So who on earth is the Barefoot Doctor?

Or, come to that, the mysterious Angie and Jules who are so enthusiastic about Rachel Willis – she of Angel Energy Practitioner course fame? For on her personal Channelled Guidance website, these people are quoted as writing:

“You can totally trust her wisdom and knowledge of universal truth”
Barefoot Doctor

“That was absolutely amazing.”
Angie

“Wow Rachel – you are one talented intuitive.”
Jules

Yes, I know, you’d expect to find the same quotes on an astrology website. Frankly, I can’t see the difference, apart from the woomeister not even pretending to make calculations based on the positions of the stars. By the way, Rachel, if you read this: FAIR USE. Should you feel yet again tempted to issue a demand for immediate takedown, I would respectfully refer you to the relevant jurisprudence, which is the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

So, to get back to the matter in hand, who in the name of sweet holy fuck is this Barefoot Doctor? Willis doesn’t actually provide a link to information about this person, which is odd. I mean, if such an august-sounding personage in the happy-hoppy world was saying nice things about me as a humble practitioner of woo looking to build up a practice, I’d be linking to them like billy-ho.

Yet here we have nothing. Not a fucking sausage. Strange.

Searching the Web – and by the way, Google, your ‘personalized search’ idea sucks dead elephants through a pipette – we find that ‘barefoot doctor’ is a generic term for Chinese farmers who received minimal basic medical and paramedical training in order to ensure rural communities had at least some healthcare; according to Wikipedia anyway. Caveat lector, as always, but you get the idea.

There is a woomeister in the UK who calls himself The Barefoot Doctor, despite not actually being a doctor, probably not even in the fairly lax sense that it was used for the real ‘barefoot doctors’. His name is apparently Stephen Russell, and he’s into Taoism. And, er, other things according to the rather colourful story revealed by fellow quackbashers The Holford Watch: Barefoot, Sex, Sleaze and Life’s 4 Living.

Fortunately for all of us, in this particular instance I think there has been an exchange of advertising, rather than bodily fluids. In the wootastic Links section of his site (where Willis and her various websites aren’t otherwise mentioned, as far as I can tell), Russell links to a two-page spread about himself in the June 2010 edition of Willis’s Light Worker Magazine. Apart from being vitalistic woomeisters, the two don’t seem to have a lot in common. Look at the testimonials. While Russell claims a client wrote this:

By using the techniques in Manifesto, along with some my wife did for me, I worked very hard writing a novel, and visualising a massive book deal for myself, as well as seeing my book on the shelves in Waterstones etc. In August 2007, after a bidding war between 6 major publishers, my book was sold to Preface, part of Random House, the biggest publisher in the UK, for a six figure deal. I am busy writing the second novel now (it’s a trilogy) and am planning to start manifesting the film deal soon.

Thanks to the Barefoot Doc for helping me to learn how to manifest! Ben

… which of course absolutely does not smack of “use my method and become rich and famous” in any way at all, while Willis publishes testimonials like this (on The Food Intuitive, aka diets magically intuited by email for ONLY £85):

“Mr F was an active executive leading a happy life with his beautiful family and stunning home. He was turning 40 years old and came to see Rachel after looking in the mirror one day with the discovery that somehow over the course of the past few years his waistline had grown, almost without him realising.

He knew popular opinion was that beyond a certain age weight gain is inevitable, but he wasn’t so sure. And so it proved. He learned – based on Rachel’s reading of his energies – that he needed to eat more, more often, and to cut out coffee because this was so toxic to his system that fat cells were created to store the toxins and keep them from damaging his precious internal organs. After only 4 weeks, he shed 2 stone – feeling and looking like a 20 year old again!”

Yes, that is the font colour used for several testimonials on the webshite. Sorry. Now, I picked the testimonial above because:

• Losing 2 stones, i.e. 28 lbs or 12.75 kg, in a month is dangerous for your health
• As Sceptical Letter Writer points out, it’s a breach of the advertising codes to claim a weight loss from a diet of more than 2 lbs (1 kg) a week in the UK

I understand someone else has already made a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority over the claims, real and implied, on that site. What else? Healing IBS? Really?

Repulsive as he is, Russell seems at least to have the sense not to make specific claims to cure anything apart from a negative attitude on his webshite. Seriously, if he did endorse Willis’s particular brand of neo-judeochristian whackjobbery, then why? I can only conclude, in my deeply cynical way, that both find some financial interest in the deal, because their types of woo belong to totally different religions and traditions.

Or do they consider that using the word ‘spiritual’ covers a multitude of sins? I think it’s just another instance of woomeisters scratching each other’s backs (in a purely financial sense, obviously), just as the reiki crowd tend to also promote homeopathy, homeopaths are pally with herbalists, and herbalists… Well, you get the idea.

UPDATE 5 Feb. 2012 (because it’s just too funny/insane for words)

A two-day event was announced in Texas: Stephen Russell: Barefoot Doctor in Houston, Texas – The Tao of Healing through Sound and Movement + Taoist Manifesting & Magic.

Here are some choice extracts from the sales blurb:

This entire universe is built on a sound wave occurring at 50 octaves below human hearing.  Physicists call it the background radiation wave. Yogis call it the AUM (…)

Barefoot spontaneously heard the background radiation wave, the AUM when he was 6 years old (…)

… your five vital organs correspond to the five primordial elements which underlie all aspects of existence, the five ‘God Particles’ recently discovered by physicists working at the CERNE [sic] particle collider in Switzerland (…)

by healing your organs you automatically heal all aspects of your life: the physical, psychological, emotional, personal, social, professional and financial.

And with that breathtaking display of bareback WTF without a safety net, I leave you, good people.