James Samuel Gordon is an author, Harvard-educated
psychiatrist, and one of the truly big names in quackery and pseudoscience
promotion. Gordon promotes mind-body medicine – in particular unproven and alternative techniques – and is the founder and Director
of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), an “educational” organization, as
well as a fellow of the Fetzer Institute.
The Fetzer Institute funds a range of alternative medicine initiatives –
notably an infamous and thoroughly flawed David Eisenberg study on altmed – and has sponsored forums for advocates of psychedelic
experience and spirituality. Gordon is, in short, a pretty powerful proponent
of alternative and complementary medicine, or
“integrative medicine” – the practitioners tend to change the designator every time the public starts to
associate the current name with what they actually peddle (Gordon himself has tried
to rebrand pseudoscientific nonsense as “self-care strategies”).
Gordon himself is a “licensed acupuncturist”.
And like many promoters of altmed (and as the changes in designation would
suggest) he is not afraid to use misrepresentation to further his cause:
A typical and dishonest gambit is the bait-and-switch tactic of lumping nutrition and exercise – which
belong squarely in the science-based medicine – in with “alternative
treatments” to suggest that plenty of alternative treatments are demonstrably
efficacious (they need to do that, of course, since none of the actually alternative treatments are).
He is also a guru of sorts, and his book The Golden Guru:
The Strange Jouney of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh includes a description of his own rebirthing in India as well as a defense ofviolent psychotherapy (yup) and attempts to defend the egregious excesses and abuse committed by Rajneesh,
the televangelist fraud and cult-leader who taught him. If you don't remember them, the Rajneesh cult
actually made some headlines back in the day, especially in 1984, when Rajneesh’s
followers apparently recruited hundreds of mentally ill and drug-addict street
people to come to Oregon to vote as part of a plan to take over their section of
the state through the ballot box. They also, famously, inoculated salad bars
with salmonella bacteria to keep local residents away from the polls – the first confirmed instance of chemical or biological terrorism to have
occurred in the US (Rajneesh himself was deported from the US for immigration
fraud somewhat later). Gordon has offered plenty of Rajneesh-inspired therapies
in his psychiatric practice,
including the “mind expanding” technique of whirling and spinning to dizziness,
and decades after Rajneesh cult’s influence had faded Gordon continued to sell
Audio CDs of Rajneesh’s “Dynamic Meditation” and “Kundalini Meditation” at his
own CMBM Online Bookstore. Merely to call this shit “nonsense” is to overlook
the danger it may pose to people in vulnerable situations.
Despite his background as a Rajneesh fan the Clinton
administration viewed Gordon as fit for tasks that required accountability and
responsibility when they appointed him to the position of chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary andAlternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) (to the protest of real psychologists who have long recognized Gordon as a promoter of potentially dangerous and
untested treatments).
He has been in the game for a long time, though:
-
Gordon directed the Special Study on Alternative
Services for President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health.
-
In the 80s he designed and implemented a study track
for medical students in integrative and alternative medicine at Georgetown’s medical school (which appears to have turned into something close to a pseudoinstitution at
this point).
-
His own CMBM was founded in 1991 to offer professional
training programs in mind-body medicine and integrative oncology to health and mental health professionals in order to help them integrate
pseudoscientific techniques into their practices. He and his followers have
apparently also trained local teams in Kosovo, Israel, and Gaza to make the
CMBM model a fully integrated and sustainable part of the local healthcare
systems there. In 2008 they apparently even won a research award from the US
Department of Defense to study their mind-body approaches with veterans
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
-
In the 90s, Gordon was also co-director of the
Mind-Body Panel at the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM), together with
Larry Dossey and Jungian transpersonal psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, and managed to steer
OAM’s and NCCAM’s Mind-Body research into mysticism and parapsychology.
-
Gordon has also organized a series of Comprehensive
Cancer Care Conferences for practitioners of pseudoscience, quackery and New
Age craziness, as well as representatives for the NIH and the American Cancer
Society. His book based on these conferences, Comprehensive Cancer Care, is not a trustworthy source of cancer-care-related information.
-
He has even been part of the “Scientific Advisory
Board” of John Mack’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (Mack is a proponent of “alien-abduction
therapy” to help the hundreds of thousands of Americans he believes may have at
some point have been abducted by aliens).
-
Heck, Gordon was a speaker at a 1997 conference of
followers of “orgone energy” theorist Wilhelm Reich – though he did admittedly seem reluctant to endorse their ideas (suggesting
that they should “test” them; yeah, right). But he has pushed the Gonzalez protocol.
His latest (?) book is Unstuck:
Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression, which outlines a
program “adapted from mythologist Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking [bullshit] studies of the world’s mythic heroes and heroines.”
Like most of Gordon’s work we suspect the evidence base for the claims is
limited to the author’s ego.
Diagnosis:
One of the most dangerous people alive – he has a pretty non-modest view of his
own self-importance, but there is no doubt that Gordon has had plenty of
negative influence of medical practices and standards of care in the US.
Much of
the information for this post was obtained from quackwatch’s entry here.
No comments:
Post a Comment