When Jack had finished his mini-lecture, Laurie’s response was to congratulate him on finding a worthy subject to occupy his mind while the family was treading water regarding JJ’s treatment. She even confessed to some jealousy, but that was as far as it went. When Jack again brought up the subject of getting her back to work with the aid of round-the-clock nurses, she’d again refused, saying she was doing what she needed to do. She then went on to mention three cases of alternative-medicine fatalities that she’d had herself. One was a case of an acupuncture victim who’d died when the acupuncturist inadvertently impaled the victim’s heart with an acupuncture needle right in the area of the sinoventricular node. Two others died from heavy-metal poisoning from contaminated Chinese herbs.

Jack was pleased to get Laurie’s cases and had admitted he’d sent out an e-mail to all their M.D. colleagues, asking for similar cases, to try to estimate the incidence of alternative medicine- induced deaths in New York City.

“Hey!” Chet called out while giving Jack’s arm a forceful nudge. “What are you having, a psychomotor seizure?”

“Sorry,” Jack said, shaking his head as if waking from a trance. “My mind was someplace else.”

“What did you want to ask me about my VAD case?” Chet asked. He had been waiting for Jack to finish his question.

“Could you possibly get the name or accession number of that case so I can get the details?” Jack said, but he didn’t listen for Chet’s response. His mind was back, remembering that morning when he’d awakened at five-thirty, still in his clothes, still sitting on the living-room couch. On his lap was Trick or Treatment, open midway through the appendix.

The book had solidified his negative feelings about alternative medicine and boosted his interest in the issue. Although there were certain sections of the book that he’d skimmed, for the most part he’d read the entire volume, even underlining certain key passages. Its message surely meshed with his own stance on the subject, and he felt the arguments the authors used to justify their conclusions were clear and unbiased. In fact, Jack felt they had bent over backward to try to make a case for alternative medicine, but in their summary all they could say was that homeopathy provided only a placebo effect; acupuncture, besides placebo, might have an effect on some types of pain and nausea, but it was minor and short-lived; chiropractic, besides placebo, showed some evidence of efficacy in relation to back pain, but conventional treatments were usually equally beneficial and far less expensive; and herbal medicine was mostly placebo, with products of little or no quality control, and for those products with a pharmacological effect, drugs that contained just the active ingredient were decidedly more safe and more efficacious.