HuffPo’s Dangerous Quacks, Hacks And Cultists
Salon has a great post by a doctor about medical quackery at the Huffington Post, where a columnist recently suggested colon cleansing could treat swine flu. This is the downside of HuffPo’s open, unpaid model — and culty recruiter.
Arianna Huffington is famously aggressive about recruiting bloggers from her personal life; in 48 hours last year she invited “someone at a book signing… a fifteen-year-old lecture attendee; a bookstore owner; the Asperger’s-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j.; a woman… who was trying to stop insecticide spraying.”
Huffington doesn’t pay the vast majority of her contributors, so they must make the work pay elsewhere, and this is where HuffPo gets itself into trouble. Kim Evans, who wrote about treating swine flu with enemas, uses the site to flack for her book Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse. New York City’s comptroller, William Thompson Jr., used his HuffPo blog as an extension of his mayoral campaign.
More alarming is the site’s relationship with Russell Bishop, like Arianna Huffington a disciple of the culty Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness and its worshipped leader John-Roger. Bishop co-founded the employee development firm Insight Seminars with John-Roger; Insight shares a “Spiritual Director,” John Morton, with the religious group and at one point its headquarters was monitored by John-Roger via widespread listening devices, according to a Los Angeles Times exposé.
Arianna Huffington has forced her staff to attend Insight retreats, according to insiders.
She’s also installed Bishop as HuffPo “Senior Editor at Large.” Bishop’s role, an insider tells us, is mainly to recruit bloggers to the Living section and shape its tone; it’s this same Living section that contains the pseudo-medical articles Salon’s doctor (and a great many science bloggers) complains about. This, perhaps, explains why the section has so many MSIA true believers.
Indeed, Huffington’s relationship to MSIA — she is an ordained “Minister of Light” in the group and loads her iPod with guided MSIA meditations — might also give a clue as to why her website has such a heavy focus on alternative treatments.
According to Life 102, a memoir by disaffected ex MSIA member Peter McWilliams, John-Roger discouraged traditional medical treatments, often “healing” people with his own spiritual powers. After McWilliams got sick in Africa, apparently from parasites, the guru advised him to go to a nutritionist rather than a real doctor. When he did visit a real doctor, John-Roger admonished him:
When I told J-R about my rapid healing thanks to Western medicine… he told me it was just “a coincidence” that I started getting better within twenty-four hours of taking the prescription. “The natural way was working, and you would have gotten better at exactly the same time because what cured you was the natural medication. The prescription drug just polluted your system, now I’ve got to work on taking all the toxicity of it out of your system.”
Now, thanks to the Huffington Post, we can all question Western medicine in this manner.
(Pic: Huffington and John-Roger at a 2004 book party.)
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
The problem is that sort of nutritional imbecility connects to people's feeling of bodily sanctity. I've dated girls into this crap, and it is cultish and irresponsible, but it triggers such pleasant mental vibes, and narratives, it sticks, and gets hits, too. Many great writers, historically, bought into unfalsifiable nutritional crap. I suspect all colon cleansing/clean body/clean mind crap is utter shite, but what can you do? Huffpo is propagating idiocy. Also all doctors up to the 20th century caused more harm than good, literally. ALL doctors. Most contemporary nutritional crap may be fallacious, but it does no harm, for the most part, except for faith healer horror stories. I'd personally love to take money from stupid people.
urbororr
@Cacy Forgenie: Peer review doesn't count when the "peers" reviewing it are quacks too.
http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/null.html
http://www.geocities.com/healthbase/null_hypothesis_laidler.html
It's pretty shameful how the alt-medders have so little recourse that they have to cling on to garbage written by fake PhDs. Almost pitiful. Almost.
I expect the next response will be that I have autism from all my vaccinations.
celery
@Dave J.: Maxon Crumb's HuffPo piece on how coprophagia prevents bedbug infestations was quite illuminating, though.
@BadUncle:http://www.healthe-livingnews.com/articles/death_by_medicine_part_1.html
Happy reading; this was peered reviewed and tested via SCIENCE.. Oooh big scary word.
Cacy Forgenie
@blix: Colon cleansing: it cleans out your wallet!
I’ll be damned; you mean to tell me colon cleansing doesn’t prevent swine flu! Seriously, how could shoving a hose up your ass, filing your innards with water and then- well you know the rest- not prevent a viral infection is beyond me. At least I will still gargle twice a day and continue to chew sugarless gum.
Nesbiteme
@Cacy Forgenie: Close to a million people die from prescription medicines? Okay.... who told you that? Is this an actual statistic? Is this people who died from mixing prescription medications, like idiots?
And as for medicine, well most general-level prescriptions are just extracts of natural plants, refined and concentrated. The reason we know they work is because they've been verified by countless trials and observations.
I continue to believe that there is something weird and kind of kooky about people who are obsessed with cleaning out their colon. They all remind me of R. Crumb's insane brother who would swallow string and the slowly poop it out (if you saw "Crumb," you know what I'm talking about--that dude was completely crazy and unnerving.)
@Cacy Forgenie: Why don't you do some research instead of throwing up popular published opinion?
You mean, "popular published opinion" that's based on observable evidence? You know - science? Maybe you should do a little research before making wildly insane statistical arguments. To let you off the google hook, here are some AMA-drawn numbers for deaths in America:
http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/30
@Cacy Forgenie:
Are you serious?? They have to advertise those side effects because some people have had them while taking the drug. It is a law. All that means is that someone had a bad reaction to that drug. It doesn't mean you will.
"ask yourself if an enema and a radical change in your diet and lifestyle would make you live longer"
Remove the enema part and I would agree with you. That is common sense.
I would also ask you to back up with numbers how many of those "million" people died due to misusing the medicine or would have died without it.
ConAir34
Set Ben Goldacre on them immediately! After all, he was able to purge the nutritionists from the Guardian!
We should question Western medicine any and every chance we get because Medications do pollute our bodies.
Next time you see a commercial for a med whose "side effects include suicide"; a drug thats been approved by the FDA for your consumption, ask yourself if an enema and a radical change in your diet and lifestyle would make you live longer. Close to a million Americans die every year from prescription medicine but you'd never hear about it because it gets buried by clueless mainstream media types like yourself, Ryan Tate. Why don't you do some research instead of throwing up popular published opinion?
Cacy Forgenie
Ah, Los Angeles...
@Queen of the Passive Aggressives: It's a way of reaching emptiness.
Subscribe to quackcast and enjoy.
@The Lone Scout: Public enema number one.
Minister of Where the Light Doesn't Shine.
The Lone Scout
Colon cleansing is a load of crap.
True story: My husband's ex once had her "inner evil" yanked out and thrown into a fire by a spiritualist. Not sure it was covered by bc/bs.
Queen of the Passive Aggressives
Insight: colon cleansing will definitley bring inner awareness.
Queen of the Passive Aggressives