Busted Hustler: Ben Carson Lies about His Quack Cancer Cure Endorsement

by Nomad

Questions have emerged about Ben Carson's endorsements of a fraudulent cancer cure product. For his part, Carson denies any relationship with the company, despite plenty of evidence.

During the debates the other night, Dr. Ben Carson was asked about his relationship with a Texas-based medical supplement maker, Mannatech, Inc.

"It's absurb," he replied, "that I had any kind of relationship with them. Do I take the product? Yes, I think it's good product." 

Carson called the claims "total propaganda."

And when the moderator pointed out that he was on the product's website, Carson maintained that: 

"If somebody put me on the homepage, it was without my permission."

The crowd clearly came out in support of Carson who used that to ignore any further questions on the matter.    

Intimidated by the audience, the moderator backed off, much to Carson's relief.

Although Carson's image has recently been scrubbed from the Mannatech site, the video of his endorsement is still available. It is not simply a matter of somebody hijacking a photo of a doctor. It is an endorsement of a product. 

In the video, Carson plainly states:

The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they recognize that when God made us he gave us the right fuel. ..What the company is doing is trying to find a way to restore natural diet as a medicine.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Carson went even further in paid speeches. He suggested that the product helped him overcome the symptoms of prostate cancer.

I started taking the product, and within about three weeks, my (cancer) symptoms went away.

Is that not an endorsement? To say that this testimonial was recorded without his permission is a blatant lie. 

And keep in mind, Carson was a doctor of some repute. His testimonial would carry much more wieght than, say, a housewife or a company salesperson.

Jim Geraghty of the National Review provides more information on the product and the manufacter.

In 2007, three years after Carson’s first dealings with Mannatech, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott sued the company and Caster, charging them with orchestrating an unlawful marketing scheme that exaggerated their products’ health benefits.

The petition makes eye-opening reading. Promotional testimonials, the lawsuit charges, made claims that the products have "cured, mitigated, treated or prevented diseases." These claims were bogus and were “not supported by legitimate scientific studies, nor are its products approved as drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Geraghty cites a 20/20 report which charges that Mannatech sales associates were peddling the company’s signature drug, Ambrotose, which “costs at least $200 a month,” as “a miracle cure that could fix a broad range of diseases, from cancer to multiple sclerosis and AIDS.”

ABCNews pointed out that in 2007 alone, Mannatech earned a staggering $415 million selling "selling sugar pills and powders made from larch bark and aloe, known as glyconutrients." 

Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a cancer treatment and research institution in New York City, states that there was "no evidence that glyconutrient products are effective as cancer treatment in humans." 

Two years later, in 2009, according to The Atlantic Monthly, Mannatech paid a $6 million settlement in 2009 and in exchange for no admission of wrongdoing the company agreed not to continue with such advertising or otherwise making unsupported claims.

Ben Carson Busted Hustling Bogus Cures For Christian Company

Despite all of this evidence, Dr. Carson maintained that he had no relationship with the company in question. Clearly untrue. 

UPDATE: Here's one of his promotional speeches for Mannatech. It's pretty much the smoking gun evidence that Carson's claim he had no relationship with the company is false. 

However, something he said caught my attention. At one point, he seems to say that he didn't have prostate cancer at all. That it was a misdiagnosis. He diagnosed himself actually.

Now here is the interesting part. He admits in this video (10:38) that in fact, an MRI scan revealed it to be a "congenital anomaly of the bone marrow" -a condition Carson was born with. That's not prostate cancer.

So I question whether Carson ever even had cancer at all.  

But there is yet another aspect of this story.

Diving into the archives, we see an article about Dr. Carson in Ebony magazine, dated January 2003. The article is entitled "Top Surgeon's Life-and-Death Struggle with Prostate Cancer."
In that article, Carson doesn't make any mention at all of taking any supplements of any kind. The closest he comes is this single sentence:

Carson changed his diet to include more organic fruits and vegetables.

He also reflects on the role of faith and family, but nothing about cancer-curing health tablets or Mannatech. Nada.

If you think about it, that's quite an oversight on Carson's part, not to recommend or even to mention in passing a product that he later claimed to have worked such a miracle.

For the suspicious, this might suggest that Carson never took the Mannatech product, then lied in his endorsement and is now lying about endorsing the product. 

If that theory is true, then Carson is simply proving the truth of Lincoln's famous quote: 

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

In any case, a successful liar should not be rewarded with the presidency.

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