Peter Glidden is a licensed licensed naturopath who graduated from Bastyr University in 1991. And like many promoters of quackery, Glidden has developed a real animosity toward practitioners of real medicine and toward real medical advice, which tend to contradict the nonsense advice he himself likes to give, as expressed e.g. on his show Fire your MD now. According to himself, Glidden is a member of a group of “real doctors, who deserve to be called physicians because there are only a handful of us in the world who are actually taking upon themselves the task of helping to eliminate human suffering.” And he probably really believes that; were it not for the harm he is causing people with real medical problems, we’d almost feel pity for him: Glidden really wants you to take him, rather than real doctors with real educations that he himself would never manage to pass, seriously, and has worked so hard to construct and maintain the illusion of being a real physician that we have no doubts he has deluded himself into thinking he is, something that is probably part of the backstory for him being fined $5,000 and served a cease and desist order in 2012 for practicing medicine in Illinois without a license. According to Glidden, medical doctors (at least he is not waffling about integrative medicine) use therapies that are “based upon a methodology and an understanding of the human body, which is inconsistent with reality”. Meanwhile, he himself has – according to his bio – managed to reverse Downs syndrome of fetuses (i.e. reset chromosomal disorders) by using naturopathic medicine and nutritional therapies. When Glidden says ‘reality’, he doesn’t mean reality. His book The MD Emperor Has No Clothes: Everybody is Sick & I Know Why is discussed here .
Glidden is most famous, however, for a video consisting a deranged conspiracy rant that went viral in 2012 – possibly due to a social hacking experiment by Anonymous – and racked up over 17 million views and 671,000 shares. In the video, Glidden promotes a number of baseless conspiracy theories (e.g. that one “Dr. Hardin B. Jones recently revealed that chemotherapy doesn’t work 97% of the time, and doctors only recommend it to get kickbacks” – that the quack Hardin Jones died in 1978 is not the wildest miss in that claim) and insane delusions; for instance, according to Glidden, “the reason that people get cancer in the United States and the reason that we have completely lousy outcomes is because medical doctors are driving the research bus. Research funds should be spent on homeopathy and naturopathy.” Of course, naturopathy and homeopathy doesn’t really need research funds either – it’s not like NDs like Glidden would tailor his advice to what the research says (at least if it didn’t say exactly what he had already decided he wanted it to say). The video is discussed here; other errors, nicely demonstrating Glidden’s dishonest and incompetent use of scientific literature, are discussed here .
Despite the flaws and generally insane idiocy of the contents, the video keeps being cited by various quacks and conspiracy theorists (who, because they are incompetent, stupid and dishonest, don’t even bother to google ‘Hardin Jones’), such as this one.
Diagnosis: Insane quack on a joyride through dreamland loaded with anger, inferiority complexes, paranoia and conspiracy theories. Nothing that falls out of his mouth has any discernible relationship to reality, but if you listen it will hurt you.
Hat-tip: Brit Hermes @ naturopathic diaries
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