#2949: James Grundvig

James Grundvig is a freelance journalist, relentless conspiracy theorist, senior member of the anti-vaccine movement and contributor to disgraced antivax doctor Sherri Tenpenny’s blog Vaxxter, where he seems bent on trying (and failing) to make even Tenpenny’s nonsense seem reasonable. So, Grundvig is the kind of guy who tried to blame Covid-19 on 5G so that the whole vaccine effort could be dismissed as a smoke-screen and conspiracy targeting a virus that is harmless unless ‘triggered’ by 5G), citing “images” of “people walking down the street, collapsing dead without any external force. Dozens of such videos and photos showed the fallen people spread eagle, flat on their backs, face down on sidewalks. Lifeless” ostensibly from Wuhan and Northern Italy.

 

It’s not Grundvig’s only foray into Covid-related conspiracy theories. In September 2020, for instance, he and Tenpenny tried to argue that food poisoning due to brucellosis is (or will be) passed off as COVID-19. With regard to biology, bacteriology, virology, or basic facts about infectious disease that claim makes absolutely no sense, of course; instead of trying to make sense, Grundvig and Tenpenny offered conspiracy videos by Joe Imbriano that they found between Imbriano’s rants about 5G and how Disney promotes homosexuality and how Apple is Satanic because numerology. They also asserted that Bill Gates and the WHO are behind (and managing) the pandemic for some unspecific but nefarious purpose (with regard to the CDC and the WHO, in particular, Grundvig and Tenpenny noted these organizations’ warnings about future COVID strains: “Why sound the klaxon on a new scourge of COVID when there is zero evidence and zero data to show one is coming? Do the architects of the plandemic know something that the rest of society doesn’t know?” but didn’t consider the rather obvious answer that why, yes: the experts do know more than the rest of us: they have data and understand how to interpret them). Their post also included a “greatest hits of Covid conspiracies” list, including the “only 6% nonsense”.

 

Indeed, trying to downplay the risk of the viruses we vaccinate against (using conspiracy theories) to try to argue that the vaccination is pointless is a go-to strategy for Grundvig. Addressing a 2019 measles outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that killed at least 5,000 people, Grundvig did a multi-prong deflection attempt to explain how a “generally mild viral infection” (false!) could rack up such numbers:

 

-       That since outbreaks of this severity doesn’t occur “in first world countries”, “hygiene, nutrition, refrigeration, and potable water” must be the cause, something Grundvig calls “a long-known and well-kept secret by the WHO, UNICEF, and medical institutions around the world”. Well, that Grundvig interprets the fact that malnutrition is a major risk factor for death from measles is a “well-kept secret” should tell you a bit about his knowledge of the subjects he discusses. In fact, Grundvig does cite a USAID article mentioning these risks, but notes that “those environmentalist researchers didn’t say vaccines were at the heart of disease reduction”, except, of course, they explicitly did (Grundvig naturally doesn’t expect his audience to read the material he cites).

-       That shedding from measles vaccines are “muddying” the numbers from the outbreak (it most certainly doesn’t).

-       That the purported measles cases arereally acetaminophen side-effects (“could the bulk of the 5,000 measles deaths be a case of mistaken identity?”), since acetaminophen side effects sound a bit like they could be mistaken for measles symptoms; Grundvig even includes pictures of both, which even to untrained eyes (like Grundvig’s) don’t look remotely similar. “This author firmly believes so,” says Grundvig. So there.

 

He also cites research suggesting that the measles virus produces immune amnesia to try to raise worries about the measles vaccine, conveniently forgetting that it takes a full measles infection to damage the immune system in that way – in other words, the research gives you yet another bloody good reason to get the vaccine – or how garbage antivaxx ‘studies’ are “censored” when they are rejected or retracted due to methodological shortcomings.

 

Otherwise, Grundvig has given numerous talks and written numerous rants about how anti-vaxxers are “censored” by the fact that public health groups don’t take them seriously, listen to them or give them platforms.

 

Diagnosis: Grundvig is first and foremostly an Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorist, and as Sherry Tenpenny’s frequent sidekick he is not a nobody in antivaccine circles. Delirious moron, of course, but at present, people like him seem, in fact, to be informing public health policy in the US.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2948: Shannon Grove

Shannon Lee Grove is a wingnut conspiracy theorist who has represented California’s 12th State Senatorial district (southern Central Valley and parts of the High Desert) since 2018, after having served in State Congress since the Tea Party wave in 2010 and until 2016. She even served as the minority leader of the California State Senate from 2019 to 2021 before her fellow party members, who recognized her idiotic lunacy, conspiracy theories and cultlike devotion to MAGA – Grove believes that Trump is “the greatest of all time” – as “a significant liability” and managed to oust her.

 

Grove is a relentless supporter of Trump, and has spent much effort promoting stop the steal-related conspiracy theories about voter fraud in the 2020 election. Like other stop the steal promoters, Grove had already on election night decided that there had to be something wrong with the results since they weren’t what Grove would have liked – she tweeted images comparing Trump to Moses and stated that she believed Trump would serve for “the next 4 years” – and then looked for straws and conspiracy theories to back the conclusion up, including, for instance, repeating baseless online rumors that votes were illegally “injected” into Arizona’s tally (she was joined in her efforts by a few other California wingnut representatives, like Tom McClintock, Melissa Melendez and Doug LaMalfa, though most California Republicans have vigorously avoided commenting on the issue). Following January 6, 2021, Grove promoted the conspiracy theory that antifa was responsible for the attack. “Patriots don’t act like this!!!” said Grove, hence “This was Antifa.”

 

Grove is a self-proclaimed “gun-carrying, tongue-talking, spirit-filled believer” and hasn’t shied away from bringing her religious views to bear on pressing issues. In 2015, she received a bit of attention after linking abortion legislation and the wrath of God to the drought in California. Speaking to a group of anti-abortion activists in Sacramento, Grove showed a copy of the Bible and stated that “Texas was in a long period of drought until Gov. Perry signed the fetal pain bill. It rained that night […] Now God has His hold on California.” When her statement was criticized for being ridiculous, Grove responded that she had been misconstrued, and attempted to clear things up: “Is this drought caused by God? Nobody knows. But biblical history shows a consequence to man’s actions.” In other words, her critics interpreted her precisely and accurately. She had previously tried to blame the drought on the Endangered Species Act, with, predictably, little success. As for abortion, Grove opposed a 2015 bill that could potentially curtail the effectiveness of misinformation from crisis pregnancy centers, likening the bill to Nazi Germany forcing “people [to] wear Jewish stars.”

 

Throughout her career in the legislature, Grove has consistently sought to represent the views and interests of anti-vaccine activists, usually under the guise of “health freedom”. She has opposed efforts to improve vaccine coverage and has expressed deep support for parents who erroneously believe “from the depths of their soul” that vaccines are dangerous and who should therefore be free to start outbreaks. She is also a climate change denialist who officially opposes efforts to combat climate change because such measures are “unaffordable”; in 2012, however, she invited Lord Monckton to speak to the Legislature, which strongly suggests that her views are based on lunacy rather than hand-wringing apathy masquerading as sense. In 2021, she tried to get the Kern County board of supervisors to block solar energy projects in the county as revenge after state regulators had denied several new fracking permits.

 

Grove is also on the advisory board for Revive California, a dominionist group affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), and was herself a panelist at NAR’s Harvest International Ministry’s Global Summit 2020.

 

Diagnosis: Ridiculous moron, but that still hasn’t stopped many people from getting elected, it seems. Sharon Grove has done her worst to make the world a shittier place for a decade and a half, and seems to be on a trajectory to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

#2947: Edward Group

Edward F. Group III is an anti-vaccine activist, conspiracy theorist, healer, quack, “industry leader and innovator in the field of natural health” (i.e. quack) and founder of something called Global Healing, which seems to be a motivational standup show with a webpage that has a prominently placed “shop” section. As for credentials, Group is an “DC, NP, DACBN, DCBCN, DABFM”, but he was nevertheless touted as an ‘expert’ or so in the anti-vaccine ‘documentary’ series The Truth About Vaccines because he is the kind of ‘expert’ that’ll see a marketing opportunity in appearing on shows like that. Beyond being “a registered doctor of chiropractic (DC)” and “a naturopathic practitioner (NP)”, his websites also boast affiliations like “proud alum of Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management” even though he didn’t graduate from any of them, doesn’t have an undergraduate degree, and only completed a “non-degree certificate program” at MIT, which according to MIT makes calling yourself an ‘alumnus’ “inaccurate and misleading.”

 

Mostly, Group promotes and sells supplements. And he has had some success, mostly due to his role as medical consultant for InfoWars. Oh yes: for years Group served as the ‘medical alibi’ for Jones’s conspiracy theories and nonsense about health and medicine (for years, Group credentials would include a ‘medical degree’ from the Joseph LaFortune School of Medicine, a Haiti-based unaccredited diploma mill; at some point, that one quietly disappeared from his websites), and he would frequently appear on the show to try to downplay claims that the products, which range from the stupid to the dangerous and stupid, are a scam (they are) and opine about vaccines (a “hidden poison”) and fungus (the root of all evil, though luckily Jones and Group sells supplements that ostensibly help banish fungi from the body).

 

Among recurring topics on the show are the alleged benefits of colloidal silver, which Jones sold as Silver Bullet. Indeed, Group and Jones advocate drinking colloidal silver (you really shouldn’t): in 2014, for instance, Group happily told the InfoWars audience that he has been drinking “half a gallon of silver, done a 10 parts per million silver, for probably 10 or 15 days” for years and claimed that the FDA at one point “raided” his office to steal his colloidal silver, because it is too powerful: “It was one of the things that was targeted by the FDA because it was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and a threat for doctor’s visits because it worked so good in the body,” said Group, because once you’ve started lying as profusely as this, it’s hard to stop.

 

Another mainstay of Group’s contributions to InfoWars is anti-fluoride conspiracy nonsense (Jones reasoned that the government is using fluoride as a means to “cutting us off from higher consciousness”). Instead of fluoride, Jones would promote iodine products, including the “Global Healing Center’s Oxy-Powder”, which would give you a dose of iodine per serving four times higher than the maximum recommended daily dose.

 

Group would also regularly appear in ads for various InfoWars formulas, including “Living Defense”, which was promoted as a way to fend off “refugees spreading disease” (it’s one weird trick that has “the CDC is going crazy right now,” says Group.) In 2013, Group announced that “Gaiam TV has launched the first of twelve episodes of ‘Secrets to Health’ featuring myself and the Health Ranger, Mike Adams of Natural News!”, and that would have been a useful indicator of what sort of character we’re dealing with, too, if the InfoWars connection hadn’t been amply sufficient on its own.

 

Though popular with conspiracy theorists, Group’s products are indeed, like he admits, not so popular with the FDA, who has issued warning letters to Group’s business e.g. over his promotion of the nonsense product ViraZap as an “Avian Flu Treatment” (“Help treat symptoms of Flu! Strengthen your immune system” – his intended audience is presumably those who don’t recognize that those two sentences are a contradiction). Even Group’s own employees admit that the claims the Global Healing company make are “incorrect, totally circumstantial or based on incomplete evidence”.

 

Notably, Group has also been caught being a proponent of urine therapy. At a 2021 quack conference inTennessee where Eric Trump featured as a keynote speaker, Group suggested to the audience that they should drink their urine as an alternative to getting vaccinated against COVID-19 (an idea most famously promoted by “Vaccine Police” leader Christopher Key). If you wish to hear more, you can look up his segment “The Power of Urine Therapy” on the podcast hosted by batshit moron and flat-earth promoter Courtenay Turner.

 

Diagnosis: Not only instrumental in building Alex Jones’s empire, Group is also partially responsible for popularizing anti-vaccine nonsense and medical conspiracy theories among the MAGA crowd. He is, of course, a complete and utter fraud; but that doesn’t mean he isn’t also a lunatic true believer in everything false and stupid. We don’t know how his reach has been affected by Jones’s fall from grace, but his name keeps popping up in various contexts – contexts in which you really shouldn’t find yourself.

#2946: June Griffin

June Griffin was an insane wingnut fundie – a “preacher and morals activist” – who ran as candidate for District 31 of the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2016 and, previously, for Governor of Tennessee in 2010. Her political career seems to have been motivated by her engagement in a 2009 fight to stop decriminalization of homosexuality in Tennessee through a legal suit that she claimed would “decriminalize sodomy in Tennessee and allow lesbians and homosexuals to teach their deviate lifestyles in our public schools;”  the suit would, if successful (it was), accordingly “move us from our foundation of law, the Bible”, and Griffin warned the judge directly about God making “Sodom and Gomorrah an example to those who should after live ungodly” and complained that “hanging over your head is a chandalier with the ‘Ten Commandments’ written on it and that you want to kill our law with new definitions and alter the source of guilt.” Sodomites, Griffin pointed out, “have a tax scheme of funding of their schools, hospitals, and insurance. They want to soften the rod of God's wrath against sin”; also, if sodomy were to be decriminalized, “the sodomites will then qualify for TennCare!”, fumed Griffin (criminals don’t, apparently).

 

At about the same time, she launched some anti-evolution billboard campaigns; “it is payback time”, said Griffin, apparently referring to the Scopes trial – Griffin herself is a resident of Dayton, where the Scopes trial originally took place, and she is still sore about it. When a statue of Clarence Darrow was erected at the County Courthouse in 2017 opposite a statue of William Jennings Bryan erected in 2005, Griffin was enraged: “This is a hideous monstrosity.And God is not pleased,” said Griffin; she struggles a bit to distinguish herself and God, but that’s par for the course among her peer group.

 

Earlier, in 2006, she was arrested for stealing a Mexican flag from a local business. Noticing the flag in front of the store, Griffin was outraged and deemed it an “act of war” that “insulted my citizenship.” In court, she apparently argued that the act was not theft since it was done openly. So there.

 

Currently – still sore also about court cases like Engel v. Vitale – she appears to travel around handing out framed displays of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments (she calls them ‘The Keys to Americanism’), since to her those documents are on par with regard to American law (they’re really not) and because nobody else is apparently willing to “represent God and the Bible”.

 

Diagnosis: So full of hate and rage that she struggles to pass as functioning in a semi-civilized society. But she is also more or less old enough to have experienced the Scopes trial firsthand. We deem it unlikely that she’ll reappear in any position of power. Still.

#2945: Geoffrey Grider

Geoffrey Grider is an absolutely insane fundie maniac Baptist pastor and endtimes preacher affiliated with Now The End Begins Ministries in Saint Augustine. Indeed, Grider is “author and editor-in-chief” of the Now The End Begins website, which he describes as delivering “aggregate breaking news of the day from a biblical perspective” but which more neutral observers describe as “an extreme right wing Conspiracy website that rarely publishes factual information”. Its contents consist largely of hysterical nonsense based on whatever is cooked up in Grider’s own paranoid imagination, putative conversations with God or Jesus, and things he has picked up from other fake news sites, typically standard MAGA stuff and silly fake stories like “PROOF OF GEORGE SOROS NAZI PAST FINALLY COMES TO LIGHT WITH DISCOVERY OF FORGOTTEN INTERVIEW” (not a chance, and yes: the source is one of Roseanne Barr’s Twitter rants). One example that gained some traction on social media was his story “Joe Biden Says Bible Believing Christians Violate LGBTQ Rights by Simply Existing” based on nothing whatsoever Joe Biden has remotely said.

 

Though a firm Maga cultist, Grider has nevertheless voiced suspicions that Jared Kushner might be the Antichrist (he tries to emphasize that he is not actually saying that) based on an n-degrees-of-separation relationship to Soros and the fact that if you squint, he sort of resembles a fictional character from the Left Behind series (he is also Jewish, of course). Emanuel Macron is apparently also the antichrist, and Grider has spent quite a number of words establishing that case based on fables and endless genealogies (the Bible only matters when it supports what he already wants to believe) – Grider traces Macron’s heritage back several generations to establish that he is really a covert German Jew, which to Grider is rather slam-dunk.

 

Diagnosis: Absolutely amazingly idiotic nonsense, paranoia and feverish delusions. We don’t know what impact he has, but apparently enough people think he’s got something meaningful to say to prop him up with donations. 

#2944: Bruce Greyson

Charles Bruce Greyson is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Perceptual studies at the University of Virginia, as well as a semi-legendary parapsychologist and pseudoscience promoter. He is also affiliated with the Esalen Institute and with the International Association of Near-Death Studies, a group of very silly people who try to continue to promote the work and ideas of Raymond Moody, who is most famous for thinking that near-death experiences are a evidence for an afterlife. They are not. Greyson himself is co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (2009) (as well as author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021)), and has, in fact, himself been called ‘the father of research in near-death experiences` – he has even developed a scale to ‘measure aspects of near-death experiences’ that has apparently become very popular among like-minded researchers (or whatever you call them) and various media of the kind you’d expect would be interested in such stuff. He has also devised a truly pseudoscientific 19-item scale to assess experience of kundalini, the “Physio-Kundalini Scale”. Greyson doesn’t really like science but he enjoys the trappings of science and the sheen of respectability that comes with dressing nonsense up as science.

 

Greyson is a Cartesian dualist of the old-fashioned kind, and like most defenders of Cartesian dualism seems to operate largely in blissful unawareness of the devastating problems with and 350-year history of refutations of that idea. Cartesian dualism is e.g. the point of departure for his book Irreducible Mind (2007), which he co-edited with Alan Gauld and a gaggle of other parapsychologists. Although Irreducible Mind purports to be a kind of psychology book, it is in fact a ridiculous pseudoscience tome filled with anecdotes that are supposed to promote paranormal claims. Serious psychologists were largely unimpressed and/or embarrassed by the book and its attempt to promote substantial (and silly) claims without empirical evidence.

 

Diagnosis: You’d perhaps be excused for thinking that this is hardly among the most serious challenges humanity is facing at present. However, this kind of pseudoscience is, in fact, rather insidious: It is carried out by people with genuine credentials and presented with a sheen of scientific respectability – to very many people, the work of Greyson and his ilk might unfortunately be rather difficult to distinguish from real science. As such, it will certainly be ammunition for those who seek to discredit real science (‘look how silly those scientists are’), and there are quite a lot of those these days.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki

#2943: Tanveer Grewal

The yogi jacket – which we have encountered before – is probably among the silliest things ever to be (attempted) marketed, regardless of category (‘attempted’ because at the time it was brought to our attention, in 2018, it was still the subject of a Kickstarter campaign to get it started). According to its promotional materials, the jacket will “[n]aturally relieve pain and reduce stress” – they obviously don’t define ‘natural’ – since its “7,000+ acupressure spikes support you in reaching a deep state of relaxation to elevate your overall well-being”. Yes, apparently “over 7,000 strategically placed nontoxic plastic spikes” line the interior of the jacket to “stimulate” acupuncture points and “energy centers” in the body to provide a sense of happiness and comfort. Of course, since the plastic spikes are all over the place, they wouldn’t primarily hit what quacks identify as “acupuncture points”, but that observation is, honestly, probably of rather limited significance at this point.

 

The jacket was developed by one Tanveer Grewal, who according to himself used to feel uncomfortable and low on energy spending 10–12 hours a day in front of a computer until he designed the jacket, which he currently (ostensibly) wears around everywhere, and feels much better, something he credits the jacket rather than spending time away from the computer. Otherwise, the marketing is unsurprisingly rather vague about the jacket’s indicated health and wellness outcomes and even briefer on the evidence behind the vague gestures toward “reliev[ing] back pain” and “promot[ing] relaxation of tense muscles”. We don’t rule out that it would be a hit if it ever hit the market. We definitely rule out that it would ever do anything but ruin your clothes and potentially cause infections, however.

 

Diagnosis: A strong application for an advisory position on public health in the current HHS. Or influencer status in downtown LA. There might be a worrisome horseshoe situation here. 

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2942: Michael Greger

Michael Greger is a vegan activist, author, MD, and general purveyor of medical misinformation. As laid out in various videos and in his bestselling book How Not to Die, Greger basically claims that eating animal-based foods is the cause of all disease and that, conversely, a vegan diet is the cure for everything. This is, needless to say, incorrect.

 

Greger rose to (some) fame in the early 2000s for his wild alarmism about mad cow disease, which he claimed was “much more serious than AIDS”; according to Greger, “thousands of Americans may already be dying because of Mad Cow disease every year”; that last claim was, in fairness, posed as a question and should be treated accordingly.

 

His current advocacy for a vegan, whole-foods diet is fairly typical for activist perusal of science: Although many of Greger’s statements constitute good and sound advice, and some of it is based on genuinely scientific findings, his claims are also characterized by judicious cherry-picking, omissions (e.g. this), misrepresenting real research (a plethora of examples are mentioned here) and overstating the benefits of his recommendations (and the dangers of animal-based foods). His book How Not to Diet, for instance, is reviewed here: as his other stuff, it mixes good and sound advice with omissions and unsupported speculation, and no: it has not been shown in a randomized controlled trial that a whole food plant-based diet can reverse heart disease. His video on how Death in America is largely a foodborne illness, which purports to offer “practical advice on how best to feed ourselves and our families to prevent, treat, and even reverse many of the top 15 killers in the United States”, is discussed here: In the video, it is for instance claimed that “a plant-based diet of primarily whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes can completely prevent heart attacks” based on some small-scale and flawed research by Caldwell Esselstyn that only purported to show that patients (merely a few) who had already had a heart attack did not have a second one while on cholesterol-lowering medications and a largely plant-based diet that also included animal-based foods; that “those who eat meat are 2-3 times as likely to become demented as vegetarians”, which is demonstrably false; and that diabetes can be cured by a plant-based diet, which is insane nonsense. His best-seller How Not to Die provided data for this study.

 

Greger is a co-founder and fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and founder of the website NutritionFacts.org. His list of books is long but his stylistic characteristics seem to found in most of them, for instance in Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, which, as public health expert David Sencer tactfully put it, “a professional audience would quickly put aside for more factually correct sources of information”.

 

Diagnosis: No, he is not always wrong. But he is always untrustworthy, and you have no good reason to listen to anything he has to say (if it is correct, you’ll find it in better sources; if you can’t find it in better sources …). His popularity is depressing.

#2941: Patty Greer

Crop circles are geometric designs of flattened or knocked-over crops resulting from simple pranks or the work of slam artists in line with a tradition started by David Chorley and Doug Bower in the 1970s. Crop circles were very popular themes in media in the 1980s and 1990s when it was still possible to convince teenagers and loons that they were caused by alien visitations, i.e. before the internet made it obvious to everyone that they were not (and no, it’s not like there is any remaining mystery: we know that they are man-made – except perhaps these – and how). Well, almost everyone: There are still some dingbat loons out there trying to argue that at least some of the crop circles are alien-made. These people, called cereologists, adher to the classical and time-honored pseudoscientific method of studying all bullshit that purportedly supports what they want to believe and carefully ignoring tiresome facts and reality. Perhaps the unofficial leader of this colorful group of conspiracy theorists is filmmaker Patty Greer, known for ‘documentaries’ like The Wake Up Call: Is Anybody Listening?; 2012: We’re Already In It; The UFO Conclusion; Crop Circle Diaries, and Orbs and Light Beings.

 

Greer apparently travels around to crop circles. When she arrives, she always make a bow at the entrance, heads to the center of some main circle and lays down in order to experience an intuitive connection with the “circlemakers” (not the people who actually made the circle, of course). Indeed, what spurred her “documentary” film making career was what she describes as a “life changing out-of-body-experience in the center of a UK Crop Circle in 2007”, in which “her perception of reality was forever changed” (we admit harboring some suspicion that she was plenty kooky prior to that experience, too – why else would she find herself at the center of a crop circle to begin with?). To Greer, the circlemakers are some “illuminated light beings” that a “stunned witness” saw “come out of orange balls of light” at a crop circle in 2010 because stunned witnesses talking about light beings trump the facts every time.

 

Her documentaries seem to touch on anything suitably flashy from the demented lifeworlds of whale.to contributors; much of it is, obviously, concerned with UFOs, and the documentaries cover every piece of nonsense ever covered on any History Channel Ancient Aliens show, including things like the Abydos helicopter. Her 2012: We’re Already In It documentary focuses on the projected 2012 apocalypse and offers “a rich medley of interpretations of the Mayan Prophecies blended with ancient wisdom and scientific probabilities, well known experts and druids share their predictions and perceptions about 2012”. For the record, ‘scientific’ in that passage does not mean scientific, and her ‘experts’ seem to be limited to C-list New Age novelists like Patricia Cori, Geoff Stray and Simon Peter Fuller, as well as Barbara Lamb, an instructor at the International Metaphysical University whose specialty appears to be “human–alien hybrids”.

 

In addition to being a mainstay at outlets like Coast to Coast AM, Greer also appeared as a feature at the 2015 Conspira-sea Cruise (one has to give the organizers some credit for its wonderfully Bob’s Burger-esque name) together with classic conspiracy mavens like Leonard Horowitz and Andrew Wakefield. Then there is this, which is entirely predictable and which we just leave here without comment.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, at level of caring for facts and reason, Greer is comparable to Wakefield, trapped as she is in an incoherent and flaky fantasy world of her own making. But as opposed to Wakefield, she is presumably entirely harmless.

#2940: Heather Greenlee

We’ve had ample opportunity (e.g. here) to talk about the intrusion of quackery into academic medicine under the brand name ‘integrative medicine’ – the idea that mixing nonsense with real medicine somehow makes medicine better – and some of the reasons for why it happens and some of the rhetorical techniques used for marketing it. Some common reasons include:

 

-       there is often significant amounts of money, through gifts and donations, attached to such projects, and the administrators who make the decisions are not necessarily deeply motivated by mere medical concerns

-       it’s glitzy, faddish and easily marketable (integrative medicine is all about marketing, of course).

 

Some common marketing tricks include:

 

-       Appealing to real problems inpatient care, such as the opioid crisis and the desire for non-pharmacological ways of addressing the conditions and the suffering that opioids are used to alleviate – while being notoriously vague about whether the alternatives actually work to treat the relevant conditions because they don’t.

-       The Trojan horse strategy of rebranding elements from conventional medicine (like diet and exercise) as somehow ‘alternative’ to argue that there is nothing scary about alternative medicine and that its critics are hysterical, and then use the rebranding to introduce bullshit like reiki, homeopathy or acupuncture as if such quackery is merely an extension of the obvious, non-alternative measures. (And once integrated into institutions doing real medicine, proponents of quackery can then use the institutional credentials to claim that their pseudoscience is science-based without actually doing any science)

 

One of the major movers in the attempts to whitewash quackery and providing such nonsense with a sheen of legitimacy through equipping pseudoscience with academic affiliations, is Heather Greenle. Greenlee has an MPH in addition to an ND degree from Bastyr University, and she is a board-certified naturopath (“naturopathic physician”), medical director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Integrative Medicine, and associate professor with the Division of Medical Oncology at the UW School of Medicine. Greenlee is an advocate of “integrative therapies” in cancer treatments to “ease side effects and bolster overall physical and emotional health”. Officially, her “goal is to help patients with cancer make sound decisions about using integrative medicine”. That is, of course, not her actual goal. Here is a discussion of a purportedly rigorous study on acupuncture she was part of. And here is a discussion of a press release from her center that perfectly illustrates the distortions and tricks people like Greenlee employ to market integrative practices.

 

Greenlee was also president of the Society for Integrative Oncology from 2013 to 2015. The Society for Integrative Oncology is an organization that purports to be “dedicated to studying how to apply evidence-based integrative medicine to the treatment of cancer”, and which has its own journal, the Journal of the Society for Integrative Oncology. The level and type of dedication they’re talking about is discussed here. You may also wonder what, exactly, integrative oncology actually is, but if so, you should probably not ask them. The group (nevertheless) publishes guidelines for what they deem to be “evidence-based” supportive care for cancer patients, including a 2015 set of guidelines concerning breast cancer patients, which, with its addendum ‘Clinical practice guidelines on the evidence-based use of integrative therapies during and after breast cancer treatment’ written by Greenlee et al. in 2017, is discussed here, and yes, it is mostly convential suggestions mixed with fluff and acupuncture – the ‘evidence-based’ claim is, as you’d expect, based on appealing to real studies (for the conventional therapies) and appeals to ancient traditions and vitalism for the rest.

 

As part of her organized and concentrated efforts to whitewash quackery, Greenlee has also for instance been involved with a University of Michigan course to miseducate healthcare professionals with infomercials about “integrative oncology”. The course would offer modules on a range of quackery, in particular various “mind-body” interventions and “natural” products, but also energy medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, supplements (no, seriously), Ayurvedic medicine, naturopathy, and high-dose Vitamin C, and it would of course do so with the help of the strategy mentioned above: coopt conventional science-based diet and lifestyle modalities (though their dietary recommendations of course themselves mixes the sound with the pseudoscientific), and use these recommendations as a Trojan horse for insane quackery like homeopathy.

 

Diagnosis: No, she is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. But that makes her just more dangerous, insofar as the target for her disinformation and propaganda on behalf of woo and pseudoscience is academic institutions. And she seems to be rather successful.

#2939: Ben Greenfield

Ben Greenfield is a deranged promoter of quackery, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and – apparently – a hugely successful one, having amassed a significant number of followers in various “health” and fitness communities – so much so that even serious media has sometimes mistaken him for an “expert”. He is not, but he has products to sell, and is pretty good at selling them. Greenfield is the author of more than a dozen books and numerous articles, and he hosts a popular website, podcast and coaching business, which he uses to sell a wide range of unfounded and silly – but expensive – supplements and his own “Kion” products. Among the many things Greenfield promotes is extreme biohacking, which really is nothing but “a rebranding of the usual self-help pseudoscience”.

 

Though much of his advice and recommendations fall into the categories common sense or useless, much of it is also potentially dangerous. The latter category encompasses his “at home” stem cell injections (Greenfield is really into stem cell injection quackery), which even received credulous coverage as a Science of Sport Ad by Sportsnet, to the consternation of anyone who actually knows anything and has a modicum of integrity. Other dangerous advice from Greenfield is the nonsense collected under his “Cancer Resources”, which includes discussions of topics like “Why You’ve Been Lied to About Cancer [yes, there is conspiracy] and What You Can Do About It” and which supplies information from famous quack David Minkoff, a promoter of bogus cancer treatments like metal detoxification and chelation. (Remember that cancer patients who seek out alternative and complementary cancer treatments are more likely to refuse conventional cancer treatment, and have a twofold greater risk of death compared to patients with no complementary medicine use.)

 

The useless category encompasses his magic “power bracelet”, which is ostensibly superior to all the other ridiculous power bracelets out there because it uses piezoelectricity: it contains “a piezoelectric ceramic disc [that] is pre-programmed with about 100 different sound frequencies” that “are amplified by the wave signals that emanate from motion” in order to bring your body into a “state of cohesion”. Some might wonder how ‘state of cohesion’ is operationalized for scientific testing. We don’t. Even Greenfield admits that “I know that this stuff can get a bit tricky to understand” (well … sure) but he helpfully offers some youtube videos about piezoelectricity that has nothing to do with his wristband and directs readers to a podcast with one Jeffrey Thompson called “How You Can Use Sound And Music To Change Your Brain Waves With Laser Accuracy And Achieve Huge Focus And Performance Gains”.

 

His podcast is otherwise a cesspool of nonsense, pseudoscience and conspiracy mongering (“Deer Placenta Smoothies, Smearing Colostrum On Your Face, How To Use A Clay Mask & Much More”) and hosts guests who are often even less concerned with reality than Greenfield himself, including anti-vaccine activists and breatharians (“Biohacking The Body With Breatharianism By Pranic Breatharian Ray Maor”), as well as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

 

Indeed, Greenfield is anti-vaccine himself, claiming, contrary to all evidence and reality, that “vaccines do indeed cause autism” and telling his readers preemptively not to trust the fact-checking organization Snopes. For his podcast “The Shocking Truth About Vaccinations: Everything You Need To Know About Vaccines And Your Health”, he hosted Stephanie Seneff, no less, and directed fans to her “resources” concerning the VAERs database and glyphosate delusions, as well as Suzanne Humphries’s antivaccine classic Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History.

 

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientific moron. And you should be really sick and tired of the large group of fools on Reddit and elsewhere who claims that “Ok, some of his stuff is dubious/crazy/nonsense but he’s got lots of good stuff as well.” No, he really doesn’t: Misinformation works best if seamlessly mixed with stuff that is close to being correct, and Greenfield is a successful purveyor at misinformation. Don’t listen to him about anything; if there is anything correct in anything he says, you’ll find it better expressed from more trustworthy sources.

 

Hat-tip: Sheila Kealey