Dr Mercola

[Cairenn]

He keeps showing up on many of the anti Monsanto sites and others. He is on naturalnews a lot also.

I would like more info on him.

From Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mercola

Mercola has also received three warning letters from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for violations of U.S. marketing laws. The first two letters, dated 2005 and 2006,[12][13] charged Mercola with making false and misleading claims regarding the marketing of several natural supplemental products, which violated the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act.[4] In the most recent letter, sent in March 2011,[14] Mercola was accused of violating federal law, by making claims about the efficacy of certain uses of a telethermographic camera exceeding those approved by the FDA concerning the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of the device (regulation of such claims being within the purview of the FDA). Dr. Mercola has challenged the FDA's order stating that "We believe that the FDA's warning letter is without merit and is an attempt to regulate the practice of medicine, which the agency does not have the regulatory authority to do. Our use of the thermography device is consistent with its 510(k) clearance for use by health care professionals in their diagnosis and treatment of patients."

Content from external source

 

[Mick West]

What specifically?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Joseph+Mercola+quack

 

[lotek]

anyone got a longer pole? my 10 footer aint enough to touch this guy..

 

[Cairenn]

I can't find anything credible that doesn't include the Q word with his name. I would like to know why Dr Oz had him on his show, of course I am not convinced that Dr Oz doesn't lean toward that Q word either.

 

[Rafterman]

I was attacked by a "friend" on Facebook the other day after she had posted something from Mercola linking breast cancer to the active ingredient in Round Up weed killer (conveniently made by Monsanto). As I do in these cases with folks I know, I simply suggested that she take anything from Mercola with a grain of salt and do her own research. She didn't like that suggestion at all.

 

[MikeC]

The Rational Wiki article on him ha a summary of his activities and beliefs.

 

[Cairenn]

I am on liberal FB page and they posted a silly anti GMO meme yesterday and me and others kept posting facts. Someone linked to that breast cancer 'study' there.

 

[cosmic]

The Rational Wiki article on him ha a summary of his activities and beliefs.

The RW article unfortunately includes a number of dead links to Respectful Insolence on Scienceblogs due to a formatting change, but interested readers can of course search for the article titles. David Gorski (Orac) has done a wonderful job tackling Mercola's woo, and there's a similar treasure trove over at Science-Based Medicine.

 

[David Fraser]

Mercola is similar to Janet Hull and they spur on the whole anti-aspartame nonsense. You know the one aspartame causes cancer, MS, Parkinsons, teenage pregnancy, homelessness, autism, premature baldness, sterility and it tastes shit. I have real life friends that believe in this nonsense (well except it tasting shit). I made the mistake of telling someone I get bad migraines if I drink to much pop with aspartame in, at the wrong time of the month. I was in undated with Mercola links and advised to get a detox. Detox? I asked. No thanks I have a liver.

 

[JohnJones]

(Bumping this old thread because I just came across an article by Dr Mercola which nicely illustrates the quality of his research.)

In this Mercola article:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/05/21/raw-milk-sales.aspx

Dr Mercola says:

"CDC data[3] shows there are about 412 confirmed cases of people getting ill from pasteurized milk each year, while only about 116 illnesses a year are linked to raw milk."

Dr Mercola quotes this statistic to support his argument that raw milk is more healthful than pasteurized milk. However, one caveat that occurs to us is, his statistic is meaningless until we know how many people drink pasteurized milk versus how many drink raw milk. The footnote [3] leads to this URL at the Centre for Disease Control:

https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/rawmilk-outbreaks.html



On this CDC site we read:

"Raw milk was much more likely to cause outbreaks than pasteurized milk."

Unlike Dr Mercola, the CDC has compared the percentage of raw-milk-drinkers who get sick with the percentage of pasteurized-milk-drinkers who get sick, and this comparison leads them to their conclusion.

So Dr. Mercola is claiming that raw milk is safer, and wants us to believe that the CDC, a reputable authority, backs up his claim. But when we go to the CDC, we find that it says the exact opposite of what Dr. Mercola is telling us. In order to make the data fit his hypothesis, Dr. Mercola is inviting us to make an elementary statistical error, comparing absolute figures from populations of very different sizes.

 

[Hevach]

His numbers might be right - however, that's because not a lot of people drink raw milk, while millions of people drink pasteurized milk. Comparing the number of cases between groups of immensely different size is like looking at the number of people killed by sheep vs. the number killed by sharks, and believing that means an encounter with a single sheep is more dangerous than an encounter with a large shark.

What you need to do is look at rates, how many sheep encounters there are a year vs. shark encounters, and use the number of incidents to determine the probability that any encounter will prove lethal. Shark deaths are rare, but shark encounters are also rare, and every one carries a real (if overestimated) risk of death. Sheep deaths are slightly less rare, but sheep encounters are innumerable - if you take a job on a large ranch you'll have tens of thousands of encounters per year, and it's highly unlikely you'll figure out how to get yourself killed in any of them.


With raw milk, perhaps more people get sick from pasteurized milk, but when you account for the disparate frequency of drinks, you're left with raw milk drinkers being a staggering 840 times more likely to get sick from their beverage.