Let me tell you about Dinshah P. Ghadiali and his Spectro-Chrome.聽聽Dinshah, as he like to be called, was born in India in 1873 and at least by his own account was a remarkable man.聽聽He began school at the ripe age of two and a half and by eleven he was an assistant to a professor of mathematics at a college in Bombay.聽聽This prodigy began to study medicine at the age of fourteen, but then we hear no more about his progress in this area.聽聽Probably because he saw no need to pursue these futile studies once he had independently discovered the key to health.聽聽Colour therapy.
Dinshah apparently came upon this discovery when he exposed a young girl 鈥渄ying of colitis鈥� to light from a lamp fitted with an indigo colored glass filter.聽聽Within three days, the girl was well and a career was launched.聽聽Dinshah opened an Electro-Medical Hall in India where he began to refine his treatment.聽聽By the time he came to America in 1911, he had a theory to go along with his colored lights.聽聽Every element, he said, exhibits a preponderance of one of the seven prismatic colors.聽聽Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon, the elements that make up 97% of the body, are associated with blue, red, green and yellow.聽聽In health these colors are balanced but fall out of balance in disease.聽聽Therapy is simple; to cure disease administer the lacking colors or reduce colors that have become too brilliant.
Of course, Dinshah had exactly the method to use.聽聽His Spectro-Chrome was a box with a lightbulb and an opening that could be fitted with various colored filters.聽聽It was accompanied by The Spectro-Chrome Therapeutic Sytem guide detailing the appropriate colors to shine on a patient.聽聽Green light, for example, was a pituitary stimulant and germicide while scarlet was a genital stimulant.聽聽Any disease, save broken bones, was amenable to color therapy.聽聽The Spectro-Chrome was especially suited for use by intelligent people, Dinshah said, because 鈥渄rugs quickly upset the nervo-vital balance of persons of high mental and spiritual development.鈥澛犅燗 pretty clever trap.聽聽The gullible, thinking themselves to be intelligent, ate it up.
To many people the argument about the benefit of color therapy seemed convincing.聽聽After all, they knew that premature babies were treated with blue light to cure them of jaundice, that sunlight was needed for the synthesis of vitamin D in the body and that plants absolutely required light for growth.聽Add to this the notion that chemists had shown that elements when heated emitted different colors of light, and Dinshah鈥檚 preposterous notions seemed to make sense.聽聽His slogan of 鈥淣o diagnosis, No Drugs, No Surgery鈥� also sat well with a public largely unsatisfied with current medical care.聽The non-invasive therapy and the promise of a cure for virtually any ailment was very appealing.
Iit wasn鈥檛 long before Dinshah ran into trouble with the establishment.聽聽He was labeled a fraud and a charlatan by the American Medical Association but managed to cunningly portray himself as a humanitarian who was being persecuted by the money-grabbing, ineffective, jealous physicians.聽聽To protect himself legally, Dinshah came up with some incredible lingo.聽聽He didn鈥檛 talk of cures, he spoke of 鈥渘ormalating鈥� the body.聽聽Instead of treating patients he claimed 鈥渢o restore their Radio-Active and Radio-Emanative Equilibrium.鈥澛犅燭his would be done with his light exposures, or 鈥渢onations.鈥澛犅燭onations would be carried out with the patient lying with his head to the north, so as to align the earth鈥檚 and the body鈥檚 magnetic field, of course.
In 1931 Dinshah had his first run-in with the law over the Spectro-Chrome.聽聽He was arraigned on second degree grand larceny after being charged by a former student who claimed that the Spectro-Chrome did not perform as promised.聽聽Dinshah trotted out numerous satisfied patients in his defense, incredibly including some physicians.聽聽A surgeon, Kate Baldwin, claimed that she had successfully treated glaucoma, tuberculosis, cancer, syphillis and a very serious burn case.聽聽The government countered with experts who testified that the Spectro-Chrome was nothing other than an ordinary lamp and that the successes were all due to the placebo effect.聽聽The prosecution could not prove the intent to defraud and Dinshah was found not guilty.聽聽He went back to selling more Spectro-Chromes, now claiming that he had been vindicated.
After the passage of the Food and Drug Act of 1938 which gave the FDA some teeth in regulating theraputic devices, the government began to assemble evidence against Dinshah.聽聽Finally in 1945 he was charged with introducing a misbranded article into interstate commerce, a violation of the criminal code.聽聽Once again he trotted out his satisfied patients, but this time there were no supporting physicians.聽聽His fate was virtually sealed when one of his star witnesses, whom Dinshah had 鈥渃ured鈥� of seizures, had a fit on the witness stand.聽聽The jury also heard how patients he had claimed had been cured had actually died.聽聽The prosecution brought a witness who Dinshah had repeatedly profiled in his advertising as having been cured of paralysis.聽聽She could not take a single step when the master urged her.聽聽And finally the court heard how the celebrated burn victim, described as a miracle cure by Dr. Baldwin in the previous trial had in fact died of her injuries.聽聽Another witness described how he had called Dinshah after his diabetic father had lapsed into a coma and was told to just shine the yellow light on him.聽聽He did, until the man died.聽聽Dinshah was heavily fined, his books and lamps were seized and he was put on five years probation.
The Dinshah legacy is still with us.聽聽Through the Dinshah Health Society of Malaga you can buy plans to build an inexpensive Spectro-Chrome from a light bulb, cardboard and colored plastic sheets.聽聽They apparently do not sell the finished product, but another company on the Internet does advertise Color Light Therapy Lamps 鈥渁s recommended by Dinshah.鈥澛犅燭hese look suspiciously like theater spot lights with colored gels.
It seems that today there is still enough ignorance about what light is, about disease processes and about how the body functions to allow the gullible to be victimized.聽The colorful Dinshah may have lived in what we think are enlightened times, but his pseudoscientific ideas smacked of the dark ages.
