Orac the Nipple Ripper...

Opinion by Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen

Friday, November 20th, 2009

I've been wondering who would pick up the reins of the quackbuster  operation once Stephen Barrett croaks, which could be very soon.   I think I found the candidate.  He's perfect for the job - has all of the right qualifications, and seems eager to fill the spot. 

For years there was a contest, among the quackpot faithful, to be crowned the heir apparent, and many were groomed for the job.  But, problems kept coming up, so there was no obvious Crown Prince. 

Everybody who follows my newsletter could figure out that there were two major candidates vying for the top spot - sometimes even trying to push Stevie off the bus a little early.  I am, of course, referring to Bobbie Baratz, the current president of the National Council Against Health Fraud and Terry Polevoy, Canada's low-budget Barrett copy.

Bobbie Baratz was, for a time, head and shoulders above Polevoy in the race, for he had three doctorate degrees (MD, DDS, and PhD) and he flaunted them in everyone's face, offering himself, just like Barrett did, as a virtual expert in EVERYTHING.  To here him talk, and talk and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, you could get the impression that he was a one stop shop, a virtual fountain of infinite knowledge about health care (and much more) - or at least he wanted everyone to think so.

But then one day I was asked to check him out.  A lawyer handed me Baratz's resume and a transcript of a deposition Baratz had just taken.  I, Tim Bolen, am a true skeptic - not one of those pseudo-skeptics that associate with the quackpots.  I truly look at things with a critical eye, and once I started verifying (or in this case NOT verifying) the information presented on Bobbie's Resume I began to dribble ashes on Bobbie's Crown Prince Costume. 

I set a trap for Bobbie in a case in Wisconsin, setting him up for a three day "credibility hearing," in the case he was testifying in.  That's the case where we have him crying on video tape... It got so bad he'd crawl under or over tables whenever I showed up at a hearing.  Before long, I'd guess, the powers that be (from New York?) must of decided that Royal Purple wasn't his color - and you don't hear much about Bobbie anymore.

Then there was Polevoy in Canada (insert rude noise).  Terry is kind of like the overactive kid vying for everybody's attention with bad behavior in a public place.  You know the one.  We all keep wondering why his mom doesn't just smack the little sh*t.  His website is a cheap carnival of brainless crap presented in garish colors and chaotic organization.  It is easy to get the impression that its author has mental problems.

But, Terry tries very hard to please the powers, day after day, and even though he is an unpleasant individual, well, so are the rest of the quackpots.  Terry just happens to be a little ickier than the others.  Well, actually, a LOT ickier...  So much so that his name never appears on the quackpot power structure committees.  I think there is a reason for that nobody talks about - the fact that Polevoy used to be a practicing Pediatrician and something happened.  Now he is a simple pimple doctor who makes about fifteen percent of what a Pediatrician can make, in income, in Canada.

When Barrett, Grell, and Polevoy sued me and a few others you will recall, the threesome got hit with over $500,000 US in attorney fees they had to pay to Ilena Rosenthal.  The quackpot boys and girls raised money to pay off this debt so that Ilena wouldn't take over quackwatch. 

But, they only raised money for Grell and Barrett - conspicuously leaving Polevoy spinning in the wind.  Polevoy, now, still owes the $311,000 US to Ilena - plus three years interest, bringing  the total now to $413,000 US - and Polevoy is suing Grell, and twenty others, for the money.  I guess he didn't like spinning in the wind.

So, my guess is (sarcasm intended) that Terry isn't going to get the purple fur robe either.

There was a sort of third candidate vying for the job, and if "kiss-up" was the deciding factor this boy would have met the grade, for he did just about everything to be helpful.  It wouldn't surprise me if he went to New York, from his home in Denmark, every week and shined leadership shoes.  His name is Paul Lee and he is a PT, which, although Physical Therapy is a very honorable profession, means that he doesn't, for quackbuster purposes, have the right degrees.  He is not an MD (Medical Deity). 

Lee was, pretty much, it appears, writing all of Barrett's articles for his quackwatch website for quite a while. The only thing I really knew about him was that he seemed to be the liaison between the quackbusters and the gay porn world.  He seemed to know his way around there.

So - no on Lee also.  He's just a worker bee who is, now, hiding out.  Yup - hiding out.  He has disappeared from Denmark, to a secret location, I think, to avoid being Summoned in a few lawsuits involving certain of his actions involving pages on Wikipedia.  He claims bad health (chills, diarrhea?).

So, for a while there I thought there might be a vacancy at the top once Barrett slid off the throne, for the final time.

But then...

The quackpots, like a major league baseball club, have a "Farm Team..."

I've been watching the quackpot's Farm Team for years, and, frankly, I was underwhelmed.  There you'd find the second class players like Harriet Hall from Washington State so drab she doesn't even blend into the wallpaper - more like a dirt stain.  Or, Australia's Peter Bowditch - dumber than a box of dirt, but full of the typical pseudo-skeptic hatred of his betters.

Ratcheting up you'll find a former Australian Oncologist (or so he claims) Peter Moran (they call him "The Moron") who couldn't carry an argument in a basket. Then, of course. there is Wallace Sampson, a guy so insecure he made up qualifications for himself, claiming he was a "Professor Emeritus" from Stanford Medical School, when, in actuality, he couldn't actually give you adequate directions to the Stanford Campus.  His best feature is his permanent sneer which, I think, is his reaction from seeing himself in the mirror every morning.

There were others haunting the internet - but they hid behind fake names, internet sobriquets, platforms from which to launch nastiness from a hidden place .  That "hidden identity" thing is an internet phenomenon, sort of a modern day electronic version of the KU Klux Klan.  I didn't take this group seriously - for who cares what a sissy, who won't identify himself/herself will do. Cowards are cowards - right?  They are not going to come out and play once the going gets rough - and rough it is going to get.  The North American Health Freedom Movement plays hardball.  Sissies don't.

But then someone in the Health Freedom Movement exposed one of the mouthier "hidden identity" ones, a guy who calls himself "Orac" on the Usenet discussion groups.  The same guy, I believe, is "MastCell" on Wikipedia.  So I stared reading this guy's material, and at that point I began to realize that someone in New York, at the misinformation agency, was quietly bringing up Barrett's replacement - possibly to even replace flagging Barrett in his lifetime. 

Orac the Nipple Ripper...

What kind of mentally deranged person would go on the internet and set themselves up with a hidden identity claiming that they are "The Oracle," and that their pronouncements are infallible?  And actually believe it?  And treat people like dirt?

The definition of the word "Oracle" pretty much says it all.  "Oracle - a person, a priest or a prophet, believed to be infallible." 

For a moment there I thought that this "Orac" guy must have been Stephen Barrett, himself, writing under a pseudonym - because if anybody on Planet Earth sees themselves as infallible it has to be Stephen Barrett.  Since this was not Stephen Barrett I had to look for someone equally as crack-whacked.  I didn't have to look very far.   Someone had already identified this boob who calls himself "Orac" and were openly challenging him on the internet. 

(1)  For instance, on Patrick Sullivan's blog, Ashleigh Anderson, way back in 2005, had already found the cesspool "Orac" slept in.  More she identified most of his connections to the dark side.  The information, in some part, is dated, for "Orac" no longer lives in New Jersey.  He has moved to Detroit.  But, you can see it by clicking here.  She says:

(2)  And then - J. B. Handley of "Age of Autism" writes that:

Mr. Gorski’s blog, Respectful Insolence, is anything but. His putdowns and demeaning language aimed at our community (and many of his colleagues) are rampant. And, so, in the spirit of Mr. Gorski’s novel use of the word “respectful”, I insolently offer up:

A DOZEN REASONS TO RESPECTFULLY HATE DAVID GORSKI, M.D.:

1. He lives in a very cheap glass house

Mr. Gorski writes proudly, “As far as I've yet been able to ascertain, I'm the only academic surgeon with R01 funding in the world with an active -- and, even more shockingly, even a somewhat popular -- blog.”

The obvious question that he never asks is, “Why don’t any of my peers spend loads of their time publicly bashing other scientists?” The answer to that question would be, “Because most research scientists are not idiots who place ego gratification through reader adulation above professional conduct.”

2. He is a nobody in the science world

I could care less about Mr. Gorski or his career. I’m sure he has worked hard to get where he is. But, relatively speaking, Mr. Gorski is a nobody. He’s an “Assistant Professor.”

When Bill Walton criticizes NBA players, he annoys some, but the man is highly accomplished in his field, so people listen and respect his point of view. Mr. Gorski’s only claim to fame is that he blogs frequently enough to be high in the search rankings.

You can read all of J.B. Handley's interesting article by clicking here.

(3)  But Handley and the "Age of Autism" aren't the only ones.  There's the scientific community, in the form of the Intelligent Design Community, who said:

You can read their commentary here.

(4)  You can comb the search engines all day and find criticisms of David Gorski - some of them very angry.  For, it is obvious Gorski speaks in nasty tones, not criticizing, but openly demeaning others on subjects that Gorski has absolutely no expertise in - like autism. 

So, who and what is a "David Gorski MD?"

It is pretty clear here that we are dealing with a serious mental aberration.  What kind of person sets themselves up, and actually believes, that they are an infallible Oracle, and then presents themselves in public as one? 

What I found did not surprise me.

In short, David Gorski MD is a loser.  He got himself a good education and set off on what he thought, at the time, was a good career path.  But, like many focused people, he didn't make the effort to compare the situation he was currently in with the reality of the surrounding world.

He became a Breast Cancer Surgeon - and as we all know, that's kind of like being a major DDT Manufacturer just before the EPA wakes up.

Every day Gorski gets out of bed and heads to work where he claims, on his website, that he "is a surgical oncologist specializing in breast cancer and an Associate Professor of Surgery at the Wayne State University School of Medicine based at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute." 

Sounds impressive?  It isn't. There is absolutely no recognized medical specialty known as "surgical oncologist."  It is a made up term.  One to soften, I think, the reality that there is a whole male dominated mini-industry promoting the horror of hacking off women's beasts as a health measure.

The whole idea of breast cancer surgery is being challenged right now by studies conducted by the US government - as well it should be.  The "Gold Standard" of breast cancer surgery is called the Halstead Procedure, which, in reality, draws a surgical line four inches above the naval, and a second line just below the collar bone.  Everything between the lines is chopped off - down to the ribs, including all those 29 lymph nodes.  "Mom" comes home from the hospital looking a lot different.  Then, since all those lymph nodes are gone her arms are going to swell up to the size of her waist.

But the family needn't worry.  They won't have to look at "Mom" in her new ugliness for long, for the surgery itself released all those tumorous cancer cells that her body's immune system had encapsulated, into her blood stream spreading the cancer EVERYWHERE.  So "Mom" will be heading back to the hospital where the same white-coated-stethoscope-around-the-neck doctor will now recommend $400,000 of chemotherapy (and could you stop by the hospital business office while you are here, and sign over the title to your home as guarantee of your co-pay please?).

But, thank God, all this is on the way out.  City Cemeteries won't be doing a boom business in "Mom we love you..." signage so much, now that the government, and hence insurance companies, have cut out those "annual mammograms" designed to scare young women into letting some ghoul stick needles into her breasts for so-called tests.

More,  needle biopsies themselves are death waiting in the wings.  The action of some ham-handed, poke-a-lot, drooling(?) older male "surgical oncologist" jabbing, and jabbing, and jabbing, and jabbing, and jabbing, a biopsy needle into a soft tissue breast trying to find an actual tumor is a cancer spreading procedure.  Why?  Once the needle finds the tumor it pierces the shell the body's immune system has built up around the cancer cells.  Withdrawing the needle, while squeezing the breast makes the cancer cells squirt into the breast tissue along the needle hole. More jabbing spreads the cancer cells around, and the capillaries in the breast pick up the cells and transport them throughout the body to lodge and replicate elsewhere - Isn't that special?

Frank Weiwel, from People Against Cancer, tells me: 

Dr. Ian MacDonald, internationally known cancer surgeon, now deceased, presented extensive data on breast cancer in the American Journal of Surgery (March 1966) and concluded that "the massive educational, diagnostic and therapeutic attack on mammary carcinoma of the past two decades has failed to alter rates of incidence and mortality of this most frequent malignant neoplasm in female patients. Reports on the therapy of mammary cancer in the surgical literature often lack significance through selected samples of small size and the lack of statistical validation." When the statistical errors are accounted for, he added, the corrected data "lend little if any support to the case for 'early' diagnosis."

In other words - it is common knowledge both inside and outside the cancer industry that the David Gorski MDs of the world represent the front line of deadly bullshit.  And, they are on their way out.

Gorski woke up not so long ago,  I think, and realized that he had the equivalent of "Exclusive manufacturing and distribution rights to DDT in the US" and that those people pounding on his door at 6:00AM were EPA Agents with a warrant to dig up his basement floor. 

Gorski, I think, instead of changing his life, his career path, and finding a path towards "good," has decided to lash out at others - those that had taken the right path to start with.  He turned vicious, and nasty, and because of that I think Quackbuster Central will use him to replace Stephen Barrett. 

The new guy heading up the quackbuster assault is going to be, I think, "Orac the Nipple Ripper."

Stay tuned...

Tim Bolen - Consumer Advocate 

 

 

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