Complaint Review: Clarity LLC - Los Angeles CA

My opinion of Steve Ambrose DC is that he is a flim flam artist who misleads nonexperts into thinking that he has expertise in health care strategy and various other areas when he lacks the education, work experience and motivation to develop and follow through on actual projects.  Ambrose's initial career experience is from being a chiropractor.  He has a degree from Life University in Marietta, Georgia, which at the time he attended was the largest chiropractic school in the United States. 

Life had a major scandal around 2000 when it was discovered that they were defrauding students in order to promote insurance fraud by substituting boilerplate diagnosis for the differential diagnosis that was required by their accreditor the Council on Chiropractic Education.(1)  This was done to normalize and popularize an outdated style of chiropractic called straight chiropractic (as opposed to mixer chiropractic which is more akin to integrative medicine) which falsely promoted it as a panacea and prophylactic for nearly all diseases and as a treatment for osteoarthritis. 

The school temporarily lost accreditation after Ambrose graduated so he has little knowledge of evidence based diagnosis and treatment guidelines and a strong indoctrination in quackery and scams.



Ambrose's father, the late Robert "Bob" Ambrose had a successful straight chiropractic office located in Princeton, NJ and Steve, a mediocre college student, hoped to follow in his footsteps which led him to attend Life.  Steve was a true believer in the fraud so when the scandal came out around 2004 Ambrose continued to practice and refused to publicly condemn the abusive practices because that would diminish the prestige of his doctor title from Life which he used to inflate his credentials and promote himself as an expert to reporters on ergonomics, menstrual pain, back pain, headaches, ear infections, fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis.(2)(3)  Ambrose briefly worked for his father in New Jersey and then moved to Henrico, Virginia where he started Completely Natural Chiropractic PC where he continued to practice for nine years. (4) 

Steve Ambrose's grandiosity was not limited to exaggering his abilities as a clinician.  He has a string of failed business ventures that started with a brake light patent that was never commercialized which was followed in 2010 by a patent for an insurance system called ClaimCatcher which failed because it required new legislation to give insurance companies access to protected patient health information which Ambrose unsuccessfully lobbied for.  Despite its failure, Ambrose was able to raise $500,000 in funding and it was promoted by the now defunct company ICEX Inc. as its only product which was headed by his brother Michael Ambrose.

After failing to launch ClaimCatcher, Ambrose completed the Executive Program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management (4) and began a podcast called Red Hot Healthcare (5) where he promotes himself as a corporate business consulting expert in the healthcare industry and offers consulting services under the company Clarity LLC which he owns.  Aside from his limited experiences as a non-evidence based straight chiropractor and the brief executive course, Ambrose does not have any other qualifications in either healthcare business practices or journalism.  

Ambrose also promotes another business entity called Walk The Ridge (6) created by his wife Nellie Ambrose (7). The site offers training in civility and tolerance for conflict resolution, although she has no credentials in this area.  Nellie Ambrose's Linkedin profile shows her working as a marketing representative at IBM, an office manager for her husband and as the owner of Sweet Nellie's, another small failed business venture selling homemade cupcakes.  Not surprisingly, neither Steve or Nellie Ambrose have any qualifications in conflict resolution that would qualify them as experts in this area.

REFERENCES

1) An Open Letter to Life University Students and Graduates https://quackwatch.org/chiropractic/edu/botnick2/

2) Formerly http://doctorambrose.com/ archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20070125072054/http://doctorambrose.com/

3) Dr. Ambrose In The News https://web.archive.org/web/20111107145429/http://www.doctorambrose.com/news_apps.php

4) https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-steve/

5) https://walktheridge.com/

6) https://www.linkedin.com/in/nellie-ambrose/