#2716: Elizabeth Cox

“Sarita” Elizabeth Cox is a Mississippi-based naturopath, acupuncturist, “Mind Body Spirit Medic”, “Creator of Element Wisdom Card decks” and a graduate of the National College of Natural Medicine (accredited by the Council on Naturopathic Medical Education – not by anyone caring for facts or evidence). Her range of products – yes, she runs a commercial enterprise, of course – includes, in particular, “amethyst biomat treatments and rentals”. According to Cox, “[o]ffering far infrared heat waves and negative ionization, the amethyst biomat can be used for balancing and maintaining health as well as detoxification. It is paired with select meditative and brain wave altering headset audio to help change habit patterns, achieve relaxation and optimize health. As this quantum energetic is cumulative, three and six session packages are available. Amethyst can be added on to any treatment. Both the mini mat and full length professional mat are available for rental.” Yes, it’s quantum. But what can the mat do for you? According to Cox, it can do virtually anything you can imagine (we’re dealing strictly with imagination here): it purges toxins, pesticides and PCBs, it reduces stress and fatigue, it improves immune function and cardiovascular health, no less, it reduces allergy symptoms, and it even has anti-aging properties.

Now, there are plenty of quacks and holistic practitioners in Mississippi. The only reason we took note of Cox is that her name came up in connection with discussions about naturopathic licensing in the state in 2015. If that had proposal had passed, then Cox would have been among the practitioners eligible for licensing, i.e. an official stamp of approval and a sheen of legitimacy achieved through legislative alchemy.

Diagnosis: Cynics may suggest that the fact that there is a market for Cox’s product may be a relevant factor when considering how much trust you ought to put in humanity, and it’s hard to come up with a good reply. We suppose that Cox herself thinks it works, at least.

#2715: W. Lee Cowden

Fake diagnoses is a central feature of the quack industry, insofar it is often easier for quacks to push nonsense for fake diagnoses they have convinced your victims that they suffer from (e.g. through fake diagnostic tests) than to push nonsense for real medical issues: Of course mainstream medicine doesn’t have a cure for your alleged case of Morgellons; after all, you aren’t actually suffering from Morgellons – and no matter how much doctors try to empathize with whatever does indeed trouble you and no matter how much they are willing to work to find solutions, denying that you are suffering from what you have convinced yourself you are suffering from amounts to not taking you seriously, undermining your agency and paternalism. That’s a lots of motivation to seek out an alternative practitioner who’ll accept your narrative without resistance and has a range of nonsense products to sell you that just so happens to “help” with your disease, whatever it might be, too. And admitting, later, that the nonsense didn’t work, at least not beyond placebo, would be tantamount to admitting that you might have been wrong all along and the doctors right, and that would jeopardize your trust both in your intelligence and in your agency, so you really don’t want to do that.

Among the numerous fake diagnoses being assigned by quacks, hucksters and crackpots out there, Chronic Lyme’s disease is one of the most familiar. Yes: Chronic Lyme is a fake diagnosis, and it’s a lucrative one, with several practitioners – even real MDs – having emerged as “lyme literate” practitioners willing to offer you expensive nonsense for a disease you do nothave. William Lee Cowden, for instance. Cowden is a quack, and despite having been disciplined for quackery and for failing to keep appropriate medical records (an important failure if you want to be a quack and not held accountable) a number of times, he is, of course, still promoting quackery and false medical advice. Cowden is also an MD, which is useful as a means to earn the trust of potential victims and a sense of authority to audiences who have no expertise in medicine. He is probably most famous for having established what has managed to become one of the leading chronic Lyme treatments of our time, known the Cowden Protocol, a series of treatments consisting primarily of various herbal extracts, including cumanda and samento, as well as other nonsense interventions such as hyperbaric oxygen treatment and ozone therapy. It’s expensive, and it will do nothing whatsoever for your health.

Cowden’s quackery is not limited to chronic lyme quackery, however. Among other things, Cowden is also affiliated with the Cancer Free University, which is not in any sense a university but an online course (or rather a series of infomercials – unaccredited, of course) offered by something called The Vitality Network, costing $549, and consisting mostly of bullshit (it emphatically does not help you or anyone get cancer free). He is also the author and coauthor of numerous books, including Foods That Fit A Unique You, Create A Toxin-Free Body & Home Starting Today, BioEnergetic Tools For Wellness and (with W. John Diamond and Burton Goldberg) of a similarly evidence-light and cynical tome of cancer quackery called the Definitive Guide to Cancer (1997). In 2008, Cowden co-founded the Academy of Comprehensive Integrative Medicine, and he serves as the organization’s Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board; this is not an organization you should trust.

According to himself, Cowden “has pioneered successful treatments of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, autism, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and many other illnesses” and is “a recognized leader in the practice of evaluative kinesiology [a bit unclear what it is; probably a variant of this], electrodermal screening, homeopathy, orthomolecular and herbal therapies, German neural-therapy, electro-cutaneous stimulation, as well as fixed-magnetic, electromagnetic, and detoxification therapies.” Apparently, there are few limits to what kinds of fraudulent ridiculousness Cowden is willing to subject his victims to – and medical boards tend to agree with that assessment: In 1996, for instance, Cowden was placed on two years of probation for (a) injecting a patient with Hodgkin’s disease with a homeopathic product and (b) prescribing Cytomel (a thyroid hormone) to a patient “without appropriate indication or documentation” that the patient had hypothyroidism. And In 2002, he was fined $2,500 and placed on three years’ probation for failing to maintain adequate medical records or to obtain adequate consent related to his management of three patients, for whom he made up nonsense diagnoses and prescribed quackery.

And also according to himself (he is rather lackadaisical about keeping records, remember), Cowden has actually saved the lives of numerous patients whom real medicine (“allopathic medicine”, according to Cowden) had given up, and he is more than willing to explain how he managed to do so: He did it “by restoring hope in the minds of those patients and helping them to call on the power of God for their healing”. And that is presumably key to understanding the foundation for Cowden’s willingness to discard science, evidence and facts and embrace whatever nonsense he intuitively feels like embracing, regardless of what it might be: If he intuits that something might be profitable help, it must be the guiding hand of God at work in providing him with the intuition: Cowden firmly “believes that the source of all healing is the one-and-only living God and believes (and has overwhelming scientific proof) that the entire Bible is the inspired Word of God.” Fuck evidence.

Diagnosis: Quacks hardly come more offensively nonsensical and spineless than W. Lee Cowden – and being a true believer (he seems to be) has surely helped his marketing. His career has apparently been a lucrative one, and he continues to enjoy quite some influence, to the detriment of us all.

#2714: Thomas Cowan

From "The heart may not be a pump"

Once upon a time, Thomas Cowan was a licensed medical doctor. He renounced his license in 2020 as one of few MDs who were actually sanctioned for COVID misinformation, after having already been put on probation in 2017 for prescribing non-approved medicines without telling his patients that they weren’t approved and without reviewing the patients’ medical file or even seeing them. He currently works as a “health coach” – and he still sells worthless supplements through his website, of course. Now, Cowan hadn’t in fact been practicing anything resembling medicine for decades before renouncing his license, having instead run an alternative medicine practice in San Francisco. Indeed, among all people with genuine education, few have renounced evidence, reason and accountability more thoroughly than Tom Cowan, and he is probably one of the craziest and most unhinged conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience promoters in the US today. He is also a member of the board of directors of the fundamentalist quack-organization the Weston A. Price Foundation, and has been vice president of the possibly even more dingbat Physicians Association for Anthroposophical Medicine. 

According to himself, he surrendered his medical license because “I simply see too much to be willing to function as a physician in the medical system at this time”. In an ideal no one would buy that bullshit: What Cowan discovered was the formula for wealth and success in the alternative medicine world, the same used by every successful quack from Dr. Oz to Joe Mercola, and for that strategy to work, you need to circumvent the barriers posed by things like ethics and accountability and facts and science and evidence, and put your (or your customers’) faith in conspiracy theories instead. The formula consists of convincing his audiences that modern medicine makes them sick or doesn’t work, that only brave maverick doctors like himself are willing to stand up to the establishment, and then push them on to your online store selling worthless dietary supplements. (He also makes money off his SubscribeStar account.)

Germ theory denialism 

For starters, Cowan is a germ theory denialist. Yes, such people exist: people who deny that pathogens cause diseases – it is, in fact, a major strain of alternative medicine thought. Few of them have medical degrees (or basic literacy, so Cowan is a curious exception. According to Cowan, viruses don’t cause disease but are instead waste from cells that are poisoned by … unnatural lifestyles and toxins, mostly. And given that disease, according to Cowan, is not caused by pathogens but by toxins, you should definitely avoid drugs, medical treatments, and – in particular – vaccines, which are unnatural and therefore toxic. It’s not particularly difficult to discern the vastness of the conspiracy theory needed to sustain Cowan’s narrative, and Cowan of course doesn’t hesitate to endorse it all with the religious fervor such pseudo-religious fundamentalism such edifices invite.

Some of the poisoning, though, comes from electromagnetic fields, such as 5G wireless communication.

Covid conspiracy theories 

If you deny that pathogens cause disease, you’re sort of predisposed to accept some alternative facts about Covid-19, too. Cowan goes, in general, for incoherent nonsense glued together with belligerent, vague and incoherent conspiracy theories. And he apparently has an audience: Cowan was one of the primary promoters of the idiotic idea that 5G wireless communications, not viruses, were responsible for making people sick, and his video presenting his lunatic take on it (5G causes “bad DNA”, which causes illness), made at an anti-vaccination conference organized by something called the Humans for Humanity Coalition and featuring Andrew Wakefield (of course), was promptly pushed by a multitude of Facebook accounts (lots of bots) and quickly gained a widespread audience; it was viewed more than 650,000 times on Youtube before being taken down, for instance, and was pushed by a number of dangerously intellect-challenged celebrities such as Keri Hilson, Woody Harrelson and John Cusack, and Cowan’s audiences caused significant damange. There is a timeline for the spread of the video here. It is pretty dark.

The video itself is a litany of nonsense, of course, claiming in passing e.g. that

• the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic coincided with the worldwide introduction of radio, proving that radio waves caused the outbreak. Accuracy is not Cowan’s strong suit; the first commercial radio station started broadcasting in 1920, which is, chronologically, very close to the Spanish flu pandemic, but not in a way that supports Cowan’s narrative particularly strongly.
• the Boston health department tried to experiment with the 1918 flu virus by purposefully infecting healthy people with the mucus of infected patients. There is no evidence for any of this, and it doesn’t make sense given that the Boston health department, like all health departments, were fully aware of the virus and in general how viruses work. Illuminatingly, the only source for the story on the Internet is Cowan himself.
• A big piece in Cowan’s box of evidence is the point that Wuhan, China, where the outbreak started, was the first city to be covered by 5G. It would had helped Cowan’s case if the claim was remotely true rather than bizarrely random, which it isn’t. He didn’t try to explain why Iran or Malaysia, which do not have a 5G network, was so severely hit early in the pandemic when Cowan made his video either. We strongly suspect there is a conspiracy theory for that.

Cowan has otherwise written numerous books promoting fringe woo and pseudoscience, including (of course) anti-vaccine nonsense. His books include:

• Human Heart, Cosmic Heart: A Doctor’s Quest to Understand, Treat, and Prevent Cardiovascular Disease (2016). Chelsea Green Publishing
• Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness (2018), Chelsea Green Publishing, which lays out his germ theory denialism with a particular focus on how to make dangerous choices regarding sick children: “We (modern doctors) have forgotten (or never learned) that acute disease – disease that is typically self-limiting and usually accompanied by fever, rash, and pus – is the primary way the body rids itself of unwanted toxins or other substances,” says Cowan, not mentioning the obvious reason why modern doctors do not learn that.
• Cancer and the New Biology of Water (2019). Chelsea Green Publishing.
• (with Sally Fallon Morell) The Truth About Contagion: Exploring Theories of How Disease Spreads (2021). Skyhorse.

Yes, several of them have been published by Chelsea Green. There is a decent portrait of that particular publisher here. 

Tom Cowan is probably unrelated to Stephen Cowan, another MD who has thoroughly fallen down the rabbit hole, is affiliated with the quack organization New England School of Acupuncture, and who offers courses (and books) on things like how “to apply the principles and practices of Chinese Medicine to help children manifest their destiny”.

Diagnosis: Gibbering lunatic, but that is no longer a barrier to gaining a significant amount of followers. This is a dark timeline.

 Hat-tip: Alex Berezow @ acsh.org

#2713: Brooke Covington

Brooke Covington is a lunatic moron and longtime minister at Word of Faith Fellowship, a deranged cult in Spindale, North Carolina, founded by former math teacher Jane and Sam Whaley – indeed, the Word of Faith Fellowship has been described as “one of America’s most dangerous cults”. Covington received some national attention after she led a beating of a former member to expel said ex-member’s “homosexual demons” in 2013. The effort involved subjecting the former member to slapping, punching, choking and “blasting” – intense screaming – for two hours. Apparently blasting is a commonly employed procedure at the Word of Faith Fellowship church, and often involves people holding the victim of the procedure down. It sounds as stupid as it sounds vile, but these are vile and stupid people. Covington came to the conclusion that the victim was demon-possessed because “the way you hold your hands, the way you cross your legs, that's all homosexual devils and we are going to get it out of you.” The 2013 case wasn’t the first time the cult had tried to cure homosexuals in that manner.

The effort landed the congregation in some legal trouble, and the cult engaged in extensive efforts (involving social workers and attorneys – Chris Back and Frank Webster – affiliated with the cult) to coach congregants and their children on what to say to investigators and to discredit the victim.

Diagnosis: There are, of course, plenty of these cults around populated by vile and deranged loons and their victims. It is hard to do aim at comprehensiveness for an encyclopedia of loons without covering some of them, even though most of them – like the present one – are boring and scary at the same time.  

#2712: Dennis Courtney

Given variable legal standards, dubious stem cell clinics have popped up like mold outside of the US, giving rise to the phenomenon known as stem cell tourism. But US jurisdiction is not particularly tight either, and plenty of for-profit stem cell businesses are operating within US borders, too; most of these facilities are selling treatments without evidence to support them and with mostly unknown safety, but people in their target audiences are often in desperate situations and hence relatively easy prey for such business ventures.

Dennis Courtney is an associate of Edward Kondrot, the self-declared “leading homeopathic ophthalmologist” and a prolific purveyor of nonsense, pseudoscience and quackery. Courtney is in charge of clinical operations at Kondrot’s Healing the Eye & Wellness Center in Florida, where you can be exposed to stem cell therapy using cord stem cells. According to Kondrot “the FDA has approved Cord Stem Cells”; he doesn’t mention that the product he uses is different from the product the FDA approved for a very limited and specific set of conditions that are not identical to the conditions Courtney and Kondrot are targeting. And that really shouldn’t be a minor issue: Kondrot is deliberately engaged in deception about what he is using, and the fact that he feels the need to mislead should really tell you a lot (what Kondrot and Courtney are using is some non-FDA-approved products from something called Burst Biologics.) At least as scary is Courtney’s claim that “we can’t harm you with stem cells. These cells are of such a level of age that they cannot differentiate to any harmful cells. They can’t become a cancer, for instance. That can’t be done with the kind of cells we use. We can only do good. We cannot harm.” Well, there are serious safety concerns with the products that are tested and approved; Courtney’s and Kondrot’s are neither.

Courtney also does podcasts and presentations at homeopathic and integrative medicine conferences about the perceived magic of stem cells. Though Courtney is, indeed, an MD, his commitment to real medicine and patient safety has clearly vaporized somewhere along the way.

Diagnosis: No, it isn’t funny. It is sad, offensive, and potentially dangerous.

Hat-tip: SciencebasedMedicine

#2711: Ian Coulter

We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: Naturopathy is bullshit. Ian Coulter, PhD, is nevertheless a firm defender of naturopathy. And the disconcerting thing about that, is that Coulter is a senior health policy researcher at and (long-time chair and) codirector of the RAND Center for Collaborative Research in Complementary and Integrative Health, a branch of the RAND corporation. He is also professor emeritus at UCLA and research professor at the Southern California University of Health Sciences, and no: his background is of course not in medicine.

 

Now, the RAND corporation has, indeed, done a lot of solid stuff, too, but in 2008 the prospect of receiving money from billionaire quack advocates became too hard to resist, so they teamed up with the legendary pseudoscience and woo-promoting Samueli Institute to create a center devoted to bridging the gap between mainstream and “complementary medicine” (ostensibly through research), which might sound nice to those who pay too little attention to realize that mixing science-based approaches with pseudoscientific handwaving based on anecdotes is not going to create a better end result. Of course, one substantial barrier to achieving the desired integration is mainstream medicine’s focus on rigorously testing whether the treatment options they offer are safe and effective, and the regimes the RAND center is willing to consider (like energy chelation) are clearly unable to pass such tests; the RAND center accordingly seems to recommend using a double standard: mainstream medicine can continue to use their standards, and alternative practices be measured by the standards they are able to pass, such as handwaving and flimsy anecdotes – and popularity, of course: One of Coulter’s crucial arguments for why quackery should be integrated with mainstream medicine is that customers are willing to pay for it: “We know that patients appreciate CAM, we know they give it very good satisfaction scores, we know they're willing to pay for it [just like psychics, tarot readers and MLM products!]. We should start paying attention to this. This is worthy of attention.” 

 

Despite having a background in sociology rather than medicine, Coulter has, according to his bio, long “experience conducting both qualitative and quantitative research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and integrative medicine (IM)”; he has at least published a number of books and articles (in sociology journals as well as very dubious altmed journals like Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine). And there is money to have thrown at you for such things; Coulter is for instance a recent recipient of a Center of Excellence grant “to study the appropriateness of care in CAM”, a grant to “study the use of Crowdsourcing with CAM patients”, a DoD grant to “conduct comparative effectiveness trials of chiropractic in military facilities”. We’re confident he’ll get the results he wants; CAM research usually does.

 

Diagnosis: A central and powerful figure in the movement to undermine the safety and efficacy of medical care in the US, no less. Coulter has spent a lot of money to try to free medicine from the constraints of accountability and evidence, and given the slew of licensures of naturopaths and their ilk across the US, he hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful.

#2710: Matt Couch

Originally a fringe internet activist, Matt Couch – “Christian, Father of 2, Investigator, Founder The DC Patriot & America First Media Group, Razorback, Truth Slinger” according to himself – rose to prominence for his promotion of Seth Rich murder conspiracy theories and has subsequently risen to become something a leading Qanon conspiracy theorist and promulgator of conspiracy theories about Covid and Covid vaccines.

As for Seth Rich, a relatively anonymous campaign worker for the National Democratic Committee who was killed in a botched robbery in 2016, Couch and fellow deranged loon Ed Butowsky promoted, without a shred of evidence (or coherence), numerous elaborate (silly) conspiracy theories, including the idea that Rich (rather than Russia) was one of WikiLeaks’ sources in a large leak of Hillary Clinton-related emails and that he was murdered on the orders of the Clinton family – apparently, according to Couch, Rich’s brother was the brains behind the effort, a claim that landed Couch in some legal trouble; Couch ultimately had to officially disavow the whole thing. His audiences, however, do not exactly consist of people who give much weight to facts, reason and accountability, so demonstrating, with the help of facts and reason, that Couch is full of shit hardly made a dent in his appeal.

Persistently running the conspiracy theory tracks, Couch spent much of 2020-2022 amplifying and spreading misinformation, pseudoscience and bullshit about Covid and Covid vaccines (“Dr Vladimir Zelenko: Covid Is A BioWeapon, The Poison Death Shot Is Premeditated Mass Murder And We’re In World War III”) through his DC Patriot website and on Twitter, where Couch enjoyed a large number of followers (presumably including a not insubstantial number of bots) ready to swallow up his nonsense, including the claim that the flu vaccine increases the risk of coronavirus by 36% – it doesn’t, of course, and it doesn’t require very much knowledge of, well, anything to recognize that someone (one Benjamin Krause, in fact) must have badly misunderstood something fundamental in order to make such a claim; Couch, of course, reacts to reason as if it were poison. His Twitter account was ultimately suspended for promoting false Covid information.

As a curiosity: In an interview on “The Todd Coconato Show” in 2021, Couch argued that people should avoid the vaccines and rather expose themselves to weakened versions of the virus (“self-inoculation”) to achieve protection, like they did during the Revolutionary War – a.k.a. get vaccinated.

Couch was also an invited speaker at the 2020 AMPfest, a conference at Donald Trump’s Doral Hotel designed to bring together Trump supporters, anti-vaccine activists and QAnon conspiracy theorists. On January 6, 2021, he was also one of the March for Trump/Save America speakers.

Diagnosis: Yes, there is more, though at this point, Couch is just one of many dingbat conspiracy theorists mainstreaming misinformation on the rigthwing clown circuit – he has a substantial number of followers, but we expect that most of them would be just as silly and crazy if Couch hadn’t been around.