#450: Rolando Arafiles

Delusional hack crank journalist and dualist Bryan Appleyard is British. Dr. Emoto-fan David Anselmo is Marketing Director for some spa in Colorado and a true piece of pie – he is probably a nice person, but he also claimed that we could clean the Gulf from the oil spill by uniting our energy in prayer  – but may be too minor for a separate entry.

Few people would call Rolando Arafiles a “nice guy”, however. Arafiles’s rose to notoriety through his malicious actions September 2009. Background: two nurses reported dr. Arafiles for dubious practices (well-documented) at the Winkler County Memorial Hospital, and Arafiles responded by contacting his friend and patient, sheriff Robert Roberts, who got both nurses jailed for “misuse of government information” and HIPAA violations (despite strong protests from the Texas Medical Board). The full story is here. It even went to trial.

Now, despicable, immoral and vile behavior isn’t sufficient to qualify for an entry in the encyclopedia. But the nurses were of course entirely correct. Arafiles is a supreme crackpot with a penchant for colloidal silver, alkalized water, homeopathy, intravenous hydrogen peroxide, bioluminescence therapy (no idea), anti-vaccinationist rhetoric, rantings about Morgellon’s disease, and more or less all woo that comes his way. His full lunacy is documented here, and here, and here. Now, the Texas Board of Medicine finally took action against him in 2010, and he seems to have been neutralized, but that doesn’t make him less of a loon.

He has received at least some recognition for his work, however. In 2011 he made it onto Medscape’s list of the worst doctors of the year.

Diagnosis: Woo-wielder supreme; gullible but malicious loon; has caused a lot of trouble but is hopefully neutralized at present even though the wingnuts of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons – the arch-rigthwing looney club legally represented by Andy Schlafly – has tried to portray him as a martyr.