Everything's All Mixed Up Now'a'days

"Dr. Christine Daniel promised to her patients what many considered the improbable — the chance to cure cancer through an herbal treatment.

Using her influence as an ordained Pentecostal minister, Daniel tapped into the vessel of faith to entice people from across the nation to try her regimen. She even appeared on cable's Trinity Broadcasting Network in December 2002 touting her cancer cure and its 60 percent success rate, according to federal investigators.

Daniel, 55, of Los Angeles was arrested and charged Thursday with two counts each of wire and mail fraud and faces up to 80 years in prison if convicted. She is scheduled to appear in federal court Friday.

A phone message left for Daniel's attorney, Manuel Miller, was not immediately returned.

Daniel was interviewed by investigators in August 2004, and she denied ever practicing alternative medicine for cancer, court documents show. She also attested that she never talked about a 60 percent cancer cure rate on television.

In court documents, authorities contend Daniel took advantage of terminally ill cancer patients in their darkest hours, some of whom desperately sought alternative measures after enduring draining rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.

In all, federal prosecutors said Daniel siphoned about $1.1 million from 55 families between 2001 and 2004. Six patients ranging in age from 4 to 69 died within seven months after seeing Daniel."

-- Greg Risling, who I want to nominate for a Nobel Prize - just for reporting this story - because that's a bigger real-world accomplishment than some recent winners I can think of have completed, even at The San Francisco Chronicle.

One of "Dr." Daniel's suckers, Christiana Kwakye, who "was channel surfing one night after spending hours by her mother's hospital bed when she came across a testimonial about Daniel's treatment", adds:

"I should have known better. My mental state wasn't clear at that time."

Which is a common complaint, though, from what I can see, generally speaking, nobody seems particularly bothered, or finds anything particularly strange, about all the believers out there suffering with altered mental states.

I wonder if Christiana Kwakye will now consider a job on the board of the Nobel Prize Committee? It seems to me, with a streak of gullibility that intense, she'd fit right in,...