#2728: John E. Curran

Frauds are far too often allowed to continue to fraud happily along given the impotence of the institutions and agencies nominally charged with overseeing medical practices, though there are limits to how brazen you can be. John E. Curran apparently cares as little about those limits as he cares about his victims patients (and about facts) and has managed to land himself in trouble on multiple occasions. In 2008, for instance, the Rhode Island Department of Health suspended his health care practices, the Rhode Island Health Aid in Cranston and the Northeastern Institute for Advance Natural Healing in Providence, after he falsely portrayed himself as a physician and naturopath – Curran had listed ND degrees from various naturopathic pseudoeducational institutions as well as an MD from the St. Luke School of Medicine, none of which were accredited, and his website claimed that he was “certified” by Brown University, Duke University and Harvard University Medical Schools, even though medical schools do not “certify” people (he presumably bet on his target audience not being aware of that).

 

And what he offered at those practices was bullshit from start to finish: His “Complete Body Assessment” was a diagnostic program priced at $950 (including “an in-depth consultation regarding your health history and nutritional diet, BioMeridian Stress Assessment, Food testing (250 foods), Iridology, Chinese Tongue and Nail Analysis, Urinalysis, Blood Oxygen Level Testing, Heart and Lung evaluations, and a Full Body Thermography Scan”) and his “treatment” offerings included an impressive array of quack devices.

 

Like many quacks, Curran would commonly use blood samples to conduct nonsense tests to provide false and usually nonsense diagnoses, and then prescribe nonsense treatments that occasionally were not only useless and expensive but demonstrably harmful. He would for instance tell patients that they suffered e.g. from live parasites in their blood stream, severely reduced number of blood cells, worms in their blood, holes in their blood or life threatening diseases, and then diagnose them, using live blood analyses and Bio-Meridian tests (neither of which has any genuine diagnostic value, of course), before offering treatment programs costing between $200 to $10,000 and guaranteed to make no actual medical sense. Curran apparently managed to collect some 1.3 million by falsely telling victims that they suffered from (or would soon suffer from) life-threatening diseases or were near death.

 

Among his many nonsense products, a perhaps particularly notable one was his “E-water”, which ostensibly has the “synergistic healing properties as the water in Lourdes, France,” which might actually be true but not for the reasons his victims might think. It was ostensibly also “uniquely charged water wherein the molecules spin in reverse direction and emit electrical energy”, which is certainly not true (in the way a random string of letters is not true). He also sold his so-called “Green Drink” containing “a synergistic blend of all natural compounds that support and promote the body’s overall ability to fight and prevent disease”, which he falsely claimed to have formulated himself (it turned out to be a commercially available dietary supplement that he bought from a distributor).

 

Before that, in 2006, Curran was also convicted of mail fraud and money laundering. and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.4 million in restitution to 338 victims. John E. Curran is, in other words, not among the good guys.

 

Diagnosis: Villain. Hopefully still in jail, but we don’t really know and recommend locking your doors if you live in the Rhode Island area.

 

Hat-tip: Quackwatch