Wayne B. Jonas is a family
physician and one of the most influential, powerful and dangerous promoters of
quackery and woo in the US, partly because he undeniably has his credentials in
order and often manages to play the role of an apparently serious researcher
(despite publishing in pseudo-journals like
The Journal of Alternative and
Complementary Medicine; e.g. the one discussed
here).
He is the current president and CEO of the Samueli Institute, one of the foremost
proponents of
integrating fake medicine into medicine,
and which focuses on “research” into the efficacy of alternative medicine – or
altmed apologetics – such as the effects of prayer on treating disease, use of
homeopathy to fight bioterrorism, use of magnetic healing devices on orthopedic injuries
and a lot of
acupuncture pseudoscience. According to Jonas “
there
is a good case for looking at these things scientifically, because we don’t
know a lot about them,” which is actually untrue since
we do know lots about most of them (and Jonas has
been involved in demonstrating that they probably don’t work,
but seems to refuse to admit that this is actually the result), and for others
there is a combination of limited resources and low prior plausibility that
makes putting resources into conducting well-designed and expensive trials a
waste (though Jonas seems willing to compromise on “well-designed” if that
makes it more likely to get the results he wants, which it does). Indeed, in a
letter to
the Lancet Jonas argues
that further studies of homeopathy is a good idea while admitting that “
we agree that homoeopathy is highly
implausible and that the evidence from placebo-controlled trials is not robust.”
Look:
you can’t have it both ways, Jonas: if the treatment is highly implausible and has no evidence to support it
(but ample evidence that it does
not work),
then we don’t have good reason to throw further millions into researching it. The
Samueli Institute received over $31 million in taxpayer funds from the
Department of Defense and
over $43 million in taxpayer dollars altogether between 2003 and 2013 to produce nothing but obfuscation.
Jonas has, in fact, long been a
defender of homeopathy, which stands to reality and science roughly as
young-earth creationism does. As director of OAM, Jonas said that “
[j]ust
as the discovery of infectious agents revolutionized our ability to care for
many diseases at the turn of the century, the discovery of what happens when a
homeopathic preparation is made and how it impacts the body might revolutionize
our understanding of chemistry, biology and medicine,” which really is the
hallmark of
tooth-fairy science: Trying to nvestigate
how something works
without having established
that it in
fact works. Indeed, since
homeopathy doesn’t work,
Jonas attitude is best characterized as
denialism
(peppered with allusions to the
Galileo gambit).
Jonas has himself written books on
homeopathy (
Healing With Homeopathy: The
Complete Guide and
Healing With
Homeopathy: The Doctor’s Guide) in which
he expresses certainty about its effectiveness but openness to the mechanism (he admits that
it might be placebo, but in the mythical energy sense of not-really-placebo
that altmed promoters sometimes invoke;
besides,
he doesn’t really believe its placebo).
The pattern of nonexistent molecules “
must
be stored in some way in the diluted water/alcohol mixture,” wrote Jonas
(i.e.
water memory,
and suggested that
occult energies,
imaginary “biophotons” or
New Age quantum effects could be involved. He is, however, frustrated with the research being done into
homeopathy, since it rather clearly suggests that it doesn’t work, and has accordingly
suggested that validating homeopathy “
may
require special pleading a theory that incorporates subjective
variables,” which in practice means the ability to influence the effects of
a remedy by intentions, i.e.
psychic
powers. In fact, Jonas is also on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the
Institute for Noetic Sciences,
where he “
envisions the development of
protocols using gene-array procedures to examine possible genetic expression
arising from CAM signals in distant healing;” Jonas thinks that “
bodily parts [can] communicate over long distances
almost instantaneously” by means of “
nonlocal
characteristics in the biological process, with widely separated parts
interacting in ways that don't have obvious physical carriers.” He believes
this because he needs it for getting other things he wants to believe to come
out possibly true, not because there is a shred of evidence suggesting that it
is, in fact, true.
Here is a report on a testimony Jonas gave to the Senate Committee on Veterans’
Affairs, where he argued in favor of making government pay for offering
quackery to veterans (Jonas
has been among the most vocal proponents of pushing snake oil on military veterans). It is … telling (yes,
it’s grand claims and some metaphors supported by some amazing examples of
tooth-fairy science but no evidence for efficacy of the altmed treatments in question whatsoever).
Meanwhile, Jonas continues to churn out meaningless papers completely failing
to show the efficacy of homeopathy while
loudly claiming otherwise.
Diagnosis: Ultimately, the
distinction between being wrong and being a loon will be rather blurry, and
Jonas might immediately appear to be intelligent, honest and serious but
mistaken. But really: He’s been pushing the same sort of tooth-fairy science
based on the same thoroughly falsified assumptions for decades, all the while
refusing to revise those assumptions. That’s the hallmark of a pseudoscientist.
Still, Jonas continues to be frighteningly influential.
