Internet quack Joe Mercola is worried. Dr. Oz to the rescue!

Dr. Oz interviews Joe Mercola on his show.

After a series of studies showing that vitamins and supplements are usually a waste of money, including my recent article on the top 6 vitamins you shouldn’t take, internet supplement salesman Joe Mercola is worried.  He should be: his Internet-driven empire is largely based on sales of vitamins and supplements, for which his claims range from merely implausible to dangerously untrue, including:

• Himalayan salt is far better for you than regular salt. Coincidentally, Mercola sells the good salt.
• Vitamin D is "the new silver bullet for cancer." No, it's not.  Not even a little bit.
• Homeopathy cured a boy of autism. Of course Mercola doesn't provide any proof of this, only a testimonial.  This is not even remotely plausible, since homeopathic preparations are just sugar pills.

I could provide many more examples, but this should be enough to demonstrate that I'm not making this stuff up.

Mercola is also one of the loudest voices and worst offenders in the anti-vaccine movement. Among other misinformation, he claims that the hepatitis vaccine causes autism, and his website urges people to use his supplements instead of getting vaccinated.

So how do I know Mercola is worried? He's appearing on the Dr. Oz Show on Monday, February 10 (the day after I'm writing this) to talk about multivitamins. Apparently his 10 minute segment wasn't enough, so he posted an article on his website with the "Information I couldn't share" on Dr. Oz's show.

Does the article explain why multivitamins are actually good for you?  Well, no. Most of the article is a big red herring, in which he argues that supplements should not be regulated as drugs, because "we have all the regulations we need." Then he contradicts himself and says that the FDA already regulates supplements. (It doesn't - or to be more precise, the FDA does not require supplement makers to prove their products work. It can only step in if the products start to kill people. This is what Mercola calls regulation.) Besides, he says, supplements are harmless. As evidence, he cites a press release from a pseudoscientific organization that claims "no deaths from supplements in 27 years."

Not surprisingly, Mercola doesn't cite any actual science to support his claims. In contrast, several very large studies in major medical journals, cited in my own columns last month and last October, show that routine supplementation with multivitamins, especially with the megadoses that many people take, can indeed cause genuine harm. Those same studies showed that if you don't have a deficiency, there's simply no benefit to taking most vitamins.  Mercola's response is to cite opinion pieces from his own website that simply assert, without any evidence, that the studies are wrong.

In other words, Mercola's response is "Oh yeah?" He then goes off on a tangent and launches an irrelevant ad hominem attack on noted vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit.

Why has Dr. Oz repeatedly had Joe Mercola on his show? This is a tough one. Does Oz believe that autism is caused by vaccines, something Mercola has claimed repeatedly over the years?  Does he understand that Mercola's anti-vaccination campaign leads to genuine harm? Does he know that the FDA has repeatedly issued warnings to Mercola to demand that he stop making false claims about his vitamins and supplements, as Chicago Magazine reported?

Or does Dr. Oz keep inviting Mercola back because he knows Mercola has a big audience that will increase his own viewership?

Despite my past criticism of Dr. Oz, I still think he has a better grasp of science than Joe Mercola. He also reassures viewers constantly that he doesn't sell the products that appear on his show. And yet Oz is giving a platform to someone who makes huge profits selling products based on unproven claims. By having Mercola on his show, Oz is giving him free publicity and helping him sell those same products. And whether or not Oz agrees with Mercola, he is helping to give credibility to Mercola's wildly inaccurate and dangerous anti-vaccine claims.

Whatever happened to swine flu?

What happened to the flu pandemic?  In 2009, a new flu strain swept across the world. The new strain, called H1N1, emerged from pigs and jumped over to humans sometime in late 2008, and then swept through the human population starting in the spring of 2009.  Panic ensued.  Egypt responded by slaughtering all of its pigs, about 300,000.

Was the panic justified?  If so, where are all the victims?

I first wrote about this soon after the outbreak began, and we now know that hundreds of millions of people were infected, somewhere in the range 11% to 21% of the population.  That's an awful lot of sick people.  However, H1N1 turned out to be a very mild flu: many people experienced little more than a few days of sniffles, much like a common cold.  This surprising mildness of swine flu led to great confusion.  Conspiracy theorists claimed that the threat had been overblown, hyped by vaccine manufacturers and their government co-conspirators.  A wacky German lawmaker, Wolfgang Wodarg, even claimed that the swine flu vaccine caused cancer, a claim that was picked up and amplified by famed internet snake oil salesman, Joseph Mercola.

The swine flu now seems routine, just another human flu circulating among the population. As I wrote back in 2010, the seasonal flu vaccine now includes the H1N1 pandemic strain, so if you get your flu shot, you're protected.  But as this figure from the CDC shows, the current season has been dominated by H3N2. 

See the little tiny brown bits at the top of each bar?  Those are swine flu cases.  The swine flu has nearly vanished.

This is a big surprise, because in all three of the previous pandemics: 1918 ("Spanish" flu), 1957, and 1968, the new pandemic strain completely replaced the older strain.  That hasn't happened this time, and it looks like the old strain, H3N2, is winning.  That's rather unfortunate, because H3N2 is a much nastier flu than the swine flu.  And this year we had a big spike in deaths due to flu, all because of H3N2.

So no, the panic back in 2009 wasn't justified, but the warnings beforehand, about the possibilities of a pandemic, were legitimate.  All we knew in early 2009 was that a new pandemic strain had jumped from pigs to humans, and we didn't know for several months how bad (or mild) it would be.  The human species got lucky this time.

Can anyone say when the next pandemic will arrive?  Well, no.  Look at the past century: 4 pandemics, separated by 39 years, 11 years, and 41 years.  From that record it seems we should be safe for a while.  But until 2009, the pandemics had always pushed out the previous flu.  We're still living with the 1968 flu strain, and no one knows when a new flu will truly replace it.

Meanwhile, get your flu shot, because the flu mutates so fast that we need a new vaccine every year to keep ahead of it.  Work continues to try to develop a permanent flu vaccine - one that we will only have to take once in a lifetime.  If you like that idea, then keep supporting NIH, which is the biggest source of funding for flu research.

Oh right: we just cut NIH across the board because Congress couldn't get its act together.  I guess we may have to wait a bit longer for a better flu vaccine.

Dr. Oz tries to do science

TV doc Mehmet Oz, who hosts a very popular daily television show, tried to conduct a scientific experiment this week. He wanted to test whether apple juice from some of the most popular juice makers in the U.S. contained toxic levels of arsenic. For some reason - perhaps he was feeling guilty about all the unscientific claims he has been pushing on his show - he decided he would try to prove this scientifically.

With all the resources of his TV network behind him, he was able to put on a pretty good show. But Dr. Oz is no scientist, as he made very clear when he presented his "discoveries." His pretend-science act - and that's what it was - was a disaster. I'd have to give him an "F" for his experiment, where he claimed that he had found dangerous levels of arsenic in five popular brands of apple juice: Minute Maid, Apple & Eve, Motts, Gerbers, and Juicy Juice.

His website proudly displays these results, claiming that the arsenic is from pesticides used in China. After his "extensive national investigation" he concluded:

"American apple juice is made from apple concentrate, 60% of which is imported from China. Other countries may use pesticides that contain arsenic, a heavy metal known to cause cancer. After testing dozens of samples from three different cities in America, Dr. Oz discovered that some of the nation's best known brands of apple juice contain arsenic."

There are many problems with this study, but the biggest one is that its conclusions are false. The reasons include:

1. Oz asked a lab to test for total arsenic, but there are two forms of arsenic, commonly known as organic and inorganic. Organic arsenic is everywhere, and it's mostly harmless. As the FDA explained in its first warning letter to Oz:

"As we have previously advised you, the results from total arsenic tests CANNOT be used to determine whether a food is unsafe because of its arsenic content. We have explained to you that arsenic occurs naturally in many foods in both inorganic and organic forms and that only the inorganic forms of arsenic are toxic, depending on the amount. We have advised you that the test for total arsenic DOES NOT distinguish inorganic arsenic from organic arsenic."

2. Oz didn't try to replicate his own results, and didn't even think to question the numbers he got from the lab he hired. Here's a hint, Dr. Oz: if you come up with a surprising result, then you must try to replicate it yourself to see if you get the same answer. And you should be your own greatest skeptic. Not Dr. Oz: he had all his samples tested at a single lab, which the FDA warned him was giving erroneously high results. The FDA re-tested samples from the same lot for one of the juice makers (Gerber), and sent Oz another letter on Sept 13, telling him the results, as follows:

FDA Sample Total Arsenic Result (Average)
Sample 659595 Lot #1157515791 2.0 ppb
Sample 659596 Lot #1125515762 4.0 ppb
Sample 659597 Lot #1125515761 6.0 ppb
Sample 710623 Lot #1059515761 5.0 ppb
Sample 710624 Lot #1059515762 5.0 ppb
Sample 710625 Lot #1157515761 2.0 ppb
Sample 710626 Lot #1157515762 3.0 ppb

The lab that Oz hired had reported far higher total arsenic levels: 36 ppb. The highest result that the FDA found was six times lower. This would be very, very worrisome to any good scientist. The FDA also warned in this letter that

"it would be irresponsible and misleading for the Dr. Oz Show to suggest that apple juice is unsafe based on tests for total arsenic."

But of course Oz wasn't going to go back and check his results. That would be too scientific! Instead, he aired a show in which he wildly overstated the results and the possible risks. He didn't express even the slightest uncertainty about his findings. He interviewed audience members who dramatically confessed that they hadn't realized they were poisoning their own children. The horror!

To their credit, the mainstream media didn't buy this one. ABC in particular, featured an interview on Good Morning America with both Oz and Dr. Richard Besser, ABC's medical editor, who called Oz's show "extremely irresponsible" to his face. Oz danced around the accusations but never once admitted he might have made a mistake. Besser really lays it on the line in this smackdown (click to watch the video):

Among other things, Besser said that Oz's hyperbolic, poorly-supported claims are like " yelling fire in a movie theater". Bravo for Dr. Besser.

I'm not sure if Mehmet Oz was always the way he is now, but he seems to use his show to sell products (and to sell himself!) rather than to inform the public about medical issues, as one of my fellow Forbes bloggers, Alice Walton, has noted. Dr. Oz has embraced complete quacks, too, notably Joseph Mercola, whom he has had on the show more than once.

Maybe Oz was trying to show his science-y side by doing what he thought was a real study, actually measuring arsenic levels in samples of apple juice. But he botched it so badly that he just demonstrated his own lack of serious science cred.

Dr. Oz ought retract his erroneous claims about arsenic and apologize for his scaremongering and his sloppy science. But he's showing no signs of that: on his website he is sticking by his claims, and he challenges the FDA and the food companies to come on his show. He's also claiming that the source of the arsenic is pesticide sprayed on apples imported from China, although he presents no evidence at all for that. This is not how science is done, Dr. Oz. You made a claim, and others pointed out major problems with it. It's incumbent on you to come up with better evidence. But somehow I suspect that will be too much trouble for you. Real science can be such a pain that way.