#646: Michael Ellner

Michael Ellner is an “aids critic”, and his erudite criticisms of contemporary science related to HIV – and its corresponding conspiracies – have earned him his very own page at whale.to. According to Ellner: “Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality …,” though more reality-apt people would probably note that when Ellner perceives everything upside-down it says far more about his perception of things than it says about the things he perceive. Ellner is crazy. “As far as ‘AIDS’ goes, we have been subject to the most heinous and genocidal fraud in medical history,” and he suggests that instead of ordinary medicine (which kills people) we must renounce evidence, science and reality and go for holistic treatments without the faintest trace of supporting evidence of efficacy. Accordingly, Ellner can offer nothing but anecdotes and imagination to support his claim, but such limitations hwve never stopped a crank (by definition). Then there is POMO: “AIDS is not a disease. It is a social agreement,” writes Ellner and one Tom DiFerdinando; “[t]here are others who need AIDS also. Do not forget. Medicine is a business.” In other words, people are dying because they accept the conceptual scheme on AIDS and death pushed by the establishment. And fortunately Ellner can offer you safe, affordable treatments.

Ellner considers himself “an internationally prominent Certified Hypnosis Practitioner and Pain Relief Educator,” and claims that there is considerable scientific evidence that hypnosis can help reduce, even eliminate pain (assessed here). He doesn't tell us where this evidence may be found, admittedly, but asserts that the “medical establishment” have been spreading lies about hypnosis. It is unclear whether he thinks that hypnotherapy can cure AIDS, but by the power of POMO it probably can.

Diagnosis: It is noteworthy that on his hypnotherapy homepage Ellner writes nothing about his HIV-“skepticism”, almost as if he dimly realizes that there is something less than convincing about it and that it may contribute to undermining his reputation in the field of hypnotherapy. In any case, Ellner is a woo-meister and denialist, who should definitely not be lent an ear in the most desperate of circumstances.

#590: Kevin Craig

Kevin Craig is a perennial candidate for the House of Representatives from Missouri representing the Libertarian Party (one wonders what kind of persons he would have to beat in the nomination process). More precisely, Craig describes himself as a “Christian Libertarian”, which does not mean Christian and libertarian but that he belongs, in his own eyes, to a particular brand of libertarianism. In fact, Craig seeks to establish what he calls a “Christian libertarian Theocracy”, so his brand sounds like a very, very special brand of libertarianism indeed. He is described here (this one ought to be seen, by the way).

One unusual feature of his “libertarianism” is the view that homosexuality should be criminalized. Craig believes that “Congress should: i) Hate homosexuality and homosexuals; ii) Follow God's Commandments with respect to them,” and his reasoning is that homosexuality is just like embezzlement: “Homosexuals attempt to embezzle sexual satisfaction from God's business. The entire creation is God's enterprise. God is the Boss. Homosexuals are disobedient employees. God hates them.” To emphasize that he is a radical libertarian, however, Craig does say that he doesn’t think child molestation should be illegal and punished by the government, because the government has no business concerning what goes on in people’s bedrooms.

Craig is also a global warming denialist because that seems to fit better with his political position, desperately claiming that “there is no consensus”. In fact, his website is a cesspool of New World Order  conspiracy theories, creationism (yes, Craig deploys all the silliest arguments), altmed peddling, and HIV denialism – according to Craig “The government-approved orthodox HIV-AIDS theory distracts attention from the destructive nature of the homosexual lifestyle. There are many scientists, professors, researchers, even Nobel Prize-winners, who are skeptics, and see the HIV–AIDS religion as effective political lobbying, not effective science.” One wonders whether the putatively respectable skeptics are these. That would be too bad, for the people on that list, whatever else they are, are certainly not respectable.

Diagnosis: Virtually a professional Boolean negation operator. “Craig says p, therefore not-p” seems to be a fairly reliable inference rule for the rest of us.

#579: Richard Cohen

The absolutely marvelously insane Roger Coghill is British, and his attempts to link all sorts of ailments to cell phone use is decently discussed here – but he has to be disqualified from our Encyclopedia.

The considerably more insidious Richard A. Cohen is qualified by a relatively good margin. Cohen, a former Moonie, is one of America's best known conversion therapists. In fact, he is not actually licensed as a therapist, but avoids state licensing requirements by asking for donations to his foundation instead of payment. He also gives lectures, and runs seminars and workshops on his ideas about the causes of homosexuality – which he calls “same-sex attachment disorder” – and how to cure them. He claims to have converted even himself at one point, as well as plenty of others, and his International Healing Foundation offers commercial teleconferencing classes on his cherished topics. Cohen has also been president of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, and sits on Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public Schools’s for some inexplicable reason – the upshot being that some Maryland Middle Schools have been promoting ex-gay therapy to its students. (The district’s recently retired supervisor for health education, Betsy Gallun, thinks students deserve to learn about ex-gay therapy and she “feels very badly that it’s coming under scrutiny.”)

Cohen was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2002 after six violations of its ethics code, which bars members from actions that “seek to meet their personal needs at the expense of clients, those that exploit the trust and dependency of clients, and soliciting testimonials or promoting products in a deceptive manner.” He still got an opportunity to advance his theories on Penn & Teller, which may not have helped his cause. Neither, presumably, did his appearance on Rachel Maddow.

Since heterosexuality is the natural state, according to Cohen, same-sex attraction is caused by traumatic experiences and the lack of male role models. His (unresearched) theories to this effect have become popular for instance in Uganda, though back in the US even Exodus is slightly wary of him (though the relationship seems to be a little back and forth).To achieve his results as a therapist, Cohen employs (among other things) Wilhelm Reich’s bioenergetics, which is, of course, pure vitalist woo, and holding/touch therapy, which isn’t better supported than bioenergetics as a treatment for anything. In other words, even if Cohen’s theories about homosexuality had been correct, he wouldn’t have had the faintest chance of curing it. His theories and methods are described in a series of books, including the children’s book “Alfie’s Home”, possibly the most disturbing children’s book of all time.

One ex-gay activist disciple of Cohen is Alan Downing of the organization JONAH (run by convicted felon Arthur Abba Goldberg). Downing is portrayed here and here, portrayals that should be illuminating with regard to the efficacy of gay therapy.

There is a hilarious post on the strange world of gay-to-straight conversion therapy here.

Cohen should not be mistaken for the liberal columnist for the Washington post and ardent advocate for ignorance, Richard Cohen, who is also a serious loon, and has aptly been described as “a 21st century man insisting that an 18th century education is too much for our poor students.”

Diagnosis: Bigotry combined with altmed crankery is always charming, and Cohen is no exception. Monster.

#576: Stephen Co & Eric Robins

Stephen Co and Eric Robins are the authors of Your Hands Can Heal You: Pranic Healing Energy Remedies to Boost Vitality and Speed Recovery from Common Health Problems (with one John Merryman), and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about them. Prana is the Indian version of chi or reiki, and just as solidly based on anything but reality. What Co and Robins propose is thus a form of energy healing based on the New Age understanding of energy as a form of fuzzy, buzzing cloud of metaphysical vapor, or, in other words, on a less than coherent version of medievalist vitalism, which medieval practitioners believed in because they were stupid, lacked any idea of scientific method, and were severely short on imagination (as Dennett puts it: “Vitalism – the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things – turns out to have been not a deep insight but a failure of imagination”). I’ll leave it to readers to determine what that makes of Co and Robins, though it should be noted that their book has sold pretty well among the usual groups of more seriously critical thinking-challenged flapdoodlers. It can indeed be reasonably said that vitalism, in all its fluffy incoherence, is the root of all “complementary and alternative medicine” (for instance acupuncture).

Eric Robins (a board-certified urologist), at least, has produced some “amazing” anecdotes (though the link is not to his anecdotes) reflecting how his techniques will seem to work to those who don’t understand why anecdotal evidence is problematic, underpinned by how “following his beliefs” rather than science seems to have had beneficial effects – as does what he calls having an open mind, which is of course not having an open mind at all (this is what having an open mind amounts to) but being severely rooted in confirmation bias and similar psychological mechanisms bound to lead anyone who cares about truth seriously astray.

Stephen Co’s credentials are less deceptive. Apparently “Master Stephen Co is the senior disciple of Grand Master Choa Kok Sui and one of only two Master Pranic Healers in the world.” He and his wife Daphne started the first pranic healing in the US, and apparently he’s got plenty of students.

Their work has been praised by none other than C. Norman Shealy, Carolyn Myss, Iyanla Vanzant, Marianne Williamson, dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra, Mark Victor Hansen (author of Chicken Soup for the Soul), Gay Hendricks (author of Conscious Love and Achieving Vibrance) – just to situate their contribution.

Diagnosis: Idiots. And though I’m sure their intentions are the best, they are actually rather dangerous (and no, there are no “positive placebo effects” of such crackpottery and bullshit).

#568: Nalini Chilkov

Dr. Nalini Chilkov is a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine who thinks that “alternative and natural cancer treatments” can and probably should replace chemotherapy on many occasions. According to herself, she is a “respected expert in Collaborative Integrative Cancer Care known both for her meticulous attention to detail and individualized treatment plans as well as her warmth and compassion,” and her goals is to build “bridges between modern and traditional healing paradigms.” She was also an advisor to Hollie and Patrick Quinn (who will be covered later).

Chilkov peddles diet and lifestyle changes (which is sound enough and not alternative), and using “botanical medicines”, nutritional supplements and Chinese medicine (herbal medicine and acupuncture), apparently since they seem to work, in the non-scientific CAM-sense of “seem to work”. She also peddles “integrative functional medicine” a form of pure woo based on, obviously, “functional medicine”, and bases her advice on personal experience, which of course trumps science performed by narrow-minded people who knows anything about how actually to measure evidence if truth is your standard.

Chilkov writes about her experiences on her blog, and has written about her experiences with Quinn for – what else – Huffington Post, which probably remains her main claim to fame.

Diagnosis: Another clear example of what happens when personal experience and intuition get to trumph actual evidence, and as usual the results are pretty scary. Chilkov may not be particularly influential, but her claims are frightening nonetheless.