Yes, it’s
functional medicine again, and functional medicine remains one of the most insidious
(and cynically marketed) branches of quackery there is. Now, it is admittedly
somewhat tricky to determine precisely what functional medicine is supposed to be,
as it tends to be defined in terms of vague, largely metaphoric terms like “taking a whole-patient
perspective” and “imbalances” in hormones and neurotransmitters, rather
than anything that lends itself to precise and accountable investigation and
assessment (i.e. it means what functional medicine providers want it to mean), but
at least it tends to encompass vast arrays of
unproven and disproven treatments backed by pseudoscience, anecdotes, intuition (i.e practitioner’s
trusting their own judgment) and conspiracy theories, often made up as they goalong. A characteristic of functional
medicine, though (the claim to focus on “root causes” is something it shares with most brances of woo), besides making loose and
unjustified claims about alleged interactions between the environment and the
gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems, is practitioners’ tendency to
prescribe useless and expensive tests, which they then use, based on the above-mentioned methods (intuition, pseudoscience and
conspiracy theory), to construct “individualized treatment plans” –
‘individualized’ here used mostly to avoid accountability; ‘invoice-based’ would be more accurate). Most insidiously, though, the
quackery that is functional medicine has powerful backers: the Cleveland Clinic,
for instance, has sported a Center for Functional Medicine since 2014 because the
administrators there have realized there’s good money in it– after all, functional medicine
often sounds professional and it’s tailor-made to drain its
victims of as much money as practitioners can sustain (the plans are “individualized”,
remember). There are decent primers on functional medicine here and here.)
One
particular strand of quackery that has been popular with functional medicine
practitioners for a while, is dubious (so as to avoid using the word
‘fraudulent’) MTHFR genetic mutation testing; that is, getting patients to test
for “mutations” in the MTHFR gene via direct-to-consumer genetic
testing, the results of which the quacks, hucksters and deluded woomeisters can then use to prescribe
(inefficacious) dietary supplements supposed to ward off the purportedly
deleterious effects of these “mutations”. It’s a bald-faced scam. According to Jill Carnahan, an MD who also
holds a certification from the Institute for Functional Medicine, however, “this
common genetic mutation [can affect] everything from depression and anxiety to
risk of heart attack or stroke”. Carnahan, of course, has her own line of
“Dr. Jill” brand dietary supplements for sale.
Given her
credentials, it is not particularly surprising that Carnahan was quick to try
to cynically monetize the Covid-19 pandemic with false and misleading claims
about the pandemic clearly aimed to direct customers to her supplement store.
According to Carnahan’s marketing materials from early 2020 (titled “Worried
About Coronavirus? What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself”), “[s]upplements
are one of the most potent ways to give your body a boost and drastically improve its
ability to fight off infection,” and her list of relevant supplements helpfully included hyperlinks to
her online store. Apparently, antioxidants was the key, as Carnahan saw it. One is
probably forgiven, given the general standards among functional medicine
practitioners, for suspecting that she just so happened to be in the possession
some leftover inventory from back when antioxidants had its heyday as fashion
supplement woo a decade ago. The FTC was not impressed.
Diagnosis:
Trite as ever.
