Hawaii Public Radio MD Talk-Show Host and Producer are Caught in Corruption Scandal

A major corruption scandal is brewing at Hawaii Public Radio (HPR). As I have documented in previous blogs, Kathleen Kozak, MD, and HPR have abandoned science and consumer protection in health care and embraced medical relativism, quackery and brazen health fraud. Kozak’s weekly show Body Talk is largely a forum for deceiving and indoctrinating listeners rather than informing them. The question has always been why? Now we know the ugly truth, though not all the details.

It is easy to understand why the likes of Oprah, Dr. Oz, Larry King, and other commercial talkers deceive listeners and pander to the lowest common ignorance. It’s all about numbers, nothing else. They’re in pursuit of ratings and advertising dollars. Truth, ethics, professionalism and the well-being of their audience mean nothing, so anything goes.

But public radio is supposed to be more professional, ethical and truly informative and helpful. It claims higher standards of journalism, fairness, respect for listeners, respect for the truth, and overall excellence. And we count on medical doctors to be ethical and to act in our interest. They are supposed to be the ultimate professionals, dedicated to excellence in evidence-based healing. So why is Hawaii Public Radio letting medical doctor Kozak’s quackophilia drag it into the gutter of deception?

We recently learned the shocking truth from a confidential source inside HPR. It’s not just a problem with the new-age virus (NAV) that suppresses areas and circuits of the brain involved in rational thinking; it’s also plain, old-fashion cynicism, greed and corruption. This person referred to Kozak and her producer Beth-Ann Kozlovich as the Kook and the Crook, then quickly added that they’re both both. The show draws a sizable audience, so management looks the other way and ignores complaints from discerning listeners. Now the HPR bosses will be caught up in the scandal.

In previous posts I document and discuss many instances of journalistic and medical malpractice that Kozak has engaged in. There is no point in repeating them all here, as it’s a long litany of deceptions – lying explicitly, lying by omission and lying with twisted logic. If you have not read the previous posts in this blog, I urge you to do so. Just scroll down.

In this discussion I will refer to comments that Kozak and her guest made during the July 4, 2016, broadcast of Body Talk. It was classic Kozak bullshit and it illustrates the fantastical, delusional nature of her medical philosophy. As we shall see, however, it turns out there is a certain method to her madness, a rational motive for her betrayal of reason.

Can you guess who Kozak’s guest was that day? That’s right, yet another naturopath, Monique Yuen. She had more wonderful treatments that dumb old MDs are too ignorant to use because they only treat symptoms and don’t care about the root causes of diseases like NDs do. Their sloganeering would be laughable if it weren’t so absurd, fraudulent and dangerous.

Yuen says she specializes in the thyroid and the adrenals, and she assumes that anyone who complains of fatigue probably has disorders of one or both of these glands and needs thorough testing.

Before continuing, Kozak assures us that NDs have attended a naturopathic college for four years, same as MDs and medical school. So, they have equivalent training, knowledge, and competence. We can trust and believe naturopaths. This is deceptive for a host of reasons I discussed in previous posts in this blog. It is a lie that Kozak tells again and again.

One naturopath who Kozak refuses to interview, quote or discuss is Britt Hermes. Actually, she is an ex-ND, having left the pseudo-profession for work in real science. I have repeatedly suggested to Kozak and Kozlovich that they invite Hermes for a chat. They won’t do it because their job, as they see it, is to promote naturopathy, not to question it or allow others to question it in their forum. They are no different from Oprah, Oz and the other commercial hucksters.

Britt Hermes is smart and brave. Most students and beginning practitioners of naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture who are smart enough to see through the nonsense they’ve been taught are not courageous enough to quit. Or their financial and time investments are so high they are trapped. Hermes, who had a “successful” practice, also has a conscience, and she admits, “I was a quack.” To access her fine blog posts go to www.NaturopathicDiaries.com.

Kozak justifies presenting fringe practitioners by saying that she is simply presenting a variety of views so listeners can decide for themselves. However, she refuses to present views that dissent from the fringe ideas and criticize them. She obviously does not really want people to be fully informed so they can make rational decisions. She wants listeners to blindly accept the new-age dogmas of medical relativism. All healing systems are equally true and valid and we must strive to understand and incorporate elements of each into dealing with all health challenges.

If Yuen’s tests indicate low levels of thyroid or adrenal hormones, supplemental hormones are prescribed along with dozens of naturopathic treatments (“glandular support”) for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. If the tests come back normal but the person still complains of fatigue, Yuen says, the problem is “subclinical” glandular weakness. In that case the hormones are left out but the “glandular support” is continued indefinitely. This includes a dozen or so herbal drugs, lots of dietary supplements and homeopathic holy waters. Plus other snake oils and manipulations (psychological and physical) too numerous to mention here. There is no evidence that these things reduce the fatigue.

So if you tell a naturopath that you’re tired all the time, whatever the hormone tests show you will be sold a grab bag of snake oils to “exercise and heal the glands”. How does Yuen know the proper doses for the glandular-support snake oils? She supplies the patient with a saliva test kit for adrenal stress. This is used several times per day for days or weeks.

In addition to charging for the hormone level test, the naturopath can charge several hundred dollars for the test kit. But it might be even more profitable to supply it for free since it helps sell the enormously profitable snake oils. This is fraud multiplied and leveraged by more fraud. It’s all a crude and expensive scam. Predictably, Kozak likes it. Now we know why.

Thanks to ignorant and corrupt media and legislators, naturopaths can get away with all manner of health frauds that MDs cannot because NDs have their own “separate but legally equal" standard of care which includes routinely lying to clients, using bogus diagnostic tests and selling bogus remedies. Since they are licensed and have their own standard of care they are immune to criminal and civil charges that would put an MD in prison, and cost him or her millions of dollars as well as the license to practice. By partnering with NDs and promoting them, Kozak, an MD, has found a way to get a piece of this lucrative action. Does Kozak's employer Straub Clinic have a role in any of this? I do not know at this time, but some degree of complicity seems certain.

Back to the show. Kozak answers the phone and a caller launches into a long, complicated and utterly absurd spiel on Ayurvedic treatments for the conditions being discussed. Kozak thanks her, agrees, and says, yes, we should do all this Ayurvedic stuff on top of the naturopath’s many prescriptions. All these treatments are complementary and we should integrate them into regular medicine.

Kozak says she once went to an Ayurvedic lecture and was especially impressed with tongue diagnosis. It has been around for thousands of years, so it must be true, something she has also said about other ineffective and nonsensical systems. It does not occur to her that animal-parts medicine, astrology, numerology, necromancy and many other silly and dangerous superstitions have also been around for thousands of years, but this does not make them true. Or maybe it does for Kozak. Maybe she believes in all of them.

However, the continuing belief in these systems proves not that they are true, but that humans, despite our formidable cognitive abilities and tools, are perfectly capable of believing in preposterous nonsense for many centuries, even after it has been repeatedly and thoroughly proved to be nonsense. This is why quackery is the world’s oldest and most consistently-profitable occupation. People want to believe in magic, and they resent being told that it’s all deception and that Santa Claus does not really exist. This love of the magical and mystical is one of our great weaknesses. Kozak and her ilk spread and exploit this weakness.

I have always thought it ironic that NAV-positive people usually take pride in trying to learn about any procedure, test or treatment recommended by an MD, of not blindly believing their medical doctors, of being skeptical of scientific medicine; yet they blindly swallow the heaps of hogwash fed to them by naturopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists and other “alternative” practitioners, many of whom are treated like infallible gurus by their clients. This shows that once the NAV gets into the brain, it ravages some specific types of neurological circuits while sparing other types. 

The New Age Virus, is much like Toxoplasma gondii, the microscopic parasite that infects cats, rats, humans and other animals. This amoeba, "wanting" to get inside the cat for the next stage in its life cycle, tweaks the brain circuits of the rat so it becomes perversely sexually attracted to, rather than terrified of and repelled by the smell of cat urine. Likewise, NAV tweaks the brains of some of the most intelligent and compassionate people into the jaws of superstition and self-delusion by suppressing circuits involved in skepticism and critical thinking.

Kozak seems to be unaware that scientific medicine has earned our respect with a century and a half of spectacular achievements. Through the previous one hundred centuries of post-stone-age civilization life was predictably nasty, brutish and short for most people. It was less than two hundred years ago that we started applying scientific method to medicine and reaping the benefits. Now we routinely survive scores of diseases and injuries that previously had no effective remedies. Potential pandemics have been (and continue to be) snuffed in the bud by vaccinations and other science-based measures. Average lifespans have tripled. Kozak, Koslovich and HPR seem oblivious and want to take us back a couple centuries.

Naturopathy – along with acupuncture, Ayurveda, chiropractic and the rest – has no such record of achievements and has actively opposed the most effective science-based measures, such as vaccinations. Medical doctors and allied scientists have won many Nobel Prizes and have made major advances in understanding our organs and their diseases. But no naturopath has ever won a Nobel Prize because there is no science behind their theories and nostrums. All they have to offer is dogmatic sloganeering that promotes fraudulent services, products and devices. Yet they demand respect and full equivalence with MDs.

Poor nations hit by natural and economic disasters send out pleas for vaccines, antibiotics, and anti-HIV drugs, not acupuncture needles and homeopathic holy waters. Could Kozak really not know all this?

The next caller told us that people with thyroid disorders should use a “detoxification” program and iodine supplements. Yuen added that she prescribes tyrosine, selenium and magnesium to support the thyroid. Kozak agreed with all this. Yes, keep piling it on. There’s gold in them thar mountains of manure.

Is Kozak really so deluded that she cannot see the absurdity (not to mention the cost and risk) of subjecting patients to scores of snake oils and procedures from all the healing systems and dogmas of the world because they might work? Or, more precisely, because someone somewhere at some time said they might work? Or is she just pretending to this level of madness for ulterior motives?

I have never believed that Kozak is crazy, stupid or demented. Rather, she is infected with NAV and the virus has selectively suppressed or destroyed certain circuits in her brain. Now she lacks critical thinking skills, and her cynical and opportunistic side has become dominant. In some cases the virus eventually causes the host to become a full-blown psychopath, but I don’t think Kozak is there – at least not yet.

Nevertheless, as the corruption scandal unfolds it will become apparent that Kozak’s motive is ambition or, less politely, avarice. The motives of her NAV-positive partner-in-crime, producer Beth-Ann Koslovich, are much the same: cynicism and greed in combination with new-age ideology.

HPR deserves a protest, not a pledge. It has failed listeners by being complicit in this deceitful, unethical scheme and it will have to work hard to regain the public’s trust.  

Links to all my blogs: www.KurtButlerBlogs.blogspot.com. 

For more detailed critiques of various forms of quackery, including naturopathy, see my book A Consumer’s Guide to “Alternative Medicine”. It was expertly edited by legendary quack buster Stephen Barrett, MD.  The critics say:

"Superb!" -- Dr. Victor Herbert in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Excellent" -- National Council Against Health Fraud.

"Five Stars" -- Cooking Light.

"Thought provoking; a great book" -- American Journal of Health Promotion.  

When the book was published almost 30 years ago it was strongly praised by responsible health experts and the rare responsible media, but trashed by new-age critics and even vandalized in bookstores by new-age fanatics. It is as true and relevant as ever, and has been mostly vindicated by time. Yet my courageous and far-sighted publisher, the venerable Prometheus Books, is still sitting on lots of copies. Please help validate their integrity by buying a copy. Or two or more as gifts. Perhaps 10 for your local school library and health classes. See their website for assorted discounts. Make them an offer. (My royalties are insignificant; this little promo is for the benefit of one of the world's great publishers, Prometheus Books.) 

Maui's future foretold: Barbarians In Paradise -- Terror Comes to Maui. This is a prophetic flash novel about a future police state and those who rebel against it. Available in paperback and ebook at Amazon.com.