Thursday, October 17, 2013

#755: Kent Heckenlively


Kent Heckenlively is an antivaxxer who writes for the crank propaganda site Age of Autism, and is generally known for having taken his autistic daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery and for subjecting her to all manner of biomedical woo. He is, in other words, deeply steeped in woo, and got his test results for his daughter from Doctor’sData, the favored laboratory of dubious practitioners everywhere because of its lax methodology and tendency to find high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in just about any sample. Heckenlively is also known for his participation in chelation-provoked urine testing for mercury – which is guaranteed to cause the excretion of a lot of mercury in a normal person – so that the test results would not be in conflict with his already formed opinion about the causes of autism. Of course, the fact that his daughter did not improve made Heckenlively ask a lot of questions; unfortunately none of them included the question of whether his beliefs about the causes and treatments of autism corresponded with reality.

Currently, his favored schtick seems to be that the XMRV retrovirus is the cause of autism (presumably in combination with heavy metals), in part because Judy Mikovits famously linked the retrovirus to the chronic fatigue syndrom in an appalling example of shoddy and possibly fraudulent research, and combined it with complete crank behavior that eventually got her fired. Therefore there must apparently be some truth to her claims.

So currently Heckenlively muses about autism and the scientific conspiracy against anti-vaxxers, and mixes his conclusions with some astonishing crackpottery, sometimes with interesting results. For instance, he has tried to liken those who criticize his pseudoscientific pontifications about autism and vaccines to creationists – which is getting the analogy exactly wrong, but which at least managed to piss of many of the science-challenged (creationist) readers of Age of Autism.

Of course, since reality won’t support his beliefs, Heckenlively likes to try to explain why his opponents are wrong by other means, favoring in particular speculations about the motives and psychology of those who prefer reality over dogmatic denialist crankery.

Diagnosis: A fairly typical antivaxxer, but the fact that he writes for Age of Autism gives him some influence. Dangerous.

4 comments:

  1. My views do not always align with Mr. Heckenlively's; however you are being quite biased and that you fools should at least be non-aligned. I personally was a student of his and this is quite biased. Also your claims have no backing. This is shameless smashing and clickbait. Maybe his views are not correct, but you should be able to really justify your claims with facts, not just more claims with links to articles. Also, who is more dangerous? A science teacher with multiple degrees whose daughter cannot talk, or the person who keeps hitting him with a stick? Whay did Heckenlively ever do to you? Get a life.

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  2. The original Scienceblogs post (wrt Judy Mikovits) redirect to RespectfulInsolence appears to have timed out. Here's the updated link: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2011/11/23/compare-and-contrast/#more

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  3. Who pays you to write lies, the corrupt and greedy science community?

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  4. A full account of Heckenlively's career should include the period in 2015 when he fell for Jim Humble's & Kerri Rivera's cynical "MMS" scam, and cured his daughter's autism (for the 3rd or 4th time) by bleaching the intestinal parasites out of her.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150213013751/http://www.ageofautism.com:80/2015/01/whos-afraid-of-autism-recovery.html

    "JB:

    Thank you for writing this article. I have also been actively working with the parasite protocol with my daughter and have seen significant improvements. My daughter has seizures and has been on the ketogenic diet for more than two years. Prior to the start of the parasite protocol she weighed just 70 pounds at the age of 16 years old. Within a few months she had gained 20 pounds, eating the exact same diet. We still have many issues, but that change is pretty dramatic. Although I think there may be more pieces, this parasite piece seems to be a significant one.

    All the best,
    Kent Heckenlively"

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