#2719: Brandon & Heather Credeur

Brandon and Heather Credeur are a couple of chiropractors and professional grifters, who for a long time were hoodwinking hundreds of victims into paying thousands and thousands of dollars for their brand of functional endocrinology at the Functional Endocrinology Center of Colorado for treatment of diabetes and other endocrine disorders. The treatments didn’t do shit for the patients’ medical problems, of course, and things got so bad that the Colorado Medical Board finally had to step in to order the Credeurs to cease and desist the unlicensed practice of medicine. And for anyone who knows how these things work: For a medical board to actually try to step in and crack down on chiropractic woo, things have to be really bad and really blatantly so.

Brandon Credeur is himself the inventor of the nonsense known as functional endocrinology; he invented it partially to have his own brand of woo to push and partially to sell courses to other chiropractors interesting in expanding their bullshit toolbox (his seminars promised to tell other practitioners how to “Discover How to Attract More Sick Patients With Real Organic & Visceral Illnesses”). Precisely what functional endocrinology is, is of course less clear. Credeur’s promotional material rather attacks science-based medicine for simply prescribing drugs and not getting to the “root cause” (false) of endocrine disorders, such as diabetes (chiropractic quacks love to claim, falsely, that they can do something about diabetes). One would think, then, that Credeur does focus on said root cause; instead, Credeur glaringly fails to tell us what this supposed root cause actually is, how he found it, or how his treatments are supposed to target it; nor does he have any data to suggest that they actually do work. He’s got testimonials, though.

For a time, his business model was to attract patients through seminars and “gourmet dinners” advertised in the newspaper, where diabetics would be advised on “how you too may be able to reverse your diabetes and put your health on a totally new trajectory” and “walk away from diabetes”: at the events, a “clinical model for successfully reversing diabetes” would ostensibly be “revealed”, though according to patients the clinical model consisted simply of “a diet outlined in a book given to all patients, supplements, [and] chiropractic adjustments”. Less explicitly announced beforehand was the fact that a six-month treatment would cost $8,600, all paid up front. Apparently, the business model worked in part by allowing victims to believe that he was, in fact, an endocrinologist. He emphatically isn’t.

Though the sanctions of the medical board (some details on the concerns here) gave the Credeurs some trouble (they quickly declared bankruptcy to circumvent a number of civil lawsuits), they remained licensed by the Colorado chiropractic board – chiropractors are licensed in the state – because the chiropractic board of Colorado is a get-rich-quick conspiracy of spineless hucksters and their licensing has nothing whatsoever with medicine, accountability or patient care but about being able to squeeze as much money as possible out of victims in difficult life situations.

Diagnosis: Absolute, spineless shit. But not only are the Credeurs a disgrace to humanity; their practices aren’t that different – except, perhaps, with regard to how blatant they are – than the practices of a large number of other alternative practitioners, and their antics enjoy the support of large and powerful organizations (chiropractic boards) committed to this and similar grifts. It’s an absolute tragedy.