David Eisen is executive director of something called the Quest Center and board-certified in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Eisen is among a significant number of alternative medicine practitioners who have tried to coopt the opioid crisis to market their services; as Eisen puts it, doctors should stop thinking of opioids as a first-line defense against pain and rather recognize that “there should be an array of things for people to choose from, whether it be chiropractic care, or naturopathic care, or acupuncture, nutrition, massage.” The false dichotomy involved is striking – limiting opioid use is no reason to promote bullshit – but it has a disconcerting tendency to go unnoticed by media outlets.
Indeed, Eisen even served on the Oregon Chronic Pain Task Force, a group tasked with coming up with measures to combat the opioid crisis, which resulted e.g. in a proposal to force people who truly suffer to cut opioids in favor of bullshit that does not help by limiting their health plan coverage so that it didn’t cover stuff that would actually help! And of course: the goal was also to get the health plans to cover the quackery Eisen and his colleagues are offering. In addition to Eisen, the task force included acupuncturists Ben Marx, affiliated with the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, and Laura Ocker, former president of the Oregon Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.
Diagnosis: Not a loud and incoherent quack; indeed, we suspect that David Eisen comes across as eminently reasonable if you meet him in person. Which is presumably precisely why he’s managed to get himself into a position to deal some serious harm to people who are really suffering.