Some promoters of pseudoscience and alternative medicine are dangerous because they are somewhat successful at impersonating real medical experts, and may thereby succeed in fooling otherwise intelligent people. Others are just batshit loons whose attempts to pass as respectable practitioners don’t withstand the most superficial scrutiny, but may yet, because they’re scrupulous when it comes to making grandiose claims, still be able to attract the attention of people in very difficult situations. Leonard Coldwell is definitely among the latter, and something of a legend in the fringier circles of alternative medicine (his videos have a scary amount of views). Coldwell is a promoter of various “natural remedies” and has produced numerous movies and websites promoting pseudoscientific nonsense and conspiracy theories (e.g. pushing cholesterol denialism). Given that his ideas are not anchored in reality (or anything else, really), they tend to change rather arbitrarily, and it is instructive to compare claims made on his more current websites with those made on earlier and abandoned websites.
Coldwell is known to refer to himself as the world’s leading authority on a lot of things, including cancer. (He has actually referred to himself as “the God of Healing”.) Located firmly at the summit of Mount Stupid, Coldwell possesses little understanding of biology and medicine, however, and no understanding of science and how to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses through testing.
(Alleged) Background
Originally active in Germany, Coldwell (then Bernd Klein) claims to have discovered his healing gifts as a child (or adolescent – it seems to vary a bit) when he saved his mother from a suite of serious and terminal illnesses, including hepatitis C (a virus that wasn’t isolated and identified until 1988). He offers no evidence for the claim, of course, and neither a shred of evidence to support his abysmally unlikely claim of having run a string of European hospitals with a 92.3% cure rate. He ostensibly left Germany for the US due to persecution from Big Pharma and the medical establishment who were trying to silence him. In fairness, the notion that he managed to land himself in legal trouble doesn’t strike us as that far-fetched.
In the 90s he changed his name (if his background story were accurate, you might justifiably wonder why he would) and set up shop (the Fit For Life Health Resort and Spa) in Florida together with Harvey Diamond, before launching his membership-based Neuro-associative Programming System® [NAPS], ostenislby “The world’s only integrated self-help system”, promised to cure asthma, rheumatism, muscular dystrophy and cancer, as well as to teach you the “secrets of people who are on average between 120 and 140 years old and healthy and fit.” There are some details on his backstory here.
Coldwell’s qualifications are an area of some murkiness. He claims expertise in a wide range of areas (including naturopathy), though his documented qualifications rarely (well: never) goes beyond the level of diploma mill spam and clip-art – his professed four PhDs, for instance, are in generally indeterminate fields and stems from unclear sources, though he has also claimed to have a doctorate in psychology from Columbia State University, a diploma mill operated by stage hypnotist and legendary fraud Ronald “Dr Dante” Pellar that was closed by court order in 1998. He has also claimed to be a professor at the Virginia Health University of Delaware, an institution for which google returns more or less exclusively results related to Coldwell. He does, in fact, hold an honorary Doctor of Humanities award from the Louisiana Baptist University, which is ostensibly “Non Accredited, but very prestigious”. There is some delving into Coldwell’s ‘credentials’ here.
Coldwell has a history of being aggressively litigious, and for presenting himself as a deranged madman before the courts – there is a good (hilarious) example here and another funny one here (more details here). His court cases are also notable for the conspicuous absence of highly relevant background information that he would otherwise likely be asked to document (like his claims to have run hospitals in Germany and cured thousands of patients).
More recently
Coldwell was for a while an ardent supporter of convicted felon Kevin Trudeau (the support was mutual) and the latter’s Global Information Network (GIN) pyramid scheme, with Coldwell e.g. saying claiming that GIN “will make you become a millionaire or rich beyond your wildest dreams. This is the only answer to success.” They later seem to have had a falling out.
Coldwell, however, promptly set up his own GIN-like personal enhancement plan together with ex-GIN leader Peter Wink, called the Instinct Based Medicine System (IBMS). According to Coldwell, IBMS is “endorsed by every significant physician and healer” (much hinges on the extension of “significant”, which we suspect consists mostly of himself) and has “seen almost 65,000 patients”. Indeed, IBMS is marketed as a “secret society” that is “created by achievers for achievers” Membership is expensive, and what you get for your expenses is unclear. (You can , however, purchase twenty-minute CDs of relaxing nature sounds ($99 for a set of three) and a 13-CD set ‘Curing Life’ ($454.87) without membership). At least the system is explicitly “instinct-based” rather than evidence-, science- or reality-based. The basic idea is that by listening to Coldwell’s magic CDs you can rewire your brain to achieve whatever you want. IBMS has been described as a “cult”.
Though it is somewhat hard to keep track of his activities, he has at least served on the advisory board for the crank organization the Anti-Cancer Institute, and is a regular feature on the YouTube channel ihealthtube, which belongs to infamous quack product distributor Swanson Health Products.
Cancer
A self-declared authority (world’s leading) on cancer, Coldwell has promoted an impressive range of potential causes of cancer, none of them rooted in reality or evidence, including mental and emotional stress and lack of self-esteem or hope, tap water, dehydration, chemotherapy, mammograms, sunscreen, vaccines, bras, processed meat, conventional (and herbal) medicine, chemtrails, teflon, couches, bras, tuna, deodorants and antiperspirants, baby shampoo, preservatives, GMOs, cell phones and microwave ovens, power lines, computers and laptops, being acidic, root canal work, sugar (including corn syrup) and artificial sweeteners, milk, insulin, MSG, food coloring, pringles, and Obamacare.
The list of proposed cures is even more extensive, and possibly even less anchored in reality, and includes water, herbal medicine, homeopathy (more water), vitamins B, C (injected and in general), D, E; baking soda and alkaline diets, ozone therapy, raw food, pink salt, garlic, aloe vera, curcumin and turmeric, cannabis and hemp seeds, pomegranates and grape seeds, balsamic vinegar, broccoli, beetroot, colloidal silver, dandelion, bee pollen, mushrooms, spirulina, tree nuts, walnuts, everything green, pineapple, raspberries, laetrile, cherry pie, hydrogen peroxide, ginger, sea cucumber, honey, magnesium, frankincense, dirt, smiling and prayer.
A sample of his own words (in relation to Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2014): “I am just watching the criminals on the main stream news making billions for the international bankers (owners of the pharmaceutical and medical industry ) with the breast cancer awareness hoax. Mammograms done prevent cancer they cause cancer. A breast tumor grows 7 to 12 years to a size that they can even find it. There is no need to any hurry and fast surgery and the murder via chemo, radiation and anti hormone therapy in my experience. I can cure every cancer in 2 to 16 weeks. ( not every person but every cancer ). There are over 400 natural cancer cures known today.” But yes: Coldwell continues to claim a 92% cure rate for all cancers, and even challenges doctors to match his cure rate (though he won’t, of course, provide any documentation for any of his own numbers). There is a comment on one of his videos here (note the detail about table salt, which according to Coldwell is “one third” glass or sand, and the reason it causes hypertension is because the glass scratches the arteries and makes them bleed, leading to cholesterol to go there to stop it from bleeding. No, really; and he goes on to claim that humans need a total cholesterol of at least 250 mg/dL and that real doctors are too stupid to know what they are talking about; of course, he also recommends a raw vegan diet, so it’s all moot – and no, he doesn’t notice the tension. He also calls cancer survivors “idiots”.) Then he pivots to claiming that “[c]ancer is systemic the tumor is only the symptom not the cancer. To cure cancer you need to identify and eliminate the root cause of it. Cancer is cause to 86% [science uses numbers so look: he’s a scientist!] by mental and emotional stress. If you don’t eliminate that energy draining stress that allows the body to malfunction you can't eliminate the cancer.” And the solution? Sign up for IBMS, of course. It’s rather hard to fathom that anyone would fall for this ridiculous scam, but they do.
Oh, yes: There is also German New Medicine references, and the claim that there is “[V]ery often a correlation between cancer and fungus / Candida overgrowth is mentioned in the medical world [that would be Tullio Simoncini, but Coldwell wouldn’t be able to distinguish the medical world from the comment section on an incoherent Red Ice Creations videos if his life depended on it]. To make sure I dont suffer from this Candida overgrowth I would do the Candida Remediation Protocol from awesomesupplements.com which was also created after the producer researched my historical use of protocols with my patients in the past”. What happened to the 86% bad attitude claim? Yeah, methinks we are asking the wrong question here. Coldwell also pushes colon cleansing, supplements, “alkaline healing”, and laetrile, in addition to his insanely overpriced CDs of relaxing nature sounds. People like Ty Bollinger treat him as an expert.
Conspiracy theories
Coldwell has pushed a number of conspiracy theories, though conspiracy theories concerning Big Pharma are of course the most frequent ones. Coldwell claims to have had his car bombed, been “shot at” and received multiple death threats daily from Big Pharma, which according to him spent “42 million dollars just last year to destroy [his] reputation”. He generally has a fondness of dismissing his critics as not only shills, but as (e.g.) paedophiles, former prostitutes and dog poisoners. Or as being Jewish.
But of course. According to Coldwell, “[r]emember the Jews started the first and second world war and financed Hitler and Stalin at the same time to buy all Europe cheap after it was all over. Take the money away from the Rothschild and Rockefeller’s Goldman Sachs and the other Jews and all evil on earth will disappear”. And “[t]he only reason why the jews are starting WW3 is because Russia and most of Europe ended the Fed and the Fiat money, because they created their own REAL money and will drop the worthless piece of paper that says Federal Reserve Note on it” [yes, his understanding of (a.o.) international politics is such that it leaves room for many colorful hypotheses]. But no: this foray into anti-semitism and Holocaust denialism is not a one-time affair, and “Holocaust gas chambers = Jewish Zionist hoax” is some distance beyond dog-whistle level. (As is “The Jews were not the victims; the Germans were”, and “Did you know that Russian communism was not Russian at all? It was Jewish. Jewish Bolshevik Russians invaded Russia in 1917 and mass murdered Russian Christians in a Jewish communist takeover.”) Also: “After Jews won the First World War they literally robbed the German people of almost everything they had” during “the Jewish Weimar Republic”, so the Holocaust would have been justified if it happened, which Coldwell claims it didn’t. Here are some examples of Coldwell’sviews on Black people, which would have been considered crude in rural Alabama in the 1920s (“Go home to Africa if you hate amerika that much” doesn’t exactly exude intellect).
Coldwell has, unsurprisingly, a difficult relationship with the fact-checking and myth-debunking website Snopes, and claims to have reported the website to the US Justice Department for “[n]ot telling the truth about aspartame”. The rationale for filing such a report is rather unclear (quite apart, of course, from the fact that Snopes did tell the truth about aspartame). Some of his overall strikingly incoherent charges against Snopes include being funded by “uber-Leftist (Marxist) Billionaires”, being owned by “a flaming liberal”, being “a hoax” and having “no formal background or experience”. He even brags about how he managed to “reveal” that Snopes was owned and run by David and Barbara Mikkelson after “several years research”, information that is, of course, readily available on Snopes’s website.
In 2013, after actress Angelina Jolie underwent preventative double mastectomy, Coldwell was infuriated, claiming that she had received hundreds of millions of dollars for “[t]his big hoax and scam”. No, the conspiracy theory never had more of a head or tail (or evidence) than that.
In recent years, Coldwell (and associates) have been largely griping about Facebook, where he tends to land himself in Facebook jail. Facebook, you see, is part of the establishment targeting those “who have spoken out for truth on matters such as politics, COVID-Hoax, Masks, for natural health and not big pharma, called out Monsanto and Bill Gates, or even Georgy Sorros [sic] who wants to destroy the world as we know it are being scrutinized for every word they type. Why? Because Facebook is a communist/socialist website who [sic] is pushing the agenda of the New Normal hard. They want you all to be obedient. They want (end game) for you to be vaccinated mindless drone of a slave to the system.” In response, Coldwell created his own version of Facebook, Champ book, which was promptly overtaken by spammers and bots.
Publications
Coldwell has released a number of books in his “The only answer …” series; according to himself, he is a “19 times Mega Bestselling author”. Questions for which Coldwell promises to provide the only answer include cancer; success; becoming a sales champion; stress, anxiety and depression; and surviving your illness and your doctor. Some of them are available as DVDs as well. His websites also advertises a secret book, selling at $99. There is an incomplete list of products here.
Diagnosis: Truly among the most deranged figures on the internet – and a case study for how the most insane, stupid, incoherent and obvious lies can nevertheless remain fairly popular among certain groups. Still dangerous.
Hat-tip: Rationalwiki
Reading about this man--the direct quotes in particular--has made me feel noticeably more stupid.
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