Gullibility is a disadvantage in any business, but it’s a cardinal sin in journalism. During my J-school years, I acquired the occupational deformity that afflicts most reporters: a degree of skepticism bordering on the cynical. In my professional circles, an adage holds that “if your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

I internalized the lesson and became a lifelong doubter, fairly smitten with empiricism and evidence. If you say X, and X sounds the least bit unlikely to me, I may go looking for proof. If I don’t find it, I’ll be disinclined to believe you.

But sometimes there’s crow for dinner. When I threw my back out years ago and found myself supine on the tennis court in agony, it took some self-convincing to go see a chiropractor, because most people in my tribe of agnostics and science venerators believe that chiropractors are quacks. But the professional back-cracker I visited realigned my spine with startling efficacy, producing such a wave of instant relief that I actually wept.

Which brings me to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat suffers from Lyme disease. He too is by nature or training a hard-core empiricist. But he has gradually become a convert to Rife therapy, which involves a machine that emits a “mortal oscillatory rate” for various pathogens, a frequency at which they would vibrate and then shatter, somewhat like a wineglass exposed to a resonant pitch belted out by a skillful opera singer. This discovery was, alas, suppressed by powerful medical interests, or so Rife’s admirers claimed. His work was taken up by entrepreneurs on the medical fringe who sold frequency-generating machines to rid the body of all kinds of pathogens.

Initially skeptical but in pain, Douthat ordered a Rife machine. Acknowledging that he “[fell] through the solid floor of establishment consensus,” he quickly became a believer. His change of heart was the subject of a recent column, titled “How I Became Extremely Open-Minded.” (He has also written a book about his transformation; footnote 1).

I scoffed the first time I read the column. But on the second read, I had to admit it took a brave man to write that article. Douthat, a poobah at a pedagogical newspaper whose middle and upper echelons think of themselves as supremely rational, is willing to be mocked for telling the truth—his truth, shaky and subjective though it is.

Why am I bothering you with all this? Because his experience strikes me as analogous to that of a lot of audiophiles, sans the physical illness. By insisting that swapping interconnects can make an audible difference—for which there is little if any rigorous scientific evidence—high-end aficionados invite ridicule, including allegations of deception, self- and otherwise. We spend a small fortune on vibration-reduction solutions, claiming that this will help focus the soundstage or confer other sonic benefits. In doing so, we swim against a tide of incredulity.

Cables are mild compared to some of the more bizarre audiophile tweaks: clocks in freezers, special creams, bottles of tiny rocks. Proponents of such products endure the stifled giggles of those who simply know this to be quackery. But there’s a difference between unproven claims and unprovable claims. They shouldn’t all be lumped together.

Please don’t think I’m being flippant about the analogy between hi-fi woo and unproven medical treatments. In his columns, Douthat goes further than I’d be willing to go, stopping just short of advocating serious medical woo. (But, hey, it works for him.) When an audiophile tapes a piece of colored foil to his wall or paints the edges of his CDs with a special green marker, there’s little risk. The worst thing she or he ever parts with is hard-earned cash, and always by choice. (Plus, often there’s a money-back guarantee.) As far as I know, no one has ever died from indulging in audiophile tweaks.

But when Steve Jobs rejected surgery and turned to acupuncture and juices to cure his pancreatic cancer, it may have cost him his life, and it almost certainly shortened it. (Biographer Walter Isaacson said Jobs belatedly regretted his own “magical thinking.”)

In his response to an early draft of this column, Stereophile Editor Jim Austin was spot-on in saying: “In medicine as in hi-fi, there are some seriously crooked entrepreneurs aiming to take advantage of human credulity. In medicine, they’re also exploiting desperation. In hi-fi, people are spending their own money on entertainment—not on the very survival of themselves or a loved one.”

That important distinction noted, Douthat’s account very nearly knocked me off my show-me-the-data perch. He nudged me closer to audio’s subjectivists, the brave (or foolish) folks who argue that if our senses can perceive it (whatever “it” is) but modern machinery can’t measure it, it’s the measuring machines that are wrong. To put it another way, maybe rigorous proof isn’t always necessary—maybe it’s okay to approach these things as a whole human being and not as a scientist. Maybe it’s better, because doing so sometimes opens us up to experiences we miss out on if we cling to certainty, and there’s little real risk.

In Joe Abercrombie’s novel Before They Are Hanged, a character spits out this aphorism: “An open mind is like to an open wound. Vulnerable to poison. Liable to fester. Apt to give its owner only pain.” I’d counter that possessing an open mind lets people develop an ability to steer clear of unshakeable dogma. I admire those who are truly open-minded. The human brain is forever on a search-and-destroy mission against ambiguity—some human brains, anyway. For some of us, it takes effort to tolerate some doubt and cognitive dissonance, keeping us safely away from what our gray matter craves: dead certainty.

Footnote 1: The column, which is the third part of a three-part series, can be found here. (There’s probably a paywall.) The first two parts are here and here. Another relevant Douthat column is “Long-Haul Covid and the Chronic Illness Debate.” Douthat’s book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, is at Amazon.

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