#2715: W. Lee Cowden

Fake diagnoses is a central feature of the quack industry, insofar it is often easier for quacks to push nonsense for fake diagnoses they have convinced your victims that they suffer from (e.g. through fake diagnostic tests) than to push nonsense for real medical issues: Of course mainstream medicine doesn’t have a cure for your alleged case of Morgellons; after all, you aren’t actually suffering from Morgellons – and no matter how much doctors try to empathize with whatever does indeed trouble you and no matter how much they are willing to work to find solutions, denying that you are suffering from what you have convinced yourself you are suffering from amounts to not taking you seriously, undermining your agency and paternalism. That’s a lots of motivation to seek out an alternative practitioner who’ll accept your narrative without resistance and has a range of nonsense products to sell you that just so happens to “help” with your disease, whatever it might be, too. And admitting, later, that the nonsense didn’t work, at least not beyond placebo, would be tantamount to admitting that you might have been wrong all along and the doctors right, and that would jeopardize your trust both in your intelligence and in your agency, so you really don’t want to do that.

Among the numerous fake diagnoses being assigned by quacks, hucksters and crackpots out there, Chronic Lyme’s disease is one of the most familiar. Yes: Chronic Lyme is a fake diagnosis, and it’s a lucrative one, with several practitioners – even real MDs – having emerged as “lyme literate” practitioners willing to offer you expensive nonsense for a disease you do nothave. William Lee Cowden, for instance. Cowden is a quack, and despite having been disciplined for quackery and for failing to keep appropriate medical records (an important failure if you want to be a quack and not held accountable) a number of times, he is, of course, still promoting quackery and false medical advice. Cowden is also an MD, which is useful as a means to earn the trust of potential victims and a sense of authority to audiences who have no expertise in medicine. He is probably most famous for having established what has managed to become one of the leading chronic Lyme treatments of our time, known the Cowden Protocol, a series of treatments consisting primarily of various herbal extracts, including cumanda and samento, as well as other nonsense interventions such as hyperbaric oxygen treatment and ozone therapy. It’s expensive, and it will do nothing whatsoever for your health.

Cowden’s quackery is not limited to chronic lyme quackery, however. Among other things, Cowden is also affiliated with the Cancer Free University, which is not in any sense a university but an online course (or rather a series of infomercials – unaccredited, of course) offered by something called The Vitality Network, costing $549, and consisting mostly of bullshit (it emphatically does not help you or anyone get cancer free). He is also the author and coauthor of numerous books, including Foods That Fit A Unique You, Create A Toxin-Free Body & Home Starting Today, BioEnergetic Tools For Wellness and (with W. John Diamond and Burton Goldberg) of a similarly evidence-light and cynical tome of cancer quackery called the Definitive Guide to Cancer (1997). In 2008, Cowden co-founded the Academy of Comprehensive Integrative Medicine, and he serves as the organization’s Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board; this is not an organization you should trust.

According to himself, Cowden “has pioneered successful treatments of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, autism, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and many other illnesses” and is “a recognized leader in the practice of evaluative kinesiology [a bit unclear what it is; probably a variant of this], electrodermal screening, homeopathy, orthomolecular and herbal therapies, German neural-therapy, electro-cutaneous stimulation, as well as fixed-magnetic, electromagnetic, and detoxification therapies.” Apparently, there are few limits to what kinds of fraudulent ridiculousness Cowden is willing to subject his victims to – and medical boards tend to agree with that assessment: In 1996, for instance, Cowden was placed on two years of probation for (a) injecting a patient with Hodgkin’s disease with a homeopathic product and (b) prescribing Cytomel (a thyroid hormone) to a patient “without appropriate indication or documentation” that the patient had hypothyroidism. And In 2002, he was fined $2,500 and placed on three years’ probation for failing to maintain adequate medical records or to obtain adequate consent related to his management of three patients, for whom he made up nonsense diagnoses and prescribed quackery.

And also according to himself (he is rather lackadaisical about keeping records, remember), Cowden has actually saved the lives of numerous patients whom real medicine (“allopathic medicine”, according to Cowden) had given up, and he is more than willing to explain how he managed to do so: He did it “by restoring hope in the minds of those patients and helping them to call on the power of God for their healing”. And that is presumably key to understanding the foundation for Cowden’s willingness to discard science, evidence and facts and embrace whatever nonsense he intuitively feels like embracing, regardless of what it might be: If he intuits that something might be profitable help, it must be the guiding hand of God at work in providing him with the intuition: Cowden firmly “believes that the source of all healing is the one-and-only living God and believes (and has overwhelming scientific proof) that the entire Bible is the inspired Word of God.” Fuck evidence.

Diagnosis: Quacks hardly come more offensively nonsensical and spineless than W. Lee Cowden – and being a true believer (he seems to be) has surely helped his marketing. His career has apparently been a lucrative one, and he continues to enjoy quite some influence, to the detriment of us all.