Though he is the author of a particularly idiotic essay on Intelligent Design, Jonah Cohen seems to be too minor even for us.
Michael H. Cohen, on the other hand, is perhaps one of the more
dangerous promoters of pseudoscience and woo out
there. Cohen, apparently a former professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard
School of Public Health – he has for instance been deeply involved in the woo shenanigans that have plagued the Harvard Medical School the last couple of years – is the founder of the Michael H. Cohen Law Group, which specializes in healthcare-related
legal issues surrounding altmed, FDA & FTC law, and how to get quacks and
crackpots off various legal hooks. Apparently Cohen is also trained as a
seminarian, yogi, Ericksonian hypnotherapist, and energy healer,
having been the president of the Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine
in Newport Beach; the NCCAM has also made use of his writings).
Of course, Cohen has no background in science, medicine or good critical
thinking, but he knows his legal issues, and his numerous books on legal
questions surrounding pseudoscience and woo have presumably been quite helpful
for practitioners who wish to exploit people in difficult situations (as suggested
e.g. by his contribution to the collection Integrative Oncology: Incorporating
Complementary Medicine into Conventional Cancer Care (Current Clinical
Oncology), edited by Maurie Markman and Lorenzo Cohen). He has even managed
to get at least one of his screeds (discussed here)
published in the influential (peer-reviewed) journal Pediatrics; in “Informed Consent: Advising Patients and Parents
About Complementary and Alternative Medicine Therapies” he and his coauthors (Joan
Gilmour, Christine Harrison, Leyla Asadi and Sunita Vohra, a Canadian physician
affiliated with the “Complementary and Alternative Research Education (CARE)
Program,”) advocate using laws about informed consent to force doctors to “inform” their patients
about “complementary and alternative medicine” to
pediatric patients, using touching anecdotes and trying to claim that the
evidence indicates that certain alternative modalities such as acupuncture are efficacious (false).
Of course, Cohen doesn’t limit himself to promoting
acupuncture. His blog, CAMLaw, is “unrelentingly hostile to science-based
medicine” and pro-woo, and Cohen has been deeply involved in the American
Association for Health Freedom,
a group dedicated to convincing the government to legitimize various
implausible medical claims through political campaigning rather than science.
To get an idea about where he comes from, you could have a
look at his essay “What is the Matrix? A Radical Look at Medico-Legal Reform,”
in which he likens health care law and health care to the Matrix, promoting
instead what appears to be a complete lack of regulation. And instead of
regulations, he suggests … well, perhaps we should let him speak for himself:
“Health and healing
can involve the highest of which a human being is capable. Near-death
experiences, encounters with angels, and events that touch the individual’s
interior castle and border on mysticism-hese experience manifest ‘light,’ in
the sense of coming closer to that which is Supreme at the edges of our
consciousness. How would an enlightened civilization, composed of enlightened
citizens, govern its own evolutionary movement toward the highest possible
level of healing? What role would law play? Would the absence of regulation, instead
of its pervasiveness, bring peace-a kind of regulatory lacuna? Would legal
structures be able to handle the notion that healing involves mind, body,
emotions, and spirit, but also such other dimensions of the human experience as
inter-species communication and greater sense of earth-consciousness (Gaia)?”
Yeah, that kind of guy. But he still managed to get a
(co-authored) article in Pediatrics.
Diagnosis: Not the faintest trace of understanding of or
respect for science, reason or careful assessment of evidence. Indeed, Cohen’s
writings are prime whale.to material. Yet he somehow still maintains a scary
amount of influence.
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