I second that recommendation of Randi. He is a magician and so is also an entertainer. As a result, his demonstrations of alternate explanations of the paranormal are interesting and fun as well as informative. I don't believe he says that the paranormal does not exist. His point is that so muuch of what people use to prove the paranormal can be explained by other means.

His best known example is Uri Geller who is best remembered for his bending spoons and making making broken clocks run again. What Randi shows in his demonstration is how easily non-professional (non-magician) observors can be fooled and that scientists, who are totally unprepared for sleight of hand are easily hoodwinked. His explanation of broken clocks and watches running again (a natural phenomonon, notslight of hand) all over Great Britain after Geller appeared on television is a good lesson of how there can be other explanations of an unusual event besides fraud or parapsychological power.

I have an acquintance, a physician, who is very intersted in alternative therapies. He was among the first to use acupuncture in his part of California. He also led a group of practicing physicians as they looked at auras, osteopathy, vitamin supplements and other things that thirty years ago were considered "far out". He was ridiculed but he kept pointing out that physicians do not do such a wonderful job of healing that they can afford not to look at alternative methods that claim to be getting results. As you might expect, some things worked, somethings didn't and some they weren't sure of because they needed larger numbers of people to try them on.

He is an example of what I admire in an inquisitive mind. First, he is inquisitive, second he is skeptical. Skepticism is a valuable attribute in a physician. I don't think any of us would like a doctor who tries things out on us or a sick relative because he heard from a verysincere person that a cure such as sleeping on marigold petals will cure leukemia. That's why, when he heard of "psychic surgery" in the Philippines, he went there to look at it. He had heard anecdotal reports of people benefitting greatly from non-invasive surgery at the hands of a group of psychic physicians. These people claimed to be able to remove cancers and other things through reaching into the body (without opening it) and removing the offensive tumor, growth, etc. As a physician, when he attended a a series of such operations, he recognized immediately that the procedure was a hoax but he was struck by how much better the patient claimed to feel and there was evidence that some patients actually seemed to be cured. His professional interest, from that time on, became how *belief* can affect healing. In other words, he saw faith healing as a possibility, not because of the intervention of an outside power but because of individual, internalized, beliefs.

AS a result, he did not spend the rest of his career studying how to become a psychic surgeon but how to adpapt his own practice of medicine to take advantage of the forces he had come to respect for their power. He blended what he had learned in the Philippines with what he had learned in his medical school education and his practice of medicine.

Sourdough