About a month and half ago, we learned that
über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who said that she had the
Cure for All Cancers, had died on September 3, 2009. I was criticized for entitling my post
Requiem for a Quack,
but, given how Clark’s quackery had contributed to the suffering and
deaths of an unknown number of cancer patients, I didn’t really feel too
bad about it, although I do realize that the taboo about speaking ill
of the recently dead is a strong one.
At the time, I was curious what the cause of Dr. Clark’s death was,
because it seemed rather mysterious, being described as the result of a
“spinal injury,” with no further description. Then, a reader sent me a
scan of Hulda Clark’s death certificate, and this is what it listed as
the cause of death:
Multiple myeloma. Cancer of plasma cells, a form of lymphoma.
Don’t believe me? Check out
Hulda Clark’s death certificate (certain addresses whited out) for yourself. Even
Hulda Clark’s own website admits that she had multiple myeloma:
Dr. Clark helped many people get well, but she couldn’t
help herself. Her first symptom was excruciating pain in her arms. Pain
medicines were ineffective. It would turn out she had deterioration in
her neck vertebrae which was pinching those nerves. Her hands stopped
functioning. It would turn out later she had carpal tunnel syndrome. So
as soon as Dr. Clark knew there was something wrong, she physically
could not use her Syncrometer techniques to investigate it because her
hands and arms did not work well enough. Her health deterioration was a
mystery.
Well, not really. The cause of her health deterioration, while
perhaps a mystery initially, is quite clear now. She had multiple
myeloma. It’s also a pretty lame excuse. I mean, come on! Clark
“trained” dozens of acolytes to use her Syncrometer. Are they really
saying that not a single one of them could use her device, which she
claimed as part of the “cure for all cancers,” to cure her cancer, as
she claimed she could cure all cancers? Not that it would have done any
more good for Clark than it did for any of the cancer patients who
misplaced their faith by putting it in her, but the excuse used to
explain why Clark died of cancer when she had spent so many years
claiming that she could cure it is lame in the extreme. Surely there
must have been
someone who could have operated the Syncronometer for her! In any case, this is how Hulda Clark’s site describes what happened next:
Dr. Clark could see from her blood tests that she was
anemic. She got a transfusion but was uncertain if the anemia was
significant because she had occasional anemia all her life. She also saw
reduced kidney function. She spent a lot of time trying to figure that
out but unbeknownst to her, chasing that clue would not lead anywhere.
She stopped being able to walk without severe pain. Dr. Clark lived
with months of severe hip pain before two hip replacement surgeries and
three months of rehabilitation let her walk again. Dr. Clark lived with
unrelenting nerve pain for over six months before finding a medication
that worked. She suffered more than she should have because she wanted
to solve her problems herself, even in the face of her severe physical
limitations.
In other words, like her patients, Hulda Clark suffered because she eschewed conventional therapy longer than she should have:
Dr. Clark was scheduled for a procedure to fix the
vertebrae in her neck. While doing routine blood tests in preparation
for the operation, high calcium levels were noted. The surgery was
cancelled and the hypercalcemia was treated. Her doctors evaluated all
of Dr. Clark’s symptoms and decided multiple myeloma was the best
explanation. That is a blood and bone cancer. No biopsy was performed,
so it was not one hundred percent certain, but that didn’t matter
because the treatment would be the same in any case (monitor calcium and
anemia).
Ironically, Dr. Clark documented helping a multiple myeloma sufferer in The Cure For All Advanced Cancers.
Perhaps if she had known what to look for earlier she could have better
helped herself. But it was too late. In her last few months, Dr. Clark
was physically unable to function well. Her family took care of her and
was with her when she died peacefully one evening.
It is simply not true that there is no “conventional” treatment for
multiple myeloma other than monitoring anemia and hypercalcemia. For
patients under 65, the treatment is often high-dose chemotherapy with
hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation. Hulda Clark, of course, was 80,
and thus almost certainly too old for such a harsh regimen to benefit
her. However, for such patients, there is a more mild treatment, namely
chemotherapy:
If you’re not considered a candidate for stem cell
transplantation, your initial therapy is likely to be a combination of
melphalan, prednisone and thalidomide — often called MPT — or melphalan,
prednisone and bortezomib (Velcade) — often called (MPV). If the side
effects are intolerable, melphalan plus prednisone (MP) or lenalidomide
plus low-dose dexamethasone are additional options. This type of therapy
is typically given for about 12 to 18 months.
Also, ironically enough, thalidomide has fairly recently been shown
to be an effective treatment for multiple myeloma. Either Hulda Clark
was so debilitated that she couldn’t handle even the standard therapy of
thalidomide, which is a pretty mild drug (unless you’re a
reproductive-age woman who becomes pregnant and whose child suffers the
birth defects thalidomide causes, which Clark clearly was not), or she
chose not to have any science-based therapies. Not surprisingly, I
suspect the latter. After all, let’s review the titles of some of her
books, shall we? There are:
- The Cure for All Advanced Cancers (It sounds as though
Clark’s cancer was advanced. Why couldn’t her methods cure it? After
all, her book says she has the cure for all advanced cancers. Of course,
that makes me wonder if maybe she didn’t have the cure for early stage
cancers.)
- The Cure for All Cancers (Never mind that last comment.
Clark suffered from a cancer, period. Why couldn’t she cure it if she
really did have the cure for all cancers?)
- The Cure for All Diseases. (This is my favorite of all; I
mean, shouldn’t we “allopathic doctors” be out of business, other than
trauma and orthopedic surgeons if Clark really had the cure for all
diseases?)
It also occurs to me that Hulda Clark’s death teaches us something
important about quackery. Specifically, it tells us that many of the
practitioners are just as deluded and misguided as those whom they lure
away from scientific medicine and towards ineffective and even harmful
quackery. There are two kinds of alt-med quacks. First, there are the
ones who, like Kevin Trudeau, don’t believe at all, ones who are
basically con men. Then there are the ones like Hulda Clark, ones who
really
believe. While the former can do major harm, I fear the
latter more. Because they believe the are the more persuasive for it,
and, in the case of Hulda Clark, it is clear from her reaction to her
deteriorating health that she almost certainly really believed in her
pseudoscience. Of course, its lucrative nature probably didn’t hurt,
either, but at her core, I suspect that Hulda Clark really did believe
that she had the cure for all cancers, even though it was clear from her
own end that she didn’t have a clue about cancer. How she could
maintain that belief in the absence of any evidence that her woo did
anything, in the absence of a single truly “cured” patient? Who knows?
Whatever her motivation, she did incalculable harm to her clients and in
the end, by rejecting science-based medicine in favor of her own
quackery, Clark blew her best chance at treating her cancer and
maintaining her quality of life for as long as possible.
I realize that the universe is not fair in any sense of the
imagination. All too often, bad people prosper, and good people suffer
horrible fates. However, in the case of Hulda Clark, if I believed in
divine justice or some sort of karma, I’d have to believe that her end
was completely fitting. The woman whose quackery caused so much
suffering among cancer patients during her life ultimately succumbed to
the very disease she claimed to be able to cure but was not. Having
recently watched a love one succumb to stage IV breast cancer, I
wouldn’t wish such a fate on anyone–not even Hulda Clark. However, now
that it’s happened to her it’s hard not to feel that, just this once,
there were a certain symmetry and justice in the universe. Maybe there
is such a thing as karma after all.
I want to date a girl who's over 30 years younger than me. Is that wrong?
You do look your age, you just think you dont' but the hands know.
Doesn't she already have a dad?
