I only now learned of the death of one of the most bizarre proponents that the cult of homeopathy has ever produced in its 200-year history. From his official obituary, one would not suspect much weirdness:
John R. Benneth passed away Nov. 9, 2021 in Chico, Calif., after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
John shepherded the Pixieland Theatre in Lincoln City for many years, writing, directing, and acting in plays that kept audiences coming back. He appeared often on stage in Portland and became a familiar face in local and national commercials. In the mid-1980s he was the host, writer, and creative force behind The Portland Underground, a weekly, live, late-night local access show. He gave many local actors a chance to stretch their improv talents on that and his earlier show, Mysterious Planet. His was the voice of both Portland Talk Radio’s controversial Jack Hammer, and Kandu the Mystic. He later performed regularly as Mark Twain in Virginia City, Nev., and on cruises on Lake Tahoe. John started working as a private investigator in Portland in 1978, and in 1982, he founded the National Missing Children’s Locate Center, helping parents to find their children across the U.S. He later became internationally known for his research into and advocacy for Homeopathic Medicine and was invited to present a treatise on the subject at London’s Oxford University in 2010.
John was a member of both Hawthorne and Washington Masonic lodges and the Scottish Rite of Portland.
He was preceded in death by his parents, John and Bettiana Benneth; and by his wife, Catherine Benneth. He is survived by his brother, David; and his four sons, Horatio, Merlin, Cyrano and Evan.
The ‘Bolen report’ offers a little more, albeit weirdly unreliable information:
John Benneth, PG Hom.- London (Hons) is the renowned discoverer of the link between Homeopathy and Conventional Ionic Chemistry.
The first to accept a notorious challenge to Homeopathy, he forced the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), in 1999, to back down from a spurious offer to award $1,000,000 for a test identifying homeopathic solutes from their liquid aqueous vehicles.
In 2010, by invitation of Nobel laureate physicist Brian Josephson at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, he presented the Supramolecular Chemistry of the Homeopathic Remedy revealing structural changes and the physics of hydrolysis and molecular self assembling chain reactions.
He is the author of Ebola Prophylaxis and Cure detailing the use of FDA approved homeopathic pharmaceuticals in the treatment of hemorrhagic fevers, presented in advance of the reported successful use of homeopathic remedies to cure Ebola.
He is a proponent for the use of homeopathic pharmaceuticals to cure sepsis and other dire conditions for conventional use in hospital emergency and intensive care, and the Ionic Vaccine for the safe and effective non-molecular prevention of epidemic diseases.
To estimate the true extent of Benneth’s eccentricity, we need to read some of the posts by John himself johnbenneth.wordpress.com. Alternatively, we might access some of his appearances on youtube, quackometer, or even just a post I published several years ago.
I am sad that John is gone. I always thought he was mad like a hatter, but he had me in stitches whenever our paths crossed.
13 Responses to John R. Benneth (1952 – 2021)
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Benneth “forced the JREF to back down”?
News to me.
to me too!
it must be one of the many inventions of crazy John
https://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/benneth.htm
“Mr Benneth is famous for two reasons. The first is that he claims to have found a proof of homeopathy. This would be enough to get him into the list, but he has compounded the error by claiming that he has won the James Randi $1,000,000 Challenge and that Randi will not pay him. The facts are that Benneth refuses to comply with the rules for the challenge. He seems to be under the misapprehension that the challenge should be run with Benneth’s rules and Randi’s money” (emphasis added)
Nothing new here, in other words, just the usual untruths and gratuitous claims from an alternative believer.
Indeed. Having a sniff round..
“Mr Benneth is famous for two reasons. The first is that he claims to have found a proof of homeopathy. This would be enough to get him into the list, but he has compounded the error by claiming that he has won the James Randi $1,000,000 Challenge and that Randi will not pay him. The facts are that Benneth refuses to comply with the rules for the challenge. He seems to be under the misapprehension that the challenge should be run with Benneth’s rules and Randi’s money”
Same old John.
It would be nice to dig out the evisceration Thomas Mohr once delivered to John on this blog. It was brutal stuff. And thoroughly deserved.
RIP. Homeopathy was so close to a solution for his disease, so sorry, he was very young. No mention of his graduate school of homeopathy, any college.
So, are we to conclude that of all diseases, homeopathy can’t cure Parkinson’s?
Sad to say, given the rhetoric surrounding homeopathy as the panacea that gets to the ‘root cause’ of ‘dis-ease’ it fails spectacularly when confronted by genuine illness instead of the lucrative minor troubles of the worried well.
As ever with the homeoloons. Insulin-dependant diabetic homeopath Chris Wilkinson refused to contradict Baggie when she claimed homeopathy could cure diabetes. Dutch homeopath Kaviraj relied on his sugar pills to treat his cancer and died a lingering and painful death. Many more similar tales are out there as we know.
Some of his later videos indicate that the man was severely challenged and suffering psychologically/mentally.
I hope he got good help in his last years.
Indeed. it was fairly plain that John walked a fine line with his mental health. We did wonder if his periodic lengthy absences from the keyboard were indicative of his having been hospitalised. I know of at least one skeptic who lived not too far away from him and was genuinely scared of what he might do.
I looked at this YouTube video by Mr Benneth https://youtu.be/lpC8BvHyorg
I realised I had watched it before, found it gobbledygook, and that the question I posed there two years ago is in fact the most recent comment there.
Mr Benneth in his responses to some other questions in the Comments, commends questioners on the intelligence of their questions. He didn’t commend me for my very simple and straightforward question. And nor, gentle readers, did he ever answer it…….
You guys realize he had a brother and four sons, right? Maybe you could think about the people grieving for the loss of a human before publicly mocking him and his death. How would you like it if someone was mocking your deceased loved one? And this is coming from someone he hurt deeply.
I see no mockery in the thread. And if you think that’s mockery, you should see what we said to him when he was alive.