Joseph Mercola

Joseph Mercola
File:Dr Mercola.jpg Joseph Mercola
Born	(1954-07-08) July 8, 1954
Education	Postgraduate
Years active	22
Known for	Running mercola.com, a high-profile alternative medicine website
Medical career
Profession	Osteopathic Physician (DO)
Institutions	Natural Health Center
Sub-specialties	Nutritional Medicine
Research	Nutrition, EFT, Bioenergetic medicine

Joseph Mercola, D.O. (born 1954), is an osteopathic physician, health activist, and entrepreneur practicing in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, The No-Grain Diet (with Alison Rose Levy), and The Great Bird Flu Hoax, together with several other books. Mercola is best known as founder and editor of the alternative-medicine website Mercola.com, where he advocates dietary and lifestyle approaches to health and markets a variety of health-related products. Mercola criticizes many of the practices of mainstream medicine and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), particularly vaccination and the use of prescription drugs and surgery to treat diseases. He is a member of the politically conservative Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, as well as several alternative medicine-related organizations.

Mercola has received two Warning Letters from the FDA for marketing nutritional products in a manner which violated the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. A 2006 BusinessWeek editorial criticized Mercola's marketing practices as "relying on slick promotion, clever use of information, and scare tactics."

Background

Mercola is a 1976 graduate of the University of Illinois and a 1982 graduate of Midwestern University. According to Mercola's website, he is a former Chairman of the Family Medicine department at St. Alexius Medical Center in Illinois and served as editor of a book about HIV published in 1989 by Abbott Laboratories.

Diet

Mercola claims that a well-balanced diet can increase longevity and should include mostly natural, unprocessed foods, while excluding processed and artificial foods. He sees value in paleolithic diets and advocates tailoring food consumption to individualized nutritional typing which was derived from metabolic typing, developed by William Wolcott and promoted in a book by Mercola. He encourages using water filters, including the process of reverse osmosis, to purify drinking water, opposes drinking water with chlorine, and is strongly opposed to fluoridation.

Dietary recommendations

Foods he recommends avoiding include pasteurized milk, homogenized milk, most fish (due to mercury content), trans fats (hydrogenated oil), certain processed vegetable fats (such as corn and canola oil), unfermented soy products, artificial sweeteners, sugar, starches, and for those with elevated insulin levels (such as anyone who is overweight, diabetic, or has high blood pressure or high cholesterol) he also advises avoiding all grain products ("even whole unprocessed grains, and alternative grains like quinoa, amaranth, millet and teff"), fruit juices (including fresh-squeezed fruit juices), and canned, packaged or artificial foods. This is very similar to what is often called a Paleolithic diet and the diet promoted by the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Mercola's dietary recommendations often put him at odds with mainstream dietary advice. The elimination of grains from the diet goes against the recommendation of the USDA food pyramid, where grains are viewed as a staple food. Mercola theorizes that food intolerances involving gluten, such as celiac sprue and wheat allergy, result from the relatively recent introduction of grains into the human diet, which he suggests also causes hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.

Mercola encourages the ingestion of unprocessed saturated fats, including unrefined coconut oil, which contains a form of saturated fat called medium chain triglycerides. He claims in his book The Total Health Program that this particular type of saturated fat is unfairly vilified in most studies as they do not differentiate the damage due to highly processed omega-6 trans fats that is typically consumed with saturated fat. He believes most of the damage attributed to saturated fat is due to these highly processed omega-6 fats. The American Heart Association disagrees, stating that saturated fats contribute to heart disease.

Mercola promotes the consumption of raw milk and criticises pasteurization, stating that it is unnecessary if cows are raised under healthy conditions. He claims that raw milk is one of the best sources of protein and calcium and claims that high-temperature pasteurization destroys enzymes in milk and creates converted proteins the body cannot handle. These claims are controversial and are not supported by the Food and Drug Administration or mainstream dietary research.

Food preparation claims

Mercola's website has called microwave ovens dangerous, citing accidents and lawsuits, and claiming that microwaving food alters its chemistry. Mercola offers non-microwave, convection ovens for sale in his store. He controversially claims, "Microwaves may also cause pathological changes in your body. Once a food's structure is altered, it cannot perform the desired function in your body. Clinical studies show that microwave heating of milk or cooking of vegetables is associated with a decline in hemoglobin levels. These reductions may contribute to anemia, rheumatism, fever and thyroid deficiency."

Mercola is also against homogenization. He asserts that it causes fat globules to surround the enzyme xanthine oxidase (XO), which prevents the stomach from breaking down XO and allows XO to be absorbed intact into the bloodstream. He relates this additional bovine XO as a possible source of harmful oxidative stress contributing to heart failure and increased uric acid levels associated with gout.

Drugs and supplements

Mercola advises elimination of most prescription drugs and immunizations, and favors what he calls natural food choices, lifestyle modifications and energy psychology tools to address emotional challenges. He views these as safer and more effective options because they address what he believes to be the 'root causes' of disease rather than simply treating symptoms by what he refers to as palliative means. He states that drug companies profoundly influence both government health agencies and the mainstream medical community, which in turn promote medical practices that are beneficial to drug companies but harmful to the patient. Typical supplements he promotes are krill oil, vitamin K, probiotics, and anti-oxidant supplements. He discontinued his recommendation of cod liver oil in 2008 when he learned that its high level of vitamin A interfered with vitamin D function. He strongly advised the use of appropriate sun exposure to optimize vitamin D levels and if that is not an option then to use oral vitamin D supplementation.

Pharmaceutical industry criticism

I am quite confident that if gravity had to be approved by the FDA it would clearly meet strong resistance from the multi-national drug corporations.
                                                    -Joseph Mercola

Mercola is especially critical of new drugs, as well as the economic and political powers which might influence their acceptance. He dismisses many conventional health concerns and medications as useless at best and potentially toxic or fatal at worst. He prescribes exercise, good diet, good sleep, specially filtered water, chlorella, omega-3 fats, and energy psychology methods like Emotional Freedom Technique as an overall cure for most ills.

Vaccination

Among Mercola's most controversial recommendations is his expressed concern that too many vaccines are used too soon during infancy. He believes that some subpopulations (e.g. neonates, the elderly, the chronically ill) may be less suitable for certain vaccines, and that flu vaccines are still formulated with thimerosal and other undesirable adjuvants unsuitable for use. He asserts that the slow phasedown for millions of existing doses of childhood vaccines containing mercury is against the public's greater interests.

Mercola hosts vaccine critics on his webpages, advocates preventive measures as part of an alternative immunization schedule, and strongly criticizes influenza vaccines. He questions the projected epidemic threat and severity of influenza, the flu vaccine's safety and efficacy, and suggests the possibility of harm to an individual's immune system.

Mercola claims that some chemicals used to control fungi and bacteria within certain vaccines are toxic to infants and can harm young children if too many shots with mercury-containing Thimerosal are given. He also expresses concern about potentially cancer-linked components in vaccines, such as thimerosol, and historically, that SV40 virus contaminated early polio vaccines. Medical research and views in this area are conflicting. Thimerosal is an organomercury compound used as an antiseptic and antifungal agent in some vaccines, but is no longer present in most vaccines given to young children in the USA, though it is still present in some vaccines approved and endorsed by the CDC. For instance, Thimerosal is present in some variants of the H1N1 vaccine available in the United States.

In his book The Great Bird Flu Hoax, Mercola appears to take a stronger anti-pharmaceutical industry stance by accusing them of a fear-mongering marketing campaign against the public, as allegedly occurred with the Swine Flu scare of the 1970s.

In supporting this stance, Mercola often has wholly critical views of those working in governmental health care, as well as towards international health organizations. He makes an extensive argument that disease alerts such as for swine flu and their resulting immunizations were actually false alarms put forth to terrify the public.,

Alternative medicine

Mercola promotes treatments based upon methods that have been rejected by scientific consensus, such as nutritional typing, the traditional Chinese medicine-originated and acupressure-based Emotional Freedom Technique, herbalism, naturopathy and vitalism. Proponents of conventional medicine claim that these methods are unproven.

While stating that he believes in the scientific method, he distrusts many commercial and institutional applications of it in medicine. He has stated that the only value he finds in mainstream medicine is diagnosis and emergency accident survival. Mercola paints a picture of most medical science as being corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, and the majority of medical doctors as being frequently deceived and misled by multinational corporate drug interests.

Of homeopathy he says, "I have never been formally trained in homeopathy, and as a result I don't use much of it in my practice, but I am convinced it can be used as an effective tool for many conditions if properly utilized." He has also contributed to the water fluoridation controversy and has published several anti-fluoride articles.

Religious beliefs

"When symptoms arrive as a result of how poorly you've neglected your body and mind, rather than taking personal responsibility for your own wellness (restoring wholeness) and trusting in the God-given recuperative powers of your body, many seek those who are now only too willing take on this role for you."

Mercola was raised as a Catholic. Later in life he switched to evangelical Christianity, but he now calls himself spiritual rather than religious. He was formerly a member of the Christian Medical Society but stopped his membership in 2002. Despite a lack of empirical evidence, he promotes religion and prayer as having health benefits, and focuses strongly on studies that advocate this position.

Mercola hosts the theistic writings and beliefs of other website contributors such as Carol Tuttle but stopped promoting her in 2005. As with his involvement with Emotional Freedom Technique, his support for these modalities gives such approaches value in his spiritual views, frequently presented on the website.

Criticisms of Mercola

Some of the criticism of Joseph Mercola is similar to criticism made against non-mainstream and alternative medicine in general: i.e. that cures are not based on scientific research and are therefore of questionable value. Mercola is often viewed in this light by his promotion and marketing of non-pharmaceutical approaches. While certain advice, such as good diet and exercise, are not so criticized, he promotes a variety of scientifically unproven alternative medicine as replacements for the science-based pharmaceutical approaches he mostly discourages.

In October 2000, Stephen Barrett, operator of the alternative medicine watchdog website Quackwatch, filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania against Mercola (a resident of Illinois) for libel. This was in response to allegedly defaming comments quoted on his website from Tim Bolen, a critic of Quackwatch. In June 2001, Barrett withdrew the suit on jurisdictional grounds and refiled it in Illinois on July 30, 2001, at Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. On April 17, 2003, the suit was dismissed by mutual agreement.

In May 2006, BusinessWeek published an editorial about Mercola's marketing strategies. Columnist David Gumpert opined: ' Mercola gives the lie to the notion that holistic practitioners tend to be so absorbed in treating patients that they aren't effective businesspeople. While Mercola on his site seeks to identify with this image by distinguishing himself from "all the greed-motivated hype out there in health-care land", he is a master promoter, using every trick of traditional and Internet direct marketing to grow his business. (...) He is selling health-care products and services, and is calling upon an unfortunate tradition made famous by the old-time snake oil salesmen of the 1800s.'

Publications

Mercola is the author of 16 books on health-related topics, and has written a number of alternative medicine-related articles posted on his website. He is the author of a review article in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, and several published letters to the editor in non-osteopathic journals.

Affiliates and friends

Mercola employs several alternative medicine practitioners in maintaining his website, which he calls the Optimal Wellness Center. He claims unproven alternative treatments such as chelation therapy, acupuncture, auriculotherapy, cranial osteopathy, homeopathy, and laser-assisted detoxifying are frequently superior to conventional approaches, however he has never directly advertised these services. He also endorses and promotes Emotional Freedom Techniques, as well as products related to bioenergy systems and energy medicine.

See also

• Health freedom movement

External links

• Living a Healthy Life by Dr. Mercola
• FDA Orders Dr. Joseph Mercola to Stop Illegal Claims