Huber likes to call herself “naturopathic medical doctor”, which is probably an effective way to market her services by suggesting that her pseudoscientific bullshit might be based on real medicine, science, honesty or accountability: Arizona has a powerful quack lobby and actually allows – after much legislative alchemy – naturopaths a wide scope of practice, including serving as primary care physicians with independent prescribing authority. Huber provides her services at the Nature Works Best Cancer Clinic in Tempe, where she is the “medical director” (despite being an ND; she does not have any real medical degree, of course), and she is the president of the non-profit charity Naturopathic Cancer Society.
Huber is, however, probably best known for her litigious activities, in particular her defamation suit against naturopathy critic Britt Marie Hermes in 2016. The lawsuit came about after Huber’s organization had engaged in a ridiculous cybersquatting campaign targeting Hermes, whereupon Hermes decided to take a look at Huber’s “medical” practices and how Huber’s non-profit ostensibly raised donations for patients at Huber’s own clinic. Justice prevailed in that case, and the case – some details here – has become somewhat famous as an example of how legal thuggery is being used to try to silence critics.
At Nature Works Best, Huber treats cancer patients with sheer quackery like intravenous baking soda, megadoses of intravenous vitamin C, and a strict sugar-free diet. She also conducts ‘research’ out of her clinic – marketing fake cures as ‘experimental’ provides a familiar legal loophole for quackery – and has allegedly gathered data that shows that her naturopathic cancer treatments are “groundbreaking” and that “no other clinic has such a high documented success rate”. Helpfully, she invites the public to “verify this data for yourself”; perhaps she just assumes that no one is going to bother, since competent analysis of the data apparently suggests that (“[p]utting aside the ethical issues of the extremely bad study design, the lack of ethics committee approval or patients’ agreement”) “patients under natural care have more than a two-fold higher risk to die” compared to state-of-the-art treatment (and that if “one removes data of questionable quality and takes into account only those with complete data and in treatment resp. died during treatment (i.e. in remission, not yet in remission, died), the odds ratio gets almost 10:1 in favour of state of the art therapy. This is really nasty”). And no: using alternative treatments for cancer is not innocuous) (Huber’s own version of her results were published in – of course – the predatory journal Cancer Science and Therapy). One might wonder how her study ever got approved, though a clue might be that Huber is also the secretary and founding member of the International Naturopathic Clinical Research Institute (NCRI) (or American Naturopathic Clinical Research Institute (ANRI), or Naturopathic Oncology Research Institute (NORI) – the organization goes by many names), which functions as an institutional review board for ‘naturopathic clinical research’, and which, of course, approved her study in 2010.
Despite being obviously nonsense and despite Huber being obviously a deranged quack, her claims about success rates were uncritically parroted in e.g. the quack ‘documentary’ Cancer Can Be Killed produced by conspiracy theorist and filmmaker Jeff Witzeman.
Even more insidiously, Huber advocates against state-of-the-art oncology, especially chemotherapy and radiation, because she delusionally thinks these therapies strengthen cancer – she cites (even misrepresents, in fact) an old and widely debunked myth that “chemotherapy has a 2.1% survival rate” (the actual debunked myth had it falsely that chemotherapy only had a 2.1% increase in survival rate). In other words, there is not even the usual “integrative” nonsense sheen here; Huber suggests cancer patients forego real medicine in favor of quackery. She also cites Mercola and even Gary Null, no less, as authorities.
Huber is also a serious antivaccine activist who falsely claims that “[a]bundant evidence exists that the CDC schedule, and that most vaccines used in the United States, are both dangerous and ineffective.” (Nope; but Huber cites a bogus list by Neil Z. Miller and recommends people read Suzanne Humphries’ delusional conspiracy rants instead) Her antivaccine conspiracy theories of course reached some kind of peak during COVID, when Huber was tirelessly composing anti-vaccine posts loaded with every known anti-vaccine conspiracy and gambit (yes, she did invoke the Holocaust); for some details, this post is useful. And predictably, Huber, most famous for her own legal thuggery against critics, yelled “persecution” when the Arizona Naturopathic Physicians Medical Board (yes, even a naturopathic board) felt the need to take some action against her – despite Huber’s own claims, which you by now should know not to trust, the board review doesn’t seem to have primarily concerned her COVID misinformation but concerns about wtf she was administering intravenously to her patients. When Twitter, on the other hand, suspended her account due to COVID misinformation, Huber responded by suing Joe Biden.
Oh, and with regard to herbal supplements, Huber defends it (with one Stephen Helms) on her website by claiming that “[e]xperienced wine drinkers can tell the difference in taste between an expensive and inexpensive wine, but chemical analysis would probably not indicate much of any difference. In the same way an herbal tincture that is well prepared from whole plants by a knowledgeable person provides a medicine that is not able to be chemically analyzed as different, but is far superior to anything standardized on the basis of an ingredient that may not even be active.” If you don’t immediately see how breathtakingly silly that claim is (it is not only that Huber and Helms try to defend herbal supplements by likening it to homeopathy), we recommend that you read it again.
Diagnosis: A horrible excuse for a human being, Huber is mean, evil and rotten to the core. She is also delusional and paranoid. That combination makes her a threat to anyone in her surroundings, though hopefully her bullshit and malevolence has received sufficient attention to make at least some potential victims of hers aware of the dangers.
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