You can keep alternative medicine down, but that doesn't mean that it will disappear. Though the Soviet government once banned most forms of unconventional medicine, healers, physics, homeopathic clinics, and herbal therapists were back in action soon after perestroika lifted the regulations. CAM therapies are currently so popular in Russia that the allopathic medical community is feeling duly threatened - and concerned.

In Russia she is comparable only to Nostradamus. And for good reason: she predicted the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the World Trade Center towers, the break-up of the USSR, Boris Yeltzin's election win, and even Joseph Stalin's death (with such uncanny accuracy that she was jailed for her a priori visions). She has since passed away, but Evangelia ‘Vanga' Dimitrova, or Baba Vanga as she was commonly known, continues to be the subject of rigorous scientific study by the secret service in Russia and elsewhere. Even Adolf Hitler was reported to have sought her consult—and allegedly left Vanga looking very unhappy.