Calif. herbal doctor who promised cancer cure to be sentenced; prosecutors seek 27-year term
By Greg Risling, Associated Press via Yahoo! News
Dr. Christine Daniel, operator of Sonrise Medical Clinic in Mission Hills was convicted by a federal jury of peddling a cancer treatments to terminally ill patients. Daniel, 57, of Northridge, was found guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles of 11 counts of mail and wire fraud, tax evasion and witness tampering. She is appealing the the verdict and denies any wrong doing. (Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — At the age of three, Brianica Kirsch was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Her parents, desperate to find alternative measures for their daughter who had undergone surgeries and chemotherapy, turned to Dr. Christine Daniel, who offered an herbal supplement with a success rate she claimed was between 60 and 80 percent.
Brianica’s parents spent thousands of dollars on the herbal product and their daughter spent much of her time in those last few months before she died in the summer of 2002 being shuttled from her Ventura County home to Daniel’s clinic in the San Fernando Valley.
Daniel, 58, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in a Los Angeles courtroom where federal prosecutors are asking she be sentenced to 27 years in prison for crimes they deem cruel, despicable and heinous. Daniel’s lawyer is seeking a nearly six-year prison term.
Daniel was convicted in September 2011 of 11 counts, including wire fraud, tax evasion and witness tampering. Authorities said Daniel used her position both as a doctor at the Sonrise Wellness Center and a Pentecostal minister to entice people from across the nation to take her herbal product to remedy cancer, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.
Federal prosecutors argue that Daniel preyed upon people in their most vulnerable state and gave them false hope.
Daniel “repeatedly demonstrated a merciless and callous indifference to the suffering of her patients and their family members,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns wrote in court documents. “It is unlikely that our federal criminal justice system will see the like of defendant Christine Daniel again.”
Some of her patients, relying on her product, died from complications of cancer within three to six months after taking the supplement. In one case, prosecutors contend a 22-year-old woman who had highly curable form of neck lymphoma died because she relied on Daniel’s recommendation to avoid radiation or chemotherapy treatments.
For Brianica’s parents, they implored Daniel for the stark truth given their daughter’s condition.
Related articles
- Calif. doctor who promised ‘cancer cure’ gets prison (foxnews.com)
- Doctor Who Promised Cancer Cure Faces… – ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
- Herbal remedies do not cure cancer. Cancer quack to be sentenced. (doubtfulnews.com)
- Doctor who promised herbal cure for cancer to be sentenced for ‘callous indifference’; prosecutors seek 27-year term (thestar.com)
On Thursday’s show (May 9, 2013), Dr. Oz presented 
As for that, Ms. Caputo – although she seems to have impressed the hell out of Dr. Oz, albeit based on his record this doesn’t seem to take much – didn’t seem to be able to do much of anything. She began her first reading (a demonstration prior to the “experiment”) by looking for something from a “father or a daughter.” She managed to find someone in the audience who had lost their father, but as soon as she asked who the daughter was – who was the “female spirit” – the subject drew a dead blank.
By 
This week was the 
I am that annoying Facebook friend who can smell an Internet hoax a mile away. It’s a skill I had to develop as an entertainment reporter because I often ran across stories or received tips that were about as reliable as the R train on a weekend. My protocol is made up of a few simple questions:
Carson City, NV — (
The idea of people being able to move objects through mind power alone has intrigued people for centuries, though only in the late 1800s was it seen as an ability that might be scientifically demonstrated. This occurred during the heyday of the early religion Spiritualism, when psychic mediums claimed to contact the dead during séances, and objects would suddenly and mysteriously move, float, or fly by themselves across the darkened room, seemingly untouched by human hands. Sometimes small tables would tip or levitate, disturbed either by unseen spirits or the psychic’s mind.
In spiritualism
James Van Praagh is a self-proclaimed medium who claims he has a gift that allows him to hear messages from just about anyone who is dead. According to Van Praagh, all the billions and billions and billions of dead people are just waiting for someone to give him their names. That’s all it takes. Give Van Praagh a name, any name, and he will claim that some dead person going by that name is contacting him in words, fragments of sentences, or that he can feel their presence in a specific location. He has appeared on “Larry King Live,” where he claimed he could feel the presence of Larry’s dead parents. He even indicated where in the room this “presence” was coming from. He took phone calls on the air and, once given a name, started telling the audience what he was “hearing” or “feeling”. Van Praagh plays a kind of twenty-questions game with his audience. He goes fishing, rapidly casting his baited questions one after the other until he gets a bite. Then he reels the fish in. Sometimes he falters, but most of the fish don’t get away. He just rebaits and goes after the fish again until he rehooks. The fish love it. They reward Van Praagh’s hard work by giving him positive feedback. This makes it appear to some that he is being contacted by spirits who are telling him that being dead is good, that they love those they left behind, and that they are sorry and forgive them everything.
For this purpose we need to keep up the pressure, we need to keep countering homeopaths whenever they emerge to offer a new distortion of science and evidence. This is part of what we do as activists – it is only scientific skeptics who are pushing back against this dangerous nonsense.
LOS ANGELES—’Psychic Nikki,’ the Toronto-based psychic who claimed she’d be willing have her abilities tested for the Million Dollar Challenge offered by the 
DENVER (CBS4) – One Denver psychic has been convicted of theft, a second was arrested this month in California and Denver prosecutors are still seeking to arrest a third psychic accused of convincing clients she was a “witch doctor.”
[...]
James Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but today he is best known as the world’s most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.
Reiki (pronounced ray-key) is a form of 
Reiki healers differ from acupuncturists in that they do not try tounblock a person’s ki, but to channel the ki of the universe so that the client or patient heals. The channeling is done with the hands, and like TT no physical massaging is necessary since ki flows through the body of the healer into the patient. The reiki master claims to be able to draw upon the energy of the universe and increase his or her own energy while performing a healing. Reiki healers claim to channel ki into ill or injured individuals for “rebalancing.” Depending on the training and beliefs of the healer, reiki is used to treat a wide array of ailments. Larry Arnold and Sandra Nevins claim in The Reiki Handbook (1992) that reiki is useful for treating brain damage, cancer, diabetes, and venereal diseases. Many reiki healers are more modest and treat lesser problems such as fatigue or muscle soreness. I was once treated by a reiki practitioner for a wrist injury. The treatment didn’t work because I was a non-believer, or so I was told. If the healing fails—and it will inevitably fail for such things as cancer—it is because the patient is resisting the healing energy. Non-belief is one of the great blocks to healing energy. There is a reason for that, which we will explore below.
This scam involves making a series of opposite predictions (on winners in the stock market, football games, or the like) and sending them to different groups of people until one group has seen your perfect track record sufficiently to be duped into paying you for the next “prediction.”
Speaking of Theresa Caputo, that’s 
There is the pure quackery that he features and promotes, such as psychic scammers like 
As true believers are wont to say: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That is, just because there is no compelling scientific evidence that subtle energy exists doesn’t mean that such energy doesn’t exist. True, but belief in subtle energy is based on 
In combination with selling seats through Ticketmaster and the use of credit cards, Facebook, Fousquare, Twitter and all the rest of the latest places people post private information, our own egocentric fascination with ourselves makes it easy for the techie-smart-agent or producer to make seeming miracles happen. Like the old days when the gypsy only needed to tell her sitters what they wanted to hear about themselves, we are now in an era when anyone can tell you more about yourself than you might ever want to know.
So is the Long Island Medium really communicating with those who have passed on, or is she simply using trickery to fool the living? 
“Resonate with natural frequencies” – they can’t even be bothered to make up their own ridiculous pseudoscientific technobabble. Improving blood flow by separating blood cells is also an old scam. We have evolved very robust mechanisms to ensure optimal delivery of oxygen to our tissues. There is no simple way to “improve” this in a healthy person. These mechanisms may not be adequate in someone with advanced disease affecting the pulmonary or cardiovascular systems, neither is a little wrist band going to have any effect in such serious conditions.
They quote Einstein and E=mc2 – it’s so sciencey. Yes, all atoms vibrate and have energy (unless they are at absolute zero). That’s called heat. None of this explains how their chip, or anything, can emit “subatomic energies” (what energy, exactly, is that?), and how this energy is transferred to the blood of the wearer. How is a computer chip “programmed” to do this? Are they saying that the energy of atoms responds to the programming inside a computer chip?
Harsha Maddula, a Northwestern University pre-medical student from Long Island, N.Y., went missing Sept. 22, last seen leaving an off-campus party in Illinois. Police and volunteer searchers were unable to find him, but Maddula’s family said reassuring words from psychics had raised their spirits.
Indeed, as a news article on Michigan Live.com noted, the mother of a missing woman will be seeking advice from a nationally-known psychic next week: “The mother of 
Well, well, well. 
AUBURN.—Unsatisfied customer Abraham Char filed suit against an Auburn psychic, according to the 
The elderly are recognized as being vulnerable to fraud. A study last year found that American seniors lost at least $2.9 billion to financial exploitation in 2010, and two months ago, the newly established 
If you’ve been making a nice living selling 
More than two centuries have passed since humans first started using 
It has been an art employed by some of the greatest minds and practitioners of the sciences over the centuries, as well as many of the more nefarious names in history as well. From scholars like 
Bad news for 
Psychic mediums perform one-on-one sessions for sitters. Stage mediums typically offer personal readings, but they also perform short 
Today (August 7, 2012) marks the 84th birthday of the one and only James Randi, the man loved (some might say worshipped) by skeptics the world round and squarely hated by just about everyone who claims to have a paranormal power of some kind.
This alleged trick, reportedly witnessed by thousands of people, involves an Indian 
