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The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine
Telepathy, reincarnation, voodoo, and witchcraft are just a few examples of phenomena now defined as paranormal activity. But just because these marvels lie beyond the reach of current scientific explanation does not mean that future developments will not bring understanding. For instance, some scientists now believe that the mysterious symptoms, such as hallucinations and spasms, of the accused witches in Salem may actually have been reactions to a type of poison. And a hundred years ago, who would have thought that acupuncture could be scientifically explained, let alone covered by most mainstream insurance companies? Citing case studies and analyses from respected medical journals, Dr. Robert Bobrow — an accomplished physician and clinical associate professor at Stony Brook University — investigates numerous instances that do not fit into the normal lexicon of medical diagnoses. He argues that by simply dismissing unexplainable phenomena we may be missing valuable opportunities to advance science. Although The Witch in the Waiting Room provides enough data and research to satisfy the scientific community, Dr. Bobrow's fluid writing style and straightforward analyses will engage the raft of curious lay readers who will be drawn to this book.
302 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 28, 2023
Stopped reading a quarter of the way through. Some case studies were interesting, but overall the text was lacking.
October 29, 2009
My Halloween read. took it to my doctor appt today-He thought it was cool and wants it when I am done! :)
this is a review of published medical articles/research==most recently in the past 50-60 years--covering a wide and i mean wide range of topics.
It disproves many and then also gives you moments to pause and ponder it there are abililities or things beyond our current knowledge.
this is a review of published medical articles/research==most recently in the past 50-60 years--covering a wide and i mean wide range of topics.
It disproves many and then also gives you moments to pause and ponder it there are abililities or things beyond our current knowledge.
February 18, 2023
Dr. Robert Bobrow makes a great spell checker
I have a preference for books that pull a subject apart bit by bit. I read such books as "A Perfect Red", "Oranges", and "Green Cargoes". This book fits very well on the same shelf as Kendal.
Before you try to place Dr. Bobrow in the category with new-age cooks like Shirley McLane or Gary Zukav Wait and read. This book is a natural extension of a research paper and the bulk of the information can be found and verified at "pubmed.gov".
The basic theme is that maybe we ascribe technology or phenomenon that we do not understand to witchcraft and the like. Be aware that there may be reviews that take statements from this book out of context and make more of it than was intended. Speaking about the theme in this book, you may want to read a story by H. Rider Haggard, "She" where the use of scrying is explained as a technology that is old but technically workable and not magic.
Anyway, I find the individual cases fascinating. Dr. Bobrow made a good selection and dissertation. I think you will enjoy the book and come away with a new view of medicine.
I also think he left room for a second book.
Just a note my version is on the Kendal and I used the reader a lot during my morning commutes to work I just plugged it into the car speakers.
I have a preference for books that pull a subject apart bit by bit. I read such books as "A Perfect Red", "Oranges", and "Green Cargoes". This book fits very well on the same shelf as Kendal.
Before you try to place Dr. Bobrow in the category with new-age cooks like Shirley McLane or Gary Zukav Wait and read. This book is a natural extension of a research paper and the bulk of the information can be found and verified at "pubmed.gov".
The basic theme is that maybe we ascribe technology or phenomenon that we do not understand to witchcraft and the like. Be aware that there may be reviews that take statements from this book out of context and make more of it than was intended. Speaking about the theme in this book, you may want to read a story by H. Rider Haggard, "She" where the use of scrying is explained as a technology that is old but technically workable and not magic.
Anyway, I find the individual cases fascinating. Dr. Bobrow made a good selection and dissertation. I think you will enjoy the book and come away with a new view of medicine.
I also think he left room for a second book.
Just a note my version is on the Kendal and I used the reader a lot during my morning commutes to work I just plugged it into the car speakers.
January 7, 2018
I am thoroughly fascinated by this subject and wanted to be "wowed" by this book, but I wasn't. I did like it, though the case studies were mostly decades old and not nearly covered in depth enough for my taste. It did spark my interest (pun intended) in finding out more about the correlation of electricity, magnetism, and the human body.
July 24, 2025
The book feels as if it was flung together, and some of what the author speaks borders on urban legend. His main point seems to be to say "who knows? there might be some weird stuff going on" rather than to spark an sort of debate or research into the "paranormal."
February 8, 2021
nice overview and reminder that orthodoxy in any field can lead to rigidity and denial of truth.
July 29, 2023
Un libro muy interesante para quienes tenemos curiosidad por los fenómenos paranormales que en algún momento podrían llegar a explicarse científicamente.
April 18, 2014
I had the opportunity to review this book for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and subsequently exchanged emails with Dr. Bobrow. Great guy, great book! Here's the review I wrote:
In 1997 an English housewife heard a voice in her head one evening when she was quietly reading at home.
“Please don’t be afraid,” the voice said politely. “I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this.” The voice explained that it was only trying to help, that the poor woman had a brain tumor and should immediately seek a CAT scan at a certain London hospital. The panicked lady called her psychiatrist who diagnosed “functional hallucinatory psychosis” and prescribed anti-psychotic medication.
But the voice persisted, the woman insisted on a scan, and you can guess the rest. Neurosurgeons spotted something suspicious, they opened her skull, and discovered a meningioma brain tumor the size of an egg. When she awoke from anesthesia, the voice spoke one last time. “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.”
Her experience is just one of many puzzling, health-related, paranormal experiences Dr. Robert Bobrow M.D. describes in his delightful, thought-provoking book The Witch in the Waiting Room.
More surprising than her bizarre story is the fact that the respected, mainstream British Medical Journal published it. Bobrow offers skeptical colleagues sober reports describing a plethora of “paranormal” experiences patients share with their physicians and psychiatrists – voodoo spells, telepathic dreams, déjà vu, acupuncture and hypnosis cures, self-predicted deaths, energy medicine cures and faith healings, near death experiences – all drawn directly from refereed medical journals accessible through MEDLINE, an internet database and “our profession’s Gospel, from which all our knowledge derives, from which our textbooks are largely written.” This cabinet of curiosities deserves exploring by the medical profession, he argues. Patients’ paranormal beliefs and experiences can directly affect their mental and physical health; and the anomalies themselves suggest new avenues of research which may advance medical science.
MEDLINE stubbornly refuses to index leading anomalies journals like the Journal of Scientific Exploration or the Journal of Parapsychology, depriving Bobrow and his readers of a wealth of additional evidence. But the paradigm-changing work of a number of luminaries in anomalies research still manages to sneak into the medical community’s canonical literature –Ian Stevenson’s reports of childhood memories and birthmarks suggesting a past life, and Bruce Greyson’s near death experience scale (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease); Dean Radin’s psi studies using EEGs (Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine); and Michael Persinger’s one-theory-fits-all attempt to use the earth’s magnetic properties to explain everything from poltergeists and UFOs to sightings of the Virgin Mary (Perceptual and Motor Skills).
Bobrow’s writing style is crisp, but his topic selection quirky. He devotes a chapter to lycanthropy, describing patients with “species identity disorder” who believe they’re wolves, cats, birds or gerbils. But he oddly fails to cover patients who claim alien abduction experiences, courageously investigated by the late Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack; or the landmark surveys of death bed visions conducted by Osis and Haraldsson. Surely physicians encounter these paranormal claims more frequently than werewolf confessions. And why no reference to Michael Murphy’s classic exploration of extraordinary human potential, The Future of the Body?
Still, the author’s cauldron bubbles with a heady brew of odd, unsettling experiences worthy of more stirring and tasting by a Western medical establishment bewitched by hubris and scientific reductionism.
In 1997 an English housewife heard a voice in her head one evening when she was quietly reading at home.
“Please don’t be afraid,” the voice said politely. “I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this.” The voice explained that it was only trying to help, that the poor woman had a brain tumor and should immediately seek a CAT scan at a certain London hospital. The panicked lady called her psychiatrist who diagnosed “functional hallucinatory psychosis” and prescribed anti-psychotic medication.
But the voice persisted, the woman insisted on a scan, and you can guess the rest. Neurosurgeons spotted something suspicious, they opened her skull, and discovered a meningioma brain tumor the size of an egg. When she awoke from anesthesia, the voice spoke one last time. “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.”
Her experience is just one of many puzzling, health-related, paranormal experiences Dr. Robert Bobrow M.D. describes in his delightful, thought-provoking book The Witch in the Waiting Room.
More surprising than her bizarre story is the fact that the respected, mainstream British Medical Journal published it. Bobrow offers skeptical colleagues sober reports describing a plethora of “paranormal” experiences patients share with their physicians and psychiatrists – voodoo spells, telepathic dreams, déjà vu, acupuncture and hypnosis cures, self-predicted deaths, energy medicine cures and faith healings, near death experiences – all drawn directly from refereed medical journals accessible through MEDLINE, an internet database and “our profession’s Gospel, from which all our knowledge derives, from which our textbooks are largely written.” This cabinet of curiosities deserves exploring by the medical profession, he argues. Patients’ paranormal beliefs and experiences can directly affect their mental and physical health; and the anomalies themselves suggest new avenues of research which may advance medical science.
MEDLINE stubbornly refuses to index leading anomalies journals like the Journal of Scientific Exploration or the Journal of Parapsychology, depriving Bobrow and his readers of a wealth of additional evidence. But the paradigm-changing work of a number of luminaries in anomalies research still manages to sneak into the medical community’s canonical literature –Ian Stevenson’s reports of childhood memories and birthmarks suggesting a past life, and Bruce Greyson’s near death experience scale (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease); Dean Radin’s psi studies using EEGs (Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine); and Michael Persinger’s one-theory-fits-all attempt to use the earth’s magnetic properties to explain everything from poltergeists and UFOs to sightings of the Virgin Mary (Perceptual and Motor Skills).
Bobrow’s writing style is crisp, but his topic selection quirky. He devotes a chapter to lycanthropy, describing patients with “species identity disorder” who believe they’re wolves, cats, birds or gerbils. But he oddly fails to cover patients who claim alien abduction experiences, courageously investigated by the late Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack; or the landmark surveys of death bed visions conducted by Osis and Haraldsson. Surely physicians encounter these paranormal claims more frequently than werewolf confessions. And why no reference to Michael Murphy’s classic exploration of extraordinary human potential, The Future of the Body?
Still, the author’s cauldron bubbles with a heady brew of odd, unsettling experiences worthy of more stirring and tasting by a Western medical establishment bewitched by hubris and scientific reductionism.
August 23, 2019
Datos muy concretos extraídos de artículos científicos perfectamente reverenciados. Está escrito en prosa científica pero resulta muy amena tanto para entendidos en materia médica como para completos adeptos. El autor, pese a pertenecer al campo de la ciencia, no negó en ningún momento la posibilidad de que algunos temas queden indefinidamente fuera del alcance del entendimiento humano: no fue nada tajante ni adoctrinaste en sus opiniones.
Disfruté sobre todo de los capítulos sobre la quema de brujas de Salem, pues no sabía nada de ese tema y me encanta leer sobre rituales de brujería que ocurrieron en el pasado.
De este libro pude extraer muchos datos y referencias a artículos que me gustaría estudiar posteriormente.
Disfrutará del libro si le gustan los temas paranormales controlados desde una perspectiva científica y crítica a la vez que contempla todas las opciones explotables.
Disfruté sobre todo de los capítulos sobre la quema de brujas de Salem, pues no sabía nada de ese tema y me encanta leer sobre rituales de brujería que ocurrieron en el pasado.
De este libro pude extraer muchos datos y referencias a artículos que me gustaría estudiar posteriormente.
Disfrutará del libro si le gustan los temas paranormales controlados desde una perspectiva científica y crítica a la vez que contempla todas las opciones explotables.
June 30, 2016
This was a fascinating book to read. The author includes details of actual scientific experiments on various individuals to see whether their symptoms were caused naturally or supernaturally. Other cases documented prayer as a form of healing, and I was surprised to learn that between the 1980s and 1990s, the US government funneled somewhere between eleven and twenty million dollars to support the efforts of three psychics working at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, whom they consulted with over two hundred times. This was revealed in an article from the Washington Post, “Pentagon HAs Spent Millions on Tips From a Trio of Psychics; CSI Wants to Shut Down Paranormal Study” which came out on November 29, 1995.
May 4, 2015
This book was published in 2006 so some of the science may be outdated, however this doesn't necessarily detract from the subject. The author has an open mind about the paranormal and alternative therapies he looks at in each chapter, quoting scientific studies and articles from respected scientific journals. The book left me wishing for a more recent rewrite due to cutting-edge brain research. Anyone interested in biological research and the mysteries of the human mind would enjoy this straigh-forward, unbiased look at the paranormal in medicine.
February 27, 2010
While I found the topics interesting, I couldn't engage with this book. It seemed like I had just typed search terms into Google and was skimming over entries. I really wish the author would have gone out and interviewed people to try to get some depth beyond the case studies. However, it is well researched.
July 24, 2011
Interesting, though it had a strange flow to it. It started out entertaining but as it went on it got more and more medical. While most of the jargon is explained, I still felt as though I was reading a medical journal at times.
Beyond that, there are many neat ideas and stories scattered throughout.
Beyond that, there are many neat ideas and stories scattered throughout.
November 25, 2011
This is a fast read. It let me realize how much we influence our own bodies responses to healing. Also how that response determines how a good physician works with us. I found a quote ( not in this book ) that makes since to me " we can heal when cure is not possible". When interacting with someone think of the witch in the waiting room.
July 25, 2009
Interesting, entertaining, thought prvoking.
July 25, 2009
There are more things in heaven and earth than our dreamed of in our philosophy (or science).
September 26, 2013
Interesting - thought provoking
April 24, 2013
Awesome!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews