#2458: Ray Alcon

Ray Alcon is a North Carolina-based preacher, religious fundamentalist and creationist – really just a local village idiot, but we’re aiming for comprehensiveness here, so we’ll grant him a brief entry. Alcon is “convinced that evolutionists live in a world of make-believe and delusion” and that “there isn’t one single and scientific fact that established evolution as true”; he’ll adamantly refuse to look at whatever piece of evidence you may offer. “The fact is,” says Alcon, “evolution has never been, nor ever will be, observed,” which is false and anyways not how science – testing hypotheses and theories (which are about the unobserved) against observable data that will confirm or disconfirm them – works. Not knowing how scientific inquiry works, Alcon is ready to employ any silly creationist talking point to further his case, whether he begins to understand it or not, including appealing to the second law of thermodynamics (it “destroys the possibility of evolution”, according to Alcon, which is silly) and denying the glaring evidence of the fossil record (“there has never been and never will be an intermediate evolutionary form found in the fossil record”, asserts Alcon – falsely, to the extent that the claim is meaningful).

 

Alcon’s clincher, however, is that there are many Christians who deny evolution, despite “decades of brainwashing in our educational system”. In fact, all Christians deny evolution, by definition: there may be people who claim to be Christians who believe “the big lie”, but they aren’t: “The word ‘Christian’ means ‘Christlike,’ and Christ never did nor ever will deny His creation.” So there.

 

Diagnosis: Silly creationist, fundie and local village idiot. Minor, but dreadfully moronic.

#2457: I.Q. al Rassooli

I.Q. al Rassooli is an anti-Islam activist most famous for his youtube series “Idiots Guide to Islam” and as author of the book Lifting the Veil: The True Faces of Muhammad and Islam, which seems to be mostly a transcription of parts of his youtube videos. He does not appear to have any credentials in any field relevant to his “research”, but takes the fact that scholars don’t bother to engage with the claims in his book or videos to demonstrate that he is nevertheless right. 

According to al Rassooli, every Muslim supports violent jihad, and those who claim that they don’t – that would ostensibly include former President Obama – are simply lying. Moreover, anyone who disagrees with that claim, al Rassooli says, belongs in a “mental asylum.” And polls that purport to show that many Muslims in the US don’t support the imposition are of Sharia are false, because those who insist they don’t are simply engaging in taqiyya. In other words, that the evidence straightforwardly refutes his claims, is evidence that the polls lie, which is evidence that he is right. So it goes. “Every Muslim wants Sharia,” asserts al Rassooli, and when they say they don’t, it’s “a deception, it’s called taqiyya. Taqiyya is Islamic sanctified religious deception. What do you think Obama is? Obama is all about taqiyya. He lies to protect Islam. Eight years he has been lying to protect Islam. Eight years. This is called taqiyya,” because the more times you repeat an unfounded claim, the truer it gets.  

So what should Americans do? According to al Rassooli, “you have to close every single mosque. You have to remove every single imam. You must not allow sharia. You must not allow hijab … This is exactly what needs to be done.” All in the name of religious freedom, of course.  

Diagnosis: The boiling stew of anger, hate and paranoia that is the mind of I.Q al Rassooli seems to persist entirely insulated from reality. Yet, his books and videos do seem to have a number of (equally deranged) fans. One might be excused for being worried about what they might end up doing.

#2456: Dalal Akoury

The Integrative Addiction Conference 2015 (“A New Era in Natural Treatment”) was a pseudoscience and conspiracy theory event in 2015 where medical doctors and quacks were treated to a range of talks by woo pracitioners promoting dangerous, ineffective and silly bullshit treatments, such as naturopath and dubious stemcell treatment practitioner Kenneth Proefrock’s talk on “IV Therapies and Addiction Solutions” (complete with a prominent Quack Miranda Warning assuring listeners that he is not claiming that his stem cell treatments are effective for anything but strongly suggesting that they are effective forvirtually everything). What’s frightening is that doctors could actually get continuing medical education credits for attending.

 

The person running the show (“Title Sponsor” of the conference) was Dalal Akoury, MD, who is listed by the S.C. Board of Medicine as board certified in pediatrics. Akoury is also the founder of the “Integrative Addiction Institute” and runs the “AwareMed Health and Wellness Resource Center” in Myrtle Beach, which offers a range of questionable treatments for a range of real and less real conditions: they do addiction recovery, “adrenal fatigue” treatment, stem cells, “anti-aging”, weight loss, hair loss treatment, “functional medicine” and even “integrative cancer care”. Given the variety of conditions they offer to treat, and the types of “treatments” they offer for them, it might perhaps strike some as surprising that the center has only Akoury and one licensed practical nurse on the staff, but it really isn’t. They also offer Ayurvedic medicine, which apparently has to be powerful because it has been around for so long, and alternative vaccination schedules.

 

According to herself, Akoury has “dedicated her career to identifying and addressing the root causes of chronic illness through a groundbreaking whole-systems medicine approach known as Functional, Integrative, Sexual, Cellular and Metabolic Medicine”, and her Medical Cloud profile lists her as “knowledgeable on obesity, fitness, and nutrition, and Sexual Medecine [sic]”. Her marketing, as so much woo marketing, is to a large extent focusing on “empowerment”, and she endeavors to help her victims patients to become “one with the universe, and aligning body, mind, and spirit.”

 

Diagnosis: Akoury seems to have endorsed everything that is wrong, false and ridiculous in the field of alternative medicine, and will seemingly push any ridiculous idea or treatment for any condition, real or imagined, you may think you suffer from (or she can convince you that you suffer from). To be avoided at all costs.

 

Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine

#2455: Bill Akins

Remember back in the early 2010s, when Obamacare was launched, and the associated conspiracy theories about it promoted by deranged wingnuts? One of the more popular ones was the idea that the health care law had a “death panel” clause; in one popular version, it was even specified that according to the law, all Americans had to appear before the panel when they turned 74. Despite being obviously ridiculous, that particular conspiracy theory made its rounds among Qanon-receptive circles for a while back in 2012 before eventually being replaced by other, equally ridiculous nonsense.

 

Well, the idea didn’t completely die. Bill Akins, then secretary of the Republican Executive Committee of Pasco County, Florida, pulled it back out at a 2017 townhall meeting. “Here’s the problem I have with the Affordable Health Care Act,” said Akins: “Number one, there is a provision in there that anyone over the age of 74 has to go before what is effectively a death panel.” And when audiences started booing, Akins desperately tried to prove his point by repeating his assertion: “They do,” and, “It’s in there, folks, you’re wrong.” It is, of course, not in there, and by 2017 people tended to be aware of that.

 

Akins subsequently resigned, but that seems to be mostly because his Facebook posts turned out to contain a rather impressive selection of racist memes and fake news stories, including a couple of familiar and predictable ones:

 

-       that former President Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim

-       several spins on the Clinton body count conspiracy theories (Bill and Hillary Clinton had potential trial witnesses against them murdered)

-       that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might have been murdered

-       that “Climate Change” is a globalist hoax

 

Upon resigning, Akins emphasized that he didn’t admit to being wrong, however – rather he resigned, according to himself, to be free from the Republican party’s oppressive loyalty oaths.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, this is old news, and Akins is hopefully out for good. But just as old conspiracy theories are apparently never forgotten, we aren’t forgetting Bill Akins, even if even crazier wingnuts are endorsing even more ridiculous conspiracy theories at present.

#2454: Sangeeta Agarawal

Sangeeta Agarawal is the founder of health startup Helpsy, and an ardent champion of all things woo and New Age shiny and flimsy. Helpsy is supposed to be “a platform that brings together health care experts from all evidence based health care modalities, researchers and health care centers to combine their efforts together to offer an all-in-one interdisciplinary health solution to treat all aspects of health,” and might have been a good idea if it had actually cared at all about “evidence-based” and not gone full woo. Agarawal herself has, apparently, a background as a nurse, ayurveda practitioner, and yoga teacher, and has, according to herself, “studied integrative medicine by studying, practicing and conducting research in both eastern and western medicine” and worked with “the Mayo Clinic, Stanford Cancer Center, and UCSF Cancer Center”, which, if correct, is downright horrifying. She was at least an invited participant to a panel at Stanford University’s 2016 Medicine X Conference. 

Her schtick is fairly typical for the contemporary urban hipster approach to health wellness, though: apparently Agarawal “found ways to empower herself to be healthy and happy” by taking everything into her own hands, “decid[ing] to devote her life to empowering everyone to living their best quality of life”. Yes, the sales pitch is all about empowerment, self-affirmation, individualism and finding your own way to take control over your health, and not be restricted by the oppressive chains of reality or the authority of those who actually knows how reality works – it’s basically the updated, fashionable version of the human potential movement. “Our solution is ready to help everyone live their life to the fullest,” says Agarawal. 

Meanwhile, Helpsy appears to have become mostly a marketing company for quacks, with the “health care experts” it helps patients find being mostly, it seems, acupuncturists and chiropractors.  

Diagnosis: Garbage through and through. The scary thing is that real medical institutions are giving the empty fluff and nonsense of people like Sangeeta Agarawal a microphone and a sheen of legitimacy.

#2453: Kathy Afzali et al.

State legislatures again! (Though this time around the culprit is at least gone as of now.) Kathryn L. Afzali represented district 4 in the Maryland House of Delegates from 2011 to 2019. For our purposes, Afzali is most notable for her support of a 2018 bill that would protect “lyme literate” doctors from discipline.

 

“Lyme literate” doctors are doctors who cater to groups of people who believe they suffer from “chronic Lyme” (which is not to be confused with the very real and potentially serious lyme disease). Now, these people are certainly suffering and often desperate; they do not, however, suffer from chronic lyme (for a primer on chronic lyme, this one might be helpful). However, there are doctors willing to go along with, or even confirm with the help of nonsense tests, that diagnosis – and note the diagnostic criteria being used). These doctors are, as such, essentially scamming patients out of thousands of dollars with needless long-term antibiotics – or other, less orthodox and potentially dangerous means – based on a fake diagnosis. And sadly and predictably enough, “chronic lyme” patients who have bought into the diagnosis and the associated conspiracies needed to do so, are often the most ardent defenders of these doctors and wish to see them protected from what they judge to be persecution by the medical establishment while they are being fleeced. Meanwhile, the “lyme literate” doctors themselves have banded together in their own International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), which has issued their own nonsense guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of “chronic Lyme” based on nonsense “evidence” accepted only by themselves, and which are used to teach other practitioners how to become “Lyme literate.” Needless to say, ILADS is not an ACCME-accredited provider of continuing medical education.

 

Now, already in 2016, the Maryland legislature passed a bill that would require test labs to substitute physicians’ advice and evidence-based information with the advice that legislators, such as Afzali, whose background is in theater and real estate, wanted them to have with regard to Lyme disease. According to Afzali, the bill in question was merely the first in a series of bills she hoped to get passed. “The question is, what is the proper treatment for the disease [chronic lyme]. There’s many different schools of thought. We want to be able to pass legislation that helps these patients who have long-term treatment for Lyme.” Of course, if you restrict the relevant “schools of thought” to the ones that actually base their advice on evidence and science, there aren’t many of them, but then you are forgetting that the reason there is no serious evidence for chronic lyme is because Big Medicine is in a conspiracy to suppress what the conspiracy theorists and brave maverick doctors know to be true without having to rely on that evidence. In 2018, Afzali and 38 fellow delegates sponsored House Bill 880 (later withdrawn), which would have forced insurers to pay for long-term antibiotic treatment of “chronic Lyme” disease, where the criterion for diagnosing someone with “chronic lyme” was, essentially, merely a “lyme literate” physician saying that it is chronic lyme – after all, there were no accurate, detailed, objective criteria to use.

 

However, despite the idiocy and danger of HB880, it pales in comparison with HB1266, which later died in committee and would have protected not only “Lyme literate” physicians from any disciplinary action by the medical board “for acts or omissions that arise from professional differences of opinion”, but “Lyme literate” chiropractors and naturopaths as well. That bill’s sponsors were Ned Carey, Pamela Beidle, Barbara Frush, Carol Krimm, David Moon, April Rose and Dana Stein, and at least some of those seem to still enjoy positions in the legislature. And of course: it is not only Maryland; ILADS has been making efforts in numerous states, often with more success than they enjoyed with the ultimately feeble nonsense they managed to pull of in Maryland. Some of those efforts are described here. Yes, it is horrifying.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it is deeply frightening. State legislators tend to have little understanding of medicine, science or evidence, and are often easily pushed by lobbyists with anecdotes and misguided people in desperate situations to support them. When it comes to “chronic lyme”, there is no particular reason to single out Kathy Afzali, except that she actually displayed her ignorance and nonsense to the media, though we needed a name under which to file this disconcerting bullshittery.

 

Hat-tip: Jann Bellamy @ sciencebased medicine

#2452: Kenneth Adkins

Kenneth Adkins is a Florida-based pastor and anti-gay activist who has described himself as “one of the most Respected Black Conservative Voices in America”. Adkins received some attention when he, in the wake of the 2016 shooting that left 49 club goers dead and 53 others wounded at a gay nightclub in Orlando, said that “I don’t see none of them as victims. I see them as getting what they deserve!!” He has earlier suggested that zeh gays are in some sort of conspiracy to replace “the Black Struggle” with their own, and that they might have murdered Martin Luther King as part of that effort (“Hell, the Sissies might have killed Dr. King!!”)  

 

And in 2017, Adkins was, not entirely unsurprisingly and entirely in line with Haggard’s Law, convicted of molesting two children, one male and one female, who attended his church. (Adkins does, by the way, have an impressively long criminal record).  

 

Diagnosis: Yeah, there isn’t much more that needs to be said about this vile piece of bigoted insanity. Probably neutralized.