Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.—The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), an organization that works to expose charlatans and help people defend themselves from dangerous paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, today issued this statement by JREF President D.J. Grothe on proposed licensing schemes1 for practitioners of naturopathy:
States should not give out licenses for self-styled health advisers to practice what they call “naturopathy.”
Folks, last Sunday night Dateline NBC aired an important episode blasting "alternative" cancer therapies that charlatans are peddling to desperate patients and their families. Sitcom star Suzanne Somers, the renowned medical expert who has written endlessly on subjects of which she has, according to the Sloan-Kettering Institute, “zero proof,” extolled the virtues of “anti-neoplastons,” an absolutely untested and very expensive method of treating cancer, while denying the validity of chemotherapy and/or radiation for that purpose.
(Editor’s Note: We have the distinct pleasure this week of publishing the winning essay from the first TAM London scholarship essay contest.)
In November 2004, in a particular English human body, in just one of its 100 trillion cells, a very small event took place. This event was not foretold by any soothsayer, Tarot card, or by the movement of an arbitrary set of stars. It was not intuited on Oprah, instigated by some external entity or punctured effigy; nor was it justified by any sin in this life or any previous.
And yet it happened.
In one blood cell, specifically a precursor T-cell lymphocyte, one section of chromosome 9 and another from chromosome 22 broke and changed places. This translocation reordered a sequence of DNA, creating the BCR-ABL fusion protein, in that one cell. This silent, miniature drama, occurring in a lymphocyte less than 7 micrometres across, a tenth of the width of a human hair, would alter drastically the course of my life.
Sometimes, things just work out… A couple years ago, I wrote to several authorities in Iraq offering them the JREF million-dollar prize if they could produce evidence that the ADE561 dowsing-stick actually worked. This is the device on which American taxpayers spent over $85 million just to supply it to Iraq to protect them. It was supposed to be an explosives-detector, but it just didn’t work, having no “innards” at all – just a swiveling rod that flopped to-and-fro. None of these authorities ever responded, and I suspected it was because they were already making their own profit from fluffing up the price…
Well, Iraqi police have just arrested Major General Jihad al-Jabiri, the commander of the bomb squad and one of those who received my letter! He’s a high-ranking police official who handled the business involved in buying the ADE561 toy, which was widely used by police and soldiers at security checkpoints and was meant to be a key weapon in the defense against insurgents. Sure.
