A board-certified physician with a clean fifty-year licence, advertising a certification from a body that stated it certified nobody, an affiliation with an industry built on prescribing hormones, an anti-vaccine resource page — and treatment of atrial fibrillation without prescription drugs.
Dr Moshe Dekel is a board-certified obstetrician and gynaecologist practising in Bohemia, on Long Island, with a second location at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. He qualified at the University of Bologna in 1975, interned at Long Island College Hospital, completed a residency in Brooklyn, and held appointments as an assistant clinical professor at Stony Brook, chief of gynaecologic surgery at a Long Island surgical centre, and medical director of a Long Island birthing centre.
He holds New York medical licence 132814. He has no disciplinary history of any kind. We say that at the top rather than the bottom, because it is true and because everything that follows has to be read in its light.
In 2000, after roughly a quarter-century in obstetrics and gynaecology, he stopped performing surgery and deliveries and moved into what his website calls holistic and integrative medicine. In 2003 he introduced breast thermography to Long Island. What he advertises today is a long list, and four items on it are worth examining closely.
His homepage and his about page both state that he is a DAN-certified practitioner — Defeat Autism Now. He lists autism and ADHD among his specialties.
Defeat Autism Now was a protocol introduced in 1995 by Bernard Rimland, a psychologist and founder of the Autism Research Institute. It promoted a biomedical approach to autism — restrictive diets, supplements, detoxification, and, most controversially, chelation therapy. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned against it.
Two things then happened, and both are on the record.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2010 | The Autism Research Institute announced it would stop using the name. Its stated reasons: it did not accurately describe the approach; some people found the phrase offensive; and the Divers' Alert Network, which claimed ownership of the word “DAN,” had asked it to stop. |
| 2010 | ARI resolved to freeze the clinician registry and remove it from its website — because there was no uniform way patients were subsequently treated, because people were reading the registry as a list of recommended doctors, and because ARI did not certify doctors and could not assure that every practitioner on the list provided high-quality service. |
| January 2011 | The programme was discontinued and the registry closed. The registry had listed people who attended DAN! clinical seminars. |
We make no comment on Dr Dekel's competence in treating anyone. The point is narrower and entirely about the word: a patient reading “DAN-certified” is being told something that sounds like a qualification and was expressly disclaimed as one by the organisation that ran it.
His about page states that he is part of a new approach in age management medicine pioneered by Cenegenics.
Cenegenics was founded in Las Vegas in the late 1990s by a radiologist, and sells hormone programmes, supplements and executive evaluations. It has been the subject of a 60 Minutes segment and long-running scrutiny. Its founder told Newsweek it was treating around two thousand patients for growth hormone deficiency.
Set that number beside the epidemiology. Adult growth hormone deficiency — caused by disease or damage to the pituitary gland — is thought to affect roughly three adults in every ten thousand.
Human growth hormone has approved uses. Anti-aging, bodybuilding and athletic enhancement are not among them, which is why coverage of this field has repeatedly described it as operating at or beyond the edge of what is lawful. In 2001 an American network news programme sent a 57-year-old woman to a Cenegenics clinic; she was given $1,500 of testing and offered a hormone and forty-pill-a-day supplement programme costing $1,500 a month.
Under Resources, his website carries a page headed with the question whether you should need an exemption to say no to a mask or a vaccine.
It summarises an article by a holistic paediatrician, and its source link goes to the website of an integrative medical centre run by one of the best-known anti-vaccine campaigners in the United States. The page sets out five recommendations for resisting mask and vaccine mandates: demand evidence from media outlets; contact state and federal legislators and let them know you are watching how they vote; talk to others and share your beliefs; challenge whether mandates are constitutional and raise funds should legal action become necessary; and network with people who hold similar views. Mandates are framed as promoting a political agenda rather than public health.
The original article dates from August 2020. The website carrying it was rebuilt in October 2025, and the page was carried across.
That sentence appears in the vision and mission statement on his about page, capitalised as shown. The practice, it says, addresses core issues naturally and does not try to kill symptoms.
Now read the rest of the site. The Resources menu carries pages on atrial fibrillation and on hypertension. The about page lists diabetes, thyroid and adrenal dysfunction, chronic pain, obesity and high blood pressure among the conditions treated. The services page adds prolotherapy, platelet-rich plasma and stem cell therapy.
A practice advertising that it treats these conditions and does not use prescription drugs is making a statement patients will act on. We do not know, and do not assert, what Dr Dekel actually does for any individual patient — that is between him and them, and the sentence on the website may be looser than the practice behind it. We are reporting what the website tells a prospective patient before they walk in.
Read the four items together and two of them contradict each other, on the same website.
The rest of this section is our argument. Everything above is drawn from published material and can be checked.
What makes this practice worth documenting is not any one of the four items. It is that they are the same mechanism four times over.
A test or a category produces a finding, and the finding produces a sale. Thermography grades a woman's breast risk, and the clinic sells the consultation that lowers the grade. Age management medicine measures hormones against an optimal range rather than a normal one, and sells the hormones that close the gap. A biomedical autism protocol identifies a toxic burden, and sells the treatment that removes it. In each case the finding is generated by the same person who sells the remedy, and in each case the measurement has never been validated against any outcome that matters.
That is the engine this site has documented in a dozen other places — in provoked urine testing for autism, where a chelating agent is given before the sample is taken so the result is guaranteed to look abnormal, and in live blood analysis, where the artifacts on the slide sell the supplements. One practice on Long Island runs four versions of it at once.
And the credentials work the same way. A private academy issues a certificate in thermography. A private council calls itself self-regulatory. A seminar attendance list becomes a certification. None of these bodies can discipline anyone, and none of them assessed anybody's competence — but each supplies a word that a patient will read as a qualification.
The practice: drdekel.com — home, about, services and resources pages, consulted 27 July 2026 and captured. Page assets dated October 2025. Licence number and disciplinary status from the New York State licence verification.
Defeat Autism Now: the Autism Research Institute's own 2010 announcement of the name change and the freezing of the clinician registry, including its stated reasons, as documented by Quackwatch; contemporaneous reporting of the programme's discontinuation in January 2011; the American Academy of Pediatrics' position.
Age management medicine: contemporaneous reporting in Newsweek, CBS News and CNN on Cenegenics and human growth hormone, including the founder's own statements; Quackwatch's file on growth hormone marketing, which records the 2001 network news test visit; and Cenegenics' own published statement of its prescribing position, quoted above.
The resource page: drdekel.com, Resources section, fetched and read in full 27 July 2026, including its source attribution.
QuackeryWatch corrects errors on the record rather than quietly. If any statement here misdescribes a published page, write and we will check it against the page and correct anything we have got wrong.