Talk:Albert Abrams

This article seems to be a cut-and-paste dump of some public domain material. It's not NPOV, anda good chuck of the material has little to do with Albert Abrams specifically. This needs some work. --Stephen Gilbert

Author cite to v1.0.2 / 01 jan 02 / gvgoebel@yahoo.com / public domain removed, as per Wikipedia policy.

This is almost completely without citation or attribution. WHich bits are true, and which are POV? Midgley 13:03, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

fraud

Given that the most striking thing about him was that he was a quack and fraud, should not this be in the first line of the article, or at least in the very top part - the part which among other things composes the snippet Google shows to people looking at the link? Midgley 12:02, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Degree from Heidelberg"

Heidelberg at the end of the 19th century was both famous and a long way away from the US.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_5_26/ai_91236244

" an online copy of John L. Wilson's authorized history of "Stanford University School of Medicine and the Predecessor Schools, An Historical Perspective." A significant portion of Chapter 26 is devoted to Dr. Abrams. A very specific quote by Ray Lyman Wibur, M.D., as president of Stanford University in 1922, clarifies that Dr. Abrams was never a member of the Stanford University faculty:

May I call your attention to the enclosed clippings, apparently sent out from your office, indicating that Dr. Albert Abrams is connected with Leland Stanford University. The same error has been corrected several times. Dr. Abrams has never had any association with Stanford University. He is a graduate of Cooper Medical College, which was taken over by Stanford University long after his graduation. It is evident that Dr. Abrams, or someone associated with his publicity work, has tried to keep up the fiction of his association with Stanford. It seems to me bad enough for such a responsible institution as the Associated Press to herald far and wide the scientific rubbish of Dr. Abrams, and worse still to connect the name of the University in any way with such abstsrdities.

In addition, Haines apparently accepts Dr. Abrams's claim of a degree from the University of Heidelberg at face value. However, Dr. Wilson refers to Dr. Abrams supposed credentials as follows:

"Who's Who in America for 1922-1923 contains a lengthy entry on Albert Abrams, physician: 'Born in San Francisco 8 December 1863; M.D. University of Heidelberg, 1882; A.M. Portland University, 1892; and LL.D. (date and institution not specified).' The M.D. degree in 1883 from Cooper Medical College is not mentioned. When the American Medical Association sought to validate Abrams' credentials, it was found that he had previously given his date of birth variously as 1862, 1863 and 1864; that there was no evidence of his having received an M.D. degree from Heidelberg; and that there was no record of the existence of a "University of Portland" at the time. It would apprar that the LL.D. degree was also ephemeral.""

Not too surprisingly then it appears that this fraud was not a doctor. Can anyone dig up actual copies of the documents referred to above? Or a declaration by Heidelberg that a degree was awarded? Finally, why did anyone beleive that a medical degree could be acquired at the age of 18? 20 is pushing it, even then, which makes "as a teenager" look like very poor work for an encyclopaedist.

I am about to do a major edit on this article. Midgley 13:20, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ripped to park

He became chief pathologist at the Cooper Medical Institute, later subsumed into the Stanford Medical School, and in 1893 was president of the San Francisco Medical-Surgical Society. He was regarded as a guru by other doctors in the city, and had published many articles in prominent medical journals.

Needs verifying. Latter part is hearsay and likely lies.

There remain various strictly unverified elements, including the refernce to Sci Am - anyone help on that? Midgley 13:42, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Evolution of this article...

It is worth looking at the history to see how this article evolved.

The original was a dump of a page from elsewhere, the atribution of which was then removed, and documented high on this talk page.

Elements were stripped out to what is now electrical quackery which I suppose deserves a visit, but from its title is promising. WHat was left was about a con-artist called Abrams.

User:Redcountess, very early on in an attributable editing career, cleaned up what was then a mess, but crucially[1] removed the identification of the man's nature, and accepted him as a doctor, making this the top piece. I reviewed Redcountess' contribution history and that looks like an isolated mistake, albeit I know little of several of the topics involved, in a lot of useful work and tidying.

User:David_Gerard made " a further attempt at NPOV". Unfortuantely, if you accept that a fraud is a doctor, then all the removal of the assertions he is a fraud do not improve the article, and indeed, don't produce a neutral POV, but a counter-factual one. In particular a change of "was a fraud" to "apepared he was a fraud" was simply wrong - the demonstration _was_ made. Att he same time he was tackling Xenu and OT3 and doing so credibly, so again this looks like a mistake early in what is from a review of contributions an eclectic, useful, and balanced career.

User:John Gohde whose name seems familiar moved the article from Category:Alternative medicine into People in alternative medicine, whcih if it is considered as a biographical article is fair enough, whereas if it is considered as an outstanding example of a health fraud, and typical of a type of health fraud, rather tends to cover it up.

User:71.162.33.62 made a visit as part of a general (and reverted) set of changes of Category:Quackery to Category:Alternative medicine. A long run of sophisticated change for an IP address. He also substituted a patient survey for http://www.ncahf.org/ National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) as a reference and added dowsing tothe first paragraph, whch seems both inaccurate and irrelevant to me, but might merit discussion.

The result of this sequence was an article that was frankly not encyclopaedic, had no attribution or verification, and offered support to the fraudsters who continue to sell redionics devices ascribed to Royal Raymond Rife etc.

I'm afraid this is a systematic weakness in WP.

Comments? Midgley 14:26, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The hallmark of a fraud rather than an "alternative practitioner"

Since there is another burst of rehabilitation, and reduction of the usefulness of WP as a reference work, going on at present, let me point this out:- "Alternative practitioners" not uncommonly claim that conventional medicine and conventional doctors are all wrong, or know nothing of higher things. What they don't do is claim to be qualified conventional doctors from Heidelberg. That takes him firmly over the boundary from someone who might be thought to be a quackish practitioner with some "ideas" that are not accepted conventionally for trivial reasons such as having been demonstrated to be wholly unfounded, wrong and empirically ineffective ... into the territory of the fraudster which he inhabited. Fraud is common, and health fraud is a common variety of it, and WP:IS not a tool to confuse people abut whether demonstrated fraudsters might actually be as careful and sensible as any proper doctor from Heidelberg, whether mit scars or sans Francisco. Got that? 82.152.46.201 21:41, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]