#2528: Amy Beard

Amy Beard is an MD specializing in family medicine, as well as a delusional functional medicine quack who spews antivaccine misinformation on social media. According to Beard, conventional medicine focuses on treating symptoms rather than the “root cause” of disease – one wonders seriously how and where she got through medical school, since apparently she learnt nothing about conventional medicine – and those root causes are, it seems, poor dietary choices and “high toxin burdens”. According to Beard, diet and toxins are “major contributors to chronic disease”, which is false.

 

Apparently she turned to the quackery that is functional medicine as a result of her own health problems; she is now “cured”, after recognizing that the “root cause of my problems was a very unhappy microbiome – major dysbiosis and ‘leaky gut’” – leaky gut being an infamous fake diagnosis, and precisely the kind of thing medical crackpots can magically make disappear with expensive nonsense and quackery, since it wasn’t there in the first place.

 

Given how hard it is to get the medical licenses of quacks and frauds revoked, Beard remains licensed in Arkansas (despite some serious complaints to the Medical Board), where she has presently become one of the most aggressive and outspoken anti-COVID-19 vaccine conspiray theorists and promoters of ivermectin (but of course). “HCQ [hydroxychloroquine] and Ivermectin have helped many [according to evidence, they haven’t, but this is not about evidence], but your LIFESTYLE choices can have the greatest beneficial impact on your immune response to encounters with viruses,” says Beard, because pointing to lifestyle choices means that you can blame the people who get ill for getting so ill instead of blaming her own worthless advice. According to Beard, COVID vaccines are “mutant factories” (yes, she blames them for the emergence of new variants – that would be Geert Van den Bossche’s bullshit rants) and arguing for just getting ill and dying “natural” immunity. “Before Covid, natural immunity was the BEST immunity. And it still is.” It isn’t. But even if it were, the fact that the whole point is to achieve protection without fucking dying from disease first is a detail that people like Beard tends to miss.

 

Diagnosis: Confused and self-centered conspiracy theorist. Formally, she’s qualified to give medical advice, but she demonstrates again and again that she didn’t understand anything of medschool. Utter garbage, all of it.