#856: Guylaine Lanctot

Guylaine Lanctot is an anti-vaccine activist and altmed purveyor who locates herself on the more incoherently batshit end of the spectrum. She is, indeed, an MD by training, but lost her license in Quebec and subsequently relocated to Florida (hence her inclusion in this encyclopedia even though she is ostensibly Canadian) where she pushes various forms of woo. She is, however, a hero over at places such as Educateyourself and whale.to for her work, including books such as The Medical Mafia.

According to Lanctot Zionist financiers have a stranglehold over the medical establishment, and their control over the pharmaceutical industry have resulted in the medical profession’s acceptance of quack medicine (i.e. prescription drugs and vaccines) because it is profitable, even though it kills people (and took away Lanctot’s medical license): “the whole medical system is designed to make people sicker and sicker.” The book “also uncovers the truth behind vaccines, AIDS, cancer, the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, and more.” Her evidence is primarily the fact that science hasn’t managed to cure cancer yet; therefore (instead of even trying to consider to what extent and why that is the case) there must be a conspiracy (you can see her spell out that point in an interview with Kenneth and Dee Burke here). Part of the reason for her troubles in Quebec was apparently the fact that she refused to pay taxes as well, so as to avoid supporting the Medical Mafia. That didn’t really fly with the courts.

Currently Lanctot provides diagnoses and treatments “with her own hands” (no fancy unnatural methods here), relying on her powers of intuitions and anecdotes and appeals to nature. The reason “authorities forbid alternative medicine” (which they don’t) is “because they are serving the industry, and the industry cannot make money with herbs, vitamins, and homeopathy” (which is, of course, false; altmed is an enormous and extremely profitable industry); “they cannot patent natural remedies” (also false). “That is why they [the Zionists] push synthetics. They control medicine, and that is why they are able to tell medical schools what they can and cannot teach,” rather than because, you know, the absence of evidence – Lanctot’s intuitions and anecdotes to the contrary. But the premise is the standard one: since she cannot herself be wrong, everyone else must be in a conspiracy against her. In fact, Lanctot has really expanded on the evidence thing: According to Lanctot the whole idea of scientific evidence is a conspiracy instigated by Rockefeller in 1910, the purpose of which was to eliminate the idea that one can intuit the causes of disease (which worked so well for thousands of years).

Vaccines constitute one of the main issues. According to Lanctot “vaccines are used to test biological weapons … I found that vaccines are used to spread diseases. They are used for targeted genocides,” and “we are actually changing our genetic code through vaccination. Years from now we’ll know the biggest crime against humanity was vaccination.” Huh? What’s her evidence or basis for that? Oh, that’s right. Her whale.to page, with further quotes, is here.

Diagnosis: Hardcore crank and conspiracy theorist. This is definitely one MD whose medical advice you'd want to be reluctant to take.

#855: Peter & Paul Lalonde

I sort of suspect this is a
rather old picture

Paul and Peter Lalonde are a pair of (Canadian-American) batshit fundie brothers who have managed to achieve semi-celebrity status inthe prophecy and endtimes movement, and who have a substantial fanbase and presence over at Rapture Ready. They are the founders of Cloud Ten Pictures, which specializes in Biblical and endtimes movies, such as the 1980s Biblical series This Week In Bible Prophecy and (co-producer of the) an apparently popular Left Behind film (which has no relation to Tim LaHaye’s book series). The company was started as a means of spreading the Gospel and producing inspirational Christian films and pseudo-documentaries.

Peter Lalonde is also the author of 2000 A.D. Are You Ready? (which, though I know nothing about it apart from the title, must have turned out to be an embarrassment) and 301 Startling Proofs and Prophecies, which, given the author’s previous predictive accuracy, is probably just as trustworthy and unbiased in the assessment of evidence. His RaptureReady page can be found here.

Diagnosis: Fundie morons. Probably pretty harmless, everything considered.

#854: Beverly LaHaye

Beverly LaHaye is the founder of Concerned Women for America, and a rabidly insane author of books (several of them with Terri Blackstock) attacking gay rights and the feminist movement – according to Lahaye “[f]eminism is more than an illness. It is a philosophy of death.”. She is, for instance, a vocal critic of the Committee for Eliminating Discrimination Against Women, since she believes the committee is heading a super-secred conspiracy to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and give equal rights to gay people, which I am not sure would count as a secret conspiracy even if it were true. LaHaye was as such in the vanguard in the (successful) fight against US ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, making the point that ratifying the convention would mean that a “twisted ideology of extremist feminism rebelling against God and His law” would allow communist China and North Korea to dominate American society and that communists would raise your children. Furthermore, the convention is not sufficiently Biblical, and what women really need is more Jesus.

Beverly LaHaye is married to certified madman Tim LaHaye, and they sometimes appear together to do or say silly but predictably wingnutty things.

Her organization, Concerned Women for America (CWA), is a wingnut extremist organization opposed to anything that smacks of sympathy with, well, anyone, really. Especially homosexuals, but also in general members of what they deem to be our “sex-saturated culture.” Their mission statement is “to protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens – first through prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society – thereby reversing the decline in moral values in our nation,” where “moral values” of course means anything the organization’s members don’t fancy because they are hateful bigots, regardless of whether it has anything to do with morality or not. And since their fight against contraception, say, won’t fly particularly well, they have also taken the fights to third-world countries where success is more likely (also here).

The CWA is explicitly opposed to freedom of choice, Muslims, non-Americans and non-Christians, and more or less anything having to do with women’s rights, including equal pay, birth control, abortion, maternity leave (well – real women would of course leave the workforce for good, regardless of pregnancy) and Obamacare with its "super-death-panels", as well as anything that resembles pornography or gambling. They donated $409,000 in support of Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, and opposed the 1988 Act for Better Child Care, which would have provided government-sponsored child care for families in which both parents are working, since that would not, apparently, support a Biblical design of families. As for hate crimes, CWA apparently thinks that the very existence of hate crimes against gays and lesbians is doubtful and that false reports of ha hate crimes have been used to push legislation supporting the same-sex agenda (the conspiracy is apparently everywhere). Similarly with anti-bullying efforts – according to the CWA “the radical homosexual lobby has done a masterful job of infiltrating our government schools to gain control of the minds of America’s youth. Their propaganda tactics are time-tested. With liberal school officials in tow, they brazenly circumvent and abuse parental authority to use good-hearted but misguided children as pawns to further their deceptive agenda,” repeating the claims that homosexuals do not suffer from a history of discrimination, that reports of bias crimes against LGBT people are typically fabricated, and that such protections against discrimination would violate the religious liberties of Christians (i.e. restrict Christians’ (the CWA’s) right to violate the religious liberties of others). LaHaye has repeatedly called for more God in politics, and the group’s understanding of “freedom” is predictably Orwellian.

In fact, according to themselves, the CWA is not opposed to feminism at all. Indeed, they are taking it back. According to senior fellow and director of the Beverly LaHaye Institute Janice Crouse, feminism was initially a Christian movement until it “was taken over by lesbians” (she didn’t back the claim up with evidence). Real feminism, you see, is serving your husband and fulfill your God-ordained role as his servant.

The CWA has furthermore claimed that publicly funded HIV screening and publicly funded STD treatment are objectionable programs, apparently since such programs may save the life or happiness of people who live in sin and deserve to die. They also describe embryonic stem cell research as “deadly” but display no sign of comprehension of what stem cell research is.

Another one of their favorite issues is pushing religion and pseudoscience in public schools, including school prayer and Intelligent Design (because “courses only teaching evolution fail to give students a well-rounded view of the universe's creation,” which happened in accordance with the Bible). As for sex education their position is of course “abstinence only” (apparently other forms of sex education just “furthers the homosexual agenda”). The fact that it has been repeatedly shown that abstinence only programs are ineffective is dismissed as a liberal, economically motivated conspiracy.

Michele Bachmann has cited LaHaye as one of her political heroes, and the admiration is apparently mutual. There is a good CWA resource here.

Other central figures of CWA include:

- Penny Young Nance, the group’s CEO and president, and a notoriously unsympathetic person who e.g. claimed that if Sandra Fluke spent less money on beer she would be able to afford her own birth control, which is a rather irrelevant point but apparently a pretty accurate display of Nance’s personality.

- Shari Rendall, Director of Legislation and Public Policy

- Mario Diaz, the group’s Legal Counsel, who is definitely not opposed to using deception to further the group’s goals.

- Matt Barber, CWA’s Director of Cultural and Social Policy.

Diagnosis: A thoroughly repugnant person, LaHaye and her Taliban satellite group have actually managed to cause quite a bit of pain and damage during their existence, and they remain frighteningly influential. A serious threat to liberty, reason, freedom, and happiness.

#853: Christopher LaFond

Christopher LaFond is an astrologer, and this entry could really end just there. At least LaFond attempts to spell out the connection between science and astrology – when the Star Tribune ran an article that was moderately critical of his discipline, LaFond responded by pointing out that scientists really had no clue about these things. You see, there are three kinds of zodiacal interpretations, the Sidereal, the Tropical, and the Constelllational, and while science may have pointed out certain worries with one of them, his version of astrology emerges unscathed. LaFond does “medieval astrology”, which has its own rules (apparently it must be different from “traditional astrology”, which one Valerie Livina tries to defend not entirely successfully here).

Of course, being dimly aware that his favored system of myths might not align particularly well with scientific evidence either, LaFond does in the end just assert that scientist should stay away from astrology (his points are nicely summed up here). As he puts it: “Being a Spiritual Science, if you will, astrology will never be proven correct, true, or valid to the satisfaction of the modern academy, which is still held captive by the materialist/atheist world view. I’m not suggesting that astrologers ignore everything that modern scientists say about astrology (or any other field), but why would we give it such weight? Is their goal to work with us? In most cases, their goal is to debunk astrology completely,” which I am not sure adds up to a validation of the discipline.

Apparently astrology is not supposed to issue empirically testable claims – the results that astrologers arrive cannot be measured or observed. Which I am not sure even counts as special pleading.

Diagnosis: super-kook, of the standard kind who reacts rather bizarrely when reality fails to line up with how he wants it to be (ordinary, sane people would modify their beliefs). Probably relatively harmless.

#852: Vasant Lad

Vasant Dattatray Lad, who likes to call himself ‘Dr.’ even though his “education” is from unaccredited crackpot institutions, is an Indian-born author and leading “expert” on Ayurvedic medicine in the US (though its popularity is of course to blame on Deepak Chopra). Lad is director of the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque, and teaches woo in both the US and India.

Now, Ayurvedic medicine is basically medicine based on the same mythical picture that Western medicine was based on in the Medieval age: regaining health is primarily a matter of balancing the humeurs – something that Lad more or less admits: “unlike modern allopathic drugs, Ayurvedic treatments are tailored to the specific constitution (prakruti) and imbalances (vikruti) of each individual person.” And to back up the claim? Appeal to ancient wisdom: “Ayurveda relies on its own pharmacological ‘database,’ recorded in ancient texts such as the Charaka Samhita,” which is apparently supposed to provide evidence over and above clinical testing. And which is exactly the same evidence blood letting was based on in Medieval Europe. In addition to the humeurs, there are of course the life forces; the chakras and the prana, what Western medieval alchemists called élan vital, all fully and completely based on theological musings instead of evidence.

His numerous books include Ayurveda: A Practical Guide: The Science of Self Healing, The Yoga of Herbs: An Ayurvedic Guide to Herbal Medicine (with David Frawley), Ayurvedic Cooking for Self Healing, Secrets of the Pulse: The Ancient Art of Ayurvedic Pulse Diagnosis, and Marma Points of Ayurveda: The Energy Pathways for Healing Body, Mind, and Consciousness with a Comparison to Traditional Chinese Medicine [not evidence or reality].

Diagnosis: Pure woo, of course, but Lad (with some help from Chopra) has had quite a bit of success, despite the total lack of connection to reality characterizing his teachings, and must be considered highly dangerous.