#2866: Elena Frid

Chronic lyme is a fake diagnosis. Since many people nevertheless think that they suffer from chronic lyme, however, there is a market for ‘treatments’, and a whole cottage industry has popped up to take advantage of the situation. Even a number of real MDs have joined that bandwagon – these even have their own moniker “lyme literate doctors”, and are organized into the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), one of the most dangerous and aggressive quack organizations that has ever existed – claiming that the symptoms experienced by their patients are due to chronic persistent infection with B. burgdorferi (or other Borrelia species of bacteria that can cause Lyme disease), and prescribing long term antibiotics as treatment; or, since long-term antibiotics will do nothing for the symptoms, various types of quackery that work equally well. And no, there is no evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists (this is not really controversial), but there are several randomized clinical trials that unambigously show very clearly that long term antibiotics does not help and is harmful.

 

Elena Frid is one such “lyme literate” doctor. Frid is a New York-based neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist and has been a prominent champion for getting (chronic) lyme disease recognized as “a human rights concern” – several media outlets, such as Huffpo (not a trustworthy source on medical claims), have promoted her work. So why does medical consensus disagree with her? Frid blames the tests: “the test that we have now is up to 50-70% inaccurate in some instances. Intern, if you test negative for Lyme disease on regular blood work – it doesn’t mean you don’t have Lyme.” Frid (and her associates) has her own tests that yield far more positive results – don’t you worry; Frid will find lyme.

 

Then there is this, though we emphasize that we don’t know the context.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she’s got credentials. That doesn’t entail that her claims about lyme disease are evidence-based – they clearly aren’t. Avoid.

#2865: Bob Frey

Pretty obscure, perhaps, but anyways: Bob Frey was a 2014 candidate for District 47A of the Minnesota House of Representatives (he didn’t advance beyond the primaries) and possibly the looniest conspiracy theorist on the ballot in that state that year. His platform was a rather typically (for that time) wingnut one, including “Common Core must be stopped in Minnesota because of it’s political agenda to indoctrinate instead of educate” and “ObamaCare should be repealed at the Federal level”, but he nevertheless managed to make a bit of a name for himself for his views on the gay agenda – though as Frey felt it important to emphasize: “it’s not about the gay agenda but about the science and the financial impact of that agenda. It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle.” Now, when someone like Bob Frey invokes “science”, you know you’re in for some deranged nonsense, and Frey delivers: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there's an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it's the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That's why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” It should be unnecessary to point out that this is not how anything works, but we can’t help entertaining a little bit of curiosity about what goes on in those parts of Frey’s deranged imaginations he doesn’t feel willing to share in public. Whatever source he thinks he is using for his claims, at least his son Mike used the same when he made the same claim before the Minnesota legislature the previous year.

 

When Frey talks about ‘science’, you should of course also keep in mind that he is talking about ‘real science’. Frey’s background includes running a group called ‘Creation Science Seminars’, which would claim that teaching creationism in public schools would reduce the rate of violence that teaching the theory of evolution had, according to Frey, brought upon communities. And in a 2004 appearance before the Minnesota State Senate Education Committee, he asserted that the fossil record proves that “dinosaurs have always lived with man” and that such “real science” should be taught in public schools rather than the scientists’ science they are teaching these days.

 

Diagnosis: Obscure, perhaps, but the fact that local village idiots like Bob Frey can get as far as he did indicates that there’s a lot people in Minnesota whose critical thinking skills and basic comprehension of their surroundings are so unfathomably low that they really shouldn’t be allowed to handle doorknobs without assistance. And they are the real horrors lurking in the wake and shadow of people like Bob Frey.

#2864: Carly Fraser

The website Live Love Fruit is a slick and fashionable-looking blog run by one Carly Fraser and devoted to spreading chemophobia and anti-GMO misinformation. Indeed, Live Love Fruit is, according to itself, an “online hub for learning how to live more holistically. Whether you need a natural remedy or healthy recipe,” and it provides advice in the manner popularized by the Food Babe. And Fraser’s recipe seems to be to just make things up: In “Health Dangers of Canola Oil: Not the Healthy Oil You’ve Been Led to Believe”, for instance, Fraser argues that canola oil is bad for our health due to the toxicity of oleic acid – she seems unaware that oleic acid actually makes up most of the fatty acids in the human body’s fat deposits and is also the main fatty acid found in olive oil, which she does claim is healthy. She also suggests that canola oil is the cause of Keshan disease – which is the result of selenium deficiency and a viral infection – and, for good measure, that erucic acid hampers growth in children. Needless to say, her evidence for such claims stems, at best, from misinformation from places like NaturalNews or GreenMedInfo, though with a healthy dose of her own imagination mixed in.

 

Since it seems to be pretty popular, the blog has, in fact, received some attention for Fraser’s lackadaisical attitude toward facts as well as for her rather brazen attempts to deploy misinformation for personal gain. In 2016, for instance, Fraser received the attention of Snopes over a post, shared more than a million times on social media, alleging that various popular brands of tea contain dangerous levels of pesticides. In detail, Fraser’s claims were based on three sources:

 

-       Testing performed by CBC, to which Fraser explicitly claims that “over half of all teas tested had pesticide residues that were above the legally acceptable limit,” which is simply false (none were remotely close to such limits), and that “a large majority of these pesticides are currently being banned in several countries,” which is equally false (though one chemical, endosulfan, is on some lists of restricted chemical, even though the levels identified by CBC were four orders of magnitude lower than the US maximum allowable limits).

-       A Greenpeace report that according to Fraser found “high levels of pesticide residues” in various tea brands in India but which in reality only determined levels “above the analytical limit of quantification” – i.e. detectable – but of course far, far below legal limits. That the dose makes the poison is, in other words, a too complicated a fact for Fraser and her ilk.

-       A 2013 report from Glaucus Research Group on Hain-Celestial teas. Well … note first that the Glaucus Research Group is a short-selling operation, and it produced the report explicitly in an attempt to short the Hain-Celestial stock! Glaucus didn’t even really bother to hide that their report was deceptive and aimed to harm the target company, if not downright dishonest.

 

So Fraser’s descriptions are a mix of the misleading and the downright dishonest. Now, it’s an iron rule of good discussion that you are not allowed to try to explain why someone is wrong before you have shown that they are, in fact, wrong. Fraser, however, is demonstrably wrong, so the why question is legitimate. And to begin to answer the why question, it is worth noticing that Fraser’s post is an example – a textbook example, even – of affiliate marketing: Fraser’s blog receives money from Amazon if people purchase the teas she linked to. Do you think she clearly informed her readers of that?

 

Diagnosis: So, probably a loon – a fashionable chemophobe – but definitely dishonest (indeed we suspect a sort of Belle Gibson-like attitude (though admittedly less obviously destructive): If her claims give her affirmation and income, she is more or less unable to recognize that she’s corrupt and that her claims are complete fantasy). And at least back in 2016 she had a lot of readers and a lot of influence.

 

Hat-tip: Snopes

#2863: Karen Frangos

‘Naturopathy’ is the term for a fuzzily delineated mass of woo, quackery and pseudoscience – mostly ineffective at targeting the health problems practitioners claim that their recommendations target, and often dangerous, especially when the practitioners have deluded themselves into thinking they can treat real diseases rather than any of the many fake diseases that are central to naturopathic mythology; that homeopathy is a major part of their ‘training’ is illustration enough. Naturopaths are, at best, confused but well-meaning people who weren’t qualified to get an education in real medicine, but many – if not most – are dangerously delusional.

 

But naturopaths, especially through their ‘professional organizations’, have been and are engaged in a concerted effort to expand their income base, especially by trying to fool clueless legislators to pass various bills that would license their profession and give it a misleading sheen of legitimacy and even to officialy recognize them as primary care practitioners (a horrifying idea). Their efforts have been frighteningly successful, and in no state more so than in Hawaii, where they enjoy a broad scope of practice, including prescribing privileges according to the naturopathic formulary. Indeed, through an agreement between the Hawaii Society of Naturopathic Physicians and the insurance provider Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), you may, in fact, choose a naturopathic doctor as your primary care physician, something that practicing Maui naturopath Karen Frangos, President of Hawaii Society of Physicians, calls “a big deal” because it “allows us all kinds of privileges in terms of being able to be part of a professional physician organization like all other medical doctors do”, including “potentially admission privileges in hospital settings.” She even asserts that it “helps close the gap in the shortage of primary care physicians in Hawaii.” It most assuredly does not, except perhaps on paper.

 

The challenge for naturopathic practitioners in Hawaii is of course that insurance companies tend to deny reimbursement for obvious nonsense, with the result that naturopathic care is generally not covered. As naturopath Marsha Lowry at Whole Body Wellness in Makawao and Hale Malu in Wailuku complains, insurance companies are “auditing our charts and kicking back things […] and saying it’s not MD standard of care”. Lowry’s practice offers patients a range of quackery, including homeopathy and IV nutritional therapy. Meanwhile, Frangos and her group have persistently tried to change the situation, of course, backing a number of bills, such as SB 318 (dead; sponsored by Russell Ruderman, Rosalyn Baker – who has elsewhere asserted that “our people don’t need to be treated by quacks”, suggesting that her quack detection abilities are poorly calibrated  – and Mike Gabbard), which would compel insurers to cover care provided by naturopathic doctors; SB 1034, which will lift the cap on the number of visits related to personal injury protection benefits provided through motor vehicle insurance; HB 1952, regarding network adequacy, and SB 2332 (dead; sponsored by Ruderman, Baker, Gabbard, Kalani English, Gil Keith-Agaran, Michelle Kidani, William Espero, Les Ihara, Clarence Nishihara & Brian Taniguchi), which would allow naturopathic doctors to prescribe controlled substances.

 

Diagnosis: Though she wouldn’t appear clearly delusional to anyone meeting her just briefly, that just makes Karen Frangos and her organization all the more dangerous. They’re thus far been frighteningly successful, to the detriment of us all.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2862: Gary Franchi

It has long been a delusion among particularly paranoid conspiracy theorists that FEMA is constructing or on the verge of constructing a set of concentration camps – potentially death camps – to facilitate a mass internment of good patriots, Christians or whatever group the particular conspiracy theorist promoting the conspiracy theory feel that they belong to, in preparation for some (always immanent) government declaration of martial law.

 

Gary Franchi began his rise to fame in conspiracy circles as a leading promoter of the idea. In 2009, for instance, he produced the video Camp FEMA: American Lockdown, arguing precisely that FEMA – a notoriously bureaucratic and chaotic government institution completely unsuited for secretive conspiracies – is building such camps to house political dissenters. The camps are located “on existing military bases now,” said Franchi – adding that “it’s not a big secret” (it is, in fact, not a big secret, but not for the reason Franchi thinks) – but that FEMA was ready to utilize other structures as well, including airport hangars and vacant office buildings; even “[y]our local church may have already signed a deal with the devil.” And then, of course, his rhetoric turned ominous: “If you believe in the 2nd amendment, if you believe in the right to self-defense, then perhaps you will have a different decision to make than the person that will let them kick your door in and drag you out.”

 

Franchi was at that point (and probably still is) national director of RestoreTheRepublic.com, a group (website) dedicated to eliminating the Federal Reserve and the IRS, to making it illegal to implant microchips in people, and ro end globalization since globalization is a means to a one-world government. He also ran the Patriot social networking site RestoreTheRepublic.net and appeared as a host of the ‘Reality Report’ on Freedom.TV and as editor of Republic Magazine, and was a mainstay at various Patriot conferences where he would lay out his conspiracy theories about global elites: “There is a global elite structure of bankers and organizations that are pulling the strings of the parties, pulling the strings of the president, the speaker of the House,” contended Franchi.

 

In the 2010s, Franchi’s media conglomerate evolved into the Next News Network (NNN), an infamous online operation “that recycles stories harvested from far-right publications, fake news sites and Russian media outlets” particularly targeted at exploiting youtube’s algorithms to generate as many views as possible. Prior to the 2016 election, for instance, YouTube’s algorithms “consistently amplified” the NNN’s anti-Clinton conspiracy videos, and in the 2020s, NNN’s COVID-19 conspiracy videos racked up more than a billion views – despite YouTube’s promise to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation. Indeed, YouTube instead gave Franchi a gold “creator Award”. As for the 2016 election videos, the top-performing NNN video was apparently one claiming that Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old (Franchi is more or less open about the claim being simply made up out of thin air); data show that three quarters of the traffic to such videos were due to YouTube recommendations – external traffic accounted for almost nothing.

 

As for COVID, NNN produced much-viewed videos covering the whole gamut of conspiracy theories (with no apparent regard even for coherence), claiming that COVID is a “false flag” to force “mandatory vaccines” and microchips on people and that Bill Gates and 5G cell phone towers were somehow involved – indeed, NNN was to a large extent responsible for popularizing such conspiracy theories among paranoid, reason-challenged low-information groups. Their video “EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Rashid Buttar BLASTS Gates, Fauci, EXPOSES Fake Pandemic Numbers As Economy Collapses”, featuring discredited osteopath and hysterically deranged conspiracy theorist Rashid Buttar, received nearly 7 million views and 1.2 million Facebook engagements before being taken down. In the video, Buttar claimed that Anthony Fauci had the COVID-19 virus created in a North Carolina lab before outsourcing it to China in a deliberate attempt to cause a pandemic for not-entirely-coherently-explained purposes but also that not a single death had actually been demonstrated to be caused by the COVID-19 virus – the plan, of course, was to use an entirely benign virus to introduce vaccines that would then kill everyone, in line with Bill Gates’s depopulation agenda – that the activity at hospitals was all fake, that hydroxychloroquine had “at least 99% efficacy” in treating COVID-19, and that 5G and chemtrails were involved; Franchi himself concluded that Buttar had showed (Franchi doesn’t distinguish showed from claimed without justification whatsoever) that there is fraud “being perpetuated across the world by the World Health Organization, the CDC, Bill Gates, the deep state, the mainstream media”.

 

The audiences for NNN’s massive promotion of evertyhing conspiracy include people like the 87th United States attorney general Attorney General Pam Bondi and Rudy Giuliani, and it has proved to be a threat to civilization also far beyond the US.

 

Diagnosis: Although it would be natural to suspect Franchi of being merely a scrupulous entrepeneur, evidence shows that Franchi has been a deranged conspiracy theorist from the start. Whatever the case may be, as one of the most influential producers and promoters of fake news and misinformation in the US, Franchi is a major threat to civilization.

#2861: Michael W. Fox

Few scientific conclusion are better established, despite protestations from loons and conspiracy theorists, than the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. The Washington Post’s veterinary advice “Animal Doctor” columnist and former vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, Michael W. Fox, is, however, one of those loons and conspiracy theorists who disagree. Indeed, not only does Fox believe, contrary to all evidence, that there is a connection between vaccines and autoimmune diseases and that the medical establishment is in a conspiracy to deny it and discount antivaccine rants and anecdotes suggesting a different opinion: Fox also believes that vaccines cause autism in animals – that, at least, is the delusional idea espoused in his 2016 Local Living column ‘When cats are very needy, they often knead a lot’, where he also promote the silly book Vaccines and Autoimmunity compiled by familiar anti-vaccine stalwarts like Yehuda Shoenfield and Lucija Tomljenovic.

 

Now, Fox is in fact one of several sources for the notion that pets can get “autism”, an idea that has apparently become popular among some groups (no serious science suggests quite that). But Fox’s championship of the idea should probably be seen in light of his having built a significant part of his career on producing eccentric papers on attempts to apply pop-psychology and Freudian concepts to pets, e.g. a paper on the ‘evidence’ of the Oedipus complex in dogs, and similarly eccentric columns for the Washington Post on e.g. post-traumatic stress disorders in cats and obsessive-compulsive disorders and panic attacks in dogs, and so on. It’s all gibberish, but it makes his current notability as a leading advocate for anti-vaccine nonsense to pet owners not entirely surprising.

 

Now, Fox may, in fact, be British, but given his stint as vice president of the Humane Society of the United States (and because we didn’t discover his nationality until writing this post), we’ll grandfather him in here.

 

Diagnosis: Do not listen to this delusional lunatic about anything. Keep a safe distance, and make sure to keep your pets at a safe distance, too.

#2860: Megan Fox (II)

Megan Fox is an actress who has made several stalwart efforts to confirm the myth that people with marketable looks are empty-headed morons. In particular, Fox produced and starred in her own show Mysteries and Myths with Megan Fox for the fake news and conspiracy theory outlet The Travel Channel, the purpose being to try to argue, by omission, misunderstanding and misrepresentation, how archaeologists are in a conspiracy to hide ‘the truth’ about history from all of us. (“History only gives us a one-sided view of the truth,” says Fox.)

 

And Fox is, as she sees herself, supremely well-positioned to take on such a task: having no background in, interest in, or understanding of the processes or role of evidence in disciplines such as history and archaeology: “I haven't spent my entire life building a career in academia so I don't have to worry about my reputation or being rebuked by my colleagues, which allows me to push back on the status quo. So much of our history needs to be re-examined.” I.e., her lack of understanding, knowledge or background makes her more qualified than the experts. In fact, Fox’s credentials stem not only from her lack of background in archaeology or history: Fox “just hated school, period. I wasn’t interested and I wasn’t getting anything from it. I’ve never been a big believer in formal education,” she says, and “to get caught up in something that you don’t feel totally right about or that doesn’t make sense to you is a really, really bad idea.” Her status as a maverick outsider – a veritable Galileo, even – should in other words be ensured. (It does admittedly seem correct that she didn’t get anything from her stints in formal education and that the contents didn’t make sense to her.) And though she doesn’t fancy ‘formal education’, she has ostensibly been long obsessed with “the history of ancient cultures, people and places, always questioning their ‘documented’ story,” according to a Travel Channel spokesperson, and she is a great fan of shows like Ancient Aliens.

 

The series, “an epic and personal journey across the globe” that will challenge “the conventional wisdom that has existed for centuries”, was apparently set to delve into silly and nonsensical questions like “whether Amazon women really existed or if the Trojan War was real” – the target audience presumably being in particular people who would assume that the fact that her journey was “personal” adds credibility to whatever nonsense Fox comes up with.

 

We admit that we cannot be bothered to watch the results – they seem, based on reports from people who actually bothered to watch them, to have been rather blander than they were initially supposed to be, but still full of misinformation, nonsense and desperate attempts to portray well-established facts as somehow novel and game-changing.

 

Diagnosis: Being uninformed and a know-nothing doesn’t make you a loon. But when you add in some self-delusion and delusions of grandeur, like the idea that you nevertheless (or, in this case, because of your status as uninformed) have anything to contribute are in a special position to reject the claims and views of those who really do know something, things change. And Megan Fox certainly combines her complete lack of insight or understanding with serious confidence in the value of her perspectives on issues.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencealert