Natural News and other "alternative medicine" sites -

[The 25th Cyberman]

www.naturalnews.com
Natural News is a news-and I use that term loosely-site operated by Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, which, in addition to promoting alternative medicine, embraces just about every anti-science conspiracy theory under the sun, from truly rabid anti-GMO bullshit:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140725...de_Monsanto_collaborators_media_sellouts.html

to antivaccine nonsensense:

http://m.naturalnews.com/news/03469...ds-cse&usg=AFQjCNE6OVxDser1Mb-BcrPVEws8M1HopA

to, in sharp comparison to its usual hard-green position, global warming denialism:

http://m.naturalnews.com/news/044856_global_warming_dishonest_science_climate_myths.html

Oh, and while we're at it, the owner, Mike Adams, is a bit of a lolcow himself, from attempting to sue Forbes writer Jon Entine for "cyber bullying":

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/c...ls-health-ranger-threatens-sue-forbes-writer/

to accusing the skeptical community in general of voting fraud in the Shorty Awards for nominating, and voting for, an Australian M.D. named Rachel Dunlop:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/01/23/shorty-awards-fraud-the-evil-illuminati/

(There's no small irony in this, as many of the Twitter accounts who were voting for Adams had only one post and were created quite recently.)

So yeah, that's Natural News. In my opinion, the alt-med crowd is dramatically underexplored for as big as it is.

(Sorry if it's a little short, first time post.)

 

[yasscat]

This is one of my favorite group of cows to point and laugh at. Anybody who believes this bullshit (fucking Mercola) deserves whatever preventable/treatable disease they catch because of lack of vaccination, or worsens because of lack of treatment.

 

[Bugaboo]

I have a story about someone like this, I was in line at the bulk barn's cash and this chick and her 2 kids in front of me were checking out. Her boy asked if he could have a maple syrup lollypop and he says "it's made with maple syrup so it's ok" and the mum's like "I don't know if it has any gmo ingredients in it" and she starts telling her life story to the cashier about how her kids are apparently allergic to gmo foods and apparently this allergy is so bad that when a teacher gave the boy a lollypop and he ate it she pulled her fucking kids out of school to save them from the horrors of gmos
I should add that this life story thing was totally unprovoked and the cashier was just smiling and nodding because that's her job.

Like fuck, don't expose your kids to this bullshit and fuck them up by pulling them out of school over a goddamn lollypop

 

[The 25th Cyberman]

This is one of my favorite group of cows to point and laugh at. Anybody who believes this bullshit (fucking Mercola) deserves whatever preventable/treatable disease they catch because of lack of vaccination, or worsens because of lack of treatment.

Unfortunately, most of the people behind these websites did, in fact, get vaccinated as children and all that, so they have no personal experience with vaccine-preventable diseases. Perhaps if they did, these kind of sites wouldn't exist.

 

[Inquisitor_BadAss]

I feel this is very appropriate

 

[Mrs Paul]

What do you call "alternative medicine" that works? Medicine.

 

[*Asterisk*]

This is one of my favorite group of cows to point and laugh at. Anybody who believes this bullshit (fucking Mercola) deserves whatever preventable/treatable disease they catch because of lack of vaccination, or worsens because of lack of treatment.

I don't care about these hateful fucks dying of disease, but there's actually a decent amount of people in society who actually can't get vaccinated because of real medical reasons. Their only defense is to live in an area with herd immunity, and the more people compromise that, the more these innocent lives are put at risk.

That's not even getting in to the poor children of these lunatics who've committed no crime but being born to bad parents. And it's for these reasons why we need to clamp down hard and with zero tolerance on these fuckers. They're a fucking threat to national security.

 

[yasscat]

I don't care about these hateful fucks dying of disease, but there's actually a decent amount of people in society who actually can't get vaccinated because of real medical reasons. Their only defense is to live in an area with herd immunity, and the more people compromise that, the more these innocent lives are put at risk.

Oh, I'm aware. I'm immunocompromised because of something something powerlevel...I think that's why these assholes rustle my jimmies more than any other group of cows.

 

[HypeBeast]

I've had arguments with my sister and her friends over whether or not crystals can heal people. They were getting so fucking angry that my boyfriend and I were telling them that rocks don't have healing powers and if they did they would already be in use. Fucking rocks people.

Relevant sketch

 

[The 25th Cyberman]

I don't care about these hateful fucks dying of disease, but there's actually a decent amount of people in society who actually can't get vaccinated because of real medical reasons. Their only defense is to live in an area with herd immunity, and the more people compromise that, the more these innocent lives are put at risk.

That's not even getting in to the poor children of these lunatics who've committed no crime but being born to bad parents. And it's for these reasons why we need to clamp down hard and with zero tolerance on these fuckers. They're a fucking threat to national security.

 

[Trash Tier Waifu]

Have you encountered Michigan's own Heather Dexter before? She blogs about her many crunchy wisdoms at Like Minded Mamas and holistically risked naturally killing all three of her children with whooping cough. More about that in the spoiler below the pictorial interlude.

By the way, she would like you to pay her for Natural Services because she's "a Board Certified Naturopathic Doctor, Certified Holistic Doula, and Certified Usui Reiki Master Practitioner." (Yes, she's so certifiable.) Her feng shui interior decorating advice is $250 for two hours plus travel expenses or, if you're cheap, you could settle for a $60 ear candling.

In the center, Heather's pro shot of her holistic headband.
Lower right, Heather when she was eating junk food in high school.
Upper left, Heather 12 hours post-partum and about to drink the processed placenta.
And here she is doing her best Frances McDormand impression while telling you about essential oils:

Spoiler: Whooping Cough As Family Health Triumph

Heather of course isn't going to vaccinate her kids. That's just wrong even if there has been an outbreak of whooping cough (pertussis) in her state. So comes the day when Heather's oldest kid coughs miserably for weeks to the point where she's waking up in the middle of the night to barf mucus over the railing of her loft bed, it's just nature's way of making a little girl stronger.

Weeks into that and the middle kid gets sick, too. It would be wrong to horde natural immunity opportunities, so Heather has him keep going to gymnastics with other people's kids. She apparently didn't warn those parents about the gift of natural immunity her son might bestow. And pretty soon he was barfing up mucus all night and, even according to Heather, looking really scared when he'd wake up unable to breathe. Silly boy, you're just getting stronger.

With both of her older kids very sick for many months, Heather started feeling tired, cutting back her professional work, and worrying about her marital bliss. She blogged about her torments calling it "a living HELL." Some people wondered why she seemed so focused on herself instead of on her very sick kids. Silly people, narcissism is 100% natural.

Then the nine-month-old baby started coughing, too. If Heather had had the baby immunized when the first kid got sick, the littlest one might have gotten UNnatural immunity and either not been able to take advantage of the natural immunity opportunity Mama created for her or would have contracted a lesser form of the infection. No way.

This will give you two and a half minutes of what whooping cough is like for just one sick kid with obviously loving parents (I haven't made it past the first 30 seconds, though):

At the Dexter house, with three little kids all whooping and spewing and crying, Mr. Heather declared it was maybe, sorta, kinda, please-don't-hit-me-honey time to take them to a real doctor. NO.

Next Heather's veterinarian-father tried telling her she was letting her pride stand in the way of her better judgment. NO.

Pride is 100% natural just like stupidity is, you mansplainers who do not respect Mama Wisdom.

But of course she did give the kids hundreds of dollars worth of those fantastic herbs that olde tyme people took so they could die younger than we do today. She also gave the kids lots of enemas. (Don't let that give you ideas of kinky ways to use Nyquil, you degenerates. That would not be natural. at. all.)

All together Heather provided very effective treatment because none of the kids died and the oldest one got better in only six months.

Now all three have natural immunity to whooping cough. Isn't that great?

Welp, immunity to whooping cough wears off whether it comes from having had the awful disease or from being vaccinated against it, so the Dexter household may yet again become a river of puked-up mucus -- but it will be naturally induced puked-up mucus.

Being charismatic even when drinking a placenta, Heather has inspired niche bloggers with allopathic medical and research backgrounds to write about her. The more amusing of these articles are the sources for my blithering here and are linked up for you in this spoiler...

Spoiler: Smart People Writing About Heather

"The suffering the search for 'natural immunity' inflicts on children," Science-Based Medicine, Nov. 8, 2015, here -- This is the second whack SBM took at Heather -- first whack's linked below. It focuses more on the idiocy of naturopathy and calls Heather a child-abusing quack, while summarizing Heather's whooping bloggery and the treatments she tried out on her kids. It includes Heather's account of her veterinarian-father's urging her to get real medical help, a detail Heather's since deleted.

"Naturopath mom lets her kids suffer from whooping cough because it's an 'immune-building process," DeadState, Nov. 6, 2015, here -- Summarizes Heather's whooping bloggery and includes a tweet from a real doctor saying, "Worth pointing out pertussis survivors can have permanent lung damage, long term pulm issues. This family did not triumph." Yeah, but that would be 100% natural long-term pulmonary damage, you Big Pharma shill, you.

"The horrible consequences of seeking 'natural' immunity: Naturopathy and Whooping Cough," Science-Based Medicine, Nov. 5, 2015, here -- A more detailed summary of Heather's whooping bloggery, plus an explanation of what the disease does to kids and how vaccines work and, oh you know, facts that aren't natural or holistic enough to matter. Amid the 1,678 comments, by the way, Natural News is proffered as an authoritative source and the profferees get free cyber colonoscopies from the science-liking commenters there.

"Horrifying suffering caused by treating pertussis 'naturally,'" Respectful Insolence, Nov. 4, 2015, here -- The doctor-author calls Heather a quack and a child abuser while summarizing her whooping bloggery and noting she's been taking down the most self-incriminating information, but not before it gets archived. This is the most fun one to read.

Then there's this one not-smart person writing about Heather... Oops, it's Heather herself:

"Natural Remedies for Whooping Cough: Getting Through It Is Possible," Heather Dexter, Like-Minded Mamas, oops x 2, it's passsword protected these days for some mysterious reason.
​

But oops x 3, Google Cache has it for now and there's this copy, too. Wayback can't crawl it because the site has one of those die, robot, die scripts.

At this point, I'm sad to say Heather's got her social media helmet on. But unless she gets distracted by having to set up a legal defense fund, I'm sure the lure of selling shit will bring her back out into the open where we can enjoy her better soon.

C'mon, Heather, give us a fresh vid and a few crunchy tweets. You and your Like-Minded Mama buddies are more viral than small pox.

Edit: Fixed typos.

 

[Bugaboo]

You know, there's a reason people used to die at age 35 and child mortality was high so people had to make a shit ton of kids.
I swear to God, parents who do shit like this when their kids are horribly sick should have their kids taken away and given proper medical care, they can do it to themselves but kids can't escape the batshit insanity until like 18 years later

 

[yasscat]

You know, there's a reason people used to die at age 35 and child mortality was high so people had to make a shit ton of kids.
I swear to God, parents who do shit like this when their kids are horribly sick should have their kids taken away and given proper medical care, they can do it to themselves but kids can't escape the batshit insanity until like 18 years later

I regret that I have but one 'agree' rating to give you.

 

[Trash Tier Waifu]

You know, there's a reason people used to die at age 35 and child mortality was high so people had to make a shit ton of kids.
I swear to God, parents who do shit like this when their kids are horribly sick should have their kids taken away and given proper medical care, they can do it to themselves but kids can't escape the batshit insanity until like 18 years later

As Blake Bumbleby said, that deserves more than one "agree."

What's next for the little Dexter kids? Polio?

It amazes me that the antivaxxers and the mommy bloggers on "kid's not dead yet so butt out" rampages are almost all upper middle class or better and have spent time and money getting degrees. Heather's dad is a vet, so she can't have grown up in a 100% Woo Naturale environment. The animals he treats get more intelligent care than her kids do.

I need to study the old journal pages on her MyMotherEarth site -- now given over to advertising her services to the public -- to see if she's homeschooling, too. That both helps to hide illness and abuse and also guarantees that the kids will not be taught good science or critical thinking skills.

But if new moms want to drink the placenta... ooookay by me.

 

[Arctic]

This is what Mike Adams actually believes.

Spoiler

 

[The 25th Cyberman]

This is what Mike Adams actually believes.

Spoiler

Oh boy, David Dees. This guy would deserve his own thread, in all honesty, were it not for the fact that he's kind of dried up.

 

[Arctic]

Oh boy, David Dees. This guy would deserve his own thread, in all honesty, were it not for the fact that he's kind of dried up.

Apparently he used to illustrate Sesame Street.

 

[The 25th Cyberman]

Apparently he used to illustrate Sesame Street.

What is it with Sesame Street and antisemitic conspiracy theorists? I mean first there was that Dan Sandler guy, then this?

 

[Jozef]

This is what Mike Adams actually believes.

Spoiler

Plants have been bred to survive harsher climates and produce a higher yield, thus providing a LOT more food. If everything was organic, no pesticides used, etc, there would be an absolutely huge lack of food, and a lot more people would be starving than right now.
They simply don't know what they're protesting against, and so many of them are only doing it because they hate the government and big corporations.

 

[The 25th Cyberman]

Plants have been bred to survive harsher climates and produce a higher yield, thus providing a LOT more food. If everything was organic, no pesticides used, etc, there would be an absolutely huge lack of food, and a lot more people would be starving than right now.
They simply don't know what they're protesting against, and so many of them are only doing it because they hate the government and big corporations.

Gotta disagree with the latter part of what you're saying there. At the risk of sounding like a Tumblrite, most of the anti-GMO crowd is privileged upper-middle-class white people, (very much like the population of my hometown, Sebastopol) who really couldn't care less if people in the Third World were starving. Or at least most of them wouldn't.