There are instances where people here in the UK have built successful media careers based on fake doctorates that they purchased from unaccredited online universities and colleges.
One example is "Dr" Gillian McKeith an multi-millionaire celebrity dietician who assesses the health of her patients by examining their turds. McKeith made a fortune via TV shows and appearances, books and a variety of snake oil cures and so called health foods.
There is a great article about her by Ben Goldacre (a real doctor) below
What’s wrong with Dr Gillian McKeith PhD?
February 18th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in adverts, bad science, channel 4, gillian mckeith, nutritionists, PhDs, doctors, and qualifications, stifling criticism | 314 Comments »
For years, ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith has used her title to sell TV shows, diet books and herbal sex pills. Now the Advertising Standards Authority has stepped in. Yet the real problem is not what she calls herself, but the mumbo-jumbo she dresses up as scientific fact, says Ben Goldacre
Ben Goldacre
Monday February 12, 2007
The Guardian
Call her the Awful Poo Lady, call her Dr Gillian McKeith PhD: she is an empire, a multi-millionaire, a phenomenon, a prime-time TV celebrity, a bestselling author. She has her own range of foods and mysterious powders, she has pills to give you an erection, and her face is in every health food store in the country. Scottish Conservative politicians want her to advise the government. The Soil Association gave her a prize for educating the public. And yet, to anyone who knows the slightest bit about science, this woman is a joke.
One of those angry nerds took her down this week. A regular from my website badscience.net – I can barely contain my pride – took McKeith to the Advertising Standards Authority, complaining about her using the title “doctor” on the basis of a qualification gained by correspondence course from a non-accredited American college. He won. She may have sidestepped the publication of a damning ASA draft adjudication at the last minute by accepting – “voluntarily” – not to call herself “doctor” in her advertising any more. But would you know it, a copy of that draft adjudication has fallen into our laps, and it concludes that “the claim ‘Dr’ was likely to mislead”. The advert allegedly breached two clauses of the Committee of Advertising Practice code: “substantiation” and “truthfulness”.
Is it petty to take pleasure in this? No. McKeith is a menace to the public understanding of science. She seems to misunderstand not nuances, but the most basic aspects of biology – things that a 14-year-old could put her straight on.
She talks endlessly about chlorophyll, for example: how it’s “high in oxygen” and will “oxygenate your blood” – but chlorophyll will only make oxygen in the presence of light. It’s dark in your intestines, and even if you stuck a searchlight up your bum to prove a point, you probably wouldn’t absorb much oxygen in there, because you don’t have gills in your gut. In fact, neither do fish. In fact, forgive me, but I don’t think you really want oxygen up there, because methane fart gas mixed with oxygen is a potentially explosive combination.
It is a very long article and you can read the rest here
http://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/The point I wanted to make was that I agree with dabosijigwokush and that most people either don't know about these fake qualifications or they don't care. In McKeith's case her fraudulent activities and claims were exposed long before she was eventually forced to stop calling herself "doctor" by the authorities. Nobody did anything to stop her simply because she was steering a huge, money making gravy train and all the various media people involved had no inclination to stop it as they were getting paid for as long as it continued to roll on its merry way.
