#2809: Yousef Elyaman

Yousef Elyaman is a Florida-based MD who specializes in the quackery known as “functional medicine”. But even though functional medicine is quackery, medical doctors could actually get continuing medical education credits for attending his talk on the subject at the Integrative Addiction Conference 2015 (“A New Era in Natural Treatment”), given that the conference was sponsored in part by Continuing Education, Inc., which is accredited by the American Council for Continuing Medical Education. Elyaman is also affiliated with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, a horrible quack organization.

 

Elyaman’s day job is Medical Director of Absolute Health in Ocala, Florida, where he, according to himself, has “integrated a functional medicine approach into insurance-based primary care”. Moreover, Elyaman is Medical Director at HumanN, a “leading nutraceutical company”, i.e. a supplement producer – Elyaman pushes a lot of supplements through his Doctor E’s Choice online supplement store – and the author of Your Healing Power, which is ostensibly “a guide to mastering one’s genes to reverse disease.” Needless to say, you can safely leave that one on the shelf.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Elyaman is a real MD. But there are many real MDs, and it might be wise to choose one that hasn’t given in to the useless tests and useless supplements (and hefty invoices) that make up most of the quackery known as ‘functional medicine’.

#2808: Phil Elmore

As a former WND correspondent, Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor deputy undersecretary (under Trump) and well-established conspiracy theorist Curtis Ellis seems to have passed away, but there are more where he came from: Phil Elmore has also written columns for the WND, lambasting libruls and gay people.

 

As Elmore sees it, the “progressive mind-control mob” (e.g. those in favor of marriage equality) is not only trying “to establish thoughtcrime” punishments and take away the rights of conservatives but really wish to have their opponents killed – “You must therefore be denigrated, punished and silenced – and that’s only because the libs haven’t yet worked up the courage to murder you. Yet” – presumably because that’s what he himself would have liked to do to those who voice their political disagreement with him (at least he cites no other evidence for his conjecture). 

 

So ok, that one’s old, and subsequent encounters we’ve had with Elmore mostly consist of him accusing those who disagree with him on politics of being “simpering pansies”, “fat, arm-flailing children”, “effete liars” and “almost certainly gay”.

 

Diagnosis: Angry, stupid and irrelevant.

#2807: Jenna Ellis

Jenna Lynn Ellis is a lawyer, dominionism-adjacent religious fundamentalist and Christian nationalist, member of Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign’s legal team, legal advisor for Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and as such a prominent promoter of 2020 election-related conspiracy theories. During the Trump presidency, Ellis presented herself as a “constitutional law attorney”, a characterization that her background does not support. She also falsely claimed to have a history of being a “professor of constitutional law”, presumably referring to her time as assistant professor at Colorado Christian University (rather than her time as director of the public policy division at the James Dobson Family Institute), which does not have a law school. Her background instead includes being educated at the fundamentalist Bible school Cedarville University, having held a position as deputy district attorney in Weld County, Colorado, from which she was fired after six months due to “mistakes” attributed to “deficiencies in her education and experience”, as well as fellowships at Liberty University’s Falkirk Center and being a special counsel to the Thomas More Law Center.

 

Before joining the Trump team, she also self-published a book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution: A Guide for Christians to Understand America’s Constitutional Crisis, where she argued that the US Constitution must only be interpreted according to the Bible (as she reads the Bible) and (e.g.) that Obergefell v. Hodges would lead to polygamy and pedophilia becoming accepted – Ellis describes homosexuals as “sinners” whose “conduct is vile and abominable”.

 

Trump’s Elite Strike Force Team

Ellis rose to national fame after being hired as a senior legal adviser for Trump and his 2020 re-election campaign in November 2019, becoming in effect Rudy Giuliani’s protégé and an obvious pick for Trump’s legal team to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results, what Ellis called the “elite strike force team” to overturn Biden’s victory.

 

As a member of the team, Ellis made numerous claims to the effect that Trump really won the election (the “election was stolen and President Trump won by a landslide”) based on no evidence or anything recognizable as a reason – indeed, at the November 2019 press conference, she explicitly declined to present evidence of fraud when asked to do so, responding instead that asking for evidence at the press conference was “fundamentally flawed”. Of course, the complete lack of evidence proved to be an obstacle when the cases were brought before the courts: the Pennsylvania case was dismissed with prejudice given its “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were “unsupported by evidence”; Ellis and Giuliani reacted by claiming that the ruling in fact “helps” the Trump campaign “get expeditiously to the U.S. Supreme Court” though they simultaneously accused the judge, a Federalist Society member, of being “Obama-appointed”.

 

The lawsuit was later dismissed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, on the grounds of having provided neither “specific allegations” nor “proof” and because the “claims have no merit”; this time, Giuliani and Ellis promptly condemned the “activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania” (of the three judges, one was appointed by Trump and the two others by George W. Bush), and when they, some days later, appeared in front of the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee, they urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to fix what they claimed to be a “corrupted, irredeemably compromised election” by either arranging for a new “special election” or to “direct the manner of your electors” to ensure that the electors would support Trump rather than the candidate who in fact won the election. Ellis and Giuliani subsequently made similar (and similarly quickly dismissed) baseless and silly suggestions to Arizona lawmakers, including claiming that there were 500,000 votes “that were cast illegally” in Arizona (something Ellis later admitted was a complete fabrication); to Michigan’s House Oversight Committee; and to state lawmakers in Georgia.

 

When the Trump administration’s Attorney General William Barr stated that the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security had investigated fraud but found nothing, Ellis and Giuliani reacted by accusing Barr and the DoJ of, in effect, having misunderstood what ‘investigating fraud’ means: the DoJ apparently thought it meant finding out what actually transpired when it really means finding support for what Giuliani and Ellis wanted to believe had transpired.

 

Ellis was also responsible for drafting two memos (blatantly) falsely asserting that vice president Mike Pence could change the results (her grasp of constitutional law is tenuous). The first memo contained a detailed (and insane) plan to overturn the election results, and the second argued that certain provisions of the Electoral Count Act that restricted Pence’s authority to accept or reject selected electors were unconstitutional. As a guest on David Brody’s show, she even managed to maintain a straight face while claiming that such an act “wouldn’t be political” and would create a “clean outcome” for the election (Brody endorsed Ellis’s scheme, of course). In 2022, Ellis was subpoenaed to testify before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack (the memos would presumably figure prominently in that appearance), but pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

 

Post Strike Force Team

Despite being obviously and demonstrably wrong, Ellis continued to spread falsehoods about the 2020 election and calling for President Joe Biden to be impeached long afterwards, e.g. on her program Just the Truth and at various QAnon-themed rightwing rallies. She has also promoted conspiracy theories about e.g. the Mar-a-Lago raid. In 2022, she was hired by Doug Mastriano as a senior legal adviser for Mastriano’s 2022 campaign for governor of Pennsylvania, presumably to do the same thing she did for Trump if it became necessary.

 

In March 2023, Ellis was publicly censured by the chief disciplinary judge of the Colorado Supreme Court for recklessly making 10 public misrepresentations about the 2020 presidential election, including claims that Trump won the election and that the election was stolen from him, something Ellis admitted to. In August 2023, she was among the people indicted in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution for participating in a criminal enterprise to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and in April 2024, she was indicted in Arizona for attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the state. In October 2023, she pleaded guilty to one felony count of “knowingly, willfully and unlawfully” aiding and abetting false statements in writing during a Georgia legislative hearing in December 2020 (the blatant lies included claiming that the Georgia election had included illegal votes from over 10,000 dead people, 2,500+ felons, and 2,400+ unregistered people), and in May 2024 her Colorado law license was suspended for 3 years. (For what it’s worth, Christian nationalist Jarrin Jackson declared that by pleading guilty, Ellis was “living the feminist tragedy”, and blamed feminism – “this is how feminism lies to women” – for fooling her into thinking that she, as a woman, could build a successful career rather than a family.)

 

After the Club Q shooting in November 2022, Ellis complained that the shooting was being exploited to suggest that “Christians hate homosexual and transgender individuals and somehow that ‘hate’ led to the shooting”. Moreover, as Ellis saw it, there is “no evidence at all” that the victims were Christians, so as a consequence, the victims “are now reaping the consequences of having eternal damnation [...] Instead of just the tragedy of what happened to the body, we need to be talking about what happened to the soul and the fact that they are now in eternal separation from our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” She was adamant that she wasn’t hateful or judgmental towards the victims, however; it’s just that if you don’t share her views of things – especially on politics – you can’t be Christian, and then you deserve suffering; and since her belief that those who disagree with her deserve suffering is a genuine belief, it can’t be hateful. As for Israel and Palestine, Ellis was among the fundie wingnuts who heartily welcomed the violence as a sign of the End Times: “Biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, so that the rapture literally could happen at any moment,” said Ellis, adding that good Christians like herself “will return with [Jesus] on white horses.” Just take a moment to reflect on how much mindrot you have to entertain for something like that to fall out of your mouth.

 

It is worth pointing out, though, that by 2023, Ellis seemed to have returned to her pre-2016 views, arguing e.g. that she couldn’t support Trump “for elected office again” due to Trump’s “malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong ... And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling”. She remains a hateful conspiracy theorist, however: by 2024, Ellis was caught pushing Taylor Swift conspiracy theories on her show (which is hosted by the hate-group the American Family Association and which has featured a number of white nationalists and anti-semitic activists), suggesting, together with Auron MacIntyre and not entirely jokingly, that Swift might replace Biden on the 2024 Ticket – the Democrats are just “so completely just enamored with celebrity,” said Ellis, the former lawyer for a washed-up reality star and celebrity businessman turned president.

 

Diagnosis: Fundie conspiracy theorist – that’s all, and that’s apparently precisely the desired characteristic for the positions she’s been appointed to. 

#2806: Ann Eller

Ann Eller is a nurse, new age religious fundie and conspiracy theorist. Eller has, according to herself and as laid out in her book Dragon in the Sky: Prophecy from the Stars, had numerous encounters with “other-worldly beings” and views it as her mission to spread what is usually rather fluffy and insubstantial messages to humanity she has received during these encounters; her book has been kindly described as a “fruit salad of vague, warmed-over new age claptrap, peppered with rambling musings about dreams, Eastern mysticism, folk theology, encounters with celestial beings, and fringe urban mythology”.

 

In particular, Eller claims to have met with the Anunnaki, and a recurrent message from those is that humans have to change their ways if they are to have any hopes of surviving the Earth changes that will come when planet Nibiru approaches. Apparently, the Anunnaki has done this warning thing before: Last time Nibiru approached, they warned a guy called Noah so that he’d build an ark to survive the subsequent cataclysm. A major source of evidence for Eller is her dreams – “In a recent dream, I was shown the exact location of Planet X” (her dreams are, of course, IM’s from angels) – but she has apparently also, unlike anyone else, seen Nibiru with her own eyes. And of course, the fact that the government isn’t talking about this shows that there is a conspiracy afoot: instead of telling us what Eller perceives to be the truth, the government serves us nonsense about “man-made ‘global warming’ ” to hide what’s happening.

 

Coast to Coast AM has of course featured her work.

 

Diagnosis: Pretty obscure, and we frankly have no idea how we came by the name. Interviews and podcasts from her occasionally pop up at the fringes of the Internet, but we honestly have no idea whether her current rants align with her previous ones (in light of the 2012 disappointment) or whether she’s received the help and support she needs in the meantime (doubtful).

#2805: Linda Elkins

Anti-vaccine activists have long tried to argue, with no basis in fact, that unvaccinated children are healthier than children who has been vaccinated according to schedule. And since, according to them, no such study has been carried out by the establishemt (that claim is abundantly false; real studies just don’t yield the conclusions antivaxxers would have liked them to yield), they do their own, so that they can violate any methodological constraint and contort the data as they like. An infamous example is the hilariously inept 2016 Anthony Mawson study (co-authors Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan and Binu Jacob should also be noted as untrustworthy pseudoscientists if their names ever come up in other contexts), which was so incompetent, dishonest and bad that it was formally “unpublished”, after having been provisionally accepted, even by the bottom-feeding journal Frontiers in Public Health (which is published by Frontiers Media, which is on Beall’s list of predatory publishers and which has also published – before retracting – e.g. a study on chemtrails).

 

But how did that “study” get provisionally accepted by Frontiers in the first place? It turns out that Frontiers was using a too-literal interpretation of ‘peer-review’ for such a piece of shoddy pseudoscience and sent it to Linda Mullin Elkins. And Elkins is far from being a reputable scientific authority on anything but a chiropractor at Life University, a non-accredited pseudo-educational business billing itself as a “Holistic Health University”; Life University offers studies “within the fields of Chiropractic, Functional Kinesiology, Vitalistic Nutrition, Positive Psychology, Functional Neurology and Positive Business” . Indeed, Elkins is not only a doctor of chiropractic (DC), but “DACFP, DGSS, FGCSS, FICPA, CACFP”, and there is little that signals dingbat pseudoscience more immediately than altmed alphabet soups; even more worrisomely, Elkins has apparently focused on pediatric chiropractic care.

 

Diagnosis: No, we haven’t determined what Linda Elkins’s personal views on vaccines may be, but regardless of that, she’s i) a woo-practitioner affiliated with a quack institution, and ii) partially responsible for promulgating antivaccine conspiracy theories, and that’s enough for us.

#2804: Fouad ElBayly

This is some old bullshit, but we feel compelled to mention him in case he should crawl out of the woodwork again in the future: Fouad ElBayly is the former president of the Islamic Center in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a position from which he was forced to step down after he issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against activist and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2007: “She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith,” said ElBayly, and if you have “defamed the faith” by leaving Islam or not agreeing with ElBayly on theological issues, the sentence is death: “If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.” The context for the fatwa was that Ali was scheduled to speak at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown. ElBayly’s and Islamic Center of Johnstown founder Mahmood Qazi’s attempts to pressure the university to cancel Ali’s appearance failed miserably, however.

 

The incident received renewed attention in 2015, when the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Prisons contracted ElBayly to provide “leadership and guidance” to Muslim inmates at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. And although the Islamic Center in Johnstown officially had distanced themselves from his 2007 antics, it turned out that ElBayly was – of course – still on their payroll in 2015.

 

In 2016, ElBayly was also behind a petition in Somerset County challenging the results of the presidential and U.S. Senate races. The petition, which was quickly quashed, asked for “a forensic analysis of the software and media inside the (voting) machines” based on ElBayly disliking the results and no evidence whatsoever but non-specific rumors of hacking and cyberattacks – basically the same sort of nonsense that would define the Stop the Steal conspiracy theories and antics four years later from the other camp.

 

Diagnosis: A repugnant piece of garbage. His influence is limited, but he has also been given opportunities to use that limited influence to sow garbage, and he does seem to have some followers.

#2803: David Eisenberg

Truly one of the grand old men in the efforts to mainstream quackery, few individuals have done more than David Eisenberg to undermine public health services’ foundation in evidence and accountability. Eisenberg’s power comes partially from his credentials: He has been the Director of the Osher Institute at Harvard Medical School and the Division for Research and Education in Complementary and Integrative Medical Therapies, and Bernard Osher Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, positions that have certainly helped him sustain the illusion of being someone to trust on medical issues: he’s served as medical advisor to (among other things) to the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Public Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federation of State Medical Boards with regard to complementary and alternative medicine research, education and policy, and been consultant to TV series and participated in a large number of high-profile events (like chairing the Scientific Review Committee for the International Research Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health). In 2003, he was also appointed to the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) committee to identify scientific and policy issues in “complementary and alternative medicine” (“CAM”) research, regulation, training, credentialing and “integration with conventional medicine” – which could, on the face of it, sound like a good thing, were the committee not crammed with quacks and hucksters of various kinds. As a representative for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health at the Mass. Special Commission to Study Complementary and Alternative Health Practitioners, he and Michael Cohen recommended that the Commonwealth license “naturopathic physicians” as health care providers to give them an official stamp of approval and legitimacy through legislative alchemy (Eisenberg conveniently neglected to disclose that he had accepted funds from the group).

 

Eisenberg’s annual CME conference at Harvard was designed to allow quack advocates to promote whatever they do, including spinal manipulation and acupuncture, without facing critics, so that they could bolster their CVs with entries that might, on the face of it, sound impressive and build trust. Indeed, Eisenberg must be credited with being largely responsible for Harvard Medical School’s descent into pseudoscience (here, here, here, here and here) as illustrated e.g. by the Harvard Complementary and Integrative Medicine Course he directed and which according to (more reason-oriented) participants “was more like a political rally or a religious revival than a scientific conference”. Here is Eisenberg waxing lyrical about chiropractic, inadvertently giving almost perfect descriptions and illustrations of how quackery works in the process – such as praising chiropractors for “never failing to find a problem” and thereby validating the concerns of their patients while being eminently billable.

 

Eisenberg has also written a large number of articles on complementary and integrative medical therapies. His 1993 article on “Unconventional Medicine in the United States”, for instance, has for a long time been widely cited since ‘quack treatments are very popular’ is a commonly used defense of the legitimacy of quackery among those who promote ‘alternative’ techniques – and even for that study, Eisenberg’s research design was abhorrently shoddy: for instance, to reach the conclusion that “[o]ne in three respondents (34%) reported using at least one unconventional therapy in the past year”, he and his coauthors defined ‘unconventional therapies’ as “medical intervention not taught widely at U.S. medical schools or generally available at U.S. hospitals”, thus including self-help groups and commercial relaxation and/or weight-loss programs. Later surveys conducted and promoted by Eisenberg similarly inflate (in a manner very popular by alternative medicine proponents) the numbers by rebranding all sorts of standard, medically justified methods as ‘alternative’. And whether the alternative therapies included are effective or even plausible is of less concern to Eisenberg; although he is careful to avoid making significant positive claims, his list of techniques that “warrant further investigation” and funding includes homeopathy (including “homeopathy as distinct from placebo”), distant healing and intercessory prayer. What matters to Eisenberg and requires a response from clinicians, is that “[t]he market for complementary and integrative medicine is vast and shows no sign of diminishing” – yes, the market; not medical needs.

 

Here is a discussion of an article by Eisenberg and Ted Kaptchuk on “Establishing an Integrative Medicine Program Within an Academic Health Center: Essential Considerations”. It is … revealing: there is much about how to develop an optimal product delivery model; the question of whether the product works, however, are at best an afterthought. Here is a discussion of an article by Eisenberg with naturopaths Patricia Herman and Beth L. Poindexter on the alleged “cost-effectiveness” of CAM treatments that completely misses the point by strenuously avoiding the awkward point that the fact that the CAM therapies under discussion are not effective matters to discussions of how ‘cost-effective’ they are.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, Eisenberg is all about how to solve practical obstacles to market and deliver alternative medicine, in an effective manner, to as many people as possible. And he’s admittedly good at it. What he seems clinically unable to recognize, however, is the importance of the rather basic question: does it work? We really don’t think he means harm; he just genuinely doesn’t recognize that there might be a gap between believing that something works and whether it actually works that ought to be bridged by evidence.