#2830: David Feinstein

Emotional Freedom Technique is an infamous but relatively widespread pseudopsychiatric therapy that claims to heal the mind and a range of psychological (and physical) problems using, in a handwavy manner, the ideas of acupuncture. Specifically, EFT therapists claim to manipulate the body’s ‘energy field’ through acupressure and to access meridians while focusing on a specific traumatic memory. Needless to say, it is pure pseudoscience, and doesn’t remotely work; indeed, the idea – like the ideas behind energy medicine in general – is not only raging bullshit but fractally wrong.

 

Now, we’ve encountered EFT before, since – despite its desperate lack of plausibility, evidence or coherent underpinnings – the nonsense is, as mentioned, quite popular (though in fairness: most psychologists easily recognize it as absolute bullshit).

 

And despite the implausibility of the ideas, proponents of EFT have long been engaged in some serious pseudoscience to try to lend the technique a sheen of scientific legitimacy. Central to that strategy is the work of energy psychology proponents like Dawson Church and David Feinstein. In a 2008 review, Feinstein concluded that energy psychology (EFT in particular) was a “rapid and potent treatment for a range of psychological conditions” based on systematically ignoring all the evidence demonstrating that EFT doesn’t work; like so many other pseudoscientists, Feinstein also failed to disclose his conflict of interest as an owner of an online shop for energy psychology products. Unfazed, Feinstein published another review in 2012, according to which energy psychology techniques “consistently demonstrated strong effect sizes and other positive statistical results that far exceed chance after relatively few treatment sessions” based on employing the exact same technique as last time: systematically dismissing or ignoring high-quality studies (which consistently show no positive effect) in favor of methodologically worthless small studies that did suggest an effect.

 

Indeed, over the years, Feinstein has published a number of pseudoscientific papers and reviews based on shoddy pseudostudies, including for instance “Manual Stimulation of Acupuncture Points” (in Journal of Psychotherapy Integration). In the very same journal issue, real scientists with intellectual integrity and deploying real methodological techniques (like the AMSTAR2 analysis criteria) on the same material, concluded that the studies Feinstein relied on were of “critically low” quality and poorly carried out, concluding (since they actually deployed methodological rigor and, unlike Feinstein, were concerned with accuracy and accountability) that EFT was pseudoscience and an “unsinkable rubber duck”.

 

Feinstein has written a number of books and done a number of podcasts (e.g. for the aptly named Sounds True with New-Age-woo promoter Donna Eden), and is also on the board of editors of the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, ostensibly “a peer-reviewed professional journal dedicated to reporting developments in the field of energy psychology”; unfortunately, this is the kind of pseudoscientific journal that takes the notion of “peer review” way to literally. It’s board of editors also include the other central leaders of the EFT cult: Dawson Church, Larry Dossey, Charles Tart, Norman Shealy, James Oschman, orthomolecular medicine champion Hyla Cass and Stanley Krippner, the parapsychologist whose parody-friendly work was a crucial part of the foundation for The Men Who Stare at Goats.

 

Diagnosis: Militant pseudoscience. And once again, it is fascinating (but also, of course, frightening) to see the complex but likely completely unconscious strategies proponents of pseudoscience use to avoid reality and the evidence that unambiguously demonstrate that what they advocate is bullshit: Yes, we do think Feinstein is a true believer, and when he systematically champions shoddy nonsense studies and desperately dismiss (or simply ignore) the actual evidence, we suspect he is doing so in good faith – unbelievable as it might sound.

#2829: Burton Feinerman

 

We’ve covered dubious stem cell clinics several times already; it’s lucrative business since people in desperate straits are easy targets and willing to pay whatever it takes for a glimmer of (false) hope. Burton Feinerman is the owner of one such business, the Stem Cell Genetic Med Clinic. Now, Feinerman claims that “I don’t do this for money but to give hope to these people and try to help them, to give them treatments that are scientifically good,” because refraining from lying would be poor marketing; but Feinerman has also claimed to be able to treat virtually any “incurable” condition, from “advanced cancer” to “transverse myelitis” (“and more”, to cover anything he might have forgotten that a potential client might turn up suffering from) with his quackery, and there is still absolutely no convincing evidence that a stem cell treatment is able to cure or treat any of these things.

 

Feinerman is also into autism quackery; as Feinerman claims to see it, most people “now feel that some types of chemicals, toxins and vaccines are the causative agents” for autism (which would be incorrect, of course), and that people are exposed to these agent through “aluminum ingestion or absorption, lead exposure, chemicals in foods such as MSG and aspartane, mercury preservative in vaccines, reaction to measles, or pertussis in vaccines.” Oh, yes – the antivaccine crowd are sitting ducks in this game; we have no evidence that Feinerman actually believes any of this nonsense, or whether he really distinguishes what there is evidence for or (epistemic) reasons to believe from whatever can be turned into a marketing ploy. And what does he offer for autism? “Stem Cell Genetic Med approaches the treatment as a chronic inflammatory condition of the brain with immunological dysfunction” (it isn’t; and note that Feinerman doesn’t actually explicitly claim that it is), and his protocol consists of pure quackery, including “[c]helation intravenous or oral”, “[i]ntravenous infusion of glutathione and neurological supplements” and numerous expensive and unnecessary lab tests.

 

Feinerman is also the founder of something called “the Lung Institute”, which makes dubious claims of being able to treat a range of chronic lung diseases – you can read about a real scientist attending one of their infomercial seminars here. The institute claims to fix damaged lungs by (simply) injecting stem cells into your blood, which is parallel to “claiming that I could fix your broken iPhone by just injecting some metal into it” – and Feinerman is predictably careful not to use the word “cure” in his infomercials but rather relies on words like “help”. But hey: they’ve got testimonials.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, he is fully indistinguishable from a stereotypical parody of a used-car salesman. Does he believe his own bullshit? Well, it’s unclear, but natural to suspect that Burton Feinerman believes whatever could help fill his pockets if it were true; and there are plenty of potential victims out there. A horrible, horrible person.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2828: Danny Faulkner

 

Creationism, as a pseudoscience movement with legislative bite, seems to have receded into the background of political discourse in the US the last few years, but from that background it is still heavily promoted by religious fundies and wingnuts. Few of these promoters have any relevant scientific background, of course, so Danny Faulkner stands as a rather lonely figure who actually does have credentials to brandish when flouting his young earth creationism. Faulkner is an astronomer who at one point did some actual research related to binary stars and worked at a real university, before retiring to work for Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research (he is the ‘dean’ of the Astro/Geophysics department at the ICR Graduate ‘school’), where he could pretend to teach and do research without the constraints of rigor, truth, accuracy and sensitivity to reality put upon him by his previous associations and his discipline.

 

His post-science output has been published e.g. by the cargo-cult journal Answers Research Journal, and has included a.o.

 

-       ‘Interpreting Craters in Terms of the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis’ (for volume 7). Creationists have different hypotheses on when craters appeared in the universe; Faulkner distinguishes craters created on day four of the creation week from later ones by the time-honored method of assertion.

-       ‘Did the Moon Appear as Blood on the Night of the Crucifixion?’ (for volume 7)

-       ‘A Further Examination of the Gospel in the Stars’ (for volume 6): Faulkner wades into the creationist discussion of how the stars and constellations got their names.

-       ‘Astronomical Distance Determination Methods and the Light Travel Time Problem’, (for volume 6) where Faulkner admits that astronomers measure distances correctly, which refutes young Earth creationism; but astronomers overlook the versatility of the Goddidit hypothesis. Indeed, in the very same volume, Faulkner also published his own take; in ‘A Proposal for a New Solution to the Light Travel Time Problem’, he suggests that “light from the astronomical bodies was miraculously made to ‘shoot’ its way to the earth at an abnormally accelerated rate in order to fulfill their function of serving to indicate signs, seasons, days, and years. I emphasize that my proposal differs from cdk in that no physical mechanism is invoked”.

-       ‘How Long Did the Flood Last’, for volume 8

 

Faulkner seems not only to have forgotten some parts of his education but to never actually have quite understood science. Recounting his own personal history, he has expressed significant concern “with people who put that much faith in the big bang. It is the overwhelmingly dominant model, and they’ve had a few impressive predictions, like the background radiation. But it has many problems – they keep changing the model to make it fit the data we have,” which is what science does: adjusting one’s theories in light of evidence is a strength of science; it’s the feature that shows that a theory is sensitive to the facts and what distinguishes science from dogmatism. Of course, Faulkner is also honest about what his real issue is: “my biggest concern is that it doesn’t agree at all with the Genesis account of how the world came to be”. It certainly doesn’t.

 

At least he is clear about his presuppositions. Scientific work also require background knowledge, so if the results “contradict Scripture, we need to reexamine the assumptions” (Faulkner neglects to mention the uncomfortable fact that the background theories used in scientific investigation are themselves testable and well-established by evidence), and although even creationists don’t know everything, by “starting with the key eyewitness to world history, the Bible, we take a crucial step in the right direction that others ignore.” Faulkner was also among creationist critics of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s revival of the show Cosmos, on the grounds that the show lacks scientific balance because it fails to provide airtime for evolution deniers.

 

A commitment to Biblical literalism raises some obvious questions, and much of Faulkner’s ouput the last decade has consisted not only of trying to counter inconvenient scientific results (such as trying to figure out how he can argue that radiocarbon dating doesn’t work) or desperately trying to argue (well, assert) that the results really support creationism, but of countering challenges from more consistent literalists, including in particular the flat earth movement. Faulkner has even attented some flat Earth conferences, where he encounters some absolutely fantastic pieces of irony that he unwaveringly refuses to recognize.

 

Diagnosis: Given that he can flaunt some genuine credentials, Faulkner has indeed become one of the most significant authorities within the creationist movement today. His background also puts him in a position to entertain some awareness of the insanity of what he’s doing; and he sometimes seems on the verge of being aware – to the extent that one almost starts suspecting it’s all a hoax – but blind faith is an amazing insulator.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2827: Dave Farnsworth

David Christian Farnsworth is an Arizona state senator serving since 2013 (with a break between 2021 and 2023), representing District 10. Farnsworth is a creationist. When Arizona was considering a Darwin Day resolution in 2016, Farnsworth was dismayed: he would, he said, have supported an Arizona Science Day (like many creationists, Farnsworth pretends to love science), but a Darwin Day would be a very different matter: “When I was growing up in Mesa, I was taught in school the evolution theory that my ancestors came from monkeys. Personally, I was offended by that theory, especially when you consider that I hold a deep-seated belief in creationism.” Science might be cool, but doesn’t trump Farnsworth sensibilities as an arbiter of truth, especially when it comes to issues Farnsworth doesn’t begin tounderstand. He also pointed out that it would be fairer to teach both evolution and creationism, both as theories, in public schools, since again, science should be held to no more rigorous standard than the standard of what Farnsworth feels is fair.

 

Of course, Farnsworth is an across-the-board loon. As a Mormon, Farnsworth is a firm defender of that characteristically Mormon piece of deranged pseudohistory idea that Mormonism was founded by followers of Jesus who settled in the US right after Jesus’s death (the Nephites) but who were killed off by heretics whom God subsequently punished by darkening their skin (the Lamanites). But more generally, Farnsworth is an all-in religious-fanaticism-fuelled conspiracy theorist ranting about “secret combinations” (Mormon for conspiracies) that “will seek to destroy the freedom of all lands,” which are currently “the insiders, One World Government people, the socialists” of the modern world – Farnsworth is fond of quoting John Birch-society affiliate Ezra Taft Benson (“If you want to know what I believe, and how I feel, just Google Ezra Taft Benson. Because I don’t disagree with anything he ever said”) that “there is no conspiracy theory in the Book of Mormon – it is a conspiracy fact”. So there. Benson, who believed that Black people were “the seed of Cain” and therefore couldn’t have positions in the church, and that the civil rights movement was “a Communist program for revolution in America”, famously wrote the foreword to this book.

 

Farnsworth has also claimed that QAnon is a “credible group”. Indeed, he received some attention in 2019 for his claims that the Arizona Department of Child Safety is involved in sex trafficking, specifically that the DCS would arrange for the children to be abducted and sold into a global sex trafficking ring: “After several months of digging, I am quite confident that there is a connection,” Farnsworth told the QAnon-promoting website Epoch Times. He did not cite any evidence, of course. He also affirmed that “I think most knowledgeable adults believe that there is a sex trafficking ring all across the world.” He did of course not cite any evidence for that claim either, for obvious reasons. When his fellow state senator Kate Brophy McGee told him to stop holding meetings at the Capitol with “unbalanced” people (Farnsworth’s QAnon friends), Farnsworth promptly called the police and claimed that she had threatened him.

 

Farnsworth returned from retirement in 2023 (with Trump’s endorsement) after his primary opponent (Rusty Bowers) had decided to testify before the January 6 committee and had also strayed from what Farnsworth considers church doctrine by holding a hearing on an LGBTQ nondiscrimination bill (Farnsworth judges homosexuality to be a “lifestyle choice”). Even more importantly, Bowers hadn’t, in Farnsworth opinion, done enough to “ensure faith” in Arizona’s electoral processes after they failed to ensure that Trump emerged as the state’s official candidate: Farnsworth doesn’t only believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump through fraud, but that it was a Satanic conspiracy, that the “devil himself” was behind it. His evidence is (exclusively) that “in the book of Mormon in Ether Chapter 8, the synopsis of the chapter says … modern gentiles are warned of a secret combination which seeks to destroy the freedom of our lands”, adding that “this is larger than any of us, because every tyrant that ever lived has been inspired by Satan to take control over the hearts and minds and souls and bodies and lives of mankind.” When pressed, he did add that “I felt that the election was stolen” and that Dinesh D’Souza’s laughably fact-challenged conspiracy movie 2000 Mules “reinforces how I already felt”. And the conspiracy is wide-ranging; Farnsworth liberally accuses political operatives working for his opponents or media coverage he feels is favorable to his opponents of being part of the conspiracy and “working for Satan”. His candidacy was promptly endorsed by a sufficient number of frothingly insane Arizona wingnuts (like Kelly Townsend, Andy Biggs and Kelli Ward).

 

As for Covid, Farnsworth was very frustrated with government efforts to halt the pandemic, in particular its effects on churches: “If this is a real epidemic, why wouldn’t we be fasting and praying that the Lord would turn it aside, rather than going after the solutions of men? Which is a shot that probably does more harm than good.” Yes, you can be confident that if it has been uttered by Dave Farnsworth, it is not only wrong but fractally so.

 

Diagnosis: As Rusty Bowers put it, Farnsworth “doesn’t invest intellectual capital” – and that’s a … generous characterization. Possibly one of the most deranged loons in the US today.

 

Hat-tip: Business Insider

#2826: Bert Farias

Bert Farias is a self-decared “messenger of the Lord carrying a spirit of revival to the Church and the nations”, i.e. a fundie dominionist, who is associated with Charisma magazine and who runs something called the Holy Fire ministries together with his wife Carolyn. Apparently, the ministry is guided by words and ideas that pop into Bert’s head and which he assumes is God speaking to him and telling him how important his work is in the distinctive style of contemporary American NAR-associated evangelicism (“your vision is to build a city not made with hands – to take a people to a place where I am, sojourners in a land, a vision not of man”, and so on). He has also written a couple of books with titles like “Tongues: the elevation of a mystery”.

 

Farias is, of course, committed to Biblical supremacy and inerrancy, and is accordingly concerned with various aspects of modern culture; indeed, “there is a diabolical plot to remove major sections from the Bible – a move that we don’t even talk about today” (Farias talks about it a lot, at least). Such sections targeted for deletion would likely include the authors’ opinions on homosexuality – Farias does not like homosexuality, and has for instance declared that gay-friendly Christians and churches “are tools of Satan”; during the 2016 election primaries, he also firmly denounced Pete Buttigieg, referring to him as “Petunia”, calling him a “trophy of Hell” and accusing him of trying to indoctrinate the public with homosexuality: and to clarify the stakes, Farias concluded that Buttigieg’s “abominable lifestyle” is bringing the “death rattle of a nation.”

 

Indeed, Farias has his own theory of homosexuality: Homosexuality is caused by fart demons! In choosing to be gay, a person chooses to engage in “unclean demonic practices”, and “homosexuality is actually a demon spirit. It is such a putrid smelling demon that other demons don’t even like to hang around it.” He knows this because “a genuine prophet of God [who shall conveniently remain unnamed] told me that the Lord allowed him to smell this demon spirit, and he got sick to his stomach.” Indeed, the demons are so repugnant that they even drive pigs to suicide. Farias’s research was published, as you’d expect, by Charisma News, where Farias also implored gay people to “not get upset with me,” since they “will see that I am actually trying to help you.”

 

Lamenting the 2020 elections and how “the antichrist spirit is now the dominant spirit throughout America and the nations of the world,” Farias called out those who went against Trump and supported “evil” and urged them to repentance: “If only more professing Christians acted like Christians at the ballot box our nation would’ve never reached this point of crisis,” said Farias [no link provided].

 

Diagnosis: Fundie who is worried about fart demons will probably do just fine.

#2825: Ashley Everly

The vast majority of anti-vaccine ‘experts’ are, at best, people with some competence in areas far removed from anything related to vaccines. Ashley Everly, however, presents herself as “a toxicologist and a mother”, and since a toxicologist might actually possess some not irrelevant expertise, her anti-vaccine claims have been treated with some authority in antivaccine circles. Of course, Everly has no degree in toxicology beyond a BS. What she has, is the experience of being the mother of a child she has convinced herself is vaccine injured and a fear of toxins. (She is also – and nevertheless – ‘toxicology consultant’ to the anti-vaccine conspiracy group Health Freedom Idaho.) And her toxicology ‘research’, such as her conclusion that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause autism (it doesn’t) has not been published on anything but anti-vaccine websites and facebook.

 

If nothing else, her book and website The Vaccine Guide provides a good illustration of the nature of her ‘research’; it consists of collecting screenshots of cherry-picked studies, articles, and webpages, where Everly highlights passages that can be used to spin in an antivaccine manner or be used to look like they fit anti-vaccine conclusions if you don’t look too closely or know enough of the context to judge their validity. Do you, for instance, think she understands – or wants to help her readers understand – what ‘unavoidably unsafe’ means in legal contexts?

 

A major section of her website is the Vaccine Ingredients/Excipients/Contaminants section (discussed in some detail here), which tries to push several of the variants of toxins gambits that have been promoted by anti-vaccine activists over the years; and yes, it is indeed striking that someone calling themselves ‘toxicologist’ appears to be unaware that the dose makes the poison. Real and reliable information on vaccine ingredients paints a strikingly different picture than the one Everly is trying to paint.

 

She also has sections on (screenshots of) vaccine package inserts and on the most favored anti-vaccine trope of them all, shedding. Indeed, as Everly sees it, vaccines are not only unsafe (false), but ineffective (false), and she provides numerous links to non-relevant articles (like the one discussed here), to push her point. Her website also pushes various types of quackery, including naturopathy and chiropractic.

 

Diagnosis: A relatively typically clueless anti-vaccine activist who presents herself as – and may genuinely believe her position to be – science-based. But although Everly’s efforts are pretty incompetent, she seems to have managed to gain considerable influence among conspiracy-minded people in her parts of the US, and she is far from harmless.

#2824: Carol Everett

Carol Everett is a former director of a couple of abortion clinics in Texas in the early 1980s who has subsequently established herself as an anti-abortion activist and completely-off-the-rails conspiracy theorist, most famously through her colorful fantasies about Planned Parenthood. To Everett, Planned Parenthood isn’t only offering health services to women, but are the nexus of a vast, Satanic conspiracy to maximize the number of abortions carried out by any means possible.

 

So according to Everett, Planned Parenthood’s “agenda was to give women low-dose birth-control pills they knew [the women] would get pregnant on and to pass out defective condoms. I will go to my grave believing that their agenda was three to five abortions between the ages of 13 and 18 from every young woman they could find.” In an interview with Lee Ann McAdoo on InfoWars, she even claimed to have been involved in such practices herself back in the day to be able to “sell [a woman] an abortion on the telephone.” Indeed, according to Everett the whole idea of sex education is really only a vast ploy by the abortion industry to get teens pregnant so as to keep the industry profitable.

 

Of course, Everett’s story of how she went from being a director of abortion clinics to being an anti-abortion (and anti-sex) activist is used for all it’s worth as a rhetorical ploy in her presentations and interviews, and it has lent her some credibility both among the less well-hinged parts of the internet and among wingnut politicians, even though she obviously lies about her background, too. (And for the record, she had no affiliation with Planned Parenthood and has nothing resembling a background in medicine.) According to Everett, abortion is “unnatural” because it is an “interruption of the natural process” (so it’s unnatural in the sense that any medical procedure is unnatural) and “a terribly painful procedure.” The procedure is particularly harmful when performed “on a woman who is really not pregnant,” which she falsely (and insanely) alleges is “being done [today] on women who can be convinced they’re pregnant even though they aren’t.” And because it might be effective with certain audiences, Everett has also pushed the abortion-is-Black-genocide conspiracy theory: Planned Parenthood is, according to Everett, targeting Black communities and “until recently there was not a single abortion clinic located in a white, middle class area”, something that is stupendously and ridiculously false.

 

She is of course anti-contraception, too. According to Everett, emergency contraception is “destructive to a woman’s reproductive system” – it would “sterilize” them – and constitutes “a social experiment on children” (yes, she can just make things up whole cloth – those who bother to listen to her are not going to care). And as for her sex education conspiracy theories, they quickly veer into anti-LGBT land: sex education providers “break down” children’s “natural modesty” and teach them “perverse behavior”; now, apparently girls (who?) have been “telling me they were bisexual” because sex education has “broken down” children’s values. Indeed, sex education is a conspiracy to ensure that “the homosexual lifestyle is exploding” (she didn’t explain how that helps abortion providers “expand their market”). She has also alleged that Planned Parenthood has “a website that actually encourages sex with animals” designed for teens; when asked for an url, Everett supplied a link to an anti-abortion website that did not make the claim but which had published an excerpt from a 1981 study on sex in rural America that didn’t mention or have anything remotely to do with Planned Parenthood.

 

At the core of her views, is her hatred and fear of promiscuity; as Everett sees it, and as relayed to Rick Green at WallBuilders, it is “almost like rape when you’re having sex with two or three” different partners before getting married, because she herself cannot “imagine another woman who cares or respects herself who would” have sex with a man who has had other consenting partners before, and everyone should share her preferences; “the only thing that can help us recover is Jesus,” said Everett.

 

Everett is the founder and CEO of The Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization that purports to give women health “advice”, but which is not a medical provider and can accordingly not perform any actual healthcare services. That didn’t prevent the Texas legislature from awarding them $1.65 million in taxpayer money in 2016 for their “health care services”, which the organization – to repeat ourselves – does not provide. (According to themselves, “The Heidi Group exists to ensure that all Texas women have access to quality health care by coordinating services in a statewide network of full-service medical providers,” though what that involves is not explained). Everett admitted that much of the grant would be given to so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which is the preferred US euphemism for religious anti-abortion activist groups. The Heidi group’s efforts ran into the ground in 2018, when the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, after Texas had ‘inexplicably’ renewed their contract twice, were forced to conclude that there were “substantial deficiencies in the areas of contract compliance, service administration, and financial and administrative management of both contracts” – predictably, since the group was never in the business of (or had any competence to or inclination to be) offering the health care services or coordinating services they promised to deliver (“it’s not as easy as it looks”, admitted Everett, who is not the first to make that observation). Everett concluded that there was a conspiracy led by nefarious forces (Planned Parenthood) afoot, and dismissed the HHSC report as “lies” (she didn’t provide any further explanation or documentation).

 

The Heidi Group has partnered with anti-abortion groups like the Center of Medical Progress, and has helped spread CMP’s discredited conspiracy theories. Everett has also served as an “integral partner” to Operation Rescue, having herself recruited women who were “willing to go into the abortion clinics and be very aggressive” to secretly film inside and expose manufactured incidents that Everett alleged represented the “way women were being mistreated even today in the abortion clinics”

 

As a political actor, Everett and her group is nevertheless a force to be reckoned with in Texas. She has worked tirelessly to shut down funding to Planned Parenthood and direct money to anti-abortion activist groups She was for instance involved in the Texas push for requiring women to either bury or cremate the remains of an aborted fetus, testifying that if fetuses were flushed down toilets (not the relevant alternative, needless to say), we could face a public health disaster and that people could be afflicted with STDs or even HIV due to fetuses flooding the sewer systems. “What if one day something horrible escaped into the sewer system?” asked Everett [Please. Just. Pause. For. A. Moment. And. Assess. That. Piece. Of. Reasoning.]. In 2013, she similarly tried to argue, using one of the dumbest ‘what-if’s in the history of what-ifs, that abortion clinics needed to be regulated because of Ebola: “with the Ebola scare, … what [germs] would we be transferring [at clinics]?”

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she is demonstrably lying through her teeth and making things up as she goes, and seems to consider herself justified in doing that because Jesus. But despite being a wild-eyed and morally corrupt conspiracy theorist, Everett maintains significant political influence, especially in Texas. People listen to her, since she says what they want to hear, regardless of the obvious fact that she is clearly just making it up.

 

Hat-tip: Mediamatters

#2823: Irene Estores

The infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine – in the form of fellowships, research and clinical trials studying nonsense, or even large centers – is a significant threat to health and wellbeing in the US. It is driven by the fact that there is a certain level of public demand for such things, that there is money in it, and that it is often easy to market in appealing-sounding ways (“care for the whole person”, “wellness”, “we offer every means available”); and since decisions are made at administrative – not scientific – levels, the temptation is often too big for these academic institutions. The University of Florida in Gainesville, for instance, launched their New UF Health program in 2013, with press releases full of market-tailored nonsense about blending “holistic therapies and modern medicine”, the “best of both worlds” and so on; according to the program’s “first fellowship-trained integrative medicine physician” and director, Dr. Irene Estores, “[i]ntegrative medicine addresses the needs of the whole person – mind, body, spirit – in the context of community. We’re coming back to our roots and honoring what was effective in other healing traditions and using that to be able to be more effective in caring for our patients.” Of course, there is nothing holistic about the treatments offered by so-called ‘holistic’ medicine (rather, ‘holistic’ is at best a line in a defense when confronted with the fact that the purported benefits don’t show up in tests caring for rigor, accuracy and accountability), treating the “whole person” – which ordinary doctors certainly do – doesn’t require embracing pseudoscience, and integrating science with pseudoscience – or medicine with fake medicine – doesn’t make for better science or medicine. (Those are indeed the crucial false dilemmas at the heart of all woo.)

 

At least the services provided by the program, such as guided imagery, medical acupuncture and yoga, are themselves mostly harmless. But the thing is: embracing these, too, requires deemphasizing or even jettisoning values like accountability and being guided by evidence – indeed, the whole point of such programs is to weaken or eliminate standards of care, which is certainly not a healthy thing to do. And indeed, looking beyond the press releases, you’ll see that the program’s recommendations may also include “referrals to practitioners of other healing systems such as Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda (a holistic medicine system from India), or homeopathy.” Oh, yes, they do.

 

Estores herself is a trainee of Andrew Weil’s integrative medicine program at the University of Arizona, as well as a Bravewell fellow and an acupuncturist. According to herself, her “interest in integrative medicine grew out of self-exploration of other healing and belief systems, the deepening of her spiritual practice of prayer, self-reflection and meditation, and a mindful experience of both the good and bad things that have happened in her life as an individual and as a physician. She considers her practice of medicine as a vocation and a spiritual path.” Needless to say, this is not the kind of practitioner you should trust if you want reality-based care – note the conspicuous absence of ‘evidence’, ‘reality’, ‘facts’ or ‘science’. According to herself, however, Estores does not practice ‘alternative medicine’ – “[h]ere at UF, we do not have alternative medicine. We do not have complementary medicine. We have integrative medicine” – which is, of course, an attempt at pure semantics for marketing purposes; what she does practice, is woo based on pseudoscience

 

Diagnosis: Slick, smarmy, arrogant and completely devoid of any sense of care that reality matters. Though Estores does have a medical degree, she has done her best (worst) to cure herself of the notion that evidence and facts trump her gut feelings (‘spiritual’) or feel-good PR blather (‘coming back to our roots and honoring what was effective in other healing traditions’).

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2822: Rebecca Estepp

Talk About Curing Autism (TACA) is an anti-vaccine group known for blaming vaccines for autism like it was 2003 and for being devoted to promoting various kinds of potentially dangerous woo and quackery and pseudoscience as potential cures for autism. (Though they seemed to have tried to tone down the conspiracy theories a bit after changing their name to The Autism Community in Action in 2018.) The group was founded by Lisa Ackerman, and its national manager, at least during the group’s antivaccine heydays, Rebecca Estepp, has made a bit a name for herself in antivaccine circles.

 

Indeed, Estepp – the mother of an autistic child she incorrectly believes is vaccine injured – was one of the claimants in the 2007 Autism Omnibus trials, and was predictably disappointed with the (obvious) outcome, rhetorically asking “When does anecdotal evidence become enough?”, the scientific answer to which is, of course, “never”. Estepp also asserted (this time representing the anti-vaccine) Coalition for Vaccine Safety that “[t]he deck is stacked against families in vaccine court. Government attorneys defend a government program, using government-funded science, before government judges” – a fair system would presumably rather rely on anecdotes interpreted by anti-vaccine activists and bloggers. In 2010, when the medical journal The Lancet issued a full retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s paper linking vaccines and autism, Estepp – speaking for TACA –  insisted that she still trusted Wakefield’s research.

 

As a matter of fact, Estepp seems to be claiming not only that vaccines are dangerous (false) and fail to prevent disease (false), but that vaccines might make you more likely to contract vaccine-preventable disease. But then, Estepp’s ability to determine safety and effectiveness is demonstrably subpar; Estepp recommends e.g. chelation therapy as a cure for autism and was dumbfounded when the government declined to fund a study on chelation therapies and autism “with no explanation”; of course, the government did explain: it isn’t safe; it just wasn’t the explanation Estepp wanted to hear.

 

As communications director for the anti-vaccine group Health Choice, Estepp was also heavily involved in the 2015 protests against California’s SB277, which restricted the use of non-medical exemptions to vaccine requirements in public schools (something Estepp herself had made use of for her children). She was also affiliated with the antivaccine Canary Party.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, evidence, accuracy and science is a conspiracy against concerned antivaccine parents – same as always, though at least Estepp is, as opposed to many anti-vaccine activists, more or less clear that this is exactly what she’s claiming.

#2821: John Esseff

John Esseff is a Scranton-based Catholic monsignor, President of Board of Pope Leo XIII Institute and local (though possibly retired) exorcist. As an exorcist, Esseff has met plenty of demons and demon-possessed people, growling and shrieking and slithering up against the wall – The Exorcist was apparently a pretty accurate documentary, and Esseff’s main criticism of the movie’s depictions is its tacit suggestion that the devil can just fly in and possess anyone when in reality “the devil is afraid of you” as long as you stay faithful and virtuous. Apparently you may also get help from your ”guardian angels”, whom you can invoke through prayer to “make a perimeter” around the area in which you find yourself.

 

In 2018, Esseff even managed to get himself in the national spotlight for his criticism of Celine Dion’s (gender neutral) children’s clothing line as being occult and demonic. “The devil is going after children by confusing gender. When a child is born, what is the first things we say about that child? It’s a boy, or it’s a girl. That is the most natural thing in the world to say. But to say that there is no difference is satanic,” said Esseff, who also accused the clothes of displaying occult imagery that no one else were able to see. Satan’s hand at work was also clearly visible: “People behind this are influencing children to disorder. This is definitely satanic. There is a mind behind it – an organized mindset. The devil is a liar and there are huge lies being told. This is being done for money, and there is divisiveness that comes from this [he didn’t reflect too long on who is doing the divisiveness here] – marks of the devil.” Esseff’s criticisms and warnings were published by the National Catholic Register, which has made it its business model to see demonic forces at work more or less everywhere.

 

Diagnosis: Doddering moron, though probably not himself particularly harmful (he’s got to be close to 100 by now) even though his delusions are frighteningly widespread.