#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.

#579: Richard Cohen

The absolutely marvelously insane Roger Coghill is British, and his attempts to link all sorts of ailments to cell phone use is decently discussed here – but he has to be disqualified from our Encyclopedia.

The considerably more insidious Richard A. Cohen is qualified by a relatively good margin. Cohen, a former Moonie, is one of America's best known conversion therapists. In fact, he is not actually licensed as a therapist, but avoids state licensing requirements by asking for donations to his foundation instead of payment. He also gives lectures, and runs seminars and workshops on his ideas about the causes of homosexuality – which he calls “same-sex attachment disorder” – and how to cure them. He claims to have converted even himself at one point, as well as plenty of others, and his International Healing Foundation offers commercial teleconferencing classes on his cherished topics. Cohen has also been president of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, and sits on Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public Schools’s for some inexplicable reason – the upshot being that some Maryland Middle Schools have been promoting ex-gay therapy to its students. (The district’s recently retired supervisor for health education, Betsy Gallun, thinks students deserve to learn about ex-gay therapy and she “feels very badly that it’s coming under scrutiny.”)

Cohen was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2002 after six violations of its ethics code, which bars members from actions that “seek to meet their personal needs at the expense of clients, those that exploit the trust and dependency of clients, and soliciting testimonials or promoting products in a deceptive manner.” He still got an opportunity to advance his theories on Penn & Teller, which may not have helped his cause. Neither, presumably, did his appearance on Rachel Maddow.

Since heterosexuality is the natural state, according to Cohen, same-sex attraction is caused by traumatic experiences and the lack of male role models. His (unresearched) theories to this effect have become popular for instance in Uganda, though back in the US even Exodus is slightly wary of him (though the relationship seems to be a little back and forth).To achieve his results as a therapist, Cohen employs (among other things) Wilhelm Reich’s bioenergetics, which is, of course, pure vitalist woo, and holding/touch therapy, which isn’t better supported than bioenergetics as a treatment for anything. In other words, even if Cohen’s theories about homosexuality had been correct, he wouldn’t have had the faintest chance of curing it. His theories and methods are described in a series of books, including the children’s book “Alfie’s Home”, possibly the most disturbing children’s book of all time.

One ex-gay activist disciple of Cohen is Alan Downing of the organization JONAH (run by convicted felon Arthur Abba Goldberg). Downing is portrayed here and here, portrayals that should be illuminating with regard to the efficacy of gay therapy.

There is a hilarious post on the strange world of gay-to-straight conversion therapy here.

Cohen should not be mistaken for the liberal columnist for the Washington post and ardent advocate for ignorance, Richard Cohen, who is also a serious loon, and has aptly been described as “a 21st century man insisting that an 18th century education is too much for our poor students.”

Diagnosis: Bigotry combined with altmed crankery is always charming, and Cohen is no exception. Monster.

#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).

#573: Dawson Church

Dawson Church is a “researcher” in the field of energy medicine (which is firmly based on the New Age understanding of "energy" as a tangible cloud of fluff) and author of Communing With the Spirit of Your Unborn Child, Facing Death, Finding Love, Soul Medicine and The Genie In Your Genes. In other words, if snowflakey energy woo is your thing, Dawson Church is your man. He earned his doctorate (non-accredited) in Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the mentorship of none other than neurosurgeon C. Norman Shealy, and can also pride himself on a “postgraduate Ph.D.” in Natural Medicine, as well as a “clinical certification” in Energy Psychology. Impressive.

Church is the founder of Soul Medicine Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to “research, education and therapies that link consciousness with healing,” and which offers the Iraq Vets Stress Project for veterans seeking energy psychology treatments. They publish the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, Practice, Training (which is not PubMed indexed). Church’s main schtick appears to be Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Technique, an especially silly brand of the completely unsupported idea of thought field therapy (there is a useful discussion here).

Diagnosis: As far into loonland as crackpots go. The stuff he pushes has nothing to do with reality, but he seems to try to make up for that by pushing it particularly ardently.

#539: Rosalyn Bruyere

Rosalyn Bruyere is one of the most prominent healers, clairvoyants, and newthought promoters in the US. She runs The Healing Light Center Church (with a telephone line for healing requests) and the Crucible Program, a ”modern mystery school”. To see what she’s driving at, Bruyere has said that ”[i]t has taken thousands of years, but within this century both scientists and spiritual seekers alike have once again begun to view the laws of nature and the laws of God as reflections of the same truth,” a claim which many would view as mildly controversial (but more accurately as incoherent nonsense). Apart from that, she and her partner Ken Weintrub offer seminars on energy healing, chakras, Qi Gong practices, Brain Balancing, Pain Drain, and, well, pretty much the whole nine yards of woo. Her book Wheels of Light, A Study of the Chakras is claimed to be an ”invaluable text for the bridging of ancient and modern healing arts. Reverend Bruyere has studied extensively in areas of Egyptian temple symbology, Sacred geometry, ancient Mystery School rites, international shamanic practices, the pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bon-Po Ways, and various Native American Medicine traditions.” Indeed.

You can read an assessment of her energy chelation technique here. The idea seems to be that just as heavy metals are toxic to the body, so stuck emotions are toxic to the body, mind, and spirit. Though the claim is not formulated as an actually testable hypothesis (no attempt to cash out the metaphors, for instance), energy chelation is still promoted a “method which removes sticky, heavy dark energy from the human energy field,” which is not formulated in a manner that makes much sense either. And no, its proponents do not seem to know what “energy” means. As Blake Stacey put it “’Energy chelation’ is just one of several ways to remove interphasic parasites which live in subspace rifts and feed on the biogenic fields of organic life-forms who encounter them while using warp drive”. On the downside a study of the technique was actually published in the journal Cancer, and its authors were positive even though the results were consistent with placebo; see a discussion here.

Diagnosis: We are perfectly aware that sometimes life is hard and reality painful. “Reject it and make up your own,” does not in general seem to be a proper response for rational people. Bruyere seems to be relatively influential, however.