#1421: Felicia Briones-Colman

Felicia Briones-Colman is another MD who has turned to the dark side, yet again reminding us that MDs are not scientists, and are not necessarily trained in anything remotely resembling evidence assessment or proper methodology. Briones-Colman is, in fact, so extreme in her rejection of evidence, facts, and science in recommending healthcare strategies that she has contributed to NaturalNews. Yes, that NaturalNews.

As she will point out, Briones-Colman is not only an MD; she is “board certified in both Internal Medicine and the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine,” the latter of which is nothing to be proud of. Nonetheless, she recommends that you should “[c]hoose a doctor certified by the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine” when you need holistic medical help. We don’t want to share the market, do we (it’s not like the board in question bases the certification process on evidence and reality in any case)? According to her, “[t]he practice of Integrative Medicine i[…] requires knowledge about alternative therapies that are scientifically proven to be effective and which can cause harm,” which is inaccurate in that any treatment that is “scientifically proven to be effective” is by definition not an alternative therapy, and seeing a board certified alternative practitioner rather than a non-certified is advisable to make sure that you receive the most efficacious woo and avoid harmful practices; “… a doctor who is board certified provides assurance of excellence,” says Briones-Colman, a claim so stupid and crazy it easily justifies an entry in our Encyclopedia.

Diagnosis: A useful reminder that a proper appeal to expertise on the efficacy of medical treatments is not the same as an appeal to your local MD. That’s the best I can manage to say about her.

#1420: Joel Brind

Joel Brind is a professor of human biology and endocrinology at Baruch College, CUNY, a pro-lifer and a by now famous pseudoscientist. He is best known for his association with the discredited link between abortion and breast cancer; it was Brind’s 1996 meta-analysis that popularized the idea (and got him famous). That study, which despite Brind’s strongly worded conclusions showed a barely statistically significant increase, was not particularly professionally done, and the results were quickly discredited (summaries here, here and here). What makes Brind a pseudoscientist is not the initial claim – the hypothesis really wasn’t that far-fetched given the available information – but that he has continued to push the link after it has been thoroughly refuted (yet another study discussed here). At present he is primarily pushing it through his organization “The Breast Cancer Prevention Institute”. He has been active in the anti-abortion movement (e.g. through Christ’s Bride Ministries) for several decades.

Though his original analysis appeared in a respectable journal, his later papers on the same theme (presumably because they didn’t manage to overcome the refutations using proper methodology) was published in places like the pseudojournal JPANDS, the house journal of the crank organization Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Brind, on his side, remains contemptuous of mainstream medical professional organizations and journals, accusing them of conducting a deliberate cover-up with the goal of “protecting the abortion industry”, asserting in print that the National Cancer Institute “… is just another corrupt federal agency like the IRS and the NSA.” Ah, yes, but of course; that’s the proper reaction when everyone else refutes your claims. Conspriacy mongering is, of course, as much a staple fare among this particular group of science denialists as it is among other groups promoting similarly refuted ideas.

To further cement his reputation as a pseudoscientist, Brind is also a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s anti-evolution petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

Diagnosis: Though he has credentials, Brind is not reluctant to let any commitment to truth, evidence or sound methodology fly when truth, evidence or sound methodology doesn’t serve his ideologically driven purposes.

#1419: Peter Brimelow

Peter Brimelow was born in Britain, but is currently American. He used to have a career as a writer and editor for various more or less respectable magazines (no, he really did have a quite substantial influence on American and Canadian politics), until he doubled down and founded the webzine VDARE, a platform for Brimelow’s anti-immigration views, white nationalism and “racial realism” (other topics covered seem to be just so much window dressing, though they do seem to want to take credit for popularizing the idea of a War on Christmas). VDARE takes it name from Virginia Dare, the original anchor baby (a point that seems to be lost on them), and is designated as a hate group by the SPLC – Brimelow’s response was to call the SPLC “the notorious Treason Group.”

Brimelow’s main target is, unsurprisingly, multiculturalism, and as he put it in his talk “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” at the 2012 CPAC (oh, yes), diversity is the greatest threat we are facing and “immigration is polluting America.” The host of the session, Robert Vandervoort, former leader of the White Nationalist group Chicagoland Friends of the American Renaissance, thanked CPAC for hosting the panel despite the work of “leftist thugs” trying to “shut down freedom of speech and freedom of assembly,” since not giving people a platform to speak is obviously a violation of their constitutional rights.

As expected, Brimelow is a fierce critic of “Obama’s racial-socialist coup,” and fears that the U.S. is doomed to face a “minority occupation government.” In fact, according to Brimelow, the Democrats’ supposed support of an “invasion” and “colonization” of the US by non-white immigrants is treason because it reduces the percentage of the white population. Accordingly, he called on the Republican Party to start focusing on becoming the party of white voters by attacking “ethnic lobbies,” affirmative action, bilingual education and “taxpayer subsidies to illegal aliens.”

And the connection to the War on Christmas? In his book Alien Nation, Brimelow wrote that “weird aliens with dubious habits” were damaging the “ethnic core” of white Christian America and were part of a “multicultural struggle to abolish America;” seeing the trend toward saying “happy holidays” as part of this sinister movement, he decided to do something about it: an annual competition in the magazine for the “the most egregious attempt to suppress Christmas.” It should be mentioned that the idea had already been promoted by the John Birch Society for years.

In 2015 Brimelow, in a Martin Luther King day speech, argued that states must secede to protect “white rights” (i.e. the right not to have to see black people). Instead of promoting unity, Brimelow said, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day “has just turned into anti-white indoctrination.” And unless “cultural Marxists” who are behind “political correctness” and “the war on Christmas” are resisted, he claimed, the U.S. will collapse. Again. With regard to the Ferguson protests, he argued that force is needed to counter the inherent “criminality in the American underclass”.

Steve King is a positively giddy fan of Brimelow’s.

Diagnosis: Dude, this guy’s views on immigration are too extreme for the WND. He nevertheless maintains quite a bit of influence.

#1418: Lee Bright

Ah, the state legislatures. (Yes, again). This time it’s South Carolina’s turn, since that’s where you find Lee Bright, representing the 12^th district (Spartanburg and Greenville) since 2008. In fact, Bright enjoyed a career as a village idiot even before he got elected – more precisely as the resident village idiot on the Spartanburg School District Six Board from 1999 to 2008. As a school board member, Bright called for teaching creationism in school science classes instead of evolution, explaining that “they’re teaching evolution right now in school, and it’s only a theory.” No, he didn’t even bother to try the deceptive approaches recommended by the Discovery Institute.

As a state senator Bright is just a little bit more extreme on most issues than your crazy uncle, leading to posturing events that usually ends in him submitting quixotic bills just to prove a point to his constituencies, presumably (as well as to move the overton window, perhaps). As an outspoken opponent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, for instance, Bright sponsored a bill that would criminalize the act. (Yes, Bright is a proponent of the unconstitutional idea of state nullification). It’s all a fight against tyranny, you know, and Bright later warned that the IRS “Brown Shirts” might start enforcing Obamacare with semiautomatic rifles, adding that FEMA is a scam and disaster relief is much more efficiently managed through private donations.

In 2013 Bright announced that he’d seek the nomination for US Senate (against Republican Lindsey Graham; his competitorsBill Connor and Nancy Mace deserve separate entries), on a platform not only asserting that income tax is something out of Nazi Germany and opposition to women with nice nails and pocketbooks getting food assistance (able-bodied food stamp recipients “shouldn’t eat” and the social safety net is “the role of the church”), but – it seems – on refighting the civil war (“If the Tenth Amendment won’t protect the Second, we might have to use the Second to protect the Tenth”). It’s all Lincoln’s fault, really, that Bright is no longer able to enjoy genuine liberty – in particular, Lincoln’s Revenue Act of 1862 “was when government started becoming God and taking over this country.”

He has also warned his fans that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor might want to dissolve the states, and that Obama wants to be king and that Americans today are in fact under “the chains of slavery.” Indeed, he reassured them that in a conflict President Obama wouldn’t send troops to South Carolina because armed forces from the state would turn against him. “I’ve talked to plenty of soldiers,” said Bright. In 2015, after landing a spot as one of three state co-chairs of Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, Bright assured his followers that he was ready to stave off Obama’s invasion of South Carolina.

His opposition to immigration is of course based on the idea that “a lot of these folks from terrorist nations are coming in on student visas,” and that the Muslim Brotherhood may be behind the “invasion” going on at the southern border, and he has promised to oppose the “indoctrination” of the “homosexual agenda.” In fact, Bright has taken up what he seems to think is an urgent and desperate fight against the the scourge of gay “recruitment” that apparently has become a major problem in South Carolina – Bright (and fellow state senator Mike Fair) is deeply worried for instance that the “homosexual agenda” has “seized the educational establishment” and has gone on “full march in our institutions of higher ed and we’ve gone from education to indoctrination.” Keep in mind that this is the guy who would prohibit teaching evolution in public schools in favor of creationism.

Of course, like most of these people, Bright claims to revere the constitution, but has apparently never read it. Nullification is one thing, but Bright also argues that federal judges who disagree with him should be impeached.

Here is Bright on marriage equality, the Confederate flag and possession by the devil. It’s strikingly unhinged, even for Lee Bright.

Diagnosis: Hysterical moron, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from winning a political race, it seems. Dangerous.

#1417: Josephine Briggs(?)

Josephine Briggs is the Director of the Nactional Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM; currently the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)), former senator Tom Harkin’s heavily subsidized heartchild devoted to studying woo. Now, at least in its infancy NCCAM applied rigorous scientific methods to their studies, which of course meant that little or no actual support for altmed quackery would be forthcoming. Harkin and others were predictably disappointed, and over the years the NCCAM appears, perhaps as a result of political pressure, to have adopted more “flexible approaches” – as one of the original Board Members, Barrie Cassileth, put it, “The degree to which nonsense has trickled down to every aspect of this office is astonishing ... It’s the only place where opinions are counted as equal to data.”

Although some of the previous directors of NCCAM have been pretty rigorous, with Briggs the political sponsors seem to have found the kind of leader they wanted all along. And Briggs appears to have no more than a half-hearted intention of letting reality determine NCCAM’s recommendations. For instance, one great thing about doing research on woo is that one can ignore the base-rate fallacy and credulously push any false positive one wants, and Briggs seems intent on trying that one.

Briggs’s favorite trick, however, is the false balance gambit, and she seems genuinely unaware of what the problem with that gambit from a critical-thinking related point of view might be. So, for instance, although she has been willing to listen to scientists and evidence, she also listens to homeopaths (and promotes a balanced assessment of their claims). It was apparently in response to a meeting with scientists that she produced a post on the NCCAM blog entitled “Listening to Differing Voices”, in which she distinguished between CAM advocates, on the one hand, and skeptics who reflexively dismiss CAM and want to eliminate it, on the other, “open-mindedly” concluding that hers is the only reasonable position between them, and pointing out that: “As I’ve stated before, our position is that science must remain neutral, and we should be strictly objective. There are compelling reasons to explore many CAM modalities, and the science should speak for itself.” The problem, of course, is that the science does, indeed, speak for itself, and has decisevly refuted the very hypotheses Briggs wishes to take seriously. Indeed, her response to data seems to have become reflexive: the continued refutation of altmed claims continue to be met with Briggs’s calls for “rebooting” the debate and a “nuanced and balanced” conversation.

And, heck, there is a good argument to be made that she is utterly incompetent at what she is trying to do – if by “what she is trying to do” we mean trying to determine whether treatments work rather than making savvy political moves (as in this, since this) Here, for instance, she discovers Bayesian probability and fails so miserably that it would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so sad because she is actually in a position of power and influence.

Indeed, Briggs has lent her imprimatur, along with those of the NIH and the federal government, to the formal celebration of quackery titled the “25th Anniversary Convention of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians.” Moreover Briggs nominated Jane Guiltinan, former President of the AANP and Dean of Naturopathic Medicine for Bastyr University, to membership of the National Advisory Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NACCAM). Guiltinan, according to herself, “emphasizes the concepts of treating the cause of a problem, supporting the body’s own healing process and encouraging patients to create their own wellness even in the face of serious illness. Dr. Guiltinan uses nutrition, plant medicine and homeopathy [!] in her practice and believes that air, water, food, touch, love and laughter are some of the most powerful healing agents.” The NCCAM has previously nominated homeopath Brian M.Berman to their advisory committee.

Antivaxx sentiments are widespread in the altmed community, and one would think that NCCAM – if it were a responsible organization – would help defuse the antivaxx myths. Briggs has officially agreed to do this, but the NCCAM has abundantly failed to follow up on that promise.

Diagnosis: It could be argued that Briggs may not qualify as an outright loon, and that as a director of NCCAM she is put in something of an awkward position, but she is certainly a great facilitator of and legitimizer of quackery; given her position the only respectable stance would have been a staunch defense of reality, critical thinking and evidence. By hedging on those points she is really causing a lot of harm.

Addendum: Oh, the hell: Josephine Briggs is an advocate for anti-science and a loon. Her series – published as a supplement Science, no less – “The Art and Science of Traditional Medicine Part 1: TCM Today—A Case for Integration” (with contributions from a number of powerful quacks and pseudoscientists such as Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO and Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Executive Publisher of Science) is so fundamentally dishonest that we cannot give her the benefit of doubt anymore. It is, however, worth quoting the goal of the series (a series of issues, in fact):

“… we present a series of articles making a case for the integration of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into modern medical practice. From the new WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy to the application of systems biology in studying TCM, we aim to highlight the potential for creating an integrated, network-based health care system. The next two issues will cover herbal genomics and highlight the importance of quality control, standardization, regulation, and safety for traditional therapies. An overview of indigenous medicines in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and the Americas will also be provided.”

Notice what’s missing? That’s right. They will not consider the evidence or scientific foundation for TCM. Apparently that doesn’t matter. TCM is popular, and that’s enough, ostensible becuase if people want to use TCM then it works for them and we all create our own realities and energy flows and vibrations and so on and so forth.

Josephine Briggs is a disgrace to her profession, to decency and to civilization.