?
and (2) In your own words, could you
tell me what it means to study something scientifically? (The failure to
correctly answer this clearly indicates
that people do not understand the
principles that underpin formulating
a theory/hypothesis and designing an
experiment to test it or the role of control groups and the need for rigorous
and systematic comparison.)
A research article in Skeptic by
Walker, Hoekstra, and Vogl (2002)
concluded:
Students that scored well on these
[science knowledge] tests were no
more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students
that scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to
apply their scientific knowledge
to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this
inability stems in part from the
way that science is traditionally
presented to students: Students are
taught what to think but not how
to think. (p. 26)
Given that lots of people do not
understand the way science works,
Vol. 45, No. 5, 2016
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CASE STUDY
what do we do to fix the problem?
One solution suggested first by Carl
Sagan (1996) and later by Shermer
and Linse (2001) is that we provide
students (actually everyone) with a
Baloney Detection Kit. We want them
to automatically ask 10 questions
whenever they hear an unusual claim:
1. How reliable is the source of the
claim?
2. Does the source make similar
claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by
somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the
world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the
claim?
6. Where does the preponderance
of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the
rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing
positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for
as many phenomena as the old
theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the
claim?
But how can we tuck these habits
of mind into normal classroom exercises? To achieve this end, improved
education and creativity at the K–16
level is important; this is where state
and national standards and core
curricula come into play. How that
scenario will end up is yet to be determined.
What about those of us in higher
education? Is there anything that we
can do to improve the situation? It
appears that we have at least three
populations of students. One group
is our STEM majors. We tend not to
worry about them. It is true that there
is evidence that suggests that the more
science courses and lab experiences
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Journal of College Science Teaching
they have, the more they understand
the facts as well as the process of the
scientific enterprise. But here is a
caveat: The process of indoctrination
to the canons of science takes a long
time, and there are many dropouts
along the way. How much do our
graduates really understand about
how to evaluate the “science” of today
as it is filtered by the modern media?
What about our preservice science
teachers headed for the K–16 classrooms? They will be in the front lines,
but many of them are poorly prepared
to grapple with STEM subjects they
have only taken one course in, which
most likely was delivered by a traditional lecture. Unfortunately, 86% of
most introductory science courses are
still delivered this way, a medieval
presentation method created at a time
when we didn’t have textbooks, film,
or the internet. STEM majors may
survive this indoctrination with their
enthusiasm intact, but many others
who may end up teaching our children
may not. Again, just more science
doesn’t make someone immune to
pseudoscientific claims (Walker et
al., 2002).
Here is the big question: How
do we deal with the overwhelming
number of students who take science
courses because they have to? I have
the impression that many of my colleagues are really dismissive of these
students; they are not potential graduate students. We usually have only one
shot at nonmajors, one or two semesters in a general education course, and
then they are free to roam the media
world littered with alien abductions,
Sasquatch sightings, homeopathic
remedies, probiotics, magnetic bracelets, and the latest health benefits they
just heard about on the Dr. Oz Show.
The faculty at Sam Houston State
University in Huntsville, Texas, has
come up with a promising antidote
to the lack of critical thinking by
designing a course for nonmajors
that seems to fit the bill (Rowe et al.,
2015). This general education and
interdisciplinary course, called Foundations of Science, “emphasizes the
nature of science along with, rather
than primarily, the findings of science;
incorporates case studies, such as the
vaccine-autism controversy; teaches
the basics of argumentation and logical fallacies; contrasts science with
pseudoscience; and addresses psychological factors that might otherwise
lead students to reject scientific ideas
they find uncomfortable” (Rowe et al.,
2015, p. 1). Their approach is to try to
inculcate in students the operational
approach to critical thinking provided
by Bernstein, Penner, Clarke-Stewart,
and Roy (2006). When presented with
claims such as vaccines cause autism,
global warming is a hoax, and there
are no transitional fossils, one should
ask: (a) What am I being asked to
accept? (b) What evidence supports
the claim? (c) Are there alternative
explanations/hypotheses? and fi
nally, (d) What evidence supports the
alternatives?
Sam Houston State University
chose to focus on pseudoscience
because the topics are inherently
interesting even to science-phobic
students: astrology, homeopathy, Bigfoot, and intelligent design. They adopted a textbook that emphasizes the
same approach: How to Think about
Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a
New Age (Schick & Vaughn, 2014).
A key feature in their curriculum is
the use of two case studies. The first
deals with the claim that vaccination
is a cause of autism (Rowe, 2010).
The students work in small groups
and analyze the data provided in a
study by Wakefield et al. (1998).
Then they are asked to design a better
study and in the process learn about
experimental design and sample size,
replication, double-blind studies,
and scientific honesty. In another
case study published recently in the
Journal of College Science Teaching
(Rowe, 2015), the authors apply ecology theory to evaluate the credibility
of finding a plesiosaur moonlighting
as the Loch Ness Monster. This case
is especially interesting because it
integrates traditional scientific facts
and principles along with a skeptical
approach to fantastic claims, illustrating how important it is to consider
alternative hypotheses to unproven
claims, especially those that verge on
the incredible.
So here is my pitch: We need to
do a much better job of teaching everyone how science actually works.
This is the same sentiment that James
Conant carried with him back to Harvard at the end of World War II, after
his term of service as science advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt.
While in this position, Conant became
convinced that the American public
just didn’t understand the process of
science. He set out to remedy this, at
least with Harvard students, by teaching a course, Natural Science 4, “On
Understanding Science.” Four years
later, he began teaching another undergraduate course, Philosophy 150,
“A Philosophy of Science,” which
led to the famous text published in
1957 titled Harvard Case Histories
in Experimental Science. As far as I
know, this was the first formal attempt
to use the case study approach to teach
basic STEM topics.
We have no record of how the students at Harvard in Conant’s classes
received this new approach telling the
detailed history of the major scientific
discoveries. Surely, the subject matter
was better digested than the previous
method of delivering endless facts
to nonscientists. However, Conant’s
case studies were all delivered via
the lecture method, the least effective
method for teaching (Lord, 2007).
Unfortunately, the lecture is still
favored by STEM teachers today in
spite of a mountain of evidence, suggesting the method is a major reason
that 60% of students who enter college intending to major in a STEM
field fail to graduate with a STEM
degree (see, e.g., Gates & Mirkin,
2012).
There are hundreds of studies concluding that active learning strategies
like cooperative and collaborative
learning produce greater learning
than the lecture method (see, e.g.,
Hake, 1998). But we faculty appear
too set in our ways to easily give up
the technique where we ourselves
excelled. It is a Darwinian process.
We managed to learn via the lecture
method and so we expect our students
to do the same. We are the survivors,
the ones who stayed in the system.
What about the crowd of students who
dropped by the wayside, not necessarily because they didn’t do well, but
as Sheila Tobias (1990, 1992) wrote
long ago and the President’s Council
of Advisors on Science and Technology (2012) declared recently, they
quit STEM disciplines because of
uninspiring introductory courses, the
math requirement, and an academic
culture that is unwelcoming (Gates
& Mirkin, 2012).
All of this then gives me a strong
platform from which to argue that
the methodology of science is best
taught via active learning using the
case study method. Using stories
(true ones are best) puts the science
in context (Herreid, 2007). There are
two obvious ways to do this. One is
to showcase scientists actually going
about their daily business of making
discoveries—detailing their mishaps
and struggles to solve a problem. The
website iBiology (www.ibiology.org)
attempts to fill that need. They have a
growing collection of more than 275
videos by scientists talking about real
cutting-edge scientific research and
topics related to science.
Another approach is to use written
case studies, a method championed in
this column and promoted by the National Center for Case Study Teaching
in Science (http://sciencecases.lib.
buffalo.edu/cs/). Our collection has
over 600 STEM case studies, many
emphasizing scientific methodology:
Watson and Crick puzzling over how
DNA replicates, Warren and Marshall
battling to convince the medical
establishment that bacteria are the
major cause of ulcers, epidemiologists
hunting for the reservoir of the Ebola
virus, and citizens debating the legalization of marijuana are just a few
examples. Further, we are treated with
mini-mysteries such as when statistician Ronald Fisher was confronted
by a woman who claimed she could
taste whether tea was prepared by
adding milk before or after the tea was
poured in the cup and a little puzzle
about a spa that advertised that their
foot bath would remove the toxins
from customers’ bodies (McCallum
& Prud’homme-Généreux, 2016).
Big or small, these tales are the stuff
of challenging classroom exercises.
Case studies have the potential to
correct many misconceptions that a
layperson might have about science.
One common false impression is that
scientists are lonely recluses working out the wonders of the world in
a dingy laboratory waiting for the
“aha” moment to rush out into the
street shouting “Eureka.” If that were
ever true, it certainly isn’t true today,
when research teams and joint publications are the rule. We can have 45
authors contributing to the discovery
and analysis of the fossil Ardipithecus
Vol. 45, No. 5, 2016
63
CASE STUDY
ramidus or in physics publications
with over a thousand authors. Even
teachers may neglect the role that scientific society as a whole plays in the
discoveries, especially the part that
peer review plays. This is a vital point
for students to learn, and a case study
can illustrate the process powerfully.
Only by understanding the checks and
balances in the scientific enterprise
can the public get a sense of how seriously researchers take their jobs and
can they gain confidence in science.
So when 97% of climate scientists say
that climate change is upon us (Stern,
2015), we would hope that the public
would accept this is a fact that we had
better act on.
Perhaps the best way that the
scientific process is in full display is
when misconduct is discovered. Seldom is it an outsider that pulls back
the curtain on inappropriate conduct;
it is scientists themselves who normally discover unsavory business.
One of the best examples is when
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann
claimed to have discovered cold fusion, a process of energy production
with a promise to satisfy the world’s
insatiable desire for cheap energy
(Taubes, 1993). In a laboratory at the
University of Utah, these respected
investigators asserted they produced
a nuclear reaction on a table top. Before publishing their findings, they
bypassed the usual vetting of their experiment in a journal review process
and held a press conference touting
their spectacular claims instead. Then
they delayed giving important details
of how their work was accomplished.
This created a firestorm of criticism.
Many investigators tried to replicate
their work. All failed. Soon it became
apparent that their claims were more
than doubtful. Pons and Fleishmann’s
careers took a nose dive. They had not
followed the usual canons of science
64
Journal of College Science Teaching
and as a result payed a personal price.
The story did not have to end this way.
If they had followed normal protocol
and submitted their findings to their
colleagues, criticism would have been
confined to the scientific community
and reviewers would have been able
to identify the possible errors before
going public. That is one moral of
the story: There is a good reason that
we have the critical and analytical
process that we have, to prevent just
these kinds of errors.
Case studies like these are an ideal
way for students to get a true taste
of what goes on with us scientists.
These are cautionary tales. Rather
than showing the fallibility of scientists, they illustrate how hard we try
to find out the truth. Criticism is one
of the safeguards of the process and
is a key part of the self-correcting
nature of science. Case studies are an
ideal way to showcase the beauty of
the process. Whatever techniques we
teachers choose to use, we have an
obligation to help rectify the problem
of scientific illiteracy in our students
before they head into the world of
Loch Ness Monsters, astrology, chiropractors, and acupuncture. ■
Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science
Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos.
DUE-0341279, DUE-0618570, DUE0920264, DUE-1323355 and a Higher
Education Reform Grant from the PEW
Charitable Trusts. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of
the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF and PEW
Charitable Trusts.
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The Case Study
Clyde F. Herreid
Department of Biology
State University of New York
Buffalo, NY 14260-1300
herreid@buffalo.edu
Research and
Teaching
Ann Cutler
Editor
acutler@nsta.org
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Vol. 45, No. 5, 2016
65
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Proposal :
Based on this week’s reading "When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese
Medicine in the 21st Century" by Qiu Jane, I find the topic of TCM is quite interesting and based
on reading this article I think we need to better understand the TCM since TCM is not all bad for
wild animals, in fact, there are many policies try to protect and stop use wild animals in Chinese
medicines, and I also find that there are many substitutes elements of wild animals, so that
today’s the ingredients of wild animals are usually replaced. Also, I think better understanding
of TCM can learn the cultural values as well as better understanding the importance of protecting
wild animals. So my main argument is that TCM can protect wild animals. My enthymeme is
that: Herbal treatments ingredients should use in TCM and they are not harmful to environment
because there are many substitutions use in TCM and policies help protect wild animals so that
make people more participate in protecting them.
Or
Stop use wild animal elements in TCM is good because there are many substitutions use in TCM
and policies help protect wild animals so that make people more participate in protecting them.
One real life example is that the majority parts of Chinese medicines are gain from plants that
Chinese medicine uses approximately 1,000 species of plants and 36 species of animals. The
animals in medicines usually come from planation. Supported of wild animal policies also help
control and protect the wild animals. For example, in 1993, China banned domestic trade of tiger
bones, and Chinese medicine deleted tiger bones from its official pharmacopoeia. Many
practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine now refuse to use medicines containing tiger parts
and prefer alternative treatments. And there is a China’s Tiger Restoration Program (CTRP) will
last until 2022. It aims to increase the area and quality of tiger habitats; establish monitoring and
patrol systems; balance tiger protection with the local economy; and crack down on poaching,
smuggling, and illegal tiger products trade. Person who kill or trade tiger will face at least 13
years jails. It is effective way to help protect wild animals.
Two course reading that I would use include is that I did a lot of research on this topic and I find
this topic is very interesting to me. I will use Qiu Jane paper as well as Michael's What It's Like
to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom to discussion how plants such as mushroom can
impact people and benefit or influence people. This can refer to the plants ingredients use in
TCM. Mushroom is also used in TCM.
I would think those people who have little know about TCM would disagree with me. And those
wild animals protectors will disagree with me. I would response to them that as the technology
development today, TCM has replaced a lot of wild animals ingredients and a lot of strict polities
to help protect wild animals. This is no longer the issue.
Outline
First body paragraph:
Traditional Chinese Medicine, commonly referred to as TCM, is a healthcare system that dates
back to the third century BC. It originated from the writings of ancient therapists who began to
record their observations of the body, its functions, and responses to various therapies and
treatments including herbal medicine, massage, and acupuncture. Over the past 2000 years,
generations of therapists and scholars have supplemented and improved this knowledge. The
result is a classic document on almost all health issues-from the common cold to cancer, from
pregnancy to old age.
I will use "When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the
21st Century" by Qiu Jane’s artilce and give a brief introduction of TCM.
Second body paragraph:
Many people in the Chinese medicine community are trying to discourage the use of animal
therapy. In 1993, rhino horn and tiger bone were deleted from the Chinese Traditional
Pharmacopoeia. In 2010, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies issued a
statement urging members not to use tiger bones or other endangered species. In addition,
although some shops and restaurants still sell animal products, many well-known Chinese
medicine practitioners are now prescribing alternatives to animal therapy.
I will use "When the East Meets the West: The Future of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the
21st Century" by Qiu Jane’s artilce and give a brief introduction of TCM.
I will also use Michael's What It's Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom
Third body paragraph:
In February, the National People’s Congress of China completely banned any terrestrial wildlife
trade until the country’s Wildlife Protection Law and subsequent regulations for related
industries can be fully updated. The world is also taking action to stop the use of endangered
wild animals in traditional medicine. Three Chinese NGOs and two global organizations have
recently proposed that all members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) support stopping the use of threatened species in traditional medicine.
Forth body paragraph:
Chinese medicine has proven that it can cope with the plight of threatened animals. In the
1980s, rhinos were on the brink of extinction because poachers killed rhinos for rhino horns. At
that time, China was still a poor country, so the largest markets for rhino horn were Taiwan and
Hong Kong, two booming but relatively small markets. After a public outcry, the rhino was
removed from the official Chinese Pharmacopoeia and included in the CITES Index I-the
strongest level of protection. Coupled with strict d...
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