The IntegrativeAddiction Conference 2015 (“A New Era in NaturalTreatment”) was a pseudoscience and conspiracy theory event in 2015where medical doctors and quacks were treated to a range of talks by woo pracitioners promoting dangerous, ineffective and silly bullshit treatments, such as naturopathand dubious stemcell treatmentpractitioner Kenneth Proefrock’s talk on “IV Therapies and Addiction Solutions” (complete with a prominent Quack Miranda Warningassuring listeners that he is not claiming that his stem cell treatments are effective for anything but strongly suggesting that they are effective forvirtually everything). What’s frightening is that doctors could actually get continuing medical education creditsfor attending.
The person running the show (“Title Sponsor” of the conference) was Dalal Akoury, MD, who is listed by the S.C. Board of Medicine as board certified in pediatrics. Akoury is also the founder of the “Integrative Addiction Institute” and runs the “AwareMed Health and WellnessResource Center” in Myrtle Beach, which offers a range of questionable treatments for a range of real and less real conditions: they do addiction recovery, “adrenal fatigue”treatment, stem cells, “anti-aging”, weight loss, hair loss treatment, “functional medicine” and even “integrative cancer care”. Given the variety of conditions they offer to treat, and the types of “treatments” they offer for them, it might perhaps strike some as surprising that the center has only Akoury and one licensed practical nurse on the staff, but it really isn’t. They also offer Ayurvedic medicine, which apparently has to be powerful because it has been around for so long, and alternative vaccination schedules.
According to herself, Akoury has “dedicated her career to identifying and addressing the root causes of chronic illnessthrough a groundbreaking whole-systems medicine approach known as Functional, Integrative, Sexual, Cellular and Metabolic Medicine”, and her Medical Cloud profile lists her as “knowledgeable on obesity, fitness, and nutrition, and Sexual Medecine [sic]”. Her marketing, as so much woo marketing, is to a large extent focusing on “empowerment”, and she endeavors to help her victims patients to become“one with the universe, and aligning body, mind, and spirit.”
Diagnosis: Akoury seems to have endorsed everything that is wrong, false and ridiculous in the field of alternative medicine, and will seemingly push any ridiculous idea or treatment for any condition, real or imagined, you may think you suffer from (or she can convince you that you suffer from). To be avoided at all costs.
Hat-tip: Sciencebased medicine