Snap. Crackle. Pop. That’s the release you’ve been waiting for—the ecstasy of small gas bubbles being “cracked” along your spine. While it’s debatable how much good chiropractic adjustments are doing for your body—there’s some evidence that it alleviates lower back pain, alongside a litany of unsubstantiated claims—what’s not debatable is the number of anti-vax, pseudoscience-prone chiropractors clogging the conspirituality pipeline these days.This isn’t a “chiropractor takedown” episode, as both Derek and Julian have benefited from treatments in the past. Indeed, there’s a whole realm of “mixers” that try to follow best practices and clinical science. Yet there’s a strong conspiritualist lean among a number of chiropractors and we want to know why. To that end, Derek offers a history of the practice, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, rooted in an anti-vax, anti-medicine strain of 19th-century vitalism. Julian discusses some of his experiences while Matthew questions consent and harm in the industry. The team then breaks down chiropractor Melissa Sell’s discussion of the antisemitic Germanic New Medicine, which she recently championed on the pseudopalooza of online disinformation conferences, The Event 2021. Show NotesU.S. Judge Finds Medical Group Conspired Against ChiropractorsChiropractors Charged in Insurance Scam Can Indecision Cause Hemorrhoids?Goodbye to All Yoga Bullies. | by Matthew Remski | Medium
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I'm Julian Walker, recently recovering from Omicron.
Oh my gosh.
How did you catch a fake disease?
I don't know.
I'm talented.
You can stay up to date with Julien's Omicron progress on our Instagram page, as well as some other social media outlets.
Twitter is where he mostly posts about his challenges there.
We are all independently on Twitter.
And of course, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us, keep us editorially independent, and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspirituality 88, New Age Crack.
Snap, crackle, pop.
That's the release you've been waiting for, the ecstasy of small gas bubbles being cracked along your spine.
While it's debatable how much good chiropractic adjustments are doing for your body, there's some evidence it alleviates lower back pain, alongside a litany of unsubstantiated claims.
What's not debatable is the number of anti-vax, pseudoscience-prone chiropractors clogging the conspirituality pipeline these days.
Now, this isn't a chiropractor takedown episode, as both Derek and I have benefited from treatments in the past.
Indeed, there's a whole realm of mixers that try to follow best practices and clinical science.
Yet, there's a strong conspiritualist lean among a number of chiropractors and we want to know why.
To that end, Derek offers a history of the practice which is perhaps unsurprisingly rooted in an anti-vax, anti-medicine strain of 19th century vitalism.
I'll be discussing some of my personal experiences, and Matthew questions consent and harm in the industry.
Then the team will break down chiropractor Melissa Sell's discussion of the anti-Semitic Germanic new medicine, which she recently championed on the pseudopalooza of online disinformation conferences, the event 2021.
Okay, guys.
We all talk in Slack on a daily basis, and you know I've been wanting to cover chiropractors for a while, because it's one of the main professions that a lot of the conspiritualists that we cover dabble in.
Joe Dispenza, Phil Good, Ben Tapper, Devin Vrana, who is one of the hosts of the event 2021.
If you don't know what that is, we will be covering it in more detail in coming weeks.
And then we have Melissa Sell, who we're going to be looking at in the last segment of this episode.
She's a big proponent of Germanic new medicine, sometimes called German new medicine.
But as a listener pointed out to me on Twitter, Germanic is a better translation for a The founder, you guys might know how to say, I should have thought, Reika Geert Hamer.
Thank you.
That's why we have Julian.
Thank you.
Hamer believed that all mainstream medicine was created by Jews to destroy non-Jews.
Actually Julian, can you pronounce that too?
That last bit?
It's just so we get it.
This is a medicine that was created by Jews to destroy non-Jews.
Mainstream medicine was created by Jews to destroy non-Jews.
Oh boy.
So the question, as Julian said earlier, this isn't a chiropractor takedown, but I want to investigate this question, which is why are chiropractors particularly susceptible to these outlandish healing modalities, healing in quotes there, as well as pseudoscience and, as we'll get into, grifting.
And the short answer is that chiropractic is rooted in some outlandish ideas about the body and spirituality.
But before we get into the history and then Sel's appearance at the event, I want to make clear that I don't have complaints about chiropractic per se, and I want to give a brief anecdote about that.
You know, one common criticism that's been directed at us since we began is that, for example, we're shills for big pharma or allopathic medicine, which is rich.
I've spent my entire life in varying levels of pain due to some bad decisions by orthopedic surgeons when I was young.
And for a time, chiropractic provided the only relief.
I've probably had about 500 sessions in my life, and I know that sounds extreme, but when you consider I went two to three times a week throughout all of college and part of high school and then after, it adds up.
So when I broke my right femur in 1986, I spent a month in traction with a pin through my leg, and then two months in a full body cast, followed by nine months of physical therapy to learn how to walk again.
And today, if you break your femur, surgeons have you walking as soon as possible.
So there's an example of some medical mismanagement, but I don't blame my old surgeon.
He was working with the knowledge that he had at the time.
But unfortunately for me, that accident, along with breaking my right collarbone in a bike accident and then breaking my right ankle twice playing basketball, and this was all in my teenage years, it led to a lot of chronic pain.
That's a lot, Derek.
That's a lot.
Yeah, this is why I found yoga in the first place that got me out of chiropractic.
And I won't get into that whole story, but that is what led me to yoga.
But when I reflect back, it's hard being an athletic 16-year-old who needs his mother to help him get in and out of bed due to severe sciatica.
And that's when my parents started bringing me to a chiropractor, which really helped at that time.
The problem, though, is that my first chiropractor and many that followed All basically told me I was going to have to keep returning to them for the rest of my life.
And if you think about a few minutes of stim therapy followed by spinal manipulation, it only provides temporary relief.
And personally I consider this a failing of the profession, but that's not something that all chiropractors practice.
In fact, my last chiropractor, who I was seeing up to about eight years ago, he practiced massage and physical therapy before the adjustment, and he also gave me assignments to strengthen my problem areas, and he always told me that he wants to see me as little as possible and then eventually get rid of me altogether, which he did because of his help, so I'm really grateful for that.
Anyway, I just wanted to make clear that I have nothing against the profession.
And like any discipline, there are good and not so good, and then there are a few straights, which we'll get to, throughout this discipline.
And I credit chiropractic with providing me tremendous relief during high school and college.
I don't know how I would have gotten by without it.
How about you guys?
Well, I just want to flag right away that we're introducing some some cool like insider jargon that we're going to get to later.
So those are coming up.
Mixers and straights are the two that I've grabbed so far.
You know, in my experience, there's been a fairly tight link between yoga and chiropractic.
And just like you, Derek, I would say that overall, my experience of using chiropractic adjustments as a kind of physical therapy intervention has at times been really effective for me.
I have similar criticisms about the sort of lack of integration.
From the very beginning of me getting involved as a student and then as a teacher at a yoga studio, there usually have been two or three chiropractors in each community that are getting passed around as referrals.
What I learned over time is that this Perhaps in part has to do with a culture that A, encourages students to enter the maze of ascending through levels of yoga accomplishment, right?
And increasing frequency of attendance so that you have a strong practice and then doing all the workshops and then signing up for the training.
And then B, in the case of teachers, chronic overuse and traveling and sleeping in hotel beds, etc.
Which all adds up to meaning you have a community of people who often need adjunct therapy to put our bodies back together from doing too much yoga.
I think the aspect of chiropractic that has legitimacy is actually a good fit here because the hypermobility that we're sort of understanding I think over time in vulnerable joints, that's quite common for dedicated yogis, can at least temporarily be corrected by a skillful adjustment.
Now some chiropractors I went to had, shall we say, an episodic model, right?
Come when you need it, we'll do what we can to make you feel better.
Others, and I think this is kind of the majority in my experience, have a really strong upsell, right?
Like a six-month plan, come four times a week in the beginning, then three times a week after your first couple months, etc.
And there's a variety of approaches being used and claims being made.
It's kind of a Wild West sector of the economy, from the tame to the really outrageous.
Some also do a robust business in supplement sales.
So there's that piece of it.
I remember one guy I used to go to, he had a little labyrinth of five treatment rooms that he would move through with the lights low and dreamy music playing.
And he would deliver adjustments in sequence, back to back, going from room to room, a kind of joyful and loving like Christian science trance, often saying things like, I just move the bone, get the hell away from the bone and let your innate intelligence do the rest.
Or he'd say things like...
Things like let's move this bone and let the force of God flow freely through your nervous system.
There was this like childlike teaching display on the wall in one of the rooms which lit up to show how subluxations at various levels of the spine impacted the health of specific organs.
So like full on just pseudoscience medicine show, right?
We can't underestimate, I think, how powerful it certainly was for me, the medical seeming setting, x-rays, special treatment machines, white coats, there being a receptionist in the front, and then the chiropractor being called a doctor.
It's really a gateway into legitimizing pseudoscience.
I've also come to realize over time by reading up on this a little that Really sincere new graduates from chiropractic schools in the US are nonetheless entering the marketplace with an average of $120,000 of student loans.
And that makes adopting highly structured patient care models, you know, come, you're going to keep coming to me forever, along with layered income streams by these supplements, you know, go and get these adjunct treatments, etc.
That makes that all very appealing.
Yeah, I think the repetitive cycle that I've heard described is something that I'm going to focus on, but in a slightly different way.
But the first thing I want to say is that I just learned a lot about you here, Derek.
I mean, we've known each other for years.
We've been working on this project.
I knew that you grew up bullied for being overweight, that you broke your femur at 16.
I don't think I really understood the years of chronic pain part, so maybe I wasn't listening carefully, or maybe you've never been quite so explicit?
I don't know.
But it really adds to my understanding of where you're coming from, so I'm grateful for that.
And I'm not sure how it adds to my picture of you specifically, but I think it does tell me a little bit
about why you're so insistent on nuance in our science discussions because on one hand you have this like really deep bodily experience of how important it is that we get proper care and on the other hand that same experience has shown you that sometimes the best medical practices are inadequate or they develop through time and in the interim we have to reach for what works and so that better not be offered by con artists.
Yeah, and like, wow, 500 sessions.
I was thinking of the money, too, and I feel like that would be like a year's salary.
Well, I didn't always have insurance storing all those either, so it's probably more than a year's salary.
So, yeah, my story's a little bit different.
I think I might have gone to three chiropractic sessions in total.
There's a reason for that.
I can't remember exactly when or where or for what and I think that fogginess is in the category that I recognize as governed by a kind of dissociation because something happened during those appointments that I really didn't like.
I do know that they were with a kind of burly guy who was a straight as you're going to describe Derek.
This is a chiropractor who just focuses on bone cracking.
There was no discussion prior to what he did of what he was going to do.
There was no explanation.
There was no preparation.
It's really like he was a car mechanic or some sort of tradesman or a mason figuring out very quietly where the stones should all fit together in the wall.
What I do really remember was the confusion and the fear I felt as the guy put me into some twisted tangled up pretzel position and then asked me to inhale and exhale before squishing and cracking and my understanding of inhaling and exhaling from that At that point was from, you know, Buddhist meditation and from yoga.
And so I associated it with like relaxation and surrender and things like that.
And in that case, I was kind of submissioned in a position I couldn't get myself out of.
And I was supposed to trust this person that I knew nothing about.
And then later on, I go on to realize that this whole category of practitioners might believe in some wacky shit.
But I think what was even more confusing was the flood of pleasure that came after the crack.
And I was very intrigued as to what that was.
I remember you referred to it at the beginning, Derek, or I think it's in the show intro that, you know, there's some idea that There's locked up fluid or gases that are being released and that seemed to make sense as an analogy, but I began to wonder whether it was a kind of pleasure or a kind of shock.
Like was it that the strangeness of this surrendered position to this manhandling, like which in the absence of really informed consent we have to consider I think through the lens of you know, just intrusion, maybe even assault.
Uh, why, you know, was it, was I surprised that it had not produced immediate harm?
Like I was immediately scared and then immediately relieved.
Um, but it was later that I felt this same flip between terror and pleasure when a very famous yoga teacher, uh, this was a direct student of Iyengar really almost, uh, severely injured my spine with a non- Came up behind me, I wasn't expecting it.
He ripped me around like way farther than I could possibly have gone on my own and the sound was incredible through the room.
Later, I learned that these adjustments that he had learned from this early modern school of yoga dating back to the 1930s in Indian gym and yoga training, those adjustments were often called bone setting.
So, there was some kind of cultural or practicum link between yoga adjusting and chiropractic that happened in this colonial collision of the early 20th century.
So, here's what I want to propose about why this experience is so compelling as I read about it, as I remember my own experience.
I imagine that in some cases it offers a kind of implicit and maybe modest almost BDSM-like process by which the conundrum of pain and pleasure, also their proximity, the fact that it's sometimes difficult to tell them apart, their transitive nature can be explored in the guise of clinical treatment.
Because the person is placed into utter submission, the practitioner does something that in another context might be actually violent, and typically there's also this flush of immediate pleasure that recalls euphoria, even orgasmic relief after a buildup of tension.
And then there's a form of aftercare, this implicit notion that this has been good, it's been therapeutic, and we're going to do it again, you're going to come back, maybe 500 times.
So I don't want to imply that you were indulging, you know, some kind of kink, Derek, but you're describing a kind of pain-pleasure oscillation that for some people I imagine can get into a repetitive loop, an itch that when scratched gets more itchy.
I'll just say that I had this place in my upper mid-back that even up until I met my wife, I would have her like knee me to help crack because it provided that feeling.
And then funnily enough, I started doing very specific sorts of rows and overhead presses, and I've never needed that crack again.
So again, just showing you that it was the muscles that were the problem.
Right, so if you actually, I mean there's something so poetic about that because you build your own localized strength for performing the movements that you're not able to perform and you're stiffening up around that lack of mobility, then the pain goes.
I mean that's been my experience in a lot of instances.
If I get stronger, I have Less pain in some way.
I'm not talking about like lifting huge amounts of weight, but I mean, it sounds like you really needed this.
And so, you know, again, I'm not minimizing or caricaturing the experience for you or for anybody else, but I think this intimacy of pain, pleasure signaling carries a lot of complicated stuff that I just can't shake out of my brain.
And I also think it can be gendered.
Case in point, Sometimes I'm flipping through IG Reels and I came across this Cairo account and this guy is always, he's kind of a muscly guy and he's always manhandling young women and crunching their spines in ways that make my hair stand on end.
But the camera is always there to catch the deep sigh and the purring smile of the patient.
Then there's this other guy who films himself snapping people's necks with captions that say, the lightning was delivered, the thunder was felt, love was present.
So there's definitely more going on here than therapy, I'd say.
That was a really good last point, Matthew.
In fact, I think we have a future episode on consent and yoga adjustments that can correlate to this in the future for an episode.
Yeah, I think so.
I've been injured twice in yoga classes that put me out of commission for weeks.
So that, you know, we'll work on that next.
But they opened you up spiritually.
They opened you up spiritually, those injuries.
Yeah, I couldn't backbend because my heart wasn't open.
So they were just opening my heart.
So I felt much more heart opening as I was lying in bed with extreme low back pain.
It was wonderful.
Cultivating forgiveness.
But to the history now, because as I said, if there's a reason that we find a lot of chiropractors dabbling in pseudoscience today, it's because it's baked into the philosophy.
In 1895, Daniel David Palmer performed the first chiropractic adjustment on a partially deaf janitor in Iowa named Harvey Lillard.
Palmer was working as a magnetic healer when he noticed that a vertebrae was out of alignment on Lillard's back.
Lillard was working shirtless at the time.
And Lillard claimed that the pop he heard when bending over cured his deafness.
He could hear fully again the day after the adjustment.
Now, this magical adjustment Has been disputed by Palmer's daughter, who said that Palmer actually slapped the janitor on the back after hearing a joke.
And the janitor reported that his hearing improved a few days after the slap.
So the very origin story is in dispute, as often happens.
But anyway, it didn't stop Palmer, who he had previously worked as a beekeeper, a schoolteacher, and a grocery store owner.
Hey, Sayerji.
Before becoming a magnetic healer.
Palmer is also a believer in spiritualism, the idea that the dead live on in a spirit world and communicate with the living, often to provide moral and ethical guidance.
So here we have an opportunist who believed that he had found a new healing modality, one that he immediately wrote into his own mythology, and he even claimed to have received chiropractic from the other world, from a deceased physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson.
Palmer also regarded chiropractic as religious.
There had been debates about whether to make it a religion in the first place, and he stated that he was the fountainhead in the spirit of Christ, Mohammed, and Martin Luther.
Now, was Jim Atkinson a real guy?
I don't know.
I'm sure if I kept going I could have found that, but I did not because this is mind-boggling enough.
Didn't you want to find out whether the person he was channeling from really existed?
Because that would make a difference as to whether or not it was accurate, I think.
I also want to say that it's always such a shame when you find out that someone with such sterling previous credentials gets waylaid by something that's so obviously off-color.
I think there's nothing wrong with beekeeping either.
Like you mentioned Sayer G, and I think that's a reference to the fact that he worked in a health food store and grocery store in Florida.
And I'm like, these are good jobs.
I mean, beekeeping, school teaching.
They're just not the preparatory track for medical school.
Yes, well put.
He also had a little bit of Latin in him because the word chiropractic comes from heros and practicos, done by hand.
And given the religiosity, you get a sense that Palmer also believed he had some magic juju in his own healing hands.
He believed that the body provided all natural healing power through the nervous system.
So remember that when we get to Melissa's Cell and Germanic New Medicine.
Palmer invented the notion of a spinal misalignment, which he said caused a shortage in nerve supply, which he termed subluxation.
So Julian brought up that term before.
Let me say that that is a disputed term.
Doctors, medical doctors, don't believe that such a thing exists, but chiropractors Say that that is the reason for pain.
In fact, chiropractic realigned the nerve supply, according to Palmer, which he regarded as the root cause of all disease.
Well, to be exact, he claimed that 95% of all diseases, cancer, brain tumors, all of it, are caused by subluxated vertebrae and the other 5% is caused by displaced joints in areas of the body other than the vertebral column.
And surprise, surprise, Palmer was an anti-vaxxer and germ theory denialist.
We'll be doing germ theory denialism in two weeks, I believe, so we might revisit him.
Among his many writings, he wrote It is the very height of absurdity to strive to protect any person from smallpox or any other malady by inoculating them with a filthy animal poison.
Oh boy, so I just want to add here that the filthy animal injection bit is being juxtaposed against something very ancient.
I'm pretty fascinated with the hand stuff, the laying on of hands, because when Palmer names his therapy, I'm hearing all kinds of ritual and scriptural echoes of how blessings are conferred between generations, between priests and commoners, between fathers and sons.
The hand is often this radiant microcosm of the sun, And I'm reminded that years ago when I was into a lot of like Vedic stuff like Jyotish and Vastu Shastra, I also studied palm reading.
It's called Hasta Samudrika with a guy named Harc de Faux.
And we would do handprints and read the lines and it was pretty fascinating.
So, he looked at my print and he predicted that I would author 10 books, which is pretty impressive until you asked whether he knew I'd already written 8.
But the main premise of Hasta Samudraka was that the hand was a microcosm of the body and a book of its destiny.
So, like, the fingers communicated the energies of the planets, the palm was like the sun.
So, I don't know, it seems like Palmer's picking up on something old in that, that there's something embedded in these atavistic forms of manual therapy.
And also, I think, mythologized through Jedi stuff, like Yoda raising his hand to lift the X-Wing out of the swamp.
But, of course, then the Kylos take it up a notch.
That was what?
That was real.
That was real, yeah.
Yeah, there was subluxations in the X-Wing.
And then the Kairos take it up a notch, and they do this manhandling and crunching.
Anyway, hand stuff.
There may be a Gematria link here, too, given that his name is Palmer, right?
Oh, wow.
Right.
It's deep.
I know.
Destiny.
Everything is connected.
So, speaking of crunching, a decade before Palmer started cracking backs, Osteopathy was founded and there was an immediate turf war between the two.
Though to their credits, osteopaths started looking for mainstream medical accreditation much earlier than chiropractors.
In 1896, the year after the magical adjustment, Palmer apparently borrowed the philosophical principles of chiropractic from osteopathy.
As both describe the body as a machine that can be cured without drugs.
They both claim that spinal manipulation improves health.
And subluxation is effectively synonymous with the osteopathic somatic dysfunction.
Though the latter affects the circulatory system, not the nervous system.
So while osteopaths somewhat rightfully considered chiropractic a bastardized form of their practice, Palmer initially denied studying osteopathy But then in 1899, he claimed that he had indeed taken a course and that, quote, chiropractic is osteopathy gone to seed.
He also studied electropathy, cranial diagnosis, hydrotherapy, and facial diagnosis.
So very body-related, as you were referencing, Matthew.
In 1897, he then founded the Palmer School and Cure in Davenport, which was later renamed the Palmer College of Osteopathic.
Of course.
And then he was jailed, of course, because he was practicing medicine without a license.
He spent 17 days in the slammer, and he finally coughed up and paid the fine, and he sold the school to his son, B.J.
David Daniel moved to the West Coast and he established chiropractic schools in California, Oklahoma, and Oregon.
Daniel had a fraught relationship with all of his children, in fact.
BJ, his son, claimed that he was barely a father and often beat his three children.
It gets even worse.
Daniel died after being struck from behind by a car driven by BJ, though the official cause of death was listed as typhoid fever, which this is debated, but he probably got after the car accident, and as I said, the accident itself is even contested.
Well, it sounds like the accident may have caused some subluxations, which then led to the typhoid fever, right?
Yeah, but we need to pause here.
We need to pause here.
It's awful.
I mean, it's the early 20th century.
Domestic abuse, child abuse is systematically rationalized by the supposed need for corporal punishment, and this is everywhere.
So we're not talking about something unique in this story of the Palmer family, but I think we have to be super suspicious of a manual healing technique That looks like physical domination that emerges out of this paradigm.
Like my whole book on the Ashtanga Yoga Cult and Pattabhi Joyce, its founder, showed how the quote-unquote adjustments that he learned from Tirumalai Krishnamacharya really couldn't be separated out from the corporal punishment that Krishnamacharya meted out as par for the course in his yoga classes to boys as young as 12 and 13.
And that same discipline and punish but also faux BDSM scenarios go on to play out through the generations where violence is conflated with attention and care and pain is conflated with pleasure.
So we have a report of Palmer beating his children.
And then one of them going on to take up this manual therapy that again tangles up pain and pleasure, domination, submission.
I think it's not smart to, you know, avoid the question of what is going on behind the curtain and to reflect on how easy it would be to allow the premise of chiropractic to launder some very complicated dynamics of physical coercion and correction.
My argument about abuses in the yoga world is that they have been rationalized in part through a process of sublimation whereby the dominance is reframed as healing.
I don't know.
My gut says there's something similar going on here.
To his credit though, BJ, after being abused, he took chiropractic and he evolved it quite a bit.
He allowed x-rays in 1910.
His father was opposed to any mainstream medical intervention, such as x-rays.
And as it made its way into the mainstream, there's long been a combination, and here are the definitions, of mixers, which are chiropractors who perform spinal adjustments and other treatments to go along, and the straights, who rely only on spinal adjustments.
When I was discussing my own experiences earlier, I was predominantly discussing mixers I did actually see one straight in my life.
He thought that one vertebrae in the neck cured all disease.
And he was also a big burly man, as Julian experienced.
and lie down and he would come in and he would crack my neck and leave.
And that was it.
That was the only touching that was done.
It was not pleasurable.
I did not go long because he was very personable.
He was a hippie throwback.
We got along as people.
But after a few adjustments, I was like, this is crazy.
It's not doing anything for me.
Yeah, that's the idea, if I'm not mistaken, that the relationship between the atlas and the axis bones determines how everything else lines up.
And if you can just keep cracking right there at the top of the cervical spine where it meets the occiput, then everything will be fine.
Can we just review that for a sec, though?
If you keep cracking it, meaning at a certain point, will the surfaces be ground down to a fine powder so that they'll slide together nicely or something?
What do you mean by keep cracking it?
Because the adjustment doesn't put it back into place properly, but the next one might?
Once it's pure powder, it's then ingested up through the pineal gland.
If you can just cut your tongue and get your tongue back up, then you're enlightened.
No, but it's powder, so you have to snort it, actually, by using the tube.
You snort it off the tip of your tongue.
Everything is connected.
Well, until you cut it.
Until you cut the tongue.
Then it's not connected, right?
So the straight versus mixers camps date back to near the origins of chiropractic.
And even though he allowed x-rays, BJ didn't like mixers.
But he was slightly less metaphysical than his father.
In 1924, he speculated that only 12% of the nation's 25,000 chiropractors were actually straights.
So we do see an early impulse to mix spinal manipulation with other modalities, which again puts it more in alignment with osteopathy than its own island.
By the 30s, chiropractic was the largest alternative healing profession in America, and clinical trials began in 1935.
So the road to mainstream medicine for chiropractic was not easy, and we can still question whether it is or not.
And this is in part due to straights.
Making it religious-like.
Or I really should say, really a religion.
As I mentioned, there's been a debate for a while.
In 1963, the American Medical Association formed a committee on quackery specifically to combat chiropractic pseudoscience.
Three years later, they labeled it as an unscientific cult In 1980, they warned medical doctors not to associate with the profession.
But seven years later, the AMA was found guilty of trying to demonize and eliminate the profession, and this was from a 1976 antitrust lawsuit filed by chiropractors.
So this capped off a growing interest in the profession at large for potential treatments around spinal manipulation.
So one reason my parents were able to bring me to a chiropractor in 1991 when I started was because insurance accepted it, which is sadly a marker of acceptance in the Western medical system.
And I say sadly just simply due to how much we rely on private insurance as a marker of efficacy in this country.
But we can get into socialized medicine another time.
And like I said, chiropractic should continue to follow the evidence.
I couldn't imagine The pain I would have been in throughout college if I didn't have it.
But as I hinted at earlier, there's also a really glaring reason that we see a number of chiropractors in the conspiritualist realm today, and we can point back to its origins to understand why that is.
I just want to add in here too that the insurance piece is really interesting from a slightly different angle in terms of what I said before about how the trifecta of ultimate status, exploitive student loan practices, and how complementary medicine has secured pathways into legitimacy as you were just discussing, Derek.
There is a persistently contentious relationship between the chiropractic industry and another type of insurance, auto insurance.
The companies allege every year there are lawsuits, multi-million dollar lawsuits, alleging fraud from the chiropractic industry.
And I just did a quick Google search when I was looking at this and immediately turned up headlines like, chiropractic doctor charged in 3.1 million dollar insurance scam.
15 California chiropractors charged in a $6 million auto insurance kickback scheme and that's a very recent case.
LA County chiropractors in a $2.5 million insurance fraud.
And in all the cases that I've listed, well in cases like these that I just listed, there's usually more elaborate collusion.
But at the most basic level, this type of fraud Usually just involves overbilling insurance on personal injury cases by lying about the severity of the injury and the treatment expenses.
The recommended frequency of visits also goes way up.
For example, after my little Honda Civic was rear-ended by a Ford Explorer in my 20s, I had a course of treatment just like this through a chiropractor, and I saw the grossly inflated receipts that I was issued, and they were loaded with additional items that, you know, various kinds of treatments or things that were ordered, you know, various kinds of treatments or things that were ordered, tests, etc., that never were, under a cost of visit line that was already double what I had been paying And I didn't pay a cent.
I just kept showing up, and they kept billing the insurance company until the case resolved.
That's incredible.
I just want to try to understand, though, if there's always this sort of upsell to constant returns.
Like, Derek, you said that the person that you first went to when you were 16 implied that you would have to come back for the rest of your life.
How is it going to help you?
I don't understand how I don't understand.
What's the end game?
Is it just that your spine would always be chronically maladjusted or out of place or out of joint and you were always going to have to have it manhandled?
That one was specifically hip subluxation.
That was the diagnosis.
So the idea was my hips would always be subluxated and that I would always need adjustments to give me temporary relief.
But because I was wearing a lift in my shoe for my orthopedic at the time, I no longer do.
For seven years, I wore a lift in my right shoe, and that was because I never received proper physical therapy to actually stretch out and strengthen the muscles that needed to work.
And I still have some disparity, but a lot of people do.
So the idea was that because of that disparity in my hips, I would always be in pain the rest of my life.
There was nothing I could do about it.
The only cure would be the temporary relief provided by chiropractors.
That seems a little bit more sensible, but what are you going to say, Julian?
Well, the way that I would often hear it framed would be, you're going to come for six months to a year.
We'll start off doing really frequent adjustments because your body's out of balance, right?
And it's going to repeatedly pull itself back into that out-of-balance alignment pattern.
And over time, you'll need less and less adjustments for it to set.
And take and for you to be in, eventually we're going to get you to this place where you're, where you're now fully in balance and nothing is out of alignment.
And then you may need to come back for maintenance from time to time.
That wasn't what I experienced.
I did experience the three visits a week down to one.
That was true.
But the idea was that there would always be a visit a week.
And again, I'm sure many chiropractors have different grifts.
So that was the one that I was just victim of.
Yeah, and I've seen like network chiropractic treatment plans that they have like on the desk that they give to everyone where it's like you are being initiated into a powerful process of complete sort of alchemical transformation.
You're going to go through all these healing crises as a result of coming in and we've got these cleanses that will help you because we're releasing toxins and just on and on like it's very elaborate.
I never got into the chiropractic sort of circles that you've mentioned, Julien, in the yoga community chiropractors.
Mine was 16 in the New Jersey suburbs, medicalized.
I always stuck within the medical profession, meaning that I wasn't going to these offshoots that someone would recommend.
It was always through insurance.
Well, not always through insurance.
In my early 30s, I didn't have it.
But it was predominantly through, I would guess you would say, more of the mixers who were trying to present as doctors, I never experienced anything spiritual in chiropractic except for that brief experience that I said.
So all those adjustments were done by what I would consider more of the attempted to be mainstream chiropractors.
So now to address the question we started with, why are chiropractors in particular susceptible to pseudoscience?
We will turn to Melissa Sell, who I found at least a year ago after a listener tipped us off about her work.
Funnily enough, when I went to check her Twitter and Instagram accounts that were sent to me, I found out that she had already blocked me.
A suspiciously preemptive move.
But now as I made explicit about chiropractic earlier, I want to make something else explicit as I find myself having to explain this on our social media feeds often.
I don't know this person.
I haven't spent a ton of time looking into her work.
What I'm about to share is purely based on what she says at this event, not who she is as a person.
I don't care about that.
From time to time, we will make speculative comments about the influencers, and we always note that it's speculation.
My interest here is purely why this chiropractor would be reviving a blatant pseudoscience rooted in anti-Semitic ideology.
Well, that sounds very personal actually, Derek.
And I think, you know, I'm glad that you're putting that disclaimer in, but I think the truth is that because these intuitive and sort of evidence-free often positions are so reliant upon the charismatic personality, an attack upon the data feels like an attack upon the person.
Because what else is putting it forward, right?
Right, true.
And the way that people monetize themselves become part of their identity, so I understand that.
Absolutely.
But nothing in what I'm saying is implying that she's anti-Semitic.
I highly doubt it.
I don't know, but I'm not going to go that route and I don't think that's the case.
As we just went through though, chiropractic almost started as a religion, yet evolved into a critical medium.
medical, credible medical discipline, straights aside.
Daniel Palmer might have been an anti-vaxxer and germ theory denialist, but I didn't come across any blatant antisemitism or xenophobia.
And if I missed it, I apologize.
You can let me know in our DMs.
It's just that my red flag warning system screams whenever I hear mid-20th century Germany and Jews evoked in the same sentence.
Yeah, conspiracy theorist.
We're at the event 2021 and Melissa Sell presents Mastering Your Mindset Against Disease.
Before we get into this talk, though, I want to highlight a blog post that she wrote on June 18, 2020, because it's a good indicator of the territory we're heading into.
The post is called, Can Indecision Cause Hemorrhoids?
Out of fairness, it's linked to in the show notes, so you can read it.
It begins with many of the ambiguous claims that we deal with on this podcast, such as your body having a language, the idea that health is not random, and that you have an innate survival system, all of which fits into the anti-vax bodily sovereignty paradigm perfectly.
And, yes, Cell sells courses on this, so the monetization pipeline is right there.
I think this post, to set up what we're getting into, is worth quoting in length.
So Julian, would you do the honors?
When you experience a shock of not being able to make a decision, and you're concerned about making the right choice, your body responds by eroding the surface mucosal tissue of your rectum.
The ancient biological way your body is attempting to help you is to widen your rectum so that it is easier for you to stake your claim and make your choice.
Even though, as evolved homo sapiens, we don't go around urinating and defecating on things to establish our identity and ownership, Our body's language is ancient and instinctively remembers the good old days when any slight biological survival advantage made a difference between life and death.
Once you make your decision and feel the relief that comes with no longer being on the fence, your body begins to repair the rectal mucosal tissue and you experience what is commonly called Hemorrhoid?
Nope!
Hemorrhoids have nothing to do with not eating enough fiber.
They have to do with being divided internally and unable to make a decision.
Another example of this fascinating language of the body is a person experiencing low self-esteem.
When you have low self-value, your body experiences this as not being enough, strong enough, smart enough.
Pretty enough.
Et cetera.
I love this so much because body fascists are so obsessed with poop and anality.
And here, I mean, the doctor, the good doctor, takes something pretty simple.
I mean, I'm not a proctologist, but I understand that, like, muscle strain, constipation, sitting, compression, maybe pushing a baby out through your vagina.
These can all stretch out your ass veins.
And she creates this whole Jungian universe right there in your butt.
Anyway, I love the tell here because she says, even as evolved homo sapiens, we don't go around urinating and defecating on things to establish our identity and ownership.
Au contraire, doctor, because actually, homo conspiritualis goes around showing off and talking about pee and poo all the time.
By the way, did you guys know that Kelly Brogan is getting into pee drinking?
Oh, auto-urine therapy.
I remember 20 years ago when I started in earnest my yoga practice in New York that that was going around at the time.
No, no, it's new.
No, it's totally new.
It's a new ancient thing.
What you were doing back then in New York wasn't so aligned, but this is new.
Well, yeah, I just found out, I just found out by Jordan Peterson, I've never been doing yoga correctly as well.
You know, but the thing here too is that this implies that there was a stage in the evolution of human beings where we ran around pooing and peeing on things like dogs.
I've never heard of this before.
This is new evolutionary psychology, obviously channeled from the great beyond.
Yeah.
Well, the Post also speculates that feeling ugly can cause acne.
Oh, fuck off.
All of this very much fits into the drononic new medicine paradigm.
Hammer practiced medicine from 1963 to 86, and then he was disbarred for malpractice.
He was also imprisoned a number of times, his big offense being that he claimed his modality could cure cancer.
So, before we get it to his five principles, I want listeners to understand where they originate.
As I mentioned, Homer considered mainstream medicine a Jewish plot to kill non-Jews.
How?
Well, through chemotherapy and opioids specifically.
He claimed that neither chemo or morphine was used in Israel.
Incredible.
No Jew is treated with chemotherapy in Germany.
That's a quote.
Taking it a step further, and let me know if this sounds familiar, guys, the needles that are used in chemo are secretly implanting microchips that contain chambers of poison that are lated activate by satellites to kill the patient.
That's right, Jewish Space Lasers 2009.
He coined it.
He's also an AIDS denier and he believed that the swine flu vaccination campaign was also a microchip implant mission.
Oh, everything old is new again.
I want to loop back around for a second here to tie some of these themes together.
I've also encountered a pretty strong anti-vax messaging in chiropractic officers.
You know, remember the guy I was talking about before who moved the bone and got the hell away from the bone and let God do the rest?
He had in his waiting room alongside the various magazines that are usually there, these binders that were filled with horror stories about vaccine side effects in infants, like really horrible, heart string jerking kind of stories as small children and infants.
And then of course, next to those would be testimonials about how chiropractic care specifically at this facility had cured, restored the health of those kids.
Did he do the baby adjustments?
Because that completely freaks me out.
Yep, he did.
There's pictures of him doing that stuff.
So as with other forms of alternative medicine, which I should say, as we've said many times on the podcast, it's all a mixed bag.
We can't tar them with the same brush.
It's perhaps no surprise that chiropractic is a vector of conspirituality.
And in fact, In May of last year, a very influential and highly antisemitic QAnon figure who had maintained a secret identity, going by Inevitable ET, was unmasked as a Denver-area chiropractor named Craig Longley, who, after being booted from Twitter in the wake of the Capitol riots, he quickly built a dominant QAnon-themed Telegram account called WeTheMedia, which is now up to over a quarter of a million followers,
And his main inevitable ET account on Telegram has an additional 85,000 followers.
And of course, he shares all the usual pedophile cabal, election fraud, COVID denial stuff, but notably also references the protocols of the elders of Zion in glowing terms, and promotes the Blue the Jew campaign, which if you haven't heard of this, people post stuff and they create memes and identify notable Jews by photoshopping them in the color blue.
Yeah, Neo-Nazis create memes identifying notable Jews by Photoshop.
Yeah.
Horrible stuff.
Incredible.
Just this morning, Jeff Charlotte, who's a fantastic journalist, who did all the work on The Family, that, you know, it became a documentary, he posted that a friend of his is His son is a representative in Weinstein, and he's Jewish, and 30 Trumpers stood outside his home with their trucks and their Confederate flags screaming to bow to the cross.
That was this morning.
So, when we're talking about these things, these have real-world consequences and they're getting worse.
Of course, Mouse was just taken out of a Tennessee school district.
It's just so troubling.
So, let's get on to Germanic New Medicine and talk about stories.
Again, Homer's son, Dirk, was shot and killed by the last king of Italy in 1978 on a yacht.
That sounds sketchy.
But this is the Dramonic New Medicine origin story because shortly after his son's death, Homer developed testicular cancer and believed there was a link between the two.
And let me say how absurd this is because as a testicular cancer survivor, it's so disconcerting.
When I was young, I had a series of hormone shots because my right testicle never descended.
It turns out, and this again goes to the 80s and not knowing things, 90% of men who have an undescended testicle when they're young develop this cancer later in life.
They didn't know that then, they know it now.
There's nothing mystical or even emotional about it.
And even though we don't know what the exact link is, but this led Hammer to develop his five biological laws, which Melissa Sell will now explain.
She begins by discussing this very origin story, wiping aside the notion that cancer is genetic and purely causal from the incident of his son's death and that there was no reason that he should have developed cancer.
So, So, as a survivor, I will get personal for one moment to sell and say, fuck off.
Yeah, and what's gross before you play the clip is that I can imagine that one of these fuckers could get to you in some vulnerable circumstance and tell you that your undescended testicle was the result of a karmic trauma or that it's predicted your choice to not have children or something like that.
And what's super gross about it is that if you were really vulnerable and really reaching for meaning at that particular point, a really skilled bullshitter could make all of that sound plausible and then hook you into some sort of wellness repentance.
And so, he started investigating, he started interviewing cancer patients, he started looking at patterns, and he started noticing something.
And what he noticed was that every man who had testicular cancer, he discovered that they suffered a tragic loss.
Yeah, it's called being human.
Every person who had lung cancer had a death right conflict.
Everyone who had colon cancer had an indigestible, hard to process situation that they were dealing with.
And so basically what he did was he mapped out the entire body, which is this chart back behind me, is the mapping out of the entire human body.
And if you're thinking of a giant whiteboard with all of these arrows and circles pointing to this and that, you are right on track.
He discovered that everybody who gets sick has suffered before in their life.
That's amazing.
He discovered that Barnum's statements could be turned to a fine medical profit.
Now, let's go on to where she explains what cancer really is, which really is the origin myth of Dramonic New Medicine.
So cancer, it's not something going wrong in the body.
You know, it's when we look at, I think the title of my workshop was, you know, Mastering Your Mindset Against Disease.
In order to do that, we need to know what we're talking about.
When we say disease, what do we even mean?
And Dr. Homer's work helps us to see that what we're calling disease It's not an error.
It's not something that's going wrong in the body, but instead it's an intentional tissue adaptation that your body does in response to shocking trauma.
Paging Zach Bush, right?
That's shocking trauma, not shock and trauma.
That's a term I don't know if she coined, but I see that a lot.
She goes on to call Germanic New Medicine an experiential science, which some of us would call an anecdote.
As you'll hear, these five biological laws are being presented as the real cause of all disease.
Well, let me pull back.
Disease isn't even a thing in this system.
And notice here something common in the sovereignty sphere because you're at fault for your illness.
So don't even think about passing it off to genetics or the environment.
It's really you.
But guess what?
I have a workshop you can buy that will help to teach you how to be truly healthy forever and ever.
So here's Law 1.
Yes, so the five biological laws.
The first biological law is the psyche-brain-organ connection.
And so, the psyche is your whole sensory apparatus.
Like, every bit of you is on board with survival.
Your body is programmed to survive and to reproduce.
And so, in order to achieve this, the body has to pick up on every little change that's going on in your environment.
And when your body picks up on, like I mentioned before, It's something that is isolating and shocking and you're kind of caught off guard in a moment.
If the psyche perceives that something like that has occurred, immediately and automatically a biological program is initiated.
And the biological program depends on the content of the conflict.
Palmer called this the iron rule, which can actually be seen in the brain scan, a phenomenon he termed the hammer foci, a set of concentric rings in the brain caused by trauma, which then goes from brain to tissue.
I posted last week on Instagram about the whole all trauma is stored in tissue idea that I still hear in yoga classes today.
And you guys might be surprised, but no neuroscientist has ever seen this before.
Yeah, I'm not surprised because I think it actually sounds like a chakra or a granthi from pre-modern Indian medicine.
I don't know the concordant Chinese terms, but it makes me realize that part of the appeal of this stuff involves reaching back into this older visualization of potential tender or aspirational points in the body.
And it's notable that the MRIs aren't finding this because Hamer is obviously visualizing it.
He's imagining it to be there, only he's living now, and all of the Hatha Yogi guys are coming up with this stuff in the 15th century.
It also just, she really sounds like she needs to get her story straight here, too.
Like, she's not entirely self-convinced, it seems, of how all these things, all of these principles fit together.
It's a very odd presentation.
Now, if you were to watch the video, better is actually to read the transcript of the video because it's just a confusing mishmash of things.
So, law one sets the stage for the brain as the focus of all potential disease, and now for law number two.
So when you have a conflict shock, when you've been caught off guard by something in your environment, you're feeling unsafe, you're feeling afraid, you just found out someone is cheating on you or something terrible has happened to somebody that you care about.
In that moment of shock, your body starts this adaptation process and you shift into a state of heightened sympathetic activity.
You know, this plugs right into these overlapping areas between legitimate research into how trauma affects the brain, especially our implicit and explicit memory processes, and the autonomic nervous system on the one hand, and then this tendency that has become so widespread now to use these reference points, to use this language, which is what pseudoscience does, right?
To promote a kind of neuro-woo, or even like Joe Dispenza does, to make grand mind over matter claims of being able to use meditation to cure things like cancers.
Yeah, it's disturbing on so many levels.
And listeners have asked if we'll be doing Dispenza.
We will.
That's coming up as well.
Now, back to Homer and his two-phase nature of disease, which is very humoral, in fact.
Fight-flight-freeze, sorry, response that cell invokes either results in a cold disease that results in stress, weight loss, and sleep disorders, or a warm disease such as infection, allergies, or rheumatoid arthritis.
So, trauma that afflicts the brain with concentric rings now manifesting as either cold or warm humors.
Cell also notes that tissue cells are building up at this point.
I'm going to speed around the last three laws because, you know, I just don't want to listen to Targo through it at this moment.
So the third law is disease progression is either controlled by the old brain or new brain.
And it's basically Homer adapting the triune brain model in terms of physical and ideological mapping.
You know, you have the reptilian brainstem region that controls primitive processes, while the newer cerebrum is implicated in direct Conflicts.
The fourth law.
So here we arrive at germ theory denialism.
Microbes are coordinated by the brain to heal, provided that they're available.
So there's some, like, if you think in the right way, you'll have enough microbes to be available.
Microbes, according to this law, are not in fact damaging to the body, and modern medicine is wrong in trying to ward them off because medicines interfere with the natural processes of microbial activity.
Cell calls these microbes symbiotic because they live within us and are just dormant.
This leads to the claim that bacteria and viruses do not cause disease, something that she says there's just no evidence to substantiate such a claim.
And then we get to the fifth law or quintessence, in which the active conflict phase and healing phase of disease are combined to form a, quote, special meaningful program of nature.
Basically, we developed an ability through the course of evolution to deal with emergency situations for which Hamer developed an explanation for every disease known to humankind as well as the only cure that truly heals the patient Which is resolving emotional conflict.
So, that's it.
It's all on you.
The only way out of it is to think better and deal with your shit.
The cancer is all your fault.
COVID means you fucked up somewhere.
Right.
Now, in the talk, fellow chiropractor Devin Verano, one of the hosts, says this is a total paradigm shift.
Of course.
And she says that the body is always on our side and trying to help us.
No, it's not actually.
That is a lie, because the body is actually punishing you for your sins, according to this paradigm.
There's an ugly contradiction there, right?
If the body was on your side, it would forgive you your psychic sins, wouldn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
And this is always the problem.
I always look at it religiously.
Yeah.
God created everything in the universe.
Oh, but evil isn't God's fault.
That's slipped in there without him realizing it, even though he created it.
It's the same exact thing just pushed onto the body now.
Right.
So, let's see how Sel spins this philosophy, this new paradigm shift.
When people start recognizing that tumors are an adaptation, that your body is doing something intentionally, that it's not a nefarious wrongness.
When you're looking at symptoms through the lens of wrongness, either something wrong has happened to me, you know, that's the kind of the ultimate victim mode of, you know, my genes have just, they are what they are.
Or the virus just got me.
Or, you know, I got sick.
This is this idea that I'm helpless in the matter.
I'm powerless and things happen to me.
And it's a wrong thing.
It's a bad thing.
It shouldn't have happened, but it did.
And now I just have to cope or take medication or suffer.
You know, and then even if we graduate into the perspective of This is something that is a result of a poor lifestyle, or I made choices, or I exposed myself to certain foods or toxins or whatever, and now my body is suffering as a result of a wrongness.
Again, we're looking at this through the lens of a wrongness.
This is something bad that's happening.
You know, she sounds, that entire clip could have been taken verbatim from Kelly Brogan or a number of other influencers that we cover.
The language is all the same.
It's really about differences in affect delivery.
Like with Sel, there's kind of like a coachy aspect to it.
It's less inspirational.
I don't think she would be as good as a meditation leader.
I don't think she'd be as good as a yoga teacher.
I think that's Kelly Brogan's territory, but the content is all the same.
It's all just interchangeable.
I also just wonder hearing shit like this, like what you would say about the youngest victim of COVID to date in Los Angeles County, which happened this week, a 15 month old died of COVID.
What are you going to say to the parents?
You're going to give the parents this clip and say that it's disgusting?
In terms of rightness, what their definition is, it's accepting the symptoms, not taking medicine, and bringing your body back into homeostasis by resolving the conflict in your mind.
Not sure how a 15-month-old resolves those conflicts.
Cell does state that some diseases do require surgery, but that's only because you are in a state of conflict for a really long time and your tissues adapted.
They grew larger because of the chronic conflict.
Now, all this shit, what's the actual solution?
Well, Cell's program is getting really profoundly solution-oriented and creative and viewing the entirety of your body as a project itself.
It's an attitude of resilience and not catastrophizing yourself.
It's accessing higher consciousness, recognizing that you are not your trauma.
It's this deep knowing that you can overcome whatever comes your way.
Julian, does this sound familiar at all?
Well, paging Mary Baker Eddy, remixed through Louise Hay, The Secret, Byron Katie.
I mean, it's all the same shtick.
In fact, Matthew, when you started talking a moment ago, I thought you were going to compare it to A Course in Miracles, right?
Because nothing that you see in the world is not a creation of the mind.
There is nothing that is wrong, right?
And that's Christian science.
In a way, I think the pandemic called the bluff on all of this mind over matter fundamentalism, just like AIDS did in the 80s.
And in our context, it exposes the deeply problematic epistemics of what can otherwise sound like harmlessly positive metaphysical notions.
It's beyond alarming to me that anyone claiming to be an actual medical doctor could be converted to this victim-blaming cult, which is part of what Sel talks about in her presentation from reading the transcript that I did.
And yeah, what you just said, Derek, about, you know, the incredibly tragic, there are so many incredibly tragic situations like that, that this kind of, this way of weaving a story around it is just so profoundly offensive.
And usually I find that when people are invested in this kind of stuff and you confront them in the way that you just did, they'll say, well, past lives, you know, it's all a mystery.
Everything is perfect.
You know, even the Jews in the Holocaust at some level were getting exactly what they needed in a way that is beyond our understanding and our human judgments.
And it just, it's maddening.
There's an accusation of people, Kelly Brogan does this all the time, of people embodying victim consciousness or something like that, that expresses a kind of contempt for the pain that people feel while combining it with this idea of, well, you're punishing yourself There's another thing right there too, right?
Which is that there's this contempt for the reality of suffering and trauma while at the same time saying, well, that's where all of your illness comes from and we can teach you how to fix that.
The way that you heal suffering and trauma is not through this contemptuous kind of mind over matter bullshit.
It's actually through getting real about that pain and suffering.
I think because it doesn't work, the contempt has to flip over into complete emotional avoidance, right?
Because if the disease isn't actually cured, then the person pivots to shrugging their shoulders and talking about karma.
So it's like they have all their bases covered.
They don't really have to empathize with human suffering because it's the person's fault.
If the person doesn't fix themselves, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, then well, they couldn't because...
Because it's their karma or it's their past lives or something like that, but at no point does this type of practitioner have to just sit in the existential dread of, oh fuck, this is human life, this is where we are, and I'm sharing this with you, and maybe doctoring has something to do with that empathy.
Well, I want to share one final clip because this is where you can really hear how this has nothing at all to do with science or medicine.
In this worldview, disease specificity doesn't exist.
Germ theory is gone.
It's outdated.
It never mattered.
Vaccinations are damaging.
Hell, stop hand-washing.
Those germs won't actually harm you.
It's only your mind that will harm you.
When you see cancer as a wrongness that needs to be removed, when you see bacteria and viruses as enemies, well, why wouldn't you be saying, thank you doctor for this vaccine, thank you for this surgery, thank you for this chemotherapy?
Because when you are in that model, it makes sense what they're doing.
But when you can zoom out and say, why would my body develop a tumor to attack itself?
Why would my body turn on itself?
I mean, this body has been around for a really long time.
It's got really ancient programming.
How would humans have even survived if the body was designed to break down and to turn on itself?
You have to kind of zoom out to a bigger kind of philosophical, what do I actually believe?
And that was one of my points I did want to say, because a big part of this is questioning.
investigate the unquestioned assumptions that you have about life.
Because the things that we just kind of take for granted, you've never even thought to question it, question everything.
Because that's how you're going to figure out for yourself, what do I really believe?
Am I just an accumulation of other people's thoughts and other people's assumptions and conclusions that they've come to about the world?
Have I ever actually investigated this belief?
Do I believe, for myself personally, That the body attacked itself.
Does that make sense to me?
So there it is.
Yeah.
Everything in 90 seconds.
Yeah, bravo, doctor.
That's amazing.
This could be the conspiratorial creed.
Put it on the billboard in Austin, it's all there.
Anti-vax, pro-sovereignty, don't trust the experts, only listen to your innate wisdom.
Your body could never harm itself, but your mind is the root cause of all your afflictions.
Pure Cartesian religious pseudoscience.
Well, let me just say here too, it was, it was an absolute embodiment of a freshman skepticism.
Right.
As well.
Right.
This, this, this like very, very like initial, like, Oh my God, question everything.
Like what, like your profound deep beliefs, like.
When you do, you'll come to this nonsensical Christian science system of beliefs.
Sel has 32,000 Instagram followers, roughly 6,000 Twitter and another 12,000 on Facebook, so she's really a minor deity in the conspiritualist pantheon and still sharing the stage with many of our more powerful conspiracy-peddling wellness gurus.
She's called masking kids an abusive indoctrination ritual.
She says that our society incentivizes laziness and unhealthiness.
She calls materialism outdated while trying to revive vitalism, linking her Germanic New Medicine nonsense with her straights chiropractic bullshit.
You know, the Republican Party has long been accused of romanticizing the 1950s, but Sell, along with the whole cohort of conspiritualists that we cover, seem to be fixated on 19th century mysticism that actual scientists and researchers left behind when the evidence didn't bear out the results that were being claimed.
Here we are again.
People won't seek cures from cancer due to quackery like this, and on their deathbed they will think, if only I had truly thought I could defeat this disease.
And people won't get vaccinated due to this egomaniacal fixation on sovereignty, and on their deathbed will think, this was really anthrax poisoning.
I know I stood in my power and someone just had to take me down.
So master your mindset, Dr. Cell.
How about read a fucking book?
Read The Empire of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee if you want to know what cancer actually is.
And if you want to know that we all have cancer cells in us at all times and just need to be activated in some capacity.
If you're obsessed with environmental mismatches, read The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman.
Or try out Robert Sapolsky to know what evolutionary biology, oh I'm sorry, ancient wisdom, really means.
Try Meredith Wadman and Eula Biss to learn what vaccination really entails.
But stop making shit up, because it's deadly, it's dangerous, and you're going to harm more people than you help through those courses you're selling for this mystical quackery.
Yeah, I hope Dr. Cell finds some good resources.
To me, you know, I guess my closing comments are really going back to the cruelty that I see at the heart of so much of this stuff and that the pseudoscience seems to provide this very potent set of rationalizations That can be mobilized by people who need to act out corrective fantasies on their patients.
Going back to how I felt on the chiropractic table, there was just a lot of that energy that echoes with the authoritarian parenting of just straighten yourself out or stand up straight.
And of course now we see that passed down through the rebranding of Jordan Peterson.
So I don't know, I mean, I think I've gone a little bit hard on this theme, but if it is germane to suggest that, you know, the manhandling that comes out of Palmer has this context of physical correction and a history of corporal punishment that is commonplace to that era, also reportedly common in his home,
I think part of what we're talking about with this disciplinary attitude that we hear in Sel's talk is we're talking about the discipline of unruly and crooked and karmically insufficient bodies in these patronizing and mechanistic ways.
And it means that children and sick people and old people are viewed as As potentially, if they're young, but then actually twisted, that they are gnarly and they can be stretched out and straightened so that they can embody health and virtue.
But that takes a lot of compliance.
And I couldn't help thinking, as I was preparing for this episode, of Alice Miller's work, especially For Your Own Good.
She's the psychologist who studied, you know, the systematization of corporal punishment-based parenting that proliferated with the rise of fascism.
I don't know.
It also made me think of this strange combination of love and care and also danger that these scenarios invoke for me.
Have you guys ever thought or noticed this phenomenon of grandmothers pinching the cheeks of babies just a little too hard?
Right?
Yes.
This is like famous with the Italian grandmothers that I grew up around.
Like I think there's this primal impulse in corrective disciplinary instincts that we see in chiropractic that have something to do with that.
I think there's this confused there might be this confused feeling of love and protection and discipline and but also confinement.
Like, the granny loves the baby, but is also, like, troubled by something?
Like, needs to correct something?
They want to devour the baby, eat them up, to make them feel safe?
Anyway, I just get this vision when I have the notion of the corrective bone cruncher who wants to crack your spine to set you free.
But of course, you know, Daniel Palmer isn't a granny pinching cheeks.
It does feel like this thing is driven by something like that, this tendency amongst, I'm thinking about like anxious middle-aged fathers, something that I have in myself, like that we'll look at the teenager slouched over and depressed and we'll want them to sit up straight, you know, I'll feel my teeth go on edge, you know, I want them to show a little pride in themselves.
And I think when we are brought up in a culture in which, as children, we might be taught a kind of contempt for illness and weakness, and perhaps we fear these potentialities in ourselves, we might feel compelled to punish it or to extract it from others.
You know, to want to smack that kid in the back.
I mean, that's what he did with the janitor, right?
Apparently.
There's this confused story about how he fixed the subluxation.
You know, so I don't know, there's some ancient paternal thing in there for me, to yearn for order and then to extract it from bodies by force.
And then it's really haunting to think that in the end, Palmer's own son might have run him down with a car, because that's like the other constant with paternal violence, because at some point the child has to retaliate.
