#3050: Rodney Howard-Browne

Rodney Morgan Howard-Browne (H-B) is a South African-born evangelist and conspiracy theorist who has been polluting Tampa, Florida since the mid-1990s as pastor of The River Church and founder and head of Revival Ministries International. He is, accordingly, qualified for an entry in much the same way as other foreign-born loons like Ken Ham and Ray Comfort, whom he might not quite beat on silliness but whom he outpaces on sheer hatred and evil.

 

H-B’s services are characterized by an array of typical charismatic antics, like laying on of hands and worshipers giggling in ‘spiritual drunkenness’ – as well as speaking in tongues, breaking into uncontrollable ‘holy laughter’, shaking, dancing in the aisles, falling over, and similar behaviors – the kind of behaviors that has made it natural for H-B to characterize himself as “God’s bartender” or “holy ghost bartender” (while also declaring that anyone who criticizes his revivals are going to hell). He has apparently also ministered, under one Mike Rose, at the Bethel Assembly of God in Juneau, Alaska, a church that Sarah Palin has been attending.

 

Howard-Browne apparently came to national attention back in 1999 when his Revival Ministries organization rented Madison Square Garden for six weeks for “an effort to achieve a Billy Graham-style faith uprising” called Good News New York, but his reputation was perhaps more firmly established during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, when his church hosted political meetings for the Florida chapter of the Republican Party to rally for then-candidate Newt Gingrich, with H-B leading the flock in calls for a national “rising” of Christian Americans “that will not sit idly by and allow the killing of unborn babies and allow Islam to take over this country”; he also characterized Mormonism as a “cult” that used to have “death squads that would go around killing everybody that was not a Mormon”. His own operation has been characterized as a “cult”, with H-B as “a manipulator leading followers into a cult; a circus ring leader making a good living” through millions gathered from vulnerable followers. (Though he officially distances himself from the prosperity gospel, his followers have made Howard-Browne fabulously wealthy and he tends to become unreasonable whenever poor people are reluctant to give him money.)

 

Through their Revival Ministries, Rodney Howard-Browne and his wife Adonica also operate the River School of Government, a degree-granting program (though hardly accredited in any normal sense) that funds training for people seeking to run for political office. H-B’s own educational achievments include a “doctorate of ministry degree” from “The School of Bible Theology”, the infamous diploma mill from which a range of other fundamentally dishonest religious charlatans and grifters (including Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, Billye Brim and Benny Hinn) have also purchased their “degrees”.

 

That H-B is fundamentally a fraud and grifter is demonstrated not only by him flaunting a fake degree, however, but equally well by his MLM involvement; him and his wife were top-ranking distributors for Monavie, the infamous acai berry pyramid scheme, until that business folded in 2014, and H-B has more recently served as “North America Emerald Director” for the MLM company Jeunesse.

 

Politics and Trump

A Trump sycophant, Howard-Browne was one of 17 evangelical pastors (frauds) who visited the White House to pray for and lay hands on President Donald Trump in 2017. On the occasion, H-B did his best to draw attention to himself by claiming that his blessings averted “a planned attack on our president and that’s all I can tell you about right now; I know what I’m talking about, I’ve spoken to high-ranking people in the government”; he refused to tell Secret Service any specifics or what his sources were, however, citing pastoral privilege. He had previously praised God for giving America a “Rambo” to take on the global conspiracy to destroy America that he claims exists (“Donald Trump Is the New World Order’s Worst Nightmare”, said Howard-Browne).

 

For H-B, Trump was God’s answer to the spiritual troubles ruining America. As he laid it all out in Charisma in 2014, America (at that time) had only “two or three years” left, due to “an increasingly rapid decline in America’s morality” that has been going on “since prayer was removed from schools in 1962. Abortion was legalized in 1973. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage in 2004.” (America is “demon possessed”, said H-B.) That process had, for some reason, caused God to lift “a measure of His hedge of protection around America”, exemplified not only by Christians “meeting with persecution in the marketplace, and anti-Christ agendas are working overtime to send America into a downward spiral of darkness” but by “natural disasters”, “economic disasters”, “famine”, politicians and schoolchildren being shot, “pastors are falling into sexual immorality in America” and “violent protesters”. Enter Trump, who according to H-B, would at least delay the coming of the Antichrist.

 

Unfortunately, Trump would face massive opposition from the global elite of Satanists that really run the world to implement “that Antichrist one-world religion and one money system.” Throughout Trump’s first period, H-B warned his followers not only about how intent these elites were on removing Trump from office but of the possibility that they might be able to recruit the assistance of Vice President Mike Pence. Indeed, one of the major threats to Trump was always betrayals from people who should be loyal, such as John Bolton,: H-B declared that Jesus would “beat the crap” out of Bolton, just as described in the Bible.

 

Much of his views on politics (and much else) is laid out in his 2018 book The Killing of Uncle Sam: The Demise of the United States of America, co-written with conspiracy theorist Paul L. Williams. H-B is also worried about upcoming EMP attacks that would wipe out half the population, which we mention mostly because it seems likely that H-B’s source here is Chuck Holton, whom we just covered; that H-B listens to Holton is a good reason why you should not.

 

Conspiracy theories and QAnon

“Russiagate is a complete fabrication, high level individuals, politicians and media heads need to be arrested & go to prison!#UraniumOne #LockHerUp #QAnon #ClintonFoundation #CrookedHillary #FusionGPS #corruption #HumaAbedin #Comey #DrainTheSwamp #8chan #4chan #WhiteRabbit”

-       Rodney Howard-Browne’s New Year greeting, January 1, 2018

 

A staunch conspiracy theorist, Howard-Browne has been a guest at InfoWars e.g. to claim, in 2018, that a series of bombings in Austin, Texas were being used by “anarchist terrorists” in an attempt to bring “everything under control” (a characteristic anarchist terrorist goal), that churches and religious groups were being censored in the U.S., and that “globalist gremlins” were attempting to thwart Trump’s agenda. He then presented Alex Jones with a handgun to show that Jones was “protected by God” because that’s what normal people do for normal people reasons. Later in 2018, he even co-hosted InfoWars, an opportunity he used to assert that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be shot for treason. (She is far from the only SCOTUS or political figure H-B would enjoy seeing shot for treason).

 

Shortly after the Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019, H-B tweeted that it was a ‘false flag’ operation: “There is no doubt that what happened in New Zealand as horrific as it is, is a false flag that will be blamed on conservatives when it’s all said and done!” (he later doubled down). Meanwhile the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was “A False Flag MK Ultra PSYOPS To push for the disarmament of America and do away with the 2nd Amendment – this is the plan of the UN Agenda 2030.”

 

H-B was, notably, an early proponent of QAnon. In an October 2017 sermon, he brought the message to his congregation that “human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years” in Hollywood and D.C: “They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of young kids. This is a fact.” People like H-B, failing to fully grasp the role that evidence and reason play for reasonable people, tend to think of asserting the latter sentence as a sort of spell that conveys truth on whatever just fell out of their mouths. Indeed, you’ll discern the same gambit in several of H-B’s rants, e.g. his 2014 rant (in front of several congresspeople) about how the US under Obama was building concentration camps and gas chambers and preparing to institute martial law: “We’ve been taken over. We are living in occupied territory. It’s like Nazi Germany in 1933 right now in America. People say, ‘That’s just crazy.’ But no it’s not, it’s fact.” (to be filed under ‘Howard-Browne loses an argument with his own imagination’). The gas chambers were ostensibly being built “right before our eyes” – H-B specified in particular one under construction in Kentucky –  as a result, of course, of a UN Agenda 21 plot to pave the way for a “one world government” and “the rise of the Antichrist.” Apparently said one-world government will be based on socialism, Zionism, Masonry, the Rothschild family and owl-worship (presumably connected to this but who the hell knows), and it will empower the “Luciferian structure of the globe that worships Lucifer.”

 

But anyways, with regard to Hollywood (and, it seems, celebrities in general), “they’re prophets of the enemy ... These people are full of the devil, these people can’t even be reasoned with, these are not people you can talk to, they have already given their soul to the devil. These people go through seances, these people drink blood, these people sacrifice children.” Moreover, “many of the Hollywood actors that you go see on a screen, what you don’t know [is] they bring a witch, they do a big seance right there on the set and they worship devils and they allow devils to come into them before they take the part of what they're going to act. It’s a fact.” (Oh, yes.) Hilary Clinton is a witch, too. Fortunately, with Trump in charge, these satanists are at the end of the line: “the next thing to be exposed will be all the pedophilia that is going to come out of Hollywood and out of Washington, D.C. The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years.”

 

Meanwhile, ISIS is trained and controlled by the CIA. “The ISIS bases are in 49 states in America that the CIA brings them and trains them here and then ships them out to the areas of the world where they want there to be conflict. They are all trained here. Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA, so does Anderson Cooper. Work that one out.”

 

Covid antics, misinformation

Howard-Browne really rose to national fame during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he used for all it was worth (and in utter disregard of human life) to promote his status. H-B famously kept his church open and encouraged his congregants to continue to shake hands because they were “revivalists, not pansies”. His loud and flagrant violations left the Hillsborough County Sheriff with no choice but to place him under arrest because “his reckless disregard for human life put hundreds of people from his congregation at risk and thousands of residents who may interact with them”, something that allowed H-B to play the persecution card and gain the sympathy of the usual crowd (fuck the people he probably killed).

 

H-B would otherwise dedicate COVID-era sermons to misinformation about COVID and mocking those who were concerned with the spread of what he called a “phantom plague” deliberately designed to shut down churches and terrify people into receiving a vaccine that would cause mass deaths as a population control scheme – he claimed to find evidence of such an agenda in a 2010 document produced by The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network that few of those listening to him would bother to read anyways. Apparently, the whole COVID debacle was a strategy initiated by the globalists after they had been forced to conclude that the “climate change narrative for global governance failed”. The COVID vaccine, specifically, is a satanic plot to change your DNA and “remove the God factor out of people so they won’t feel God.” Also, you have to recognize the connection between COVID measures and the racial war they are whipping up; the goal is to “disband our police department so that they can bring in a United Nations police force of 500,000 people” to implement “gun confiscation, ultimately. That’s why they’re trying to push this thing with COVID-19.” (Even H-B seemed to struggle to connect the dots he wanted to connect here.) Anyways, “[t]hey’re trying to drag it out so they can put masks on every single person because that is the forced compliance that will come, and then everybody will have to get a vaccine. If you go and get the vaccine, you'll be dead within a couple of years.” It is apparently all so clever that ordinary people struggle to grasp even how the suggested plan is supposed to be in any way coherent. H-B declared that he would “not compromise”.

 

He also claimed that he would cure Florida of coronavirus. After all, he had previously, in a 2019 video, delusionally claimed that he and other worshippers at his church had cleansed Florida of the Zika virus.

 

It is worth noting that H-B’s antivaccine views predate and go way beyond COVID. According to H-B, vaccines are really just an eugenicist effort to impose population control on the world by sterilizing people and giving them diseases, and he vowed “go Old Testament” if anyone ever tries to forcibly vaccinate him, something H-B of course believes is likely to happen.

 

Meteorology

In September 2017, Howard-Browne received some media attention after referring to Hurricane Irma as a “nothingburger” after his and other fundie dingbats’ “prayer took the teeth out of the storm”. Irma caused the death of fifty people in the US and Caribbean and resulted in power outages affecting 5.5 million people in Florida, but whatever.

 

Howard-Browne has also weighed in on climate change, asserting that climate change is not real because the Book of Genesis says that the seasons will never end, which is an argument most websites providing answers to questions about climate change don’t seem to have explicitly addressed. Indeed, he has devoted whole sermons to the issue of climate change, which, as he sees it, is “a total fabrication”; H-B can for instance inform you that all the scientists are lying and that “the ice caps are not melting”, based on information he has personally gotten from his “Eskimo friends.”

 

As for the weather patterns, “we have to get into the whole thing of weather modification, what they’ve been doing with the chemtrails, what they’ve been doing with creating drought, manipulating weather,” explained Howard-Browne, adding – predictably – that “this is not some conspiracy theory, this is fact”. Well, then. The goal of this they is “all about creating food shortages. We used to be in a place where the world's food supply was six months in backup; it’s down to days, one crisis and people are starving. I mean, you can go within 11 days from today into people eating each other.”

 

Yes, they’re really out to get us. The food we eat, it’s “got all the GMOs in it ... It’s not even a food, it’s a chemical. That is what’s killing our people.” And “the water supply that’s in many of the cities, it’s got fluoride in the water. Fluoride in the water. Fluoride is not there to protect your teeth. Fluoride causes cancer. Fluoride lowers people’s I.Q. Fluoride makes people passive.” And on top of that, there’s “the stuff they spray in the air.” So “people are poisoned everyday through the food supply, they’re poisoned through vaccines, injections, their poisoned through the food they eat, the water they drink, even the sodas they drink – and I can go on and on and on – and then the air.”

 

Diagnosis: That anyone would believe that Howard-Browne is anything but full of shit is one of the things that comes closest to a miracle these days, and it is, like many things these days, a shit one. A bloodthirsty, legitimately insane fraud, huckster, misinformation merchant, conspiracy theorist and cult leader; a suitable villain for a spoof of a YA fantasy novel, perhaps, were he not so obviously cognitively malfunctioning.

 

#3049: Terrence Howard

Terrence Dashon Howard is an award-winning film and television actor, and probably famous enough that we don’t have to say much about that part. He is also an amateur-mathematician, and that’s where our interest picks up. (He has also claimed to have a PhD degree in chemical engineering from South Carolina State University (SCSU), an institution he never attended and which does not confer doctorates in chemical engineering).

 

According to Howard, he has developed language of logic called “Terryology” (oh, yes), which he ostensibly can use to prove the statement “1 × 1 = 2.” For, as Howard sees it, mathematicians have always been wrong about this (he actually blames the Annunaki for fooling everyone in order to halt the development of Mesopotamia). “How can it equal one?” asks Howard: “If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what’s the square root of two? Should be one, but we’re told it’s two, and that cannot be.” You tell them, Terrence! He blames his leaving the Pratt Institute over disagreements with a professor regarding this hypothesis, which we admit doesn’t sound all that implausible. He also says that he dedicates up to 17 hours daily to creating sculptures from plastic fragments joined with copper wire, which he argues (well, says) “make up the motion of the universe” and which demonstrate his mathematical model by telling “the truth from within”. His “proof” that “1 × 1 = 2” was published in the journal on Twitter in 2017 but failed to make a lasting impact on the mathematical community.

 

He has later attempted to debunk the Pythagorean theorem, claimed he can “kill gravity” (he is, of course, an electric universe crank), asserted that he does not believe in the number zero, and claimed to remember the events of the day he was born. He has moreover sketched some universal theories of everything (aimed to replace physics) based on combining some presocratic-style nonsense with the New Age idea of sacred geometry, and wants to “rebuild the periodic table” partially on the grounds of his contention that carbon, silicon, cobalt, and hydrogen are of the same color, just “doubled in each octave”. And no, the fact that all of physics contradicts his ravings (to the extent that they are sufficiently coherent to be properly contradicted) doesn’t give him pause: “Everyone is wrong. The universe backs me up. You have all of these physicists saying something different but none of them have 97 patents. None of them have introduced a new form of flight.” He also, for good measure, claimed that a patent he owned at one point was the foundation of VR technology.

 

Some of Howard’s ideas are explained and evaluated here.

 

And yes, this is merely another celebrity who promotes nonsense. Celebrities are, after all, remarkably frequent purveyors of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, presumably because their exposed careers, higher levels of narcissism, and lifestyles “can easily become untethered to the experiences of average people”. But that’s no excuse for anything (and Howard is not a good person). Just don’t listen to them.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it might seem a bit unfair to call someone out for their private pet stupidities when it’s not related to their primary profession (and probably wouldn’t affect their execution of their primary profession), but it was, after all, Howard himself who offered this brilliant illustration of stupidity to the public. We hope someone helps him with his own finances.  

#3048: Roanne Houck

Several states currently have naturopathic licensing laws, something naturopaths and naturopathic organizations (and other pseudoscience organizations) for years have been trying to achieve across the US because it gives their practices a sheen of legitimacy that their quackery, being pseudoscientific nonsense, cannot obtain from facts, science or actual results. Colorado does, despite efforts from naturopathic organization, not – they require registration to hold the title “Naturopathic Doctor” (ND) and give them limited prescriptive authority but has no licensing system – but many Colorado naturopaths nevertheless like to cosplay as real doctors to fool people who actually need health-related help into paying for their services. 

 

Such services include ervices like the services provided by Roanne Houck, who, through Gunnison Main Street Clinic, offers unsuspecting or low-information (or delusional) victims stuff like homeopathy, “detoxification”, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, and something called Ortho-Bionomy®, a form of osteopathic manipulation. The reason we took note of Houck in particular is that she is also the former president of the Colorado Association of Naturopathic Doctors (its current president is one James Gilchrist, ND, Lac), a position from which she repeatedly and grudgingly had to tell Colorado naturopaths that they couldn’t call themselves “physicians”, all the while fighting hard to expand naturopaths’ scope of practice in the state against the advice of real medical groups – something that, as demonstrated by Houck’s own practices, would have been lunacy.

 

Diagnosis: More of the same. It’s endless, and we might be losing. At least we’ll continue to expose them.

 

#3047: Richard Horowitz

 Yes, here we go again.  

 

Chronic Lyme is (still) not a genuine medical diagnosis and people who think they suffer from chronic Lyme don’t really suffer from chronic Lyme. They (usually) do really suffer, though, and since most real doctors and medical organizations have standards and want to avoid lying and misinformation, they often struggle to help this group of people. And that, of course, provides a room for hucksters and opportunists, such as the group of conmen, conspiracy theorists and confused medical providers (it’s often hard to assign particular members to particular subcategories) known as Lyme-literate Doctors, people who have – probably for a variety of reasons – jumped in to offer these people recognition, affirmation, pseudoscience and costly nonsense. Such ‘Lyme-literate Doctors’ – they are fairly and even-handedly described here – are organized in the all-round frightening group International Lyme and Associated Disease (ILADS) to provide support and legal protection for whatever nonsense its members want to offer.

 

Richard Horowitz, MD, is an ILADS board member and scientific advisor and a patron to Lyme Disease Association of Australia. It’s notable that lyme isn’t even endemic to Australia; neither, for that matter, is Horowitz, who is medical director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Centre, an “integrative medical center which combines classical and complementary approaches in the treatment of Lyme Disease and other tick-borne disorders”. He is, however, a pretty central figure in the chronic Lyme movement, and has put in plenty of effort to spread the myth of chronic Lyme, e.g. through speaking tours and at least two books that have apparently helped popularize the nonsense and pseudoscience behind it, Why Can’t I Get Better? Solving the Mystery of Lyme and Chronic Disease (2013) and How Can I Get Better? An Action Plan for Treating Resistant Lyme and Chronic Disease (2017).

 

Horowitz claims to have treated more than 12,000 patients for chronic Lyme – or “Lyme-MSIDS” (‘multiple systemic infectious disease syndrome’), as he likes to call it. To diagnose them, he tends to use one of his own most influential contributions to Lyme pseudoscience, the Horowitz Lyme-MSIDS Questionnaire and similar symptom list; the questionnaire and symptom list have most emphatically not been validated for diagnostic purposes and are not useful for diagnosis if actually aligning with reality is part of one’s standards for usefulness. But according to Horowitz, most of his patients can be diagnosed with a range of associated tick-borne illnesses (Borrelia hermsii, Babesia, Bartonella, Mycoplasma, Chlamydia, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Q-fever, Ehrlichia or Anaplasm), and he claims that MSIDS “involves not only the bacterial and parasitic infections mentioned above, but also associated viral and fungal infections, immune issues, inflammation, hormonal disorders, mitochondrial dysfunction, sleep disorders, environmental toxins with heavy metals, and detoxification problems”. Whatever fits his bill, in other words. To treat his patients, Horowitz doesn’t only use antibiotic therapy (“you can’t just blow up bugs”) but “[d]etoxification, hormone balancing, heavy metal removal and ramping up immune function”.

 

One thing that is worth noting, by the way, is how the mythology of chronic Lyme has influenced pseudoscientific nonsense involving ivermectin treatments during COVID (some details here).

 

Diagnosis: A serious threat to health, well-being and personal finances. And he has, apparently, a serious number of fans – like, seemingly, many of the figures we are currently covering. Things are not going well.

 

#3046: Todd Hoover

   

Within the large-scale, lucrative but scientifically bonkers industry of homeopathic remedies, the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia Convention of the U.S. (HPCUS) is a big deal. 

 

It is HPCUS, a non-profit volunteer organization, that publishes the official compendium of standards for homeopathic drug manufacturing and quality in the U.S. (such as they are), which purportedly ensures what they deem to be “safety and efficacy standards” for homeopathic products. Of course, although one might think ‘efficacy’ should mean efficacy, homeopathic products are not efficacious in the sense that they have health benefits, so the HPCUS has their own standards of quality, strength, and purity based on purely pseudoscientific homeopathic theory. Since 2021, the president has been one William Shevin, a retired MD who early in his career fell victim to the lure of the dark side of lucrative pseudoscience and has been a practicing homeopath for 40 years. Its current (and long-time) Secretary is Todd Hoover, a major figure on the American homeopathic scene who has also served as President of the American Institute of Homeopathy, President of the Council on Homeopathic Education, and the U.S. representative to the Liga Medicorum Homoeopathica Internationalis, an aggressive international organization of homeopathy apologists. He is currently affiliated e.g. with something called the Academy of Homeopathic Education.

 

It was also Hoover who represented HPCUS at the 2015 FDA public hearing on homeopathic remedies, and he made a poor showing, admitting that homeopathic remedies haven’t been properly scientifically tested (which is, of course, false – it’s just that they fail every half-decently constructed test), but quickly invoked a type of special pleading familiar with homeopathy apologists: homeopathic remedies and regimes are so specifically tailored to particular people and their conditions that systematic testing is impossible, which, of course is a very obvious lie (95 % of homeopathic remedies are over-the-counter, exactly in line with the preferences of HPCUS). Unfortunately, homeopathy and their over-the-counter products are lucrative, and despite the fact that the FDA hearings clearly displayed the nonsense and pseudoscientific underpinnings for what they are, homeopathic regulation ended up so diluted that there was little substance left, which presumably made the HPCUS happy even though the legislation should therefore, by their standards, be even more powerful – it’s almost like they are a bit selective as to how and when they apply their own theories.

 

Hoover has also apparently been “a clinical preceptor” for Hahnemann Medical College for over twenty years. We are not sure what that involves, but it sounds thoroughly cargo-cult-scientific. His research areas include “provings, clinical studies of homeopathic medicine, and applicability of homeopathic principles in allopathic medicine” and he has ostensibly published “many articles in both homeopathic and allopathic journals”, though at least for us PubMed yields meager results, especially with regard to actual studies related to efficacy for homeopathic remedies published in real medical journals. He has apparently written a number of books on yoga and ayurveda, too.

 

Diagnosis: Though a crucial part of the cogwheels of one of the major engines of pseudoscience and quackery in the US, Todd Hoover appears to be working mostly a bit behind the scenes: he doesn’t show up that much in discussion of the pseudoscience of homeopathy; we suppose that by his own lights, the less he is present, the larger his power should be. But whatever the outcomes of his efforts, they are surely not good.

#3045: Jerry Lee Hoover

  

The field of “natural cancer cures” consists of a variety of putative cancer-curing schemes that do not work (but are often costly) but that their promoters sell by appealing to some version of the pseudoreligious tenet that what is natural is good.

 

There are numerous types of natural cancer cures out there: most are scams, all are bunk. One we haven’t yet had the opportunity to cover, at least not in any detail, is red clover, a plant that is likely responsible for liver disease and reproductive problems in a number of animals but which proponents of natural cancer cures think may e.g. “help beat breast and prostate cancers.” After all, the isoflavones responsible for the health issues in animals also kill cancer cells in test tubes, just like many poisons (or a gun) would do. There is no serious evidence for any benefit, but there are, indeed, reasons to be concerned that isoflavines might actually increase the risk of breast cancer and increase the resistance of cancer cells to radiation for prostate cancers.

 

None of that bothers Jerry Lee Hoover, a naturopath and longtime proponent of red clover as a cure for cancer who seems to be working out of Nicaragua for reasons we decline to speculate about. According to Hoover, red clover contains a wealth of important minerals and vitamins, including “B12” (of course it doesn’t, but Hoover seems to be just making things up) and “B17”, which it does contain and it’s very telling that Hoover mentions it. According to Hoover, red clover “is good for cancer on any part of the body”; research disagrees, but Hoover’s evidence base consists instead of the claim that “Red Clover has been used in America for over 100 years to treat and prevent cancer” and that he has “personally used it for many years at my clinic and have seen many individuals recover from cancer”. So there.

 

Hoover is also a proponent of earthing and raw-food diets (or at least he was when these were still prominent health fads): as Hoover points out, “[c]ooked food is dead food”, plant any seed and it will grow. Cook the seed and then plant it and it will not grow because its life principle has been destroyed. This astounding fact is known to the Cancer society, but the public was never informed. Place cancer cells in a cooked media and they will proliferate. Now place the cancer cells in a raw matter and they will disappear!” Yes, it is a chaotic mix of metaphors, conspiracy theories and irrelevant delusions; at least it is pretty safe to conclude that Hoover is very deeply confused and ignorant about cancer. He has lately promoted fear mongering about cell phone radiation.

 

Diagnosis: No, he doesn’t seem to be a particularly major figure, and might feel that it’s unfair that he is singled out as a representative for red clover nonsense. But he is nonsensical, and it’s rather staggering that this kind of drivel is accepted as advice by a not-insignificant amount of people.

 

Hat-tip: Skepdic