#2485: Lynne August

MD is a professional degree, and although medical school will equip their students with plenty of knowledge and skill to diagnose and treat various conditions, it is not an education in scientific or critical thinking. People with medical degrees are not necessarily particularly immune to pseudoscientific nonsense, and sometimes they go over to the dark side of woo and quackery, where their degree will be a particularly effective marketing tool. Lynne August, for instance, completed medical school in 1973, but currently runs the website Health Equations, which offers a range of supplements, woo and bogus tests, such as an “inflammation calculator” that will “measure and monitor hidden inflammation to prevent or manage modern disease and aging”, many of which are ostensibly caused by “toxins”. Right. At least her website has a Quack Miranda warning (and plenty of testimonials). Her Blood Test Evaluation was at least nonsense enough to make this list.

 

According to her bio, August “began her pursuit of nutritional, environmental and energy medicine” right after medschool, and later integrated the infamously insane quackery known as orthomolecular medicine, as well as “terrain analysis, whole food nutrition, Ayurveda and sensory integration”, in her “holistic practice” that seeks to “cultivat[e] health according to nature” (take a moment to ponder how dangerous “health according to nature” really sounds). August is, however, best known as a promoter of the nonsense of the legendary pseudoscientist and quack Emanuel Revici – August apparently studied under him and calls him a “world-renowned researcher in the quantum forces of lipids”; he certainly and emphatically was not. Now, Revici was mostly engaged in cancer quackery, and August has taken it upon her to develop his ideas further, in particular to “prevent and treat all chronic and degenerative disease”, areas in which it is somewhat easier to avoid accountability (Revici himself received at least some slaps on his hands). According to August, her ideas “can transform 21st century medicine”. Let’s hope not.

 

Apparently, August’s Health Equations Research, Inc. is a “nonprofit organization dedicated to research in therapeutic lipids and public and professional education about lipids and dietary fats”. To non-specialists that description might of course sound sciencey on the surface; after all, deranged pseudoscience sort of depends on sounding that way to have any chance of being successfully monetized, and what August is doing is nothing more than a mockery of science, although, as a good cargo cult science practitioner, her pseudoscience has its own venues for dissemination, unhampered by accountability or potential critical evaluations – August “offers her interpretations and applications of Dr. Revici’s profound research at DrRevici.com and the Revici Journal.”

 

Diagnosis: What a waste of energy, effort and life. That itself is tragic, of course, but August’s pseudoscientific nonsense runs the risk of pulling other people under as well. Simply terrible.