#2921: Garry Gordon

Shaini Candace Goodwin, the “Dove of Oneness”, graduate of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment and Internet Queen of the cult of NESARA, is dead, though the cult’s offspring and heir is very much alive. And though Garry Gordon is less flamboyant, he isn’t really that much less of a loon (and we just assume he’s still around – he’s been in the game for a while).

 

So Gordon, an actual MD, is former president of the American Academy of Medical Preventics (subsequently called the American College of Advancement in Medicine), a group of doctors who practice and promote chelation therapy for all sorts of ailments for which it is demonstrably useless and dangerous. He has also been medical director and board chairman of Mineralab, a large commercial hair analysis laboratory, and director of a subsidiary of that company selling useless nutritional products. Not the least, Gordon has been among the leaders of the National Health Federation (NHF), a group of promoters of quackery (like Kurt Donsbach and Bernard Jensen) and questionable methods that engage in lobbying campaigns and many other activities promoting quackery and deregulation of questionable methods. The NHF seems to have been particularly active from the 1970s through the 1990s, and was partially responsible for popularizing the idea of “health freedom” as a strategy to promote denialism and woo. Gordon is also Founder/President of the International College of Advanced Longevity (ICALM) and Board Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the National Foundation for Alternative Medicine, as well as Consultant for Longevity Plus, LLC, a nutritional supplement company based in Payson, Arizona, “where he is responsible for designing effective, natural, non-toxic alternative supplements for the treatment of every disease known to man”, a description that really should need no further comment.

 

Gordon is, in fact, one of the self-styled “fathers of the chelation therapy movement”, and has promoted chelation therapy for a range of ailments for which chelation therapy does nothing and is actively dangerous. Indeed, his 1982 book on the topic (with Morton Walker, one of the main proponents of the infamous Gerson therapy), The Chelation Answer: How to Prevent Hardening of the Arteries and Rejuvenate Your Cardiovascular System, has long been a go-to reference for proponents of chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease; needless to say, it is not a scientific study. Gordon is also the author of a couple of sequels, including the 2004 exercise in quackery and quackery-related pseudoscience and fallacies The Omega-3 Miracle: The Icelandic Longevity Secret That Offers Super Protection Against Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, Arthritis, Premature Aging, and Deadly Inflammation.

 

Interestingly, Gordon has also made appearances as a member of the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners for Arizona – almost as if to emphasize how unconcerned he is with the restraints to marketing creativity provided by care for evidence and accountability – where he was e.g. making excuses for homeopathic pratictioners whose patients had died while being subjected to nonsense woo treatment regimes.

 

Diagnosis: A long career of pushing any health-related advice (and lobbying for the removal of legal barriers to pushing such advice without consequences) that can be turned into money and that he knows, or should know, are completely worthless, to people who are often in desperate situations. We don’t know … What would you call that?

 

Hat-tip: Quackwatch