Ramanand Jhingade

I used to hallucinate (even if there was no cup and saucer in front of me, I was drinking imaginary sips of tea/coffee from it) and talk irrelevantly, according to my relatives (I don't remember most of the things I did at that time). The Psychiatrists my sister took me to, diagnosed me to be Schizophrenic. She then happened to take me to 'A to Z Polyclinic' and overnight, I became alright. 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 Healer, Hypnotherapist, Qualified Doctor and Homeopath." Jhingade has a marginal presence on the internet, running a website that promotes pseudoscience and extraordinary medical claims.

Or, to give his own description of himself:

Yeah, get ready for a lot of woo.

Claimed qualifications
Various qualifications have been claimed for 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 Jhingade to practice modern medicine in any country.

Quackery
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.
 * 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 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.

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:
 * "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.

AIDS
While 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, 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. He was quickly banned for sockpuppetry and spamming.

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.

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. 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. In calling out RationalWiki, 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 this article's talk page.

He is not restricting himself to homeopathy alone at CZ, having posted an article there about pranic healing, which was deleted as spam. For those amused by inane, meaningless, new-age blather here is an extract from his attempted CZ article:

Proper spelling of Jhingade's name
Some have proposed spellings for 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, Jhingade's name cannot be properly written with Latin letters, and thus some variations can be expected when rendering it as such &mdash; 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. 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" as Gujarati, and Marathi, which also fail to use circumflex diacritics.

The truth is that known-good representations of Jhingade's name regularly appear without diacritics at all, especially on Citizendium, to which he has contributed spam. However, without the true representation of his name in the original script no definitive answer can be given.