The fengshui consultant says your baby will recover from her deadly illness if you leave your current home, build another house according to the practitioner’s floorplan, and furnish it with certain auspicious items.

You pay several thousand dollars to the consultant, abandon your current home, and move into an apartment.

You pay more money to change the characters in your names to avoid bad luck: Ralph and Emily become Wrolf and Imelea. But you don’t mind. If your baby lives, who cares if people can’t figure out how to spell your names?

Things look promising

The baby seems to improve as soon as you move into the apartment. But you have to move again. And again.

Finally the new house is ready. The auspicious items suggested by the fengshui consultant have been installed. You move in.

But the very next morning the baby collapses and you rush her to the hospital. Five months later she is dead.

Hindsight is 20-20 vision

Grief-stricken, you take your “fengshui certified” floor plans to a different fengshui consultant, hoping to understand what happened.

What they say startles you. So you ask another consultant to review the plans. And then you ask another.

Independently, the three consultants all say the same thing: the room that your fengshui consultant picked for your baby was terrible for her health, full of sha qi.

How did your fengshui consultant miss seeing the sha qi that other fengshui consultants believe is obvious to any trained practitioner?

A true story

This actually happened to some very nice people — a real-life, fengshui tragedy. Other clients of this consultant have stepped forward, telling tales of decline and bankruptcy.

Do you think the consultant caused the child’s death? Is the consultant delusional, poorly educated, or a vile fraud?

Frauds can breathe a little easier, because it would be difficult to prove to a jury that the consultant was the direct cause of the child’s death. (The consultant is still in business.)

The timing is what makes us think the consultant is to blame, but that would be the classic error in logic known as Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc or “leaping to a conclusion.”

The conclusion is not justified by the evidence, because there is no evidence. This is a popular way to view things because it is easier, and faster, than an investigation. But it often leaves you with the wrong answer.

You avoid falling into the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc trap by

• Not indulging in snap decisions.
• Remembering that causes do come before effects, but it is not always true that what comes before is the direct cause.

You need to know what occurs before something happens, but your inquiry should not end there.

Remember the facts

The baby was terminally ill before all this began. In desperation, the parents sought the services of a fengshui consultant. Their desperation led them to believe (at face value) the marketing claims of the consultant. The consultant claimed they could heal the sick with fengshui and other special abilities.

Warning signs of fraud

• Does the consultant tell you how good they are?
• Does the consultant claim to possess intuitive, transcendental, or psychic abilities?
• Does the consultant claim the ability to heal serious illness?
• If they charge a lot of money, do you think that means they have more expertise than a consultant who does not charge as much? Fees vary. Some very good practitioners are expensive, and so are a lot of frauds. Some very good practitioners are quite reasonable. And so are a lot of frauds!
• Is the consultant fee reasonable, but the consultant advises that you buy “auspicious” items from them or an online store they are associated with? This indicates the consultant has a conflict of interest — that is, there is a problem with their ethics. The desire to make money influences their analysis.

Giving the practice [of fengshui] a bad name are the ones who sell all kinds of things. Fengshui is not just about selling auspicious items.
— Adelina Pang, quoted in The Electric New Paper 11 June 2007

Do you prefer the hard truth or a comfortable lie?

Heaven’s luck and human luck outweigh fengshui. Those are the facts. Honest practitioners typically state this on their websites and in other materials. Fraudsters deny such facts exist. They prefer the make-believe of the law of attraction.

Fengshui is not magical thinking, though frauds try to convince people it is.

An honest practitioner would have told the family that fengshui does not work miracles. They should rely on good doctors, the natural healing abilities of the body, and prepare themselves for the inevitable. They should enjoy the time they have left.

An honest consultant would have sought to make the child comfortable without moving her! Moving house is highly stressful to the healthy. Imagine the effects on a gravely ill child!

The child succumbed to her disease, but stress was surely a contributing factor.

Honor among thieves?

Three practitioners independently agreed that the bedroom in the new house was the wrong location for the ill child. That suggests the consultant was not trained, or poorly trained — or an outright fraud.

Why was it left to the family to speak out concerning what happened to them? Because silence is “respectful” of the different varieties of fengshui, say the New Agers.

Too bad they don’t have the brainpower to think that one through.

They have succumbed to the false belief that all alternative perspectives are equally valuable and deserve equal defense. 

If you have abandoned all reasoning, morals, and business ethics,

• Fraud, in the form of posing as a fengshui consultant without adequate education, is valuable and deserves equal defense.
• Causing the death of a child, indirectly and circumstantially due to one’s “professional advice,” is valuable and deserves equal defense.
• Damaging the reputations of the many honest practitioners is valuable and deserves equal defense.

The fengshui community must police its own: denounce the delusional, the impostors, the frauds among them. If they don’t, then eventually all fengshui practitioners will be considered morally corrupt frauds.