I occasionally get spam from alternative health types. I presume this comes from posting to places on Usenet like sci.skeptic and alt.fan.art-bell. Today I got some for something called The Health Freedom Expo, scheduled for Dallas, Texas November 4th. One of the speakers will be Hulda Clark. I knew the name sounded familar and so I looked her up. Her ideas are very dubious. Imagine my surprise to learn that Clark has a degree from the University of Saskatchewan! Its ironic a practioner of kookie stuff like that would have a degree from a university where various medical advances have been worked on, such as the "cobalt bomb" cancer treatment device of the 1950s. Of course it should be noted that Clark's degree was not in medicine, and she possesses no recognised training in mainstream medicine. Her Ph.D is in philosophy.

Looking at some of the other speakers at this conference the thought comes to mind that it would be interesting to get them in the same room together. Their beliefs tend to be in contradiction with each other in one way or another. Clark's bugaboo is parasites in the body, which she claims cause things like cancer. Dr. Joel Wallach on the other hand claims all diseases are the result of not taking sufficient amounts of the right minerals, and if you do you'll never be sick and can live to be over 100. Of course what these people do share is a common foe, mainstream medicine.

I have nothing against investigating alternative medicine claims. If they can be proven valid scientifically we should use those concepts that are effective. Unfortunately the world is full of people like Clark, who make claims but are unwilling to properly test them, and who denounce any testing that proves their inefficacy as mainstream medicine trying to suppress "the truth."