November 12, 2014

The Majority Report's Sam Seder discusses Glenn Beck's "revelation" that he's supposedly been battling some sort of mysterious brain illness, or as Sam explained, possibly just the latest scam he can use as a pivot point to change his programming.

From TPM's reporting earlier this week: Glenn Beck Reveals Serious Illness That 'Made Me Look Crazy':

Conservative pundit Glenn Beck tearfully disclosed Monday night that for years he suffered from mysterious and debilitating health issues that he said "made me look crazy."

The symptoms Beck experienced, which he had never discussed in public before, stretched back over five years to his days at Fox News, he said. He described having vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems, shaking hands, trouble sleeping and even seizures.

"We didn't know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands or feet or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, or set them on fire or pushed broken glass into my feet," he said.

Most harrowingly, Beck said that at one point he took a traumatic brain injury test at a hospital in New York City and scored in the bottom 10 percent. Doctors told him he would have between 5 and 10 years before he would no longer be able to function. He then began to search for a successor at TheBlaze.

But eventually Beck said he landed at a brain rehabilitation center in Texas, where doctors determined he had several connected health issues "from an autoimmune disorder to adrenal fatigue."

Raw Story has some follow up on this supposed "treatment" he's been receiving: Glenn Beck’s diagnosis and treatment are quackery, say medical experts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raw Story spoke with a representative of Emory Health Care in Atlanta who pointed out that Beck’s symptoms do not actually match those typically associated with adrenaline fatigue, which is a syndrome that affects people exposed to high levels of stress over long periods of time. Read on...

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