September 25, 2023 • 43 mins
This week Kat takes a DEEP dive into the ever popular meditation and “health” guru, Joe Dispenza. In this episode, Kat talks about what separates real science from pseudoscience (fake science that tries to pass as science). The tricky part is, pseudoscience mimics real science by co-opting their terms and using them in a way that sets you up to want to believe it’s true. Here we will discuss how we can keep an eye out for the red flags that scream “SCAM”. And what does Joe Dispenza have to do with all of this? You’ll just have to listen to find out. 😉
Articles:
Drawing the line between science and pseudo-science
Eat, Pray, Lie: Hollistic Wellness Scams in the Age of Social Media
From workplaces to politics to Instagram influencers, "cultish" language is everywhere
Follow Kat on Instagram: @Kat.Defatta
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Have a question, concern, guest idea, something else? Reach Kat at: Kathryn@youneedtherapypodcast.com
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Produced by: @HoustonTilley
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
I started to realize that not being an expert isn't
a liability, it's a real gift. If we don't know
something about ourselves at this point in our life, it's
probably because it's uncomfortable to know.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
If you can die before you die, then you can
really live. There's a wisdom at death's door. I thought
I was insane. Yeah, and I didn't know what to
do because there was no internet.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I don't know, man, I'm like, I feel like everything
is hard.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Hey, y'all, my name is Kat. I'm a human first
and a licensed therapist second. And right now I'm inviting
you into conversations that I hope encourage you to become
more curious and less judgmental about yourself, others, and the
world around you.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to You Need Therapy.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Hi guys, and welcome to a new episode of You
Need Therapy podcast. My name is Kat. I am the host,
and if you are new to You Need Therapy. I
always like to remind people before we get into the
meat of what we're talking about that although this podcast
is called You Need Therapy, I am a licensed therapist.
This does not serve as a replacement or a substitute
(01:20):
for any actual mental health services, but we always hope
that it can help you somehow, someway wherever you are
on your journey to wherever you're going. And this episode
is a little bit different one.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's just me.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
You get to just hear my voice the whole episode,
and it's also a little bit of a wild ride,
or it was a wild ride for me. I was
a little bit scared. There's a lot of fear. There
was a lot of shock that came over me as
I did some of the research for this episode, and
(01:56):
at one point I had to to say, Okay, enough
is enough. I've gone down, I've gone down the black
hole far enough and it's time for me to work
my way back up to the top. Or I don't
know what's going to happen. And this episode is a
prerequisite to what honestly, what I came to is a
(02:17):
docuseries that could be created. Now I'm not going to
be the one that does that, but I really think,
or I really wonder, and I was wondering now as
I was doing this research, if this is going this
topic is going to be the topic of a docuseries
on a Netflix or a Hulu or one of those
streaming services in the future, because I think those are
(02:39):
getting more popular, and this is such a popular thing
right now that I just I don't know. Maybe it's
because I just watched the Hill Song documentary on Hulu
and I'm like, huh, never would have seen that coming
ten years ago, but now I do see those things coming.
If you haven't seen that, very good now, I will
say before before we get into it. Usually, I like
(03:02):
to come on here and I like this podcast to
be more of a kind of a platform to spread
hope and share helpful information and tools that promote a
more positive outlook on some of the complexities of life.
And I like to offer insight that might be helpful
for y'all and it could help you understand yourselves in
the world better. That isn't exactly what we're going to
(03:24):
do today. A couple of years ago, I read a
book that some of you may remember me talking about
because I talked about it a lot, and I did
a whole episode on some of the stuff I learned
from the book. And the book was called Cultish was
written by a woman named Amanda Mantel, and she actually
hosts a podcast called Sounds Like a Cult it's very
good and the book was incredible. I cannot recommend it enough.
(03:47):
And the basis of the book was talking about how
language shapes our experiences and how cults and cult like
groups use language to create their followings. Since the term
cult is actually quite relative and there's not a really
an objectifiable criteria, or there isn't objectifiable criteria to identify
(04:08):
what is and what isn't a cult, what the book
talked about is the varying level of groups to the
ones that come to your mind when you think cult,
to the ones that you might be involved in that
you just think this is cool. It talked about the
varying level of groups and followings that reached these like
fanatic levels and how they ended up getting there.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
And this book aided to.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
My already somewhat jaded, I think outlook on social media helpers.
You guys, if you've been here for a while, you
know how I feel about that, and me being one
of those people. And this led me to having a
little bit of a crisis of my own. I was
contemplating how do I promote the information that I think
is helpful, also maintain a business and stay within my
(04:53):
ethical walls. And when helping others is mixed with money
in business and power, what I have found for myself
and a lot of the things that I've seen, it's
nearly impossible to make any sense of altruism. So you
really have to be careful to continue to check yourself
(05:15):
and evaluate yourself to make sure you're staying in your
morality and you are staying within your value system. And
when helping others can be monetized, and then we can
scale that monetization, there tends to become the slippery slope
that can lead to not only ethical dilemmas, but in
(05:37):
a lot of places, malpractice. And we saw this with
the rise of telehealth companies like Story brol and I
don't know if you guys have heard of that. It
grew really fast, especially when COVID hit.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
And it started as.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
A seemingly innocent way for people to get medical attention
and get what they need prescriptions, just to see telehealth
doctors easily and affordably. It started innocently, and then it
turned into a company that was way more focused on
marketing than the quality of their clinical work and actually
helping others. And this resulted in the hiring of hundreds
(06:16):
of clinicians without proper training and credentials, and the over
prescribing of stimulants, which interestingly enough surprise opioids as the
largest drug class of illicit drug transactions, which is a
big deal. And this company was prescribing that like it
was you know, sour gummy worms. And I actually was
(06:40):
reading an article on the Wall Street Journal recently that
quoted one of their potential investors who passed on the
opportunity to invest, as saying, we wanted to back a
team in mental health committed to clinical quality. Ultimately, we
perceived their focus to be more in marketing, which ended
up in a lot of controversy. And you can look
(07:00):
that up. That's another dark hole that we might explore
another day. But I just was using that as an
example of when money is mixed with helping and scaling
and capitalism, it really makes you have to consistently constantly
check your ethics and your morality and your values, because
(07:21):
it's easy to get really motivated by money that bends
and shapes and moves and distorts the view of what
you're actually doing in your mission. Now back to Cultish.
One of the names mentioned in this book was one
that I had heard of a lot, but I never
really gave him much attention. And this person's name was
Joe Despenza. Now I'm sure some of you are like,
(07:43):
oh my gosh, I know that guy. I love that guy.
His meditations are awesome. Oh my gosh, she's wonderful. What
are you gonna say about him?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
He's extremely popular right now, and I can see from
the outside why and how he is so popular. So
why would he be in this book? And I think
where I want to start is explaining to those of
you who were like me and might have heard of
his name but didn't really know who he was. I'm
going to start explaining who this guy is. So Joe
(08:11):
des Benza is a self proclaimed researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics,
and neuroscience, and he currently, I just checked this, has
two point seven million followers on Instagram, which is a
lot of followers. He sounds very fancy when you read
those words epigenetics, quantum physics, neuroscience, Like my brain goes wow,
(08:35):
he's so smart and educated. I wonder where he was educated. Well,
this is interesting. If you go to his website or
the internet in general, you will be very hard pressed
to find any information about Joe himself, which I find
as odd and so odd that I felt like I
(08:55):
was like missing something.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Was I being dumb?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
I'm like, of course, there has to be somewhere on
his website this that gives it a bio or about
him that tells us where this guy came from and
why we should trust him instead. All I could find
on his website, and I'm open to being wrong still,
but I really spent a lot of time on that
website was a tab on the top titled proof that
(09:18):
included a lot of in quotes, research articles that were
created by Joe or his team themselves, or summaries of research,
but not a lot of real academic or peer reviewed anything.
It was just pretty general information that looked really legit
(09:39):
even when I read it.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
It just didn't really say a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And on the mission page of his website, you also
won't find much about Joe. What you will find is
these stories of transformation that look more like clickbait for
the vulnerable than actual scientific evidence or explanation of what
Joe is selling. Some of the titles were she Went
all In and her Depression disappeared in a selfless act
(10:06):
of love, her lung disease was healed. He regenerated his
jawbone and himself, which again very clickbaity, right. And I
want to read one of the stories of transformation on
Joe's website. And I want to read one of the
stories of transformation on Joe's website. This is quoted from
(10:29):
the website. After suffering with many illnesses throughout her life,
Yvonne was already deep into doctor Joe's work when she
received the toughest diagnosis of all metatastic ovarian cancer. When
our doctor performed surgery, though he was mystified the results
didn't match the diagnosis, he wanted to pursue further treatment,
but Yvonne was convinced she had found the answer to
(10:50):
healing and she would continue the work on her own.
Two years later, her oncologist had to agree that cancer
was gone, and as she recounts her story, three years later,
Yvonne is still cancer free. So this doesn't really say much.
It basically makes you think that whatever this person did
with Joe Despenza cured her cancer. Doctor Joe Despenza, which
(11:13):
we will get to later, and Joe hosts a lot
of workshops and retreats. It's one of the main selling
points on his website. He's known for and in these retreats,
he claims to heal genetic disorders through the power of belief,
and at one convention, he claims to have helped a woman,
this woman named Petra, regain her eyesight. He was quoted
(11:39):
saying she could do surgery and drugs, but it wouldn't
really change her gene expression. Instead, he believed that believing
her vision could return, this woman was able to change
her genetic makeup in a way that would allow her
to regain her site. Now I heard about this read
about in an article, and I was like, Okay, well,
haters of Joe could say anything on the internet, so
let me go do some research. Well, I found the
(12:01):
video on YouTube of this woman at the convention along
with Joe talking about this experience. What I didn't find
was any research about this. I didn't find any clinical
trials about what he's doing. I couldn't find anything other
than this video where him and this woman claimed that
(12:23):
this had been done. Which is confusing because if this happened,
why wouldn't we want everybody to know about it because
we could help other people, but also why should we
believe what you're saying, Like, where wouldn't you want to
give us some more information on this? And I watched
the video, like I said, and he explained how this
can be done to a large group of people and
(12:45):
including myself, Including myself in this group of people even
though I wasn't there in the video that don't have
the education or the real understanding of gene expression, genetics
the medical world.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So he explains it in a way that makes the average.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Person they're able to understand what he's saying, but he's
not really saying anything at all. There was a lot
of just like fancy words, something that I like to
call word salad that doesn't really mean anything. But at
the same time, as I'm listening, it's so charismatically presented,
and he's such a good speaker in that way that
I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds a ligit, that sounds
(13:19):
like science, that sounds like something that actually at the
end of it, I was like, Okay, now I'm just confused.
But for somebody who wants to believe this, I can
very easily understand why I would listen to that and
say there's the proofs right there.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
He just explained it to.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Us, and what he was saying as my brain was
trying to do gymnastics understanding what he was saying. He
said that she was born again in the same life
during this meditative magnetic field that his followers had created
during this retreat, and that's how she regained her eyesight
because she was born again in the same life. Now,
(13:56):
this is very curious to me because, like I said before,
if this man can heal this woman's blindness, why are
we not talking about this. Why are we not doing
trials on this, Why are we not trying to get
this information to legitimate doctors? Why are we not using
this if this is what he says it is, If
(14:18):
this is true and real, I just don't know why
we aren't currying everybody with cancer in this way, because
if it's that easy, I would love to be able
to help some people in my life that have some
of these diseases that they go through mainstream medicine to
find healing from. Now, Joe Defenza also charges thousands of
dollars for people to come to these retreats for what
(14:41):
I can see appear more like performances and shows, if
you will, And they seem to take advantage of the
average person's understanding and ability to understand science and their
vulnerability towards the claims they make. Maybe there's a lot
of people who have been burned by mainstream medicine or
other things haven't worked, and so they turned to this
as a last resort. And I do believe, because I
(15:05):
don't want people to think that I'm just hating on
him to hate him, I really wish what he was
saying is true, because I would be awesome.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
For the world.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
I do believe there is power and positivity. There is
power in believing something. If we don't believe something is
able to work, it really does hurt our chances of
that actually working. So I do believe that our attitude
does shape some of our suffering, some of our healing.
I do believe meditation is helpful. I mean, we have
evidence to prove that, just not to the extent that
(15:35):
this man is proclaiming. And I know that I'm one
to be skeptical, so I want you guys to know
that this is coming from somebody who is known to
be skeptical. However, my skepticism I believe here comes with
good reason, because just because someone says something is true
in a really charismatic way, it doesn't mean I should
(15:58):
trust them. And this is something that really gets me.
If you want to find Joe's credentials, you will need
a lot of patience and a web browser with a
magnifying glass, because they aren't something that it appears Joe
wants you to see. And I find this very curious.
I have my degrees hanging on my wall in my office.
(16:18):
I have my background listed on my website and plain site.
I want people to know where I went to school.
I want people to know that I'm licensed. I want
people to know that I'm regulated. I want people to
know that I did the things that I needed to
do and studied the things that I needed to study
in order to do the work that I'm doing. I
think that is very helpful for people that might become clients,
(16:39):
and it's just helpful to create safety in our field.
It helps people understand what gives you the right to
do the work that you're doing. It builds trust, and
it's something that I believe we are allowed to be
proud of too.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I worked really hard to get to where I am.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
What I could find on Joe is that he holds
a Bachelor of Science degree with an emphasis in neuroscience.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
I found some.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Places, but some places have just said Bachelor of Science
degree and as a doctor of chiropractic, which for that
he went to this place called Life University. There's a
lot of controversy on that university, some because they lost
their credentials because of their illegitimate teaching practices at some point.
(17:25):
I didn't do a lot of research on that, but
that did come up in several articles that I read.
But this is what I'm finding. He has a Bachelor
of Science degree and he is a chiropractor. His end
quotes postgraduate training, which that is I don't really know
what that term exactly means, includes the fields of neuroscience, neuroplasticity,
(17:47):
quantitative electro. I don't even know how to say this
word electro, sell a felogram, measurements, epigenetics, mind body medicine,
and brain slash heart coherence. I don't know what that means.
I don't know what he did for his training. He
could just have read a couple of books like that
could mean anything. As my point, and he used a
(18:09):
lot of fancy words. Again, I could read some books
on neuroscience and say that I did training in neuroscience
postgraduate as well. So why wouldn't we want to Why
wouldn't he want us to know the legitimacy of that,
because what I can gain is what he has done
does not equal neuroscientists. Also, back to his Bachelor of
(18:31):
Science degree, I don't know what it is in. It
could be in business, it could be in fashion merchandising,
it could be in nutrition. I don't know what it
is in, and I find that odd that he wouldn't
want us to know that. So let's go back to
some of what Joe does along with these retreats, which
again thousands of dollars. If that is what you want
(18:53):
to spend your money on, we'll get to that. But
that's one thing that he promotes and is known for.
He also teaches an online course at the Quantum University,
which I had never heard of before. There's another man
named Bruce Lipton that also teaches at this university, and
he's a biologist who believes cells are reprogrammable through the
(19:15):
power of God.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And this university is very confusing and.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Advertises bachelors masters, PhD, and doctorate programs in holistic, natural
and integrated medicine. Now, none of this is actually accredited
by any agency that's recognized in the United States.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So that means you can.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Go to the school and get this bachelor's degree, but
it doesn't really mean anything to anybody other than this
school and the boards that are created around what the
school teaches.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Let's say I.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Went to Alabama University of Alabama, and I did a
year of training there or a year of school there,
and then I said, I want to transfer to University
of Tennessee. Your credits most likely are going to transfer
up over to that other school because it is an
accredited school recognized by the United States. Nothing is recognized
(20:11):
in this school. So if I go and I study here,
it doesn't really mean anything. I would have to start over.
And again, it does not hold any value to anybody
other than the people that are.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Associated with this school.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
At this school, both Joe Despenza and this guy, Bruce
Lifton teach their students that DNA is controlled through the
power of thought and that each of us are able
to alter our genetics through our minds. Now, again, it'd
be pretty cool if this was true, and if this
is true, I really want to listen and I want
more information about this. I would love to read and
(20:46):
hear and learn about this, but I can't seem to
find where anybody's getting this from. The scientific research and
I'm doing air quotes around that on his website are
either studies that he did himself with his own team,
or they're just things that don't really say much. There's
one that said that meditation does aid in the progression
(21:08):
of certain illnesses and mental health struggles. Well, yeah, we
know that. Well I know that, and I believe that,
but that doesn't mean that we can reprogram. We're going
from A to Z, and I want to know what's
in the middle. So this brings me back to the
question I asked a long time ago that I posed earlier.
Why was his name mentioned in this book? Well, I
(21:29):
assume most of you guys could take a really good
educated guest now based on what I have just said.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
In explaining who he is.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
But the reason he's in this book is because he
has created a cult like following of people by creating
a delusion of intelligence and credibility through co opting scientific language,
which is becoming more and more of a problem in
our communities. And it's actually some of that is the
(21:57):
motivator in the series that Tara Booker and I did
and will continue to do, where we talk about the
difference between real mental health terms and how they are
shifted in pop culture. People take these terms and they
distort them to use as basis of credibility. They make
you sound smart, and then people are like, ooh, I
(22:18):
want to follow that person. So a woman named Nicole
Carlis interviewed the author of the book Cultish, Amanda Montel,
and in this interview, I'm going to take a quote
from Amanda, the author of Cultish and just read it
to you because it says so much good stuff in it.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
She said. This is Amanda, the author of Cultish. She said.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Co Opting technical terms from scientific fields and giving them
new metaphysical meanings is something that all of history's most
notorious New Age leaders, from Marshall Applewhite to l Ron Hubbard,
has done. This is what New Age groups have always done.
They combine scientific language or language from the DSM, and
(23:03):
the DSM is the diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental
health disorders like psychological language with spiritual mystical metaphysical language
in order to create this impression that they are tapped
into a power higher than science. And what someone like
Joe Dispensa does which is particularly grating and harmful, is
(23:25):
he will co opt terms from astrophysics. He'll talk about
quantum fields. And again his credential is he has a
degree in chiropractic from the university called Life University. He
is a joke, but he will basically use really complex
terms that are above the average follower's head. And because
he uses them with such confidence, and he's the picture
(23:48):
of that type of person that we would expect to
know about astrophysics, aka a middle aged, balding white man.
Either the average follower is not going to fact check
that you're just scrolling through in Instagram or you're just
surfing the internet with this overload of information that you're
getting on Instagram or on the Internet, you're not going
to FactCheck every little thing. It would take you all day.
(24:11):
It would be like a full time job. And study
after studies shows that misinformation spreads more quickly on the
Internet than true stories, especially on Twitter, and it's really
difficult to differentiate between false information that feels more novel,
and we're more likely to spread or retweet or reshare
information that feels new because it makes us feel again
(24:34):
like we are accessing something special, that we're in the know,
and sometimes true information feels boring. So yeah, the combination
of metaphysical language in science language is really dangerous because
it devalues actual science. And in an era like we
are and in now, where there is a civil war
over disinformation, when people think that science is a conspiracy,
(24:57):
when people have such mistrust in the healthcare sits in academia,
that becomes incredibly dangerous, especially because people like Joe Despenza,
and he's a diamond dozen by the way, aren't spreading
this ideology because they really think it's going to help people.
They're spreading it to make a buck. The roster of
products and services that Joe Despenza has for sale would
(25:19):
blow your mind. It's really like the metaphysical Disney Store.
And so he's reaching for attention. That's what he wants.
He doesn't want to help people, he wants attention and
followers and money. How do you get attention. You spread
the news that's going to feel most novel to people,
the news that it's going to feel the most novel
to people, it's probably going to be false, and that's
(25:40):
just destructive for so many reasons. And that's the end
of that quote. I am going to post all of
the or a lot of the articles that I got
the information for this episode in the show notes. You
can read that whole interview with Amanda, but you can
see a lot of already why it is so important
to talk about and peel apart the peace people. And
(26:01):
like you said, Joe is a dimond dozen that are
doing this because we are going to follow things that
feel most novel, and we also are in a space
where the world feels a little broken. We are a
distrust of certain agencies, and there's so many conspiracy stories,
and we want to trust something, and so we go
(26:21):
to the new thing because the other thing has burned
us in some way. And I also read a study
done by a group of researchers at USC in their
School of Business, and they looked into why fake news
spreads so fast on social media and they found, which
was not surprising to me, that social media has a
reward system that encourages users to stay on their accounts
(26:43):
and keep posting and sharing. So users who post and
share frequently, especially sensational, eye catching information, are likely to
attract attention, which huge Joe de spends his claims, And
that's what Amanda's saying when she's saying, if you want attention,
you're going to share information that feels most novel. And
(27:04):
the information that feels most novel that gets people's attention
is so often false because the truth sometimes can be
really boring. So at this point you might be thinking,
we get it. It seems like you don't like this person,
and it seems like you think he's a joke. Why
(27:28):
are we talking about him on Union Therapy? And my
answer to that is because of what Amana Montel said
in that quote where she said people like Joe are
a dime a dozen and the average person can't and
won't fact check everything we see on the internet. There
is science, and there is ethical research conducted to support
(27:50):
or disprove the theories that individuals develop. In that science,
there's also pseudoscience, something that can easily pass as legitimate
but does have to go through the same regulations to
get to your eyes. What science does is it accepts
the inevitability of error and it sets out to find
and eliminate that pseudoscience really starts from a desire to
(28:18):
prove something right. They start with a commitment to their
views that they don't want to falsify. And because pseudoscience
typically tries to pass for science, that's what it does.
It wants to look legitimate. There's nobody that's going to
pose something or write an article and be like, this
(28:39):
is fake science. So I want everybody to know they're
going to do it in a way that passes for science.
It can be hard to differentiate, and that affects our
ability as a viewer as the public to make decisions
based in science, Like, we want to make decisions based
on good research, based on education, based on what we know,
(29:00):
but that's hard to do when we have fake science
that looks like real science that we're making decisions off of.
So to me, this is like a right now and
it's a future health crisis. An article that was posted
by MPR titled what is Pseudoscience from twenty seventeen stated
one reason that differentiating science from pseudoscience matters is because
(29:22):
many individuals and institutional decisions depend on our best understanding
of the natural world and understanding that science is uniquely
poised to provide social and natural sciences inform medical decisions,
legal decisions, and public policy, not to mention our own
decisions about what to eat, how to manage illness, and
how to lead our lives. If pseudoscience is an unreliable
(29:46):
basis for making these decisions, it is important to draw
a line between science and alternatives that purport to offer
the same level of authority. So here's where my brain
starts to panic. How do we know who to trust?
And how do we know who to look into more?
And what my flight response in my nervous system tells
(30:08):
me to do is trust no one. And that's where
a lot of my skepticism has come in. But also
that has helped me do the fact checking. It's helped
me look at things more critically. And what I don't
want us to do is just ignore any information that
comes at us because we're afraid we're going to get duped.
Because there are plenty of good humans out there and
(30:28):
lots of health information out there that these people are
providing as well. So how can we learn to tell
the difference between actual science and pseudoscience? We know that
fake scientists purposely deceive their audience by inflating their credentials,
making themselves look more legitimate without actually being legitimate, which
is what Joe Dispensa has done. He calls himself a
(30:50):
doctor even though he has I believe chiropractors have a
purpose in life. That is a whole thing. They go
to school, they do that is not a medical doctor.
And there is a difference between that. The same thing
when somebody go is a doctorate of education, has a
PhD in or has a PhD in clinical psychology, that's
not the same as a as a psychiatrist or a
(31:14):
gastroinurologist or any of those kinds of medical doctors. And
so we need to look at the differences between those. So,
like I was saying, these fake scientists, what they do
is they inflate their credentials. So if you notice somebody's
hiding something red flag and they make false claims or
just they might not even be false, but we don't
(31:37):
really have anything to base.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Them off of.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
They're just guesses that haven't been looked at any further,
based on a bias that they might have, and they
disguise them as they're based in scientific evidence, and they
profit from the despair of people who have been disappointed
by science, mainstream medical world, mainstream anything. So we can
(32:00):
identify some things to look for before we as a
public hit the reshare or subscribe buttons to some of
this information. I found a good starter to checking science
from pseudoscience checklist from this article the Rise of Fake
Science from nests labs, which is an online learning community,
and they posted these couple red flags to look for.
(32:23):
So the first one is if the person has no
peer reviewed research. And what's funny is I remember being
so annoyed by having to read all these peer reviewed
research articles and do this and do that in school,
and now I'm like, oh, I get why this is
so important because this legitimizes what we were doing. But
if this person has no peer reviewed research to back
(32:45):
up their claims, that research is not very regulated and
anybody can say anything, so something might pass as research,
but we have to look for peer reviewed research. Two,
all the materials about their work were produced by themselves
or their teams, so this is kind of similar. If
everything that they are talking about comes from just themselves,
(33:09):
that is a red flag. There are a lot of
people that I really trust in the community of research,
and particularly psychology, because that is what I do for
a living, and often they look at what other people
have done and they will grow from that, or they'll
use that to corroborate what they're with the hypotheses that
they're creating. And that feels really helpful and hopeful because
(33:32):
it's a team of people working together based on the
community of what we've found together, versus I have an
idea and I'm going to go with it blindly and
then just convince you that I'm right with this information
that just came from me. Number three look for a
vague biography that leaves out important information, such as they're
(33:53):
Alma Marter.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Where did they go to school?
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Actually, I don't think I've found anywhere where went to undergraduate?
I did read somewhere that he took some classes at Rutgers,
but it didn't say that he graduated from there, so
that's interesting. And then number four made up scientific terms
not used by anybody else in the scientific community. And
this one was really interesting. They gave that example. This
(34:19):
person named I'm going to pronounce this name wrong. Idris
Abercaine is known to have coined the term neuro wisdom
in his book Free Up Your Mind, which was described
by neurology researcher Sebastian Diegez as an uninterrupted succession of
isolated facts, of pointless detours, antidotes of personal opinion, elementary mistakes,
(34:45):
debunked theories, truisms, hyperboles, and alphorisms, which do.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Not make for good science education.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
So look for what I mentioned earlier that I call
word salad, which is not a scientific and not a
term that I've coined. I actually heard that. I think
the first time I heard that was in the book Cultish.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
But it's just an.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Idea that there's a lot of these fancy, cool sounding
words that really mean nothing. Now, if you look into
the argument deeper of what makes science science, you will
find information about a philosopher named Carl Popper and his
attempt to separate empirical science and pseudoscience. Had the main
(35:31):
takeaway that you will see this idea of falsifiability. In
real science, something has to have the ability to be
proven false to be science, which is interesting because a
lot of pseudoscience you will see focus only on the
information that corroborates their story. They aren't looking to see
if it doesn't make sense. They're only looking into and
talking about what does. And in an article title drawing
(35:52):
the line between science and pseudoscience, the author Janet D.
Stemweedle writes, the big difference Popper identifies between science and
pseudoscience is a difference in attitude. While a pseudoscience is
set up to look for evidence that supports its claims,
Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its
claims and to look for evidence that might prove it false.
(36:14):
Pseudoscience seeks confirmation. In science seeks falsifications. Now, he doesn't
think that we should dismiss pseudoscience as utterly useless, uninsterresting,
or false.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
It's just not science.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Now under the assumption that science has this kind of power.
One of the problems with pseudoscience, again, this is the
point that we've been making throughout this is that it
gets an unfair credibility boost by so cleverly mimicking the
service appearance of science. So the reason this is so
important is that pseudoscience gets the benefit of looking scientific
(36:47):
and has the unfair advantage that it doesn't have to
look for falsifiability. It just has to prove itself. Right,
People like Jodaspenza make a lot of claims, and they
tell their side of the story that includes enough corroborating
evidence to support their in quotes theories. But this is
very important. All of these claims are just that their
theories and theories are not facts. And as a neuroscientist,
(37:09):
one would think you would be testing this theory over
and over and over in reputable ways. But for so
many like him, that's not happening, Kitchie. Clickbait turns you
into spending five thousand dollars plus on a program, a retreat,
a workshop, a membership, or something that might just be
a bunch of words that sound important when said next
(37:29):
to each other. And what I really love about being
a therapist is that our ethical guidelines balance on us
owning that we are not the knowers, we are the helpers.
It is why we can offer insight with ease, but
are somewhat slow to give direct advice or tell someone
with certainty something about themselves. We use phrases like it
(37:50):
sounds like I wonder, I'm curious about etc. But I
would be cautious to give someone a recipe for guaranteed success.
And I make a lot of us sumps. But I
state that in some of those phrases that I use.
I wonder it sounds like I have this idea that
none of that is fact. I know a lot of
(38:11):
things that aren't helpful and do cause harm, and I
know a lot of things that are helpful, but those
things very person to person, case to case. We can
make observations and we can come up with ideas. We
are trained to know and notice our limitations. Now does
that mean everyone does that and does it well one
(38:32):
hundred percent of the time. No, I've made mistakes before,
But there's also a system set up to regulate the
best it can. How this category of helpers is helping
people like Joe Despenza don't have that. He doesn't have
a regulating body. Again, He's a chiropractor acting as a
essentially medical professor. That's curing cancer and blindness. He's acting
(38:54):
as a oncologist, he's acting as an optometrist. He's acting
on all these things. But there's no life, so he
can't somewhat be sued for malpractice. I wonder that's actually interesting.
I wonder if he's even still licensed as a chiropractor,
because I can be sued for malpractice if I act
out of my scope. Let's just say I had a
(39:14):
PhD in some kind of psychology whatever. If I use
that term doctor to legitimize myself and then talk about
something that I actually wasn't trained in, I can be
sued for malpractice. So we would be acting outside of
our scope. But what Joe was doing, he's acting in
a world that isn't regulated by these licensing boards. It
(39:37):
sounds like they don't have to play by any rules
because there aren't any rules for them to follow. And
you know, sometimes I really really hate some of the
rules that we have to follow as licensed therapists. It's
a lot of tedious stuff. However, when I've broken them,
I'm very quick to understand why they're there. And it
(39:57):
makes me think of the show Shrinking. I kind of
jealous watching that because the main character just went rogue.
He was a therapist and he just started doing whatever
he wanted to do and then breaking all these ethical
guidelines and all of his professional boundaries were basically non.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Existent, and I was like, oh man, he's so bold.
I wish I could do that.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Why do I have to have so many boundaries in
this and that I should be cooler. But then as
you continue to watch this show, you saw very clearly
why those boundaries are needed. Things started to get messy,
and things started to get very unsafe. And as I
was preparing for this episode, one thing that I kept
asking myself, because I was sucked into this hole and
(40:40):
I had a lot of feelings, is why do I
care so much? Why does my blood boil when I
hear about this kind of stuff? Because again, this happens
over and over. There are so many people like Joe Dispensa.
He's not the only one, He's just the one I'm
using as the example. But why can't you just use
the mel Robbin's tactic, let them and just go on
living my life life? And in this moment, the most
(41:02):
true answer feels like I get really angry when people
are taking advantage of, especially for the vulnerability of their
unmet needs. It's the justice part of me, the part
that made my therapist wonder if I'm actually an eight
on the Enneagram and not a seven. I want this
episode to be a wake up call for all of us,
for those listening and for those helping. I want us
(41:24):
to get more curious about what we're listening to and
I even mean what you're listening to me say, because
I'm not an expert in everything. I'm not an expert
on the difference between science and pseudoscience. I went and
did some research on it. But there might be some
of you listening that are like, huh, I want to
learn more about that.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Fact check me. I would love that. Please fact check me.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Maybe I can learn something more from you guys even
doing that. But I really want this to be a
call for us to be listening, but listening more intently,
being curious, but also being skeptical. I can be optimistic
and skeptical at the same time time. I mean truly,
I mean when I say I want cure and cancer
(42:05):
to be as easy as Jodasvenza says it is. However,
I have to be skeptical of that because I don't
know that it's actually true, and that could cause a
lot of harm to me and the people around me
if it is affecting the choices that we're making. I
also want us to be slow, slower to reshare things
that sound really cool and exciting and click baity and novel.
(42:30):
I want us to maybe settle in the idea that
the truth can be boring sometimes, and we're allowed to
regulate our systems and get used to that a little bit.
When we're always looking for the most exciting, new fanatical thing,
then even exciting things can feel really boring. So maybe
(42:51):
our system of our attention has been skewed because we're
constantly looking for the thing that's going to trump the
last really exciting thing that we heard or learned. So
that's all I have for you today. If you have
any feedback, questions, stories, anything about this or anything else,
(43:12):
you can always email me Katherine at you Need Therapy
podcast dot com.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
You can follow me at you Need.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Therapy Podcast and at cat dot defata. And until I
talk to you guys next time, I hope you guys
have the day you need to have.
I started to realize that not being an expert isn't
a liability, it's a real gift. If we don't know
something about ourselves at this point in our life, it's
probably because it's uncomfortable to know.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
If you can die before you die, then you can
really live. There's a wisdom at death's door. I thought
I was insane. Yeah, and I didn't know what to
do because there was no internet.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
I don't know, man, I'm like, I feel like everything
is hard.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Hey, y'all, my name is Kat. I'm a human first
and a licensed therapist second. And right now I'm inviting
you into conversations that I hope encourage you to become
more curious and less judgmental about yourself, others, and the
world around you.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to You Need Therapy.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Hi guys, and welcome to a new episode of You
Need Therapy podcast. My name is Kat. I am the host,
and if you are new to You Need Therapy. I
always like to remind people before we get into the
meat of what we're talking about that although this podcast
is called You Need Therapy, I am a licensed therapist.
This does not serve as a replacement or a substitute
(01:20):
for any actual mental health services, but we always hope
that it can help you somehow, someway wherever you are
on your journey to wherever you're going. And this episode
is a little bit different one.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It's just me.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
You get to just hear my voice the whole episode,
and it's also a little bit of a wild ride,
or it was a wild ride for me. I was
a little bit scared. There's a lot of fear. There
was a lot of shock that came over me as
I did some of the research for this episode, and
(01:56):
at one point I had to to say, Okay, enough
is enough. I've gone down, I've gone down the black
hole far enough and it's time for me to work
my way back up to the top. Or I don't
know what's going to happen. And this episode is a
prerequisite to what honestly, what I came to is a
(02:17):
docuseries that could be created. Now I'm not going to
be the one that does that, but I really think,
or I really wonder, and I was wondering now as
I was doing this research, if this is going this
topic is going to be the topic of a docuseries
on a Netflix or a Hulu or one of those
streaming services in the future, because I think those are
(02:39):
getting more popular, and this is such a popular thing
right now that I just I don't know. Maybe it's
because I just watched the Hill Song documentary on Hulu
and I'm like, huh, never would have seen that coming
ten years ago, but now I do see those things coming.
If you haven't seen that, very good now, I will
say before before we get into it. Usually, I like
(03:02):
to come on here and I like this podcast to
be more of a kind of a platform to spread
hope and share helpful information and tools that promote a
more positive outlook on some of the complexities of life.
And I like to offer insight that might be helpful
for y'all and it could help you understand yourselves in
the world better. That isn't exactly what we're going to
(03:24):
do today. A couple of years ago, I read a
book that some of you may remember me talking about
because I talked about it a lot, and I did
a whole episode on some of the stuff I learned
from the book. And the book was called Cultish was
written by a woman named Amanda Mantel, and she actually
hosts a podcast called Sounds Like a Cult it's very
good and the book was incredible. I cannot recommend it enough.
(03:47):
And the basis of the book was talking about how
language shapes our experiences and how cults and cult like
groups use language to create their followings. Since the term
cult is actually quite relative and there's not a really
an objectifiable criteria, or there isn't objectifiable criteria to identify
(04:08):
what is and what isn't a cult, what the book
talked about is the varying level of groups to the
ones that come to your mind when you think cult,
to the ones that you might be involved in that
you just think this is cool. It talked about the
varying level of groups and followings that reached these like
fanatic levels and how they ended up getting there.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
And this book aided to.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
My already somewhat jaded, I think outlook on social media helpers.
You guys, if you've been here for a while, you
know how I feel about that, and me being one
of those people. And this led me to having a
little bit of a crisis of my own. I was
contemplating how do I promote the information that I think
is helpful, also maintain a business and stay within my
(04:53):
ethical walls. And when helping others is mixed with money
in business and power, what I have found for myself
and a lot of the things that I've seen, it's
nearly impossible to make any sense of altruism. So you
really have to be careful to continue to check yourself
(05:15):
and evaluate yourself to make sure you're staying in your
morality and you are staying within your value system. And
when helping others can be monetized, and then we can
scale that monetization, there tends to become the slippery slope
that can lead to not only ethical dilemmas, but in
(05:37):
a lot of places, malpractice. And we saw this with
the rise of telehealth companies like Story brol and I
don't know if you guys have heard of that. It
grew really fast, especially when COVID hit.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
And it started as.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
A seemingly innocent way for people to get medical attention
and get what they need prescriptions, just to see telehealth
doctors easily and affordably. It started innocently, and then it
turned into a company that was way more focused on
marketing than the quality of their clinical work and actually
helping others. And this resulted in the hiring of hundreds
(06:16):
of clinicians without proper training and credentials, and the over
prescribing of stimulants, which interestingly enough surprise opioids as the
largest drug class of illicit drug transactions, which is a
big deal. And this company was prescribing that like it
was you know, sour gummy worms. And I actually was
(06:40):
reading an article on the Wall Street Journal recently that
quoted one of their potential investors who passed on the
opportunity to invest, as saying, we wanted to back a
team in mental health committed to clinical quality. Ultimately, we
perceived their focus to be more in marketing, which ended
up in a lot of controversy. And you can look
(07:00):
that up. That's another dark hole that we might explore
another day. But I just was using that as an
example of when money is mixed with helping and scaling
and capitalism, it really makes you have to consistently constantly
check your ethics and your morality and your values, because
(07:21):
it's easy to get really motivated by money that bends
and shapes and moves and distorts the view of what
you're actually doing in your mission. Now back to Cultish.
One of the names mentioned in this book was one
that I had heard of a lot, but I never
really gave him much attention. And this person's name was
Joe Despenza. Now I'm sure some of you are like,
(07:43):
oh my gosh, I know that guy. I love that guy.
His meditations are awesome. Oh my gosh, she's wonderful. What
are you gonna say about him?
Speaker 2 (07:49):
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
He's extremely popular right now, and I can see from
the outside why and how he is so popular. So
why would he be in this book? And I think
where I want to start is explaining to those of
you who were like me and might have heard of
his name but didn't really know who he was. I'm
going to start explaining who this guy is. So Joe
(08:11):
des Benza is a self proclaimed researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics,
and neuroscience, and he currently, I just checked this, has
two point seven million followers on Instagram, which is a
lot of followers. He sounds very fancy when you read
those words epigenetics, quantum physics, neuroscience, Like my brain goes wow,
(08:35):
he's so smart and educated. I wonder where he was educated. Well,
this is interesting. If you go to his website or
the internet in general, you will be very hard pressed
to find any information about Joe himself, which I find
as odd and so odd that I felt like I
(08:55):
was like missing something.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Was I being dumb?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
I'm like, of course, there has to be somewhere on
his website this that gives it a bio or about
him that tells us where this guy came from and
why we should trust him instead. All I could find
on his website, and I'm open to being wrong still,
but I really spent a lot of time on that
website was a tab on the top titled proof that
(09:18):
included a lot of in quotes, research articles that were
created by Joe or his team themselves, or summaries of research,
but not a lot of real academic or peer reviewed anything.
It was just pretty general information that looked really legit
(09:39):
even when I read it.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
It just didn't really say a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
And on the mission page of his website, you also
won't find much about Joe. What you will find is
these stories of transformation that look more like clickbait for
the vulnerable than actual scientific evidence or explanation of what
Joe is selling. Some of the titles were she Went
all In and her Depression disappeared in a selfless act
(10:06):
of love, her lung disease was healed. He regenerated his
jawbone and himself, which again very clickbaity, right. And I
want to read one of the stories of transformation on
Joe's website. And I want to read one of the
stories of transformation on Joe's website. This is quoted from
(10:29):
the website. After suffering with many illnesses throughout her life,
Yvonne was already deep into doctor Joe's work when she
received the toughest diagnosis of all metatastic ovarian cancer. When
our doctor performed surgery, though he was mystified the results
didn't match the diagnosis, he wanted to pursue further treatment,
but Yvonne was convinced she had found the answer to
(10:50):
healing and she would continue the work on her own.
Two years later, her oncologist had to agree that cancer
was gone, and as she recounts her story, three years later,
Yvonne is still cancer free. So this doesn't really say much.
It basically makes you think that whatever this person did
with Joe Despenza cured her cancer. Doctor Joe Despenza, which
(11:13):
we will get to later, and Joe hosts a lot
of workshops and retreats. It's one of the main selling
points on his website. He's known for and in these retreats,
he claims to heal genetic disorders through the power of belief,
and at one convention, he claims to have helped a woman,
this woman named Petra, regain her eyesight. He was quoted
(11:39):
saying she could do surgery and drugs, but it wouldn't
really change her gene expression. Instead, he believed that believing
her vision could return, this woman was able to change
her genetic makeup in a way that would allow her
to regain her site. Now I heard about this read
about in an article, and I was like, Okay, well,
haters of Joe could say anything on the internet, so
let me go do some research. Well, I found the
(12:01):
video on YouTube of this woman at the convention along
with Joe talking about this experience. What I didn't find
was any research about this. I didn't find any clinical
trials about what he's doing. I couldn't find anything other
than this video where him and this woman claimed that
(12:23):
this had been done. Which is confusing because if this happened,
why wouldn't we want everybody to know about it because
we could help other people, but also why should we
believe what you're saying, Like, where wouldn't you want to
give us some more information on this? And I watched
the video, like I said, and he explained how this
can be done to a large group of people and
(12:45):
including myself, Including myself in this group of people even
though I wasn't there in the video that don't have
the education or the real understanding of gene expression, genetics
the medical world.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
So he explains it in a way that makes the average.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Person they're able to understand what he's saying, but he's
not really saying anything at all. There was a lot
of just like fancy words, something that I like to
call word salad that doesn't really mean anything. But at
the same time, as I'm listening, it's so charismatically presented,
and he's such a good speaker in that way that
I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds a ligit, that sounds
(13:19):
like science, that sounds like something that actually at the
end of it, I was like, Okay, now I'm just confused.
But for somebody who wants to believe this, I can
very easily understand why I would listen to that and
say there's the proofs right there.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
He just explained it to.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Us, and what he was saying as my brain was
trying to do gymnastics understanding what he was saying. He
said that she was born again in the same life
during this meditative magnetic field that his followers had created
during this retreat, and that's how she regained her eyesight
because she was born again in the same life. Now,
(13:56):
this is very curious to me because, like I said before,
if this man can heal this woman's blindness, why are
we not talking about this. Why are we not doing
trials on this, Why are we not trying to get
this information to legitimate doctors? Why are we not using
this if this is what he says it is, If
(14:18):
this is true and real, I just don't know why
we aren't currying everybody with cancer in this way, because
if it's that easy, I would love to be able
to help some people in my life that have some
of these diseases that they go through mainstream medicine to
find healing from. Now, Joe Defenza also charges thousands of
dollars for people to come to these retreats for what
(14:41):
I can see appear more like performances and shows, if
you will, And they seem to take advantage of the
average person's understanding and ability to understand science and their
vulnerability towards the claims they make. Maybe there's a lot
of people who have been burned by mainstream medicine or
other things haven't worked, and so they turned to this
as a last resort. And I do believe, because I
(15:05):
don't want people to think that I'm just hating on
him to hate him, I really wish what he was
saying is true, because I would be awesome.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
For the world.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
I do believe there is power and positivity. There is
power in believing something. If we don't believe something is
able to work, it really does hurt our chances of
that actually working. So I do believe that our attitude
does shape some of our suffering, some of our healing.
I do believe meditation is helpful. I mean, we have
evidence to prove that, just not to the extent that
(15:35):
this man is proclaiming. And I know that I'm one
to be skeptical, so I want you guys to know
that this is coming from somebody who is known to
be skeptical. However, my skepticism I believe here comes with
good reason, because just because someone says something is true
in a really charismatic way, it doesn't mean I should
(15:58):
trust them. And this is something that really gets me.
If you want to find Joe's credentials, you will need
a lot of patience and a web browser with a
magnifying glass, because they aren't something that it appears Joe
wants you to see. And I find this very curious.
I have my degrees hanging on my wall in my office.
(16:18):
I have my background listed on my website and plain site.
I want people to know where I went to school.
I want people to know that I'm licensed. I want
people to know that I'm regulated. I want people to
know that I did the things that I needed to
do and studied the things that I needed to study
in order to do the work that I'm doing. I
think that is very helpful for people that might become clients,
(16:39):
and it's just helpful to create safety in our field.
It helps people understand what gives you the right to
do the work that you're doing. It builds trust, and
it's something that I believe we are allowed to be
proud of too.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I worked really hard to get to where I am.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
What I could find on Joe is that he holds
a Bachelor of Science degree with an emphasis in neuroscience.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
I found some.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Places, but some places have just said Bachelor of Science
degree and as a doctor of chiropractic, which for that
he went to this place called Life University. There's a
lot of controversy on that university, some because they lost
their credentials because of their illegitimate teaching practices at some point.
(17:25):
I didn't do a lot of research on that, but
that did come up in several articles that I read.
But this is what I'm finding. He has a Bachelor
of Science degree and he is a chiropractor. His end
quotes postgraduate training, which that is I don't really know
what that term exactly means, includes the fields of neuroscience, neuroplasticity,
(17:47):
quantitative electro. I don't even know how to say this
word electro, sell a felogram, measurements, epigenetics, mind body medicine,
and brain slash heart coherence. I don't know what that means.
I don't know what he did for his training. He
could just have read a couple of books like that
could mean anything. As my point, and he used a
(18:09):
lot of fancy words. Again, I could read some books
on neuroscience and say that I did training in neuroscience
postgraduate as well. So why wouldn't we want to Why
wouldn't he want us to know the legitimacy of that,
because what I can gain is what he has done
does not equal neuroscientists. Also, back to his Bachelor of
(18:31):
Science degree, I don't know what it is in. It
could be in business, it could be in fashion merchandising,
it could be in nutrition. I don't know what it
is in, and I find that odd that he wouldn't
want us to know that. So let's go back to
some of what Joe does along with these retreats, which
again thousands of dollars. If that is what you want
(18:53):
to spend your money on, we'll get to that. But
that's one thing that he promotes and is known for.
He also teaches an online course at the Quantum University,
which I had never heard of before. There's another man
named Bruce Lipton that also teaches at this university, and
he's a biologist who believes cells are reprogrammable through the
(19:15):
power of God.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And this university is very confusing and.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Advertises bachelors masters, PhD, and doctorate programs in holistic, natural
and integrated medicine. Now, none of this is actually accredited
by any agency that's recognized in the United States.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
So that means you can.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Go to the school and get this bachelor's degree, but
it doesn't really mean anything to anybody other than this
school and the boards that are created around what the
school teaches.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Let's say I.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Went to Alabama University of Alabama, and I did a
year of training there or a year of school there,
and then I said, I want to transfer to University
of Tennessee. Your credits most likely are going to transfer
up over to that other school because it is an
accredited school recognized by the United States. Nothing is recognized
(20:11):
in this school. So if I go and I study here,
it doesn't really mean anything. I would have to start over.
And again, it does not hold any value to anybody
other than the people that are.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Associated with this school.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
At this school, both Joe Despenza and this guy, Bruce
Lifton teach their students that DNA is controlled through the
power of thought and that each of us are able
to alter our genetics through our minds. Now, again, it'd
be pretty cool if this was true, and if this
is true, I really want to listen and I want
more information about this. I would love to read and
(20:46):
hear and learn about this, but I can't seem to
find where anybody's getting this from. The scientific research and
I'm doing air quotes around that on his website are
either studies that he did himself with his own team,
or they're just things that don't really say much. There's
one that said that meditation does aid in the progression
(21:08):
of certain illnesses and mental health struggles. Well, yeah, we
know that. Well I know that, and I believe that,
but that doesn't mean that we can reprogram. We're going
from A to Z, and I want to know what's
in the middle. So this brings me back to the
question I asked a long time ago that I posed earlier.
Why was his name mentioned in this book? Well, I
(21:29):
assume most of you guys could take a really good
educated guest now based on what I have just said.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
In explaining who he is.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
But the reason he's in this book is because he
has created a cult like following of people by creating
a delusion of intelligence and credibility through co opting scientific language,
which is becoming more and more of a problem in
our communities. And it's actually some of that is the
(21:57):
motivator in the series that Tara Booker and I did
and will continue to do, where we talk about the
difference between real mental health terms and how they are
shifted in pop culture. People take these terms and they
distort them to use as basis of credibility. They make
you sound smart, and then people are like, ooh, I
(22:18):
want to follow that person. So a woman named Nicole
Carlis interviewed the author of the book Cultish, Amanda Montel,
and in this interview, I'm going to take a quote
from Amanda, the author of Cultish and just read it
to you because it says so much good stuff in it.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
She said. This is Amanda, the author of Cultish. She said.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Co Opting technical terms from scientific fields and giving them
new metaphysical meanings is something that all of history's most
notorious New Age leaders, from Marshall Applewhite to l Ron Hubbard,
has done. This is what New Age groups have always done.
They combine scientific language or language from the DSM, and
(23:03):
the DSM is the diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental
health disorders like psychological language with spiritual mystical metaphysical language
in order to create this impression that they are tapped
into a power higher than science. And what someone like
Joe Dispensa does which is particularly grating and harmful, is
(23:25):
he will co opt terms from astrophysics. He'll talk about
quantum fields. And again his credential is he has a
degree in chiropractic from the university called Life University. He
is a joke, but he will basically use really complex
terms that are above the average follower's head. And because
he uses them with such confidence, and he's the picture
(23:48):
of that type of person that we would expect to
know about astrophysics, aka a middle aged, balding white man.
Either the average follower is not going to fact check
that you're just scrolling through in Instagram or you're just
surfing the internet with this overload of information that you're
getting on Instagram or on the Internet, you're not going
to FactCheck every little thing. It would take you all day.
(24:11):
It would be like a full time job. And study
after studies shows that misinformation spreads more quickly on the
Internet than true stories, especially on Twitter, and it's really
difficult to differentiate between false information that feels more novel,
and we're more likely to spread or retweet or reshare
information that feels new because it makes us feel again
(24:34):
like we are accessing something special, that we're in the know,
and sometimes true information feels boring. So yeah, the combination
of metaphysical language in science language is really dangerous because
it devalues actual science. And in an era like we
are and in now, where there is a civil war
over disinformation, when people think that science is a conspiracy,
(24:57):
when people have such mistrust in the healthcare sits in academia,
that becomes incredibly dangerous, especially because people like Joe Despenza,
and he's a diamond dozen by the way, aren't spreading
this ideology because they really think it's going to help people.
They're spreading it to make a buck. The roster of
products and services that Joe Despenza has for sale would
(25:19):
blow your mind. It's really like the metaphysical Disney Store.
And so he's reaching for attention. That's what he wants.
He doesn't want to help people, he wants attention and
followers and money. How do you get attention. You spread
the news that's going to feel most novel to people,
the news that it's going to feel the most novel
to people, it's probably going to be false, and that's
(25:40):
just destructive for so many reasons. And that's the end
of that quote. I am going to post all of
the or a lot of the articles that I got
the information for this episode in the show notes. You
can read that whole interview with Amanda, but you can
see a lot of already why it is so important
to talk about and peel apart the peace people. And
(26:01):
like you said, Joe is a dimond dozen that are
doing this because we are going to follow things that
feel most novel, and we also are in a space
where the world feels a little broken. We are a
distrust of certain agencies, and there's so many conspiracy stories,
and we want to trust something, and so we go
(26:21):
to the new thing because the other thing has burned
us in some way. And I also read a study
done by a group of researchers at USC in their
School of Business, and they looked into why fake news
spreads so fast on social media and they found, which
was not surprising to me, that social media has a
reward system that encourages users to stay on their accounts
(26:43):
and keep posting and sharing. So users who post and
share frequently, especially sensational, eye catching information, are likely to
attract attention, which huge Joe de spends his claims, And
that's what Amanda's saying when she's saying, if you want attention,
you're going to share information that feels most novel. And
(27:04):
the information that feels most novel that gets people's attention
is so often false because the truth sometimes can be
really boring. So at this point you might be thinking,
we get it. It seems like you don't like this person,
and it seems like you think he's a joke. Why
(27:28):
are we talking about him on Union Therapy? And my
answer to that is because of what Amana Montel said
in that quote where she said people like Joe are
a dime a dozen and the average person can't and
won't fact check everything we see on the internet. There
is science, and there is ethical research conducted to support
(27:50):
or disprove the theories that individuals develop. In that science,
there's also pseudoscience, something that can easily pass as legitimate
but does have to go through the same regulations to
get to your eyes. What science does is it accepts
the inevitability of error and it sets out to find
and eliminate that pseudoscience really starts from a desire to
(28:18):
prove something right. They start with a commitment to their
views that they don't want to falsify. And because pseudoscience
typically tries to pass for science, that's what it does.
It wants to look legitimate. There's nobody that's going to
pose something or write an article and be like, this
(28:39):
is fake science. So I want everybody to know they're
going to do it in a way that passes for science.
It can be hard to differentiate, and that affects our
ability as a viewer as the public to make decisions
based in science, Like, we want to make decisions based
on good research, based on education, based on what we know,
(29:00):
but that's hard to do when we have fake science
that looks like real science that we're making decisions off of.
So to me, this is like a right now and
it's a future health crisis. An article that was posted
by MPR titled what is Pseudoscience from twenty seventeen stated
one reason that differentiating science from pseudoscience matters is because
(29:22):
many individuals and institutional decisions depend on our best understanding
of the natural world and understanding that science is uniquely
poised to provide social and natural sciences inform medical decisions,
legal decisions, and public policy, not to mention our own
decisions about what to eat, how to manage illness, and
how to lead our lives. If pseudoscience is an unreliable
(29:46):
basis for making these decisions, it is important to draw
a line between science and alternatives that purport to offer
the same level of authority. So here's where my brain
starts to panic. How do we know who to trust?
And how do we know who to look into more?
And what my flight response in my nervous system tells
(30:08):
me to do is trust no one. And that's where
a lot of my skepticism has come in. But also
that has helped me do the fact checking. It's helped
me look at things more critically. And what I don't
want us to do is just ignore any information that
comes at us because we're afraid we're going to get duped.
Because there are plenty of good humans out there and
(30:28):
lots of health information out there that these people are
providing as well. So how can we learn to tell
the difference between actual science and pseudoscience? We know that
fake scientists purposely deceive their audience by inflating their credentials,
making themselves look more legitimate without actually being legitimate, which
is what Joe Dispensa has done. He calls himself a
(30:50):
doctor even though he has I believe chiropractors have a
purpose in life. That is a whole thing. They go
to school, they do that is not a medical doctor.
And there is a difference between that. The same thing
when somebody go is a doctorate of education, has a
PhD in or has a PhD in clinical psychology, that's
not the same as a as a psychiatrist or a
(31:14):
gastroinurologist or any of those kinds of medical doctors. And
so we need to look at the differences between those. So,
like I was saying, these fake scientists, what they do
is they inflate their credentials. So if you notice somebody's
hiding something red flag and they make false claims or
just they might not even be false, but we don't
(31:37):
really have anything to base.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Them off of.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
They're just guesses that haven't been looked at any further,
based on a bias that they might have, and they
disguise them as they're based in scientific evidence, and they
profit from the despair of people who have been disappointed
by science, mainstream medical world, mainstream anything. So we can
(32:00):
identify some things to look for before we as a
public hit the reshare or subscribe buttons to some of
this information. I found a good starter to checking science
from pseudoscience checklist from this article the Rise of Fake
Science from nests labs, which is an online learning community,
and they posted these couple red flags to look for.
(32:23):
So the first one is if the person has no
peer reviewed research. And what's funny is I remember being
so annoyed by having to read all these peer reviewed
research articles and do this and do that in school,
and now I'm like, oh, I get why this is
so important because this legitimizes what we were doing. But
if this person has no peer reviewed research to back
(32:45):
up their claims, that research is not very regulated and
anybody can say anything, so something might pass as research,
but we have to look for peer reviewed research. Two,
all the materials about their work were produced by themselves
or their teams, so this is kind of similar. If
everything that they are talking about comes from just themselves,
(33:09):
that is a red flag. There are a lot of
people that I really trust in the community of research,
and particularly psychology, because that is what I do for
a living, and often they look at what other people
have done and they will grow from that, or they'll
use that to corroborate what they're with the hypotheses that
they're creating. And that feels really helpful and hopeful because
(33:32):
it's a team of people working together based on the
community of what we've found together, versus I have an
idea and I'm going to go with it blindly and
then just convince you that I'm right with this information
that just came from me. Number three look for a
vague biography that leaves out important information, such as they're
(33:53):
Alma Marter.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Where did they go to school?
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Actually, I don't think I've found anywhere where went to undergraduate?
I did read somewhere that he took some classes at Rutgers,
but it didn't say that he graduated from there, so
that's interesting. And then number four made up scientific terms
not used by anybody else in the scientific community. And
this one was really interesting. They gave that example. This
(34:19):
person named I'm going to pronounce this name wrong. Idris
Abercaine is known to have coined the term neuro wisdom
in his book Free Up Your Mind, which was described
by neurology researcher Sebastian Diegez as an uninterrupted succession of
isolated facts, of pointless detours, antidotes of personal opinion, elementary mistakes,
(34:45):
debunked theories, truisms, hyperboles, and alphorisms, which do.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Not make for good science education.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
So look for what I mentioned earlier that I call
word salad, which is not a scientific and not a
term that I've coined. I actually heard that. I think
the first time I heard that was in the book Cultish.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
But it's just an.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Idea that there's a lot of these fancy, cool sounding
words that really mean nothing. Now, if you look into
the argument deeper of what makes science science, you will
find information about a philosopher named Carl Popper and his
attempt to separate empirical science and pseudoscience. Had the main
(35:31):
takeaway that you will see this idea of falsifiability. In
real science, something has to have the ability to be
proven false to be science, which is interesting because a
lot of pseudoscience you will see focus only on the
information that corroborates their story. They aren't looking to see
if it doesn't make sense. They're only looking into and
talking about what does. And in an article title drawing
(35:52):
the line between science and pseudoscience, the author Janet D.
Stemweedle writes, the big difference Popper identifies between science and
pseudoscience is a difference in attitude. While a pseudoscience is
set up to look for evidence that supports its claims,
Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its
claims and to look for evidence that might prove it false.
(36:14):
Pseudoscience seeks confirmation. In science seeks falsifications. Now, he doesn't
think that we should dismiss pseudoscience as utterly useless, uninsterresting,
or false.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
It's just not science.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Now under the assumption that science has this kind of power.
One of the problems with pseudoscience, again, this is the
point that we've been making throughout this is that it
gets an unfair credibility boost by so cleverly mimicking the
service appearance of science. So the reason this is so
important is that pseudoscience gets the benefit of looking scientific
(36:47):
and has the unfair advantage that it doesn't have to
look for falsifiability. It just has to prove itself. Right,
People like Jodaspenza make a lot of claims, and they
tell their side of the story that includes enough corroborating
evidence to support their in quotes theories. But this is
very important. All of these claims are just that their
theories and theories are not facts. And as a neuroscientist,
(37:09):
one would think you would be testing this theory over
and over and over in reputable ways. But for so
many like him, that's not happening, Kitchie. Clickbait turns you
into spending five thousand dollars plus on a program, a retreat,
a workshop, a membership, or something that might just be
a bunch of words that sound important when said next
(37:29):
to each other. And what I really love about being
a therapist is that our ethical guidelines balance on us
owning that we are not the knowers, we are the helpers.
It is why we can offer insight with ease, but
are somewhat slow to give direct advice or tell someone
with certainty something about themselves. We use phrases like it
(37:50):
sounds like I wonder, I'm curious about etc. But I
would be cautious to give someone a recipe for guaranteed success.
And I make a lot of us sumps. But I
state that in some of those phrases that I use.
I wonder it sounds like I have this idea that
none of that is fact. I know a lot of
(38:11):
things that aren't helpful and do cause harm, and I
know a lot of things that are helpful, but those
things very person to person, case to case. We can
make observations and we can come up with ideas. We
are trained to know and notice our limitations. Now does
that mean everyone does that and does it well one
(38:32):
hundred percent of the time. No, I've made mistakes before,
But there's also a system set up to regulate the
best it can. How this category of helpers is helping
people like Joe Despenza don't have that. He doesn't have
a regulating body. Again, He's a chiropractor acting as a
essentially medical professor. That's curing cancer and blindness. He's acting
(38:54):
as a oncologist, he's acting as an optometrist. He's acting
on all these things. But there's no life, so he
can't somewhat be sued for malpractice. I wonder that's actually interesting.
I wonder if he's even still licensed as a chiropractor,
because I can be sued for malpractice if I act
out of my scope. Let's just say I had a
(39:14):
PhD in some kind of psychology whatever. If I use
that term doctor to legitimize myself and then talk about
something that I actually wasn't trained in, I can be
sued for malpractice. So we would be acting outside of
our scope. But what Joe was doing, he's acting in
a world that isn't regulated by these licensing boards. It
(39:37):
sounds like they don't have to play by any rules
because there aren't any rules for them to follow. And
you know, sometimes I really really hate some of the
rules that we have to follow as licensed therapists. It's
a lot of tedious stuff. However, when I've broken them,
I'm very quick to understand why they're there. And it
(39:57):
makes me think of the show Shrinking. I kind of
jealous watching that because the main character just went rogue.
He was a therapist and he just started doing whatever
he wanted to do and then breaking all these ethical
guidelines and all of his professional boundaries were basically non.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Existent, and I was like, oh man, he's so bold.
I wish I could do that.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Why do I have to have so many boundaries in
this and that I should be cooler. But then as
you continue to watch this show, you saw very clearly
why those boundaries are needed. Things started to get messy,
and things started to get very unsafe. And as I
was preparing for this episode, one thing that I kept
asking myself, because I was sucked into this hole and
(40:40):
I had a lot of feelings, is why do I
care so much? Why does my blood boil when I
hear about this kind of stuff? Because again, this happens
over and over. There are so many people like Joe Dispensa.
He's not the only one, He's just the one I'm
using as the example. But why can't you just use
the mel Robbin's tactic, let them and just go on
living my life life? And in this moment, the most
(41:02):
true answer feels like I get really angry when people
are taking advantage of, especially for the vulnerability of their
unmet needs. It's the justice part of me, the part
that made my therapist wonder if I'm actually an eight
on the Enneagram and not a seven. I want this
episode to be a wake up call for all of us,
for those listening and for those helping. I want us
(41:24):
to get more curious about what we're listening to and
I even mean what you're listening to me say, because
I'm not an expert in everything. I'm not an expert
on the difference between science and pseudoscience. I went and
did some research on it. But there might be some
of you listening that are like, huh, I want to
learn more about that.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Fact check me. I would love that. Please fact check me.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Maybe I can learn something more from you guys even
doing that. But I really want this to be a
call for us to be listening, but listening more intently,
being curious, but also being skeptical. I can be optimistic
and skeptical at the same time time. I mean truly,
I mean when I say I want cure and cancer
(42:05):
to be as easy as Jodasvenza says it is. However,
I have to be skeptical of that because I don't
know that it's actually true, and that could cause a
lot of harm to me and the people around me
if it is affecting the choices that we're making. I
also want us to be slow, slower to reshare things
that sound really cool and exciting and click baity and novel.
(42:30):
I want us to maybe settle in the idea that
the truth can be boring sometimes, and we're allowed to
regulate our systems and get used to that a little bit.
When we're always looking for the most exciting, new fanatical thing,
then even exciting things can feel really boring. So maybe
(42:51):
our system of our attention has been skewed because we're
constantly looking for the thing that's going to trump the
last really exciting thing that we heard or learned. So
that's all I have for you today. If you have
any feedback, questions, stories, anything about this or anything else,
(43:12):
you can always email me Katherine at you Need Therapy
podcast dot com.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
You can follow me at you Need.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Therapy Podcast and at cat dot defata. And until I
talk to you guys next time, I hope you guys
have the day you need to have.
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