Shi'ites and Sunnis - background

Son-in-Law vs. Father-in-Law

When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, there was a dispute over who would succeed him to become the caliph, or leader, of the young Muslim community. Shi'ites believe Muhammad had clearly designated Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, as his successor. But a group of Muslim elders gathered and selected Muhammad's father-in-law, Abu Bakr, instead. For a time, Ali stayed out of the public eye, but a small community of Shi'a (Arabic for "followers") soon surrounded him and deferred to him as their imam, or "guide."

According to Shi'ite belief, God chooses the imam to serve as an infallible guide for the community of the faithful. Every imam must descend directly from the Prophet, through Ali and his wife Fatima. Because Shi'ites emphasize the imam's God-given role, they have often rejected other sources of religious authority, such as community consensus, that are important within majority Sunni Islam.

Imam vs. Caliph

The caliph had the allegiance of most Muslims, but the imam was still a threat. Ali actually became caliph in 656, but not for long--in 661 he was killed by a dissident Muslim. Most of the imams who followed tried to keep a low profile, but many died violently.

In 874, the twelfth imam, known as the Mahdi ("divinely guided one"), simply disappeared. Most Shi'ites today, called "Twelvers," believe that the twelfth imam was the last one and that he is not dead but hidden, and will return at the end of time to reign over a period of justice and right religion. Other Shi'ite sects recognize fewer legitimate imams, or more, and say different things about who can assume the role. But all have looked to the imams, and not to caliphs or to the consensus of the Muslim community, for authority.

Shi'ite vs. Sunni

Shi'ite and Sunni Islam did not split over doctrinal differences, and even today they agree on the fundamentals of doctrine and practice. Both groups respect the Prophet, the Qur'an, and the oneness of God. Both also hold to the Five Pillars of Islam: shahada, the profession of faith; salat, the daily prayers; zakat, the alms tax; sawm, the Ramadan fast; and hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

But Shi'ites are distinctive in aspects of worship that grow out of their unique history--for instance, commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn, the third imam. A pilgrimage to Husayn's tomb in Karbala, Iraq, is believed to cleanse sins. Pilgrims join a procession circling the tomb, some beating their chests and gashing their scalps with swords to commemorate the martyr's suffering.

Also, Shi'ite society invests enormous importance in grand ayatollahs, who through their teaching have gathered followers who look to them for guidance. Shi'ites pay a special religious income tax, called the khums, to their chosen grand ayatollah, and this money funds schools and other community services. The first imam, Ali, is still venerated as the ideal Shi'ite teacher--morally uncompromising and pure in both word and deed.

Mark Diller
knowledgenews.net

Immigrant Group Puts a New Spin On Cleaning Niche

Tidy Business

Immigrant Group Puts a New Spin On Cleaning Niche

In Boston Area, Brazilians Build, Trade Maid 'Routes'As a Means to Advance

By JOEL MILLMAN
February 16, 2006; Page A1
The Wall Street Journal


FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- When families look to have their homes cleaned in the Boston suburbs, many turn to Brazilian immigrants, part of an exploding population of recent emigres who have been arriving here since the 1980s.

But the maid service is different than most. It isn't an ad-hoc group of workers scouring for weekly gigs; nor is it a corporate-driven franchise operation of the sort which has sprouted in other bedroom communities across the nation.

The transplanted Brazilians have promoted an unusual system for buying and selling domestic services. Central to the model are specific "routes" comprised of individual houses and cleaners that are grown and tightly managed -- often by a single family. In recent years, as the demand for housecleaning work has soared, these routes or "schedules" have become particularly valuable, and are commonly traded like commodities.


Maria da Graça De Sales helped fuel the trend. Sipping coffee in a tidy duplex she bought for $140,000 six years ago, she apologizes for her messy kitchen. "With so many homes to clean, I sometimes don't have time for mine," she says. Her business grosses more than $100,000 annually, servicing the homes of 70 clients. Some she scrubs herself, but mostly she pays other Brazilian immigrants -- many of them, like her, well-educated English speakers -- to do the work. Starting off as cleaners, the most industrious save enough to purchase their own, ready-made routes from entrepreneurs like Ms. De Sales.

Brazilian cleaning networks, also on the rise in cities such as Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla., demonstrate a subtle shift in immigrant work patterns. Through the 1990s, U.S.-bound immigration was split between the poor fleeing hunger or oppression and wealthy elites seeking high-paying jobs. Now, more middle-class, middle-skilled emigrants are heading to the U.S.

Other examples of so-called middle-skillers targeting specific niches include Filipinos, who dominate civil-service jobs in West Coast locations such as San Francisco and Seattle; and Jamaicans, who have cornered similar niches in such Eastern cities as New York and Miami. Immigrants from Nigeria have found security-guard work in Houston.

Brazilians enjoy advantages over some other groups. About 90% of Brazilian immigrants finished high school, and nearly 40% have some college training, estimates sociologist Franklin Goza of Ohio's Bowling Green State University. By contrast, a majority of Mexican and Central Americans lack high-school diplomas.

"When Brazilians talk about social mobility and new opportunities, emigration to the U.S. is high on the menu," says Eduardo Siqueira, a Brazilian professor on the Public Health faculty at the University of Massachusetts' Lowell campus.

The cost and complexity of emigrating from Brazil -- often involving a flight to Mexico for a chance to sneak into the U.S. -- means that only the relatively prosperous can afford such a journey. That helps to explain why former dentists, school teachers and journalists are among those coming here to pursue better, albeit sometimes humbling, income opportunities.

Ms. De Sales's experience is typical. A former public-school teacher, in 1984 she concluded that even after landing a dream job -- working for Brazil's treasury department in the city of Governador Valadares -- she would never save enough to put her three children through college.

Entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico, she spent two years working in Florida's orange groves. In 1986, she pooled savings with her brother Gerardo and contrived to get her teenage children out of Brazil.

After securing transit visas that let them pass through Florida, Robson, Rosangela and Rogério met their mother and drove the 1,500 miles to Framingham, where they were joined by their Uncle Gerardo. While the adults took daytime restaurant jobs, the children enrolled in Framingham's vocational high school. From 4:00 p.m. to midnight, all five worked at a local Sheraton hotel as housekeepers.

Scanning the want ads, Rosangela noticed the demand for domestic services. "Hotels paid $5 an hour, but people who wanted homes cleaned were paying $8," she recalls. She and her mother built a loyal following of clients, eventually growing a business large enough to sustain a separate client route for Rosangela. Today, Rosangela has more than 100 regular customers of her own.

Without the cleaning business, says Maria, her family never would have succeeded. "Here, it's hard," she says. "There, it's impossible." Proceeds from her family's extended cleaning business helped put her son through medical school at Temple University, in Philadelphia. After qualifying for amnesty -- and receiving tutoring help from one of her clients -- she passed her U.S. citizenship exam in 2000.

Anthropologist Soraya Resende Fleischer of Brazil's Federal University studied Brazilian housecleaners near Boston for her 2002 book, "Coming to America to Clean." Many of the immigrants, she discovered, left home with $10,000 in savings: half for smugglers taking them into the U.S., the rest seed capital to start cleaning businesses. The newcomers often were tradesmen or professionals who would leverage the skills of their fellow immigrants.

Brazilians who dominate the field rarely clean themselves but enlist as many as a dozen workers and fill out their client lists as word of their reliability spreads. When they book too much business to handle efficiently, they can carve out "starter" routes to pass on to family members newly arrived from Brazil. Or, as is the trend now, they can sell the routes via a highly-developed underground market.

In classified advertisements in Portuguese-language newspapers such as Tá Na Mão, (slang for "you got it!"), and on Internet postings, Brazilians use the English word "schedule" for cleaning routes. Notices declaring, "I want schedule" or "I'm selling schedule," flutter from walls wherever Brazilians shop or eat. Buyers easily outnumber sellers.


Selling routes dates to at least the early 1990s, when newcomer Hermes Reis paid $7,500 for cleaning rights to 14 homes in Framingham and nearby Wayland. "It was 10 times [weekly] revenues," Mr. Reis recalls, using a formula familiar to Wall Street types. The price has risen since then. In January, Rogério Araújo, a 35-year-old former schoolteacher, sold a coveted 31-home route after receiving more than 65 inquiries from an ad in Tá Na Mão. Mr. Araújo, who holds a green card, says he plans to report the $18,000 sale to the Internal Revenue Service.

The winning bidder was another immigrant living in a nearby Boston suburb. Significantly, the route included a Web site designed by Mr. Araújo's wife, Adriana, who worked for Microsoft Corp. before leaving Brazil.

Such sites enable clients to post instructions for cleaners. Missives such as "Skip the office, my husband doesn't want his papers disturbed," or "Just bathrooms today" are typical. Web sites also function as a marketing tool: By posting ads on sites such as Craigslist Inc., owners can attract plenty of referrals and carve out more schedules to sell later.

Selling routes -- essentially, the right to clean clients' homes -- can cause friction with customers. Michelle Fredette, a human-resources consultant in Framingham, was miffed when her longtime cleaner returned to Brazil and a stranger called announcing she was assuming the schedule. "It was, like, who is this telling me, 'I'm taking over'?" Ms. Fredette recalls. She didn't give the new operator access to her home.

Avoiding Problems

To avoid such a problem, Mr. Araújo emailed his clients about the impending change. Rather than disclose details of the sale, however, he told them a partner was buying him out. A few customers, he says, returned emails agreeing to switch; most didn't bother to reply. "I figured if they didn't respond they didn't mind," he says.

Today, Ms. De Sales, 58 years old, oversees four women who she pays a flat fee of $20 a house, keeping as much as $50 in profit for an average job. Divided into two-person teams, they clean a four-bedroom house in two hours. Unlike some operators, she treats them as subcontractors, which means they are responsible for paying taxes on the $100 or so they can earn in a day. (Though she requires her workers to produce Social Security numbers, Ms. De Sales isn't bound by law to check that they are valid.)


On a recent blustery morning, Ms. De Sales's first stop was Newton, an affluent Boston suburb of brick mansions and clapboard houses. There she met Erika Cristina Silva and Simone de Dias, two of her charges, cleaning a brick colonial on Greenlawn Street. Both women were smuggled in from Mexico in 2003. Ms. Silva says she paid $10,000 to come over the Rio Grande with 10 Brazilian men at night on an inflatable raft.

Ms. Silva, 27, is Ms. De Sales's crew chief, responsible for driving cleaners to sites on time, dividing the workload and making sure everything is cleaned properly.

Back in Vitória, capital of Brazil's Espírito Santo state, Ms. Silva graduated from college with a degree in public health and worked as a dental assistant. She hoped one day to have her own practice but decided to emigrate, reckoning opportunities were greater abroad. In Brazil, it would take years to save enough for dentist's training, she says. Credit is scarce in Brazil, and student loans aren't readily available.

"Here, I make $400 a week," Ms. Silva says. "There, I made $600 a month." Sharing an apartment with a cousin on Framingham's South Side, she says she was able to pay off her debt to the smugglers in less than six months. Today she drives her own car and already has begun researching dental programs.

Off the Radar

Brazilians began arriving here in large numbers in the 1980s, following in the footsteps of a small Portuguese colony. With low rents and quick access to major highways, the location suits entrepreneurs seeking work in richer towns like Newton, Sudbury and Weston. Another plus: Suburbs are off the radar screen of immigration authorities, who search for illegal immigrants at busy worksites where dozens might be discovered in a single sweep. Individual homes aren't a priority for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Boston, which now combines antiterrorist surveillance with more mundane tasks. "We target nuclear power plants, commercial airports and defense facilities," says Paula Grenier, an ICE spokeswoman.

In the past decade, according to Framingham officials, the Brazilian population has roughly doubled to one in four of the town's 67,000 residents. South Side storefronts sport Brazil's signature green and gold colors, while the aroma of puffy, warm pão de queijo wafts from Brazilian bakeries and cafes. Second-story offices once leased to accountants and lawyers now house sellers of imported foods and Brazilian soap opera DVDs.

The growing Brazilian presence fuels resentment in some quarters. Critics complain that educating immigrants costs the town $10,000 per student a year, while many parents work for cash and don't pay taxes.

"They've made Framingham an outlaw town," says Joseph Rizoli, 53, a school-bus driver who founded an anti-illegal immigration group called Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement.

Some mornings, he and his twin brother, Jim, lead protests outside a busy Brazilian bakery, a gathering point for day laborers looking for construction or cleaning jobs. They tote signs, some in Portuguese, declaring: "It's illegal to hire illegals," and "Illegals Out!"

Among the suburbanites who hire Brazilian cleaners, those sentiments are typically not shared.

Ethnicity and immigration status "are not relevant," concludes Joanne Aliber, a longtime customer of Ms. De Sales. At both her and her husband's high-technology workplaces, they consider immigrants as colleagues, not competitors. Housekeeping is just another aspect of the global economy. "My company employs people all over the world; in India, in Brazil," says Jeffrey Aliber. "As far as I'm concerned, it's the same principle here. You buy the best service."

Ms. De Sales views the market from a slightly different perspective. "American women don't know how to clean," she says with a shrug as she prepares to drive to another home.

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com1

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Ever More Relevant,Prime-Number Proofs Chalk Up More Success

Ever More Relevant,Prime-Number Proofs Chalk Up More Success
February 3, 2006; Page B1
The Wall Street Journal
Sharon Begley

Classic math problems can derail a mathematician's career. "You usually can't solve them," says mathematician Daniel Goldston of San Jose State University, so devoting your career to one is likely to leave your list of accomplishments a bit short.

Mathematicians are not letting a little thing like daunting odds deter them, however, and as a result one of the most romantic subjects in math -- prime numbers -- has recently seen what Kannan Soundararajan of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, calls "spectacular progress. Only five years in, and already this has been a great millennium for primes."

Ever since Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes (though they get sparser the farther out on the number line you go), claims about primes have proliferated like rabbits. In many cases, mathematicians know in their hearts that a claim is true but, to their chagrin, can't prove it.

That used to bother only those who inhabit the rarefied world of abstract math, where discussion of a "pseudo complex structure on a manifold X of dimension 2N is a C-module structure on a tangent bundle" counts as small talk. But now that primes are the basis for codes that encrypt financial data as well as national-security transmissions, making sure that mathematicians' hunches about primes are actually true matters in the real world, too.

A prime is a number whose only factors are 1 and itself, like 2, 3, 5, 7 and 18,793, not to mention 2 multiplied by itself 30,402,457 times minus 1 (the largest prime discovered so far, announced on Christmas; testing ever larger numbers for primeness, while doable, is very time consuming). Like the atoms from which the world of matter is constructed, primes are the raw material from which the whole world of numbers can be assembled because every number can be written as the product of primes. For instance, 18 = 2 x 3 x 3. They are also beacons of simplicity and purity -- minimalist art in the otherwise rococo landscape of math.

Yet primes' simplicity belies their mystery. "There are so many basic questions about prime numbers that we can't answer, and many things we think are true but can't prove," says Prof. Goldston.

His quarry is a centuries-old claim called the twin-prime conjecture. It asserts that there are infinitely many primes separated by 2, like 29 and 31. The largest known twin primes are the numbers 16,869,987,339,975 times 2 multiplied by itself 171,960 times plus 1, and that product minus 1.
But just because mathematicians have found a bunch of twin primes doesn't mean there are endless pairs, as claimed. Lots of crackpots have taken a stab at proving the claim, to no avail. Pros have also claimed to have a proof, only to retract it when competitors have spotted an error.

In three papers submitted to math journals for publication, however, Prof. Goldston and two colleagues have come as close as anyone in history.
"We weren't actually working on the twin-prime conjecture, because the feeling was there's no way to attack it," says Prof. Goldston. Instead, he and Cem Yildirim of Bogazici University, Istanbul, thought they might prevail against a weaker claim, namely, that there are infinitely many primes separated by gaps way smaller than the average spacing. They succeeded, proving that if the average gap between primes in some region of the number line is, say, 10 trillion, you can nonetheless find gaps as small as you care to.

Their proof suggests that there are infinitely many consecutive primes that differ by only 16, which is getting close to the 2 claimed by the twin-prime conjecture. "They're tiptoeing up to it," says Prof. Soundararajan.

The breakthrough surprised even its architects. "A year and a half ago I was convinced I'd die without solving" the twin-prime conjecture, says Prof. Goldston. "But now we're so close."

The popular image of mathematicians has them staring into space seeking inspiration, but Prof. Goldston scours old papers to find nuggets that might apply to his quest. Since 1999 he has collaborated with Prof. Yildirim. Their first proof, unveiled in 2003, had a mistake. When János Pintz of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences helped fix it, he became part of the "GPY" team.

That was not the only benefit of the error. The proof contained a sub-proof, like an accurate chapter in a flawed book, that Ben Green of the University of Bristol, England, and Terry Tao of UCLA used to prove a counterintuitive claim: that there exist special number sequences, called arithmetic progressions, containing as many primes as you can imagine.

In such progressions -- such as 5, 11, 17, 23, 29, 35 . . . -- the numbers are the same distance apart; here, 6. The longest such sequence, discovered in 2004, contains 23 primes starting with 56,211,383,760,397 and increasing by 44,546,738,095,860. Prof. Green and Prof. Tao raised that 23: You can find a progression with 1 million primes, one with 10 trillion, or any other number, they proved.

Other prime claims elude proof. The Goldbach conjecture, which dates from the 1700s, says that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes (20 = 7 + 13, for instance). Everyone believes it's true, but no one has proved it. Still, the millennium is young.

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps - NYT editorial

I do not endorse this viewpoint - too liberal - but a great piece of writing
======================
January 29, 2006
Editorial
New York Times
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation,contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big,dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. they missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who nowsay 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one couldpossibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush willfinally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged fromhiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will nothappen - because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as thoughthey do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al Qaeda iscalling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to knowwho they're calling and why," he told Republican officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing- and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a callfrom Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign IntelligenceSurveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaedaand other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generatethousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to deadends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridgewith a blowtorch - a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americansby reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created forthis purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist.The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush,who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to"reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance betweennational security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right.But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties andjudicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator - Mike DeWineof Ohio - introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable suspicion"for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department opposed it,saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical issues" andmay have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans -and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof - and dispensed with judges and warrants - forAmericans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to doanything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartimemeasure." That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mindwars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keeptrying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything.

Other presidents did it. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged totheir deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for apresident to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned GeorgeWashington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents haveno bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timelineconveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISAin the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican..

The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void

February 3, 2006
Being a Patient
When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void
New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY

A few moments before boarding a plane from Los Angeles to New York in January, Charlene Solomon performed her usual preflight ritual: she chewed a small tablet that contained trace amounts of several herbs, including extracts from daisy and chamomile plants.

Ms. Solomon, 56, said she had no way to know whether the tablet, an herb-based remedy for jet lag, worked as advertised. Researchers have found no evidence that such preparations are effective, and Ms. Solomon knows that most doctors would scoff that she was wasting her money.

Yet she swears by the tablets, as well as other alternative remedies, for reasons she acknowledges are partly psychological."I guess I do believe in the power of simply paying attention to your health, which in a way is what I'm doing," said Ms. Solomon, who runs a Web consulting business in Los Angeles. "But I also believe there are simply a lot of unknowns when it comes to staying healthy, and if there's a possibility something will help I'm willing to try it." Besides, she added, "whatever I'm doing is working, so I'm going to keep doing it."

The most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.

They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.

This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening.

Haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects all feed their disaffection, to the point where many people begin to question not only the health care system but also the science behind it. Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment.

Experts say that people with serious medical problems like diabetes or cancer are least likely to take their chances with natural medicine, unless their illness is terminal. Consumers generally know that quackery is widespread in alternative practices, that there is virtually no government oversight of so-called natural remedies and that some treatments, like enemas, can be dangerous.

Still, 48 percent of American adults used at least one alternative or complementary therapy in 2004, up from 42 percent a decade ago, a figure that includes students and retirees, soccer moms and truckers, New Age seekers and religious conservatives. The numbers continue to grow, experts say, for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements.

"I think there is a powerful element of nostalgia at work for many people, for home remedies — for what healing is supposed to be — combined with an idealized vision of what is natural and whole and good, " said Dr. Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine.
Dr. Barnes added, "People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all."

Healthy and Dabbling

Ms. Solomon's first small steps outside the mainstream came in 1991, after she watched her mother die of complications from a hysterectomy.
"I saw doctors struggling to save her," she said. "They were trying really hard, and I have great respect for what they do, but at that point I realized the doctors could only do so much."

She decided then that she needed to take more responsibility for her own health, by eating better, exercising more and seeking out health aids that she thought of as natural, meaning not prescribed by a doctor or developed by a pharmaceutical company.

"I usually stay away from drugs if I can, because the side effects even of cough and cold medicines can be pretty strong," she said.

The herbal preparations she uses, she said, "have no side effects, and the difference in my view is that they help support my own body's natural capability, to fight off disease" rather than treat symptoms.

If these sentiments are present in someone like Ms. Solomon, who regularly consults her internist and describes herself as "pretty mainstream," they run far deeper in millions of other people who use nontraditional therapies more often.

In interviews and surveys, these patients often described prescription drugs as poisons that mostly mask symptoms without improving their underlying cause.

Many extend their suspicions further. In a 2004 study, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted interviews with a group of men and women in Tucson who suffered from chronic arthritis, most of whom regularly used alternative therapies. Those who used alternative methods exclusively valued the treatments on the "rightness of fit" above other factors, and they were inherently skeptical of the health care system.

Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show.

"I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make" for the breakdown in trust in the medical system, said Joyce Newman, 74, of Lynnwood Wash., who sees a natural medicine specialist as her primary doctor. "The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head."

From here it is a small step to begin doubting medical science. If Western medicine is imperfect and sometimes corrupt, then mainstream doctors may not be the best judge of treatments after all, many patients conclude. People's actual experience — the personal testimony of friends and family, in particular — feels more truthful.

To best way to validate this, said Ms. Newman and many others who regularly use nontraditional therapies, is simply to try a remedy "and listen to your own body."

Opting Out

Cynthia Riley effectively opted out of mainstream medicine when it seemed that doctors were not listening to her. During a nine-year period that ended in 2004, Ms. Riley, 47, visited almost 20 doctors, for a variety of intermittent and strange health complaints: blurred vision, urinary difficulties, balance problems so severe that at times she wobbled like a drunk.

She felt unwell most of the time, but doctors could not figure out what she had. Each specialist ordered different tests, depending on the symptom, Ms. Riley said, but they were usually rushed and seemed to solicit her views only as a formality.

Undeterred, Ms. Riley, an event planner who lives near New London, Conn., typed out a four-page description of her ordeal, including her suspicion that she suffered from lead poisoning. One neurologist waved the report away as if insulted; another barely skimmed it, she said.
"I remember sitting in one doctor's office and realizing, 'He thinks I'm crazy,' " Ms. Riley said. "I was getting absolutely nowhere in conventional medicine, and I was determined to get to the root of my problems."
Through word of mouth, Ms. Riley heard about Deirdre O'Connor, a naturopath with a thriving practice in nearby Mystic, Conn., and made an appointment.

In recent years, people searching for something outside of conventional medicine have increasingly turned to naturopaths, herbal specialists who must complete a degree that includes some standard medical training in order to be licensed, experts say. Fourteen states, including California and Connecticut, now license naturopaths to practice medicine. Natural medicine groups are pushing for similar legislation in other states, including New York.

Licensed naturopaths can prescribe drugs from an approved list in some states, but have no prescribing rights in others.Right away, Ms. Riley said, she noticed a difference in the level of service. Before even visiting the office, she received a fat envelope in the mail containing a four-page questionnaire, she said. In addition to asking detailed questions about medical history — standard information — it asked about energy level, foods she craved, sensitivity to weather and self-image: "Please list adjectives that describe you," read one item.

"It felt right, from the beginning," Ms. Riley said. Her first visit lasted an hour and a half, and Ms. O'Connor, the naturopath, agreed that metal exposure was a possible cause of her symptoms. It emerged in their interview that Ms. Riley had worked in the steel industry, and tests of her hair and urine showed elevated levels of both lead and mercury, Ms. O'Connor said.

After taking a combination of herbs, vitamins and regular doses of a drug called dimercaptosuccinic acid, or DMSA, to treat lead poisoning, Ms. Riley said, she began to feel better, and the symptoms subsided.

Along the way, Ms. O'Connor explained the treatments to Ms. Riley, sometimes using drawings, and called her patient regularly to check in, especially during the first few months, Ms. Riley said.

Other doctors said they could not comment on Ms. Riley's case because they had not examined her. Researchers who specialize in lead poisoning say that it is rare in adults but that it can cause neurological symptoms and bladder problems and is often missed by primary care doctors.

Dr. Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist who directs the lead research group at the University of Pittsburgh, said DMSA was the pharmaceutical treatment of choice for high blood lead levels.

Researchers say there is little or no evidence that vitamins or herbs can relieve symptoms like Ms. Riley's. Still, she said, "I look and feel better than I have in years."

Life and Death

Diane Paradise bet her life on the uncertain benefits of natural medicine, after being burned physically and emotionally by conventional doctors.
In 1995, doctors told Ms. Paradise, now 35, that she had Hodgkin's disease. After a six-month course of chemotherapy and radiation, she said, she was declared cancer free, and she remained healthy for five years.

But in 2001 the cancer reappeared, more advanced, and her doctors recommended a 10-month course of drugs and radiation, plus a marrow transplant, she said.

Ms. Paradise, a marketing consultant in Rochester, N.Y., balked.
"I was burned badly the first time around, third-degree burns, and now they were talking about 10 months," she said in an interview, "and they were giving me no guarantees; they said it was experimental. That's when I started looking around. I really had nothing to lose, and I was focused on quality of life at that point, not quantity."

When she told one of her doctors that she was considering an alternative treatment in Arizona, the man exploded, she said. "His exact words were, 'That's not treatment, that's a vacation — you're wasting your time!' " she said.

And so ended the relationship. With help from friends, Ms. Paradise raised about $40,000 to pay for the Arizona clinic's treatment, plus living expenses while there.

"I had absolutely no scientific reason for choosing this route, none," she said. "I just think there are times in our life when we are asked to make decisions based on our intuition, on our gut instinct, not based on evidence put in front of us, and for me this was one of those moments."

Cancer researchers say that there is no evidence that vitamins, herbs or other alternative therapies can cure cancer, and they caution that some regimens may worsen the disease.

But Ms. Paradise said that her relationship with the natural medicine specialist in Arizona had been collaborative and that she had felt "more empowered, more involved" in the treatment plan, which included large doses of vitamins, as well as changes in diet and sleep routines. After four months on the regimen, she said, she felt much better.

But the cancer was not cured. It has resurfaced recently and spread, and this time Ms. Paradise has started an experimental treatment with an oncologist in New York.

She is complementing this treatment, she said, with another course of alternative therapy in Arizona. She moved in with friends near Phoenix and started the alternative regime in January.

"It's 79 degrees and beautiful here," she said by phone in mid-January. "Let's hope that's a good sign."

For all their suspicions and questions about conventional medicine, those who venture outside the mainstream tend to have one thing in abundance, experts say: hope. In a 1998 survey of more than 1,000 adults from around the country, researchers found that having an interest in "personal growth or spirituality" predicted alternative medicine use.

Nontraditional healers know this, and they often offer some spiritual
element in their practice, if they think it is appropriate. David Wood, a naturopath who with his wife, Cheryl, runs a large, Christian-oriented practice in Lynnwood, Wash., said he treated patients of all faiths.
"We pray with patients, with their permission," said Mr. Wood, who also works with local medical doctors when necessary. "If patients would not like us to pray for them, we don't, but it's there if needed."

He added, "Our goal here is to help people get really well, not merely free of symptoms."

That is exactly the sentiment that many Americans say they feel is missing from conventional medicine. Whatever the benefits and risks of its many concoctions and methods, alternative medicine offers them at least the promise of affectionate care, unhurried service, freedom from prescription drug side effects and the potential for feeling not just better but also spiritually recharged.

"I don't hate doctors or anything," Ms. Newman said. "I just know they can make mistakes, and so often they refer you on to see another doctor, and another."

Seeing a naturopath, she said, "I feel I'm known, they see me as a whole person, they listen to what I say."

A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another

January 31, 2006
Essay
A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another
By ARTHUR I. MILLER
New York Times

Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago.

There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.

Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a "pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.

Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which Einstein attributed his theories.

Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories.

As a boy Einstein did poorly in school. Music was an outlet for his emotions. At 5, he began violin lessons but soon found the drills so trying that he threw a chair at his teacher, who ran out of the house in tears. At 13, he discovered Mozart's sonatas.

The result was an almost mystical connection, said Hans Byland, a friend of Einstein's from high school. "When his violin began to sing," Mr. Byland told the biographer Carl Seelig, "the walls of the room seemed to recede — for the first time, Mozart in all his purity appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure lines, roguishly playful, mightily sublime."

From 1902 to 1909, Einstein was working six days a week at a Swiss patent office and doing physics research — his "mischief" — in his spare time. But he was also nourished by music, particularly Mozart. It was at the core of his creative life.

And just as Mozart's antics shocked his contemporaries, Einstein pursued a notably Bohemian life in his youth. His studied indifference to dress and mane of dark hair, along with his love of music and philosophy, made him seem more poet than scientist.

He played the violin with passion and often performed at musical evenings. He enchanted audiences, particularly women, one of whom gushed that "he had the kind of male beauty that could cause havoc."

He also empathized with Mozart's ability to continue to compose magnificent music even in very difficult and impoverished conditions. In 1905, the year he discovered relativity, Einstein was living in a cramped apartment and dealing with a difficult marriage and money troubles.

That spring he wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in the music of Bach and Mozart.
In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.

"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."

In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe. Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the theory's beauty. "Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be able to escape the charm of this theory," he once said.

The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought to be. And amazingly, the universe turned out to be pretty much as Einstein imagined. Its daunting mathematics revealed spectacular and unexpected phenomena like black holes.

Though a Classical giant, Mozart helped lay groundwork for the Romantic with its less precise structures. Similarly, Einstein's theories of relativity completed the era of classical physics and paved the way for atomic physics and its ambiguities. Like Mozart's music, Einstein's work is a turning point.
At a 1979 concert for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the Juilliard Quartet recalled having played for Einstein at his home in Princeton, N.J. They had taken quartets by Beethoven and Bartok and two Mozart quintets, said the first violinist, Robert Mann, whose remarks were recorded by the scholar Harry Woolf.

After playing the Bartok, Mann turned to Einstein. "It would give us great joy," he said, "to make music with you." Einstein in 1952 no longer had a violin, but the musicians had taken an extra. Einstein chose Mozart's brooding Quintet in G minor.

"Dr. Einstein hardly referred to the notes on the musical score," Mr. Mann recalled, adding, "while his out-of-practice hands were fragile, his coordination, sense of pitch, and concentration were awesome."

He seemed to pluck Mozart's melodies out of the air.

Arthur I. Miller, professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College London, wrote "Empire of the Stars."