Andreas Moritz can’t fool them all

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Michael

Over at FTSOS’ sister blog Without Apology, Paula B. has posted an excellent response to Andreas Moritz’s bullshit and lies.

I was first intrigued by Moritz’s AMAZING LIVER CLEANSE book until I started looking at some of the incredibly broad claims he made, one of which really caught my attention. He claims that “Over 2/3 of the world’s population is vegan and has no access to animal protein. It [presumably this ‘vegan population’] shows no signs of such degenerative illnesses as heat disease, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis, etc.” p77

It caught my attention because my well-meaning but occasionally gullible fiance decided that this book was law and that he meant to change his lifestyle accordingly, and become vegan, because he felt so great while on the “cleanse.” Well, I didn’t feel great, myself, because I was lethargic and was craving protein and fat and felt like sleeping for a week–so this broad claim that 2/3 of the world’s population (roughly 4.5 billion, based on the 6,827,100,000 estimate of total world population of the US Census, June 4, 2010) is vegan hit me like a ton of bricks–SURELY I would have heard that before, having so many vegan friends, if that were the case. Thinking about the world’s cuisine, most countries have meat recipes–how could this possibly be true? Well, researching online gave me the impression that the world population of vegetarians (not even vegan) was closer to 2.5-5%, NOT 67%, so I started questioning what other “facts” were in this book that just a month before, we were so in awe of, since it sounded so scientific (we’re both kind of gullible when it comes to pseudoscience). I found lots of other “liver flush” recipes, and people raving about them, but also found they were saying the stones “melted” and were “squishy” which seemed to contradict what Wikipedia said about gallstones, and might instead be saponified olive oil from the cleanse when exposed to the bile salts. So I got very suspicious, and was wary, because, as I said, I was doing this “cleanse” too, and suddenly it didn’t seem like such a great idea. But (maybe to say “I told you so! to my fiance) I did anyway, though I did NOT take the last dose of epsom salts, because I was tired of being hungry and going to the toilet every 5 minutes–enough is enough! I know that people claim to gain wonderful benefit from it, and supposedly Moritz himself does it twice a year even though no “stones” come out. Me and my fiance didnt’ notice a lot of “stones” (pseudoliths?), either, though, but that might have more to do with how our bodies deal with 120ml of olive oil. We’ve both decided, however, that we can do without it for the future, and I’m so looking forward to eating ice cream again, despite Mr. Moritz’s dietary guidelines.

Furthermore, I wanted to add that the danger of unsubstantiated disinformation–if such there is–is that people often read things without considering their source, then remember the (dis)information, not remembering where they heard/read about it, making it harder to trace where certain ideas came from, and therefore examine them. I guess this is a lot of what “conditioning” is about, come to think about it. But just reading that one sentence (sited in my previous post) caused me to doubt this whole book that I’d mostly read, and had already internalized, to some extent, which astonishes me–who would have thought that “open-minded” somehow became “gullible,” but I think the connection certainly exists. Therefore, a lot of disinformation can be spread to people without a “bullshit meter,” making us vulnerable unless we doubt everything. It broke my trust in the author, that’s for sure.

Crazy how all those facts get in the way of Moritz and his shenanigans.

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Richard Maurer is a quack

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Michael

I was going over an old post when I realized I had spelled the name of a naturopathic quack incorrectly. I referred to Richard Maurer as Richard Mauler. Whoops.

Immediately after correcting his name, I did a quick search and found his blog. It’s a lot of the traditional malarkey from naturopaths: a lot of noise and a smidgen of Gish Gallop from non-experts who are out of their amateurish field. But this post stood out to me in particular.

In this case the study summary says it all.

“Vitamin D3 supplementation during the winter is linked to lower incidence of influenza A, particularly in specific subgroups of schoolchildren, according to the results of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial reported online in the March 10 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition”

Sounds reasonable enough, right? Of course it does. There actually is a study which draws that link. But that’s all it does. It cites its small sample size alongside the lack of testing for most compounding factors (such as antibodies) as weaknesses in the research. Anyone who concludes that there is anything more than a link between vitamin D3 and a decreased incidence in influenza A is a quack. And you all know what’s coming. But hang out, I’ll even quote the abstract from the study.

RESULTS: Influenza A occurred in 18 of 167 (10.8%) children in the vitamin D(3) group compared with 31 of 167 (18.6%) children in the placebo group [relative risk (RR), 0.58; 95% CI: 0.34, 0.99; P = 0.04]. The reduction in influenza A was more prominent in children who had not been taking other vitamin D supplements (RR: 0.36; 95% CI: 0.17, 0.79; P = 0.006) and who started nursery school after age 3 y (RR: 0.36; 95% CI: 0.17, 0.78; P = 0.005). In children with a previous diagnosis of asthma, asthma attacks as a secondary outcome occurred in 2 children receiving vitamin D(3) compared with 12 children receiving placebo (RR: 0.17; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.73; P = 0.006). CONCLUSION: This study suggests that vitamin D(3) supplementation during the winter may reduce the incidence of influenza A, especially in specific subgroups of schoolchildren.

It’s an interesting result, but no competent doctor is going to make recommendations based upon it. That isn’t to say doctors don’t have other reasons for recommending vitamin D; this just isn’t one of them. But does that stop the quack brigade from marching in the streets? Nah. Check out the title of Maurer’s blog post.

Vitamin D, as suspected, prevents the flu.

Christopher Maloney tried pulling this same garbage when he claimed black elderberry can “block” H1N1. Given the drubbing Maloney got back then in December, it’s curious that Maurer would repeat the same sort of anti-medical trash just a few months later. Vitamin D does no such thing. Maurer is either lying or incompetent. I won’t argue against anyone who claims he’s both.

It’s this sort of stuff that helps to solidify the naturopath’s leadership among charlatans.

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Save money, stop wasting funds on alternative malarkey

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Michael

If alternative medicine had any evidence about it, we’d all just call it medicine. Unfortunately, most of the people within the alt-scam are good at lying. They’re good at making people think they have something to actually offer, when in reality they’re a bunch of anti-science quacks. That’s why it’s unlikely the alt-med scene is where we can start saving funds for real scientific research. But it’s also why we should be saving funds there.

This past week, President Obama called on all federal agencies to voluntarily propose budget cuts of 5%. Well, Mr. President, you might be surprised to learn that there’s a way for you to cut the National Institutes of Health budget without hurting biomedical research. In fact, it will help.

Here’s my proposal: save over $240 million per year in the NIH budget by cutting all funding for the two centers that fund alternative medicine research–the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM). Both of them exist primarily to promote pseudoscience. For the current year, NCCAM’s budget is $128.8 million, an amount that has rapidly grown from $2 million in 1992, despite the fact that not a single “alternative” therapy supported by NCCAM has proven beneficial to health. OCCAM’s budget was $121 million in 2008 (the latest I could find) and presumably higher in 2010. That’s over $240M, not counting money these programs got from the stimulus package (and yes, they did get some stimulus funding).

Whereas anti-science, Republican/teabagging mooks like Sarah Palin can’t see the value in fruit fly research, pseudoscientific organizations like the OCCAM and NCCAM are managing to bleed funds from worthwhile scientific research (like that done on fruit flies). And they’re doing it on some of the silliest programs imaginable.

These two organizations use our tax dollars – and take money away from real biomedical research – to support some of the most laughable pseudoscience that you can find. To take just one example, NCCAM has spent $3.1 million supporting studies of Reiki, an “energy healing” method. Energy healing is based on the unsupported claim that the human body is surrounded by an energy field, and that Reiki practitioners can manipulate this field to improve someone’s health. Not surprisingly, the $3.1 million has so far failed to produce any evidence that Reiki works. But because there was never any evidence in the first place, we should never have spent precious research dollars looking into it.

It’s all a big, ugly scam.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Giberson gets it before Maloney

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Michael

Karl Giberson is one of those insufferable BioLogos accommodationists who loves to make up stuff about New Atheists. He has recently offered up a sort of apology for his crappy rhetoric. This comes after Dan Dennett pointed out that his attacks make him a fibber for faith.

As I reflect on the various exchanges [via email with Dan Dennett], I see no evidence that religious believers are standing on any higher moral ground. The vilification of the New Atheists is accompanied by caricature, hyperbole, misprepresentation (sic) and a distinct lack of charity.

On the Answers in Genesis site, to take one example, Ken Ham published a report about the atheist that Christians love to hate entitled “Dawkins Ranting in Oklahoma.” The audience was described as “mind-numbed robots,” and Dawkins’ ideas were sarcastically dismissed as communications from “an extraterrestrial.” Anti-evolutionary religion sites across the Internet make similar claims. But not all the charged-up rhetoric is on the lowbrow backwaters of the Internet. A passage from the 2007 book “Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion,” compares Richard Dawkins to a “museum piece that becomes ever more interesting because, while everything else moves forward and changes, it remains the same.”

Alas, I have to confess to having authored the museum metaphor. It was a cheap shot and, while hardly the cheapest of all possible shots, it was probably about as cheap as could reasonably sail past the staid editors at the venerable Oxford University Press. Certainly my co-author, the late Father Mariano Artigas, would have objected to anything less charitable.

…

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. So Dan, I was a faith fibber. Sorry about that.

My only hope is that this doesn’t get confused as a call for unneeded civility. I always like to see substantial, cutting arguments that address issues; Giberson didn’t always do that, instead making up whatever about an entire group of diverse individuals who aren’t even held together via a common philosophy. But I think he could have let his language soar, a la Hitchens or Dawkins or Myers, and not been charged as a Faith Fibber by Dennett.

I have to confess that the temptation to ridicule one’s debating opponents is all but unbearable, especially when playing street hockey on the Internet, where one must shout to be heard. In the past few months I have tried hard to come up with clever rhetorical attacks on Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and countless others whose ideas I was supposedly challenging. PZ once wrote the following about me, which I thought was pretty clever: “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter, and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth.” Of course, I responded to his evangelistic assault on me by calling him “Rev. Myers” in an essay on Salon.com. And so it goes. (I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers — you can’t win.)

If only his rhetoric could soar to such levels.

But notice his use of “Rev. Myers”. My, oh my. Who else has done that?

Dear “Reverend” PZ Myers,

How fitting that, three hundred years later, the witch trials continue. If you recall, it was the herbalists that were burned then as well. Your flock has spoken to me, Reverend Myers, with the shrieking common to all fundamentalist cults. I believe if you check you will find that fundamentalism involves a closed mind while doing science requires an open mind. It also involves a thing they call research.

Yes, yes. Christopher Maloney.

Now I understand why Maloney refers to me as The Maine kid with an English degree who can’t read: his writing reads like a child’s and maybe he’s looking for (made-up) excuses why everyone else does so much better. Honestly. Aside from the fact that he has qualified that an English degree is unable to read (which I suppose is true), his rhetoric is about as strong as his medical background. But then he’s taken all sorts of homeopathic classes. Maybe that explains why the strength of his responses are so diluted?

At least Giberson has figured out how the Internet works.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

‘The Dirty Dozen’

Posted on June 1, 2010 by Michael

Christopher Maloney has arbitrarily chosen 12 sites which criticize him, referring to them as “The Dirty Dozen”. I mentioned this recently. Now some of those sites are picking up on him.

I have been promoted to “The Dirty Dozen”, a minion, nay, a TOP minion of PZ Myers. You see, PZ Myers literally has MILLIONS of minions and for somebody (even a quack like Christopher Maloney, or even a stranger quack purporting to be Christopher Maloney) to recognise me as one of the TOP 12 minions is a singular honour.

I just want to take this time to thank my parents, without whom I would never have been able to achieve this honour. And I would like to thank my team and especially the crowd from #pharyngula who have made all of this possible. I would like to thank my lovely wife, whose support and assistance during this time has made all of this possible. And thank you all, for your loyal support. And last, but not least, I would like to thank Dr. PZ Myers. Without his inspiration and mentoring, I would surely never have been able to win this award. Thank you.

At least he’s grateful.

Of course, not all are so gracious.

So, finally over, right? Wrong. Chris has apparently been busy putting up crummy websites about how awful PZ and his “drones” are. I made it onto his list of The Dirty Dozen.

Hey, I’m on a list with Steve Novella! And that would mean something if I respected this Maloney’s judgment!

Listen, Chris. I’m glad you hate me. You are a cancer quack, the worst type of shit there is, harvesting the hopes of the desperate. Seriously, look at what this animal put on his website about how he “treats” cancer!

That blogger, Happy Jihad, then goes on to quote this from Maloney.

Claiming to treat something like cancer is a bit like claiming to treat something like colds, except in this case we have a different cold specialist for each eye, each ear, and every part of the nostril. Oncologists will rightly yell that I have little to no experience with your particular subsection of cancer and that might be correct. But my reply is that despite all the extensive specialization we have been unable to stem the tide of cancer. Perhaps a slightly wider view of the whole body system would be beneficial.

“The tide of cancer” is a phrase which means nothing. It’s intentionally ambiguous; the alt-med crowd doesn’t like to be pinned down and so use nothing-terms to avoid backing up anything they say. Does it mean survival rates? Does it mean frequency rates? Does it refer to carcinogens? It’s impossible to tell from any of this.

As for “a slightly wider view of the whole body system” being beneficial, this is more ambiguous language. It’s a promotion of vague alt-med ideas – none of which have significant supporting evidence.

At any rate, more websites are picking up on Maloney. The reason? He keeps chirping. I’ve said it so many times now, but I’ll say it again: He cannot make anything better. He can only not make it worse.

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

I just don’t get it

Posted on June 1, 2010 by Michael

I made issue of two errors in one of Christopher Maloney’s new, sort of weird blogs. First, he had a typo. I’m sure I have plenty of those; I really just wanted to see how quickly he would make a change to his site. My stats page has long made it obvious that he clicks and sends off each post I make about him, presumably because he doesn’t get that sitting down and doing nothing is still his best solution. As it turns out, it didn’t take him long to make the correction. Second, I also made issue of the title to a link where he said I could not “read science”.

Oh, and naturopaths apparently read science. Not scientific literature, raw data, or anything of that nature. They literally read science itself. It’s magical.

This prompted a change in that link title.

The Maine kid with an English degree who can’t read.

This is probably funnier than the way it was originally. The whole point of the first title was to say I cannot understand the Gish Gallop of citations Maloney provides when he’s trying to draw anti-science conclusions. He even goes so far as to claim I have an English degree (I don’t), specifically implying that my specialty lies outside the realm of science. But while he poorly worded everything the first time around, the point was understandable, if still false on a number of counts. Now he’s completely changed his point. It’s not that I don’t understand science, it’s that I’m illiterate. And to top it all off, he leaves the falsehood that I have an English degree.

But I don’t get this. I mean, I make one quick post to point out a number of flaws with Maloney’s work and the turn-around is impressive. Basically the next morning the guy has made a number of alterations, accepting my criticism as worthwhile. But then he still leaves several lies. He’s still saying I have an English degree. He still hasn’t changed his whine about his post being moderated, even though he knows it was caught by a spam filter:

Somehow I crossed an unseen boundary, and the following post was moderated out of existance. Myers later claimed on his blog that he has standard moderation and that he doesn’t check it. But I wrote to him personally the same day he moderated me out and received no reply. The only logical conclusion is that Myers found my posting too much of a threat to allow me to continue. I was crossing the boundary from quack to regular, and he couldn’t handle the transition.

While I’ve pointed out in the past that PZ has responded to a number of my emails, he certainly hasn’t responded to them all. I’ve managed to get his attention for a post mocking creationists, the Discovery Institute, and the validity of the term “new atheists” (a post which also showed up on RichardDawkins.net) as well as the whole Maloney-Moritz malarkey, but several of my emails have been ignored. And that’s understandable. Pharyngula gets millions of hits a year, PZ gets hundreds of emails a day. It is not a logical conclusion to say PZ did or thinks one thing or another just because he doesn’t give a personal response to every individual with an email account who wants to talk with him. Nobody moderated Maloney out of “existance” (how long until that one changes?), but basic truth isn’t his particular concern.

But what I really don’t get is that if a single, short post is enough for him to accept my criticism as valid, then why does it seem like my more lengthy posts refuting his entire profession go by the wayside? This really isn’t that hard: cite established facts with empirical evidence, use information that has the support of the medical community, and only offer patients and critics studies which involve more than 29 people. Hell, it would be nice if he just stopped citing studies which don’t even have the full backing of the original researchers, e.g., studies which say more research is needed before any firm conclusions are drawn.

But I’m asking for a lot from a naturopath.

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Because apparently it’s a slow news day

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Michael

My local paper, the Kennebec Journal, has an article today about ghost hunters.

Florence Drake, the Readfield Historical Society president, will be especially interested in the investigation’s outcome.

She and the historical society’s board heard an initial presentation of paranormal evidence last fall, but Drake said many of the recordings weren’t quite clear enough to discern exactly what was happening.

“Some of the spirits, or whatever they are, I’d like them to speak a little more clearly, more loudly and clearly,” Drake said, “something I could play to our members and say, ‘Here. This is going on.’ “

What a monumental waste of time. Drake didn’t hear anything because it’s all a big scam. Ghosts are as non-existent as God.

Fortunately, there’s a commenter with some good sense.

“There’s voices and stuff moving and unexplainable crap,” she said.” Such phenomena ARE explainable. Steatorrhea, for instance, is often the result of too many fries and too much fried dough with your KFC, especially if you or the kids suffer digestive problems or malabsorption syndromes. Porta-potties at state fairs are an excellent venue for investigating such paranormal occurrences.

What made me most happy about this was that it prevented me from needing to sign-in in order to leave a lengthy comment myself. But that happiness was quickly dashed when I read this:

Divinity (the first commenter), can you prove it’s NOT haunted or that spirits DON’T exist? I didn’t think so.

Oh dear. This old canard. Didn’t the Flying Spaghetti Monster answer this? Didn’t Sagan already do away with this bull? Hasn’t anyone taken a basic science class?

But no need to worry! That same user, Divinity, is to the rescue.

mdenis46 said… “Divinity, can you prove it’s NOT haunted or that spirits DON’T exist? I didn’t think so.” Remember that beautiful summer, Michael, when you had to spend the best days of it in class studying statistics while your mind was on the beach? While you were day-dreaming the instructor was explaining that you never prove the null hypothesis, i.e. similar to “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Personally, I not only believe in spirits, I like to imbibe them when socializing with kindred ghouls and ghosties. I used to love my visits to Mount Desert following those C.E. tribulations; Caspar was always friendly and could drink like a fish.

Burn.

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It’s so simpy!

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Michael

Instead of laying low like a good quack, Christopher Maloney has expanded his lies. He has made several sites, each one more poorly done than the last. And it’s all so perplexing. He cannot make anything better. We’ve already destroyed his web presence – “we” meaning the readers of this site, Richard Dawkins’ site, PZ Myer’s site, Respectful Insolence’s site, Dr. Novella’s site, David Colquhoun’s followers on Twitter, and the hundreds of other bloggers who picked up on the malarkey of Maloney. The best he can do is not make things worse. But fine. If he wants to keep expanding his Internet footprint (despite not really understanding how the Internet works), I’ll keep posting about him on my blog. After all, sure, I’m number 1-4 in Google for “Christopher Maloney Maine” when the quotation marks are included, but I’m only number 6 without them.

Of course, maybe this is just me making another simpy rant.

Previously, I have been bewildered by your need as individuals and as a group to attack me. But as I have come to understand you, it has become clear that you are sad and lost. Rather than engage in constructing the society that you would like to live in, you have given up hope and simpy rant from the sidelines.

I guess he’s made some progress. Instead of going to length to let all who visit his main website know that half the Internet has attacked him, he has moved everything several links away. But he loses points for directly addressing two distinct audiences on the same page.

Pharyngula: the Master Blog

Unless you happen to be interested in the opinions of the ignorant (basically internet graffiti), it is necessary to both moderate a blog and to respond to personal emails. Since PZ Myers does neither, his blog is the equivalent of a bathroom stall in terms of quality of information.

Yet if you search for replications of Myers’ blog posts, you will find several dozen individuals who are intelligent enough to copy his information but do not engage in any true evaluation. These are his “minions” people who either automatically post his ramblings or add their own profanity to his tirades.

I actually have several responses from PZ in my email. Hell, I even have a Cc response from Simon Singh during the height of his legal troubles. Maybe not everyone deserves a response about everything? Crazy, I know.

As far as moderating goes, no. Unless someone is spamming or posting something which may bring about moderation from the hosting site (e.g., porn), there ought to be free range for users. I can understand why a naturopath would be against this sort of open exchange, but Maloney is wrong on this one.

Next up, Maloney links to a number of “Myer’s Minions”, arbitrarily picking 12 (several of which I hadn’t even seen until just moments ago) and calling them “The Dirty Dozen”. I presumed they would all be “simpy” copy and paste jobs of PZ’s post. That would make sense since he apparently has excluded FTSOS from the list, right? Well, most are repeats, but a couple clearly are not. One is Dr. Novella’s post which goes to length to refute Maloney’s bull and misrepresentations. Another is A Hot Cup of Joe. This one gets cited twice, once for a recount of PZ’s post. The second time, however, goes to length to address Maloney’s malarkey.

So give this a moment’s thought (because Maloney clearly did not). He’s been trying to hammer home that everyone is just a minion or parrot of PZ’s, yet he includes sites which do no such thing. (Note, there is nothing wrong with the repeats; they’re why I’m back in business.) One wonders why, then, he would exclude the central person in the criticism of him and his profession – me.

But don’t worry! Under “Pharyngula” I finally get my mention. (Because that’s the location that makes the most sense. Sure.) I’m so flattered.

The Maine kid with an English degree who can’t read science.

First I was a freshman. Then I was 18. Then I was an English major. And now I have an English degree. Oh, and naturopaths apparently read science. Not scientific literature, raw data, or anything of that nature. They literally read science itself. It’s magical.

Here Maloney links to an old post of his which just repeats his lies and anti-vaccine positions. I’ve already addressed them.

My absolute favorite part of Maloney’s new quack outlet has to be this.

Did Myers basically turn over his blog to some Maine kid? Is he losing it? I haven’t seen a single “campaign” against the pope, child molesting priests, or specific evangelicals. I’ve been reading through Myers blog, and organizing attacks is not his style. He’s not a rabble rouser, he’s a rabble collector. More like a bar tender than a guru.

There are two possibilities here. One, Maloney is lying and he has not actually read through PZ’s site. Two, he has read it, but he just likes to lie that much. It’s tough to pick one.

When has a week gone by where PZ hasn’t attacked the pope or priests? Since when is attacking Graham and others not specific enough? Was Crackergate not a big enough “campaign”? Christ. This is such basic information about Pharyngula.

A lot of this junk has already been addressed, I know. For instance, Maloney is still insisting that he had a post which was not allowed. He has already been told several times that he triggered the spam filter because he included five links. The exact same thing would happened to him on FTSOS (and I think I’m being rather generous with how many I allow). But do any of these facts matter? Of course not.

So I will end with this final gem:

For the sake of clarity, I took on the role of Quackalicious and was clear about who I was. Almost all the posters maintain anonymity, allowing them to say things that they would never say to someone in public. The following posts should be taken within the framework of a black man walking into a KKK meeting. People were prejudiced against me from the start, and I had to keep my temper while having a deluge of profanity hurled my way.

Oh, totally. I can really see how the plight of a black man is so similar to Maloney’s. I mean, he was judged by the piss-poor content of his ideas, his lack of empirical evidence, his dishonest behavior, and his insistence on spamming up the place with his Gish Gallop routine. Really, if black people would have just stopped doing all that, well heck, we probably wouldn’t even have had a civil war.

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Christopher Maloney responds

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael

Maloney has responded to my complaint about his ‘practice’. I would gladly post it, but I’ve read some vaguely worded confidentiality information in relation to all the documents I have. I presume it pertains to the state, not me, but I’m going to side with caution. Besides, anyone can probably guess roughly what he has said. I will, however, mention that using one’s own mug as part of a letterhead isn’t the most snazzy or humble looking thing I’ve ever seen on a piece of paper.

Once I offer my response and Maloney becomes an agenda item at a board meeting, I will make everything public. And really, that’s the point. I have my fair doubts that anything direct will come of all this. After all, the State of Maine has already given naturopaths far more than they deserve as it is. (If only we could take after the states that have explicitly made their dangerous malarkey illegal. Sigh.) However, I am hopeful I can bring attention to the issue. I think that’s the key in fighting these people. For instance, take chiropractors. They’re basically quacks (sometimes with limited, legitimate physical therapy training – but usually not). Until a few years ago, even I thought they were honest practitioners with something medically valuable to offer. But then PZ Myers and others went out of their way to point out the quackery of these people. That helped to make me aware and completely change my perspective of chiropractors, thus saving me money and hurting their business scams. The same has to be done with naturopaths and most other alt-med people. Like I’ve said before, even my tiny campaign for the well-being of Augusta residents has probably resulted in preventing Maloney from writing more letters to the editor.

Now if Mainers can just get together and outright ban naturopaths, the state might be a safer place.

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Christopher Maloney tweets

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Michael

One of the successes of my original letter to the editor about Christopher Maloney is that it’s unlikely he’ll write in support of naturopathy again any time soon. If he does, he’ll just be re-raising his profile, prompting another, cutting letter from me, and probably getting a few more Google results for himself. I’ve said it several times: there are far more interesting topics for a blog, but so long as he continues to try and put his quackery out there, I’m not going to be the person who ignores it. Simply, I, quite honestly, do not want to see people going to a naturopath when they need serious medical attention.

And the thing is, I don’t think I’ve been unclear about any of this. Sure, I never said my paper is UMA endorsed, nor have I ever said I’m an English major, nor have I listed my age as 18 (I’m 25, as of Sunday, for those interested), and sure, Maloney inanely thought otherwise, but I still think there’s no excuse for not knowing that silence is the only reasonable option for him right now – especially since I’ve made the point over and over. Really, there’s nothing he can do to help himself at this point; he can only not make things worse.

So that’s why it’s so perplexing that Maloney would start Tweeting. So far he’s only had vague, new agey-sounding posts.

The impossible is simply a few steps removed from what you consider ordinary. Focused attention will draw it into your ordinary sphere.

So inspirational! But whatever. If he wants to spout truisms or whathaveyou, he’s welcome to do it; I can’t muster enough concern to make posts about each one. (Plus they’re even less interesting than the rest of his life.) I’m just interested to see how long until he starts disparaging vaccines while promoting black elderberry or some other dangerous malarkey that can have the actual result of making people less healthy.

Filed under: Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

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