I got a curious response from one of my readers last week. It was quite amusing, except VERY SAD.
I should preface it with an old medical joke: something works well in practice—but does it stand up in theory? (you know it should be the other way round: “It’s OK in theory but does it actually WORK in practice?” is the real question).
The joke is, of course, about things working well and yet don’t seem to fit with accepted theory. There’s lots of that in medical science!
Well, this guy read some comments about Mike Adams on my blog. The visitor is a “Mike Adams is a smart guy and knows everything” kind of hero worshipper. He was then going to check me out, he said, to see if I knew what I was talking about in comparison!
Seems very odd to me that you would be measuring one of the world’s top alternative physicians, who has been a pioneer for 40 years and made medical history on more than one occasion, against a blogger who has no medical training and never served a patient in his life?
No disrespect to Mike, who has his own action agenda, but isn’t this a kind of crazy logic? How can you compare a person who’s DONE it, been there and got the t-shirt, with someone who sits at home and thinks about it?
More to the point, this sort of hero worship is very bad. The measure by which I like to judge my information is whether it has any scientific validity: are there studies to support this? Not who said it.
To measure facts against a person is very silly. We all make mistakes (some more than others). I’ve made plenty, of course. But nothing of the magnitude of blunder of Mike Adams saying, for example, there was no such thing as ADD and ADHD.
I assure you there is. And many dedicated and wonderful physicians worked hard to get this condition recognized back in the 1980s, so that kids were not just labeled “naughty” and punished, when it was really a brain-excitation reaction that drove them crazy.
See, Mike Adams is following the “Big Pharma is bad and anything they say is a lie, therefore they invented ADHD to sell more drugs…” agenda.
For 40 years I’ve stood up for the “These kids have a problem, it’s an allergy and, just because you are too dumb to admit the existence of allergy and sensitivity reactions, don’t take it out on the kids, let’s fix them…” agenda.
There’s a difference.
I’m not saying don’t read Mike Adams. He’s a TORRENT of cool stuff. But I would suggest, when he and I differ, you remember I’ve treated 10,000s of patients and earned the right to say what I say. I am a clinician first and a blogger second.
Even then, I’m not saying I must be right and Mike wrong. I’m just saying consider the odds: I’m more likely to be right, that’s all.
HATS OFF to you, sir, for your comments about Mike Adams. Mike picks and chooses various parts of the ‘alternative health’ field to latch onto, which he then does by selling (sometimes factually incorrect) ebooks to people, in addition to the admittedly free “articles” published on the site. his viewpoints are often contradictory; in one article he bashes synthetic vitamins as becoming unnatural to the body, the in a few interviews he gushes about the Ola Loa products, which have… synthetic vitamins. well, consistency and science are not Mike’s strong points, which is why in an article on influenza (it was h1n1 or H5n1) he recommends echinacea despite the fact that in can increase cytokine levels which is how these flus kill…
really, reading the guy is like dredging a lake: you might find some good stuff, but most of it is junk. usually when the stuff is good it’s other studies or authors he’s citing. he’s not quite as bad as Kevin Trudeau, but definitely getting there based on his increasingly anti-anything “western” medicine and cult-like following.
The Health Ranger– you must question some of his commentary– the conspiracy and stuff–which sometimes is totally off base. Nonetheless, he does bring the news of the day but unfortunately twists it all too often. Dr. Mercola is much better.