#627: Joseph "Joe" Dispenza

Joseph Dispenza is an author of several fluffy New-Age snowflake bullshit self-help books, and is particularly notable for his appearance in the deranged piece of pseudo-science delusion “What the Bleep do we know”. Dispenza, who presents himself as "Dr. Dispenza", is the proud possessor of a “Doctor of Chiropractic degree” from Life University, and currently seems to be in the “miraculous healing” business. He is also a follower of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, and has produced several Youtube videos in which he talks about quantum physics the way he sees it, which has nothing to do with quantum physics (Dispenza really doesn’t even have the faintest idea what quantum physics is), but a lot to do with gibberish centered around various ridiculous forms of woo and crackpot spirituality crap.

If you enjoy torturing yourself with fluffy fogbanks of pink-tinged drivel, you may check out his DVD series “Your Immortal Brain,” which allegedly “looks at the ways in which the human brain can be used to create reality through the mastery of thought” – which does not mean anything (alludes to the Secret), but that doesn’t seem to matter much to Dispenza; like quantum physics linguistic meaning appears to be just whatever Dispenza fancies it to be at any given moment.

Diagnosis: Pretentious, delusional puddinghead who is apparently convinced that what he thinks becomes reality in virtue of him thinking it. Otherwise Dispenza doesn’t care too much about reality.

#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.

#576: Stephen Co & Eric Robins

Stephen Co and Eric Robins are the authors of Your Hands Can Heal You: Pranic Healing Energy Remedies to Boost Vitality and Speed Recovery from Common Health Problems (with one John Merryman), and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about them. Prana is the Indian version of chi or reiki, and just as solidly based on anything but reality. What Co and Robins propose is thus a form of energy healing based on the New Age understanding of energy as a form of fuzzy, buzzing cloud of metaphysical vapor, or, in other words, on a less than coherent version of medievalist vitalism, which medieval practitioners believed in because they were stupid, lacked any idea of scientific method, and were severely short on imagination (as Dennett puts it: “Vitalism – the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things – turns out to have been not a deep insight but a failure of imagination”). I’ll leave it to readers to determine what that makes of Co and Robins, though it should be noted that their book has sold pretty well among the usual groups of more seriously critical thinking-challenged flapdoodlers. It can indeed be reasonably said that vitalism, in all its fluffy incoherence, is the root of all “complementary and alternative medicine” (for instance acupuncture).

Eric Robins (a board-certified urologist), at least, has produced some “amazing” anecdotes (though the link is not to his anecdotes) reflecting how his techniques will seem to work to those who don’t understand why anecdotal evidence is problematic, underpinned by how “following his beliefs” rather than science seems to have had beneficial effects – as does what he calls having an open mind, which is of course not having an open mind at all (this is what having an open mind amounts to) but being severely rooted in confirmation bias and similar psychological mechanisms bound to lead anyone who cares about truth seriously astray.

Stephen Co’s credentials are less deceptive. Apparently “Master Stephen Co is the senior disciple of Grand Master Choa Kok Sui and one of only two Master Pranic Healers in the world.” He and his wife Daphne started the first pranic healing in the US, and apparently he’s got plenty of students.

Their work has been praised by none other than C. Norman Shealy, Carolyn Myss, Iyanla Vanzant, Marianne Williamson, dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra, Mark Victor Hansen (author of Chicken Soup for the Soul), Gay Hendricks (author of Conscious Love and Achieving Vibrance) – just to situate their contribution.

Diagnosis: Idiots. And though I’m sure their intentions are the best, they are actually rather dangerous (and no, there are no “positive placebo effects” of such crackpottery and bullshit).

#563: Morris Cerullo

Morris Cerullo is a Pentecostal Christian evangelist and a faith healer of the good old kind. He encourages people with serious illnesses and disabilities to attend his revival meetings so Jesus can heal them (and he can receive well-deserved financial compensation for letting the sick access his Jesus), and uses posters of people leaving wheelchairs and crutches to promote his efforts.

Cerullo was an early champion of the Satanism scare, to the extent that he put up a traveling exhibit dubbed the ”Witchmobile,” in which horrified spectators and frightened children would see on display various occult artifacts used for Satanic rituals, such as astrology items, Ouija boards, and Tarot cards, in order to recognize and combat these nefarious enemies in their ordinary lives. As late as 1999 Cerullo ran an ad in the UK, claiming that ”Satanic hordes” occupy ”principal palaces of power in Europe” (and that homosexuality is an abomination). The campaign was not an unqualified success, particularly since Cerullo’s faith healing campaigns in the UK had previously left a trail of death. Cerullo was subsequently challenged to produce his three best examples of claimed miraculous healings for scrutiny by a panel of doctors. They were not particularly impressed. Cerullo has also been expelled from India after his inability to actually heal people caused a riot (30 000 people apparently showed up to Cerullo’s event, including several disabled people, and Cerullo rather audaciously just declared that they had all been healed, something many of them rather obviously felt was inaccurate).

His evangelical campaigns targeted at the Jewish community have been met with some criticisms as well (Rev Dr Chris Wright, principal of All Nations Christian College, denounced Cerullo's methods as ”spiritually perverted and pastorally disastrous”).

He may be most famous, however, for his stint as an amusement park owner, having got his hands on the PTL Club and Heritage USA amusement park that Jerry Falwell appropriated from Jim Bakker after the latter’s fall from grace. He later lost the park but retained the PTL television network (currently named ”Inspiration” and run by his son David).

Diagnosis: Raving mad, of course, and sufficiently insane to jeopardize his own influence. That, of course, doesn’t scare away the most gullible of the gullible, and he still seems to enjoy a modicum of influence.

#522: Barbara Brennan

Barbara Ann Brennan is an author and intuitive healer who works in the field of “energy healing”. According to the Watkins Review she was the 94th most spiritually influential person in the world in 2011. Brennan has pretty much adopted every conceivable form of imaginary woo, from Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone energy to chakras and astral healing, as well as most other typical crank baggage, such as promoting herself as a doctor of philosophy (Greenwich University) and doctor of theology (C. Norman Shealy’s Holos University), both from unaccredited diploma mills.

Brennan’s first book, Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field, is still viewed as a classic among the reality impaired. In writing it Brennan claimed to “receive intuitive information about her clients during sessions, and to see repetitive patterns in the energy fields of her clients indicating common roots underlying their difficulties”, and the whole thing is a mess of auras, “energy fields” that interact with each other, and promotion of “the seven-layermodel of the energy field, each layer being structured of differing frequencies and kinds of energy and performing different functions.” The chakras are supposedly transformers that receive and process universal energy. It is hard to believe that Brennan actually believes any of the bullshit she’s spewing.

According to Wikipedia Brennan “is best known for taking a methodical, scientific approach to energy healing,” but – suffice to say – it is doubtful that anyone taking Brennan seriously has the faintest clue about what a scientific approach implies (hint: “let anecdotal evidence take you where you want to go” is not a scientific approach).

As mentioned Brennan has developed “energy healing techniques” (she calls them “full spectrum healing”) to work on the seven layers of the human energy field or auras, including what she calls “spiritual surgery” applied to the “fifth level” using the power of a spirit surgeon. It really is all about energy, and neither Brennan nor her adherents understand what energy actually is (hint: energy is not a buzzing, glowing, luminescent. magical cloud surrounding objects that one can tap into by the right means – even if focusing one’s will were “the right means”).

In 1982, she established the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, designed to train professional healers in Florida, which has come to be known as one of the epitomes of New Age healing. It is licensed by the State of Florida Commission for Independent Education (i.e., it is unaccredited) and listed here. She herself has moved to Austria to open more branches of the school (there are branches in Austria, Germany, and Japan).

Brennan has a listing in Quackwatch’s helpful Dictionary of Metaphysical Healthcare, Alternative Medicine, Paranormal Healing, and Related Methods.

Diagnosis: The epitome of New Age healing, few people do woo more thoroughly than Barbara Brennan. She’s had a lot of influence and must be considered a dangerous enemy of reason and reality.