Medical Doubt Cast On Glenn Beck's Recent Health Claim

Glenn Beck

Last week, radio/TV personality Glenn Beck tearfully announced to the world that he has been battling for years against a rare neurological disorder. See Original Posting: Click Here

The illness, Beck said, baffled doctors all over the world, but has now been diagnosed as “adrenal fatigue” by maverick “chiropractic neurologist” Dr. Ted Carrick.

Beck said that the mysterious ailment came on gradually over the course of the last few years, causing him to lose his memory and to suffer seizures, intense pain in his hands and feet and fits of vocal paralysis. He had long bouts of insomnia, mental “fogginess” and a spate of emotional outbursts that he said “quite honestly has made me look crazy.”

Now, after a range of treatments by Carrick — including being strapped into and spun around in a giant gyroscope — and an intense regimen of spiritual work and fervent prayer, Beck claims to have a “clean bill of health.”

“My brain is back online in a big way,” he said.

According to a Raw Story posting, “Chiropractic neurology” is a controversial branch of medicine that Yale University neurologist Dr. Steven Novella dismissed outright as “pure pseudoscience” in a column from November of 2011.

Dr. Steven Novella

“Chiropractic neurology does not appear to be based on any body of research, or any accumulated scientific knowledge,” Novella wrote. “I am not aware of any research that establishes their core claims. A search on PubMed for ‘Carrick T’ yielded nothing, and searching on ‘chiropractic neurology’ yielded mostly studies about neurological complications from chiropractic treatment.”

“Chiropractic neurology appears to me to be the very definition of pseudoscience — it has all the trappings of a legitimate profession, with a complex set of beliefs and practices, but there is no underlying scientific basis for any of it,” he concluded.

When asked if he believes that Beck could be making this up out of whole cloth in an effort to make himself seem less erratic and hasten the sale of his network Blaze-TV to a major cable provider, Novella refused to speculate.

“I wrote my article giving him the benefit of the doubt,” Novella said. “In my opinion, he hasn’t demonstrated himself to be a particularly honest broker of information, but that’s not what I wanted to write about. I don’t care about Glenn Beck, my blog is not political.”

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