‘Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion’ is a thoroughly engaging and detailed account of the backstories to the big debates between science and religion over the past five hundred years. Through new material and detailed social context, it vividly brings to life the trial of Galileo, the debate between Wilberforce and Huxley on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and the Scopes monkey trial. The big drawback is that it presents a view of science from the outside looking in, and while it identifies the issue at the centre of these debates – who has authority to say how the world is? – it plays down the different rules of evidence and standards of proof within science and religion and the fact that revelation has trumped empiricism for most of this relationship.
The author Nicholas Spencer is a senior fellow at the think tank Theos, part of The British and Foreign Bible Society and he is most at home exploring the foundational role that religious orders from Baghdad to Rome, Paris and Oxford played in the birth of science by fostering learning and inquiry into the nature of the universe. The book’s purpose, made clear in the introduction and dedication, is to support the complexity theory of the relationship between science and religion, championed by historian John Brooke, and portray the conflict theory widely accepted outside academia as myth.
At the heart of the question of authority is the different epistemologies of science and religion, the different ways they believe we can know about the world. Science holds that we can only know about the world through observation and experience, phenomena that impinge upon our five senses. If we can’t see, hear, feel, smell or taste some thing or phenomenon, directly or through telescopes, microscopes, Large Hadron Colliders and all the other instruments that extend the reach of our senses, then science can say no more than evidence of its existence is beyond its reach.
Religion on the other hand, and this history deals primarily with the three Abrahamic religions, accepts that we can also know about the world through means other than our five senses, through revelation, inspiration, dreams and visions from beyond the human realm.
In recognition of these different epistemologies, palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed a resolution by describing science and religion as ‘non-overlapping magisteria.’ The term magisteria was borrowed from the encyclical Humani generis in which Pope Pius XII argued that evolution, existentialism, historicism and other “…false opinions…” originated from the “…reprehensible desire of novelty…” and threatened to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine by neglecting the magisterium, the authority of the Pope and bishops.
Gould’s well-intentioned intervention was bound to fail, however, as science and religion will continue to overlap wherever there are competing explanations for the same phenomenon, such as the movement of the planets that saw Galileo forced to kneel before the inquisition as a heretic and recant.
That religion played a role in the birth of science by fostering education and research has been long argued by historians of science. But as science gained increasing independence and respectability, its explanations for natural phenomena began to encroach into the domain of religion.
To view the relationship from the point of view of science, consider the two domains as concentric circles. Science is the smaller inner circle, originating as a dot around the time of Aristotle and gradually expanding as more phenomena that previously relied on supernatural explanations are demonstrated to have natural origins. Encompassing science is the much larger circle of religious belief and the supernatural, and beyond that, the uncontained territory of the unknowable.
Sitting at the frontier between science and religion is a double wall, a waiting room containing the untested hypotheses, assumptions, conjecture and speculation that are part of scientific practice. This intermediate zone is where the contest of ideas is most active. Until empirically tested, concepts in this territory lack authority but are vital to the scientific process. Such as Einstein’s 1915 prediction of the existence of gravitational waves, not empirically confirmed until 2015, or the existence of Higgs boson, predicted in 1964 but not experimentally confirmed until 2012.
By describing their territories as ‘…indistinct, sprawling, untidy and endlessly and fascinatingly entangled…’ Spencer over complicates the relationship. Seen from within the domain of science, the boundary between the two is a lively frontier of imagination, uncertainty and the novelty so disdained by Pius XII, their relationship more like that of parent and child than benevolent midwife; originally nurturing, then intolerant, finally accommodating.
In the case of the Catholic Church, that accommodation only formally occurred in the last century, the treatment of two its own illustrating this shift. Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was executed for supporting heliocentrism in 1600. Three hundred and thirty three years later, Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître was photographed with Albert Einstein and feted on a lecture tour of America after Edwin Hubble confirmed his Big Bang theory.
Labelling the history of science and religion complex glosses over the fact that, for most of its existence science was overruled whenever it challenged received wisdom. The confusion and untidiness Spencer portrays is due to a misrepresentation of the scientific process and the reluctance of religious organisations to formally accept empirical evidence where it is in conflict with their authority. In the case of heliocentrism, formal acceptance took three hundred and fifty nine years. For evolution by natural selection, unconditional acceptance took one hundred and fifty five years. In the case of the Big Bang, acceptance took just eighty three years and in doing so pushed back the role of a creator by some fourteen billion years.
While this book provides a highly readable account of the origins of Western science, of more interest to science and greater value to society would be an exploration of the relationship between science and animism. Of the one hundred billion people estimated to have ever lived since the appearance of modern humans, more than half existed over two thousand years ago. The vast majority of those lived for thousands of generations without undermining the basis of their existence to the extent we are today, informed by a worldview that grants personhood to the animate and inanimate alike.
In 1974, a team of scientists led by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan composed a message to be transmitted to the edge of our galaxy. Specifically, to the globular cluster Messier 13 – a group of stars roughly 25,000 light years from Earth. This was humanity’s first attempt to phone ET.
The message was written in binary code, which, when displayed as a graphic in a 23×73 rectangle (chosen for being prime numbers), provide several pieces of information about human beings and our planet. These include the atomic numbers for the elements that combine to make up DNA (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus), a stick figure of a human being, a representation of our solar system and our position in it, and a representation of the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico that was used to transmit the message.
This latter inclusion was a testament to the technological prowess of humanity – to be able to send a call out into space, further than any transmission had been sent before, supposedly with the intention of reaching out to intelligent alien life.
Then, in 2001, in the sleepy Hampshire countryside, we got our reply. Not via the Chilbolton Radio Telescope, but in a field a short distance away. The reply came in the form of a crop circle (technically, a crop rectangle) seeming to be a copy of the Arecibo Message but with some key differences. The atomic code for carbon had been replaced with silicon, the stick figure had changed shape to indicate a large head and smaller body, and the image of Arecibo had been replaced with a complex image seeming to indicate some kind of space telescope with solar panels – or potentially a mimic of other complex crop circles that have been drawn in the past.
Could this be ET calling us back? No. No it couldn’t. And there are some key reasons for this. Firstly, and probably most importantly, the initial Arecibo message hasn’t reached anywhere yet. While the radio burst signal can theoretically travel all the way to the M13 cluster (seen in the constellation of Hercules in the Northern Hemisphere) it is currently thought to be only 1/1000th of the way there. It will be another 250 centuries until the message gets there – and by that time those stars will have moved in space. There will be nobody in to take our call, and likely no voicemail for us to leave our message after the beep.
But you might be thinking, what if maybe some other, much closer alien race picked up the signal? Well, that’s not likely either. The width of the beam carrying this message was less than 1/15th the diameter of the Moon. While this might sound wide to you or me, cosmically speaking, it’s a pinpoint. The message was transmitted using radio bursts and lasts only three minutes. Add to this that there is nothing in the radio bursts that makes it clear that the signal bursts need to be formatted into a visual, and within a specific layout of 23 columns containing 73 rows of data. The chances of a race being in the right place at the right time to pick up this transmission and then knowing to convert this information into a visual graphic are, quite frankly, astronomical.
Now let’s look at the image of the “reply” itself.
For ET to have picked up the original message, they must have the ability to receive radio signals. So it would stand to reason that they can also send radio signals, right? If that were the case, then why not radio us a response? This would be much more efficient for speed and clarity of their message, rather than travelling to Earth, waiting in hiding for the right time of year for the crops to grow, and then bending them. Even without speech, sending back the same radio bursts we used to send our message would be much more convincing than carrying out a Neil Buchanan-esque “big art” in a field next to a radio telescope, itself the home of SETI’s (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Hampshire chapter.
Then we have the picture, made to resemble what some refer to as a “Grey” alien – a large head with big eyes and a pointed chin atop a smaller body. This is the stereotypical alien, as seen everywhere in popular culture from psychedelic posters and various smoking paraphernalia to Hollywood movies such as Mars Attacks! and Paul. This image goes back to some of the earliest alien encounter stories and seems to have come from a sketch produced by Barney Hill when undergoing hypnosis to “recover lost memories” of his “alien abduction” from the 1960’s.
Then there is the DNA information. The reply makes a change from carbon to silicon. While long-held in science fiction tales as an alternative to carbon-based life forms, the reality is that silicon would not be well-suited to support life, especially on a water and oxygen-rich planet such as ours. And, while an extra strand was added to the helix pictograph in the “reply”, no additional information or new core elements have been added to the data sent.
Nobody has ever come forward to claim ownership for producing the image in the wheat and, honestly, that is probably the biggest piece of evidence in favour of this being a “genuine” ET message – it truly is a work of art and would take some dedication to pull off. If I had done it, I would absolutely be showing it to everyone that would look.
That said, while we can’t say for certain who produced this reply to the Arecibo message, we can be certain that the call came from inside our terrestrial house.
After forty-five years educating the public about the danger of cults, the Cult Information Centre’s, Ian Haworth, 76, stopped taking phone calls in August this year, but before he disconnected the phone, he agreed to condense four-and-a-half decades of experience into two long-distance telephone conversations.
Ian Haworth (Source: CIC)
Ian answers the phone on the third ring, but — despite trading emails for a few weeks leading up to our conversation — it takes him a moment to remember who I am.
“I wasn’t sure which Paul it was.” I ask him if he regularly speaks to a lot of Pauls. “Well, anything’s possible in this field,” he says.
He opens our conversation with a caveat: “You can hit me with anything you want to. It could be personal or otherwise because I don’t have to answer and I’ll be very straightforward with you.”
Despite the disclaimer, Haworth is happy to talk and punctuates his observations and recollections with jokes, anecdotes, and original metaphors that require a mental double-take to keep up.
“Nobody in the right mind would try and do this sort of work for 45 years,” he says as he gives a candid window into the fascinating, often unbelievable, often tragic world of cults.
Not an Expert
An Internet search for information on people working in what is sometimes called the anti-cult field yields the term “cult expert,” which refers to a person (often a former cult member) who raises public awareness about the issue and provides specialised exit-counselling for people leaving cults.
Haworth, however, doesn’t feel comfortable with the title, “I’m a cult specialist. Whether or not somebody wants to see me as an expert is up to them.”
He simplifies his role even further, “I have wanted to be, over the years, available to talk things through with people that want to talk about something to do with cults – whoever they are. And I’ve tried to do that.”
While he might not consider himself an expert, Haworth’s work has seen him in the lecture theatres of universities and schools across North America and the UK, appear in TV and radio interviews, and inside courtrooms to provide expert witness testimony, or—as I learn a little later—on the receiving end of libel suits levelled against him by the groups he’s trying to protect the public from.
His book Cults: A Practical Guide is currently in its fourth edition, and he’s helped found non-profit organisations and charities across North America, the UK, and Europe to help educate the public and support former cult members and families who’ve lost loved ones to cults.
Since 1987, Haworth has been the general secretary of the London-based Cult Information Centre (CIC), one of the few UK-based non-profit organisations set up to help educate and support the public.
In the last few years, Haworth has stopped giving so many talks. “I had to just slow down a bit because I was suffering from O.L.D,” he pauses and then adds, “Sorry, that’s my attempt at humour again.”
Regardless of how he sees his role in the last forty-five years, Haworth has been one of the few on the frontline fighting to protect the public from cults.
From Bolton to Canada
Born in Bolton in 1947 to a family of “farmers on both sides,” Haworth moved to Leyland, Lancashire when he was young, where he grew up on his family’s poultry farm. Back then, according to Haworth, a cult meant nothing more to him than the name for a young horse.
Unsure about his future career options, the young Haworth first dabbled in engineering before settling on business. After a three-month university trip to the US in 1969 and a stint washing dishes in a resort hotel in Connecticut, which Haworth describes as “the best holiday of my life,” he moved to the US. Then, in 1972, a twenty-five-year-old Haworth, concerned about America’s ongoing war in Vietnam and the possibility of being drafted, headed to Toronto, Canada, where he worked for electronics and telecoms companies in various roles, and was a buyer of the first sub-$100 calculators on the market.
Reflecting on his professional ambitions at the time, Haworth says he had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life – but that would all change in the space of a few days when he signed up for a course that promised to help him stop smoking.
“The only time I was convinced that I knew what I had to do,” he says, “Was when I escaped from the cult.”
Encountering the Group
Toronto, 1978, and Haworth – a heavy smoker of seven years – is seeking professional help to quit, and is considering his options. He sees an advertisement for a $220, five-week course boasting a 70% success rate. Researching things a bit more, he encounters another company offering a similar thing; however, this one comes with a money-back guarantee.
“What could be wrong with that?” he recalls thinking, “Well, everything, as it turns out.”
A motel near the Toronto Pearson International Airport provided the venue for the course. Haworth attended on a Thursday evening along with forty other participants – some of whom hoped to see changes in their professional lives or practices; some wanted a more personal transformation. No matter what they were individually seeking, they were all there to improve some aspect of their personality or life, and whatever that was, this course, and the group behind it, promised to deliver.
The opening evening’s session on that Thursday night went on well into the early hours of the following morning. Exhausted and operating on very little sleep, Haworth went to work the next day. Instead of returning home to rest once his workday had finished, he was expected to attend the course again for another evening session.
From the beginning, the group established clear rules to prevent the participants from interacting too much with each other, or questioning what was happening. According to Haworth, everything was “…there to inhibit us from questioning and checking things out.”
The group’s activities were tightly controlled, and designed to force changes in the participants’ behaviour and thinking. Haworth remembers the days well:
We were hypnotised, 16 times in the four-day course without knowing it once. We didn’t eat the normal sorts of food that we would normally eat. Nor did we eat the food as often as we would normally eat it, or at the same time. And the chairs in the room were set up in such a way to work against us.
The intense, long days and nights filled with relentless group activities and controlled toilet breaks, combined with sleep deprivation and hypnosis had a powerful, heady effect on Haworth, “One of the results of being hypnotised, even a few times, never mind, 16, is that you’ll feel good. You’re hungry, you’re exhausted, but you feel good.”
This continued over a few days – that’s all it took. The group’s techniques were so effective that by Saturday afternoon, Haworth hadn’t been for his usual cigarette during the allotted break.
“I was theirs hook, line, and sinker by Saturday midday,” Haworth remembers, “Two evenings, one morning, and I was gone.”
However, he doesn’t attribute this break in his old habit to the course’s efficacy in delivering on its promise, but rather the creation of a new identity — one that belongs to the group, “I quit being me because they turned me into someone else who didn’t smoke,” Haworth tells me.
Cases of pseudo-identity observed among cult victims are often very clear-cut, classic examples of transformation through deliberately contrived situational forces of a normal individual’s personality into that of a ‘different person’.
The sudden shifts in Haworth’s behaviour began to concern the people who knew him best; neither his girlfriend nor his roommate could understand what had happened during the space of a weekend that could turn somebody they knew so well into a person they hardly recognised.
He also handed in his notice at work. His boss, noticing the changes in his personality and sensing that something wasn’t quite right, didn’t immediately process the request, “She knew something was wrong, she couldn’t explain it, but she knew I was in trouble,” he says.
The group’s meetings and activities quickly took over all of Haworth’s free time, whether it was fundraising, recruiting people on the streets, or attending courses and meetings, “I was just doing whatever they told me to do,” Haworth explains.
Monday evenings, he’d be attending top-up meetings; Wednesdays, he’d be handling new recruits and getting them to sign up for courses. The group, in a short space of time, had learned that Haworth was a former competitive swimmer, so they arranged for him to teach disabled children to swim at the local hospital on Tuesdays to help boost the group’s image and profile within the community.
He even tried recruiting the people closest to him. One of these people was Haworth’s neighbour. “A very dear neighbour who, like everyone else, I tried to recruit,” he admits.
This neighbour called him one day to tell him the group he’d been non-stop talking about for the past week was in today’s newspaper and invited him to the lobby of their building to receive a copy. Eager to see what good things the press were saying, he immediately returned to his own apartment and opened the newspaper, expecting the article to be full of effusive praise for the group—but what he found was anything but.
Dejection and disbelief replaced excitement – Haworth “fell apart at the seams” as he read horror stories of one former member in a psychiatric unit, and other recent ones in psychiatric care.
The message in the article was unambiguous: This was a cult, and people needed to stay well away.
A shocked Haworth took the article to the group’s leadership, where his questions were met with a tirade about the ethnicity of the journalist. “Why don’t you go away,” they told him, “And come back when you’re feeling better?”
Haworth did leave, but instead of ignoring the article as propaganda or bad press, he decided to call the journalist behind the piece. A forty-five-minute telephone conversation later, the journalist invited Haworth to his office to see the information he had about the group that, but — for legal reasons — couldn’t print.
Haworth wasted no time and immediately jumped on a train, arriving at the newspaper office. The journalist left Haworth alone in the back office with all of his research. A shocked Haworth emerged an hour later, “This is far worse than what you said in the article!” he said to the journalist, who nodded, “Yes, my boy. That’s lawyers for you.”
Persistent influence
Despite the course only lasting a few days, and Haworth only being in the group for two-and-a-half weeks, the techniques used against him had lingering effects.
It was six months before he began to notice certain aspects of his original personality returning, “As time goes by, the cult personality is eroded away, till it no longer exists,” he says.
His desire to smoke returned; however, this was a welcome sign that things were beginning to change, “And when it got to the point after six months where I wanted to smoke again. I was actually happy, because I knew that was normal.”
It was a few months before other aspects of his suppressed, authentic personality began to re-emerge. Again, he—and this time the people closest to him—took this as a positive sign that he was returning to his former self; although, Haworth’s not so sure his friends were happy to see all of his previous traits reinstated:
“After eleven months, my typical painful sense of humour came back as well, and that’s when I knew I was really the old me again. I was back to telling jokes that would make people say, ‘Oh no, Ian” No. Why?’ Come up with a new material please!’” Haworth laughs.
Haworth continued to attend the group’s meetings to warn others, a very dangerous move, he admits, as he could have easily been sucked back in. During this time, he convinced six other members to leave, but the seventh alerted the leadership to Haworth’s activities, and the jig was up—after that, he never attended another meeting or saw any of the group’s leadership again.
After leaving the group, Haworth returned to his former place of work to ask if he could rescind his request and have his old job back. His boss removed the letter of resignation from the drawer in her desk and tore it up in front of him.
Haworth resumed smoking but managed to quit a few years later, this time on his own terms—without the help of anyone or any course.
The World Gets Introduced to Brainwashing.
Berkeley, California, 1974. Charles Manson, the notorious drifter-criminal, and mastermind behind the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders that terrified Hollywood and brought California’s counterculture movement to a bloody close, is three years into a life sentence (commuted in 1972 from the original death penalty sentence).
The highly-televised public trials that once captivated audiences in the US and internationally, and dominated all the nightly news channels, have been replaced by a more pressing national issue—the latest developments about Nixon and the Watergate scandal.
However, Manson is still an unresolved issue in the minds of the American people, psychologists, and the media. Nobody understands or has a definitive answer for how a thirty-six-year-old, 5”2 man, with a slightly above average IQ of 109 could have so much power over a group of middle-class, educated, idealistic young people—known to him as the Family—to have them murder on his command.
Three years after Manson’s sentencing, and 370 miles north of Los Angeles, in the city of Berkeley, the same issues of control, complicity, and coercion, would again be part of the national debate.
On February 4, 1974, the far-left militant group the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, then 19, and subjected her to threats and acts of psychological torture (including being locked in a cupboard for weeks) that would, according to some psychologists at the time, constitute to “brainwashing”.
Hearst would go on to be an active participant in the SLA’s bank robberies, and images from CCTV footage from one raid show her shouldering a M1 carbine semi-automatic rifle and yelling at customers, “Up, up, up against the wall, motherfuckers!”
Hearst wasn’t present in the SLA’s hideout when a gun battle with police left six members of the group dead, along with its leader, but she was apprehended shortly afterwards after two failed attempts to kill law enforcement with homemade explosives.
In her testimony, Hearst claims she was coerced and manipulated into participating in the SLA’s activities, and the few psychologists at the time who understood the effects of mind control and thought reform (often known as “brainwashing”) validated her claims.
But doctors on the prosecution’s side described Hearst as “a rebel in search of a cause” and very much in control of her actions, and with no brainwashing defence to help her in the courtrooms, Hearst received a hefty thirty-five-year sentence.
However, an incident five years later would bring the dangers of cults and mind control to international attention. On November 19th, 1979, television media aerial helicopters circle over a 3,800-acre agricultural settlement in Guyana. Strewn around the central structure, the bodies of 918 women, children and men lie face down in the verdant grass. Motionless multi-generational families have their arms draped over one another in one final act of domestic affection; some even have pillows beneath their heads.
On the orders of their leader, the reverend Jim Jones, members of the People’s Temple queued up to consume a cyanide-laced drink in what Jones described as an “act of revolutionary suicide” against the tyranny of the US government.
Parents waited in line, holding their children in their arms as they queued patiently to receive their fatal doses—mothers and fathers squirted syringes into their children’s mouths before ingesting their own.
The event would be the largest death of US citizens before 9/11, and would be known then on as the Jonestown Massacre.
In the wake of Jonestown, American actor John Wayne was one of many vocal supporters of the incarcerated Hearst, and instrumental in the shift in public option about her complicity in the SLA’s crimes:
It seems quite odd to me that the American people have immediately accepted the fact that one man can brainwash 900 human beings into mass suicide, but will not accept the fact that a ruthless group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, could brainwash a little girl by torture, degradation and confinement.
With the tragedy at Jonestown, Hearst’s sentence was commuted to 22 months by then-President Jimmy Carter. She would later receive a full pardon by US President Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001—his last day in office.
And with Jonestown, cults became an international phenomenon and concern.
Haworth remembers the sequence of events very well:
The course started in September, I escaped in October and what happened in November of 1978? Well, Jonestown occurred, of course, in Guyana. The massacre in Jonestown.
One evening, the radio hosts of Canadian radio station CHFI-FM were discussing the tragedy, and—like the rest of the world— were trying to unpack and understand how a single man could get 918 people to not only commit suicide at his behest but kill their children on his command as well.
The hosts discussed whether they should be concerned about such a tragedy happening in Canada and open the phone lines to their audiences for comment.
The phone rings, and the caller is connected. “Yes,” says Haworth, now live on air.
And for the next few moments, the hosts and anybody tuned in on the drive home that evening, listened to Haworth tell his story about the dangers of mind control and cults.
Haworth’s knowledge of a burgeoning topic of interest led to him being invited for a longer interview, which then caught the attention of other media outlets, “I was doing media interviews from that point on,” he recalls.
Council on Mind Abuse (COMA)
Haworth’s first organisation was (the now defunct) Council on Mind Abuse (COMA), which he set up the year after his exit from his group and was the first of its kind in Canada.
COMA would provide the template for Haworth’s UK-based organisation, the CIC, eight years later. His goal in 1979 was to “Warn the public in general. It was to help families. It was to help ex-cult members. It was to help the police. It was to help researchers. It was to help anybody and everybody that was interested in looking at cults.”
He sold all his insurance policies, pooled his finances, and began to give talks and interviews around Canada to educate the public about his personal experiences and the danger of cults. The talks saw him standing in front of high school and first-year university students, members of the Jewish women’s league, and the congregations of local churches.
“I was doing 200 lectures a year,” Haworth says, “It was not unusual, unfortunately, for me to be doing two talks in a day and occasionally three: one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening.”
In the beginning, he paid for his own petrol and overheads, but as the work and the demand picked up, he realised that if he wanted to continue, he would need to start charging a fee. The dollar price tag attached to the ticket only piqued people’s interest further, and each night, more people would come to see Haworth speak about the dangers of cults, “So then it started to balance out financially,” he says, “I could just about stay afloat.”
From its very inception, COMA and its members had the attention of lobbyist groups connected to and funded by the groups Haworth was trying to warn the public about. The purpose of these lobbyist groups, says Haworth, is “to criticise the critics.”
A few weeks after COMA’s launch, Haworth learned about a meeting at a Canadian hotel about him and his organisation’s activities. He knew nothing about it, and getting the information last minute, he took a car to the location. A panel of academics from a group calling itself the Canadians for the Protection of Religious Liberties (CPRL) had called a press conference in the back function room of the hotel and were preparing to address an audience of journalists.
Haworth arrived five minutes late, and as he entered the room, all cameras, microphones, and lights turned on him.
He introduced himself to the audience as the subject of the meeting; however, out of respect to the CPRL, who had hired the room, he agreed to wait in the corridor and respond to any allegations when the CPRL had finished their address.
Exiting the room, he closed the door just enough so he could hear what was happening inside.
With the proceedings underway, a religious affairs editor for a national newspaper stood up and asked the panel—in a very thick Irish accent, Haworth recalls—if they [the CPRL] were possibly affiliated or connected with any groups that might be considered cults.
The panel looked at each other. “There are none of us here associated with any group that’s been formed in the last 100 years,” replied one CPRL representative.
The editor checked his notebook. “Ah. That’s very interesting,” he said and then asked why a well-known cult (infamous still to this day for ruthlessly going after their critics) was down on the hotel’s records as having paid the CPRL’s bill for the press conference.
Throughout the 1980s, COMA operated out of a secret location and would receive between 100-150 calls a week from members of the public who wanted information. Haworth left the organisation in 1987, but trouble with funding and protracted libel suits with two well-known groups forced COMA to declare bankruptcy and officially close on March 1st, 1992.
A Wing Mirror on Each Shoulder
Haworth is no stranger to the lengths cults will go to discredit or silence anyone bringing negative attention to their activities and practices. The CIC’s website does not list an office address for security reasons, and a company specialising in secure post boxes manages its private PO Box address.
“It isn’t a field people queue up to get into because, if you do, you’re not going to make much of any money and you’re going to get smeared,” he tells me, “And, if you did work all the hours they wanted you to work, then you wouldn’t last very long.”
During our conversations, Haworth uses the word “cult” and the “cult phenomenon” to describe the field at large, but avoids it entirely when describing any individual or collective of individuals.
When we discuss the 418 who starved to death in Kenya when Good News International Ministries pastor, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, told his followers to begin a deadly fast in preparation to “meet Jesus,” or Smallville’s Allison Mack’s recent release from prison after she was named a co-conspirator in NXIVM founder Keith Ranieri’s sex trafficking and forced labour charges, Haworth avoids the term cult entirely, preferring instead to refer them as “groups” or “groups of concern.”
A defensive tactic, which is “common sense for people in our field,” according to Haworth, who describes how some of his hyper-vigilant colleagues—concerned about the lengths some cults will go to silence or cause problems for their critics—conduct their work with “a wing mirror on each shoulder.”
To illustrate his point, he begins a story about how a friend, an outspoken critic of one group, had the Canadian police call to inform her that they had disturbing photographs in their possession.
These photos showed four men parading around her hometown carrying a coffin. Her name was written in big letters on the wooden lid.
Members of a group under scrutiny or receiving negative press may use intimidation tactics to get a person from speaking out against them, but if the group in question has resources and money on its side, then a libel case can be costly even if you manage to win, “If their lawyer is better than yours, and if they’ve got more money than you, tough. And in addition, you can tell the truth and win, and lose a fortune,” Haworth points out.
When asked if the threats and harassment ever had him reconsidering his position in the field, he’s quick to respond, “I wouldn’t see the point in that,” he says, “It’s not something I want, or I look forward to, but it’s something I anticipated when I started off in the field. It’s just life in the big city when you’re dealing with cults.”
He recounts one incident with his characteristic sense of humour, “I had a phone call from a guy who told me my end was near. And I guess that was a bit ambiguous,” he pauses for a second, “It could have meant I was short.”
While he might not welcome the harassment, the attention he gets means that he’s doing something right and “If you’re not doing something worthwhile, you’re not going to get the flak. So, the more flak I got, the more it convinced me that, oh well, something must be working.”
Mind Control
“When most people think of cults, they only think of religious cults,” Haworth explains, “It’s [also] nice to think that there’s a problem elsewhere, like California rather than here.”
There’s also the misconception that only the down-and-out, the mentally ill, and the disenfranchised members of society end up in cults. In reality, cults are looking for the opposite type of person, “They think there must be something wrong with someone that finishes up in a cult in the first place. It’s the blame the victim syndrome,” Haworth adds.
During his own time in a group, he remembers the instructions given to him during his recruiting drives, “When I was recruiting, I was told to stay away from ‘space cadets’, that was the technical terminology used.”
Highly educated students or graduates from prestigious universities like Oxbridge, he says, are high-risk targets for recruitment.
American cult expert Steve Hassan’s website Freedom of Mind defines undue influence (another term for mind control) as “any act of persuasion that overcomes the free will and judgment of another person. People can be unduly influenced by deception, flattery, trickery, coercion, hypnosis, and other techniques.”
The CIC website lists 26 different mind control techniques: hypnosis, limitation of food, and sleep deprivation are all part of the list.
Groups do not need to use all twenty-six techniques to erode a person’s autonomy and encourage compliance; instead, a combination might be used depending on the group, as some people are more receptive to some techniques than others.
“All that varies from one cult to another in terms of the methodology is which combination of techniques that particular group uses,” Haworth describes, “Trance induction, for example, is extremely powerful and if someone is being induced into a trance state through chanting or through hypnosis, then you can do just whatever you want with that person.”
Other experts or specialists may have a different way of identifying the presence of mind control, but Haworth prefers to take a non-academic approach to keep things understandable as “Some criteria are difficult to get your head round. It’s not plain English for me, but then again, I’m from the north of England.”
Psychological Coercion
When asked to define the danger these groups and their leaders pose to the public, Haworth needs little time to think over his answer, “A complete loss of free will, a loss of the ability to think and use logic, which most of us take for granted… And until you see that happen in someone, it’s hard to imagine what that can be like.”
He compares what happens in cults to a type of slavery, but unlike the laws that protect people from being physically trafficked, there’s nothing to protect people from psychological coercion, “What cults have been doing is a form of slavery for decades. And not one of the slavery laws has ever been applied and can’t be applied when dealing with cults.”
Only within the last decade have laws been passed to protect people from coercive and controlling behaviours. The issue is proving the presence of psychological coercion. “It’s not illegal to psychologically coerce people,” Haworth points out.
Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 makes it an offence to use controlling or coercive behaviours and, if found guilty, carries a maximum penalty of a five-year prison sentence. The law, however, only applies when people are personally connected, which means only in the context of family or relatives, or being in a relationship (intimate, married, or civil partnership). There’s another misconception that a person joins freely and can leave on the same terms.
The signature block at the end of each of Haworth’s emails contains a warning of sorts. It reads, “People don’t join Cults…they are recruited.”
While people may be attracted to cults by their own will, a series of techniques will be used against them to erode their autonomy: keeping them within the group, carrying out orders without question, and behaving in ways that go against their best interests.
“If you get a judge that understands what a cult is, boy you’ve done well.” Haworth gives the example of a family member trying to access their family after they’ve been shunned or lost contact with their loved ones, which is, unfortunately, a frequent occurrence when people are involved with cults.
The judge may say to a desperate husband trying to contact his wife, “‘Please, Sir. Are you trying to tell me that your spouse is a cult member? How ridiculous! Your spouse is a very intelligent person.’ So, this person is equating intelligence with sussing out of cult ahead of time and being less likely to be recruited. It’s actually just the opposite.”
If it’s not illegal to set up a cult and psychologically coerce people into working for free, handing over their belongings and finances, and excommunicating their friends and family, then one of the best defences someone has in ensuring they’re not recruited is to research the group thoroughly before making any type of commitment.
“If it’s that good, then there must be a ton of information available ahead of time. Check it out thoroughly. If it’s okay, you should be able to Google it and find a lot of good news online. But Google it, in case it’s a cult,” recommends Haworth, “because if it is, there may well be some horror stories online.”
He adds, “More people will check out a second-hand car than a course that might ruin their lives.”
Role Change
I scheduled another phone call with Haworth, and we exchanged emails in the week leading up to our next conversation.
“Never heard of you,” he tells me with a laugh when I inform him who is calling.
Today will be the last time Haworth answers the phone at the CIC.
We’re discussing his involvement in the Canadian group when he suddenly stops me mid-question because he’s remembered something. It sounds as if he’s about to say, “If I have one regret,” but he self-corrects, and asks me if I remember the story about his Canadian neighbour who gave him the newspaper article about the group he was involved in all those years ago.
I should have gone back to her to say thank you so much. Maybe bought a bunch of flowers or something. But I never saw her again. She left the country and went to live elsewhere. So that’s a little regret that I have, that I could ever thank her for being so kind to give me the newspaper article… She said [the article] was great, because [from] her perspective it was, because she was worried about me.
I ask if anything shocks or surprises him after all this time. Haworth needs no time to think over his answer:
It’s not what shocks me, it’s what upsets me. It upsets me that the government still doesn’t understand how cults work and aren’t doing anything to protect British citizens. And because of that British money is going down the drain into these groups. British corporations are less productive than they could be. The National Health Service is hit with more patients.
Haworth’s previously jocular tone is absent:
It upsets me that the legal system is, by and large, completely unaware of how cults operate and how undue influence should be applied in civil cases. It upsets me that the police haven’t been trained in this area. It upsets me every time the phone rings and someone else has been lost to a cult.
But not every phone call is just another horror story, another desperate parent or spouse seeking advice about how to get their loved ones back.
Sometimes, it’s a person who’s escaped from a group, or it’s people recently reunited with their family members, and they want to wish Haworth a happy Christmas:
It makes my day when I get a call from somebody who says they’ve just managed to escape even if they’re at the beginning of the withdrawal period, which is an awful time to go through. I’ll say, ‘Hey, thanks very much, you’ve made my day, you really have’. And it’s such great news because most of the time it’s another person grieving the loss of someone to one of these groups.
But even after forty-five years in the field and everything he’s seen, Haworth is not considering today as the start of a type of retirement.
The phone calls at the CIC will stop after today, but Haworth has no intentions of leaving the field. Instead, he’ll be focusing more on maintaining the CIC’s online presence, writing on the topic, and recording the occasional podcast, “I’m going behind the scenes,” he explains, “I’ll still be out there and trying to warn people but doing it through writing rather than in person on the phone.”
“And,” he tells me, “My wife will come first.”
Author’s Note: The names of any cults or groups Mr Haworth has personally been involved with, or encountered in the courtrooms, have been omitted from the following article.
If you, or anybody you know, have been affected by anything mentioned in this article and would like more information or support, please visit one of the following websites:
There is so much misinformation in the animal health sphere, ranging from the tame to the outright ridiculous – but it all has the potential to impact negatively on animal (and human) health and welfare.
One of the common myths veterinary professionals hear – and we will burst the bubble at this point by clarifying it is indeed a myth – is that rabbit ears, often fed as a treat to dogs, act as a natural dewormer. This is incorrect. You may think this is relatively harmless – the dog gets a nice treat, and no one is hurt. But the issues associated with this practice have quite deep roots.
Firstly, it is an endorsement of the naturalistic fallacy, which makes way for different and more harmful forms of health misinformation, and secondly, many parasitic worms have zoonotic potential. There is also the problem that many of these pet food shops selling and advertising these treats as natural ‘dewormers’ are making medicinal claims – which should bereported to the Veterinary Medicines Directorate.
How does it ‘work’?
Those who believe in the deworming properties of rabbit ears often state that the indigestible hair from the ear scours the gut lining to rid the gastrointestinal tract of worms. However, there is absolutely no evidence that rabbit ears, or any other hair covered body part like a limb, will work as a natural dewormer.
We knowthat raw meat can be a vector for parasites, with one review stating the potential hazard of some parasitic infections in pet animals is based upon the ingestion of raw meat. Livestock act as intermediate hosts for some parasites, carrying cysts in their meat or offal and enhancing the chance to make the human an occasional host. When raw meat is ingested, cats and dogs can act as definitive hosts for these endoparasites. Harbouring the adult stage of the parasites which are shed as eggs via the faeces, thus leading to environmental burden.
If rabbit ears did actually act to deworm dogs, any carcass-eating animals such as foxes would likely have similar protective mechanisms – so, to understand why hair ingestion doesn’t work, we can look at the prevalence of endoparasites in foxes.
The fox data
The most common endoparasites of foxes are worms – a paper published in the journalParasitology Research found a total of 32 helminth (intestinal worm) species in red foxes — including Alaria, Pearsonema, Taenia, Toxocara, Trichinella larvae and Ucinaria — all of which are considered significant for medical and veterinary health. A similar study found many of the same helminths, with 86% of animals carrying Uncinaria stenocephala (a hookworm), 81% with Toxocara canis (a type of large roundworm well known to infect dogs), and 28% with Angiostrongylus vasorum, and a further study identified 17 helminth species from 136, stating that fox helminth species significantly increased in number in the last 35 years, with Toxascaris leonina, Mesocestoides litteratus, Trichuris vulpis and Angiostrongylus vasorum being four new veterinary-relevant species.
Furthermore, a team of ten biologists from the UK and Germany carried out a study of 588 foxes from across Great Britain to look at disease-causing parasites. The results, were published inVeterinary Parasitology and showed that the most common gut parasites were Uncinaria stenocephala and Toxocara canis, occurring in 41% and 62% of the foxes, respectively.
There are clearly some major downfalls to this data when assessing whether rabbit ears, or any other hairy appendage, will treat worms – mainly the fact that raw meat is a big potential vector to introduce parasites. Even so, as far as we are able to tell, the data suggests that regular eating of hair-covered carcasses – as a fox would be likely to do – does not protect against worms. We can therefore reasonably extrapolate that other hair-covered dog treats making these claims do so without any evidence to substantiate them.
Belief in misinformation proceeds to further beliefs not founded in evidence
When owners start to believe in products because they are ‘natural’, believing them to be perhaps safer for their pets, or less harmful, these beliefs may also lead to further belief in natural or alternative views and practices, that may be even more harmful.
Furthermore, when it comes to the motivation behind raw feeding,a survey on this topic found that 26% of respondents said the main reason they choose to provide raw meat-based diets was ‘to respect the dog’s carnivorous nature’. Pet owners feeding raw animal products also reported lower levels of trust in veterinary advice than pet owners not feeding raw animal products, and they were also less likely to find vaccinations and parasite screening to be of benefit to their pet.
Thelink between medical mistrust and the naturalistic fallacy has been the subject of research, which found strong correlations between vaccine mistrust and adherence to complementary and alternative medicine and conspiracy ideation. The results of a study by Cuevas et al. suggest that mistrust toward healthcare may unfavourably affect patient-clinician interactions and patients’ health-related outcomes.
So, while we may think that the marketing of rabbit ears as natural ‘de-wormers’ is benign, that it’s just a dog enjoying a nice treat, it can be correlated with, or even potentially open the owner up to, a much deeper mistrust and respect of the depth of veterinary professionals’ knowledge, which ultimately could be of negative consequence to the health and welfare of those pets, or the people interacting with them.
Illegal medicinal claims
A product ismedicinal by presentation if it gives the averagely well-informed person the impression that the product treats or prevents disease, or they gain that impression. This regulation includes product labels, leaflets, websites and social media advertisements or oral recommendations, and any other forms of literature relating to the product issued before, during or after the sale. A product which is medicinal by presentation must have a Marketing Authorisation granted by the Secretary of State before it can be placed on the market, unless it is covered by Schedule 6 to the VMR exemptions for small pet animals.
This means that if a person placing the product on the market, or the manufacturer, or a connected third party, expressly indicates or recommends the product for treating or preventing disease, the product is medicinal by presentation. Certain words are considered medicinal as they’re normally associated with authorised medicines. All the shops claiming that their product is a natural ‘de-wormer’ suggest that it can ‘control a disease’ and therefore, in my opinion, are medicinal by presentation.
These products should be reported to the VMD. If the VMD deems the wording is only ‘misleading or false’ but does not imply a medicinal effect, it will not cover any claim made for an unauthorised veterinary medicine. False or misleading advertising claims about a product that is not a veterinary medicinal product are dealt with by local Trading Standards Officers under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.
Zoonotic risk
Among the parasitic worms of dogs, the species that are generally considered to be of most concern in the UK, because they’re zoonotic (i.e. can be transferred to humans), are Toxocara canis and Echinococcus granulosus.
Some worms are also of concern because of the harm they can do to dogs. In the UK, the worm of greatest concern in this regard is Angiostrongylus vasorum – which does not pose a risk to humans.
The “lungworm” Angiostrongylus vasorum is really a heartworm, but larvae migrating through the lungs can cause coughing and breathing difficulties, hence its common name. Foxes are the natural host for the parasite and appear to tolerate infection very well. Domestic dogs can also be infected without becoming clinically unwell, but a small percentage of infected dogs will develop blood clotting complications, neurological signs or will die suddenly as a result of infection. Infection occurs through the consumption of intermediate hosts such as slugs and snails so dogs that eat these or faeces or grass that contain slugs, are at particular risk of infection.
For these dogs and those living in areas where there are high levels of the parasite, monthly effective licensed deworming treatments are essential. Rabbit ears are not going to cut it! Other lungworms infecting dogs in the UK include Crenosoma vulpis and Eucoleus aerophilus. These lungworms can cause respiratory problems in dogs but are much less common than A.vasorum.
Protection against zoonotic worms needs a multi modal approach
Routine treatment for worms in dogs has traditionally been used in the UK to reduce egg shedding in dog faeces by Toxocara faeces. Eggs in the environment also pose a risk to people, and treating dogs helps to reduce this risk. The argument against this “blanket treatment” is that it leads to over treatment for some dogs and could lead to environmental contamination.
A study in 2016 showed 5% of dogs to be shedding eggs at any one time. This does not sound like a lot but when shedding by dogs is followed over a year, prevalence is much higher. This shedding over time is important because, eggs are long lived and build up in the environment. A recent study found 86% of public parks to be contaminated with eggs. This means that everyone in the UK may be exposed to Toxocara infection from contaminated parks, as well as playing fields, allotments, and homes where pets live.
The potentially severe and debilitating consequences of infection make preventing exposure important, and we all have a responsibility to help reduce this level of contamination. A few simple precautions suggested by Ian Wright, Veterinary Parasitologist, will help to reduce contamination and help keep everyone safe from infection.
1. Regular treatment of dogs for worms
Puppies provide the largest source of potential infection, so treatment for worms should start at two weeks of age for puppies and repeated every two weeks until two weeks after weaning, and then every month until six months old. The mum should also be treated at the same time. Adult dogs should be treated at least every three months to reduce egg shedding. This is because any dog could shed eggs intermittently their whole lives. Pets that hunt, are on raw diets, or that are in contact with young children or immune suppressed adults should be treated monthly, as these dogs represent the greatest risk of infection.
2. Picking up and responsibly disposing of dog faeces
UK county councils take the threat of dog fouling very seriously and have instituted a number of measures to control it, including providing clearly visible convenient disposal bins, imposing fines for dog fouling, banning dogs from children’s playgrounds and sports fields, and DNA testing of faecal samples to identify guilty pets. It is important to pick up your own dog’s faeces, but also to positively encourage others to do the same through schools, vets, and social media.
3. Thorough washing of fruit and vegetables
Fruit and vegetables in allotments and kitchen gardens can become contaminated by faeces from infected dogs, cats and foxes. These can be made safe for human consumption if first thoroughly washed or cooked.
4. Good hand hygiene
Washing of hands before eating and after prolonged petting of dogs or outdoor activity reduces the risk of many parasites being transferred from hand to mouth.
5. Cooking meat and offal before feeding to dogs
Cooking meat, or ensuring it has been adequately pre-frozen, will help to kill parasites that may be present, before consumption by dogs.
These simple preventative measures, alongside good flea control, will also help to protect against tapeworm. Dogs that have access to fallen livestock carcasses are at particular risk from Echinococcus granulosus, so keeping dogs on lead and sticking to paths around ruminants is also a very sensible precaution. Out of respect for farmers, risk of Echinococcus granulosus or not, we advise that you adhere to on-lead walking around any livestock.
Why not test and treat dogs positive for worms rather than “blanket treat”?
Routine screening dogs for worms, and then treating positive dogs rather than using preventative treatments, is a strategy adopted by some European countries. Routine testing is a valid alternative to routine treatment if carried out at the same frequency as routine treatment would have been applied. This leads to reduced drug use, but has a number of limitations.
Often, routine testing is carried out as a one-off screen, or once per year, and infections may be missed by single tests. Even if tests are carried out more frequently, the shedding of zoonotic eggs in the faeces can occur between tests. If pet owners are going to adopt routine testing instead of routine treatment, then they must understand that this shedding can occur.
There is huge value though in testing regularly alongside routine deworming to show that treatment is being effective and to look for early signs of drug resistance. Although a single test may miss infection, regular testing will show if treatment is failing.
Ultimately, while your dog might enjoy chewing on a rabbit ear, they are fine to use as a sporadic treat, but they are simply no substitute for proven deworming practices.
In my conspiracy theory course, I have my students perform an experiment. I tell them to search the internet for “favorite famous person + Illuminati.” I’ll ask them to do it as an image search and if that doesn’t produce results, I’ll have them change the same search to a general internet search. It ultimately doesn’t matter because this never fails and it’s always humorous (the only time it doesn’t work is when a student picks an obscure band that only they know). The result is usually a singer, usually a woman, making a triangle with their hands, winking, or where they have a jumble of words behind them that a conspiracy theorist has pin-and-yarned together.
Conspiracy theories attract followers based on their feelings, not facts, and one of the strongest feelings that we have is our own sense of identity. This feeling applies when there is a person or group that we identify with. There is a reason that celebrities have followings, and in the current climate – where we can have seeming interactions with them through social media accounts – that bond seems stronger than in the past. Conspiracy theories also attract based on consequence size, which is why the more famous a person is, the more it becomes a certainty that a conspiracy theory will feature them. This is also why the obscure band that my student subtly brags about knowing doesn’t show up in the search.
This, of course, means that there are a plentiful number of conspiracy theories and accusations concerning American singer Taylor Swift. Swift is so famous that a number of you groaned when you read her name. She’s so famous that most of you figured out from the first two sentences who this article must be about. For the last few weeks conservative conspiracy theorists have begun attacking her (unless legal trouble has occupied their focus). I want to explain why she was an inevitable target.
The first person I need to discuss is the true believer. The true believer’s motive is understandable when we view the world from their perspective. This would be someone who believes all media is controlled by a nefarious force that we usually label “Illuminati.” “Illuminati” at this point has become a synonym for “them.” We do not have to delve into who they really are or the specifics of the conspiracy theory, but we should understand that this type of conspiracy theorist does believe what they are saying. Since they believe that every major figure in mass media is a puppet, then anyone who gains a significant popularity would also be under their control, if they were not, that individual would not be “allowed” to become that famous. After all, who made Steve Guttenberg a star? It makes sense that someone as famous as Swift would be a target of their conspiratorial accusations.
The second group of people are opportunists pushing conspiracy theories because they are a source of revenue. They attack the current dominant phenomenon for no other reason than because it is dominant. Today it’s a person, tomorrow it may be a game or a new technology—it really does not matter. The more popular the person (in this case) the stronger and more numerous the conspiracy theory accusations are going to be against them. The important thing to remember is that for this conspiracy theorist the subject is irrelevant but in a different manner than the above theorist. The true believer can take a public figure and swap them our for a different person because they are all puppets. The opportunist can do the same because they are not after the truth, they are after attention. They know that attacking the most famous person in the culture with some absurd claim will get attention from two sides: the haters—those that despise the person and/or believe the conspiracy theories; but also those rushing to that person’s defence.
A third category exists: those people that are attracted to any kind of celebrity gossip. These individuals do not figure in my explanation; but they are important because they help spread conspiracy theories by looking at them.
Conspiracy theories spread by exposure, and while I doubt that any Taylor Swift fan going to the comment page to defend the singer is going to be convinced that she’s a Pagan witch who wants to destroy Christianity, the danger is in the exposure to the larger conspiracy world that this theorist inhabits. Just a note: while the editors here will tell you that I’m not the best at inserting links to my sources, for this article I’m purposefully leaving out links to their claims…it’s on purpose (I swear).
Taylor Swift has a much more passionate following than some of the past targets of conspiratorial accusations, which is a problem. Person A makes an outrageous conspiratorial claim about her, someone reads a headline about that, and goes to the source. That’s where our problem lies: the conspiracy theorist has succeeded. They wanted traffic to their site and attacking this singer is a cheap way to do it. The increased traffic means more ads, and that means more money.
The problem is that the “Swiftie” is going to be exposed to all of the other claims the individual makes. They are very likely smart enough to avoid believing in other claims like the “trans agenda,” anti-vaccination claims, etc. but not all of the new visitors will ignore the other stuff. Occam award winning podcast “Knowledge Fight” has issued this warning about Alex Jones. We are all aware of some of the more viral claims that Jones has made, from his nearly crying lament that “they” are turning the frogs gay, to his threat (?) that he would eat his neighbour’s ass (in a cannibalism way not in a sexual way). These absurd claims are not sincere. They are made so that that we, the larger audience, will travel to his show (again, purposefully not linking) to hear what crazy thing he says next. Maybe while we are there, we can pick a water filter or some boner pills. This is the point of these claims.
This phenomenon isn’t new because of Taylor Swift, it’s just that she’s in the news now. Here’s what Jones claimed of the Lady Gaga’s NFL Superbowl LI halftime show on 5 February 2017,
They say she’s going to stand on top of the stadium, ruling over everyone with drones everywhere, surveilling everyone in a big swarm…. To just condition them to say ‘I am the goddess of Satan’ ruling over them with the rise of the robots in a ritual of lesser magic.
I would like to point out that he made these claims the morning of the Superbowl. As in before the event occurred. He had no knowledge of what Gaga’s performance would look like, and even then, his description is absurd. His claim of mass surveillance: it’s the Superbowl—there’s cameras (both broadcast and security) everywhere, no matter who is performing. What is a Goddess of Satan? Does Satan have goddesses? None of it makes sense, but the point isn’t to convey information – it’s to get people to tune in to his Monday show where he responds to the performance.
We can add to the list Katy Perry, who is in a unique position because extremist Christian conspiracy theorists view her as something as a traitor for abandoning her earlier persona as Kate Hudson in the genre of Christian Rock. She’s been accused of being in the Illuminati too, but going further than that she was also the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit by the Christian Rap Duo of Flame and Da’ T.R.U.T.H.. I’m about as unqualified to judge musical similarity as I am to judge asteroid similarities, so I’ll leave the music dispute over the “ostinato” to the music nerds.
And by any measure, the devoutly religious message of Joyful Noise has been irreparably tarnished by its association with the witchcraft, paganism, black magic, and Illuminati imagery evoked by the same music in Dark Horse. Indeed, the music video of Dark Horse generated widespread accusations of blasphemy and an online petition signed by more than 60,000 demanding removal of an offensive religious image from the video.
Except, no, it doesn’t. Katy Perry’s song is about a potential suitor not expecting how powerful the attraction to her is going to be. The title of the track, “Dark Horse,” refers to an underdog in a horse race that wins seemingly out of nowhere.
The complaint only makes sense once you place the disputed lyrics against a video that has 3.6 billion views at the time of this writing. Fans of pop music, and anyone culturally aware in 2013 would be familiar with Katy Perry; but most would have unfamiliar with Flame and T.R.U.T.H. The lawsuit may have a legitimate complaint about those three notes (again, I have no idea), but the claim that Perry and her song are attacking the devoutly Christian message of “Joyful Noise” is absurd. The only reason that anyone would put the two together is because of the lawsuit, which was a side effect, if not the point entirely (Katy Perry eventually won the lawsuit on appeal with the ruling being that the ostinato was too generic to be copyrightable).
My point is that we should remember when someone like Mark Hemingway of the Federalist writes an article titled “Taylor Swift’s Popularity is a Sign of Societal Decline” or Nick “alpha male” Adams claims that Swift hates America, hates Trump, and loves Communism, they are hoping that you will not respond by asking “who?” People like Tomi Lahren, Candace Ownes, and Armand White are attempting to lift their conspiratorial worldviews up by pulling down an icon. Conspiracy theories die without attention, and these attacks are a cheap way to get that attention.
Whether you are a “Swiftie” or not is irrelevant as this applies to any fan of a famous actor, singer, public figure, or cultural phenomenon; this is probably made easier by the fact that their targets are generally beautiful young women too. We need to keep in mind that at a certain point their fame is going to generate conspiracy theories. It is important that we recognise that our response should be to ignore them.
The great scholar Albert Schweitzer once quipped that when surveying the life of Jesus, “we look down the well of history and see our own faces reflected.” In the Western world, everyone wants Jesus to be on their team.
Consider the words of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in the context of the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
“Where was Jesus born?… In Bethlehem, Palestine… Jesus Christ was the first anti-imperialist… So, Jesus was a Palestinian boy… He died as a Palestinian man.”
Maduro is not the first political leader to make that claim. In 2019, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour tweeted: “Jesus was Palestinian of Nazareth and is described in the Quran as being brown copper skinned with wooly hair”, again in the context of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities.
This requires some historical clarification. The word ‘Palestine’ is a derivative of ‘Philistia.’ This was how ancient Greek writers designated the lands of the Philistines. By the time of Jesus, the word was no longer in use. Jesus was born in the kingdom of Judea, ruled by Herod the Great. After Herod’s death, the area where Jesus lived was called Galilee, under the rule of Herod Antipas. He died in Jerusalem, which at the time was the Roman province of Judea. After two bloody upheavals, the Romans renamed that province in the Second Century CE ‘Syria Palestina’, partly to spite the Jews, so as to use the name of one of historical enemies of the Israelites, the Philistines.
To claim that Jesus was a Palestinian is disingenuous. Yes, the town of Bethlehem is located in the current Palestinian territories. But that is irrelevant. A historical figure’s ethnic identity is not defined by the ethnic group that today inhabits the place where that figure was born and lived. If we followed that criterion, we would claim that Saint Paul was Turkish because Tarsus is in present-day Turkey. That is absurd. Saint Paul was a Hellenistic Jew from the 1st Century CE, and he had no cultural affiliation whatsoever with the Turks, who conquered Tarsus in 1359 CE.
Likewise, Jesus was a Jew. It is risky to argue that Jesus was of the same ethnicity and religion as today’s Jews because all populations have undergone many transformations in the past two thousand years. But it can be safely assumed that in terms of ethnicity and religion, Jesus was closer to Israeli Jews than to Palestinian Arabs. His language was Aramaic, somewhat closer to modern Hebrew than to Arabic. His Judaism was not the same type of religion as practiced today by Jews, but it was certainly closer to it than to Islam or for that matter, Christianity.
Yet, it would be unfair to pick on Maduro or Sarsour’s disingenuousness. In fact, there is a long history of attempts to make Jesus a non-Jew. Prior to the diaspora into higher latitudes and intermixing with local European populations, Jews physically resembled their Middle Eastern neighbors. So, it is likely that Jesus had somewhat dark skin, with wooly hair. Yet, most Western artistic depictions of Jesus present him as a white, blue-eyed man, sometimes even blond.
This is somewhat understandable, as artists are given license to portray figures of the past adjusted to artists’ own cultural settings. Apart from representing Jesus as fair-skinned, Medieval painters depicted Jerusalem full of Gothic-like temples. It is very unlikely that those artists really believed that there were Gothic cathedrals in 1st Century Judea; they were simply making artistic statements by incorporating their own cultural experiences into the scenes they were depicting.
Pseudo-historians have had more perverse intentions when trying to make Jesus a non-Jew. For example, Nazis created the “Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” and this institute was adamant on presenting Jesus as an Aryan. As per their narrative, Galilee was populated by Assyrians and Persians, and they were forced to convert to Judaism; Jesus was a secret Aryan, and he was killed by Jews because of his ethnicity.
It is easy to be outraged by Nazis’ distortion of history. But Christians must come to terms with the fact that the “dejudification” of Jesus began in the New Testament itself. In all likelihood, Jesus was a Jewish nationalist who expected an apocalyptic event in which God would overthrow the Romans. Paul also had apocalyptic expectations, but he began to tone down Jesus’ nationalism. In this endeavor, he was at odds with James— Jesus’ own brother— who was as nationalistic as Jesus. Ultimately, Paul prevailed, and gentiles were increasingly incorporated into the Jesus movement.
The Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and Jews were thoroughly defeated after a bloody rebellion. Christians thus understood that the survival of their movement hinged on dissociating themselves from Jews and seeking Roman favor. This had an effect on the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus—all of which were composed after the destruction of the Temple—, to the point that in John —the latest of the four—, Jesus is constantly at odds with “the Jews,” almost as if he were not one of them.
In any case, for historical accuracy, it matters to know whether or not Jesus was a Jew. But for political purposes, how is Jesus’ identity relevant? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complex one, but surely, the ethnicity or religion of a 1st Century failed apocalyptic prophet can have no bearing on it. In the West, everybody wants Jesus to be on their team because ultimately, he is approached as a divine figure. But that is not what we ought to do. We must approach Jesus as any other mortal historical figure, much as we would do with Julius Caesar, Napoleon or Nelson Mandela.
Jesus was a man of virtues and defects. He had a high sense of justice, but he was also a man of his times, waiting for an apocalypse that never came. Let’s admire and criticise him for what he did, but let’s put him aside when discussing complex 21st Century topics. Jesus was not a Palestinian, but that says absolutely nothing about the right of Palestinians (or Jews) to a homeland.
Hello, how are you? Today I will put aside the medicine content in order to tell a family story. It’s the story of how I made Paulo Roberto Dutra get rid of ALZHEIMER’S. Also known as my “Dad.” Years ago, my father started to show signs of cognitive decline. As old age approached, he had constant memory slips and mental confusion. It was painful to see my beloved dad in this situation. This was one of the reasons why I delved even deeper into my studies on Alzheimer’s. After 20 years of experience, I decided to learn more abroad. I was thus the first Brazilian to be awarded the ReCODE Protocol Certificate by the renowned physician Dale Bredesen. This technique fights Alzheimer’s using natural means. I applied everything I learned on my father, and with a 4 STEP protocol I succeeded in curing him from Alzheimer’s.
Despite a great deal of medical research, there is still no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Nevertheless, on May 29th, 2023, Jolivi – a São Paulo based content publisher ‘focused on natural and integrative health’ – sent the text above to its 75,000 subscribers in a newsletter bearing the following sentence as its title: ‘How I saved my father from ALZHEIMER’S.’ Signed by the urologist Alain Dutra, who is a self-proclaimed functional, integrative and style (sic) physician, the message – tinged with an intimate and personal tone – discloses the silver bullet: a protocol called ReCODE, created by the American neurologist Dale Bredesen. For only 12 payments of BRL 99.00 each, the reader has access to something that current science still ignores: the (false) cure for Alzheimer’s.
The protocol sold by Jolivi offers a mix of therapies lacking any scientific proof, and others that in certain cases may prove beneficial – even though none of them are able to reverse the condition. As in the email signed by Dutra, the purported remission of a few patients is used to sell false hopes to thousands of families whose loved ones struggle with one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases in Brazil.
In addition to the “End of Alzheimer’s” protocol based on ReCODE, the Jolivi website sells another Alzheimer’s protocol, called “Alzheimer’s-Free Superbrain,” created by the neuroscientist Nelson Annunciato. Both make similar claims: to reverse dementia, you need only adopt a specific diet, exercise and take a number of supplements – some of them sold by a company created by the founders of Jolivi.
People who actually study Alzheimer’s say that these claims are dangerous. ‘So far there is nothing that can reverse this disease. Any material claiming the opposite is neither ethical nor truthful. At most, certain approaches, both pharmacological or not, may slow the disease’s inevitable progress,’ comments Dr. Sonia Brucki, coordinator of the Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology Group of the University of São Paulo (USP) Hospital.
Jolivi not only sells two different cures for Alzheimer’s disease for BRL 970.00 each, it also sends its subscribers free daily newsletters with information about other miracle natural treatments, criticism against the pharmaceutical industry and “reflections” casting doubt on scientifically proved therapies and drugs. The headlines include:
‘New plan to clean excess blood sugar in about 30 days;’
‘Insulin and metformin [drugs commonly used for treating diabetes] are bad for you;’ and
‘The bush that increases the “man’s hormone”,’ where an intake of 200 mg of Malaysian ginseng capsules is recommended to boost testosterone.
A further newsletter starts as follows:
Digital rectal exam? Read THIS before doing it’ and ultimately disavows the main prostate cancer prevention method with the argument that it ‘brings more risks than benefits.
An example of the group’s advertising
During the pandemic, the Jolivi team released an interview with a doctor who advocated ozone therapy for treating COVID-19, a procedure lacking any scientific proof to control this infection, or any other disease at that. In another video posted on the company’s YouTube channel, which has 1.1 million subscribers, “specialists” claimed that the flu vaccine – one the greatest allies of public health – has no effect.
It is not infrequent that the same Jolivi content also appears on the news site Infovital, and both recommend food supplements sold on Vitaminas.com.vc (trade name of Millipharma Produtos Médicos e Farmacêuticos Ltda.). Part of the Jolivi newsletters is dedicated to offering these supplements, which promise to solve anything from joint pain to loss of libido. According to the Decision no. 28/18 of Anvisa (Brazil’s Food and Drug Administration), no food supplement may make claims concerning treatment of diseases or health issues, because these properties are exclusive to drugs. Jolivi and its partner Vitaminas seem to ignore this rule.
What few people know is that Vitaminas and Jolivi are companies founded by a partnership between Empiricus – the controversial investment analysis firm recently taken over by BTG Pactual – and Agora Inc., self-proclaimed largest finance and natural health content publisher in the United States. It was the founder of Agora, Bill Bonner, who taught the founding trio of Empiricus – Caio Mesquita, Felipe Miranda and Rodolfo Amstalden – the persuasive copywriting technique used in the Jolivi newsletters and to which Mesquita attributes the company’s exponential growth since 2014. It was also Bonner who suggested to the trio of financial market economists the creation of Jolivi, called the “Empiricus of Health” by its founders and now ran by Rodolfo’s brother, Daniel Amstalden. Agora made a BRL 500,000 capital subscription to Jolivi on June 28, 2016, as recorded in its articles of association, and holds stock in the company through a holding company based in Cyprus, a tax haven. Its partnership with Millipharma still exists too.
According to information given in a press release issued by the CEO of Jolivi, Daniel Amstalden, the three companies have 46 partners and employees, more than 75,000 subscribers, 12 active health programs – among them, the “End of Alzheimer’s” protocol – and three monthly subscription plans endorsed by so-called specialists. The latest among these endorsements is by Fred Pescatore, an American doctor specialising in nutrition, offering Jolivi readers ‘a quick solution to reverse rapidly progressing dementia.’
After scaring the reader with the possibility of their memory suddenly vanishing, Pescatore claims he holds the secret of a magic solution, among many others that will be disclosed to the reader if he or she subscribes to his protocol for twelve BRL 19.90 payments. The solution is a plant that, according to Pescatore, ‘will rejuvenate your memory in less than 1 HOUR.’ The plant is Melissa officinalis – lemon balm, commonly used for brewing infusions and studied for its calming properties.
To substantiate his claims, Pescatore uses a study evaluating the antistress effects of the plant and a clinical trial involving rodents. This trial never shows any active principle at work, only evidence indicating it might bind to the brain receptors related to cognition. No study is mentioned showing reversal of dementia in one hour – probably because there is no scientific literature supporting that. This is a typical modus operandi of Jolivi and other supplement vendors: extrapolating or distorting results of early studies to promise practical effects. Another tactic clearly employed in the text is sensationalism, forcing urgency, and conspiracy theories. ‘There’s only one way to get your hands on this… News about this “mental miracle” is spreading… and this could make it much harder to find.’
In addition to the monthly reports disclosing this and other “secrets,” every new subscriber gets a BRL 50.00 voucher to redeem on Vitaminas.com.br.
How it all started
The relationship between Empiricus and Agora started in early 2014, in the meeting room of an unassuming commercial building in the Itaim Bibi neighborhood of São Paulo. Staying briefly in town on his way to his ranch in the Argentinean Andes, Bill Bonner stopped by to consolidate the partnership and convince his partners of the power of copywriting.
The economist Rodolfo – nicknamed Dolfo by his partners – a graduate in journalism of Cásper Líbero College in São Paulo, had traveled to the United States to learn sales techniques straight from the source. The suggestion of approaching Agora apparently came from Beatriz Nantes, currently operations director of Empiricus Research and, like Rodolfo, trained in economics and journalism. At that time, the stock market analysis company (which later, like Agora, became a publisher) had gained notoriety for its tongue-in-cheek investment recommendations – one of them said that businessman Eike Batista had ‘a drawer full of relevant information. Every day he picks one of them and has it published’ – but the number of subscribers did not multiply as fast as their jokes.
The audience problem started to change rapidly when the “direct mail guru” stepped in. A Sorbonne graduate, Bill Bonner created in 1978 a publishing empire by applying copywriting techniques first to financial product and natural health catalogues and later to newsletters and reports.
Agora now owns more than 31 different brands in the United States only and exports its business model through partnerships with local companies in 14 countries – Empiricus, Jolivi and Vitaminas among them. His audience, he said in an interview, are people who ‘want to become richer, happier, healthier and more productive. We try to directly reach these emotional cores.’
In another interview, when asked about an Agora newsletter that announced ‘the secret cure for cancer hidden in the Gospel of Matthew,’ he added:
[O]ur customers don’t pay us to be right. And we’re certainly not paid to be timid. Instead, we’re expected only to be diligent and honest, and to explore the unconventional, the often disreputable, and always edgy shades of the idea spectrum. And our customers have the last say. If they don’t like what we offer, they don’t buy.
Invoking individual freedom is Agora’s main strategy to avoid accusations of false advertising. It does not always work. In 2021, several subsidiaries of the holding company were sued for spreading fake news about health and agreed to pay US$2 million in fines to US authorities.
In a column on the MoneyTimes website in 2019, where he describes a meeting with the president of Agora, Caio Mesquita said that at first he did not understand why Bonner insisted on the copywriting method used in more than 300 newsletters and books bearing the Agora imprint. According to Mesquita, the CEO of Agora said that the partnership would succeed only if the partners became experts in that method: ‘It’s all about the copy. It is essential that you master copywriting techniques to develop the business.’
Even without understanding it, the trio decided to follow this commandment. They learned not only to found new companies, such as Jolivi and Millipharma, to increase profits, but also that there are always people willing to pay to know more about ‘the secret cure for cancer hidden in the Gospel of Matthew’ or the ‘inside information about a nuclear disarmament treaty.’ As revealed by Mother Jones, Bonner was the first to capitalise on the strategy dubbed by the historian Rick Perlstein as ‘the monetization of paranoia.’
Empiricus followed suit in Brazil, first advertising and then becoming a partner of the Mare Clausum publishing company, owner of O Antagonista and the Crusoé magazine. In a live broadcast in 2020, Caio Mesquita makes clear that his company was interested in the O Antagonista readership:
What was our interest in O Antagonista? It was their readership, because we sell subscriptions, just like O Antagonista and Crusoé do. Our perception (…) was that we shared people, audience, and values. We believe in private enterprise, in capitalism, in freedom. These are our guiding values, and we sensed that in you too.
In the same video, Diogo Mainardi – one of the owners of O Antagonista – added that a further similarity between Empiricus and O Antagonista is that both are outsiders to the mainstream – a discourse imported from Agora and also used in the Jolivi newsletters.
The growth
The first evidence of the power of copywriting came one year after the meeting with Bill Bonner in São Paulo. On the eve of the 2014 presidential elections, a video narrated by Felipe Miranda made catastrophic predictions for the economy if Dilma Rousseff were to win and serve a second term.
‘With only a modest marketing budget, we made a nation-wide impact and disturbed President Rousseff with the campaign “The End of Brazil.” The outcome: in less than 12 months we doubled our subscriber base and established ourselves as the largest and most relevant financial publisher in the country,’ wrote Caio Mesquita.
That video was actually an adaptation of ‘The End of America,” released in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and containing predictions of an economic collapse during the Obama administration by Stansberry Research, one of Agora’s most controversial investment analysis brands, found guilty at least twice for fraud.
In an interview, Rodolfo Amstalden justified copying the ‘structure’ of the American video as an act of ‘intellectual humility.’ ‘We copied the aggressive digital marketing approach from these guys. Independent research is naturally bound to make pessimistic cases, whether sovereign or corporate, and extremely varied narratives,’ he said. ‘Together with Agora we started to study a lot about behavioural finance, how you activate the emotions of a person.’
The campaign was the subject of a lawsuit filed by PT (Brazil’s Labour Party) against Empiricus at the Superior Electoral Court, which was dismissed.
The sister company of Empiricus in the U.S., Stansberry Research, was condemned by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC decided that the Stransberry newsletters contained
nothing more than unsubstantiated speculation and outright lies fabricated to coax investors into paying Agora (or its subsidiaries) for subscriptions of purported inside information.
Empiricus also accumulates fines imposed by the Association of Capital Market Investment Analysis and Professionals (APIMED), by CVM (the Brazilian SEC) and by Procon-SP (São Paulo Bureau of Consumer Protection) for issuing analyses with profit guarantees, such as the famous Bettina case, which earned the group a very expensive fine.
The Brazilian company followed the recommendations by Agora even when defending itself before the official bodies. It claimed it was not an analysis company anymore, but an investment content publisher, in addition to a news website. But the claim was not accepted. In the case of Jolivi, the same case is made: they are not physicians and do not recommend treatments; they only publish health content.
Empiricus only changed its position two years ago, when it was acquired by BTG, the largest investment bank of Latin America. Jolivi, however, was left out of the deal and is no longer a part of Empiricus. Caio Mesquita left the “Health Empiricus” in June 2021, and Felipe Miranda had sold his share soon after the company was founded. Only Rodolfo Amstalden is still a partner: he manages the business and is the majority shareholder of both Jolivi and Millipharma. All three of them refused to give an interview.
Pseudoscience is good business
In thousands of newsletters, videos, and podcasts, Jolivi warns against drugs and promises to cure a variety of diseases with supplements – and among them are vitamins marketed by Millipharma. The list includes eyesight issues (‘He threw away his glasses and now discloses a natural secret to cure cataracts’), prostate (‘The lean prostate supplement combo’), and chronic pain (‘A technique that can remove 90% to 100% of your chronic pain in just 10 minutes a day’), among others.
Using data scraping techniques, we analysed the reach of this material. 1.5 million people follow the three companies in social media. Their YouTube videos have more than 52 million views. The health issues most frequently mentioned in the channel are pain (499 videos), cancer (415), diabetes (411) and Alzheimer’s disease (289).
The newsletters employ a more aggressive and direct tone. The ranking of the most cited diseases is practically the same, but an analysis of 1,220 e-mails sent by the company reveals an excessive use of the words “cure” (149 newsletters), “reverse”/”reversal” (292) and “supplements” (472).
A passage from a Jolivi newsletter
We purchased two protocols offered by the company: “Alzheimer’s-Free Superbrain,” by the obstetrician and PhD in biomedicine Nelson Annunciato, and “Diabetes Protocol” by the surgeon Naif Thadeu, each selling for BRL 970.00. We soon started receiving innumerous WhatsApp message and calls offering discounts on the Vitaminas.com.vc website. The sender’s profile picture combines the logos of both companies.
Jolivi did not disclose what is their revenue from the sale of vitamins and other supplements. Hence there is no way to find out what they actually earn. We can, however, estimate their turnover by calculating their sales of content. If each of their 75,000 subscribers bought at least one protocol, averaging at BRL 970.00, their total sales would be BRL 71 million.
“Reversing” Alzheimer’s
Dr. Dale Bredesen, the inspiration for “The End of Alzheimer’s,” has authored controversial books where he claims (with no evidence to support it) that it is possible to reverse the disease and sells the ReCODE protocol for over US$ 1,300. In his latest work, “The First Survivors of Alzheimer’s,” seven patients give personal accounts about their cure. Jolivi follows the same line, using the father of Dr. Alain Dutra – an urologist who last year spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines based on messenger RNA that was unmasked by the Comprova Project – and the mother of Nelson Annunciato, PhD in biomedicine, as subjects of the purported cure.
‘In this kind of situation, it is not even possible to know if these people had a confirmed diagnosis,’ explains neurologist Elisa Resende of the Minas Gerais University Hospital and vice-coordinator of the Scientific Department of Cognitive Neurology and Aging of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology (ABN). Any personal account of healing has no value as scientific proof before it is reviewed by other researchers and published in a journal.
At the request of the Revista Questão de Ciência and Veja Saúde magazines, specialists in some of the disease “curable” by the Jolivi protocols analyzed the material. Little scientific support was found, amid a series of half-truths.
‘It is doubtless that lifestyle changes and general health measures play a significant role in maintaining cognitive functions, as observed in several studies. This is what we advise all people to do, including patients with Alzheimer’s,’ explains the neurologist Sonia Brucki. ‘But these actions do not cure the disease, they only mitigate its symptoms and may slow down the progression of the disease, which has many aspects still unexplained,’ she adds.
As it turns out, the material analysed carries over some findings about prevention to the treatment of the disease. For example, it is known that type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s disease, and that type 2 diabetes usually manifests itself after years of consuming too many calories, especially from refined carbohydrates, although the role of fats is gaining prominence.
Nelson Annunciato, the author of the “Alzheimer’s-Free Superbrain,” proposes that the reader adopts the ketogenic diet, which practically excludes carbohydrates altogether. He promises that this reduces the accumulation of beta-amyloid proteins in the brain (one of the physiological mechanisms of the disease) by up to 25% – a claim that has never even been tested in clinical studies. ‘Even the latest drugs, which decrease beta-amyloid levels, are not able to reverse symptoms,’ Resende points out.
The printed book sent to subscribers has a chapter devoted to ‘protagonists in the reversal of Alzheimer’s,’ Annunciato states that two of them, coconut oil and omega-3 fats, help reverse the symptoms for various reasons. One of them is that the disease is related to a ‘healthy fat deficiency.’ ‘This theory is under discussion, but it still has not been proved. Several studies involving omega-3 supplements have been undertaken, but they presented contradictory results and showed no relevant effects on symptoms,’ Resende comments. Regarding coconut oil, Brucki adds: ‘There are no studies of good quality and with robust results justifying the use of coconut oil.’
Imminent danger
The “Diabetes Protocol” is signed by Dr. Naif Thadeu, a plastic surgeon who promises on the Jolivi YouTube channel to reverse type 2 diabetes, another incurable disease, in 21 days. At the end of the protocol comes a surprise: the doctor claims that he is also able to reverse type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition affecting mainly children and adolescents. To achieve this, the subscriber receives a series of e-books prescribing behaviours such as following a ketogenic diet and practicing intermittent fasting (both also recommended against Alzheimer’s), as well as a supplement guide citing more than 15 substances, most of them untested against diabetes.
On several occasions, Thadeu treats type 1 and type 2 diabetes as the same thing. In one of the subscriber exclusive videos, he claims that ‘individuals suffering from type 1 diabetes may perfectly reverse their condition’ and that ‘in his clinical practice [he] deal[s] with many individuals with type 1 diabetes who need neither insulin nor medication to control blood sugar levels.’
Endocrinologist Carlos Eduardo Barra Couri, researcher at USP in Ribeirão Preto, singles out this passage as the most dangerous in the protocol. ‘Type 1 diabetes is a lethal disease if the patient does not take insulin, and the protocol prescribes an alternate treatment with vitamin D megadoses and psychiatric drugs used for alcoholism,’ he comments.
Another problem indicated by the specialists is the recommendation of generic treatments. Naif Thadeu makes suggestions both on dosing and frequency of supplements, and he also attacks drugs prescribed by specialists in diabetes.
‘Any recommendation of this kind should be individual, as there are variations in dosing according to gender, age, and comorbidity. A generic dose may bring risks,’ comments the nutritionist Natasha Albuquerque, preceptor at the Multiprofessional Residency in Diabetes Care at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). In addition to supplements lacking evidence, Thadeu recommends herbal medicines contraindicated for diabetes patients. ‘Momordica charantia and berberine can lead to hypoglycemia in these patients,’ Albuquerque points out.
Finally, another risk is the diet plan proposed by Thadeu, which practically eliminates all carbohydrates. In the first days, only raw vegetables and fruit are allowed. ‘A sudden change like this can cause ketoacidosis, a potentially fatal condition,’ Couri warns. In this condition, the organism produces an excess of ketones as a result of obtaining energy in the absence of glucose.
Exploring doubt
Jolivi’s course of action resembles those of other companies and entities created by physicians who gained notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic and profited by promoting distrust of vaccines and endorsing treatments with no scientific proof.
‘These groups have a pattern. They harness the population’s distrust of the big pharma, throw in conspiracy theories such as the one saying that “Bill Gates wants to create a new form of population control” and mix it all together in a text that makes sense, is persuasive, and is shared by people you know. In the end, all they want is to sell a solution or a “natural,” “alternate” therapy. They profit from misinformation,’ described Fabio Malini, professor at the Espírito Santo Federal University and researcher on data science.
In a questionnaire sent to their press office, we asked the Empiricus trio and Daniel Amstalden, CEO of Jolivi, about the diabetes and Alzheimer’s reversal protocols. Only Amstalden answered. He replied that all free and paid content offered by Jolivi is based on technical literature published by reliable institutions. ‘All products, marketing campaigns, videos or sales letters always list the supporting research either in the text itself or in the footnotes. This is the backbone of our work. We never publish anything that is not supported by technical literature,’ he answered.
An example of copywriting technique being used as a customer ‘bait’
Regarding the health conditions mentioned in the questions, Amstalden sent links to five scientific papers. The CEO of Jolivi guaranteed that ‘the research that supports our content suggests remission or slowing down of disease progression, as well as improvement of symptoms for some conditions. These are exactly the same terms (slowing down, improvement of symptoms, remission etc.) used in our content.’
Actually, a quick glance at the Jolivi content reveals that they also adopt more aggressive terms whose meaning goes beyond those in the scientific studies, such as ‘reversal,’ ‘end of diabetes’ and ‘end of Alzheimer’s.’
Of all papers sent by Amstalden, only one is a randomised clinical study (i.e., based on the comparison of two or more therapies, with rigorous selection of participants and random assignment between groups), and none of them supports what is claimed in the texts. (Read his full reply here, in its original Portuguese).
Legal loopholes
The Jolivi material was sent to specialists in consumer protection law and health law, and medical authorities.
Lawyer Victor Durigan, Coordinator of Institutional Relations at Instituto Vero, explains that any professional who promises full efficacy for any treatment, disavows traditional treatments and/or offers other kinds of treatments may be prosecuted for charlatanism and faith healing – both federal crimes. Charlatanism is promoting any infallible cure; faith healing is prescribing, applying, or administering substances and treatments. ‘They are similar to swindling,’ says Durigan. ‘It is worth remembering that disinformation or spreading deceitful mass information is not yet officially defined as a crime,’ he explains.
Furthermore, the participation of medical doctors in these protocols may break at least three articles of the Code of Medical Ethics. They are part of Chapter XIII, about medical advertising:
Article 112. Publicizing information on medical matters in a sensational, promotional, or untruthful manner.
Article 113. Publicizing outside the medical community a treatment process or discovery whose scientific value is not yet expressly recognized by a competent authority.
Article 114. Examining, diagnosing, or prescribing through any means of mass communication.
Agora and a physician were sued in the U.S. in 2001 because of a protocol that promised to reverse diabetes. The judge decided that consumers were harmed and that the advertisement was misleading, and sentenced the company to pay US$2 million in fines. The language of that protocol is very similar to what Jolivi offers in Brazil, although the supplements are different from the Brazilian version.
However, Jolivi claims to be a company selling not treatments, but content. ‘We always advise our readers and subscribers to never interrupt their current treatment and to discuss our publications with their health care professionals,’ Amstalden affirms.
On its website and in some health protocols, the company disclaims any responsibility for the treatments and supplements recommended in its newsletters, videos, and protocols. ‘Information contained in this newsletter is published solely for informational purposes and should not be deemed personal medical advice,’ says a footnote in several of the company’s newsletters and materials.
Lawyer Marina Paulelli of the Health Program of the Brazilian Consumer Protection Institute (IDEC) says that this disclaimer does not exempt the company from liability for failures in the services or products it sells. If the product is a promise, as in this case, failure in curing may be considered a product failure.
Paulelli also emphasises that all advertising and publicity must be truthful and not mislead the consumer or be abusive, which occurs when the content appeals to sensitive or emotional issues – a key attribute of the copywriting technique used by Jolivi. ‘This emotional aspect is especially important to determine if there is abuse in the information about health products and treatments. Legitimate, safe, and verified information is a basic right, but there are also ethical rules and specific regulations in this area that must be followed,’ she says.
On the conflicts of interest involved in recommending Millipharma vitamin supplements, Daniel Amstalden claims that ‘the suggestions of taking supplements made by the health professional do not indicate any specific brand or product,’ but he affirms that he founded Millipharma ‘so our subscribers and readers may purchase high-quality products with active ingredients approved by Anvisa.’
His answer is not wholly true. Although many passages emphasise the vitamin or substance contained in the supplement, in at least 351 newsletters there is direct reference to products on Vitaminas.com.vc.
The e-commerce website adopts a more moderate tone, using phrases such as ‘health improvement’ or ‘good for your heart.’ The newsletters, however, guarantee the supplements’ efficacy against diseases and conditions, which is unlawful according to the Anvisa rules. Anvisa informed our team that there are two ongoing investigations on Millipharma.
A passage from a Jolivi newsletter on treating chronic pain that makes direct reference to Vitaminas.com.vc. The subject line is: ‘Have you ever tried this NATURAL PAINKILLER that is 200% stronger than any medicine?’
Regarding the claimed benefits, Amstalden affirms that ‘all content about dietary supplements is extracted from the same technical literature supporting our editorial content.’ In an interview by e-mail, Anvisa informed that it only monitors product advertisement. The promotion of treatment-related content, with no direct relation to advertisement, does not fall within the agency’s scope. The agency also explains that investigation about non-compliant advertisement of supplements usually originates from third-party reports or active search.
Our team tried several times to contact medical bodies such as the Brazilian Medical Association (AMB), the Federal Council of Medicine (CFM) and the São Paulo Medical Association (APM). At the time of writing, no reply was given on the actions of the physicians working as advisors for Jolivi and Vitaminas. We also tried to reach Agora by e-mail to clarify the reasons behind the partnership with Empiricus in Brazil, but no reply was received so far. Dr. Alain Dutra, Dr. Nelson Annunciato and Dr. Naif Thadeu were contacted at the e-mail informed on their professional websites, but without success.
The case presented in this story is a good example of how the market of false natural therapies works. Imbued with a maverick, “against the mainstream” ideology, Jolivi and hundreds of other companies shed doubt on medical treatments supported by studies and several years of use, leading their customers to abandon them and run risks in search of a definitive solution for chronic or incurable diseases. Through these companies’ strong digital presence, either by e-mail or social media, many Brazilians buy it.
Editing: Diogo Sponchiato, Jaqueline Sordi & Carlos Orsi.
Additional editing: Michael Marshall
Data science: Álvaro Justen.
This story was originally a product of the partnership between the Revista Questão de Ciência and Veja Saúde magazines, and is reprinted here with permission. It was supported by the Disarming Disinformation program of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and funded by the Instituto Serrapilheira. This program is a three-year global effort funded mainly by the Scripps Howard Fund.
I’ve been involved in skepticism for a long time now. I’ve been on the board of the the Merseyside Skeptics Society for ten years and a co-host of Skeptics with a K for nine years. I’ve even been Deputy Editor of this magazine for three years. In all this time of actively researching some of the more ridiculous pseudoscientific claims out there, one of the things I enjoy coming back to time and time again are the use of crystals.
Crystals epitomise many of the appeals of pseudoscience. They’re natural, they’re ancient, they’re beautiful, they’re accessible and they’re easy. Speak to anyone who endorses the use of crystals as a way of healing and supporting your body and they’ll tell you that different crystals have different properties and can be used for different purposes. They’re a quick fix for your anxiety problems, they’ll bring you good luck for that job interview, they’ll even cleanse your chakras…
So here are my top five worst ‘uses’ for crystals.
1. The Jade Egg
This item hitheadlinesworldwide when Gwyneth Paltrow herself endorsed the use of jade eggs through her popular ‘wellness’ website, GOOP. The jade egg is a small piece of jade, shaped like an egg, that proponents recommend people who have a vagina should hold inside of their vagina. This ancient practice is recommended for supporting and training the pelvic floor or Kegel muscles. Jade is said to have properties which allow it to cleanse negative energy from the centre of “intuition, power, and wisdom” – the vagina.
It should be said that not only is the use of jade for this is completely unsupported by the scientific evidence, it might also be actively detrimental for users. According to Dr Jen Gunter, gynaecologist and all-round gem (pun intended…) jade is particularly porous and therefore carrying a crystal inside the body can lead to bacterial infections developing in the vagina. Not to mention that over-enthusiastic Kegel training can actually cause pelvic pain for some women.
Claim: “Jade eggs can help cultivate sexual energy, clear chi pathways in the body, intensify femininity, and invigorate our life force. To name a few!”
Cost: A jade egg from GOOP will set you back $66
Why not? at worst it might lead to vaginal infections and pelvic pain at best, you’ve wasted your money on something that doesn’t work
2. Crystal Bed Therapy
The Sensory 7 Energy Bath in use – image from Modrn Sanctuary.
At a New York City Wellness Centre called Modrn Sanctuary, you can immerse yourself in a crystal and energy bath using their Sensory 7 Energy Bath. For this experience you lay on an infrared biomat (whatever one of those is) with 17 layers of healing and immune system enhancing materials (apparently) and experience some ‘sound therapy’ from the sound system around the bed, ‘vibration therapy’ from the biomat, chromotherapy (which basically just means they will use coloured LED lighting to ‘adjust the vibrational frequencies in the body’) while zapping you with ‘frequencies’ and magnets to provide quantum magnetic pulses and frequency harmonising. Yes, it really is a bed combining all of the pseudoscience.
In addition to all of this there are seven Vogel-cut quartz crystals which will apparently combine frequencies from the frequency generator, UV laser energy from the infrared biomat and the magnetic energy which apparently cancel each other out to leave TESLA ENERGY. Which is focused through the crystals into your chakras.
Why not? It shouldn’t do you any real harm, but you’ll be $150 and an hour of time down
3. Crystal Facial Roller
Facial rolling particularly with jade or rose quartz rollers is becoming increasingly popular in the beauty world. The premise is simple – you massage your face with a crystal roller. There are two suggested benefits from this. Firstly, believers claim that the massage of the face is good for reducing puffiness, preventing wrinkles and enhancing the skin. Secondly, some people believe that different crystals are imbued with different properties. So, jade is claimed to be a particularly cleansing stone and rose quartz apparently opens up the heart chakra bringing you love. There is, of course, no evidence that a) crystals have these properties, b) the body has any way, by chakras or any other means, of responding to these types of energy or c) that crystals have any ability to heal the body.
It seems slightly more plausible that massage of the skin might have some benefit in smoothing the skin however research shows that any benefit from facial massage is only subjective. A study of 142 women who received facial massage at beauty parlours showed that one third of patients had some negative effects including skin reddening, swelling or flare ups of dermatitis or acne following facial massage treatments.
Claim: facial rolling will reduce puffiness of skin and prevent wrinkles
Why not? It probably won’t cause any harm and it might feel soothing on the skin, but for some people it might trigger skin problem flare ups. The best way to protect your skin is to not smoke and to use a good sunscreen.
4. Crystal Butt Plugs
Yes, there are places on the internet where you can buy chunks of crystal to stick up your behind. Which would be completely fine if it weren’t for all the weird claims about chakras. According to Nymph NYC “black obsidian is definitely one of the strongest soul-cleansing stones” which “resonates with the root chakra”. According to Hindu tantrism the root chakra or Muladhara chakra resides below the coccyx which is why this company recommends the use of a butt plug in order to cleanse it.
It shouldn’t need to be said that there is no evidence of the existence of chakra, no evidence that they need any sort of cleansing and no evidence that crystals can cleanse them.
Claim: “ORIGIN works energetically by bringing positive and nourishing energy to the root chakra at the buttocks while soaking up years of stagnant and settled negativity”
Why not? Some crystals, such as jade, can be porous. It’s probably not a good idea to stick crystals in your anus. The rectum does not produce any natural lubrication and has very thin skin prone to tearing. Any insertion into this area should be gradual, with the use of a good quality lubricant to prevent damage.
5. Crystal Yoga
A common theme here is that many of these ideas combine pseudosciences. Now, I’m not saying that yoga doesn’t have its benefits. I practice yoga for my strength, flexibility and mental health. But the practice of yoga has its origins in the spiritual and some western yogis make some interesting health claims including that it can help with infertility despite no evidence to support these claims.
But some people claim that you can use crystals to ‘power up’ your yoga practice by lining them along or around your yoga mat. Do You Yoga claim that amethyst will help create serenity and stabilise emotions while moonstone will increase your wisdom. What’s more “If there is a specific stone that you’re attracted to or needing right now, carry it around somehow (pocket, locket, etc.), wear it as a pendant or even as a mala.” And don’t forget to ‘cleanse’ your crystal else it might hold onto negative energy.
Claim: ‘boost’ your yoga using crystals to “bring a new world of intentions, energies and powers into your life”
