The Man Who Broke His Promise- "I Won't Let You Die"

Five years ago, I made what I knew would be one of my last phone calls to a friend. At twenty-nine years old, she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By the time it was discovered, it was absolutely everywhere in her body, and the doctors who diagnosed her said that her chances of surviving were zero. At best, she might have a few months left. At worst, just a couple of weeks.

Yet, when I called, she reassured me: "I'm not going to die."

You see, she had been made a promise by a man named Tom Tam. He is the founder of a form of alternative medicine called tong ren. To anyone with a rational mind, tong ren is clearly fraud. It involves striking voodoo dolls that represent the patient with magnetic hammers to rid the patient of bad and blocked energy and treat absolutely any medical condition in the world. But my friend didn't have a rational mind. She had a dying mind, and dying minds are gullible minds.

Tom Tam called himself a healer, and told my friend: "Pancreatic cancer is no big deal. I've cured it dozens of times. I won't let you die."

As the cancer churned through her body, my friend was religious about attending sessions with other patients where she hit voodoo dolls with hammers and told herself that it was curing her cancer. I have no doubt that it improved her attitude and helped combat the severe depression that is a natural result of terminal illness, but all the positive thinking in the world won't cure cancer. She wasted many of her final hours of life doing tong ren "therapy" and reassuring her friends and family that she would not die. Although the classes were technically free, Tom Tam had high "suggested donations" and made his so-called patients feel pressured and uncomfortable if they didn't pay it. My friend's money, and her family's money, gave Tom Tam a life of luxury while his patients suffered and died.

My friend also pursued a number of other treatments-- and who wouldn't, if sentenced to death at 29?-- including conventional methods such as chemotherapy and radiation, as well as alternative techniques like a macrobiotic diet and even human breast milk supplements. And, much to everyone's relief and amazement, within three months, the cancer was almost completely gone from her body. Terminal cancer. Gone. We were ecstatic, and so was my friend.

Doctors credited chemotherapy and my friend's exceptionally healthy diet for her recovery and advised her to stay on chemotherapy to keep the cancer away. But Tom Tam told my friend that chemotherapy was poison. He told her that it was he who cured her cancer, and that he absolutely guaranteed that if she kept using tong ren therapy, her cancer would never come back. She believed him-- and, after a three-month remission and plenty of tong ren therapy, her cancer came back with a vengeance.

Once again, it was everywhere in her body, causing horrible pain and severe jaundice. She grew weak and sick and lost a massive amount of weight. In her very last blog post, she said, "[My oncologist] said that if I try intensive chemotherapy one more time, there's about a fifty-fifty chance that it could get me two more months. The nurse cried with me."

I called her that day. She didn't remember who I was; she was confused and disoriented. I spoke to her mother briefly before hanging up the phone. She told me quietly, "We're preparing for the end, now."

A few days shy of her thirtieth birthday, my friend passed away in her mother's arms, with her father and sister holding her hands. Tom Tam had promised that he wouldn't let her die. He promised that voodoo dolls and hammers would save her and told her that chemotherapy would kill her, and he was wrong. My friend paid for his fraud with her life.

A few months after she passed, I wrote an article about tong ren therapy and my friend's death, exposing Tom Tam as a fraud and a quack. Two weeks later, I got over seventy emails in one day from his followers. They called me names. They said that I was lying. They said that they were using tong ren therapy, and it was healing them. They reported me to my editors and publishers, asking them to fire me. They sent messages to my Facebook friends telling them that I was a horrible person. They posted photos of me in alternative medicine Facebook groups "exposing" me and encouraging each other to harass me. They told me that I should kill myself. They threatened to sue me for millions of dollars... all for daring to speak against the patron saint of voodoo dolls.

It doesn't take much to know that tong ren is a scam. It doesn't work. There is no scientific evidence that it works and no scientifically plausible way that it could work. Tom Tam insists that his methods are researched and scientific, but there isn't a single peer-reviewed study of the merits of his work and I have yet to find an oncologist who recommends his techniques. Yet people who are very sick are often willing to believe some strange and fantastic things. He knows this and he exploits this.

I don't know if my friend would still be alive today if she hadn't listened to Tom Tam. I don't know if her cancer, which for whatever reason, went away for a few months, would have come back if she had done as her doctors advised and stayed on chemotherapy. I do know that my friend lost many of her final moments and much of her family's limited finances pursuing a treatment that she didn't know was fraudulent. I know that she deserved better than that. Every human being deserves better than that.