Last month, the director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Center, Daniel Neides, publicly condemned vaccines. This brought a quick response from clinic leadership that vaccination is effective and that Neides would be disciplined.

Good for them. However, the Clinic has become synonymous with the embrace of supplementary, alternative, and complementary medicine (SCAM). It makes an exception for the anti-vax positon not because it is a dangerous notion, but because of public relations and profit reasons.

The Neides screed was bad publicity for the Clinic because, despite the terrifying increase in anti-vaccine illogic, pro-vaxxers remain strongly in the majority. As to the profit motive, the academic and medical institutions that embrace SCAM tout it as an avenue for offering more choices to the customers. But the only alternative to taking a vaccine is to not take it. There is, for instance, no sage root recipe that these institution’s resident witch doctors offer to prevent Whooping Cough. Even hard-core anti-vaxxers usually have no product to sell, but instead encourage allowing children to “naturally” encounter typhus, mumps, and polio.

So while distancing his organization from Neides’ proclamation, Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove makes it clear that he and his doctors will continue to embrace SCAM.

He parrots one of the most hackneyed SCAM lines about mainstream doctors failing to practice preventive medicine. He writes, “Smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise were the leading factors that placed patients under my scalpel.” Clearly, no one would counter by recommending a steady diet of cigarettes, pork rinds, and the couch, so Cosgrove seems to take a reasonable position. 

However, he next writes, “The goal of the Wellness Institute is to focus on health care, not just sick care. Historically, health care has not done a good job of promoting disease prevention.”

Most untrue, insists Dr. Steven Novella of the Yale University Medical School. He writes, “All of the principles of preventive medicine, including the risks of smoking, the benefits of exercise, and the relationship of nutrition and diet to health and disease, were discovered and promoted within the paradigm of mainstream scientific medicine.”

Not only is Cosgrove’s accusation false, he uses that position as a justification for embracing quackery. To wit, Cosgrove wrote, “Acupuncture, yoga, Chinese herbal medicine, guided imagery, and relaxation techniques have scientific backing. We have heard from our patients that they want more than conventional medicine can offer and we believe it is best that they undertake these alternative therapies under the guidance of their Cleveland Clinic physician.”

Cosgrove does not provide us with any clinical trials or studies to support his claims about scientific backing. Acupuncture is in fact based on the quite unscientific notion of qi flowing through meridians. Yoga works well for increasing flexibility and can be an intense workout, but there is nothing to suggest it fights or prevents disease and sickness. Guided imagery and relaxation might well make one more mellow, but these techniques have no value when it comes to fending off eczema, dyspepsia, backaches, or any other condition.

Herbs might help in some situations, but ascertaining what effect they can have requires clinical trials and double blind studies, followed by an isolating of the active ingredient and putting it in cream, pill, or syrup form. Just swallowing some jasmine in hopes it will relieve rheumatism is guesswork.

As far as it being what the patients want, most businesses should indeed match their products with their customers’ desires. But medicine is an exception because the focus should be on making persons healthier. Doctors should strongly encourage patients to take what they need, not give them whatever unproven treatment they want. 

Cosgrove, however, happily does the latter. For instance, he embraces energy medicine, praising these “methods of healing that involve balancing and restoring the body’s natural energies for the purposes of increasing vitality, balancing emotions, and improving health.”

This describes vitalism, which reputable medicine discarded with the advent of Germ Theory. The clinic website specifically praises the Eastern faith healing practice or Reiki since its customers “find it helpful.” Promoting unscientific healing with anecdotes like this is a SCAM staple, and the clinic’s patients suffer for this line of thinking.

Cosgrove’s reason for offering these treatments is that “doing so is justified by the magnitude of the disease challenge.” Not so, says Novella.

“Needing to prevent disease does not justify embracing pseudoscience,” he writes. “As we solve simpler medical problems, we are left with more and more complex ones. This requires an increased dedication to medicine that works. We know what is safe and effective because of careful, rigorous, thorough, and unbiased assessment of all available evidence.”

Indeed. The standard for determining what works remains laboratory research, clinical trials, and the metadata of double blind studies. Despite Cosgrove’s insistence, that standard has not been changed to include a feel-good embrace of acupuncture, Reiki, untested herbs, and ocean sound CDs.

Leaky Gut Syndrome is a made-up malady in which germs and toxins allegedly enter the bloodstream through porous bowels, creating multitudinous health problems.

While some minor bowel conditions can be caused by increased intestinal permeability (“a leaky gut”), there is little evidence to suggest this permeability causes the significant medical issues some attribute to it. No scientific research indicates that Leaky Gut Syndrome exists or that the treatments recommended by alt-med peddlers would alleviate the symptoms they associate with it.

Dr. Stephen Barrett at Quackwatch writes that these treatments include dietary supplements, probiotics, and herbal concoctions. If one prefers ambiguity in their treatment plan, one alt-med practitioner recommends “restoring good balance.” Others suggest fad diets, such as gluten-free, low-sugar, no-diary, and anti-fungal varieties. Others diets contain restrictions, such as never having proteins and starch at the same meal. It’s now a hamburger OR fries for you, bud. Also, while a few folks have problems caused by gluten or lactose, most people do not and eliminating these from a diet may cause nutritional deficiencies and do more harm than good.

Promoters insist these remedies will combat Leaky Gut Syndrome symptoms like bloating, gas, cramps, inflammatory bowel disease, fatigue, joint pain, moodiness, weakened immunity, irritability, sleeplessness, eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, lupus, migraines, multiple sclerosis, depression, and even autism. Dr. James Gray, a University of British Columbia gastroenterologist, has noted that the idea of one syndrome causing such disparate afflictions is preposterous. “One diagnosis that explains arthritis, IBD, skin problems, fatigue, and more seems fictional,” he said. “Even more unrealistic is that all of these symptoms will go away if the patient just takes a few supplements and avoids certain nutritious foods.”  

Physicians sometimes detect increased intestinal permeability in those with Crohn’s disease or celiac and in patients receiving chemotherapy or who regularly consume alcohol or take aspirin. Celiac sufferers who attack their hangover with Excedrin must really be at risk. However, intestinal permeability is a symptom of these ailments, not the cause, and the only thing the permeability might lead to is an inflammation of the bowel walls. It won’t cause skin to redden or joints to ache.

Still, some patients who try these methods begin to feel better. That’s usually because of the health benefits of a sensible diet. One of the diets recommends limiting sweets and increasing the intake of bright-colored veggies and legumes. Replacing ice cream sandwiches and Pop-Tarts with green peppers and red beans is apt to make you feel better. But if a person really has a medical condition, treating a faux one with improved eating habits will cause the patient to delay seeking help for what truly ails them. And unless one has a sickness that necessitates removing a nutritious food from one’s diet, doing so is inadvisable. Such a suggestion is a good sign the speaker has no idea what he or she is talking about. And a certain giveaway is if they suggest the only way to improve the situation is to buy their herbs, shakes, and supplements.

Some alt-med practitioners give patients a test to determine if they have intestinal permeability by measuring levels of two indigestible sugars in their urine. Gray says it is unlikely to work but even if it does, is useless for establishing the legitimacy of the syndrome: “Using this test to diagnose Leaky Gut Syndrome would be like ordering a test to look for blood in the stool of someone with IBD and using a positive test result to prove that the bloody stools caused some other mysterious disease that in turn caused the IBD.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Mark Crislip at Science Based Medicine notes the complete lack of reference to Leaky Gut Syndrome on PubMed, indicating the corresponding dearth of clinical trials that have validated this condition and treatments for it. So if needing double blind studies and published papers to support an assertion that the syndrome exists, you’re out of luck. But if anecdotes from self-styled mavericks are what you want, we can set you up. 

Paleohacks.com, for instance, blames Leaky Gut Syndrome for causing “bad things.” The use of such medical terminology may explain why this work has yet to be published in scientific journals. Or perhaps it’s because where one would normally include the results of a double blind study, we instead learn that the syndrome’s existence is “backed by so much anecdotal evidence it is hard to ignore.” Either the author or his 8-year-old son crafted this nifty diagram to show how the Syndrome progresses:

The author writes that if toxins get through the intestines, the next line of defense is the liver, and if that fails, the conditions described in this post will result. But if your liver fails, your situation is more serious than insomnia or a headache. And if trying to establish that a medical condition exists, you need more than campfire stories about bad thingies.

We should usually defer to experts in their fields. If 99 percent of mechanics tell me my fuel injector needs fixed, I should have them undertake this repair. I should not seek that one outlier because I think the rest are beholden to Big Auto or because an online echo chamber convinced me my injector just needs sprinkled with a mix of high-octane gasoline and wheat grass.

But this deference only applies when persons are speaking to their areas of expertise. If 99 percent of those mechanics recommended investing in a certain equity fund, that suggestion would be much less persuasive. Following this advice would be committing the Appeal to Authority fallacy, which occurs when someone treats a person’s authority in an unrelated field as validation of something they believe in.

The website “Logically Fallacious” used the example of citing the Pope as proof that bread and wine turns into the body and blood of Christ when placed in a parishioner’s mouth. The Pope is an expert on matters related to the Catholic Church, but that doesn’t mean me knows anything special about chemistry, especially concerning an untested concept that would be at work were there any truth to transubstantiation.

Perhaps the most widespread case of this fallacy is the notion that Vitamin C will prevent or cure colds. This is based on a pronouncement by Linus Pauling, a world class chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1954. He also did pioneering work in molecular biology and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, making him one of only two persons to win a Nobel in two categories. New Scientist listed his as one of the top 20 scientists of all time.

When he touted the benefits of Vitamin C for fending off colds, believers presented these credentials as evidence for his position. But by venturing into anatomy & physiology, Pauling was going beyond his area of expertise. There’s nothing wrong with that, but support for his position needs to be based on the evidence for it, not on the fact that he won Nobel Prizes in unrelated fields.

Pauling exhibited two traits common to alternative medicine proponents: Subjective validation and an emphasis on anecdotes. After he was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, he began following a low-protein, no-salt diet augmented with vitamin supplements. He felt better after doing so, but rather than calling for this to be investigated via the Scientific Method he had used so successfully in his career, he announced that mega-vitamin therapy could cure sickness. Pauling’s observation that he felt better would have been a fine starting point – observation is the first step in the Scientific Method. But Pauling jumped straight to asserting the existence of a new field, “orthomolecular medicine.” This is the idea that varying the concentration of substances in the body can prevent and treat disease.

Dr. Paul Offit, one of the country’s foremost pediatricians, said Pauling’s unsubstantiated assertions, combined with his exalted position, made him “arguably the world’s greatest quack.”

Pauling earned this label with such positions that heart disease patients should forsake prescription drugs and surgery for lysine and vitamin C. While starting with colds, he continually expanded his list of illnesses he believed could be influenced by orthomolecular therapy and even suggested it could treat mental conditions. Quack quack.

While he published some studies that seemed to support his views, other scientists were unable to replicate them. Two of his studies centered on groups of 100 allegedly terminal cancer patients, with a claimed result that vitamin C overloads had increased survival as much as fourfold. A re-evaluation of this claim showed that the two groups were not comparable since the group plied with mega-doses of vitamin C was healthier when the study began.

This is typical of the findings that research Pauling’s claims. In an interview with NPR, endocrinologist Marvin Lipman, said, “There have been at least 20 well-controlled studies on the use of mega doses of vitamin C in the prevention of colds, treating the duration of colds, and treating the severity of colds, and in none has there been any good evidence that vitamin C in mega doses does anything.”

There are no properly-conducted clinical trials that suggest vitamin C will prevent a mild affliction like hay fever, a serious condition like cancer, or any malady in between. Some persons think that since some Vitamin C is good, lots of it must be great. But some studies suggest a small amount of beer can have health benefits and that’s no reason to suspect that three cases a week would therefore be extra beneficial.

With regard to Pauling’s cancer hypothesis, the Mayo Clinic conducted three double-blind studies involving a total of 367 patients in late stages of the disease. The studies found that giving patients 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C was no more effective than a placebo.

Pauling himself took between 12,000 to 40,000 milligrams every day before dying of, you guessed it, cancer. His ad hoc reasoning for this intensely personal failure of his hypothesis was that he would have gotten the disease earlier without the vitamin C overdose. This thinking means proponents always have an out. If no cancer develops, the treatment worked. If cancer does not develop, the patient failed to take enough of the cure.

Of course, vitamin C is still vital to good health. And because people are unable to synthesize it endogenously, we need to get it from outside sources. Fruits are better for this than supplements because our bodies absorb vitamins from food more efficiently. I know this because my mechanic told me.

There is plenty about water to be thankful for, what with it sustaining life, playing a central role in a warm shower, and being an indispensable ingredient in lemonade. And while less vital than water, it’s also easy to appreciate the value of batteries. Quaffing that lemonade is all the sweeter when a 9-volt powered video game is in hand. But it turns out that my appreciation for these two items may have still been inadequate. For they can be used to produce colloidal silver, which alternative medicine enthusiasts tout as a cure-all.

Today we will go over some of the criticism of mainstream doctors that is sometimes leveled by proponents of Supplementary, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine (SCAM).

Critics will sometimes use past science failures, real or imagined, to suggest that it can’t be trusted. But as comedian Dara Ó Briain noted, if science knew everything it would stop doing science. But gaps in knowledge cannot be filled in with whatever the listener finds most appealing.

When science screws up, it admits it. In fact, attempting to falsify a hypothesis is a cornerstone of the Scientific Method. Conceding one does not have all the answers and changing one’s mind when presented new evidence is better than wrongly insisting that one has all the answers.

For an example of the latter, I offer this Ken Ham Tweet: “I’m glad the Bible is not a textbook of science like those used in public schools, as it would change all the time. Many ideas have come and gone but God’s Word remains the same.” This word includes a declaration that the moon has its own light. There is nothing admirable in refusing to admit this is wrong. Science is a process, not a set of rules or dictates, and this fluidity is one of its strengths.

Yet SCAM proponents criticize science for what they call this wishy-washy nature, then turn right around and call science dogmatic, unyielding, and set in its ways. This more accurately describes reflexologists, chiropractors, and other SCAM practitioners, who continue to use methods that rely on meridians, auras, and chakras, all of which have never been shown to exist. Mainstream medicine does change when warranted, which is why it has embraced vaccines, CAT scans, anesthetics, antibiotics, and organ transplants.

Doctor detractors also frequently employ a number of ad hominem assaults. These may include charges of bias, being a shill, being closed-minded, or trying to protect the mainstream. None of this has any bearing on what is true.

Or we may see an ad blaring, “Doctors are TERRIFIED of this!!!” However, the first question to ask when trying to see a doctor for the first time is, “Is the doctor accepting new patients?” About half the time they aren’t. Most have more patients than they can handle and are regularly 90 minutes behind schedule by the end of their office day, at which point they head to the hospital for another round of work, although they should be checking themselves in for exhaustion. The only fear doctors have over someone using an unproven, untested miracle panacea stems from their human compassion about a patient treating a serious illness with wheatgrass and craniosacral rubs.

One of the more hackneyed claims is that doctors only treat symptoms, not the underlying causes. I’m not a doctor, nor do I portray one on this blog, so here’s what a genuine one, Harriett Hall, had to say about this charge: “If a patient has pneumonia, doctors don’t just treat the fever, pain, and cough; they figure out which microbe is responsible and provide the appropriate antibiotic. If a broken bone is painful, they don’t just treat the pain, they immobilize the fracture or insert a pin so it can heal. If a patient is in agony from pain in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen, they don’t just treat the pain, they try to figure out if the underlying cause is appendicitis, and if it is, they operate.”

The sad irony here is that a SCAM artist would give patients suffering from pneumonia, broken bones, and abdominal pain the same treatment. Applied kinesiologists, reflexologists, iridologists, and the like all assert that a certain body part is key to all health, and that manipulating the flow of Qi (which has never been shown to exist) can cure or prevent almost any malady.

A similar argument is that mainstream doctors fail to do anything to keep the illness from arising in the first place. Yet mainstream medicine offers vaccines, encourages annual checkups, gives preventive screenings, and advises breast cancer self-checks. Doctors also advise patients on lifestyle choices like diet, exercise, weight control, handwashing, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and helmet use.

Another SCAM tactic is to point to failings like adverse drug reactions, treatment complications, or blunders like amputating the wrong leg or sewing the patient back up with medical equipment inside.

But if safety is the overriding concern, medicine is the way to go. Medicine saves far more patients than it kills and many patients who develop complications would have died sooner without the treatment. These treatments will all have potential side effects, but the effects of doing nothing is likely worse. Doctors conduct a risk/benefit analysis when deciding which treatments to administer.

Finally, even if all these criticisms were legitimate, it would say nothing about SCAM’s efficiency and would be no reason to have your tonsillectomy performed by a shaman instead of a surgeon.

In the late 1980s, the word “explicit” became synonymous with the Tipper Stickers on tapes and CDs. By extension, it came to be associated with foul language. Yet explicit means clear and unambiguous, so words can be explicit without being profane and a person can be profane without being explicit.  

“You’re an asshole” is explicit, but so too is “I love guacamole.” In both cases, there’s no doubt about what the speaker is conveying. By contrast, a rambling, incoherent drunk could pepper his language with a profanity every fifth word and be the opposite of explicit.

“Explicit” bears an unwarranted stigma and another perfectly fine word that has been coopted by the agenda-driven is “holistic.” It essentially means considering the whole picture but has been embraced by pretend-medicine practitioners who claim they take a more complete approach than do their traditional medicine counterparts. They insist their holistic approach takes the entire patient into account, not just his or her symptoms. Like “natural” and “quantum,” holistic is a word with legitimate uses, but one’s quackery alarm should be blaring when hearing it in relation to supposed medicine.

Exactly what practitioners mean by treating the whole person is not exactly, um, explicit, yes that’s the word. I have spoken with several of them and found that even the most basic probing about their methods will produce sputtering and stammering. Most people who approach them are desperate for a fix that is quick, cheap, easy, and painless. So the practitioners are used to hearing, “What can you do for my knee pain,” as opposed to “How do you access the Reiki energy you say would cure my knee pain?”

When I have sought additional information on their whole person claims, I have received these types of replies:

“We look into what negative energy may still be trapped from an earlier trauma.”

“Your sense of well-being has been thrown off and we may need to make an aura adjustment to fix it.”

“We will look to optimize the conditions by which the body will tap into its natural ability to heal itself.”

 “Your mind, body, and spirit are connected and must all be regularly nourished or all three will suffer.”

This is usually followed by them flattening the straw man that they try and turn modern medicine into. They claim mainstream doctors treat only the symptoms, that they fail to consider the underlying reason for illnesses, that they don’t treat a patient’s mind and spirit, and that they don’t give patients the attention they deserve.

None of which is relevant to which of these is more likely to cure or mitigate a condition: A medical doctor grounded in Germ Theory and the Scientific Method, and who has access to vaccines, antibiotics, double blind studies, and prescription-writing privileges; or a naturopath who counters with agile fingers, sandalwood, and intuition.

Furthermore, the self-described holistic healers substantially misrepresent mainstream medicine, which does consider more than the disease, symptoms, and treatment. A medical doctor looks at a patient’s health history, habits, genetics, and state of mental health. He or she will also recommend a regimen based on diet, exercise, and healthy habits like handwashing that will lessen the chance of becoming sick.

Another tact under the holistic umbrella is to ponder why an illness arose in the first place. The correct answer is usually germs or congenital conditions, or perhaps something science is still working to unlock. But the alt-med peddler is inclined to identify the causative culprit as Qi blockage, toxin buildup, or mind-body disconnect.

The alt-med clinician and patient can spend weeks or even years undertaking a wild goose chase for the underlying cause. This plays neatly into the whole person ruse. The practitioner can probe, question, support, praise, amuse, sympathize, support, laugh, cry, and bond with the patient, doing everything for them except identifying a cure. The patient can love the practitioner’s attentive nature so much that they gloss over the fact that they are receiving their 20^th aura cleansing, ear candling, or spinal adjustment. This approach might help if the problem is loneliness, narcissism, or hypochondria, but not if it’s shingles, cataracts, or gout.

Finally, alt-med is usually far more narrowly focused than the stuffy old doctors it rails against. There are alternative medicine branches that are tailored solely for the eyes, ears, feet, hands, lungs, head, veins, muscles, spine, chakras, or meridians. And proponents of each will claim that their particular area, and theirs alone, is the key to all health. To be explicit, that’s bullshit.

The alkaline diet proposes to alter a person’s pH through food intake, making for denser bones, leaner muscle, and a healthier heart. Following the diet might produce these benefits, but it has nothing to do with your body’s pH level.

Various forms of the diet list alleged acidic and alkaline foods, with the healthier ones being heavily in the latter group. Hence, sticking to the diet might result in weight loss and muscle gain, but not in pH alternation. Your body has the same pH balance as Big Mac devotee Don Gorske and a raw food fruitarian.

It has been suggested that promoters of this diet use “acid” and “alkaline” because these terms are among the few middle school science words that almost everyone remembers. But most of us fail to remember much beyond that, which is why it’s easy to get away with this diet’s mistaken claims.

So, a little refresher course. A pH level measures a substance’s acidity and alkalinity. A pH of 0 means completely acidic, while a pH of 14 is all alkaline. A pH of 7 is neutral. Blood has slight alkalinity, with a pH between 7.35 and 7.45. Stomachs are acidic to enable the breakdown of food, and generally have a pH of about 3.5. Diet proponents are fond of pointing out that urine changes depending on what is eaten, but this applies to nowhere else in the body. Eating acidic or alkaline foods has no impact on stomach or blood pH.

Another half-truth is that cancer cells die in an alkaline environment. They do, but so does almost every other cell type. Jacking up one’s alkaline content to avoid dying of cancer would work because you would croak from healthy cell loss instead.

Many of the alkaline diet lists include obviously acidic food like citrus fruits in the alkaline column. Meanwhile, preservatives like sodium benzoate are listed as acidic, despite being slightly alkaline. The main point here is the proponents’ carelessness with the truth. More important than the foods being listed incorrectly is than none of them will change the body’s pH level. If your blood changes its acidity or alkalinity, it is quickly changed back to normal. For this, we should be thankful. Without the proper pH balance, enzymes would be unable to carry out needed chemical reactions.

For a simple example of how this works, hold your breath until you pass out. If I had a lawyer, he or she would likely advise me against promoting this, but I don’t, so take a deep breath and hold it. This will force carbon dioxide to accumulate in your bloodstream, turning your blood acidic. When you pass out, you will resume breathing again and the pH balance will return.  

Like many other items, this balance is the key. With our body temperature, 98 degrees is ideal and going 10 degrees in either direction means death. With pH, any change greater than .5 is likewise fatal. The difference is that no one is hawking a diet with the stated goal of substantially raising or lowering one’s body temperature.

If the alkaline diet worked as advertised, the crazy protein overload favored by bodybuilders would be fatal. They gorge on protein-infused muffins, chocolate bars, and shakes, pumping in more protein than their muscle-bound bodies can store. The excess protein is converted to an organic acid that, if permitted to stay, would sink the pH to dangerous levels. To keep this from happening, calcium leaves the bones and neutralizes the organic acid.

To see the results of the body losing its ability to maintain its pH balance, visit your nearest dialysis machine. Damaged kidneys are unable to regulate a bloodstream’s acidity. This means vital chemical reactions stop, toxins concentrate, and the result is usually death. If the alkaline diet worked, it would be one of the few times that another alternative medicine staple, the detox, would be possible and desirable.

There are a number of bogus cancer cures being marketed, but black salve is the only one that will sand your face off while you succumb to the disease.

Black salve is defined as an escharotic, which are topical pastes that burn skin tissue and leave a thick, black scar. Other than in sadomasochistic sessions, there would seem no reason to apply this.

The salve is best known in skeptic circles for the victims whose noses melted off after it was applied. Even in less severe cases, permanent scarring and skin damage has resulted. Its strength and purity is unknown, which highlights one of the problems with alternative medicine treatments. It’s possible that some alt-med products might have curative properties. But their active ingredient has yet to be identified, isolated, and its ideal dose determined and included in a pill, syrup, or cream. Perhaps sandalwood is effective at mitigating poison oak, but this needs to be tested according to the Scientific Method and in double blind studies, not passed around as holy writ in Tweets and in booths at paranormal fairs. Just citing anecdotes is inadequate and may cause someone to bypass a legitimate treatment.

With black salve, there is the additional danger of its potential to cause substantial harm. It is illegal to advertise black salve as a cancer cure, and there has been action taken against those who did so. This included Greg Caton, who was also charged with being a felon in possession of a weapon, and he was sentenced to 33 months. Part of this sentence was served on probation, so he took advantage of this to move to Ecuador, where he continued to market black salve as a cancer cure. When he was deported to the U.S. to serve the remainder of his sentence, Mike Adams at Natural News called this an FDA kidnapping. In reality, it was an arrest by Ecuadoran law enforcement with assistance from Interpol.

Adams endorses black salve and every other quack cure, and does so legally because he is not selling the products. It is repugnant but legal for Adams to declare, “Black salve has eliminated cancers in many people,” and then post links to other websites selling it. He even claims that swallowing a pea-sized portion of black salve for 20 days will forever banish the cancer.

The alleged mechanism for this miracle is that the salve’s corrosive agents will draw out the disease. If a tumor were limited to superficial layers of skin, it might be possible to burn it off with a corrosive salve. However, the product could also scorch the surrounding healthy tissue and result in unnecessary scarring. For superficial cancers, the cure rate with standard treatment is nearly 100 percent and there is usually no damage to nearby tissue. I had skin cancer on my face removed this way and was hoping for a scar so as to look tougher, but was confounded by modern medical efficiency.

There is no support for the claim that escharotics can draw out cancers from underneath the skin and even if they could, it wouldn’t impact cancers that had spread to other regions. In genuine skin cancer treatment, a surgeon removes the affected area, then a pathologist determines if the entire tumor has been removed. One will not receive this level of care from someone hawking black salve.

Enough about what black salve can’t do. For what it can do, we look to the book Natural Causes, which documented users whose noses or other appendages evaporated after use. This included Ruth Conrad, whose naturopath had her apply the slave to her nose because she feared a bump on it might be cancerous. She soon developed red streaks on her face, which her naturopath said was good since it looked like a crab, and Cancer is a crab in astrology. Slap on some more, he told her, and by the end of the week her nose had been replaced by a three-inch mass of thick, misshapen scars. It was the most offensive blackface since 19^th Century minstrels.  

In the wake of such spectacular failure, the likes of Adams will sometimes point out that chemotherapy can cause red scarring. But this is a false equivalency. We know how chemotherapy works and scarring can be an unfortunate, unsightly byproduct of a technique that has saved many. By contrast, black salve doesn’t work and has cured no one. Proponents of black salve never perform biopsies before, during, or after treatment. They conduct no long-term follow-ups, without which there is no way to determine efficiency or ultimate success. They do not make develop a hypothesis, make predictions on that hypothesis, experiment, analyze, or submit for peer review. Rather, they make baseless assertions like this one from Adams: “Black salve is powerful and safe and much better than any conventional treatment.”

He would have you believe this is the work of a wizard, and I’m being literal. He wrote, “Black salve is a magical cancer cure.” Never you mind about double-blind testing or long-term studies, Frodo, it’s magic.

But we cannot access this magic because it’s being squashed by the FDA. Adams, in fact, rejects all positions and statements from the FDA except for warnings on vaccine inserts.

He insists the reason black salve is being suppressed is because it is a natural herb. Yet half of medicines have a plant base, so pharmaceutical companies, government regulators, and doctors are not against considering treatments and cures derived from nature. For example, there has been research done on the potential medical value of primrose oil for eczema, cinnamon for blood sugar control, and clove oil for tooth pain. All of these have had mixed results and have yet to be confirmed as legitimate medicine. But they have been considered and studied, not hushed up and repressed.

I have backed up my belief with action, receiving traditional care for my skin cancer. Should Adams be hit with the same, I would hope for his sake that he would decline the black salve and only lose face in the figurative sense.