#1393: Fred Bloem

I have no idea how I first came across this one, but Fred Bloem runs a “holistic and integrative medical practice” in Maryland, and is a hardcore promoter of woo and dangerous forms of denialism. Indeed, his website gives you the antiscience PRATTs and woomeister myths so densely that some may suspect that the whole thing is a poe. According to himself, Bloem taught traditional medicine for a while before “it became clear to me that Western medicine as it is being taught and practiced by most physicians today has its limitations. One of the main concerns that I had was that many of the allopathic treatments do not address the underlying causes of a patient’s illness,” which is a bad start.

Currently Bloem is trained in “bariatric medicine, bio-identical hormone therapies, orthomolecular medicine, and energy medicine (NeuroModulation Technique (NMT) and Emotional Freedom Technique),” and offers treatments for “[a]ll allergies, [a]ll autoimmune diseases [yup], addictions, acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions, autism [yes, he claims to be trained in chelation therapy], Crohn’s disease, irritable syndrome, diabetes mellitus, emotional, psychological, and sensory/motor neurological disturbances, hypertension, hypothyroidism, infectious diseases and obesity.”

Oh, and he is a hardcore antivaxxer, and his advice makes one wonder whether he learned anything at all in med school (he certainly learned nothing about how science and evidence work). Yup: Fred Bloem links to naturopaths David Mihalovic’s “9 questions that stump every pro-vaccine advocate and their claims”. Suffice to say that if Mihalovic’s questions stump you, then you know nothing about vaccines or vaccine research. He also links to NaturalNews (indeed, Mike Adams is a frequent source of Bloem’s health claims in general), Jeffrey John Aufderheide’s list of “disgusting ingredients used to make vaccines” and a long row of conspiracy theory websites – those mentioned should, I think, illustrate Bloem’s approach to reason and evidence: If there is no evidence supporting his claims (which there never is – anecdotes are not evidence), then it is because Big Pharma has covered it up, which is, again, further evidence that he is right and that those who disagree with him are shills. So it goes.

Bloem is hardly a big fish, but if he has received some attention it is for his advocacy of the debunked HCG diet, but there is hardly any discernible limit to the level of crazy Bloem is willing to recommend to his patients.

Diagnosis: Certainly not one of the big fish, and there are plenty of people like Bloem out there – we cannot expose them all, of course, but we can at least sample a few. This guy is crazy.