Unguent Fever

Buy the revolutionary GcMaf immunotherapy that is taking the wellness industry by storm!

Wait, what?

If you are like the intrepid Riddled staff, you will have read that sentence and are wondering "What in the name of Odin's Ampullang is the 'Wellness industry'?" You may suspect, by analogy with the 'fitness industry', that the 'wellness' traded in this sector of the economy is not a physical condition (on a par with health or illth), and more an aspirational life-style, marked by commitment and investment and the purchase of accessories. You may be looking around nervously in case some earnest young person is about to accost you with explanations that 'health' is derived from 'hale', which is itself an old form of 'whole' (we all know that conversation). How large is the Wellness Industry, and at what point will Alt-Med hipsters adopt "Big Wellness" as a term of opprobrium?

[Big Wellness -- stolen from Oglaf]

But I should explain. Please to recall that "GcMAFplus" is a new supplier of skin-creams laced with a purportedly-beneficial "Vitamin-D Binding Protein". It showed up earlier this year to fill the ecological niche left vacant when the producer of "MAFactive" ran into legal entanglements. In US markets it is branded as "GlycoPlus" (to assuage the purists who insist that GcMAF ≠ VDBP) and purveyed through webstores with titles like "reactivatedwellness" and "purelivinghealthandwellness". Right now, though, we are going to review the Australian distributors of the stuff.

The webshop at 'gcmafproducts.com' was sometimes bandied about as a reliable GcMAF supplier. This was odd and inexplicable, for that pop-up outlet belongs to Darren Fleming of North Melbourne (also calling himself the Baron of Merlona), who is conceivably the world's worst con-man... his sundry grifting FAILs create the impression that he acquired a book on "How to Make $$$ with Fraudulent Qualifications and Mendacious Merchandise" (along with a handful of magic beans), only to find that the unscrupulous vendor had ripped him off and all the pages were blank. Thus his website is a fantasy list of the scammy but yet-to-materialise GcMAF knock-off products that he aspires to palm off on customers. The makers of MAFactive creams put their trust in Darren as the first Australian outlet for their products (before these vanished down the memory hole), reflecting the depth of their due diligence, or in recognition of a kindred spirit.

Anni Diamond -- Cancer Guide, Transformational Success Coach, erstwhile beauty-salonist and organiser of Cancer Scamborees -- is more successful at monetising her fantasy life, demonstrating that characters can escape into the world from a Tom Sharpe novel and still make a success of their new existence. Her webstore is wellnessproducts.com.au because what else would it be called?

Then a challenger appears! -- as they are wont to do! -- in the form of wellnessevolution.com.au. The shill for Big Wellness in this case turns out to be Tasmania Woman, Lucy Corrigan (backed by the BL & L Corrigan Family Trust). This inspired the following Sloka Lymerick, which, as you have not heard it, I will proceed to relate:

If brain-fade is driving you manic

While ticks send you into a panic

Improve your emotions

With special skin lotions

You buy from a lady Tasmanic.

An alternative couplet was rejected on grounds of good taste, tempting though it was to rhyme "chrism" and "jizm". 400 quatloos to the first reader to suggest a decent rhyme for 'unguent'!

Since GcMAF is involved, the whole Wounded-Healer Shamanism hairball of thought is never far away [most conspicuously in the case of Amanda Mary Jane and her pig-colon xenotransplant]. Here with Tasmania Lady, the path which led her to her Healing Vocation was the rabbit-hole of Chronic Lyme Disease. We do not judge, for this is a fate that can happen to anyone afflicted with an as-yet-uncharactererised physical malaise, or even some psychological source of distress.

Joining the Lymerati takes special dedication in Australia, for the continent is lacking in Lyme Disease, Acute or otherwise. Though it can boast of a diaspora of shonky clinics where doctors people in lab-coats will happily provide the diagnosis of choice, performing PCR-DNA analysis on a urine sample, or alternatively through dowsing.

So at right is Lucy from a few months ago, announcing her intention to turn professional. The venue was a 'GcMAF Products Australia' FaceBonk group she admins, so the announcement was well-lampshaded and no-one was surprised. Things have changed since GcMAF first arrived on the scene three years ago -- when

I am just surprised that Lyme Disease and Morgellons were omitted from the lists of conditions responding to GcMAF.

The FaceBukkake also hosts the "Vector-borne Illness Community Action Network" site, established at the same time -- 

a newly established networking group whose aim is to connect and empower individuals, activities, events, organisations, advocacy and political campaigns within our Australian vector-borne illness community.

Ticks: Much maligned

In a grudging nod to the official reality-based failure to find B. burgdorferi anywhere in the West Island, the title pays lip-service to a broad umbrella coverage of Rickettsia and Ross River Virus and "Lyme-like-diseases"... but you're right, the group is really about Chronic Lyme. The general wish-list is as follows:

1. Vindication & Recognition of Chronic Lyme self-diagnoses.
2. Mainstream medicine is evil, and corrupt, and has failed to develop a cure, and the portions are so small.
3. There should be a vaccine for Lyme Disease, and vaccines are evil.
4. Long-term IV antibiotics have horrible side-effects -- thanks, Mainstream Medicine! -- and the Lyme-Literate quacks who prescribe them are martyrs to the cause.
5. Holistic / complementary / functional modalities of healing are the way forward, but our state of incurable disability must be recognised.

Every second post seems to be a heart-warming tale of celebrities who underwent the Road-to-Damascus conversion event and now espouse the Chronic Lyme Cause --

Hadid, who was diagnosed in 2012, underwent the TVAM ( Transvascular Autonomic Modulation) procedure, in which a catheter is inserted into the jugular vein. A balloon is inflated so it stretch the vein, in doing so transferring energy to the nerve fibers along the outside of the vein. The treatment aims to relieve patients of Lyme disease symptoms, including fatigue, cognitive function, energy levels, bladder and bowel function.
The surgery came a few days after Hadid revealed she had consulted with Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, lead clinician at the Sophia Health Institute in Woodinville, Wash., and the founder and chairman of the Institute for Neurobiology in Germany and Switzerland.
“Homebound with a grateful heart,” Hadid wrote on Instagram Friday. “Thank you Dr. Klinghardt for bringing me to and shining light on the finishing line of my health journey.”

...or else it's an advertisement for some scamfest / trades-fair. With occasional advertisements for the wonderful GcMAFplus products from wellnessevolution. Imagine my surprise to find Lucy Corrigan as the admin of the site.

For bonus ensuing hilarity, here's Lucy defending GcMAF from the attempts by Drs Marco Ruggiero and Dietrich Klinghardt to traduce it. The former was instrumental in pushing GfMAF into its current central place in the Alt-Med scammocopoeia, before he renounced it -- realising that anyone could claim to be selling the stuff -- and shifted his enthusiasm to a new product Rerum, assembled from cheap ingredients and under his exclusive control.

The gist is roughly as follows:

-- Rerum is a total rip-off, lacking immunomodulatory properties, and without the Ruggiero-penned scholarly articles in parasitic journals that support GcMAF. GcMAF works, so there is simply no point (other than personal enrichment) in mixing chondroitin with Vitamin D. Anyway those reliable and reputable gentlemen who supply the GcMAFplus also provide a camel-cased but otherwise- identical knockoff product ReViVe®, as advertised at my webstore.*
-- Klinghardt is a corrupt untrustworthy sell-out who is only disparaging GcMAF because it competes with his own quackery scams as advertised on my VICAN FB site.

Evidently Chronic Lyme Disease increases one's tolerance of cognitive dissonance.

[Thx Dora]

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* Not to be confused with Omnia®, a different otherwise-identical knock-off of Rerum!

BONUS WELLNESS (and Oglaf-stealing)!!

These are the first signs of sonic attackYou will notice small objects such as ornaments oscillatingYou will notice vibrations in your diaphragmThere will be bleeding from orificesThere will be an ache in the pelvic regionYou may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting or even laughter

The last time the Riddled Journal Club looked at Drs Klinghardt and Ruggiero's article-shaped claim-stake, carving out their territory within the Chronic Lyme Disease goldfield, it was Shooting-Fish-inna-Barrel night at the Old Entomologist.

Company logo: synchronised-swimming sperm

So the pointing & laughing was focused on the scammy, spammy nature of the "Science Publications" who extrude the 'American Journal of Immunology' [editors include M. Ruggiero] from their base in the United Arab Emirates.¹ Some secondary hilarity ensued from Klinghardt's method for diagnosing otherwise-undetectable occult Lyme Disease, i.e. by dowsing. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP... dowsing was rebranded as Applied Kinesiology in the 1960s, before Klinghardt -- who never saw a grift he didn't want to copy -- appropriated it as "Autonomic Response Testing".

Fish-inna-Barrel Tuesdays are not actually as much fun as they sound, because sometimes the fish shoot back if the vile Throgmorton happened to have stocked the barrels with archerfish. Of course similar problems arise on Picking-the-Low-Fruit Wednesdays when the fruit trees fail to cooperate.

Anyways... it was inevitable that hand-held ultrasound scanners would find a place as a theatrical prop in the advertisement for the RK Protocol, for they are a recurring feature in Ruggiero's artistic practice theragnostic cosplay. We have previously seen his discoveries that the humble scanner can diagnose autism (recording brain abnormalities that remain unnoticed by autism researchers, those purblind fools), and can facilitate snake-oil treatment of brain cancer, by relaxing epithelial-cell junctions to make brain capillaries leaky and let the snake-oil through. After hours his students and assistants brandish the scanners while they chase one another around the laboratory making Pew-pew-pew noises.

So this is the new breakthrough. It is a tenet of faith in alt-med circles that the wriggly little Borrelia burgdorferi spirochaetes of Lyme Disease like to sequester themselves within the cells of your tissues in Double Secret Probation -- inert, unnoticed by the immune system, therefore undetectable by the usual tests of antibodies or even DNA. But an internal ultrasonic caress will rark the little buggers up in the manner of earthworm grunting, driving them out from the cells to renew their rampage and undergo detection.

It is not entirely clear how the ultrasounds -- with a millimeter wavelength -- can interact with structure at the subcellular scale of microns, with such dramatic and preferential effect. And given the scanner's biological impact, one wonders at its blithe and cavalier use as a harmless diagnostic tool; it is almost as if Ruggiero is not in fact stupid enough to believe in its brain-melting, spirochaete-rousing pluripotency. But we recently saw a 1970s documentary in which ultrasound irradiation of the soil, meant for pesticidal purposes, had the unexpected side-effect of transforming the previously-peaceful occupants of Manchester Morgue into reanimated shamblers with an antisocial hunger. Perhaps a similar phenomenon is at work.

Below: Effects of scanner over-use

The RK Protocol continues with PCR testing of each customer's urine sample, to confirm the post-ultrasonification appearance of DNA from the previously-dowsed spirochaete. This task of bringing reality into conformity with the results of Klinghardt's ART-woo is outsourced to “DNA Connexions”, a Colorado Springs centre of proprietory state-of-the-aunt DNA-detection procedures. Owned by Dr. Blanche Grube, with a Dr. Christopher Shade as Lab Director. Grube also trades as Biocomp Laboratories at the same strip-mall address, where she purveys a

“blood serum procedure […] Biocompatibility test, a comprehensive report that simply states whether the dental materials are Highly Reactive, Moderately Reactive, or Least Reactive.”

She is further said to operate a dental clinic -- catering for clients who cannot tell the difference between a dental bridge and the one in Brooklyn -- where they can have their fillings replaced in the unlikely event that they are dangerously Reactive. Meanwhile Shade’s primary income stream is “Quicksilver Scientific”, part of the ecosystem of Mercury Detection clinics... there he sells mercury testing (plus the usual scammocopoeia of supplements, plus Hemp Oil), and commends clients to Grube’s dentistry if their amalgams prove to be leaching the naughty element into their bloodstreams. Sounds legit!

It may be that Klinghardt is merely hewing to the code of Professional Courtesy when he shares access to the suckers' wallets as widely as possible. He and DNA Connexions regularly appear as a double-act at Chronic Lyme scam-fests trade-fairs, but this does not establish that they have a mutually-beneficial business arrangement.

The paper says little about how to cure Chronic Lyme disease once it is diagnosed. The authors note, however, that Ruggiero's current nostrum "Rerum" showed therapeutic promise when used as a "positive control". As tested by dowsing. I am not making this up.

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1. According to Ruggiero's erstwhile business partner David Noakes, writing anonymously at one of several hating books vanity websites devoted to score-settling,

There is nothing predatory about The American Journal of Immunology, and the journal would be insulted to read that.

I'll take that risk.
Of course Noakes would say that.

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With Chronic Lyme Disease it is difficult to know where to stop with the Updatage and the Out-takage. That is the trouble with esprit d'escalier... a single glass is never enough. I don't know whose idea it was to ferment and distill an Escalier, but if the consequent hangover is any guide, the idea was not a good one.

Anyway, this is as good a time as any to remember “Nordic Laboratories”, who pimp spurious blood tests for UK numpties who already know what they want to have and will pay good money for validation. Despite the Scandiwegian stylings of austere efficiency and rectitude, “Nordic Labs” are in fact one of several grifts run by an alt-health supplements-&-vitamins pill-mill in Sussex, while their Copenhagen address turns out to be a mail-forwarding service [upstairs from the amber shop and the Shanghai Chinese Restaurant].

The boss of the outfit gloated about the determination of his customer base of desperate griefers, how they go on shopping for tests until they find someone who will validate their self-diagnosis:

Chris Moore, Managing Director of Nordic Laboratories, ascertained very quickly that of the 100 or so patients in the room, only around one-fifth had actually received a positive laboratory test. Yet these patients are living in the tatters of lives torn apart by the symptoms of Borrelia infection and all of them had to seek (and fund) their own treatment because nothing is available on the NHS. He made the point that times have changed. Patients are now very informed and know a lot about their own health and are looking to their doctors for support, not dismissal.

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Nor should we forget the egregious Sin Hang Lee, who was pimping a magical PCR DNA test for Chronic Lyme before he branched into “detecting DNA in Gardasil” as a secondary income stream. So a few years ago a totally grass-roots organisation sprang into being, the Coalition Against Lyme and Related Borrelioses (CALRB), for the purpose of

hosting a symposium on September 16, 2014 at the State Capitol building in Hartford, Conn., to discuss new scientific approaches to Lyme disease testing and diagnosis.

A more accurate formulation might be that CALRB existed to bombard the Massachusetts legislature with press releases, themed around the need for more recognition of and funding for Lyme disease... and the need for more widespread use of PCR techniques to detect the elusive spirochaetes... specifically, Sin Hang Lee’s test.

Its job complete, CALRB vanished back into the quantum fluctuations from whence it came. Great was the surprise, then, when the President and executive director of CALRB (one Kevin Moore) also turned out to fill the role of “Media Relations Director for Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory”… which is to say. he’s Lee’s press agent. While the domain for the now-vanished CALRB website had been registered by Jessica Vigliotti, Lee’s lab employee, and co-author on his mockademic publications.

There is something simultaneously impressive and depressing about the shamelessness of these people, and the lack of effort they put into hiding their trail of slime.