Mike Adams is a science gene-ius. Just ask him. But be careful; the infamous โHealth Ranger,โ who has acquired a sizable fortune spreading conspiracy theories and selling often dubious and dangerous โcuresโ on his monumentally popular NaturalNews.com website, is in a hissy mood.
If Adams is true to his claim that he’s a new man, committed to serving science, he may have no choice but to sue himself for defamation and cyber bullying. But more on that later.
Adams is certainly threatening to sue me and Forbes magazine for an article I posted to the Forbes site on April 3 that mostly replicated an โInside Storyโ and a separate detailed fact summary profile of Adams that had appeared on the Genetic Literacy Project website a few days before.
Iโve been quiet about the libel threat for six weeks, but Keith KIoor over at his Discover blog has now broken the news with quotes from various threat letters and a link to a 29-page summary brief that backs up in embarrassing detailโfor Mr. Adamsโhis history of promoting crank cures and silly conspiracy theories. Read it if you have any question about the accuracy of any of the milquetoast criticisms that I noted in my two GLP reports or the Forbes story on Adams for which heโs threatening to sue me. He has also added a bizarre response (and sad–this guy needs friends) from Adams.
Adams may be considered a joke in the science community and among science journalists, but there is no denying his influence. According to Alexa, his website is ranked around 2000 globally and is the 800 most popular website in the United States.
Kloor highlights a lot of the background on Adamsโs dicey reputation and the messy details on the suit threats, so no need to go into them here. Whatโs not mentioned is that the threat letters came via a well-known Washington law firm, Emord & Associates, which specializes in representing the loosey-goosey supplements, โnatural productsโ and alternative medicine industries. Alternative products and medicine purveyors now sell upwards of $30 billion of often useless and sometimes dangerous goods every year in the US aloneโproducts that remain largely unregulated and unlabeled despite their drug-like impact on healthโin part because of lobbying by Emord and similar firms. They target the biotech industry (Emord is the law firm providing legal advice to the backers of the Vermont GMO labeling law, claiming its Constitutionality will be upheld in court) and conventional agriculture to present the alternative health movement as whiter than snow. My report, Kloorโs story and hundreds more by the countryโs top journalists paint a more realistic picture.
If youโre looking for some background on these fast-growing but notorious industries, I suggest you pick up the powerful book, Do You Believe in Magic: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine by Paul Offit, the co-inventor of aย rotavirus vaccineย that has been credited with saving hundreds of lives every day. Offit is also theย Maurice R. Hillemanย Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at theย University of Pennsylvania, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Theย Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Needless to say Dr. Offit knows what heโs talking about; for the most part Adams and his ilkโDr. Joseph Mercola and his equally dubious website Mercola.com comes to mind (here is his profile on QuackWatch)โare just hucksters, whatever they might believe of themselves.
This is not just my view by the way. My comments pale in comparison to what you can find about Adams on the Internet. Just put โMike Adamsโ and โquackโ in Google and have a field day (13,800 results). As my original Forbes and GLP stories documented and as elaborated by Kloor, there may be no public figure in this notorious field who has faced more ridicule than Adams. His website has been โhonoredโ as the most quack promoting โnatural productsโ country store on the web. Thatโs now earned him a place on the Dr. Oz show, which itself seems committed to promoting the most fringe views about health, medicine and food. Adams was a guestย on Oz on May 13 in an attempt to promote his new โheavy metals food laboratory.โ
Adams told Oz that he wants to โeliminate science illiteracyโ because it โreally concerns me as a scientistโ (Earth to Adams: youโre not a scientist; you are a supplements salesman). He calls for more โscience education in America,โ which we all support but could put him out of business sooner rather than later if it comes to pass.
Share this article
Earlier this week after Adams appeared on the Oz show, surgical oncologist David GorskiโMD and PhDโcalled NaturalNews.com โone of the quackiest, if not the quackiest site, on the Internet.โ
Just when I thought that Dr. Oz couldnโt go any lower, couldnโt invite a bigger quack on his show to fawn over and publicize, couldnโt sell out more to the forces of quackery, he does.ย โฆ [I]t was a fawning puff piece, painting Adams as a โwhistleblowerโ (heโs nothing of the sort; heโs a supplement entrepreneur), as someone who โbucks conventional wisdomโ and โresearches the truthโ in his โquest to be ahead of the curve.โ We also learn that Adams is someone whose website gets 7 million unique visits per month, which makes Mike Adams the Dr. Oz of the quackosphere.
Obviously, Adamsโ next money-making scheme is to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about supplements, the better to sell his โcleanโ superfoods, supplements, and other products. His appearance on Dr. Ozโs show is clearly designed to promote his brand, and promote it he did, with Ozโs enthusiastic help. The segment had a scary title about โpoison in Americaโs food.โ There was plenty of conspiracy-mongering about companies trying to shut him down and the FDA being cluelessโฆ.
In any case, a lot of nonsense and kissing of Adamsโ posterior are packed into Dr. Ozโs brief segment with him. I never knew Oz could do a colonoscopy with his face, but heโs certainly made sure that Adams doesnโt have a single suspicious polyp all the way up to his terminal ileum.
Read the rest of the Gorski piece. It’s a classic. But you can bypass news filters like me, Kloor, Gorski or Oz and go directly to Adamsโs website for a laugh rush. His latest campaign: warning America about falling for science hucksters.
Which brings me to the title of the piece and the question I posed: Will Adams sue himself for libeling himself? After all, if his goal is to put anti-science purveyors out of business–and those who he claims present โblatantly fictional, distorted or wildly exaggeratedโ anti-science informationโwhy not go after the person who many scientists and journalists contend is the most egregious perpetrator of โcyber bullyingโ and โharassment.โย If Adam is prepared to mount a campaign, perhaps he should targetย whatever deranged sounding person wrote the following:
GMO-promoting scientists are the most despicable humanoid creatures toย have ever walked the surface of this planet. To call them “human” is an insult to humanity. They are ANTI-human. They are demonic. Theyย are forces of evil that walk among the rest of us, parading asย authorities when in their hearts and souls they are actually corporateย cowards and traitors to humankind. To pad their own pockets, they wouldย put at risk the very future of sustainable life on our planet…andย they do it consciously, insidiously. They feed on death, destruction,ย suffering and pain. They align with the biotech industry precisely because they know that no other industry is as steeped in pure evil asย the biotech industry. GMO pushers will lie, cheat, steal, falsify andย even mass-murder as many people as it takes to further their agenda ofย total global domination over the entire food supply… at ANY cost.
I predict a future whereโand for the record I DO NOT encourage thisโshipments of GM seeds to farmers are raided and destroyed byย activists. I predict Monsanto employees being publicly named and shamedย on websites. I predictโbut DO NOT CONDONE — scientists who conduct research for Monsanto being threatened, intimidated and even physically attacked. Again, for the record, I DO NOT IN ANY WAY condone suchย behavior, but I predict it will emerge as an inevitable reaction to theย unfathomable evil being committed by the GMO industry and all itsย co-conspirators. The “Army of the 12 monkeys” may become reality.
Who wrote that classic example of cyber bullying? Oops. The above screed was written by none other than Adams himself. Yes, science needs you, Mike. Please, send yourself a libel threat letter. Letโs shut that ‘quack’ and cyber bully down.
NOTE: Adam has (sort of) just responded by calling anyone who does not believe in conspiracy theories “mentally retarded” and simultaneously touting as groundbreaking the notorious quackery of anti-vaccine promoter Andrew Wakefield and Gilles-Erich Seralini, the French scientist whose study “documenting” the alleged cancer causing dangers of GMOs was retracted. Read Adams’ latest screed–Why NOT believing in conspiracies is a sure sign of mental retardation]
Follow @JonEntine on Twitter
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.
