Cruise hawks fake fire cure

New York Post/December 14, 2005
By Richard Johnson

Tom Cruise will make a rare personal appearance tonight at the Tribeca Rooftop to raise money for a controversial Church of Scientology program that claims to be healing firefighters and rescue workers who breathed toxic smoke on 9/11.

Cruise is a co-founder of the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, and declares, "More than 500 individuals have recovered health and job fitness through this project — but for thousands more, the passage of time is only bringing more suffering. The strain on their lives, their families and their careers is tremendous."

Tickets starting at $6,250 get you face time and a picture with Cruise, plus dinner and dancing to the Alex Donner Orchestra. No word on whether pregnant Katie Holmes will be by his side. "It will be a night you will never forget," a mailing from Cruise promises.

However, doctors say the "purification rundown" dreamed up by science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is worthless quackery consisting of sauna sweating, ingestion of cooking oil and large doses of niacin.

And the program could even be harmful, because Cruise and company advise everyone to stop taking their prescription medications or using inhalers, just as he criticized Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants to relieve her postpartum depression.

"If our doctors are prescribing medication, and they are saying 'don't take it,' that's a problem for us," Deputy Fire Commissioner Frank Gribbon told PAGE SIX.

Gribbon said Dr. David Prezant, the department's deputy chief medical officer, withdrew support for the Scientologist treatment because "he is not pleased when patients are advised to disobey doctors' orders. That's where he drew the line."

Rick Ross, who covers Scientology on his cultnews.com Web site, said, "Science has proven there is no basis for Hubbard's purification rundown. It simply doesn't work. But it's not about what can be proven, it's about what Tom Cruise believes."

The Scientologists opened a clinic near the World Trade Center site and gave it an official-sounding name, Downtown Medical. But Ross said, "They used the firemen like so many props. They treat the firemen for free and charge other people $5,200."