#2869: Anita Fuentes

Legendary quack and imminent threat to health and welfare everywhere Viola Frymann died a few years ago, but her deranged legacy unfortunately seems to live on. Internet evangelist Anita Fuentes seems somewhat lost to the world the rest of us live in, too, though in a somewhat different way; hopefully her influence is more limited.

 

Fuentes is best known from her end-times podcast Open Your Eyes People, which is devoted to “bringing Breaking News World Headlines MATCHING Bible Prophecy, worship, praise and preaching the Gospel of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ”, where – well, you probably see where this is going – she rants about current events through the lens of radical fundamentalism and extreme paranoia. Back in 2014, for instance, other extremists too picked up Fuentes’s analysis of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which she judged to be a sacrilegious, cultic Satanic Ritual – a twisted parody of a baptism replete with occult symbolism that only utterly deranged people like Fuentes are able to see; apparently the fact that Oprah took it is significant, too.

 

Usually, the news she discusses signals the end times; she has the uncanny ability to discern such signs of the endtimes virtually anywhere, and Fuentes is, unlike most self-declared prophets, not above being specific. For instance, in 2016 she predicted that the end of humanity would occur on March 8, as shown by the occurrence of an eclipse, a freak supermoon and asteroid TX68 – though some observers noticed that she had, at the time of the prediction, nevertheless scheduled programs the days following March 8.

 

Then there is the grift, of course. Fuentes’s show is financed by donations, and she is hard on solicitation. Since she has a special line to God, people who listen to her and send her money will also receive special blessings; they will for instance have their marriages automatically blessed. On the other hand, not donating to her is exactly like “starving a child”. During Covid, she also solicited some criticism by offering religious exemptions for COVID vaccines in return for donations. 

 

Diagnosis: Our experience of shock and/or amusement over these kinds of lunatics has faded over time, but we still feel dutybound to cover them. Hopefully, Fuentes’s influence is limited, but she seems able to keep her podcast running and there’s a lot of fundie loon preachers like her out there.

#2868: David Friedman

David Friedman is an all-purpose quack and snakeoil salesman who has polluted the internet and various airwaves with scam enterprises, woo and quackery for some time. Friedman calls himself “Dr. David Friedman”, but he has no medical background; rather he has a “a doctorate degree in chiropractic, neurology and naturopathy” (note that even when he admits what his ‘degree’ is actually in, he doesn’t tell us where it’s from) and according to himself he is “post-doctorate certified from Harvard School of Medicine [which is … not a thing] and the Southeastern Back Institute [for which Google yields exactly five hits, all associated with Friedman]”. The ‘neurology’ part of his ‘credentials’, by the way, means chiropractic neurology, which is, of course, hideous quackery.

 

In fact, Friedman presents himself as “a leading Functional Medicine expert” and he is currently practising in Wilmington, NC, where his “dedication to wellness includes providing world-class treatment to patients, wellness coaching, and an emphasis on the importance of exercise, nutrition, meditation, yoga, and acupuncture”. According to his website, “his list of patients have included top celebrities and movie stars” and he is apparently also working as a “health expert for Lifetime Television’s morning show and syndicated radio host”. His dingbat conspiracy book, Food Sanity, how to eat in a world of fads and fiction (largely concerned with “hidden toxins” in your food) has apparently sold well, and Friedman has written numerous rants on nutrition for health and fitness magazines, pseudojournals and infomercial magazines such as The American Naturopathic Journal and Chiropractic Economics.

 

Friedman is probably – or at least should be – most familiar as a medical advisory board member of the infamous quack company Seasilver, which we have encountered before. Their product, Seasilver, is an expensive supplement that will putatively “balance your body chemistry”, “cleanse your vital organs”, “purify your blood and lymphatic system,” “oxygenate your body’s cells”, “protect your tissues and cells against challenges” and “strengthen your immune system”. In other words, the claims are precisely as imprecise, metaphorical and ambiguous as they need to be to ensure untestability and thus protect the company from accountability (apart perhaps from the “oxygenate your body’s cells” claim, which is, fortunately for any users of the product, false). To ‘support’ such claims, Friedman’s got an anecdote: himself. You see, “[d]uring my naturopathic studies, we were taught that a giant handful of vitamin/mineral pills was the answer”, which, since vitamin and supplement pills are superfluous nonsense moneymakers for big and cynical industries, is an inadvertently damning indictment of naturopathic education; Friedman, however, though he agrees (at least for Seasilver marketing purposes) that supplements in general are ineffective, concludes that Seasilver is different: “Unlike minerals from the ground, like those sold in health food stores, nutrients from the sea are recognized by our cell receptors and are allowed access into our cells,” says Friedman, since his target group is precisely those who won’t read that sentence and think ‘wait …’. Friedman even tries to explain (or whatever you call it): “Unlike other nutritional supplements on the market, sea vegetation offers ionic minerals, which experts [who?] consider to be assimilated better than any other form” (if you master basic biochemistry, you are not in his target group), before concluding that “[t]his MEDICAL EVIDENCE proves that for every hundred dollars people are spending on vitamin pills, they are flushing $90 down the toilet. Seasilver offers a 98% absorption rate .... meaning you get what you pay for!”; note the delectable use of capitalization.

 

The FTC and FDA were apparently not impressed with Friedman’s standards of proof, ordering, back in 2004, him and his Seasilver colleagues Jason & Bela Berkes and Brett Rademacher to be prohibited from:

 

-       “Making or helping others to make, false or misleading claims about the health benefits, efficacy, or safety of Seasilver or any covered product.

-       Misrepresenting that Seasilver is effective in the treatment of multiple myeloma; non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; lung, breast, and prostate cancer; brain tumors; diabetes; AIDS; typhoid; and anthrax, among other ailments.

-       Representing that Seasilver or any other product causes rapid, substantial, or permanent weight loss without reducing caloric intake.

-       Making any representation about the health benefits, efficacy, or safety of any covered product without reliable scientific evidence to support the representation.”

 

Friedman was also ordered to pay $1 million in restitution to settle charges. Note that their FTC and FDA troubles occurred a while ago, when Seasilver was making more precise and testable health claims (i.e. claims that could be evaluated for truth or falsity); the untestable nonsense and meaningless New Age bullshit Seasilver is currently using in their marketing is precisely tailored to avoid ending up in a similar situation.

 

Like so many other quacks and grifters, Friedman also weighed in on Covid, drawing some attention to himself for his bonkers suggestion that the virus could be destroyed by sunlight – “[i]nstead of staying quarantined inside your house, go outside on your back deck and soak up some virus destroying sunshine!”, said Friedman; at least his previous experiences seem to have made him wary of claiming that his own products would have any beneficial effects. The claim received some attention partially because it was repeated by Congressman Greg Murphy.

 

Diagnosis: Spineless quack, and because he knows how to market his nonsense, he apparently wields a frightening amount of influence.

#2867: Heshi Fried

Heshi Fried is primarily known, if known at all, as the owner of the world’s mostoffensive car. The ‘offensiveness’ pertains to Fried’s home-made bumper stickers, and the whole contraption is really more laughably wrong and a demonstration that Heshi Fried is an incorrigible idiot than offensive. Among the stickers reported by witnesses are:

 

-       “A good woman is a subservient frum housewife”

-       “G-d sent AIDS to punish male gays”

-       “Modern Girls: Forget Minchal Dress Modestly”

-       “Hurricane Sandy is G-d’s response to gay marriage”

-       “Atheism is a mental disorder. Evolution is science FICTION” [Heshi Fried might know something about mental disorders; he knows nothing about science]

-       “Mothers with short skirts shorten child’s life 4 inches below knee is Torah law”

-       “Shul talkers cause CANCER TNT Torah Novel Talk”

-       “Boston MASSacre G-d’s reponse to America’s 1^st gay marriage state”

-       “The universe is 5773 years old Evolution is science FICTION”

 

And so on.

 

Fried himself is a Hardei, i.e. subscribes to the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism. Even so, Fried thinks that “most people are very much with me, the people who are religious are basically all giving me a thumbs up. Except secular Jews, who usually like, express shock. They feel like I’m causing anti-Semitism or something.” Of course, that ‘most people’ agree with him tells you nothing about the quality of his positions but rather a bit about what kind of people Fried hangs out with. He also used to be a member of the fringe Hasidic group Jewish Political Action Committee, which apparently went under as a consequence of a big “Jews against the internet” protest at Citi Field a decade or so ago after which even deranged Hasidic extremists felt the need to distance themselves from the unhinged and murderous fanatics that made up that group. Fried also claims that the bumper stickers are part of his goal to make as many people as possible more observant, in which case they don’t seem to have the effect he was going for. His grasp of how other people work is as tenuous as his grasp of anything else.

 

Diagnosis: Possibly the most hateful, bigoted, monstrous and evil person in the world. Fortunately he has little means (or guts) to put his deranged hate into any kind of action – probably harmless, in other words.

#2866: Elena Frid

Chronic lyme is a fake diagnosis. Since many people nevertheless think that they suffer from chronic lyme, however, there is a market for ‘treatments’, and a whole cottage industry has popped up to take advantage of the situation. Even a number of real MDs have joined that bandwagon – these even have their own moniker “lyme literate doctors”, and are organized into the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), one of the most dangerous and aggressive quack organizations that has ever existed – claiming that the symptoms experienced by their patients are due to chronic persistent infection with B. burgdorferi (or other Borrelia species of bacteria that can cause Lyme disease), and prescribing long term antibiotics as treatment; or, since long-term antibiotics will do nothing for the symptoms, various types of quackery that work equally well. And no, there is no evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists (this is not really controversial), but there are several randomized clinical trials that unambigously show very clearly that long term antibiotics does not help and is harmful.

 

Elena Frid is one such “lyme literate” doctor. Frid is a New York-based neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist and has been a prominent champion for getting (chronic) lyme disease recognized as “a human rights concern” – several media outlets, such as Huffpo (not a trustworthy source on medical claims), have promoted her work. So why does medical consensus disagree with her? Frid blames the tests: “the test that we have now is up to 50-70% inaccurate in some instances. Intern, if you test negative for Lyme disease on regular blood work – it doesn’t mean you don’t have Lyme.” Frid (and her associates) has her own tests that yield far more positive results – don’t you worry; Frid will find lyme.

 

Then there is this, though we emphasize that we don’t know the context.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, she’s got credentials. That doesn’t entail that her claims about lyme disease are evidence-based – they clearly aren’t. Avoid.

#2865: Bob Frey

Pretty obscure, perhaps, but anyways: Bob Frey was a 2014 candidate for District 47A of the Minnesota House of Representatives (he didn’t advance beyond the primaries) and possibly the looniest conspiracy theorist on the ballot in that state that year. His platform was a rather typically (for that time) wingnut one, including “Common Core must be stopped in Minnesota because of it’s political agenda to indoctrinate instead of educate” and “ObamaCare should be repealed at the Federal level”, but he nevertheless managed to make a bit of a name for himself for his views on the gay agenda – though as Frey felt it important to emphasize: “it’s not about the gay agenda but about the science and the financial impact of that agenda. It’s more about sodomy than about pigeonholing a lifestyle.” Now, when someone like Bob Frey invokes “science”, you know you’re in for some deranged nonsense, and Frey delivers: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there's an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it's the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That's why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” It should be unnecessary to point out that this is not how anything works, but we can’t help entertaining a little bit of curiosity about what goes on in those parts of Frey’s deranged imaginations he doesn’t feel willing to share in public. Whatever source he thinks he is using for his claims, at least his son Mike used the same when he made the same claim before the Minnesota legislature the previous year.

 

When Frey talks about ‘science’, you should of course also keep in mind that he is talking about ‘real science’. Frey’s background includes running a group called ‘Creation Science Seminars’, which would claim that teaching creationism in public schools would reduce the rate of violence that teaching the theory of evolution had, according to Frey, brought upon communities. And in a 2004 appearance before the Minnesota State Senate Education Committee, he asserted that the fossil record proves that “dinosaurs have always lived with man” and that such “real science” should be taught in public schools rather than the scientists’ science they are teaching these days.

 

Diagnosis: Obscure, perhaps, but the fact that local village idiots like Bob Frey can get as far as he did indicates that there’s a lot people in Minnesota whose critical thinking skills and basic comprehension of their surroundings are so unfathomably low that they really shouldn’t be allowed to handle doorknobs without assistance. And they are the real horrors lurking in the wake and shadow of people like Bob Frey.

#2864: Carly Fraser

The website Live Love Fruit is a slick and fashionable-looking blog run by one Carly Fraser and devoted to spreading chemophobia and anti-GMO misinformation. Indeed, Live Love Fruit is, according to itself, an “online hub for learning how to live more holistically. Whether you need a natural remedy or healthy recipe,” and it provides advice in the manner popularized by the Food Babe. And Fraser’s recipe seems to be to just make things up: In “Health Dangers of Canola Oil: Not the Healthy Oil You’ve Been Led to Believe”, for instance, Fraser argues that canola oil is bad for our health due to the toxicity of oleic acid – she seems unaware that oleic acid actually makes up most of the fatty acids in the human body’s fat deposits and is also the main fatty acid found in olive oil, which she does claim is healthy. She also suggests that canola oil is the cause of Keshan disease – which is the result of selenium deficiency and a viral infection – and, for good measure, that erucic acid hampers growth in children. Needless to say, her evidence for such claims stems, at best, from misinformation from places like NaturalNews or GreenMedInfo, though with a healthy dose of her own imagination mixed in.

 

Since it seems to be pretty popular, the blog has, in fact, received some attention for Fraser’s lackadaisical attitude toward facts as well as for her rather brazen attempts to deploy misinformation for personal gain. In 2016, for instance, Fraser received the attention of Snopes over a post, shared more than a million times on social media, alleging that various popular brands of tea contain dangerous levels of pesticides. In detail, Fraser’s claims were based on three sources:

 

-       Testing performed by CBC, to which Fraser explicitly claims that “over half of all teas tested had pesticide residues that were above the legally acceptable limit,” which is simply false (none were remotely close to such limits), and that “a large majority of these pesticides are currently being banned in several countries,” which is equally false (though one chemical, endosulfan, is on some lists of restricted chemical, even though the levels identified by CBC were four orders of magnitude lower than the US maximum allowable limits).

-       A Greenpeace report that according to Fraser found “high levels of pesticide residues” in various tea brands in India but which in reality only determined levels “above the analytical limit of quantification” – i.e. detectable – but of course far, far below legal limits. That the dose makes the poison is, in other words, a too complicated a fact for Fraser and her ilk.

-       A 2013 report from Glaucus Research Group on Hain-Celestial teas. Well … note first that the Glaucus Research Group is a short-selling operation, and it produced the report explicitly in an attempt to short the Hain-Celestial stock! Glaucus didn’t even really bother to hide that their report was deceptive and aimed to harm the target company, if not downright dishonest.

 

So Fraser’s descriptions are a mix of the misleading and the downright dishonest. Now, it’s an iron rule of good discussion that you are not allowed to try to explain why someone is wrong before you have shown that they are, in fact, wrong. Fraser, however, is demonstrably wrong, so the why question is legitimate. And to begin to answer the why question, it is worth noticing that Fraser’s post is an example – a textbook example, even – of affiliate marketing: Fraser’s blog receives money from Amazon if people purchase the teas she linked to. Do you think she clearly informed her readers of that?

 

Diagnosis: So, probably a loon – a fashionable chemophobe – but definitely dishonest (indeed we suspect a sort of Belle Gibson-like attitude (though admittedly less obviously destructive): If her claims give her affirmation and income, she is more or less unable to recognize that she’s corrupt and that her claims are complete fantasy). And at least back in 2016 she had a lot of readers and a lot of influence.

 

Hat-tip: Snopes

#2863: Karen Frangos

‘Naturopathy’ is the term for a fuzzily delineated mass of woo, quackery and pseudoscience – mostly ineffective at targeting the health problems practitioners claim that their recommendations target, and often dangerous, especially when the practitioners have deluded themselves into thinking they can treat real diseases rather than any of the many fake diseases that are central to naturopathic mythology; that homeopathy is a major part of their ‘training’ is illustration enough. Naturopaths are, at best, confused but well-meaning people who weren’t qualified to get an education in real medicine, but many – if not most – are dangerously delusional.

 

But naturopaths, especially through their ‘professional organizations’, have been and are engaged in a concerted effort to expand their income base, especially by trying to fool clueless legislators to pass various bills that would license their profession and give it a misleading sheen of legitimacy and even to officialy recognize them as primary care practitioners (a horrifying idea). Their efforts have been frighteningly successful, and in no state more so than in Hawaii, where they enjoy a broad scope of practice, including prescribing privileges according to the naturopathic formulary. Indeed, through an agreement between the Hawaii Society of Naturopathic Physicians and the insurance provider Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), you may, in fact, choose a naturopathic doctor as your primary care physician, something that practicing Maui naturopath Karen Frangos, President of Hawaii Society of Physicians, calls “a big deal” because it “allows us all kinds of privileges in terms of being able to be part of a professional physician organization like all other medical doctors do”, including “potentially admission privileges in hospital settings.” She even asserts that it “helps close the gap in the shortage of primary care physicians in Hawaii.” It most assuredly does not, except perhaps on paper.

 

The challenge for naturopathic practitioners in Hawaii is of course that insurance companies tend to deny reimbursement for obvious nonsense, with the result that naturopathic care is generally not covered. As naturopath Marsha Lowry at Whole Body Wellness in Makawao and Hale Malu in Wailuku complains, insurance companies are “auditing our charts and kicking back things […] and saying it’s not MD standard of care”. Lowry’s practice offers patients a range of quackery, including homeopathy and IV nutritional therapy. Meanwhile, Frangos and her group have persistently tried to change the situation, of course, backing a number of bills, such as SB 318 (dead; sponsored by Russell Ruderman, Rosalyn Baker – who has elsewhere asserted that “our people don’t need to be treated by quacks”, suggesting that her quack detection abilities are poorly calibrated  – and Mike Gabbard), which would compel insurers to cover care provided by naturopathic doctors; SB 1034, which will lift the cap on the number of visits related to personal injury protection benefits provided through motor vehicle insurance; HB 1952, regarding network adequacy, and SB 2332 (dead; sponsored by Ruderman, Baker, Gabbard, Kalani English, Gil Keith-Agaran, Michelle Kidani, William Espero, Les Ihara, Clarence Nishihara & Brian Taniguchi), which would allow naturopathic doctors to prescribe controlled substances.

 

Diagnosis: Though she wouldn’t appear clearly delusional to anyone meeting her just briefly, that just makes Karen Frangos and her organization all the more dangerous. They’re thus far been frighteningly successful, to the detriment of us all.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence