Ramanand Jhingade

Ramanand Rao V. Jhingade (रामानंद झिङदे rāmānanda jingade) is a Bangalore-based naturopath and hypnotherapist specializing in all sorts of various quack medical "cures". According to his website, he is an "M.D.(Hom.), Incurable[1] Healer, Hypnotherapist, Qualified Doctor and Homeopath."[2] Jhingade has a marginal presence on the internet, running a website that promotes pseudoscience and extraordinary medical claims.

Against allopathy
Alternative medicine
Clinically unproven
v - t - e

Or, to give his own description of himself:

“”Dr.Râmānând Rāô V. Jhingādé (also known as Dr. Râmānând Rāô J.V.) is a Qualified, Licensed Homeopathic Doctor and Hypnotherapist. He also practises Herbalism, Bach Flower remedies, does Past Life Regressions, teaches Stress Control, Meditation, how to improve Memory & Concentration, find a most satisfying job without much effort, learn speed reading, learn remote viewing/see places far away (sitting wherever one is — with eyes closed), Telepathy (mind reading/sending messages), how to stop smoking, lose/gain weight, improve confidence, regress to a past life (especially to solve problems that one has in this life related to a past life), find lost objects, get answers for the unsolvable, get whatever through guided visualization (a car, a house, money etc.), E.S.P. (Clairvoyance, Sixth sense, Intuition etc.) and so on etc.[3]

Yeah, get ready for a lot of woo.

Website claims

Jhingade argues, among other things, that by following his treatments patients can be "cured of any 'incurable' disease." While some of his shtick is the same tired woo seen across the internet such as stress reduction and weight loss, Jhingade has taken it to a new level.

Generalised woo

His non-medical woo seems to be largely based on hypnosis, though with a liberal mixture of other insane pseudoscientific ideas. Some of the more bizarre include:[4]

  • "Find a most satisfying job without much effort"
  • "Learn remote viewing"
  • "Learn telepathy and ESP"
  • "Get whatever through guided visualization (a car, a house, money etc.)"
  • "Regress to a past life"
  • "Get answers for the unsolvable" (Though what the hell this is actually supposed to mean is anybody's guess.)

Medical woo and incredible claims

While the idea that people can gain superhero-like psychic powers is laughable, Jhingade also pushes a darker brand of woo and quack medicine. He makes dangerous farcical claims about being able to cure a range of incurable and/or lethal diseases, including cancer, cirrhosis, heart problems, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases, and kidney failure, mostly through the administration of homeopathy distilled water.[4]

AIDS

While Mr. Jhingade is not shy about making extravagant claims of being able to cure a wide range of incurable diseases, his stance on AIDS is a little more ambiguous. The relevant page,[5] while attempting to give readers the impression that he can treat the illness, nowhere actually seems to carry the explicit claim that he can cure the disease using distilled water. There is an open question about this matter on the talk page of this article and it would be interesting if he were to respond.

Results

Although his generalised woo will do no more than harm the wallets of his clients, his claims of being able to cure life-threatening illnesses with worthless treatments may delay standard, proven treatment and thereby cause significant harm or even loss of life. Should this happen Jhingade would cross the line from being a harmless crank to something far worse.

Ramanand Jhingade vs. the Internet

While his website is a good source for discredited and patently absurd medical and psychic treatments, Jhingade's primary claim to fame is his tireless crusade to defend homeopathy and other alternative medicine on the internet, primarily through blogs and wikis.

He first showed up at Wikipedia putting links to random homeopathic sites and "on-line books" all over talk pages.[6] He was quickly banned for sockpuppetry[7] and spamming.[8]

After failing at Wikipedia, he turned to the blogs where he ranted about his ill-treatment by the conspiracy of skeptics, and spammed links to his website calling for a general uprising and imploring people to buy his products.[9]

Some time later Jhingade's venue of choice switched to Citizendium, where he and Dana Ullman took up the banner for homeopathy, much to the chagrin of the few remaining rational members. Dana Ullman has been relatively inactive at Citizendium, and there is a one-year moratorium on edits to the homeopathy article. Mr. Jhingade has also called out RationalWiki, in general for unfavorable coverage of Citizendium and in particular for analysis of the "expert" crank magnet it has become.[10] In calling RationalWiki out, he also issued legal threats against the RationalMedia Foundation, though he never followed through. Those amused by unsubstantiated, outraged ranting may also like to peruse the comments someone claiming to be Jhingade left on the talk page of this article.

He is not restricting himself to homeopathy alone at CZ, having posted an article about Pranic Healing, for which deletion has been requested as spam.[1]img For those amused by inane, meaningless, new-age blather here is an extract from his attempted CZ article:

“”Master Choa Kok Sui developed Arhatic Yoga®, a system of practices to help seekers on the spiritual path expand their consciousness and work toward achieving soul-realization. Arhatic Yoga is a scientific synthesis of yogic practices to safely accelerate the spiritual development of practitioners. The practice of Arhatic Yoga is said to balance aspects of Universal Love, Intelligence and Will. Practitioners aim to develop higher intuition, advanced mental faculties, qualities of good character and progress towards realizing their true potential as Beings of Divine Love, Light and Power.

Quackery, homeopathy and qualifications

Homeopathy itself is an archetypal quack treatment, as we explain in detail, but in brief there are two general reasons for it being quackery and an additional one in the case of Ramanand Jhingade:

  • Mechanism. The idea behind homeopathy is that the more dilute a "medicine" is the more powerful it becomes. Modern science suggests that this is an absurdity.
  • Effectiveness. Homeopathic medicines do not work.[11](See our Homeopathy article for more details.)
  • Grandiose claims. Jhingade takes all this to another level by making grandiose, unbelievable claims of being able to "cure" diseases which he himself describes as "incurable".

Given that the theory behind the treatment is implausible, that the treatment does not work and the additional implausible grandiose claims made for it, it is reasonable to regard it as quack medicine. Nevertheless, homeopaths do award each other qualifications in this pseudoscience and we do not doubt that Mr. Jhingade holds such a quack pseudoscientific qualification. But the holding of a quack qualification does not mean that he does not practice quackery — on the contrary, it confirms it.

Claimed Qualifications

Various qualifications have been claimed for Mr. Jhingade, and have variously appeared on his website, changing between M.D. (Nat.) and M.D. (Hom.) as he likes. Holding both would suggest he put both down, rather than one or the other, but anyone can assign a doctorate for anything… it's the accreditation and acceptance of an institute that makes a qualification valid.

  • M.D.(Nat.): A Medicinæ Doctor of Naturopathy, from an unknown institute.
  • M.D.(Hom.): A Medicinæ Doctor of Homeopathy from Sri SaiNath Post-Graduate Institute of Homeopathy.

Note that neither of these "M.D."s would qualify Mr. Jhingade to practice modern medicine in any country.

Proper spelling of Mr. Jhingade's name

Some have proposed spellings for Mr. Jhingade's name as "Ramanand Jhingadé" or even of "Râmānând Rāô V. Jhingādé". There is however insufficient evidence for any of these alternate spellings.

Critically, Mr. Jhingade's name cannot be properly written with Latin letters, and thus some variations can be expected when rendering it as such — this is a completely normal issue in transliteration. However, having his "practice" in Bangalore, there are a number of languages that are spoken in that area: Kannada, Hindi, English, Telegu, Tamil, and Konkani. None of these languages use circumflex diacritics in transliterations, although they do use macrons for long vowels. (One macron in the purposed hyper-diacriticized version does correspond with "Ramaanand" from one genuine webpage.[2] Using doubled vowels is a common variation of using a macron diacritic, as well as simply dropping diacritics.) Wiktionary supplies some further input about the possible origins of the last name "Jhingade"[12] as Gujarati, and Marathi, which also fail to use circumflex diacritics.

The truth is that known-good representations of Mr. Jhingade's name regularly appear without diacritics at all, especially on CitiZendium, where it is known that he contributes. However, without the true representation of his name in the original script no definitive answer can be given.

gollark: Oh, it must have memetic hazard filters.
gollark: * perfection
gollark: The sheer pefection.
gollark: I don't know if my brain could take it.
gollark: (also, I suspect there may be *some* weirdness you haven't caught, knowing your WONDROUS AND PERFECT CODE)

See also
  • As alluded to above several times, this article's talk page.

References
  1. Yes, that actually means he claims to cure things that are incurable.
  2. The good "doctor's" websiteimg
  3. Ramanand Jhingade's Citizendium User Pageimg
  4. Ramanand Jhingade's websiteimg
  5. Jhingade on aidsimg
  6. Jhingade spamming wikipedia
  7. Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Dr.Jhingaadey
  8. Jhingade's Wikipedia user talk page with discussion of block for spamming
  9. See comments section for Jhingade's spam
  10. Jhingade calling out RationalWiki at CZ
  11. Impartial UK government report which confirms homeopathy does not work
  12. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Jhingade
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