#573: Dawson Church

Dawson Church is a “researcher” in the field of energy medicine (which is firmly based on the New Age understanding of "energy" as a tangible cloud of fluff) and author of Communing With the Spirit of Your Unborn Child, Facing Death, Finding Love, Soul Medicine and The Genie In Your Genes. In other words, if snowflakey energy woo is your thing, Dawson Church is your man. He earned his doctorate (non-accredited) in Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the mentorship of none other than neurosurgeon C. Norman Shealy, and can also pride himself on a “postgraduate Ph.D.” in Natural Medicine, as well as a “clinical certification” in Energy Psychology. Impressive.

Church is the founder of Soul Medicine Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to “research, education and therapies that link consciousness with healing,” and which offers the Iraq Vets Stress Project for veterans seeking energy psychology treatments. They publish the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, Practice, Training (which is not PubMed indexed). Church’s main schtick appears to be Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Technique, an especially silly brand of the completely unsupported idea of thought field therapy (there is a useful discussion here).

Diagnosis: As far into loonland as crackpots go. The stuff he pushes has nothing to do with reality, but he seems to try to make up for that by pushing it particularly ardently.