#274: Joseph “Joe” Mercola

The Richard Hoagland of medicine, Joseph Mercola is an osteopath and a frighteningly popular alternative medicine guru and (more or less) cult leader. He advocates and takes seriously more or less any idiotic crackpot or anti-science idea he comes across, including but not limited to flu-denialism and anti-vaxx – even going so far as to work with Barbara Loe Fischer. He has claimed that modern medicine kills more people than it helps, that (consequently) BigPharma is really involved in a conspiracy to kill you/prevent you from accessing the real remedies, that the Pill is dangerous, that “toxic metals in vaccines and dental fillings” is the cause for a wide variety of ailments, that your shampoo is really dangerous, and that statin drugs are dangerous. He promotes, however, Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Technique.

His website (no, you don’t get a link) contains most branches of pseudoscience, all major sorts of crankery, every logical fallacy ever committed by man (some good ones in this), dishonesties and smearing. He claims to be uninterested in profit, but makes a lot of it from selling all sorts of bullshit remedies at a steep price. His trust in the naturalistic fallacy suppresses any real science or scientific evidence he may come across. His dietary advice adds random assertions to the naturalistic fallacy, and is in conflict with any advice given by serious organizations (rather, he thinks, people should eat … the products he sells). He also – obviously – peddles homeopathy (the piece commented on in this link was written by Amy Lansky and endorsed by Mercola) and the thoroughly debunked raw-milk idiocy (the idiocy here is pasted on pretty thickly).

Despite his denialism and anti-science stance (or because of it) Mercola has many supporters, especially among the delusional, the paranoid (whose distrust of government is so entrenched that they trust the word of any non-government-affiliated crackpot), New Agers (who are generally both) and other critical-thinking-challenged groups. He has even attempted to pander to the religious through the ridiculously distortive screed discussed here. He is pretty good at following the fads and exploiting current trends and fears, and has been voted the no.10 “game changer” by readers of the Huffington Post, which tells you more about HuffPo’s health section than Mercola. More here.

His popularity stems from a combination of idiots, his authorship of two New York Times bestsellers (“The No-Grain Diet” (with Alison Rose Levy) and “The Great Bird Flu Hoax”), and a stinking pile of other books. He has also been featured on several of the more woo-friendly TV shows, including Mehmet Oz’s show.

Diagnosis: Looking more and more like a cultmaster, Mercola is an addle-brained and chronically misguided woo-meister. He is severely dangerous, however, insofar as he has managed to gather a frighteningly substantial herd of followers.

#556: Natasha Campbell-McBride

Continuing our foray into slightly less prominent (but not necessarily less nefarious) enemies of reason and science, we present to you Natasha Campbell-McBride, a physician who is perhaps most famous for appearing in one of Joe Mercola’s videos explaining how she cured her son of autism. In her explanation, she perpetuates most of the myths concerning autism, and commits most of the fallacies associated with inductive reasoning – thus providing Mercola with another testimonial of the kind Mercola relies on. Campbell-McBride falls hard for the myth of the autism epidemic; she suggests that there is no genetic component to autism, and prefers to run with a toxins gambit instead. She’s even come up with her own syndrome: Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) (her private invention; do try to ask her about evidence), and as it turns out she has – in typical crackpot vein – developed a whole industry of dietary woo to treat it (but – of course – no trials or anything remotely suggesting that she is in any way close to correct). Her book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome Book: Natural Treatment For: Autism, ADD, ADHD Depression, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Schizophrenia, tells us how she’s apparently able to treat them all.

Yes, Campbell-McBride is another one of those woo-masters who have located The One True Source of All Disease, and on her website , Doctor-Natasha.com, you will find her claim to be able to treat anything from acne to depression to diabetes to autism to ADHD to schizophrenia to tummy pain. And in support of her hypothesis? Testimonials, of course. That, and Ancient Wisdom.

Her views on vaccines are discussed in detail here, and her diet has received some coverage here.

Diagnosis: I suppose that in order to count as a quack you have to intentionally mislead people, and it seems that Campbell-McBride believes that what she’s doing actually works. So we may have to have some discussion about labels.

#1577: Erin Elizabeth

A.k.a. The Health Nut

Erin Elizabeth is Joe Mercola’s girlfriend. Elizabeth runs healthnutnews, one of the currently more popular sites devoted to quackery and medical pseudoscience on the Internet, and is pushing pretty much the same line as Mercola with natural, untested “cures” for all sorts of ailments, backed up by pseudoscience, anecdotes, and occasional forays into technobabble. The website also pushes the usual science denialist stuff, including anti-GMO conspiracies.

Elizabeth is, however, particularly notable for pushing (though she doesn’t like being described that way) the conspiracy that Big Pharma (and possibly the government) was killing of alternative medicine doctors in 2015. The most prominent victims were Nicholas Gonzalez and autism quack Jeff Bradstreet, who, according to the police, committed suicide the day after the FDA raided his clinic but who, according to the conspiracy theorists, was probably assassinated. According to Elizabeth, JAQing off, at least five other quacks had died around the same time (under what she, as a conspiracy theorist, deemed to be suspicious circumstances), including chiropractor Baron Holt who Elizabeth admits “had been struggling with recent health issues” but “none were thought to be life threatening by loved ones” (my emphasis), and five more had gone missing. And the evidence for a conspiracy is as direct and non-convoluted as these things go; for instance: “Interestingly, Dr. Holt (33), lived in North Carolina; which is the state where Dr. Bradstreet’s body (the first doctor to be found) was discovered two days prior. Dr. Holt was visiting Jacksonville, Florida, though, when he died there. Dr. Bradstreet (see story #1) was living in Georgia, at the time of his death; and before that, he lived in the neighboring state of Florida.” You can’t argue with that. Naturally Elizabeth was “terrified” for Joe Mercola’s safety, since there is hardly any bigger quack in the US. Of course, given the number of chiropractors (60,000) and altmed practitioners (no clear number, but surely higher than that) in the US, pure chance will give you a couple of even violent deaths per year, and you can imagine what happens when Elizabeth, given her level critical thinking skills and the clustering illusion, starts keeping tabs.

The efforts of the Big Pharma hit squad culminated in a situation where participants at a German homeopath conference managed to amphetamine poison themselves – of course there is the distinct possibility that the participants took the drug, referred to as “Aqua Rust” or “2C-E“, willingly since it is a psychedelic drug that apparently produces LSD-type reactions; no one from the conference was willing to talk (for good reason, as the police cited all the seminar participants for violation of anesthesia laws and using illegal drugs may cost you your license to practice in Germany). Elizabeth concluded, naturally, that they must have been poisoned. Her version of the story was duly picked up by NaturalNews, who also added expert commentary from David Avocado Wolfe.

Diagnosis: A critical thinking trainwreck and pseudoscience promoter. Elizabeth is too smart to yell “conspiracy” outright, and will thus sometimes appear reasonable when compared to other people playing in her league (such Mike Adams or Alex Jones), but appearing reasonable in comparison with those doesn’t mean that you are reasonable, and Elizabeth isn’t reasonable.

#859: Amy Lansky

Amy Lansky is a homeopath and author of Impossible Cure: the Promise of Homeopathy, which she promptly fails to deliver. Originally, Lansky was a computer scientist, but she transitioned to homeopathy after using it to “cure her son of Autism.” She explained it thusly: “As a scientist, I recognize that homeopathy is implausible. But I've seen it cure my son,” which is evidence that Lansky never had a clue about scientific reasoning or how evidence actually works to begin with. Her book has subsequently become a textbook used by homeopathy diploma mills, presumably exactly because of Lansky’s problem with distinguishing evidence from anecdotes based on personal experience.

Lansky has been involved in numerous activities and organizations to promote homeopathy, among most notable being her broadcasting a monthly Internet radio show on Autism One called “There's Hope With Homeopathy” – this one is notable, since it illustrates Lansky’s close ties with the anti-vaccination movement; and indeed, Lansky is a regular at antivaxx quackfest seminars – and on the executive board of the National Center for Homeopathy. She is, however, probably most famous for being one of Joe Mercola’s go-to people regarding homeopathy. Indeed, Mercola published Lansky’s article “Could this ‘forbidden’ Medicine Eliminate the Need for Drugs?” in favor of her cherished alchemist elixirs, an article so full of idiocy, lack of knowledge and understanding, fallacies, and conspiracy mongering that it at least should completely undermine any measure Mercola makes to appear respectable (though it won’t do that in the eyes of his fans, of course, and from the point of view of reality it was an impossible task to begin with).

Diagnosis: One of the most influential pushers of one of the most idiotic strains of crackpottery there is. The fact that it never goes away is pretty illuminating with respect to how hard critical thinking really is. 

#1556: William Campbell Douglass

Fundies do say the darndest things, but the whereabouts of the “Lee Douglas” supposedly associated with the Christian Coalition and described here cannot be determined and he probably doesn’t exist.

William Campbell Douglass II unfortunately does. Douglass is a doctor, woo peddler, hardcore conspiracy theorist and president of the Douglass Center for Nutrition and Preventive Medicine. In particular, Douglass believes that the WHO developed AIDS as a strategic element in their evil plan to usher in the New World Order by depopulating the Earth.

As for woo, well, Douglass has quite a number of … unusual ideas. He has been caught claiming that a little bit of tobacco smoking is good for you – in fact, he has written a book about that: The Health Benefits of Tobacco (I suppose “editor and researcher Tracy T. Douglass” is a relative), which seeks to rebut all those studies linking smoking to negative health effects and concluding that it’s a conspiracy. Probably by the government. The purpose of the conspiracy is left unclear. The quality of the rebuttals are well exemplified by his observation that even according to CDC studies, only 0.5% of the smoking population died at ages less than 35 – but 8% of the general population is dead before age 35; which prompts him to ask “does smoking prevent death in the relatively young – from murder, automobile and other accidents, infection or boredom?” No prize for spotting the rather obvious flaw in the reasoning (I haven’t even doublechecked the number).

Apart from his defense of smoking, Douglass has argued that exercise is overrated and that vegetarianism is bad. He has moreover promoted the idiotic raw milk fad (he is the author of The Milk of Human Kindness-Is Not Pasteurized – the title gives you a glimpse of the mind of W.C. Douglass methinks). Fluoride, however, is really bad and water fluoridation is yet another element in a grand conspiracy, as is aspartame. And sunlight, according to Douglass, prevents melanoma. Gary Null apparently really liked that claim.

Douglass has been most widely noticed, perhaps, for his anti-vaccine views. Vaccines don’t really prevent anything, according to Douglass (and the diseases they are meant to prevent aren’t really big deals anyways). Instead, vaccines are – you guessed it – a conspiracy. For instance, in his article “Pandemic Panic Hits World Health Organization”, published in the positively deranged pseudojournal Medical Voices (it’s actually a somewhat useful journal – anyone who has published anything in that journal can be safely dismissed as an insane crank), he claimed the H1N1 flu epidemic was faked by the WHO to sell drugs and vaccines. After all, according to Douglass the epidemic was “no more than a sniffle”, killing only a from a World War I battle commander standpoint insignificant number of people.

His relationship to critical thinking and evidence is, in other words, a matter of pick-and-choose. For instance, Douglass is – unusually for woo promoters – critical of the use of anecdotes in assessing a hypothesis. Of course, to Douglass, “anecdotal evidence” means any well-controlled, large study that yields results he don’t like. Personal anecdotes are, however, really valuable when they support his own, science-contrary beliefs.

Unsurprisingly, Douglass also runs a webstore that sells his special brand of supplements, and pushes at least two “periodicals” that have succeeded in making this list, Real Health and Second Opinion.

Diagnosis: A critical-thinking disaster that makes Mercola look positively wise (ok, so that’s an exaggeration). And though Douglass doesn’t quite enjoy Mercola’s level of influence, he is far from negligible.

#544: Stanislaw Burzynski (?)

The Burzynski Clinic, operated by Stanislaw Rajmund Burzynski, has offered clinical trials for alternative cancer treatment using antineoplastons. “Antineoplaston” is Burzynski’s name for “a group of peptides, derivatives, and mixtures” that he uses in the trials. The compounds are not licensed as drugs and Burzynski is not licensed to treat cancer with his mixture. He claims to have a lot of anecdotal evidence for his treatment, though looking more closely at what he’s actually doing reveals a lot of curious details, for instance that conventional cancer treatments are used as well in his treatments, and that the success part of his success stories is nevertheless not always unambiguously ascribed to those conventionaltreatments. The treatments at the Clinic are enormously overpriced, and given the time period in which the antineoplaston treatment has remained on the “clinical trial”-stage without breaking peer review (more on his “studies” and publications here), the cost of the treatment regimes, and the way Burzynski actually treats his patients, some have raised questions whether Burzynski himself actually believes in the efficacy of antineoplastons. If he does not, then “crackpot” would obviously not be the most apposite description. You can find a nice and concise explanation of why Burzynski’s practices are questionable here, and a discussion of some of the anecdotes he uses to back up his claims here.

He does, however, have a “documentary” that promotes his treatments and paints him as a brave, pioneering maverick, which he – despite the assertions of his followers – emphatically isn’t, and a pinnacle of honesty and actual care in a world where ordinary doctors are prevented by greed from seeing the light (discussed here). Burzynski is, admittedly, rather skilled at providing dubiously honest framings of his work, and has at least made him popular with an endorsed by the usualy stock of prominent suckers for anything that smells of conspiracy, such as Mike Adams and Joe Mercola (Mercola’s endorsement is discussed here).

A follow-up to the “documentary” was announced in January 2013, and described as being about as honest, investigative and reality-based as the first. Film-maker and Burzynski champion Eric Merola decided to call it “Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Chapter 2: A Modern Story,” and you can see a discussion of some of the details surrounding the production here (some reports from an early screening are discussed here and here). Merola himself seems to be currently keeping himself busy as some sort of Burzynski watchdog, arguing that criticism of Burzynski’s practices amounts to hating and baselessly accusing critics of being corrupt pharma shills - standard fare from the denialist movement, in other words. Some have questioned Merola’s intellectual honesty, and his response to critics is not the only reason. Here is Merola’s secret weapon against the skeptics unveiled.

Another propaganda video posted by Burzynski’s new PR man, Wayne Dolcefino, featuring Josh Duhamel, is discussed here.

In November 2011 the clinic quickly rose to fame after one Marc Stephens, associated with the clinic, threatened several skeptical bloggers and organizations with rather hilariously unfounded lawsuits (one example here). The Clinic eventually had to disavow Stephens and his antics, but reading the press release from Burzynski’s PR flak Renee Trimble, one realizes that they do not explicitly disavow his methods for responding to critics. The sudden public interest in the clinic was bound to cause something resembling a Streisand effect, however, and the clinic did at some point face some further scrutiny. Unfortunately, despite repeated warnings from the FDA, Burzynski and his clinic are still going relatively strong, and he got off the Texas Medical Board investigations on a technicality.

A particularly worrisome aspect of the Burzynski affair is the media’s credulous take on his practices; after all, there are plenty of people who wouldn’t let reality get in the way of a nice narrative about a maverick hero facing the establishment all by himself.

More here. One of the stories that led up to Burzynski’s quick rise to fame in November 2011 is found here; discussion here. There’s another tragic story here. Quackwatch has been following Burzynski for years, and fortunately there are other powers of good that have taken notice and are trying to make the world a better place.

Burzynski is at least the proud recipient of this year’s Pigasus Award in the Scientist Category for his efforts.

Diagnosis: A little hard to pin down; a diagnosis would depend on what exactly Burzynski thinks he is doing, which is currently a little murky. That there is just cause for concern regarding his practices, however, is uncontroversial.

Update: This is a really good resource as well.