#2874: Alan Gaby

Myers’ cocktail is (basically) an intravenous cocktail of various vitamins B, vitamin C, and minerals, originally created by naturopath Dr. John Myers and which remains popular with naturopaths and is often offered at so-called IV bars, which are apparently popular among certain conspirituality-oriented elements of New Age hipster culture. The current version was designed by Alan R. Gaby, who took over Myers’s practice, and Gaby touts it as something close to a panacea – as having beneficial effects on “asthma attacks, acute migraines, fatigue (including chronic fatigue syndrome), fibromyalgia, acute muscle spasm, upper respiratory tract infections, chronic sinusitis, and seasonal allergic rhinitis” as well as potentially for “congestive heart failure, angina, chronic urticaria, hyperthyroidism, dysmenorrhea”. Now, there is of course no evidence gathered by any real testing to suggest that it is efficacious for any of the conditions for which it is commonly marketed, but Gaby, of course, has a collection of judiciously selected anecdotes.

 

And Gaby has managed to position himself as something of anauthority (“expert”) within the holistic (or “integrative“) medicine circus in recent decades, and his writings on nutritional therapies – especially his gigantic tome Nutritional Medicine – remain extremely influential among naturopaths and related quacks. That, of course, is partially because Gaby has been a long-time faculty member at the most influential naturopathic ‘educational’ institution, Bastyr University, as well as president of the American Holistic Medical Association. Now, in fairness, Gaby has devoted quite a bit of energy to criticizing nonsense within his own field as well, but has an impressively sized blind spot for the stuff he himself supports: “mainstream medicine does not believe that vitamins and minerals and accessory food factors have therapeutic value. Conventional journals constantly put out biased review articles and biased editorials that lead to that conclusion. I don’t know what the motivation is,” says Gaby, refusing to consider the obvious candidates accuracy and correctness as potential motivations – accusing researchers of bias solely on the grounds that their studies don’t support the conclusions he wants their studies to support seems to constitute a large part of his career. And nutritional medicine, which Gaby practices, should of course not be confused with dietary recommendations from dieticians – nutritional medicine is mostly a matter of pushing supplements under the dangerous pseudo-religious myth of food as a substitute for medicine.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Gaby is concerned about research fraud, and yes, he does reject much nonsense alternative medicine as the nonsense it is; but that makes his own nonsense all the more dangerous, as it might give his recommendations a misleading sheen of being reasonable. And one can only lament how much better the efforts and energy he has invested could have been spent if he cultivated a willingness to care for facts and accuracy across the board.