#2696: William Cole

We have had the opportunity to cover the quackery known as functional medicine a number of times already, and that’s not particularly surprising: functional medicine is quackery, but it is luctrative quackery, so it is a natural gravitation point for people with poor critical thinking skills and/or a poorly developed moral compass. Though it is somewhat hard to define exactly what functional medicine is, given that it is usually described in vague handwaves (descriptions precise enough to be tested and/or legally actionable tend to be avoided – there’s a lot of focus on ‘imbalances’), a notable characteristic is practitioners’ tendency to prescribe a vast array of useless and expensive tests, the results of which they use (based on wallet medical intuition and pseudoscience) to develop “individualized treatment plans” (‘individualized’ to ensure that you pay what you can pay) based largely on useless treatment regimes and supplements.

William Cole is a good example. Cole is a chiropractor and practitioner of functional medicine who has written a very helpful article, “Feeling Off? These Are The Tests To Have Your Doctor Run”, that inadvertently lays out the scam insome detail. “As a functional medicine practitioner, I run a lot of labs,” Cole admits. Of course, since he is not a medical doctor, there may be limits to what kind of tests he can actually run (like blood tests); luckily, we can guarantee you that your health problems are to be located in the results of the tests he can and does decide to run. He is quick to point out, however, that “every person’s health case and biochemistry is unique”, or in other words: reading up on science and evidence is pointless. And he admits that a “general practitioner probably won’t be ordering these tests”, so he recommends “working with an integrative or functional medicine doctor” instead. Now, “many of these test won’t be covered by insurance” because they are not science- or evidence-based, but you should trust the holistic intuitions of your local quack to order and interpret them nonetheless. You can also order at-home tests from commercial websites with prominent Quack Miranda Warnings.

His website is slick-looking and replete testimonials, presumably from people who has taken his tests, received a fake diagnosis, gone through his treatments, and then suddenly not suffered from the ailment the fake diagnosis stated that they suffered from anymore. The website titulates his approach as “the future of natural medicine”, and given the money potentially involved in the set-up (and the complete absence of any sense of accountability among natural medicine practitioners), we suspect he might be right about that.

It may be illustrative to look at the kinds of tests Cole actually recommends for people who are feeling tired:

• a 24-hour adrenal stress index to determine that you suffer from adrenal fatigue, an infamous fake disease  
• a full thyroid panel: although feeling down can, in rare cases, be a symptom of thyroid disease, the kinds of tests Cole recommends are well-known to be bunk (Cole even recommends potential customers to disregard real lab results that show that your TSH is “normal” – “normal” on real tests just means, according to Cole, that “you’re just like a lot of other sick people” – and rather rely on him and his tests, which will surely not show “normal”; it is telling that he essentially just lies about how reference levels for lab tests are determined 
• Gut permeability labs 
• Sex hormone labs 
• Inflammation labs (rarely helpful) 
• Genetic testing

Yeah, no.

Diagnosis: Do not fall for this!

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ sciencebasedmedicine