Tasneem Bhatia MD (Dr. Taz) is a self-proclaimed “wellness expert” and “pioneer and trailblazer” who is out to “transform the way we do medicine and empower and equip you with the best tools so you can live your healthiest life.” It’s bullshit from start to finish, and her advice runs the whole gamut from homeopathy to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Of course, she likes to emphasize that she’s not antivaccine, but her “patients and my own children have forced me to rethink this vaccine controversy.” There is no actual, reality-basedcontroversy over the safety and efficacy of vaccines, but like all people who promote scams and frauds, Dr. Taz needs to listen carefully to the opinions and feelings of her patients, many of whom have evidently bought into various myths and conspiracy theories about vaccines. And she does push the nonsense myth that autistic children are “vaccine damaged”.
And Bhatia has certainly got patients. She offers many non-evidence-based and pseudoscientific services, and will even file your claim forms from the patient’s insurance company, even though she doesn’t really participate in any insurance plans.The optics are important.
If you bring your child to Dr. Taz, you can get for instance:
- a Zyto scan, and no: you really shouldn’t
- Meridian testing
- a brain boost evaluation
- sports optimization testing
You can even get your offspring a detox screen “which will directly correlate with your child’s early ability to detox and process chemicals,” i.e. MTHFR testing, which you certainly don’t need, but is one of several tests Dr. Taz and likeminded hucksters can use to promote various supplements. You can also get:
- acupuncture and Chinese medicine
- Ayurveda, which isn’t just useless but dangerous
- essential oils– it should be nedless to point out the bullshittery involved here
- craniosacral therapy (no: don’t; it’s a scam of almost epic proportions)
She has also been caught offering mobile thermograms, an unvalidated scam test for early detection of breast cancer, as well as Biopulsar-Ayurvedic Bioenergetic Screening, which measures “real time energetic information throughout the body” and lets you “visually see each organ’s vitality or life force on a screen”, no less. Yes, it measures your soul as blips on a computer screen. It woul be interesting – or not – to hear them try to explain the phrase ‘energetic information’. The idea is so insanely silly that it’s hard to conceive of mostly ordinary people falling for it: it may look more professional than Hulda Clark’s radioshack-punk zappers, but the marketing of the screening nonsense is arguably even less coherent.
Acupuncture is of course particularly central to Dr. Taz’s practice – or at least it used to be; successful woo promoters tend to be able to adapt to the fads. Here is a deconstruction of one of Taz’s ads for acupuncture dressed up as if it were anything but an ad. And yes, Dr. Taz suggests – but does of course not outright say in any legally actionable way – that acupuncture can help cure cancer. No even minimally reasonable studies suggests that it can, but for Dr. Taz that matters less than the weight of “thousands of years of older systems of medicine”, which, if that counted as evidence, would provide just as much evidence for exorcisms of bad spirits, bloodletting and anti-witchcraft measures – not that acupuncture is anything like an ancient practice anyways.
Despite offering the usual bullshit, Dr. Taz is something of a rising star in the medical pseudoscience world, partially through her position as one of Gwyneth Paltrow’sGoopexperts. She has also been a Dr. Oz Sharecare “expert”.
Diagnosis: Yes, it’s a baldfaced scam. We’re sure Dr. Taz believes her own bullshit, but the fact that what she offers is so driven by market-strategy savviness, one suspects that she does, at bottom, not really care whether her nonsense is correct or not.
Hat-tip: Vaxopedia