#1198: Sherri Tenpenny

Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopath who doesn’t appear to practice medicine in any recognizable way anymore, is an abysmally crazy promoter of woo, antivaxx views and conspiracy theories. Her website presents her as “one of the country’s most knowledgeable and outspoken physicians regarding the impact of vaccines on health,” but Tenpenny has no relevant educational background or expertise (e.g. on infectious disease or immunology), and has published no research on any related topic. There is a good and compact portrait of her and her expertise here.

She runs the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, and is the author of Saying No to Vaccines, where she argues against vaccines by relying on, well, conspiracy theories, gut feelings and pseudoscience – it earned Tenpenny her own whale.to page and landed her an interview on Alex Jones’s PrisonPlanet (where she presented her conspiracy theories about the swine flu). She is also on the board of the crank antivaxx organization Medical Voices Vaccine Information Center, which does its best to challenge whale.to for trustworthiness on things medical (and publishes her stuff), prominent member of the Canary party, and on the advisory board for the Holistic Moms Network, which is possibly the place you should get your medical advice. She is, of course, also a mainstay at the annual quackfest conference Autism One.

Tenpenny is even a a germ theory denialist; according to Tenpenny disease seems to be due to toxins that damage the body, and the germs subsequently take advantage of the toxin-damaged tissues – she has even been caught quoting the well-debunked lie that Pasteur recanted his germ theory on his death bed, no less.

Tenpenny’s lack of understanding of how evidence in science works (e.g. that looking at all the evidence trumps judiciously selecting whatever superficially seems to support your belief) or the distinction between correlation and causation is brilliantly displayed in her post “Vaccines and the Blue Foot Syndrome”, discussed (in context) here, which seems to suggest that the anecdotes gathered by antivaxxers for causal claims refuted by controlled studies, shows that it is scientists who don’t understand evidence.

Crankmaster Christiane Northrup has been caught quoting Sherri Tenpenny in her rants against vaccines, calling Tenpenny “the foremost medical expert in vaccine safety”. Mike Adams is a fan as well, calling Tenpenny “a brilliant, science-minded researcher with a lot to teach the world about vaccines and immunology.”

Diagnosis: Extreme crackpot, and it is pretty scary to see how she is repeatedly treated as if she were some kind of expert in the fields, and as if her rants contained any reality-reflecting insights. Very, very dangerous.