#1579: Shane Ellison

A.k.a. The people's chemist

Shane Ellison is “the people’s chemist” – a “rogue chemist turned consumer health advocate” – and he can cure you with alchemy. If you ever visit his website (you don’t have to; we’ve been there for you), you’ll be met with the rather interesting combination of words: “Combining chemistry and nature is an experiment. But when it yields measurable results, each day is another chance to live young without risky medications.” By “measurable results” he means … well, he’s got testimonies and anecdotes. It’s always testimonials, isn’t it? Ellison was a rogue chemist, remember, not a scientist. At least his target audience isn’t.

The narrative is, of course, that Ellison, who’s got an MA in chemistry, left the corrupt pharmaceutical industry behind (where he had for a while “ignored my suspicion that an insidious and deliberate push to get each and every American hooked on drugs, while at the same time bankrupting them, existed between Big Pharma and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)”) – from his Big Pharma experience he also learned that “[w]e design drugs based on symptoms, we don’t cure” – and his current goal is to get people off of their medications and rather buy various supplements: “prescription drugs and health don’t mix,” says Ellison. He sells quite a selection on his website, and the parameters by which these are “natural”, and prescription drugs aren’t, are a bit unclear (some of them are gluten free, apparently).

The Big Pharma conspiracy is, of course, a conspiracy to get you to use as many drugs and vaccines as possible to maximize profits (yes, he’s been pushing the “swine flu vaccine was a scam” conspiracy). Instead, you should buy Ellison’s supplements, which, according to the testimonials, have helped people achieve miraculous weight loss (they’re horribly expensive, which could of course be an explanation), and cured diabetes and aching joints. He also pushes his books, which include at least Over-the-counter natural cures and The 5 Deadliest Pills Checklist. Some of the claims in the former are discussed here. Suffice to say, it’s the usual tripe, with claims like “Big Pharma didn't invent aspirin. Mother Nature did” (no, aspirin does not exist in nature), but Ellison recommends that you use white willow bark instead, which according to him “doesn’t contain ASA (acetyl-salicylic acid) or aspirin. Therefore, it won't accidentally kill you.” Well, white willow bark contains salicin, which is converted to salicylic acid when ingested and which can indeed kill you. But you know, Ellison is on a roll and not so concerned with such inconvenient details. The reason “the industry” pushes aspirin rather than white willow bark is because white willow bark is barely effective and has at least as bad possible side effects as the drugs it is supposed to replace because “[t]he industry couldn't market the natural ingredient as their own. You can’t patent Mother Nature.” Ellison’s idea is that the patented drugs are “simply ‘copy-cats’ of Mother Nature. Unfortunately, because they are slightly altered, they carry large amounts of risk due to fast absorption into the bloodstream. These copycats are also very toxic because the body does not recognize them as being natural.” In reality, of course, the modifications are made to improve the effects and remove unnecessary dangerous side effects from the drug’s natural contexts (like in the case of aspirin and white willow bark). The last sentence of that quote, however, is a nice illustration of how crazy and dangerously wrong Ellison’s claims actually are: No, your body does not have a detector that distinguishes “naturally produced” chemicals from other chemicals. It’s rather interesting that so many people who, like Ellison, make a living off of pushing “natural” supplements sold at exorbitant prices, are trying – like Ellison – to argue that Big Pharma is suppressing natural cures because they can make no money off of them.

He does lament that he cannot use the word “cure” for his products, since “the word ‘cure’ is the sole property of the drug companies.” Of course, what he is talking about is the requirement that claims to “cure” anything must be backed up by evidence, which he doesn’t have. Anecdotes and conspiracy rants aren’t evidence.

For some reason Ellison has managed to receive some media attention, probably because his website is somewhat slicker than the webpages of those who are pushing similar conspiracies over at whale.to, for instance (in fact, Ellison does indeed have a page there as well, where he talks about his book Health Myths Exposed; the myths include the aforementioned Big Pharma conspiracies, as well as the “myth” that high cholesterol is a major risk factor for heart disease and the "myth" that “ephedra causes heart attacks, strokes and seizures”). Don’t take medical advice from this guy, please.

Diagnosis: Doing science – conducting rigorous trials and getting the results published – is hard. Doing denialism and conspiracy ranting on the Internet (or in book form) is easy. Unfortunately many consumers are apparently not entirely clear about the difference.

#1578: Michael Ellenburg

Several states currently license naturopaths, and as a result Alaska, for instance, currently enjoys a bale of state-licensed crazies, frauds and idiots with no qualifications or understanding of medicine but who nonetheless call themselves doctors and are free to prey on sick people. Michael Ellenburg, for instance, peddles the whole range, from traditional Chinese medicine to ozone therapy to homeopathy. I’m not sure he stands out from any of the others, but if he’s a typical specimen – and we have all reason to think he is – the situation in Alaska is pretty depressing. Here is Ellenburg on one of his quack remedies, Bryomixol:

“Bryomixol is an herbal therapy that targets the patient’s immune system function. In patients who have cancer they need to get their immune system to start working properly. Anyone who has cancer does not have a proper functioning immune system, otherwise they would not have cancer. Chemotherapy and Radiation are directed against the tumor(s), they do nothing to support the immune system. Bryomixol can be used in cancer to treat the patient’s immune system; it is not a targeted cancer treatment. Bryomixol specifically effects Natural Killer cell function. NK cells are involved in seeking out and destroying tumor cells, bacteria, and viruses.”

You don’t need to know much about cancer to see some errors in Ellenburg’s description, but his patients probably don’t. How this nonsense doesn’t count as fraud beats me. (And no, bryomixol has absolutely no beneficial effects on anything whatsoever.)

Diagnosis: Woo. 

#1577: Erin Elizabeth

A.k.a. The Health Nut

Erin Elizabeth is Joe Mercola’s girlfriend. Elizabeth runs healthnutnews, one of the currently more popular sites devoted to quackery and medical pseudoscience on the Internet, and is pushing pretty much the same line as Mercola with natural, untested “cures” for all sorts of ailments, backed up by pseudoscience, anecdotes, and occasional forays into technobabble. The website also pushes the usual science denialist stuff, including anti-GMO conspiracies.

Elizabeth is, however, particularly notable for pushing (though she doesn’t like being described that way) the conspiracy that Big Pharma (and possibly the government) was killing of alternative medicine doctors in 2015. The most prominent victims were Nicholas Gonzalez and autism quack Jeff Bradstreet, who, according to the police, committed suicide the day after the FDA raided his clinic but who, according to the conspiracy theorists, was probably assassinated. According to Elizabeth, JAQing off, at least five other quacks had died around the same time (under what she, as a conspiracy theorist, deemed to be suspicious circumstances), including chiropractor Baron Holt who Elizabeth admits “had been struggling with recent health issues” but “none were thought to be life threatening by loved ones” (my emphasis), and five more had gone missing. And the evidence for a conspiracy is as direct and non-convoluted as these things go; for instance: “Interestingly, Dr. Holt (33), lived in North Carolina; which is the state where Dr. Bradstreet’s body (the first doctor to be found) was discovered two days prior. Dr. Holt was visiting Jacksonville, Florida, though, when he died there. Dr. Bradstreet (see story #1) was living in Georgia, at the time of his death; and before that, he lived in the neighboring state of Florida.” You can’t argue with that. Naturally Elizabeth was “terrified” for Joe Mercola’s safety, since there is hardly any bigger quack in the US. Of course, given the number of chiropractors (60,000) and altmed practitioners (no clear number, but surely higher than that) in the US, pure chance will give you a couple of even violent deaths per year, and you can imagine what happens when Elizabeth, given her level critical thinking skills and the clustering illusion, starts keeping tabs.

The efforts of the Big Pharma hit squad culminated in a situation where participants at a German homeopath conference managed to amphetamine poison themselves – of course there is the distinct possibility that the participants took the drug, referred to as “Aqua Rust” or “2C-E“, willingly since it is a psychedelic drug that apparently produces LSD-type reactions; no one from the conference was willing to talk (for good reason, as the police cited all the seminar participants for violation of anesthesia laws and using illegal drugs may cost you your license to practice in Germany). Elizabeth concluded, naturally, that they must have been poisoned. Her version of the story was duly picked up by NaturalNews, who also added expert commentary from David Avocado Wolfe.

Diagnosis: A critical thinking trainwreck and pseudoscience promoter. Elizabeth is too smart to yell “conspiracy” outright, and will thus sometimes appear reasonable when compared to other people playing in her league (such Mike Adams or Alex Jones), but appearing reasonable in comparison with those doesn’t mean that you are reasonable, and Elizabeth isn’t reasonable.

#1576: Vic Eliason

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Update: Apparently Eliason died back in December. Our apologies for not noticing. 

Victor “Vic” Carl Eliason is the grumpy, insane, old fundie who founded (and prominently presents his views on) the wingnut Milwaukee-based VCY America Radio Network, in particular the Crosstalk section. Eliason is certifiably and proudly evil, and in fact sufficiently crazy to have received an honorary Doctorate of Laws degree from Bob Jones University.

Eliason is a birther and avowed fan of the works of Jerome Corsi, and has just enough insight to realize that he’s not being taken seriously on the issue by anyone not completely unhinged: people “call us just a bunch of crazies, radicals, birthers” and people like himself “get a label, an epithet that kind of raises a shadow over” their arguments. Indeed. To help remedy that impression of him Eliason has voiced his suspicion that Chuck Hagel is a secret Muslim, and has assented to the claim that President Obama is a communist Muslim out to destroy America, saying that the truth of the claim is “evident” since Obama won’t “combine the word Muslim and terror.” Ah, reasoning – how the f***k does it work?

Predictably, Eliason has angrily denounced efforts by the American government to protect persecuted groups abroad, since persecuting anyone other than white, American, Christian fundies is clearly God’s own order. Gays are, of course, a particular target of Eliason’s unbridled hatred. Eliason thinks the effort to end the ban on gay men from donating blood, for instance, is part of a push to normalize pedophilia and bestiality, since same-sex marriage (which “defiles people”) will inevitably mainstream “the molestation of children” and bestiality, which [somehow just] “happens to be part of the abnormal, homosexual and immoral lifestyle,” together, presumably, with Marxism, Islam and valuing evidence. So, affirming a gay person’s sexual orientation is “like saying to the pyromaniac: go ahead and try it again” (Robin Roberts coming out was accordingly “a tragedy”). He has also compared homosexuality to school shootings in an apparently concerted effort not to be outdone by Peter LaBarbera for degenerate idiocy. Indeed, there is apparently even a connection between LGBT “meltdown of morality” and ISIS beheadings.

Diagnosis: A horrible, furiously malevolent creature from the deepest pits of the abyss. Dangerous – so keep your distance – but fortunately really, really stupid.

#1575: Lee Eimers

Cedarville University is one of the most zealous anti-science institutions in the US. It offers a parody of education to some 3500 students based on a commitment to a literal, “grammatical/historical” interpretation of the Bible. Their “science” faculty tends to be committed to young-earth creationism, and Lee Eimers, Professor of Physics & Mathematics, is a case in point. Eimers does, admittedly, possess a real science education, but he does not appear to have any academic publications or to have been involved in anything remotely resembling scientific research. He has, however, debated “people who believe in the theory of evolution” and is a signatory both to the Discovery Institute’s amazingly dishonest petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism and the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the Biblical account of creation.

Diagnosis: Another undercover anti-science zealot. Eimers appears to have little clue about how science or evidence actually works, and dismisses its results apparently out of hand, but has nevertheless worked hard to gain the credentials that might make it look otherwise to those who don’t know better.