I waited.
I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever celebrities suffer from serious diseases cancer and especially when they die, he is there, looking for any opening to blame their suffering and death on that evil "allopathic" scientific medicine. And there were two major deaths last week. Both were big, but one was really, really big. I'm talking Elvis big. Best of all for him, one of them died of cancer and the other died mysteriously.
I knew my quarry would have a hard time resisting one of them, but I knew there was no way he could resist the death of both.
That's right. You guessed it. That quack promoter supreme, that man for whom no quackery is too wild or improbable to embrace wholeheartedly, that master of hyperbole and lover of bad Hitler analogies and even worse cartoons, Mike Adams, creator of NaturalNews.com, has decided to apply his investigatory prowess to the recent deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, labeling them "the latest celebrity victims of big pharma." Let me tell you, it's vintage Adams, which means it's vintage alt-med crazy turned up not just to 11 but to 20 and beyond:
(NaturalNews) That Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett both died in the last 48 hours is shocking news to many, but it's not nearly as surprising as the fact that they were both killed by Big Pharma's toxic drugs.
Do you understand why, although I despise the message Adams promotes, I still can't help but check his website from time and derive enormous entertainment value from the sheer looniness found there. Looniness like this:
Michael Jackson, we now know, died from an injection of Demerol given by his doctor -- a man who is now the subject of an LAPD manhunt. There is little question that the injection of Demerol -- a potent pharmaceutical -- caused Jackson's death. Chalk it up to yet another tragic loss of a hugely inspiring artist who has become a victim of the pharmaceutical industry and overzealous medical doctors.Demerol, by the way, is a highly-potent opioid drug that's also highly addictive. And yet it's being prescribed (and injected) by doctors with the full support of the FDA, the pharmaceutical industry and the conventional medical community. It is nothing less than amazing that mild drugs like marijuana remain outlawed while potentially deadly painkiller drugs like Demerol are openly injected into people by doctors.
Actually, it's nowhere near certain that this is what happened. In fact, it's highly unlikely, and, as we all know, Jackson's doctor ultimately did turn up and cooperate with authorities. Still, I myself did wonder about reports that Michael Jackson was being injected with intramuscular Demerol. It's something we used to do for pain commonly when I was a resident, but Demerol went out of favor, at least in surgical patients, a long time ago, mainly because it has a lot of side effects, including hallucinations, seizures, and arrhythmias, among others. It's possible that a mixture of prescription drugs could have triggered Jackson's cardiac arrest. However, even if Demerol were the cause of Jackson's death, it would be nothing more than an indication how easily some physicians can enable celebrity drug addicts, not that the pharmaceutical industry caused Jackson's death.
In a second article, Adams goes even further into his usual insanity. He declares that Michael Jackson was chemically manipulated for profit:
Although I have no specific proof of this, it is my belief that pharmaceuticals became the tools by which Michael Jackson's handlers were able to chemically abuse him in their quest for further profits. With the right drugs, even a frail man can be artificially pumped up with enough energy to make a stage appearance -- although at great cost to his vitality. And some of the drugs he was put on have the effect of turning you into a mind-numbed zombie, primed for mental manipulation.
I was shocked at this. No, I wasn't shocked that Adams ghoulishly and opportunistically uses Michael Jackson's death to castigate big pharma and rant about "toxic" drugs. That's par for the course, and I'd have been surprised if Adams hadn't ranted about that. No, what shocked me is that Adams actually admitted that he had no evidence for his belief. What shocked me is that he didn't pull all sorts of coincidences out of his posterior as "evidence" for his paranoid delusions. What shocked me is that he didn't make stuff up out of whole cloth as "proof" that his speculation is correct. Even more shockingly, he actually attributes some blame to Michael Jackson himself:
Certainly, Jackson himself is not free from responsibility in all this. His seemingly fanatical pursuit of cosmetic surgery might be called a form of self-inflicted medical abuse. Some of the drugs he was taking were no doubt pursued as a way to alleviate the possible pain and scarring resulting from so many surgical procedures. And yet for that, he can only blame himself, as those procedures were voluntary (and entirely unnecessary).
I don't think I can recall Adams ever attributing any blame to any "victim" of big pharma. Could it be that he's actually admitting that people can make their own choices? What a radical concept! After all, in every previous ghoulish appropriation of a celebrity death, Adams always paints the "victim" as helpless and hopelessly duped by the minions of big pharma.
Which is what he does with Farrah Fawcett:
Farrah Fawcett's death was far less sudden than Jackson's, but no less innocent. She was killed by chemotherapy -- a toxic cocktail of chemicals pushed onto patients by oncologists who deceptively call it "treatment."
Against the advice of many in the natural health community, Fawcett gave in to her doctors and agreed to be poisoned as a treatment for anal cancer. But what she didn't know is that one of the most common side effects of chemotherapy is more cancer! And after subjecting her body to more chemotherapy, it wasn't long before Fawcett was diagnosed with liver cancer. (Chemotherapy causes terrible harm to the liver, heart, kidneys and brain...)
The stupid, it burns. No, it goes beyond that. This is the proverbial black hole of stupid whose woo-gravitational field attracts all vestiges of science, rational thinking, and intellgence, sucking them into its insatiable maw and destroying them.
Here's a hint, Mike: Fawcett did not have "liver cancer" as a result of chemotherapy. She had anal cancer. She was treated with the standard therapy for anal cancer, specifically a protocol of combined chemotherapy and radiation known as the Nigro protocol. Unfortunately, she recurred, apparently both locally and in her liver. In other words, she had metastases from anal cancer in her liver. The chemotherapy didn't cause them. Rather, Fawcett had the misfortune of having been a patient for whom the Nigro protocol failed. Unlike Adams' quackery, which according to him virtually always works (never mind that there's no evidence that it works at all), conventional cancer therapies don't always work. Unlike the quacks whose quackery Adams advertises, doctors practicing science-based medicine don't promise that they can cure everyone with no side effects.
It's also rather telling that Adams neglected to mention that Fawcett pursued various "alternative" cancer treatments rather vigorously. She headed to the German Alps to visit clinics renowned for their woo. Admittedly, she also pursued experimental therapy administered by Professor Thomas Vogl, who used high tech methods to ablate the tumors in her liver and deliver chemotherapy directly into them. None of it worked. Sometimes nothing does. Remember one of "Orac's laws"? Specifically, I'm referring to the observation that, whenever a believer in alternative medicine uses both scientific medicine and alt-med and gets better, inevitably she will attibute her good fortune to the alt-med, not the science-based medicine? There's a corollary to that law, namely the reverse: If a patient using both alt-med and scientific medicine dies, it's always the fault of the scientific medicine, particularly if chemotherapy was involved. Always. Heads I win, tails you lose, just like this:
Cancer doctors operate with that sort of clever deception: If the cancer goes away, they claim the patient was "treated by the medicine," but if the patient dies, they claim "the cancer killed them." It's pretty easy to claim success if you take credit for the wins while fleeing the any responsibility for the losses.
Actually, alt med goes beyond that. If the cancer goes away, thanks to chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation but the patient is also using woo, then obviously the woo cured the cancer, but if the patient dies then obviously it must have been the chemotherapy. They don't even claim that it was a treatment failure and that the cancer killed the patient. They can't admit a treatment failure because to do so would be to admit that their quackery doesn't cure patients 100% of the time. So it must have been the evil chemotherapy that interfered with the "natural remedies" and "destroys the immune system" because to say otherwise would be to admit something Adams doesn't want to admit.
Finally, no Mike Adams rant is complete without his most despicable ploy of all. As with Tony Snow, Adams goes beyond blaming chemotherapy and modern medicine for Farrah Fawcett's death. He has to go beyond that to playing the "if only" card. "If only" Farrah had used his "natural cures," she'd still be alive:
Back to Farrah, while many of her friends and supporters say her battle with cancer was "an inspiration," let me be the first to publicly state that to me, poisoning yourself with toxic chemicals is NOT inspiring, no matter how much suffering you go through. I do not believe that people should be given special recognition for pain and suffering they consciously choose to inflict upon themselves, especially when all that suffering is easily avoidable. It would have been far more "inspiring" for Farrah to choose healing remedies instead of deadly poisons.
Had she chosen natural remedies, she could have skipped all the pain and suffering, restored her immune function, reversed her cancer and gone on to live a much longer and more abundant life. (It would have saved her a small fortune in medical costs, too...)
But she didn't choose natural health (nutrition, vitamin D, immune support, superfoods and medicinal herbs). Instead, she chose poison. As a result, her decision to ravage her body's health through "slash and burn" medicine ultimately cost more than her body could afford to pay.
If only Farrah had chosen Adams' quackery, she'd still be alive! Really! How does Adams know? Evidence? What evidence? Don't ask. Just trust Mike Adams. Of course, Mike Adams again neglects to note that Farrah didn't exactly eschew "natural" therapies. After all, she went to woo-friendly clinics in Germany. But it couldn't have been the cancer or the woo that killed Fawcett. Oh, no. Not to Adams. No, it had to be the chemotherapy, and it had to be that evil scientific medicine and big pharma that duped Fawcett:
The medical industrial complex, in other words, has conspired to keep the American people uninformed and diseased, making them dependent on the for-profit medical system that dominates modern medicine. That Farrah Fawcett actually made a conscious decision to allow her body to be destroyed by chemotherapy is an indication of just how insidious and manipulative our conventional medical system really is.
His solution? Read NaturalNews.com and learn about quackery like the Gerson therapy. Yeah, that'll save your live if you have cancer. You might as well do nothing at all. Actually, with something like the Gerson therapy or the Gonzalez therapy, you'd probably be better off doing nothing at all. At least then you wouldn't be expected to be doing coffee enemas and sucking down hundreds of supplements a day while eschewing adequate therapy. You might as well put a gun to your head and pull the trigger in slow motion.
Certainly that's what it feels like at times reading the idiocy that is Mike Adams.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I visited Adams' site just once, to see his reactions to the Daniel Hauser case. I could not stay there more than 5 minutes. The ignorance and paranoia hurt my brain too much.
If Adams' magical medicines worked, then we would all live to be 200 years old, or more. Unfortunately, most of seem destined to cash in sometime before our 100th birthday. Farrah's death seemed all but certain; she was very ill and undoubtedly knew she would die soon --hence, her marriage to longtime companion Ryan O'Neal just before passing.
Jackson's death was a surprise, on the other hand. And we still don't know the COD. Maybe it was Demerol (when I was in university, we used to joke that the campus health center would prescribe Demerol for anything, even a hangnail). Or maybe it was some other condition that a second autopsy will reveal. Jackson was apparently not well, and his health care seemed pretty woo-filled.
Jackson was 50. Fawcett was 62. I'm in the middle, and very happy my not-so-woo-filled life continues.
Deepak Chopra was also on CNN within hours of the announcement of Jackson's death going on about it. I didn't bother to listen, but I'm sure his comments were completely in line with his usual razor-keen insights...
Having had intramuscular Demerol injected for pain, I'm having a hard time picturing anyone using it recreationally. That ten minutes or so of paralysing nausea that kicks in about ten minutes after you have the shot seems like it'd be a powerful disincentive, as would that it doesn't seem to relieve pain, per se, it just sort of makes you care about it less. That's, frankly, a damn boring high with a big opportunity cost. Heck, if I were going to abuse prescription pharmaceuticals, I'd opt for Ativan, all the way. At least it's kind of fun...
It's hard to think why anybody today would be taking, or prescribing, Demerol.
In terms of the "chemo killed Farrah" I'm trying to understand. If she had never taken any treatment at all, does he think Farrah would be alive now?
People seem to have a hard time comprehending the seriousness of cancer. This stuff kills you. However, it seems that, since you can't actually see any physical effects (until they collapse), that people don't realize that it is killing the body. No, it's not that invisible cancer that is the problem, it is those nasty chemicals.
He hasn't blamed Billy Mays' death on science-based medicine yet? Bet it won't be long.
It seems like the famous are suddenly dropping like flies. Three dead in only a couple days? Yikes.
No, Billy Mays died from years of Oxyclean abuse.
How do you get 3? Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, and one of the stars of "My Little Margie."
Depending on what you call famous, I'd say that's at least four, and maybe even 5.
(We forget that Ed McMahon died all of, what, 5 days before Billy Mays?)
Sorry. I've been busy moving so I missed some of this. We're at 5? Wow.
Orac's law of Alt-Med is correct. Mike Adams and Deepak Chopra are both parasites who feed on confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
Caveat emptor.
I guess he missed this story:
Neb. inmate says Zoloft contributed to murder
By JOSH FUNK , 06.28.09 (AP)
www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/06/28/ap6595306.html
Randall Robbins, who is serving time in Nebraska for strangling his girlfriend to death in 2002, has sued Pfizer and Dr. Richard Wurtz of Lincoln, NE, for $2 million each for emotional distress and physical pain and $1 million from each for every year he spends in prison. Robbins alleges that the Zoloft made him do it. (Also, I think he should sue Pfizer for false advertising -- despite having taken Zoloft, he's really depressed over his girlfriend's death.)
Orac, you really ought to let Adams know about this case. Maybe he could appear as an expert witness.
Chopra was on Olbermann the day Jackson died and he was bemoaning the fact that Jackson had not heeded his advice and cleaned up his drug overuse [at the Chopra Clinic, of course]. Chopra seemed to blame the number of Dr. Feelgoods that had overprescribed meds like Xanax and Demerol. Chopra was hardly out of the mainstream.
don't forget David Carradine. he died a few weeks ago, so there have been 6 celebrity deaths in june.
i still haven't got the stomach to visit naturalnews dot com. there is only so much stupid i can take. it is nice to read Orac's synopsis of stupid. after i build up a tolerance to stupid, i might go to the site.
don't forget David Carradine. he died a few weeks ago
Yes, but that one is, ahem, somewhat difficult to blame on allopathic medicine, isn't it?
My chest exploded as I read the stupid.
Let me tell Adam's how interferon actually extended my mom's life, but the cancer still killed her.
Honestly, I would love to see this guy tell a cancer patient with a straight face that garlic will cure the disease. If that was the case, most of us would live for a very long time and then Aubrey de Grey would not have to pitch for funding at the TED conference.
I always use Patrick Swayze's Razor: If you had a cure you'd be two things, very rich and very famous. If you haven't, Shut Up !
And Tim Minchins Law too: You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine!
JH
Reading that, and also having recently read about the scientific jury giving up on Steorn's Orbo, their purported perpetual motion machine, I wondered if Mike Adams supported non-medical woo like free energy.
Yep:
Re: David Carradine
Ah, but the difficult they do immediately; the impossible is, of course, their stock in trade.
Honestly, I would love to see this guy tell a cancer patient with a straight face that garlic will cure the disease. If that was the case, most of us would live for a very long time and then Aubrey de Grey would not have to pitch for funding at the TED conference.
And there would never be any cancer in Italy.
It would have taken this idiot five minutes of research to learn that Michael Jackson's prescription drug abuse coincided with the complete crash of his career. Jackson hadn't had a hit record in years and years, and was way too "sick" to go on tour. He died deep in debt. If the "handlers" wanted Jackson to make more money for them to sponge, they would have been working hard to get him *off* the drugs. It appears, though, that they just sort of stood around doing what Jackson told them to do, i.e., get more prescription drugs.
"If the "handlers" wanted Jackson to make more money for them to sponge, they would have been working hard to get him *off* the drugs."
I've seen a report that, when top performers have died with tickets outstanding for upcoming performances, about half the ticket holders retain their tickets as a souvenir rather than seeking a refund.
If they've sold fifty shows' worth of tickets, and only half the people request refunds, that's quite a lot of money.
Tristanm
He hasn't blamed Billy Mays' death on science-based medicine yet? Bet it won't be long.
Piece of cake...Science invented flying...and, whaddaya mean you have never heard of a flight surgeon?
"One of the stars of MY LITTLE MARGIE"
FerKroo'ssake which one? That show -- remember Father Albright playing Margie's mopther who she could tell anything to and 'your father will never know' -- is, with OUR MISS BROOKS, one of the fondest memories I have of early TV.
(And,btw, a tip of the Prup topper to anyone who knows where "Kroo" comes from. It's an SF/Fantasy story from WWII, but who wrote it and created the lovable, dying God.)
Three dead. But if you call in the next five minutes....
"Neb. inmate says Zoloft contributed to murder"
This reminds me...how come Mike Adams hasn't done a big feature on the year's most notorious victim of Big Pharma - Travis Herold?
How soon we forget - Travis was the chimpanzee who went on a rampage, mauling a woman visiting his home in Connecticut. It turns out he had been given Xanax, a mood-altering (and palindromic) medicine that some believe contributed to his homicidal rage.
Mike Adams really should have played up this story for all it was worth - after all, to be part of his unquestioning and adoring readership, you'd have to have the intelligence of a chimp.
Billy Mays? Huh. And after I watched a bit of him on that Pitchmen show. Oh well.
No shortage of ghouls to pick celebrity corpses for their advertisements and self-gratification. I hear John Wayne's family is still dealing with idiots passing on that urban legend about his intestines' contents.
As someone with terminal bladder cancer who's now steeped in info both orthodox & CAM; who's a retired lecturer, engineer, scientist, I'm saddened by the entrenched and purblind views of some proponents on both sides.
Both sides often claim a greater certainty than the facts and research support. Orthodox medicine has had quite limited success, but is woefully short on cures or often explanations (such as how metastasis happen; how the 'soil' of parts of the body are receptive to metastatic seeding; spontaneous remission); generally ignores the role of nutrition and supplements (even when there's copious good research evidence such as listed in Boik's "Natural Compounds in Cancer Therapy").
So yes, too many CAM practitioners (many of whom are well qualified MDs) claim too much; but so do mainstream MDs and researchers (who trot out cancer cures just around the corner regularly too) and after 30+ years of the war on cancer there is little progress (especially when the earlier detection = 'longer survival' is subtracted) if any (bladder cancer is getting worse).
What we need is as much research into well-evidenced CAM as is pumped into the not too successful trio of chemo/radiation/surgery, such as outlined in J Dean's "How To Stop Cancer" and Jonathan Chamberlain's "Cancer: The Complete Recovery Guide"
When will all these senseless celebrity deaths end! Oh the horror...Now that said I'll get back to real life of a brand new medical school year, new residents/fellows and real life patients who are coming to see real life medical professionals practice real life medicine and stop watching the woo train wreck that is Mike Adams.
Not to mock a dying guy, but I'd like to know how you define "not too successful." Seems like since that trio was invented, cancer deaths have dropped enormously. I don't know where you're getting the notion that doctors "ignore nutrition." When my mother had cancer, the doctors she was seeing gave her a very specific and regimented diet to follow.
Yeah, there are questions about cancer, obviously, but I have sincere doubts that any of them will be answered through idiotic notions like reiki, acupuncture, or garlic for that matter.
And as someone mentioned above, well-evidenced CAM is also known as M.
Orac
Harvey Karp is off the reservation again. Hope you're working on a good smack down.
Cracking the Autism Riddle: Toxic Chemicals, A Serious Suspect in the Autism Outbreak
Sid, all that needs to be said about that is on this podcast. Enjoy.
It was Gale Storm who recently died. She was not just "one of the stars" of MY LITTLE MARGIE; she had the title role. She also starred in THE GALE STORM SHOW. I remember watching both shows as daytime reruns as a kid.
She had a few hit songs, too.
This is a great site!
Some of these hucksters are incredible. Who was the guy who said that doctors are the worst criminals in the world? He stated it in his book. There were no qualifiers. He stated it as fact....wow.
If I saw him after a motor vehicle accident, bleeding profusely, I would be tempted to say.. "You don't want me to help. I'm a physician. Apparently I'm a criminal...a particularly horrible one, as are the doctors in the hospital. Let me get your massage therapist and acupuncturist."
Another one: Dr. Jerri Nielsen, also known as Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald. She had to treat herself for breast cancer at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica in 1999 for several months before she could be flown out. The cancer recurred in 2005 and eventually killed her.
New York Times obituary
Wikipedia entry
Surprises me that the woo-meisters haven't gone after this one. Perhaps because the victim was a doctor herself . . .
Hmm... i'm sensing a pattern here...
The Alt-Med-Ghoul . . . the Hitler-Zombie. . .
All we need now is the Woo-Woo-Vampire (the Woo that wouldn't Die!) to complete Orac's Horror Gallery!
(Cue Theramin music )
As usual, Adams brings the crazy to a new level.
You know, it's funny Chopra should be mentioned. CNN (evidently alone among the major news networks) really didn't softpedal the controversies surrounding Jackson, and Jeffrey Toobin was going off in great detail about the bloodsucking enabling liars that Jackson surrounded himself with -- couldn't trust a damn one of them, basically. And there were Uri Geller and Deepak Chopra on the news talking about their associations with him...
@DLC
Hahaha ^_^
I think the woo-woo vampire is a great idea! I think Chopra should be cast as the Dracula of all woo woo vampires. ^_^
Count Chopra ?
Count Chopula ?
Can we count on Orac the Vampire Slayer, or should we see about getting Peter Cushing ?
@Jon H (comment 21)
Are you saying that Jackson's handlers killed him on purpose so they could somehow cash in on the ticket refunds? If so...? First of all, I doubt his household staff and/or "personal physician" would be on the receiving end of any of that money, especially since Jackson had so many debts (I assume the ticket refund money will go to the concert promoters?). Moreover, any money-grubbing family member or "handler" would have made much, much more cash if Jackson had stayed alive and healthy, and if he had not been in a drug stupor for the past 20 years.
"How do you get 3? Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, and one of the stars of "My Little Margie."
Karl Malden, died today at age 97.
Hey! He's been watching The Wall by Pink Floyd.
Doesn't support your assertion of claiming a greater certainty, since mainstream medicine freely admits that such things are not fully understood.
Anybody who thinks mainstream medicine ignores the role of nutrition has never listened to a typical PCP. Eating right is VERY stressed. But if you mean a role for curing cancer, then there is NO good research supporting it, far less "copious."
It's also ironic that actual doctors consider eating fruits and vegetables to be the best way to get appropriate nutrition, while "natural" sCAMmers can't get enough of popping pills.
Cite.
If you consider what's been accomplished "little progress", then you have no clue whatsoever what's actually been done.
We also need research into never-married widows. There is no such thing as well-evidenced CAM; anything that's borne out by evidence is adopted into the mainstream.