Doctors Without Dollars

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Headaches, heartaches, backaches, aching feet, fatigue, anxiety and those vague, burning pains in your legs at night--these are the nemeses of real doctors. Many people have these symptoms, but the cruel truth is that there is no reliable cure for any of them. Clever doctors watching their incomes melt away have taken notice, establishing all sorts of lucrative NRWAT practices. They've become chiropractors, osteopathic manipulators, prolotherapists, postural therapists, acupuncturists, even Therapeutic Touch practitioners. Each of these therapies proclaims the existence of force fields, bodily reactions, energies or auras that simply cannot be measured or observed scientifically. The "patients" who pay these docs run the gamut from the hopelessly deceived to the downright self-indulgent. But lest we look down too haughtily on NRWAT providers from the moral high ground of real medicine, we must admit that their patients come back again and again, seemingly happy with the treatments. And they pay them with real money--which seems, alas, to have become the whole idea.

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SARAH PALIN, in an interview with Oprah that will air Monday, on whether her almost son-in-law Levi Johnston will be coming to Thanksgiving dinner

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