Robert S. Bobrow

I had the opportunity to review this book for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and subsequently exchanged emails with Dr. Bobrow. Great guy, great book! Here's the review I wrote:

In 1997 an English housewife heard a voice in her head one evening when she was quietly reading at home.

“Please don’t be afraid,” the voice said politely. “I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this.” The voice explained that it was only trying to help, that the poor woman had a brain tumor and should immediately seek a CAT scan at a certain London hospital. The panicked lady called her psychiatrist who diagnosed “functional hallucinatory psychosis” and prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

But the voice persisted, the woman insisted on a scan, and you can guess the rest. Neurosurgeons spotted something suspicious, they opened her skull, and discovered a meningioma brain tumor the size of an egg. When she awoke from anesthesia, the voice spoke one last time. “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.”

Her experience is just one of many puzzling, health-related, paranormal experiences Dr. Robert Bobrow M.D. describes in his delightful, thought-provoking book The Witch in the Waiting Room.

More surprising than her bizarre story is the fact that the respected, mainstream British Medical Journal published it. Bobrow offers skeptical colleagues sober reports describing a plethora of “paranormal” experiences patients share with their physicians and psychiatrists – voodoo spells, telepathic dreams, déjà vu, acupuncture and hypnosis cures, self-predicted deaths, energy medicine cures and faith healings, near death experiences – all drawn directly from refereed medical journals accessible through MEDLINE, an internet database and “our profession’s Gospel, from which all our knowledge derives, from which our textbooks are largely written.” This cabinet of curiosities deserves exploring by the medical profession, he argues. Patients’ paranormal beliefs and experiences can directly affect their mental and physical health; and the anomalies themselves suggest new avenues of research which may advance medical science.

MEDLINE stubbornly refuses to index leading anomalies journals like the Journal of Scientific Exploration or the Journal of Parapsychology, depriving Bobrow and his readers of a wealth of additional evidence. But the paradigm-changing work of a number of luminaries in anomalies research still manages to sneak into the medical community’s canonical literature –Ian Stevenson’s reports of childhood memories and birthmarks suggesting a past life, and Bruce Greyson’s near death experience scale (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease); Dean Radin’s psi studies using EEGs (Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine); and Michael Persinger’s one-theory-fits-all attempt to use the earth’s magnetic properties to explain everything from poltergeists and UFOs to sightings of the Virgin Mary (Perceptual and Motor Skills).

Bobrow’s writing style is crisp, but his topic selection quirky. He devotes a chapter to lycanthropy, describing patients with “species identity disorder” who believe they’re wolves, cats, birds or gerbils. But he oddly fails to cover patients who claim alien abduction experiences, courageously investigated by the late Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack; or the landmark surveys of death bed visions conducted by Osis and Haraldsson. Surely physicians encounter these paranormal claims more frequently than werewolf confessions. And why no reference to Michael Murphy’s classic exploration of extraordinary human potential, The Future of the Body?

Still, the author’s cauldron bubbles with a heady brew of odd, unsettling experiences worthy of more stirring and tasting by a Western medical establishment bewitched by hubris and scientific reductionism.
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