Mad medicine, bad advice, bad reporting - Part 3: Pictures, Praise and Pronunciation

This is an actual picture featured in Vogue  magazine's article on Viva Mayr in 2013.  It appears that this woman has been connected to a Galvanic cell which is currently using magic to extract the toxins from her.  They could also be using her as a battery.  Either way - that swimming cap is probably to keep her brain safe from radiowaves.
Source: http://loveisspeed.blogspot.com/2013/07/destination-detox-austrias-viva-mayr.html

Viva Mayr

When googled, Viva Mayr seems more like a hotel than any form of health centre.  Indeed, when you visit their website, a small banner to the right invitingly reads, “Hotel awards 2013.  Enter now”.  It is a confusing labelling issue. Is this a “clinic” offering “spa medicine” (whatever that might be) or a hotel and spa offering expensive fancy-sounding treatments for which there is no evidence, but which clients are nonetheless encouraged to purchase at risk of dereliction of their own health.  (The author proposed a budget version of this, encouraging readers and thus would-be Mayr clients to opt only for a third of the prescribed treatments.  Alas, if only real medical prescriptions could be optimized similarly for financial reasons.)

A quick search may yield the following result: (Not safe for work)

http://loveisspeed.blogspot.com/2013/07/destination-detox-austrias-viva-mayr.html

An article, full of unquestioning child-like praise for the center can be found here:

http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/destination-detox-austrias-viva-mayr-clinic/#1

If these are actual photographs of the Mayr clinic then things are a bit worse that I could have possibly imagined.  It looks reminiscent of the "The House of Wax" or some sort of Sci-fi horror I have always been to scared to watch - Ayn Rand-ian ideas of what women should look like, suspended in trance-like hazes, undergoing who-knows-what-kind-of pseudomedical procedures and having their ordeals retold in Vogue magazine.  The stuff of nightmares, really.

A matter of pronounciation

My german is not what it could be, but even the slightest attempt to pronounce the name of the “Viva Mayr Clinic” could easily leave the individuals sipping their coffee across from me at the breakfast table, to believe that I am referring to the presitigious Mayo Clinic, a tertiary health centre which was ranked as the 3^rd best hospital in the US in 2011 (5).  This convenient almost-homophone no doubt adds weight to the air of established authority which pervades the article and online references to the institutions and individuals concerned.

In the next post, I will discuss a small matter of mysterious origins.