{"id":640259,"date":"2026-10-24T20:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T20:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/640259\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T20:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T20:10:11","slug":"the-parallel-world-of-fakery-office-for-science-and-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/640259\/","title":{"rendered":"The Parallel World of Fakery | Office for Science and Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over a century ago, a teacher was tasked with visiting the 150 medical schools that were operating in the United States and Canada. His 1910 booklet, nicknamed\u00a0the Flexner Report<\/a>, separated the wheat from the chaff, using Johns Hopkins\u2019 School of Medicine as a shining beacon and recommending that bottom-tier schools that used dried-up cadavers and lacked proper laboratories for the med students to learn science be shut down.<\/p>\n

To this day, practitioners of so-called alternative medicine denounce the Flexner Report as a witch hunt: validating pharmaceutical-oriented medicine and crushing \u201cnatural\u201d healing practices.<\/p>\n

But these practices\u2014often based on prescientific beliefs about divine energy and invisible blockages\u2014never went away. When the Internet gained in popularity, a worrisome phenomenon arose. If these spine-cracking, herb-prescribing, energy-manipulating disciples weren\u2019t allowed to practice medicine, if their studies were so weak that no serious academic journal wanted them, if they couldn\u2019t get their remedies approved as drugs, they would build parallel systems that they controlled.<\/p>\n

Dr. Joseph Mercola was one of the first to harness the promises of the early Internet and set up shop on the Web, allowing him to bypass traditional channels and speak directly to potential customers. He could falsely tell them that vaccines were toxic and that the supplements he sold were a better investment than any pharmaceutical drug.<\/p>\n

This mimicry of real institutions is now all around us. There are pseudoacademic conferences, predatory journals, would-be clinics, sham professional associations and official-sounding medical boards. Podcasts and video platforms have allowed these people free reign in doling out dangerous health advice without suffering any consequences. The rise of AI makes it easy to bypass the difficult work they are trying to emulate and to wear one more hat, that of journalist.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the mirror world of vanity institutions.<\/p>\n

Parallel doctors<\/p>\n

The land of alternative medicine, once limited to pioneers like acupuncture, chiropractic, and Reiki, is now overpopulated. It encompasses the affluent, ever-expanding suburb of wellness, an encroaching city built on the promise that what it sells you will prevent illness. Right next to wellness is the industrial town of body optimization, where the possibilities of the human body are pushed to their limits through the use of infrared saunas, special diets, and pills meant to stretch your mental abilities. And rapidly rising above this skyline is\u00a0functional medicine<\/a>, where dissatisfied patients undergo a battery of unnecessary tests which, even when they come back normal, are used to prescribe an endless supply of expensive dietary supplements.<\/p>\n

Because these forms of alternative medicine are not actual medicine, they are not regulated in the way in which medicine is\u2014but this imitation of the real deal can look quite convincing. Take the title of doctor, for example. It is elastic enough to be used by a wide variety of people. A properly trained medical doctor can still use it after they have broken away from scientific evidence to peddle misinformation\u2014see\u00a0Doctor\u00a0Joseph Mercola<\/a>. Likewise, a chiropractor can use it in many jurisdictions, even though chiropractic is not a branch of medicine and is based on some\u00a0highly questionable notions<\/a>. Calling yourself a doctor when you have strayed so far from evidence-based practices, however, can lure in customers and make them believe in the mirage you are selling them.<\/p>\n

To be fully convincing, a fake doctor can join a fake organization. The academic journal\u00a0Nature<\/a>\u00a0recently turned the spotlight on what their reporter Max Kozlov calls \u201csham scientific societies,\u201d organizations with academic-sounding names like the European Academy of Engineering or the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence that actually lack any standards and often show evidence of deceit. The EAE, for example, uses a photo on its website of a real building of the University of Gothenburg, but it digitally altered the name at the top of the impressive fa\u00e7ade to replace it with their association\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Anyone can create a group with a dignified name to give the impression of legitimacy. Scour the Internet and you too will find the American College for Advancement in Medicine and the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine. They are exercises in mimicry.<\/p>\n

Having a website is one thing. How do you meet in person to continue the charade? Much like real researchers, pseudoscientists attend conferences\u2014only theirs are stripped of their rigour, promoting instead conspiracy theories and bogus ideas.\u00a0\u00a0Robert F. Kennedy Jr\u2019s Make America Healthy Again movement has its own recurring conferences, the so-called MAHA Summits. Flipping through the\u00a0program<\/a>, it all sounds legit, with sessions called \u201cPsychedelic Medicine: The Next Frontier\u201d and \u201cPrevention, Early Detection, and a New Future for Cancer.\u201d The goal is to look rigorous and authoritative while actually promoting misinformation.<\/p>\n

Quite revealingly, RFK Jr gave the game away at the last MAHA Summit, where he\u00a0commented<\/a>\u00a0on the promises of artificial intelligence to dethrone public health: \u201cWe\u2019re never, ever again gonna be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us \u2018trust the experts,\u2019 because every American will be able to check their own medical advice, and they\u2019ll also be able to check the advice of public officials, and if somebody tells you, \u2018masks work, trust the experts,\u2019 AI may tell you otherwise. […] So it really has the capacity to dominate us, to free us from medical tyranny.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fake clinics, fake drugs, fake journals<\/p>\n

This poorly regulated, parallel system continues with points of care. Stem cell clinics, which often sell unproven and risky procedures, have been\u00a0dotting the landscape<\/a>\u00a0for over a decade, and while regulatory agencies should be acting against them, we know that they rarely do. So-called longevity clinics are following in their steps to bank on Baby Boomers\u2019 reluctance to embrace ageing. And online, tech-based healthcare solutions often come with the playing-doctor disclaimer, revealing in\u00a0a pale, illegible font<\/a>\u00a0that they do not technically offer a medical service. They are, in fact, a \u201chealthcare technology company,\u201d whatever that means.<\/p>\n

This wordplay reminds me of the infamous statement, dating back to the 1990s and\u00a0rarely enforced<\/a>, that the claims made for a dietary supplement have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and that in fact the product you are about to buy \u201cis not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.\u201d An approved drug can be said to lower blood pressure with enough evidence, but a manufacturer can claim their dietary supplement \u201chelps maintain healthy blood pressure levels.\u201d Stocked on the same pharmacy shelves that hold actual drugs, who can tell the difference? This is how hollow replicas are built: from a distance, they look the same. The vacuity at their core can only be seen upon scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Those dietary supplements, typically sold as preventatives, are themselves a parallel system for would-be drugs that lack good scientific evidence. Some supplements do have legitimate uses\u2014like, for example, creatine, protein powder, and vitamins for people clearly deficient in them and unable to palliate with their diets\u2014but the vast majority coast on vibes. In\u00a0Why Wellness Sells<\/a>, Canadian professor Colleen Derkatch lists the reasons why the people she spoke to in a research context take homeopathic arnica, and boric acid, and \u201cpapaya stuff.\u201d The reasons have nothing to do with enhancing the body or preventing disease; money is spent to\u00a0treat pain, yeast infections, and cuts<\/a>, respectively. Essentially, they are taken\u00a0as medication.<\/p>\n

But based on what evidence? Word of mouth and loud mountebanks in your town used to be enough; now, this industry creates its own academic journals. As Professor Edzard Ernst, who has spent his career appraising and criticizing studies on alternative medicine, told\u00a0Forbes\u00a0magazine in 2017<\/a>, scientific-looking papers get published in scientific-looking journals… but behind the scenes, diligence goes out the window. \u201cThe potential authors […] are invited to suggest their preferred reviewers who subsequently are almost invariably appointed to do the job….\u00a0As a result, most (I estimate around 80%) of the articles that currently get published on alternative medicine are useless rubbish.\u201d These low-quality articles are then used to blind the average customer with the appearance of science.<\/p>\n

And when it comes time to publicize these ideas, practitioners know that every mainstream communication channel has a less monitored alternative. YouTube is the new television, and if you get kicked off of it for spreading misinformation, there\u2019s always Rumble and BitChute. Kennedy\u2019s anti-vaccine organization, Children\u2019s Health Defense, has\u00a0CHD TV<\/a>, a weekly schedule of Zoom calls masquerading as television programs that promote the idea that vaccines are dangerous. Radio shows can be replaced by podcasts, where any pushback you receive via email can be ignored. Newspapers are old hat; now, everyone is on Substack, a monetized blogging platform with a high enough tolerance for alternative viewpoints.<\/p>\n

The parallelism does not end with medicine, however, as the pushback from skeptics, doctors, and reporters needs to be dealt with using something that approximates journalism. Investigative journalism, after all, is titillating: it exposes conspiracies. In putting on the cap of a newshound, alternative medicine devotees showcase a tool that is quickly facilitating this entire charade, acting as new scaffolding: AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cClaude, can you make me sound like a journalist?\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2019, I wrote an\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0about Sayer Ji, a popular health guru who curates the literature around health for his website, GreenMedInfo. I argued that, given that he majored in philosophy, he was unqualified for this curation job, and that his website was selecting papers that made alternative medicine look good and failing to showcase those that didn\u2019t. In a word, cherry-picking.<\/p>\n

Seven years later, he published a lengthy essay on his Substack called\u00a0\u201cWhy Did McGill Target Me?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0which had the shape of investigative journalism but something stuck out.\u00a0Ji asserted that I was made a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, even though I wasn\u2019t; our director, Dr. Joe Schwarcz,\u00a0was, and you can see how an AI, the output of which is driven by predicting the likelihood of the next word and the word after that, might mix the two up. Ji, a human, could have clicked on\u00a0the link the AI inaccurately provided him as a reference<\/a>, but that would require him to do the mundane work of journalism. It\u2019s easier to sit back and imagine oneself a reporter.<\/p>\n

There are other signs of potential AI use in Ji\u2019s \u201cinvestigation.\u201d To my ears, the clearest one is what follows, which sounds like a robotic research assistant prompted to write in a sophisticated fashion: \u201cNow the discipline. What the record establishes: a declared adversarial mission, a target roster mirroring a pressure group\u2019s, an author embedded in a state-funded campaign, and a sequence of dates you can check. What the record does not establish: an instruction, a payment for a particular piece, a coordinated operation. Convergence is documented. Coordination is not asserted.\u201d What human being writes like this?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not convinced, take a look at the banner image at the top of his article and reproduced below. If you\u2019ve been to our campus, you will recognize the image as the Arts Building… except it\u2019s not. It appears to be an AI reconstruction. Look at the number of stories encompassed by the columns. Look at the Gothic building to the left of the Arts Building, which isn\u2019t there in reality. Even the mountain creeping up behind campus is clearly not Mount Royal.<\/p>\n

Figure 1: Sayer Ji\u2019s banner image compared to the actual Arts Building on the downtown campus of McGill University. Spot the differences and notice, if resolution allows, the nonsensical pseudoletters in the torn piece of paper in the centre of the image, characteristic of AI-generated images. Credit (actual photo): DXR, under a Creative Commons License (https:\/\/surl.li\/ssmcfr<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Is this journalism? Or is this just a lazy sham to give the appearance of conscientious work?<\/p>\n

The importance of friction<\/p>\n

What I do as a science communicator\u2014and similarly what scientists, doctors, and journalists do\u2014is hard. We have to wade through nuance and uncertainty, double-checking our work and settling on the right words to convey our current degree of confidence in what we are putting forward. It taxes the brain.<\/p>\n

Fake doctors, pseudoscientists, and would-be journalists desperately want to be seen as the real deal, yet they refuse to do the hard work that comes with these professions. So, they build parallel systems that approximate the ones they want to join, like children simplifying castles with sand and a bucket. Oversimplification, after all, is\u00a0a major hallmark of pseudoscience<\/a>. Feeling persecuted by institutions, these people have no choice but to build hollow versions of them in which they can thrive without criticism.<\/p>\n

Friction is good, but pseudoscientists don\u2019t want it. Large language models like Claude and ChatGPT give them the illusion of wisdom without any of the friction required to achieve it. It\u2019s a shortcut, one peppered with selective evidence and outright hallucinations. The goal is not to be right but to earn respectability by cutting corners.<\/p>\n

If you, as a consumer, don\u2019t want to fall prey to these sketchy parallel systems that are metastasizing all around us, I have one piece of advice: look for nuance. It is usually absent from these pretenders. And if we want to make them less desirable, we need to do the demanding, lengthy, and unsexy work of fixing our properly regulated systems, because conventional medicine is far from perfect.<\/p>\n

In the wake of Abraham Flexner\u2019s report, medical education became more standardized in North America. But what he called \u201cmedical sects\u201d\u2014meaning natural healing practices not based in evidence\u2014never disappeared. They waited until we were engulfed in a tsunami of information to build shams that could more easily fool the average person.<\/p>\n

Double-check. Verify. Ask questions.<\/p>\n

The need for vigilance is more important than ever.<\/p>\n

@\u200cjonathanjarry.bsky.social<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over a century ago, a teacher was tasked with visiting the 150 medical schools that were operating in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[134,524,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-640259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}