Category: Health Fraud

Florida tells Brian Clement to stop practicing medicine

  Note: Also posted today is a brief profile of a new blog, Naturopathic Diaries: Confessions of a Former Naturopath, by Britt Marie Deegan Hermes, a trained naturopath who became disillusioned with her profession. I encourage you to have a look! The State of Florida has finally taken action against Brian Clement. David Gorski, Orac, and the Canadian media, especially the Canadian...

/ March 5, 2015

The Hippocrates Health Institute: Cancer quackery finally under the spotlight, but will it matter?

I first came across Brian Clement, the proprietor of the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida, a little more than a year ago based on the story of Stephanie O’Halloran. Ms. O’Halloran was—word choice unfortunately intentional—a 23-year-old mother of an 18 month old child from Ireland who was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in 2013, with metastases to her...

/ February 23, 2015

Lies, fraud, conflicts of interest, and bogus science: The real Dr. Oz effect

  I thought I’d written my final post on the Dr. Oz-fueled green coffee bean extract (GCBE) diet supplement fad. But now there’s another appalling chapter, one that documents just how much contempt The Dr. Oz Show seems to show for its audience, and how little Dr. Oz seems to care about providing advice based on good science. This week it was...

/ January 29, 2015

Detox: What “They” Don’t Want You To Know

Pseudoscientists HATE him! You won't BELIEVE what this pharmacist says about detox products!

/ January 1, 2015

Political Science: Chronic Lyme Disease

New York may soon join a handful of other states who reject science-based guidelines for the treatment of Lyme disease in favor of ideological guidelines based on the vociferous lobbying of patients and “Lyme literate” health care providers. Ignoring science is an unfortunate but well-known legislative phenomenon. I’ve discussed it a number of times on SBM, in the form of Legislative Alchemy,...

/ November 13, 2014

Naturopathy vs. Science: Fake Diseases

you consult with a naturopath, you could walk out diagnosed with something called Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome. But the naturopath would be wrong, because Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome is a fake disease. One of the hallmarks of alternative medicine is the “fake disease”. Fake diseases don’t actually exist – they are invented without any objective evidence showing that they are real. Fake diseases tend...

/ November 6, 2014

“Quackery: A $10 Billion Scandal”

Who would you guess authored a 250-page report which begins with this Preface? This report marks the culmination of an intensive four-year review of quackery and its impact on the elderly. . . As this report details, quackery has traveled far from the day of the pitchman and covered wagon to emerge as big business. Those who orchestrate and profit from the...

/ October 30, 2014

Lessons from the dubious rise and inevitable fall of green coffee beans

News this week that a randomized controlled trial of green coffee bean (GCB) has been officially retracted from the medical literature signals what is hopefully the end to one of the most questionable diet products to appear on the market in years. Plucked from obscurity and then subjected to bogus research, it’s now clear that the only people that actually benefited from...

/ October 23, 2014

Andrew Wakefield, the MMR, and a “mother warrior’s” fabricated vaccine injury story

As the time came to do my usual weekly post for this blog, I was torn over what to write about. Regular readers might have noticed that a certain dubious cancer doctor about whom I’ve written twice before has been agitating in the comments for me to pay attention to him, after having sent more e-mails to me and various deans at...

/ October 13, 2014

Yahoo News spews NaturalNews anti-vaccine (and other) propaganda

Yahoo News appears to have confused NaturalNews with actual news. It’s not. NaturalNews is the in-house propaganda organ for Mike Adams, whom I’ll introduce in a minute (although he needs no introduction for most readers here). A couple of recent examples:     A recycled story, over a year old, from NaturalNews, appearing on Yahoo News last week. It starts out as...

/ October 2, 2014