The Most Honest Man in Medicine?

“This is a big mango tree!”

The camera follows a fit, barefoot older man in a Kelly green athletic tank top as he points to a tree in his yard. He looks like a kindly retiree turned gardener as he crouches to cradle a low-hanging mango. But Dr. Joseph Mercola is not retired, and his sojourn among the fruits is a pit stop in a nearly 25-minute YouTube video titled “A Day in the Life of Dr. Mercola.”

This infomercial about Mercola’s life and taste in trees exists because he oversees an alternative-health empire organized around his namesake website, Mercola.com; the video is part of a strategy to sell the osteopath as your favorite straight-shooting natural-living guru. Perhaps you’ve seen him, paternally bald and trim and unflappable, making sanguine appearances on The Dr. Oz Show or Today or CNN. He is jacked.

Mercola is the coauthor of various New York Times best-selling books, including The Great Bird Flu Hoax and The No-Grain Diet. He launched Mercola.com in 1997, staking out an early corner in the growing “alternative health” industry and building an audience with a wholesome yet conspiratorial “what the doctors don’t want us to know” tone. The telegenic 62-year-old’s long-running e-commerce and health-blogging business is carefully positioned to attract and comfort people who feel cast off, lied to, and vulnerable. It spins a compelling tale: The world is treacherous, and danger lurks in protein powders, laptops, toothpaste, and hot tubs. Steeped in toxicity, we are poisoned by the society we’ve built. Cheerios will hurt children. Sippy cups threaten the youth. Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo is, in fact, bad for babies. Using a mobile phone regularly while pregnant will doom children to behavioral problems down the line; letting young people drink fluoridated water will make them stupid, and your local doc is in the pocket of Big Pharma.

The internet is a breeding ground for bad information. It has hosted hoaxes, conspiracy theorists, liars, and frauds since its inception, but in 2016 the scams were rewarded with credulity, attention, and virality to a dizzying extent. The truth was both harder to discern and less integral to success than it had seemed. Teens in Macedonia made bank spreading fake news on Facebook; Snopes became a bookmark to check daily. I’ve known about Mercola for years, but I found myself paying more attention to him in 2016, not because he was up to new tricks but because the shtick he’s used for 19 years is continuing to mislead people — and pay dividends. Our growing disassociation with truth stands to only benefit him more.

Mercola offers himself up as the only honest man in medicine, ready and willing to refute the arrogant lies of other doctors. He is rewarded for this effort. Business research firm Hoover’s estimates that Mercola.com LLC brings in around $9.8 million annually, with additional income from Mercola.com Health Resources LLC ($5.2 million) and Mercola Consulting Services LLC (around $320,000). His website bills itself as the “#1 Natural Health Website.” It is the top “Alternative Health” website, according to Alexa, more popular than Tony Robbins’s self-help page. (While “alternative health” is a vague category, in Mercola’s case, it means he gloms onto nonsense about the dangers of modern medicine — not that he is a champion of experimental but evidence-based procedures.)

Mercola.com hosts many blog posts, some of which accumulate hundreds of thousands or even millions of views — enough to register as viral content. Plenty of the posts are benign fluff, such as an instructional post about how to cut a mango. There are 4,400 articles on the benefits of turmeric. Other posts, however, push dubious advice. For example, Mercola says he believes fluoride is a neurological poison foisted upon Americans by a malevolent government. (Fluoride is a community health tool, as studies by the U.S. Public Health Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate). Mercola has also recommended following an alternative anticancer routine that includes coffee enemas even though other doctors have warned against the procedure, calling it risky.

“The wellness industry has exploded into superfoods, detoxes, and celebrity healers selling magic crystals,” The Outline recently wrote. The Global Wellness Institute (a think tank focused on the industry) claims that wellness was a $3.7 trillion industry as of 2015. Superfoods and detoxes are both obsessions for Mercola, who could be categorized as a celebrity healer of sorts. While his Q score pales next to Gwyneth Paltrow’s, Mercola produces one of the internet’s longest-running wellness newsletters. Paltrow’s questionable health advice (remember when she told us to steam our vaginas?) routinely gets picked apart, but Mercola seems to get a free pass because his particular brand of pseudoscience proselytizing is generally confined to the internet and morning talk shows.

“Joseph Mercola is among the top misinformation vectors of our time when it comes to health, medicine, food, parenting, and more. He promotes chemophobia and spreads fear of chemicals, GMOs, and vaccines, all while peddling alternatives to line his pockets,” pro-biotechnology activist and writer Kavin Senapathy told me. Senapathy has written for Forbes about Mercola’s habit of calling substances dangerous and then selling products containing those substances. “His promotion of pseudoscience helps fuel a culture that turns its nose up at beneficial technologies and medical treatments.”

While he’s not as well known as Dr. Oz, Mercola tends to a devoted fan base on the internet. “There was a short period where [Mercola] was recommending not showering after being in the sun because it would wash off the vitamin D, or something like that. And you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous, but he phrased it in a way that it sounded quasibelievable,” a former employee who wished to remain anonymous told The Ringer. “And we had this lady call up who wanted us to talk to her son, because he hadn’t showered in like four weeks because Dr. Mercola told him he needed to get more vitamin D. It’s like, My god, I don’t even know where to begin.”

Mercola’s fixation on vitamin D doesn’t end there. He used to sell a line of tanning beds through his site, and frequently extolled the virtues of absorbing vitamin D through sunlight. But in April, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in federal court against Mercola, charging that he falsely advertised tanning beds as wellness tools. The models in the line had names like D-Lite, Sun Splash Refresh, and Vitality D-Lite, and he advertised these beds as an optimal way to absorb vitamin D. Some of the advertisements included in the complaint as exhibits insist that Mercola’s tanning beds can help “reverse the appearance of aging” by helping the body produce collagen and flatten wrinkles. It’s easy to see why Mercola returned to vitamin D so frequently — it allowed him to clearly cast the medical establishment as stodgy, wrongheaded worrywarts, and himself as the person whose advice allows enjoyment of the “natural world.” And, of course, it just so happened to advocate using one of the more expensive products he sold.

As part of a settlement with the FTC, Mercola issued refunds to customers and agreed to stop selling tanning beds. Mercola has clashed with the FDA, which has sent him several warning letters objecting to claims the website has made about the products it has sold. For example, the FDA warned Mercola about claiming that his “CardioEssentials” product is “a much safer and effective option than aspirin and other pharmaceutical agents to treating heart disease.”

While the tanning beds are gone, Mercola.com currently hawks a wide variety of products loosely connected with his wellness mission, including essential oils, whey protein, cat litter, sardines, sauna equipment, dental gels for pets, grass-fed beef, fermented broccoli sprouts, fermented ginseng spray, fat calipers, organic tampons, leggings, peppermint lip balm, and mattresses.

Former Mercola.com marketing associate Adam Marcus recollected some of the e-commerce side’s practices to me. “With the amount of violations they’ve been through, I’m surprised they haven’t been shut down,” he said.

According to Marcus, Mercola would look at other products on the market and then identify inactive “filler” ingredients to attempt to differentiate his line of products. “Most of the time, if there was a filler ingredient he would make some claim about how that filler was harmful to you and then remove it from his version so that it was the only one on the market that didn’t have the ‘harmful’ additive,” Marcus said. “But he wouldn’t remember which ones he badmouthed, so he would then release products with those fillers.”

Marcus also talked about Mercola’s workplace attitude. “He gives off that vibe that he can’t be bothered by people that don’t live exactly the same way as him,” he said. “And that he really doesn’t like fat people.”

Mercola has guest-blogged about the alleged menace of microwaves for The Huffington Post, appeared on CNN, and also made his aforementioned appearances with Dr. Oz and the Today gang, but despite friendliness from soft-focus news, his exuberant antiscience stances have not endeared him to mainstream medical and scientific communities. Tech reporter Nick Bilton was quickly roasted when he cited Mercola in a piece on smartwatch cancer fears for The New York Times. The newspaper eventually issued an editor’s note (citing research that found no causal link between smartwatches and cancer) and the lapse in judgment was deemed so egregious that the Times public editor wrote an article in part deriding the decision to treat Mercola credulously. Meanwhile, Mercola’s fondness for telling people that objects will give them cancer led New York magazine’s Science of Us to compile a list of other household items and common experiences that Mercola categorizes as carcinogens, including bras, carbs, tattoos, and root canals.

While Mercola is the face of the company and the center of its branding, the former employee told The Ringer that Mercola does not write his own blog posts, instead employing a team of ghostwriters and then usually looking at the finished work. “He kind of separated himself from the business over the years, because he could,” the employee said. “We [know] that it’s his name that’s selling products. It’s not like you could write an article and say, ‘This article was written by Mr. Z,’ because no one’s going to want to read it then.”

At the bottom of each article on Mercola.com, readers will find a banner announcing the various organizations that receive a cut of the company’s profits. These include the Rabies Challenge Fund, which aims to minimize the amount of legally required rabies vaccinations for dogs because the group believes that rabies vaccinations can cause cancer, seizures, anemia, and many other health conditions, and the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit that New Yorker writer Michael Specter describes as “the most influential advocacy group in the campaign against universal vaccination.” Mercola has worked with the NVIC’s leader, Barbara Loe Fisher, in efforts to demonize inoculations. In 2011, they paid to display an antivaccination advertisement on a billboard in Times Square, prompting the American Academy of Pediatrics to petition CBS Outdoor to remove the ad on behalf of its 60,000-plus doctor members.

The reason the American Academy of Pediatrics reacted as it did is simple: Vaccination is a proven health tool. Vaccines prevent infectious disease and protect communities. While they are not without risk of rare adverse side effects, vaccines are a magnificent public safety achievement, at least on par with water filtration and seat belts. The brand of vaccine skepticism pushed by Mercola, Fisher, and celebrity activists like Jenny McCarthy is not an innocuous countercultural viewpoint, like believing in horoscopes or practicing Bikram yoga. Anti-vaxx proselytizing is dangerous to public health. It scares people into leaving their children and their communities vulnerable to preventable outbreaks. Due in part to the upswing in vaccine skepticism, diseases like measles and mumps are back in the news.

In her book On Immunity, an examination of vaccination fears, Eula Biss wrote about Mercola as one of the originating disinformation agents. She traced a persistent online rumor that the vaccine for H1N1, otherwise known as the swine flu, contained a chemical called squalene to an article written by Mercola, “Squalene: The Swine Flu Vaccine’s Dirty Little Secret Exposed.”

“The reproductions of Mercola’s article that proliferated across the Web early in the pandemic were then, and still remain, uncorrected. But by the time I traced them to the version on his website in the fall of 2009, the original article already included a correction in the header clarifying that none of the H1N1 vaccines distributed in the United States contained squalene. This was not a minor point of correction, but the article had gone viral before being corrected,” Biss wrote. “Like a virus, it had replicated itself repeatedly, overwhelming more credible information about the vaccine.”

Antivaccination screeds with titles like “Vaccination Dangers Can Kill You or Ruin Your Life” and “Hepatitis B Vaccine Highly Linked to Sudden Infant Death” are plentiful on Mercola.com. Most recently, the site published “Vaccines — Are They Still Contributing to the Greater Good?” in November. It has more than 675,000 views so far. Mercola has also gotten chummy with the original anti-vaxxer; he has interviewed Andrew Wakefield, the disbarred doctor who published the now-discredited study linking autism to vaccinations, which launched the modern anti-vaxx movement. After the U.K. General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise panel discredited his research, Wakefield was stripped of his medical license, The Lancet retracted the paper, and many peer-reviewed studies have refuted Wakefield’s findings. Yet he remains at the center of the antivaccination movement.

In addition to championing Wakefield, Mercola.com has attacked high-profile vaccine proponents, including Dr. Paul Offit, the chair of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Mercola’s website derides Offit as a “dangerous [‘expert’] you should never EVER believe”; in the fun-house mirror of Mercola World, he is vilified as a greedy shill for Big Pharma. In reality, Offit is a pediatrician and infectious-disease expert who coinvented a rotavirus vaccine and wrote a book on pseudoscience. He is an outspoken advocate for vaccination and, as such, is the target of smear campaigns from the antivaccination movement.

“Like all alternative medicine practitioners, he wants you to believe his magic,” Offit told me. “He wants you to reject certain major tenets of modern medicine.”

Mercola’s emphasis on rejecting accepted wisdom in favor of questionable guidance is at the heart of his danger; he conditions his fans not to think freely but to swap trust in experts for trust in only him. As Offit noted, to believe in Mercola is to push away much of modern medicine.

While his career started in Illinois, Mercola moved to Florida a few years ago. He spends time with his partner, an effervescent blonde named Erin Elizabeth, the proprietor of her own alternative-health website, called Health Nut News. Elizabeth characterizes herself as a survivor of a vaccine injury as well as of chronic Lyme disease, a controversial condition disputed in the mainstream medical community. (Neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the National Institutes of Health recognizes the diagnosis.) It’s not hard to see why the two hit it off; Elizabeth refers to turmeric as “better than chemo” for cancer patients, and she is obsessed with uncovering a pattern in the deaths of holistic practitioners. They match up well.

In his videos, interviews, and articles, Mercola certainly seems sincere, but some critics doubt how genuine he is about what he promotes. Steven Salzberg, the Bloomberg distinguished professor of biomedical engineering, computer science, and biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, also writes for Forbes about pseudoscience. He says he sees Mercola as a “snake-oil salesman.” “He’s just doing it for the money, though I think he’s completely unscrupulous. The reason he’s against vaccines is that he claims he has some other natural supplements that he thinks are good for you,” Salzberg said. “Which is completely false, utterly false. And that’s potentially dangerous. That’s where what he does can be harmful. Otherwise the main harm he does is to your wallet.”

Former employees describe Mercola as more of a confused, easily distracted believer than a straightforward charlatan. “I think he believes whatever he says, and if you really research him, you’ll see that he changes his mind all the time,” former media relations employee Gaea Powell said.

Powell has no love for her former boss. “I would describe him as a tyrant, a bully, unstable,” she said. While Powell remains sympathetic to some of the ideas Mercola espouses about alternative health care, she found the workplace culture of Mercola.com dysfunctional. Powell described a business practice to me — which was corroborated by another former Mercola employee who wished to remain anonymous — in which Mercola would obtain products from businesses under the guise of potentially reviewing or featuring them, and then attempt to copycat them for his website.

“I witnessed Dr. Mercola, he asked me to get [water filtration] devices so he could have [Mercola Health Resources CEO] Steve Rye have someone take it apart so they could steal the technology and make their own,” Powell told me.

Much of the criticism lobbed at Mercola is separate from accusations about his business practices; he is primarily viewed as dangerous because of the beliefs his website espouses. “I think he’s the most dangerous health information source in the world,” Dr. Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who operates a website called Quackwatch.com, told me. “Mercola attacks proven public health measures — vaccination and fluoridation — and encourages people to do all sorts of things that haven’t the slightest validity.”

“There’s so much there that’s potentially harmful. There’s the antivaccine stuff, there’s the cancer quackery. [Mercola] featured a video by Tullio Simoncini, an Italian doctor who claims that all cancer is a fungus and the way to cure it is by injecting baking soda into it,” Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist who also serves as managing editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine, told me.

I couldn’t find the video Gorski mentioned, but I did find other articles where Mercola cites Simoncini’s baking soda cancer cure. There is evidence that the video once existed on his site, though, as searching for “fungus cancer Tullio Simoncini” within Mercola.com brings up a thumbnail that describes a “video interview with a prominent Italian oncologist expanding on his alternative views” from 2008. But when I clicked on it, the URL rerouted to a different article about GMO labeling. Here’s the thumbnail that’s still up on the website:

Perhaps the idea that fungus causes cancer and one can treat it by injecting baking soda finally crossed Mercola and his ghostwriters’ boundary for mendacity, and the team removed it; I do not know, because Mercola.com has not responded to my many requests for comment and participation in this piece.

Pharmaceutical companies and the mainstream medical establishment they supply — “Big Pharma” in Mercola parlance — form a fat, easy target, perhaps at its most unsympathetic moment. Opiate addictions lay waste to Americans at a grim clip; this crisis was fueled by the behavior of pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma. “Drug Industry Is Responsible for Mass Addiction” a 2016 Mercola headline sings; it’s hard to argue there. It is important to separate Mercola’s strain of “natural health news” from the larger concept of “alternative medicine” or critics of pharmaceutical corporations. Good alternative medicine can be any variety of new treatments, including those derived from plant sources, as long as it is still evidence-based and rooted in the scientific process. Bad alternative medicine ignores evidence in favor of hunches and fears.

“I think all medicine is ‘alternative’ before it becomes mainstream — chemotherapy was ‘alternative’ at some point — so I am eager to see where this field goes,” cancer expert Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote in a Q&A about his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. “Much of our pharmacopeia is derived from plant sources, and there are more chemicals in plants than we know of or know how to use. As yet, there have been few unbiased trials of these medicines in cancer treatment or prevention.”

But Mercola is not pioneering anything. Mercola.com is primarily a repository for ghostwritten, aggregated “natural health” tips from elsewhere on the internet. In many cases, he (or whoever is writing under his name) starts from a reasonable position of skepticism toward the medical establishment, hooking readers by distinguishing himself from the cocksure doctor-elite — and then he peppers in antivaccine and other, more extreme viewpoints, all while selling supplements and other wellness products that he claims are the real health tools. Mercola casts himself as a rogue truth-teller railing against a greed-driven industry, when in reality he is a profiteer of the very same culture he derides. Consider pharmaceutical mega-corporation Pfizer, which owns Alacer Corp., the enormous vitamin and supplement company behind best-selling vitamin C powder Emergen-C. There is nothing “alternative” about shilling supplements anymore.

It is maddening to see someone who wields his osteopathy degree as bona fides; just as his supposed foes do, Mercola pegs his authority to give you health advice and sell you health products to his status as a credentialed expert. To see Mercola.com for what it is does not require dismissing experimental medicine or denigrating new treatments that use plants. Nor is decrying Mercola’s indiscriminate umbrella of cockeyed cure-alls the same as dismissing all treatments currently viewed as avant-garde or controversial. You can believe that a healthy lifestyle and diet can prevent illness and still see past Mercola’s gimmick. You can still have valid concerns about conventional medicine, you can still think your doctor is arrogant, and you can still loathe the practices of large pharmaceutical companies. To critique Mercola is simply to acknowledge that much of the information put forth on his website can be easily disproved.

“There were more than a few people who’d call, and you’d almost want to tell them — stop what you’re doing, this is not good,” the former employee told me, when I asked how it felt to work for a company publishing bad science. “I would have no problem working there and doing all this if people were better on average at Googling stuff.

“The problem is, you’d put out an article and people would take it at 100 percent face value without typing into Google, ‘Hey, what does this supplement do?’”

“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” Donald Trump told a reporter in 2007. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’re giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.” Trump has since tweeted a variety of statements implying he is skeptical of the current recommended vaccine schedule. More recently, he met with Mercola associate Andrew Wakefield and other prominent antivaccination advocates in August on the campaign trail.

The president-elect has articulated beliefs in pseudoscience, such as when he called climate change a Chinese hoax. He publicly scoffed at the scientific consensus in 2014 that Ebola wasn’t contagious. And his chumminess with the antivaccination movement suggests that his administration may not see eye-to-eye with scientists and medical experts. What’s more, his choice for national security adviser, Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, has a history of spreading conspiracy theories; this means Trump’s closest national security counsel has a history of taking false news on the internet seriously.

The information spread by Mercola is about medicine, not politics, but it contributes to an atmosphere in which facts are held in low regard and science is viewed with suspicion. In this way, Mercola.com reminds me of a health-specific version of Alex Jones’s Infowars. Mercola is a milder-mannered cohort of Jones, who built his business and brand by yelling a broad constellation of conspiracies into a camera until he scared people into buying prepper equipment. Both seek to discredit the establishment, and both have made themselves rich by doing so. Like Jones, Mercola congratulates his audience for questioning authority and warns that information presented by people in positions of power is potentially a scam. His embrace of antivaccination party lines exemplifies the same utter lack of interest in facts that Jones displays when he joins in with Sandy Hook truthers.

Right now, although his website moves “health” products and brings in eyeballs, Mercola remains on the fringes of mainstream medicine and the edges of respectability — but this does not make him innocuous. He is a figurehead of the antivaccination movement, the antifluoridation movement, and, more broadly, the antiscience movement. Along with fellow online “natural health” advocates like the Food Babe, Mercola floods the internet with dubious advice, all while positioning himself as a freethinker’s ally.

For 19 years, Mercola.com has profited off of scaring people away from evidence, away from science. It is not harmless hippie woo-woo: Mercola has created a tried-and-true fearmongering blueprint.

“Climate change is not a belief system. It’s an evidence-based system. We have affected this earth to the extent that there is increasing levels of CO2, which has caused the greenhouse effect, that has clearly increased the temperature of the planet. It’s causing ice caps to melt. That’s not a matter of debate. So when Trump, for example, says climate change is a hoax, perpetuated by the Chinese, it’s when you move into a world where there is no evidence and you just make things up,” Paul Offit said. “And if people criticize you, then you just simply criticize them, saying, in his case, the media lies.

“Or in the case of people like Joseph Mercola, you say that it’s what ‘doctors don’t want you to know.’ Doctors don’t want you to know all these magic medicines that I’m telling you about. Doctors don’t want you to know that vaccines can do far more harm than good. You just simply deny evidence. And it’s incredibly dangerous.”