#2653: Madison Cavanaugh

Modern medicine has a long and complex history, and currently involves a pretty large number of people as practitioners, researchers and what have you. And it is all completely unnecessary, according to Madison Cavanaugh, who has ostensibly discovered the secret to curing more or less every disease, a secret she is generous enough to share with us all in her book The One-Minute Cure. Released in 2008, the cure hasn’t quite had the impact its thesis would warrant, if true. Must be a conspiracy!

 

According to the book’s blurb, the book divulges “a remarkable, scientifically proven [no less] natural therapy that creates an environment within the body where disease cannot thrive, thus enabling the body to cure itself of disease”. And as Cavanaugh sees it, “[o]ver 6,100 articles in European scientific literature have attested to the effectiveness of this safe, inexpensive and powerful healing modality”, which has “been administered by an estimated 15,000 European doctors, naturopaths and homeopaths to more than 10 million patients in the past 70 years” to successfully cure “cancer, AIDS, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease. hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, herpes, Rheumatoid Arthritis and asthma” and more or less anything else.

 

And this magic cure? It’s 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide; you should start with one drop in a glass of distilled water three times a day and work your way up to 25 drops. So it’s a bit more than “one minute” of effort, but still. Does Cavanaugh have any evidence for any of her claims (does she refer to any specific and relevant studies, for instance, or back up the numbers she throws out)? Oh, ye narrow-minded luddites!

 

The ostensible premise for the suggestion is that all diseases are anaerobic and cannot exist in the presence of oxygen, which is derangedly false, but Cavanaugh’s idea has roots in a very familiar branch of pseudoscientific quackery: hydrogen peroxide therapy. The nonsensical idea behind that tradition (and it is magnificently nonsensical) takes as its point of departure the rantings of Otto Warburg, who otherwise made some important medical discoveries earlier in life but then went off the hinges later in life to dogmatically defend, against all evidence and despite decisive falsification, that oxygen would inhibit the growth of cancer cells. Cavanaugh just extrapolates the false idea to all other disease, and throws in the false premise that ingesting hydrogen peroxide could increase the exposure of cancer cells to oxygen. (It can’t, even if you disregard the chemical illiteracy involved in the claim: arterial blood is already saturated with oxygen). Instead of curing anything, Cavanaugh’s suggestion is, in fact, dangerous.

 

Diagnosis: This is, safe to say, simply a scam. Madison Cavanaugh is probably a deranged lunatic, but she is also a dishonest scam artist.

 

Hat-tip: SciencebasedMedicine