Between two statues of Asian art, Michel Cymes slips into the camera: “Integrative medicine is the medicine of tomorrow.” A few minutes later: credits. The sequence, filmed in the Guimet museum, in Paris, must pass Thursday July 20 on France 2, in one of the very last emissions of Extraordinary powers of the human body. After 11 years on the air, the program is coming to an end. With as a finale, a snub: what could be more daring, if not provocative, than to conclude 38 long formats on science and health, with a eulogy of the most controversial practices?
Homeopathy, plants, acupuncture, drama therapy, art therapy… Featured with Adriana Karembeu, the troublemaker doctor of the PAF has never ceased to honor pseudo-therapies and the less established sciences, in the middle of the best in research, even if it means dividing. A posture that he defends with conviction, even away from the cameras, from his vacation home in the South, where he returned after the last filming: “If the patient thinks it does him good, so much the better! We need a global medicine, which relieves, either because it is effective, or because believing in it makes us feel good”.
In a few days, the star presenter will go back to Paris to discuss his new ideas. He has “full”, he assures. None of them should deviate from the rule he has set himself, the common thread of Extraordinary powers of the human body, and trademark of the media character: to make science attractive, even if it means looking at its periphery. “It’s television, it has to be spectacular, without making spectacle medicine”, assures the 66-year-old otolaryngologist.
As many audience as Koh-Lanta
The creed succeeds him: The Extraordinary Powers of the Human Body attracted up to 4 million viewers, a very good score for science popularization. 17% market share. As much as Koh Lanta, the TF1 reality show. The two programs have in common a taste for adventure: with Adriana Karembeu, Michel Cymes has traveled around the world, to the point of brushing his limits, to illustrate physiological mechanisms. “While crossing a ridge of Mont-Blanc, we realized that I was afraid of heights. Since then, the production has made me parachute jump. And even sleep on the side of a cliff. “, he quips.
Summits, fantastic discoveries, the alternative, even the eccentric: enough to make science sexy… at the risk of deviating from it. Beyond the staging, the scientific choices of “Dr. Good” – from the name of his health and well-being magazine – have never ceased to annoy his colleagues. “He makes scientific confusion, castigates Hervé Le Bars, engineer and spokesperson for the French Association for Scientific Information (Afis). To gain ratings, he mixes reliable, substantiated scientific information with delusions pseudoscientific. With no transition, no explicit way to tell the difference between the two types of sequences.”
One of them particularly irritated. In the episode “Unexplained healings: the powers of the mind over the body”, broadcast on July 19, 2022, centered on esoteric healing, the duo engage in magnetism, a pseudo-therapy that claims to heal through thought. On the board – a gymnasium – a person is chosen, at random. Adriana Karembeu stands behind her, and concentrates mentally to destabilize her, without touching her. The guinea pig falls, he was however aware of nothing. Michel Cymes, who serves as a scientific guarantee, does not flinch. “These would be energies that are scientifically impossible to bring to light,” the voiceover reads.
However, scientific studies have been carried out, and the effect in question has never been demonstrated. A few months after this broadcast, a randomized controlled trial – “Rolls-Royce” of scientific experiments – came to confirm the lack of seriousness of this kind of practice. Carried out by a team from the Friborg hospital, and published in the journal of surgery open-heart, this study involved 200 patients having to undergo coronary angiography (an examination of the heart). Half of them benefited from a “care” magnetizer, supposed to prevent side effects (bleeding). Result: they did not have less than the others.
The favorite meeting place for online verifiers
By dint of sequences like that of the magnetizer, the show has become a must for “verifiers”. Internet users who track down omissions, errors and false information. “I had something to write about all the shows”, laments one of them, Alexander Samuel, a 38-year-old Viking-like activist, known for his cropping during the Covid-19 crisis, aimed in particular at the ‘IHU of Marseille and Didier Raoult. On each show – three or four a year on average – this mathematics professor, holder of a doctorate in molecular biology, notes the passages that cause him problems, before denouncing them on Twitter, where he is followed by 20,000 people. .
Like this time when Michel Cymes, gardening on his knees in the earth, bluntly asserts that meditation would prolong life. Because the modified state of consciousness would lengthen the size of the telomeres – the ends of the chromosomes – which would make it possible to live longer. “There are many publications, but not very rigorous, many of which have been retracted. And no study directly demonstrates an increase in life expectancy, it is an extrapolation”, details Alexander Samuel. His tweets, like many others, end up feeding the show’s Wikipedia, in the section dedicated to “controversies over the veracity of certain claims”.
Bad science, in the productions animated by Michel Cymes? “We didn’t miss a lot of them, Raoults, guys who are doing a study for themselves, or who are phoning them up”, replies the person concerned, before conceding: “We check, we nuance, but we is not infallible.” What then of the time when fasting is presented as good for the microbiota, on the sole basis of studies carried out and financed by a clinic which itself sells fasting cures? “Adriana tested and felt good”, sweeps the doctor. And the time he hugged a tree, praising sylvotherapy, whose care claims have never been demonstrated, beyond the benefits of moderate outdoor physical activity? “We never recommended that for cancer.”
“You have to laugh”
Online comments, Michel Cymes does not read them, to “avoid the ulcer”. But the retiree from the medical service still regrets the “all-controversy” of the era of social networks. “Maybe if I had hugged a power pole, my blood pressure would have dropped as quickly as with a beech tree. So what? Is it serious? You have to have a good laugh too.” While tackling the doxa: “In the middle, there are sometimes stubborn people, unable to get out of dogma. If it makes them sweat, we try to understand what magnetizers and aromatherapists do, and why patients go see them, too bad.”
Should a science popularizer say that? “We must of course talk about pseudo-medicine, and even unexplained phenomena, but with a clear, explicit and rigorous approach, otherwise it’s misinformation”, retorts Guillaume Bagnolini, researcher in philosophy and director of the association of scientific mediation Cosciences, based in Montpellier. Not far from there, in Toulouse, researchers are very seriously trying to measure the impact of shamanism sessions on neurodegenerative diseases. “Mr. Cymes and his teams could have gone to see them, report on their results and especially on their approach, rather than showcasing charlatans”, he regrets.
“If we do not make a gradation between proven practices and those which have no scientific basis, there is a real risk that people will not take care of themselves”, estimates Hervé Le Bars, of Afis. A study published in 2018 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the most reputable journals, tends to confirm this. Conducted on cancer patients interested in complementary medicine, it shows that they have less chance of survival than patients who are not interested in it. In particular because they more often refuse conventional treatments, the effect of which has been demonstrated.