Comment and Opinion

Hulda Clark

People ask me why I don't like not-a-medical-doctor Hulda Clark and why I call her a quack. The title of her book  should give a clue (nobody has "the cure for all cancers"), but the contents of that book reveal someone so detached from reality that it is hard to believe that anyone could take her seriously.

The problem is that Clark and her ilk prey on desperate people who believe (often correctly) that they are dying. The nonsense in this book might sound reasonable to someone with no knowledge of science or how scientists go about their business, but the stuff here is simply not true. Thousands of autopsies have been done on people who have died of cancer, yet the supposedly-ubiquitous human intestinal flukes have never been observed. Either all the pathologists in the world are lying and are part of some great conspiracy to hide the truth or Clark doesn't know what she is prattling on about.

Hulda Clark epitomises medical quackery and fraud. She uses the title "Dr" in a medical context despite having no medical qualifications. (She has a PhD in crab physiology gained in 1958 and a mail-order degree in Naturopathy.) She offers useless "cures" to desperate people. She operates in Mexico, out of the reach of the US authorities.

Clark has been a persistent concern of The Millenium Project for some time, and several pages have been created dealing with her activities and those of her supporters and followers.

• Hulda Clark Supporters: In Their Own Words – See how her supporters express their opinions of other people.
• Hulda Clark Supporters: Running Away - When challenged, they run like cockroaches.
• When lawyers and quacks go bad ...- Nuremberg 2001, the great court case against me and several other people. And some non-people.
• When quacks get frightened ... The newspapers get too close, so smearing of reporters is called for.
• A quack caves in – The ignominious collapse of the court case.
• Century Nutrition's Tijuana Clinic - See what $15,000 a week for treatment in Tijuana gets you.
• Tim Bolen – Hulda's PR consultant.
• The Medical Escrow Society – See how to keep gouging money even after the victim has died.
• I will even sell you copies of not-a-medical-Dr Clark's execrable books. Commission received from the sale of these books will be used to support the fight against quackery.
• Clark vs Federal Trade Commission
  • Round 1
  • Round 2

Hulda Clark's clinic in Tijuana

Clark believers set me straight

From: "Sabinecorinna Unger"
Subject: You're an idiot
Date sent: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 8:7:3 -0400

I'm living proof that Dr Hulda Clark's philosophies work. You have no right to tell me otherwise, until you have walked a day in my shoes. When all the doctors said I would die 5 years ago,I chose alternatives. I am a healthy (late stage 3) miracle cancer survivor. How dare you, shame on you

--- Sabinecorinna Unger

A miracle indeed. Details of the type of cancer and the treatment (both conventional and "alternative") would be useful. If Clark has kept records, I guess she only has 215 days to go.

Date sent: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 12:20:58 -0700
From: Vanessa Kyama
Subject: Dr. Clark

Your article about Dr. Clark is very poor. It has the same tone all her other naysayers have. It's full of piss, wind, and coca-cola.

Vanessa Kyama

From: PeggyLasswell@DecemberDecember
Date sent: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 19:32:02 EDT
Subject: (no subject)

YOU SHOULD BE UTTERLY ASHAMED OF YOURSELF FOR SLANDERING HULDA CLARK. SHE IS AN ANGEL FROM HEAVEN AND I HOPE THAT YOU BURN IN ETERNAL HELL AND DAMNATION FOR YOU COMMENTS.

Here's some more evidence of Clark's character:

Hulda Clark (6/10/1999)
Renowned cancer quack and unlicensed pretend medical doctor Dr Hulda Clark, who was listed here back in April 1999, was arrested in September and spent some time in the slammer where she couldn't hurt anyone for a while. Unfortunately, she is now out on bail. For people who say there is never any good news in the papers, you can read some here. You can follow the story on Dr Terry Polevoy's excellent Healthwatcher site.

The case against not-a-medical-Dr Clark was dismissed, not because she was found not to have been practising medicine without a licence, but because of the length of time since the alleged offence. Her supporters immediately started saying that the court had vindicated her by dismissing the charges, and at the same time claimed that they would have preferred the court to actually proceed to hear the charges so that she could be vindicated. Such sophistry is typical of quack medicine promoters. At any time, her legal team could have withdrawn their motion to dismiss the charges and let the case go to trial, yet they chose not to do this.

Clark lawyers up (18/11/1999)
Supporters of Dr Hulda Clark have been threatening people with lawsuits for saying nasty things about her. The following was sent to an Australian doctor. Please note the formal mode of address used to send a threat to someone the writer does not know. Also note the word "lible", which suggests that no lawyers were used in the preparation of this letter.

From:          "Tim Bolen"
To:            "Peter December"
Subject:       Lible

Dear Pete:

Could we get your address for legal service? I know how eager you are to put your views forward. My recommendation to the Clark team is that we let you defend your statements in Superior Court in San Diego, CA, Dr. Clark's place of business.

Couldn't have given your network any more warning than I did.

Hurry please. I've been waiting just for you...

Tim Bolen

Entering into the spirit of the occasion, I sent the following light-hearted suggestion:

From:          Peter Bowditch
To:            "Tim Bolen"
Subject:       RE: Lible <sic>
Date sent:     Mon, 15 Nov 1999 09:42:40 +1100

Dear Mr Bolen,

Dr Peter December has passed on to me your communication to him. You may like to consider a reverse class action (one claimant, multiple defendants) against all Australians called "Peter" who have ever had anything bad to say about not-Dr Clark. My own contribution can be found at https://ratbags.com/rsoles/editorial.htm where I announce the good news of her arrest and my subsequent disappointment at her release on bail. I know of at least two other Peters who think not-Dr Clark is a quack.

My personal details are:

<snip>

Correspondence should be sent to the above address, but replies will most probably come from my solicitor, who works for the firm Farr, Gough and Dye. Look for that name on any further correspondence relating to this matter.

Yours etc
Peter Bowditch

To which I received the squelching reply:

From:          Tim Bolen
Subject:       RE: Lible <sic>
To:            Peter Bowditch <rsoles@ratbags.com>

(yawn)...

My thoughts on this were:

I can only assume that this means that he has no intention of taking any legal action against anybody and is just blowing smoke and trying to frighten the gullible. Put another way, threats of legal action from Tim Bolen have about as much chance of coming true as Hulda Clark has of curing anyone's cancer. Which is none.

Follow-up: Mr Bolen may have given up on me, but he hasn't given up completely. Someone made an offer on a mailing list to appear in court for the Australian "Peters" and save us the trip to San Diego. Mr Bolen followed a web link in the lady's email signature and contacted her supervisor, demanding that she be disciplined for harassing not-a-medical-Dr Clark in work time. Mr Bolen might like to track down where I work and get my boss to threaten me too.

Emetic and Laxative of the Week (25/6/2000)
Feeling clogged up inside? Here's just the medicine you need to get you going. It's a song about not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark by Murray Soehn.

November 3, 2000 – Clark sues me (and a mailing list and some domain names)
Click here to read about this outbreak of insanity

Why are they so frightened? (18/11/2000)
Something that has always puzzled me is why people who offer guaranteed cures for diseases like AIDS, diabetes and cancer are so frightened of anyone who speaks out against them. Surely, if they could do what they claim they can do, riches and fame beyond imagination would be theirs and any opposition would be ridiculed if not ignored. The really amazing thing is … (See the rest of this, and an amazing rant from a quack's PR man, by clicking here.)

Speaking of Tim Bolen and Hulda Clark… (18/11/2000)
Tim Bolen, PR flack for not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark, was awarded a free ticket to the World Skeptics Convention for his journalistic efforts. Unfortunately, Tim failed to show up and I had to eat two meals on the harbour cruise. In other Hulda news, someone said on a mailing list that the "N.D." in "Hulda Clark, N.D. PhD" stood for "Not Doctor" and attributed this observation to me. While I am flattered, it wasn't me that thought of this. I wish it had been, though.

Good news for AIDS patients (8/12/2000)
Not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark has beaten the rest of the world to a possible cure for AIDS. You can read about her appeal for people with AIDS to participate in a trial by clicking here. Bring your wallets and purses with you. In a strange example of deja vu, it was claiming a cure for AIDS that got not-a-medical-Dr Clark into trouble with the law back in 1993.

Run, rabbit, run! (14/1/2001)
I have mentioned before how frightened the supporters of not-a-medical-Dr Clark are of any form of criticism. Well, now they have gone beyond that and not only are they paranoid about criticism but they are frightened of even being looked at. They have honoured me and several other people by banning us from their mailing list at eGroups. One person was removed for challenging Clark's nonsense; one was removed because she said her friend with terminal cancer was not being helped by Clark's methods which were promised as "the cure for all cancers"; one was removed for asking if Clark would like to participate in an outcomes study (which is a scientific analysis similar to my Cancer 100 Challenge); I was removed for being me. Many of the 65 messages sent to the list after I was banned were either addressed to or talked about banned people. And how do I know there were 65 messages? Well ... .

The unthinkable happens ... (25/2/2001)
Yes, it has finally happened, and I now face a crisis of conscience. Someone (maybe more than one someone) has purchased some of not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark's books from links on this site. When the commission comes in from Amazon I will donate the proceeds of the Clark sales to the Millennium Foundation at Westmead Hospital. I have chosen that organisation because a) they do real research into the causes and cures of cancer, b) I know and like the people who do the fund-raising, c) it is convenient to drop off the donation because their building is across the road from my daughter's school, and d) I like the name. Not-a-medical-Dr Clark will probably need her share of the sales to pay some bribes following recent events in Mexico. (Crabtree P, Dibble S. "BioPulse to sell its cancer lab in Tijuana". San Diego Union-Tribune, Feb 17, 2001)

It's good news week (23/6/2001)
There have been a couple of good news stories come out in the last week. First, two of the people who murdered Candace Newmaker by wrapping her in a blanket under the pretence that they were doing something called "rebirthing" are going to spend the next few years breaking rocks. Perhaps some very large ladies will lie on top of them while they are in prison to let them know what it feels like. Read the story here. In other good news, the Mexican authorities are getting serious about quackery and are implementing some rules that should shut down places like Hulda Clark's Tijuana money trough. Typically, Clark supporters are blathering on about how the place was only closed on a technicality (a "sign was wrong") and how shady but unnamed quackbusters are suspected of bribing the Mexican officials. When you read the bit about how research may be allowed but the "clinics" will not be able to charge people to participate, remember that the entry fee for people suffering from AIDS was $15,000 the last time Clark was doing some "research".

Clark supporters have started a letter-writing campaign addressed to the Mexican health authorities. Here is my contribution:

To Dr. Carlos Alberto Astorga
Secretario de Salud de Baja California

Dear Dr Astorga,

Congratulations on your action to close the Century Nutrition clinic operated by Hulda Clark, a person with no medical qualifications.

It is outrageous that places like this, offering unproven and unscientific treatments to desperate people, have been allowed to prosper for so long. Clark's supporters will doubtlessly claim that closing this place will be some sort of restriction on freedom of choice, but sensible people will see that freedom of choice is only a meaningful concept if the options offered have some sort of comparable value. When the choice is between traditional medical treatment (which may not have all the answers) and unproven, untested treatments based on ideas which are scientifically ludicrous then there is no comparable value.

I realise that people with terminal diseases like cancer and AIDS can become desperate when conventional medicine seems unable to offer a cure, or even a hope for a cure. I can see how this can lead these people to seek out unconventional and alternative practitioners who offer hope. The fact that people are desperate, hopeless and helpless does not, however, justify the exploitation of this desperation, hopelessness and helplessness by charlatans offering empty promises of miracle cures.

Thank you for the action you have taken, and I hope you can resist the well-orchestrated (and well-funded) campaign of support for Clark that is currently being promoted in the media and on the Internet. If the people offering these alternative cures could offer some reasonable evidence that their treatments work then they would have no problem under your new guidelines. Of course, if they had such evidence then they could have been working in the US and would not have needed to hide in Mexico to avoid US laws and regulations.

Again, I offer my congratulations and gratitude. Thank you.

Hulda bashing. Sometimes the papers publish good news. (2/3/2002)
I would like to congratulate Penni Crabtree and the San Diego Union Tribune for their excellent series of articles about quackery in Mexico. They were under some pressure from not-a-medical Dr Hulda Clark and her kind not to publish, but free speech and a free press won. See the articles at:

Tim reports from the foxhole (20/4/2002)
Tim Bolen, spokesjerk for not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark, has finally gone gaga and seems to be saying that the Medical Board of California called up a major military attack, including helicopter gunships, to drive away the millions of health freedom fighters who were protesting something that the MBC is or does. I assume that the helicopters were black. I think Tim would be spending his time more productively by getting together the paperwork for the Cancer 100 Challenge. It's probably too late for the 2002 awards now, but what could possibly stand in the way of St Hulda winning the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine. She only has to produce 100 people cured of cancer. She can do that, can't she?

Nuremberg 2001 – The Denouement (15/6/2002)
After 260 days of inactivity, the ludicrous lawsuit brought against me and several other people (and some non-people) by not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark was withdrawn. You can see the cave-in by the quack's lawyer by clicking on the image at the right. The whole lawsuit was typical of the tactics of frauds like Clark who can't meet criticism with science, or with results, or with anything except bluster and lies. If Clark could cure cancer she would be able to produce the cured people and the evidence. If she could cure AIDS she would be fêted across the world. She can do neither of these. She cannot cure anybody of anything, except perhaps wealth. "The Cure for All Diseases" indeed! It would be funny if it weren't so revolting.

Hulda referred "patients" to this place if they didn't have enough money to satisfy her greed.

Robbing the almost dead (20/7/2002)
Imagine how you would feel if you were selling a fake cancer cure and you came across a suitable prospect who met the main marketing criteria – terminal and desperate – but they didn't have enough money to buy your product or service. Unlike, say, a car dealer, you can't introduce them to a finance company for a loan because the financier might not think they will live long enough to pay the money back. You could get them to sell their house, but that takes time. Help is available, however, if they have a life insurance policy, because they can sell that to pay your quackery bills. This is very encouraging news for quacks because not only can they have the satisfaction of achieving the primary objective (stealing all of someone's money before they die), but there is the bonus of being able to get their hands on money that comes along after the death of the "patient". You can read some more about this disgusting scam here.

Some action at last (1/2/2003)
In an amazing piece of good news, the US Federal Trade Commission is taking action against not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark's quackery empire. (You can read the good news here.) Apparently their reach extends to Switzerland where Clark's representative probably thought he was safe. My prediction is that Clark will abandon her Swiss friend and leave him swinging in the wind while she looks for another patsy in another country to run her web site and her offshore distribution shield. I have said before that Clark learned from her near-miss when she was charged with practising medicine without a licence. In that case she managed to get the suit dismissed, not because she was not guilty (she had told someone that he had AIDS and she could cure it in three weeks), but because she was able to convince a judge that she was too befuddled to stand trial.

Since then she has structured her business so that she is insulated from problems. Tim Bolen runs the PR, the smear campaigns and the defamation, her son does distribution in the USA, her brother sells in Canada and runs the mailing lists, David Amrein (who is the person charged this time) runs the web site and the online sales (from Switzerland, near the banks). Clark can cut any of these people adrift as soon as they look like trouble for her. Even when she sues people, she does it through her publishing company rather than personally. It's all nothing to do with her, but I'll bet I can guess whose signature is needed to get the money out of the bank.

A song (15/3/2003)
I was thinking about those people who can "cure" cancer and other diseases, and wondering why they don't go for the Cancer 100 Challenge and get a Nobel Prize. Just as I figured out that it is probably because they can't do what they say they can do, an old sea shanty popped into my head.

Advice to die for (18/10/2003)
The following message was posted to the Dr Clark mailing list:

Hey all,
I haven't posted much here, just lurking and reading and trying to keep up with Dr. Clark's methods. Here's my problem. I was diagnosed with dysplasia of the cervix (pre-cancer cells). For the past 6 months, I've been doing the Dr. Clark thing. I even went and had my dental work done.

I went back two weeks ago and had a repap assuming everything was going to be good. Well, I got the results this morning. It's STILL High grade dysplasia. I'm at a loss as to what to do now besides surgery to have the dysplasia removed.

Any suggestions? Her book "A Cure For All Diseases" really doesn't say much about the cervix.

Lisa

Suggestions so far have mainly been to use colloidal silver (both orally and topically), plus one person who offered a purge recipe to "warm the cervix". My favourite, however, has to be : "Something that's about 100% effective is ozone insufflation". In the real world, something which is "about 100% effective" is a simple surgical procedure carried out under local anaesthetic.We are talking about a deadly disease here, one which kills countless women worldwide each year. When Lisa dies, nobody will attribute the death to quackery.

Accepting diversity of opinion (13/12/2003)
I have commented previously about how sensitive some practitioners of quackery are to any form or criticism, real or implied. I have always maintained that if I had a guaranteed, proven cure for cancer or MS or diabetes then I wouldn't give a damn about what other people think. I would just wave my Nobel Prize in their faces. Many quacks, however, know that what they are saying is lies and so they try to make sure that the people they preach to and prey on receive as little exposure as possible to the truth. This doesn't just apply to medical quackery, of course. The moves by creationists to have the teaching of evolution banned in schools is the same tactic – children will be more likely to believe the nonsense if they have no framework of truth to compare it to. Someone wrote to me this week to tell me that they had been banned from a Yahoo! mailing list devoted to discussing the insane ideas of cancer quack not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark. The banning took place within a short time of the person posting a message to the list. (At least this person posted something. I was banned before I posted anything, simply because of the powerful juju of my email address.) The offending message has since been removed from the archives at Yahoo! so that list members can be protected from its awful power. You can read the message below, and you might like to think about the mental state of someone who could be so terrified of this question that they would kill the messenger.

Hi! I'm new to the list. I joined because I read Dr. Clark's book "Cure for All Cancers" and couldn't find anyone locally who could answer my questions. I found Dr. Clark's ideas fascinating, but I'm still a bit skeptical – it seems too simple, especially when compared to the information I'm getting from my oncologist. Can anyone on the list point me to some studies that support Dr. Clark's theories?

Thanks in advance,

Bob

Hulda wasn't in, either (26/1/2004)
If you were wondering what sort of an organisation would employ a public relations consultant who only has a mobile phone and gives his office address as a post box then you should meet Tim Bolen's most well-known client. She is not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark, and she has The Cure for All Diseases and The Cure for All Cancers, according to her books. Clark has a clinic in Tijuana where she used to steal money from desperate people in a place out of reach of the US legal system. The Mexican authorities shut her down, but her PR apparatus is claiming that this was only a temporary setback and it's business as usual. To get to her clinic, you walk into Mexico at the Tijuana entry point and then turn in the opposite direction from the other tourists. You walk a short distance into what could politely be described as a slum and there it is in all its pinkness. You can click on any of the pictures below to see the place in all its putrid, colourful glory. Keep in your mind the fact that people with AIDS were asked to pay $15,000 per week to go there to be "cured".

Strange bedfellows? Perhaps not (13/3/2004)
The lies told by bigots are sometimes surprising. Not that they are lies, of course, because bigotry implies a disdain for truth, but because of how imaginative they are. One of the weirdest pieces of anti-Semitism is the notion that the Jews conspired with Hitler to conduct World War II. Apparently this was done as part of an ongoing, centuries-old war of the Jews against the rest of the world and they thought that Hitler was on their side because he was against everyone else. The deaths of the Holocaust were probably just "collateral damage", I suppose, although it would not surprise me to find out that people who would believe this madness would also deny the reality of the Holocaust anyway.

One outlet for this insanity is a book called Adolf Hitler – Begründer Israels by Hennecke Kardel. This book was banned in Germany for some time under the laws there which prohibit promotion of Nazi thoughts, but it is available in English translation as Adolf Hitler- Founder of Israel. That such a book would be made available is again no surprise, and I would never support any move to ban it or restrict its sale. I would not find it surprising to see that it was being published by the presses which put out the racist nonsense of David Irving and Ernst Zündel and which specialise in this sort of thing. I would not expect that a book like this would be in the catalogue of any reputable publishing house. In fact, I found that the publishing house which puts it out is anything but reputable, but the really surprising thing is that almost all of the other titles in the catalogue relate to health in some way, although at the extreme quacky end of the health spectrum. (There are couple of autobiographical books about the horrors of a girl growing up in an undeveloped country.) By now you should be able to guess that this execrable book is published by New Century Press, owned by the Queen of the Quacks, not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark. Clark's own books are filled with lies, but they are her lies, not someone else's. I wonder what motivation, other than money, would compel her to add a racist, anti-Semitic title to the list of books she publishes. I can only assume that she agrees with and approves of its content. If so, she has achieved the almost-impossible and fallen even further in my esteem.

Speaking of not-a-medical-Dr Clark … (13/3/2004)
Sometimes you just can't win. Someone asked on a public forum this week if Dr Clark actually held the PhD she claimed. I responded by quoting the following from the University Microfilms database (capitals in original): "A STUDY OF THE ION BALANCE OF CRAYFISH MUSCLE; EVIDENCE FOR TWO COMPARTMENTS OF CELLULAR POTASSIUM. CLARK, HULDA REGEHR, PHD. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, 1958. 74 pp.". I was immediately accused of lying by a Clark supporter. Note that when someone doubted Clark's qualifications I supplied the evidence that she has the degree she claims, but somehow the records held at University Microfilms lose their truth when filtered through my keyboard. Bizarre!

Sad email of the week (1/5/2004)
The following email shows why sites like this one need to exist. When people are faced with desperate situations it is understandable that they will seek out desperate solutions to their problems. Charlatans and crooks like not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark are only too ready to offer illusory comfort to these people, while simultaneously emptying their wallets and stealing the remaining months of their lives. You can read here about a family who were robbed of $30,000 and their dignity by this hag and her family. I don't know what to say to the person who wrote to me, except to warn her to stay away from Clark unless she is prepared to see her boyfriend broke, disillusioned and sicker because his HIV has not been treated.

hello, my name is ginny. I recently heard of Hulda Clark.My boyfriend is HIV positive, so naturally, we are curious. I got the book from a friend's dad who actually followed her medical suggestions and survived his battle with cancer at the time. He was on his death bed. I am of course very skeptical about the whole thing- it just sounds crazy. But I was wondering... Is it possible? Do you know of any of her patients who have actually tried the herbs? I visited the self Health Resource center in Chula Vista, ( I live in San Diego) and one of the women there said that people come from all over the world to see Clark, and they have had successful results. It is just so hard when you are looking for anything to help... a cure would be nice. I am not a scientist by any means, so I am not sure if what she is talking about is just flat out nuts or if it may actually make some sense. I just wanted advice I guess. Do you know anyone personally that I can talk to? My e-mail is Decemberx@hotmail.com. Thank you for your time

And where is Clark? (1/5/2004)
Over the last week various Internet mailing lists and forums have been carrying an open letter from Hulda Clark to the Federal Drug Administration offering to show them around her clinic and meet and interview some of her "patients". This has been praised by her supporters, who now claim that the ball is in the FDA's court and that she has proved that she has nothing to hide. It is seen as a mere triviality that the FDA has no jurisdiction in Mexico, and even if they did send someone to look at her clinic there is nothing they could do about what they saw there. In fact, Clark herself could walk from the clinic to the pedestrian entry into Tijuana in about two minutes and thumb her nose at FDA officials standing the other side of the turnstile and there would be nothing they could do in response. Her supporters claim that she is not hiding in Mexico, but someone I know who runs an investigation and security business was not able to locate a telephone number or address for either Clark herself or her business called "Century Nutrition" anywhere in the USA. The return fax number on the message to the FDA is in Mexico.

Clark is no stranger to hiding where the authorities cannot get to her. In 1999 she was charged with practising medicine without a licence. On the day that the court decision was handed down she made sure that she was in Tijuana, so that had she been found guilty (the case was dismissed on a technicality) the state of Indiana would have been put to the expense and time penalties of extradition procedures.

That kitchen must be hot! (1/5/2004)
It is not just Clark who likes to hide from critics. It is quite common for skeptics to be banned from alternative medicine mailing lists and bulletin boards, and hardly a week goes by without someone asking the skeptics in the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative (which was established for the discussion, pro and con, of alternative medicine) why they participate in the group. There seems to be this fear that any contrary opinions will destroy the edifice of alternative medicine. Surely, if they are so sure that they are right then criticism should not worry them.

Curezone.org claims to be one of the most popular alternative medicine sites on the Internet. It consists of a large number of forums devoted to every imaginable form of quackery. At about 11am on Friday, April 30 (Sydney time), I posted the following message in response to one of Clark's press releases about her clinic:

"With this letter, I am inviting you to visit me, and view my work at the medical facility known as "Century Nutrition" in Tijuana, Mexico on a date of your choosing.. Several patients of the facility will be available for interview between 10 and 4.at that time"

Pictures of this medical facility can be seen at https://ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/clark7.htm

The forum software told me that my message had been accepted and the elapsed time since the last post was updated, but the message did not appear on the forum immediately. I assumed that the this was because the first message from a new member might be moderated, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Twenty-four hours later the message had still not appeared, but there were three messages posted after the time I had written mine. Person A had posted the same link as I had, Person B had wondered how long that message would last before it was removed, and Person A had commented that censorship seemed to be a problem at Curezone. I replied that I had posted something the day before, and this time my message was displayed immediately. Shortly afterwards I went back to the site and found that all four of these messages had been deleted by the forum moderator. I went looking for reasons why these messages were apparently so offensive and I found, under the heading "Rules of the Game" that the following should not be included in messages:

Links to quackwatch.com or to other similar websites pretending to be the "voice of skepticism", while in reality they are just a "voice of deception". Those web sites are created with one and only purpose: to scare people from natural and traditional therapies. Some of the therapies attacked on those web sites have been successfully used for many thousands of years. If those web sites would be the real voice of skepticism, then you would for sure expect to see some references to 150 medications removed from the market by the FDA every year (because of the side effects), while those same medications have been previously approved by the same agency! You would also expect to se some references to vaccination, amalgam, environmental toxins and other serious health threats … .but guess what: there is nothing like that on those web sites! Similar links will be removed unless posted in special forums for discussion on quackery and other subjects like: Medical Ethics and Medical Politics.

So there you have it. It seems that I have been lumped in with Quackwatch, and Stephen Barrett and little old me are so dangerous that the denizens of Curezone can't even talk about us. It made my day to find that these people have so little confidence in what they say, and their fear makes it obvious that they know they are lying. (At least iVillage had the courtesy to write to me when they censored me.) By the way, the forum where they allow mentions of us representatives of Satan has only had two posts allowed through this year, and one of them was off-topic.

A song for Hulda (5/6/2004)
A supporter of cancer quack Hulda Clark failed to recognise a quotation from a popular song when it was mentioned in an alternative medicine Internet forum, and someone suggested that the fan was probably out of touch with any music postdating Stephen Foster. I couldn't get Swannee to work so I turned to Rogers and Hammerstein for a song which was definitely of the Foster oeuvre. I give you "Ol' Hag Hulda".

But someone went one better (5/6/2004)
I have to thank Rich Shewmaker for this wonderful adaptation of the poem The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. I wish I could write like this.

The futility of discourse (4/12/2004)
Sometimes it is not worthwhile to continue a conversation. During the week I was accused of lying for saying that not-a-medical-Dr Hulda Clark had not sued me for defamation but for damaging sales of her books, thereby evidencing her love for money. When I pointed the complainer to the specific paragraphs in the law suit (I even used the copy of the suit on Clark's lawyer's site so that I could not be accused of tampering with it) I was told that it said nothing about suing over books. When I pointed out yet again that the suit was bought by a publishing company which sells nothing but books and I was accused of damaging sales of the company's products (up to $10 million in lost sales), I was told that I was still lying because the word "books" was not used – it said "products". Is it any wonder that people can believe the nonsense in Clark's books if they do not have the reading skills to see beyond the literal dictionary definition of the words on the page?

Hulda Clark retracts. Or does she? (8/1/2005)
Consider the following passage from Hulda Clark's book The Cure for All Diseases:

Now consider what Hulda Clark says is one of the great gifts she received during 2004. It was this piece of knowledge:

When I pointed out the apparent inconsistencies between these statements in an alternative medicine forum I received several strange, but not totally unpredictable responses. One was to simply accuse me of lying for saying that Tim Bolen, Clark's PR man, had mentioned Hulda's gifts in his newsletter and to ask me to prove that he had said anything about it. (The person accusing me of this receives the newsletter and has often quoted from it in the past.) I gave a link to Bolen's web site, from where he linked to Hulda's gift list. I was then told that I was lying because the links on Bolen's web site did not work. (They did, of course, but you had to click on them first.) Then I was told that this was not Clark's official site and I should look somewhere else for the truth. (This particular site contains an explicit statement by Clark that it is the official site.) When I was then told that it could not be true and that Clark's site had obviously been hacked by "someone like [delete name of innocent Jewish person]" I had to retreat and give up. There is nothing that the followers of this vile charlatan will not believe if it supports her and nothing they will believe if it criticises her in any way. When I posted pictures of her $15,000 a week "clinic", one supporter said that it showed "nothing except a pink building". When I said that the sign on that pink building said "Century Nutrition" the response was, "Well, so what?"

Another example of this insane, blind loyalty came up when various people commented on the Federal Trade Commission's recent successful legal action against Clark. When someone wrote about "what Hulda's henchmen had stipulated to" he was accused of lying because the judgement does not mention "henchmen" and does not say that Hulda cannot sell "gadgets, gizmos and goos". When someone else said that the FTC had come down hard on Clark's quackery, he was also accused of lying and asked to show where the word "quackery" appeared in the court document. You can read about the judgement here and see a copy here. It is almost beyond my understanding how people can continue to support, and even come close to worship, this worthless, dangerous mad woman. Surely the alternative medicine house of cards can't be so unstable that it can't stand even the lightest pressure.

Hulda's had it (12/9/2009)
They say that you should only say good things about the dead, so here is my response to the big news coming out of the quackery world this week: "Hulda Clark is dead, and that's a good thing to say about her" As Shakespeare wrote: "Nothing in [her] life became [her] like the leaving it", or, put another way, the best thing she ever did was to die.

The plaudits and eulogies have been pouring in for this despicable woman who cared not a damn for the people she stole money from, either through her disgusting clinic in Tijuana ($15,000 per week to be "cured" of AIDS or cancer), her promises of miracle cures through "zapping" or by the sales of books with titles like The Cure For All Diseases, The Cure For All Cancers, or The Cure for HIV/AIDS. Her supporters are saying that as she was 80 years old she had to die of something, but remember this was someone who knew how to cure ALL diseases so what was she doing dying of a disease? She should just have gone on until her heart muscles wore out, although as a naturopath she probably had a cure for that as well. One thing we can be certain of is that she died with a perfect conscience. As she had never used it in her life it was still in pristine condition in its original packaging.

Practitioners of quackery have great loyalty to each other, even when their suggested cures for things are mutually contradictory. Remembering this gave me a great feeling of Schadenfreude as I imagined teams of urine therapists attending the viewing and lining up to urinate on Clark's corpse. It would have saved the families of her victims from the trouble of doing it themselves.

Click on the pictures below to see what $15,000 a week got for Clark's victims in Tijuana. And remember than Clark didn't live there. She lived in a much nicer place a few kilometres away.

Hulda Clark's clinic in Tijuana

So she could cure cancer, could she? (24/10/2009)
When Überquack Hulda Clark died, her acolytes claimed that the death was due to a spinal injury. I've got a copy of her death certificate and, guess what? – they were lying. The woman who had "The Cure For All Diseases" and the "Cure For All Cancers" also had multiple myeloma and its associated hypercalcemia.

Multiple myeloma

Multiple myeloma is cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow. Normally, the body makes as many plasma cells as it needs. When a person has multiple myeloma, too many plasma cells are made. This causes overcrowding in the bone marrow, which prevents adequate numbers of normal blood cells forming.

The abnormal plasma cells produce antibodies called M-protein (often called Bence-Jones protein or paraprotein). At the same time, the formation of normal antibodies is reduced making a person less able to fight infection.

Multiple myeloma spreads from the bone marrow into the bone. This can result in deposits in the bone called lytic lesions or can cause the bone to become thin, weak and more likely to break (osteoporosis). The breakdown of the bone can cause an increase in the level of calcium in the blood (hypercalcaemia). It can also affect the kidneys so that they cannot filter and clean the blood properly.

So she couldn't cure her own cancer but she was prepared to take money to cure other people. Any infinitesimal possibility that I might have felt a twinge of sympathy over her death has been washed away by the fact that she must have known for some time that she had a form of cancer herself. As I said to her supporters when they told me that her ashes were to be scattered at sea, I hope they filled in the correct forms for permission to dump toxic waste into the ocean.

You can get a clearer view of the certificate in this .pdf file.

And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre (31/10/2009)
To listen to the disciples of deceased quack Hulda Clark you might think that she didn't really die but has instead been the second case of assumption directly to heaven, as Catholics believe happened to Mary. Reproduction of the death certificate on this site and others has been rejected as proof on the basis that such documents can be easily forged using programs like PhotoShop. Some who accept that she might have died reject the cause of death on the certificate as it does not agree with what was announced at the time of her death. Any acceptance of the fact that she died of a form of cancer is accompanied by claims that oncologists die too, so what is the problem. (The problem is, of course, that oncologists don't publish books telling people that they have guaranteed and cheap cures for all cancers or run expensive clinics in Mexico.)

My favourite reaction, however, has come from our old friend, the Gutless Anonymous Liar. GAL has not only rejected the existence of the death certificate but has announced legal action against me if I reproduce it. (The extract from GAL's drool below has been edited to remove references to another target of Mr O'Neill's wrath. The full message is on the GAL correspondence page.) I have pointed out to GAL (as far as I can respond to an anonymous coward) by suggesting that it informs Mr William P O'Neill of the Canadian Cancer Research Group that the CCRG "research" is barking up the wrong tree because Clark had all the answers.

Liars Bowditch & Polevoy claim to possess an authenticated copy of Dr. Hulda Clark's death certificate. Even more interesting is their collective taunt that they will be publishing it on their respective websites any moment now.

No "will be" about it.

Polevoy has been boasting that Clark died of "multiple melanoma", a disease that does not exist. There is, however, "multiple myeloma" of which Dr. Clark did not die.

Oh, yes she did.

One would think that a qualified and trained physician would know there is no disease "multiple melanoma". One would also think that if they possessed a genuine death certificate and were literate they would get it right.

I didn't make the mistake. I got it right.

Bowditch, while admiring his recently aquired "pony tail" in the mirror, failed to notice Polevoy's cock-up. (Pony Tail? How many midlife crisis has this dickhead had so far?).

In any event, should either of these giants publish an "alledged" death certificate for Dr. Clark, they will face both civil and criminal complaints....and this won't be the first time for either.

* As Mr O'Neill died on March 31, 2013, I don't expect any further communication from him so I stopped the counter.

Bowditch was charged in the '80's with aggravated assault, spent time in the slammer and a couple of years ago was found guilty of defaming ACN.

I have never been charged with aggravated assault, never spent time in prison and have never been found guilty of defamation, but why should GAL start telling the truth now?

I've always loved the story about me being charged with assault. Mr O'Neill discovered this back in 2006 and it has been a staple of his and others' attacks on my reputation ever since. You can read about Mr O'Neill making a fool of himself here.

Speaking of Hulda … (31/10/2009)
There is a 1988 book that I would like to read to prepare for a conference and as I had a few minutes to spare after finishing the day at my TAFE teacher refresher course I hit the college library and used the state-wide online catalogue to see if TAFE happened to have a copy. They did, but of course it was at another campus, although I will probably be driving through that town a week or so before the conference so all is not lost.

I noticed that the library had a quackery section so on a hunch I searched the catalogue for books by Hulda Clark, and found that across the entire state of New South Wales the largest training organisation in Australia had just one copy of The Cure For All Diseases. Something made me type my own name into the "Author" search field and I found that TAFE has thirteen copies of my 1997 book How To Connect To The Internet. Quack 1 – PB 13. I quite like that score, but I think I will have to take steps to reduce Clark's count.

Zapper zapped! Maybe. (10/7/2010)
On June 24 the Therapeutic Goods Administration ordered an outfit named Natural Health Direct to stop advertising the Hulda Clark Zapper and to display the following notice on the front page of their web site (you can see the ruling here):

Just so the search engines can find it when they index this page, here is what Natural Health Direct are required to say:

RETRACTION

An advertisement for the Zapper product, which we published on this website, should not have been published.

In promoting the Zapper product, we were advertising illegal therapeutic goods in breach of section 42DL(1)(g) of the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989. We also unlawfully made claims that the product could have therapeutic benefits such as killing bacteria, viruses, and parasites, and could cure diseases.

A complaint about the advertisement was recently upheld by the Complaints Resolution Panel. We provided no evidence to support the claims we made, and the Panel found that the claims were unlawful, misleading, and unverified and breached the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code.

The Panel therefore requested that Natural Health Direct publish this retraction.

The full text of the Panel's determination can be found at: www.tgacrp.com.au/complaints

The order gave Natural Health Direct 14 days to comply. Sixteen days have now passed so I thought I would check on progress and compliance. To nobody's surprise there is no notice on the web site and the advertisement for Hulda's Zapper is still there

One day the government is going to give the TGA the teeth it needs to move beyond requesting that crooks stop promoting quackery and fraud and actually be able to shut these people down, with prison sentences for the offenders if they don't comply with orders. As it is now, charlatans can simply ignore (or even laugh at) orders made by the TGA and the Complaints Resolution Panel. After all, as their lawyers have undoubtedly pointed out, even the form of notice that they are asked to display says that it is only a request, and a request can be politely declined.

In other Bolen news ... (14/1/2012)
Here is a statement about cancer from the book The Cure For All Cancers by the late and unlamented cancer quack Hulda Clark.

Here is a statement from the web site of cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski:

You don't have to have much command of science, or even the English language, to see that there is no area of overlap or compatibility between these two statements about the cause and cure of cancer, except that both treat all forms of cancer as the same thing.

Now here's the thing. Until her death, Tim Bolen was the spokesman and PR consultant for Hulda Clark, someone he described as a humanitarian who was suppressed and oppressed by the FDA and the orthodoxy. She had the cure. She was right. Everyone else was wrong. She was also his very best friend in the world. Tim has now announced that he is rushing to the defence of Burzynski who is apparently a humanitarian who is suppressed and oppressed by the FDA and the orthodoxy. He has the cure. He is right. Everyone else is wrong.

Do you see the problem? If Clark was right then Burzynski is wrong and vice versa. As we are talking altworld here, though, this doesn't matter. Bolen can go from one to the other without a twitch, as one lie is as good as another. Those of us with working consciences might suffer a little cognitive dissonance making the change, but when you work within a structure, cancer quackery, that is based solely on lies then that problem goes away. The dissonance is replaced by doublespeak, where two mutually exclusive ideas can be held to be true at the same time. The only thing that matters is the money.

Ignorant quack fans are still with us (7/9/2019)
It might be almost ten years since egregious cancer quack Hulda Clark did the world a favour by dying but in the true spirit of alternative "medicine" where nothing ever goes away or is superseded, fans of Dead Hulda are still an extant species. One of them didn't like what I had to say about the dead charlatan.

From: Jesus Christ Let Go Let God
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2019 06:39:08 -0400
Subject: You are an ASSHOLE you know, right?

You would be a proctologist – stick your own finger up your aaa buddy.

Dr. Hulda Clarke was not a quack. She would've destroyed the 600 billion dollar bullshit drug industry. Actually heal people and you know it's TRUE

You do realise that Hulda Clark (for that is how she spelled it) died of cancer, don't you? She couldn't even cure herself, let alone threaten the incomes of real doctors who might know something about cancer.

Why is it that nobody will answer my question about the disposal of her carcass? She was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. Did her family get EPA approval for dumping toxic waste before they fed the crumbling remains of the charlatan to the fishes?

But wait, there's more!

From: Jesus Christ Let Go Let God
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2019 09:37:07 -0400
Subject: Re: You are an ASSHOLE you know, right?

Ratbag shows your mentality – soooo gives you away of the kind of spirit you have anyway

And

From: Jesus Christ Let Go Let God
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2019 09:28:12 -0400
Subject: Re: You are an ASSHOLE you know, right?

Dick head it's parasitic. You are a dumb ass though, because you believe all you've been TRAINED to believe asshole instead of following your own inner wisdom and holistic medicine. You're stupid not to get education from countries where the pharmaceutical industry hasn't tampered with using money and incentives to coax money hungry assholes into prescriptions that just don't work. Wake up asshole

I don't think that anything would be achieved by continuing this conversation (although I was sorely tempted to reply that it's spelled "arsehole" in my part of the world – I didn't want to confuse the correspondent).