#588: Gabriel Cousens

Gabriel Cousens is a health writer who describes himself in the following manner:

“Dr. Sir Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), D.D. (Doctor of Divinity), Diplomate of American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, Diplomate Ayurveda, a physician of the soul, teaches and lives the sevenfold peace. To the process of awakening and healing, Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), weaves a background as a holistic physician, medical researcher, world-recognized live-food nutritionist, psychiatrist, family therapist, homeopath, Rabbi, acupuncturist, Ayurvedic practitioner, expert on green juice spiritual fasting and detoxification fasting, ecological leader, Reiki master, internationally celebrated spiritual teacher, author, lecturer, culture-bridger, world peaceworker, to give a unique holistic approach to nurturing the hungry soul.”

That ought to tell you quite a bit about what kind of cretin we are dealing with here. Cousens’s work, in all its glory, centers around New Age woo and bullshittery (a mixture, it seems, of sycophancy and criticism of those whose unsupported claims differ from his own – e.g. Johnny Lovewisdom (criticism) and Adi Da (endorsement)). A mainstay of his particular kind of woo is Raw foodism, and he employs a wide arsenal of crackpottery (particularly the Gerson protocol) and New Age religious fluffery to prop up his advice, as well as primitive medieval vitalism: the uncooked baby carrot is “alive”, while the cooked carrot is “dead”; Hence, cooking and pasteurization “kill” food, and raw food is “living”. Why it would be an advantage that the carrot is alive is not entirely obvious, but Cousens does at least have pictures of the auras of energy surrounding the food to prove it. His rainbow diet is aptly featured here.

Apparently Cousens is the founder of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, “the world's leading spiritual, vegan raw and live food retreat center,” and the author of Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days, in which he claims that enzymes are food-qi and that treating diabetes is easy. It is discussed here. He’s got … anecdotes to back it all up, endorsements by one Joel Fuhrman – who appears not to know the first thing about reality – and plenty of thoroughly false and rather random-sounding assertions. In the accompanying video he does tone down the woo a little to make it more mainstream (without making it anywhere near reality-based), but both the video and the “Raw for Life” Encyclopedia on his website feature “expert” commentaries from Morgan Spurlock, Mike Adams and Gary Null, which shouldn’t exactly confer much authority to his claims.

Cousens has been involved in a lot of nasty bullshit over the years, including raising some controversy over his fantastically crankycellular therapy, and he has been responsible for at least one death, though according to Arizona’s board of homeopathic medicine (yes they have one) Cousens wasn’t guilty of malpractice by their standards – “standards of homeopathy” aren’t much to write home about, though.

With one David Wagner Cousens has also written Tachyon Energy: A New Paradigm in Holistic Healing. No, it is not evidence-based; and yes, it is quantum woo taken just a few steps further.

Diagnosis: A staunch enemy of humanity, Cousens is a monstrous supercrank who unabatedly continues his campaign to fool people into ruining their own lines. Repugnant.

#230: Marcus Laux

Not exactly a household name, Marcus Laux is in any case a very typical example of how woo is peddled. He is “a licensed naturopathic physician who earned his doctorate at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon. He has been clinically trained in acupuncture, homeopathy, physical medicine, among other healing modalities.” His biography is here.

It’s all there. He chose the woo route because “[science-based medicine] doctors seemed more interested in money than their patients” and – predictably – because naturopathic medicine “looks beyond the symptoms to the source, treating you as a whole person rather than a bunch of separate, unrelated symptoms”. But of course, Laux initially thought naturopathic medicine was quackery, However, he “knew in [his] heart [i.e. rather than by evidence] that the natural path was the right path” (in short, he found fallacious appeals to nature extremely intuitively compelling). He is also coauthor of “Natural Woman, Natural Menopause” (with Christine Conrad) and “Top Ten Natural Therapies” (with Melissa Block).

His web page is here. Now, Laux is the founder of Qivana, a network marketing company peddling all sorts of wellness products (woo-based, of course – no, you don’t get a link) in what they call the “Qivana Qore” series (it even has “Qi” in the name to give them away).

Diagnosis: This is how great woo is done; while Laux may be a fraud, it's more likely he is completely oblivious to the fishiness of his approach to medicine or business. Not very influential or likely to become very influential, but he is still not unlikely to cause some harm.

#144: Janice L. Gibson

AKA The EMT Empress (her own title!)

As a proponent of Energy Meridian Tapping (EMT), Janice Gibson locates herself in the fluffy far fringes of woo. She rose to some prominence when she offered and organized her services to the Haiti population after the disastrous earthquake (but her efforts were somewhat overshadowed by John Travolta’s offering of scientology ministers for more or less the same purpose, and by the Homeopaths Without Borders). Her technique seems to be related to Gary Craig’s version of Thought Field Therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique.

What is EMT? “Energy Meridian Tapping (EMT) is a user-friendly version of the long established meridian tapping modality called TFT (Thought Field Therapy). Energy tapping therapies have been well documented as significantly improving pain, impaired range of motion, stress, anxiety, phobias, physical symptoms and other health conditions. EMT's basic premise is that the underlying cause of every negative emotion and almost every physical symptom is a disruption of the body's energy flow along the same meridians that were mapped over 4,000 years ago by Chinese physicians.”

Look, this is heavy-duty, unhinged woo, and no – there has been no documentation. None. And we have encountered Thought Field Therapy before. It is serious bullshit.

Her website is here. Seriously.

Her press release for the occasion kinda got off on the wrong foot: “As nearly half the Haitian population has already or will be subject to life-saving amputations, tapping will be useful in helping these people on several fronts” … say what?

And yes, inevitably: “TFT even borrows some of its concepts from quantum physics. For instance, the idea of active information, in which small amounts of energy can affect large systems, is used to support the existence of perturbations.” Great.

More here.

Diagnosis: Well-intentioned idiot. There really is no other remotely accurate way to put it. Janice Gibson is heavily critical-thinking-challenged and wouldn’t recognize a legitimate scientific method if it hit her in the face. Woe the prevalence of failing to distinguish fact and reason from opinion and wishful thinking.

#87: Don & Carol Croft

If you think our last couple of loons were a little low-key, with the Crofts we’re firmly back in tinfoil territory. Listen, for example, to this arbitrarily selected, bitingly convinced and well-informed little quote from Don (on the healing properties of gemstones): “There are books that can teach you the properties of gemstones and minerals and these properties are greatly enhanced by orgonite. My favorite, because it's based on a combination of intuition and empirical testing, is Michael Gienger's CRYSTAL POWER, CRYSTAL HEALING. I don't personally care much for channeled literature because there's no science behind it. Science and spirituality are inseparable, in my opinion. Leaving one or the other out of our personal life leaves us either materialistic or superstitious but when they're in harmony, we're
empowered and intelligent.”

Croft keeps using terms such as “empirical testing” and “science”. I do not think they mean what he thinks they mean.

Don & Carol invented 'tactical' orgonite devices called Orgone generators (as well as adding crystals to enhance their effect) named the Holy Hend Grenade (I’m not sure they get the MP reference), Towerbuster and Cloudbuster to deal with Chemtrails, HAARP & Death towers among other applications (Laozu is opening earth energy vortices with TBs), as well as inventing an orgonite zapper, and energy weapons to deal with the dark side attacks. Orgone energy is apparently “possibly the same or similar to life force energy, chi, or prana”. If you remember, this is really Wilhelm Reich’s idea (here; see our entry on Alan Cantwell). The Crofts are etheric warriors you see, zealously engaged in battles against powers only they can see (though they do claim it’s taking a lot of lives). The best evidence of the power of orgone energy in combating the ruling Nazi parasites is apparently deduced from the way they murdered Dr Reich, and burnt 6 tons of his books, journals and papers (seems a little weak to me, but OK). That there is such a Nazi-conspiracy controlling information is proven by the fact that the original Wikipedia page was deleted, as was the entry for Don Croft. That can only be a conspiracy, right? The Crofts are, in other words, among the ur-tinfoil-hatters and into both the chemical conspiracy and the HAARP conspiracy. And of course they have their own whale.to site(s), including one that describes their adventures (among other things their realization that the Red Cross is a masonic organization).

Most notably, though, is their campaign against cell phone towers. I guess most readers are aware of the completely unsupported and unsupportable claim that such towers are a health hazard, but the Crofts take it one step further. In Don’s own words, he “campaign[s] to help genuinely inquisitive people get past the falsely promoted idea that the towers are for cellphones […] They’re simply not; they’re for destroying the atmosphere and for making everyone sick. They’re also used to target individuals in the population in conjunction with GPS.” The evidence? “Dr von Peters, who spends a lot of time teaching in various medical schools in Russia, told me unequivocally that he's seen absolutely NO death towers in that country, though everyone has a cellphone.” In other words, these towers simply must be part of a conspiracy to kill innocent people. Luckily orgonite is an antidote, so the Crofts and their followers will stay untouched. A perfect system, in other words.
Don and Carol Croft also have a special affinity with cetaceans. Apparently dolphins are some kind of ethereal safeguarding angels of something, unbound by the laws of this world. Don Croft has, for instance, a video of dolphins manipulating gravity. A lot of dolphin stuff can be found here (this is fluffgobbling insanity gone wild, so be prepared).

Diagnosis: Totally beyond reason and sanity; utterly unhinged. They can hardly be considered a major threat to humanity, however.

#49: Roger J. Callahan & Gary Craig

The last decade or so certain psychologists and pseudo-psychologists have been claiming to be could cure any craving or phobia in minutes, sometimes even over the phone, by just a wee bit of tapping and some positive thinking to "rebalance [the body’s] natural energy system." Anything, really, from addiction to biscuits, alcohol, cigarettes to murdering homeopaths. The buzzword is "Thought Field Therapy” (TFT), a mish-mash of psychology, acupuncture, neuro-linguistic programming, hypnotherapy and what amounts to reiki and life force mysticism. It has absolutely no scientific foundation, and test results don’t exactly go in its favor. But woo apparently appeals.

Not only is there no evidence for its efficacy – it also relies on such quack myths as ”meridians”. In fact, the American Psyhological Association asserted that TFT "lacks a scientific basis" and removed support for it in 1999, stating that TFT "does not meet [our] definition of appropriate continuing-education curriculum for psychologists".

The technique was invented and is promoted by – you guessed it – Roger Callahan (pictured right), who terms his treatment "Thought Field Therapy" because he theorizes that when a person thinks about an experience or thought associated with an emotional problem, they are tuning in to a "thought field. and the evidence adduced in support of TFT by Callahan and other proponents comes from uncontrolled case reports that were not peer reviewed. In 2001, in an unprecedented move, the Editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology agreed to publish, without peer review, five articles on TFT of Callahan’s choosing. Psychologist John Kline wrote that Callahan’s article “represents a disjointed series of unsubstantiated assertions, ill-defined neologisms, and far-fetched case reports that blur boundaries between farce and expository prose.” It has its roots in ancient Chinese medicine.

You can read about them here. And here. And here’s his website:

Dr. Callahan also brags about being endorsed by Kevin Trudeau (who will appear later, rest assured). Perhaps because both were in major trouble with the FTC in 1998).

For their importation of TFT into Africa to treat PTSD and Malaria, see here.

And here is an NPR interview where Callahan claimed TFT successfully treated malaria.

A balanced analysis can be found here.

(hat tip to Monica Pignotti for the last set of links)

Diagnosis: crackpot and charlatan (probably unconsciously). His influence is appallingly wide, and his crackpottery has been adopted by several serious practitioners and even received governmental endorsement.

Roger Callahan's disciple, Gary Craig (pictured left), invented a variant of TFT known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), applied kinesology and pure woo. His website is here.

Critically evaluated here.

EFT is apparently a procedure that ”borrows from the much-heralded discoveries of Albert Einstein”. How, you may think? Well, because ”everything, including your body, is composed of energy”. The residue is borrowed ”from the ancient wisdom of Chinese acupuncture.”

Diagnosis: Pure, delusional crackpot of the worst kind. Impact uncertain, but EFT is a spin-off of some frighteningly popular quackery.

#22: John Benneth

Our 22nd loon, Benneth is a respected and highly influential homeopath – indeed, one of the staunchest and most prominent defenders of homeopathic remedies in the States. Listen to Benneth explain how homeopathy works and its scientific underpinnings here, and hear one of the most ridiculous abuses of scientific language you’ve heard in a long time. It’s all there, from classic phrases like “more and more scientists have taken interest…” to “magnetic radiation” (a term Benneth employs as roughly equivalent to “qi” or “chi” or some similar New Age drivel), and the use of a sciency term that sounds like it’ll serve his purpose - in this case "nanocrystalloids", a phenomenon he thoroughly fails to understand (instead relying on the assumption that his listeners don’t understand it either). Pure nonsense and pseudo-scientific babble, in other words. It is deconstructed here.

Benneth also apparently thinks that homeopathy-skeptics are really Nazis who want to set another Holocaust into motion.

Yup – all there; no understanding of science, conspiracy theories, reductio ad hitlerum-mongering, persecution complex etc. Also an ardent youtube poster.

He takes it one step further here.

Diagnosis: this guy is located well beyond lunacy; a zealous madman without a trace of critical thinking skills or understanding of science. A pathological liar and smearer with delusions of grandeur. He seems to enjoy some respect among the kookiest of crackpots, but his total impact is unclear.