Webster Kehr

Anti-scientific works

Kehr is the author of two non-peer-reviewed on-line books, vanity publications available only through his own websites, The Detection of Ether, said to be about physics, and Hinged Sets and the Answer to the Continuum Hypothesis, said to be about theoretical mathematics. Kehr falsely claims to have disproved special relativity and photons, although both of these are well accepted scientifically and have long been verified experimentally and have led to important consequential discoveries.

In addition to his math- and physics-garbed pseudoscience, Kehr has also compiled several lengthy works which claim to disprove evolution and natural selection.

Anti-medical works

Kehr has put together a self-maintained website which falsely purports to offer cures for cancer and is vice-president of a non-arm's-length group called the Independent Cancer Research Foundation which opposes science-based medicine and for which he solicits donations. The so-called research foundation in fact has only two "researchers" — his daughter Martha Kehr, a creative writer with an interest in herbalism; and son-in-law Dustin Caddell, who answers the mail. Neither "researcher" claims academic credentials or a scientific background.

In a survey of websites purporting to offer "natural cancer cures," skeptic Robert Todd Carroll writes: "At the top of the heap is Webster Kehr's Cancer Tutor," which promotes proteolytic enzymes, despite there having been no well-designed studies showing that enzyme supplements are effective in treating cancer. As the American Cancer Society has found, "Experts question whether enzymes taken by mouth can reach tumours through the bloodstream, as the enzymes are broken down into amino acids before being absorbed in the intestine." While one animal study had found that rats with pancreatic cancer and fed pancreatic enzymes lived longer and had smaller tumours, a separate 1999 animal study found that oral pancreatic enzymes actually increased metastasis in rats with breast cancer. Then a controlled clinical trial, reported in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that human patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer who chose chemotherapy survived more than three times as long and had a better quality of life than did those who chose the fraudulent Gonzalez regimen of oral pancreas enzymes, dietary supplements and enemas.

One of the discredited "cancer cures" promoted by Kehr is the use of dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO) together with chlorine dioxide, vitamin C or colloidal silver. DMSO, however, is a fake cancer cure, according to both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the American Cancer Society. Note also that the Food and Drug Administration has twice warned against the use of the product "Miracle Mineral Supplement", or "MMS" — which, when prepared according to instructions, produces chlorine dioxide gas. MMS has been illegally marketed as a treatment for a variety of conditions, including HIV and cancer. Warning consumers that MMS can cause serious harm to health, the FDA has received numerous reports of nausea, diarrhea, severe vomiting and life-threatening low blood pressure resulting from its use.

Falsely claiming that his so-called cures for cancer are not only safer than medical treatment but supposedly more effective as well, Kehr baldly declares that patients with advanced cancer should use only discredited “remedies”, "such as the Cellect-Budwig protocol, the cesium chloride protocol, the Life One protocol of Dr. [James] Howenstine, the oleander protocol of Tony Isaacs, etc.", in place of proven techniques like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. However, "cellect" is only a quack nostrum made of shark cartilage, cynically marketed under the provably false claim that sharks do not get cancer; cesium chloride led to the deaths of 50 patients in an unvalidated cancer “treatment”; Howenstine is a discredited anti-fluoridation, anti-vaccine zealot and conspiracy theorist; and oleander is quite poisonous to humans and other mammals.

For someone holding a mathematics degree, Kehr also makes a rather basic mathematical error when he cites but misinterprets a reference paper, The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies. That paper showed that "curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy" made an estimated 2.1 percent contribution to the aggregated five-year survival rate of U.S. adults with numerous types of cancer, including those for which chemotherapy offers no incremental benefit. From that paper's calculated 2.1 percent rate, Kehr's website draws an astonishing and unwarranted conclusion: "In five years after diagnosis, 97.9% of the cancer patients treated with traditional cancer treatments, meaning those who trust the media and pharmaceutical industry, are dead." Of course, Kehr's defective arithmetic does not account for those who survived as a result of either surgery alone or of surgery plus radiation therapy — i.e., those who did not take chemotherapy.

Ties to Mormonism

Despite a disclaimer on his "Prophets or Evolution" web page that his books and articles "represent the opinions of the author" and risibly characterizing his own writing as "too scientific to be published or endorsed by the LDS church," on the same web page he boldly (and redundantly) declares: "Does the Mormon church have a creation scientist? Webster Kehr is the Creation Scientist of the Mormon Church. The Creation Scientist of the Mormon Church is Webster Kehr."

Co-religionist Jordan Roberts, medical student at the University of Arizona, responds by labelling Kehr as an outright quack. “What we have here is no inspired genius, no scientific revolution, no evidence, no workable, peer-reviewed, tested hypothesis for anything useful. No, what we have here is a self-styled ‘intellectual,’ who understands just enough about science to be dangerous — the kind of person you wouldn't want to be chemistry partners with. He knows just enough about science to misconstrue it, and mislead those who know even less than he does — a true quack.” “I have learned enough about the method employed by scientists, and the scientific community, to know that if it can't be reproduced; if it can't be supported by evidence; if it can't be tested; if it lies in the face of other accepted and supported hypotheses, and makes not attempt to reconcile and explain these disparities, then it is not science: it is speculation. Men are free to speculate, but science is not like politics or religion: science need not give equal time and consideration to the musings and whims of anybody and everybody.” Roberts concludes by stating that Kehr’s peculiar views on evolution, couched as they are in such phrases as “An LDS perspective,” may tend to confuse the public about church views on the scientific method and hence tend to place the Mormon Church in a bad light.

Self-published pseudoscience works