For the past nine years, Kim Kardashian West has been on a very public crusade to find a cure for her own psoriasis, a journey that an estimated 7.5 million Americans can relate to. On Keeping Up with the Kardashians, her treatments have ranged from medical-grade cortisone injections and bottling up Costa Rican spring water to stealing her sister Kourtney's breast milk and splashing it onto her legs. On social media, she has posted about topical herbal treatments, smoothies, and an at-home UV light-therapy device.
On Sunday's episode of KUWTK, Kardashian West decides that consulting with a so-called "medical medium" is the next stop on her quest to calming her still-incurable condition. With Kourtney by her side, Kardashian West meets with Anthony William, who claims to be the first and only "medical medium," with 1.9 million Instagram followers and four books that have made it to the New York Times best-seller list.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
For the record, William is not a doctor, and has never attended medical school nor had any formal training. Rather, in an interview with Refinery29, William says that since the age of four, he has heard a voice that he refers to as "Spirit." He says that Spirit tells him advanced medical information — ahead of science and research, he claims — about people close by him. "Just like you’d hear your best friend talk to you in your ear, that's how I hear the voice," William says. "It’s not like other mediums, where they hear it inside their head or they get a vision or they see a color or see something like that. I’m hearing it as if someone’s talking to me. It’s actually quite annoying."
In the latest episode, you see William approach Kardashian West, close his eyes, and move his hands lightly over her body. This is how most of his initial analyses go, according to William, who also claims that Kardashian West reached out to him directly via Instagram to appear on the show.
"I'm not only hearing Spirit deliver the medical information, but I’m also busy looking for things inside the body," he says. "What happens is that I start going blind and there’s all this white light, and so I start losing my vision. When I lose my vision, Spirit is looking inside Kim’s liver and telling me what’s going on in there."
As you see on the show, he ends up telling Kardashian West that an abundance of copper in her liver is what's causing her psoriasis to flare up. While there's no telling if his diagnosis is accurate, studies have shown that there is a link between high serum copper levels and psoriasis. "The spirit is literally saying, 'Inside her liver, she has an abundance of toxic copper, and that’s what’s being released out to her skin in a process that’s occurring through a viral issue, which is causing this psoriasis,'" William says.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
His proposed cure? Drinking a lot of plain celery juice, which William believes contains a compound that can get rid of copper in the body over a long, indeterminate period of time. "It's the sodium cluster salt inside celery juice," he claims. "This miraculous phytochemical compound — I learned all this from Spirit — the sodium cluster salt enters the liver and binds onto copper, and starts to disarm copper and flush it out of the system so it’s not always going up to her skin."
William considers himself the originator of the "global celery juice movement," claiming that drinking it daily can help heal everything from psoriasis and acne to constipation and high blood pressure. Plenty of celebrities have publicly declared that they're on board with his plan, including Pharrell Williams, Miranda Kerr, and Debra Messing. And celery juice does have proven benefits: It's packed with chemical constituents that can help prevent ulcers and inflammation, in addition to containing a phytonutrient called phthalides that can actually reduce blood pressure. But is it the miracle, cure-all ingredient Williams claims it to be? Not necessarily, and it should be noted that many studies on celery juice have been done on rats and mice in a laboratory setting, so we don't know the long-term effects on humans yet.
Again, William is not a doctor, and has never attended medical school or medical classes. He is also not a trained nutritionist, and has never taken nutrition classes or courses. But nevertheless, his following is massive: According to William, in addition to those celebrity fans, he's met with 250,000 individuals in the past 35 years of marketing himself as a medical medium, all while selling books that spread the knowledge Spirit tells him and contain recipes for the juices he believes to be beneficial. He also has a number of YouTube videos that show anyone with internet access how to make these juices properly.
William says he first met Kardashian in late January or early February, and Kardashian West has posted multiple times about her psoriasis flare-ups since then. In mid-March, amidst one of these flare-ups, she actually posted about drinking a Blueberry Detox Smoothie, the recipe for which came from William himself. When we mentioned that Kardashian West still seemed to be struggling with the condition, William again noted that drinking celery juice has proven benefits over a long period of time — not just over a few weeks.
Of the nonbelievers, William says: "I don't blame them one bit. Everybody’s a skeptic about something. But these skeptics should take a look at the testimonials on Instagram from women who are telling their story, and they’re being honest and truthful and no one’s being paid to do it. No one’s being prompted. People’s lives are being turned around."