Unlike some in the science blogosphere, I haven't found it worthwhile to write much about Mike Adams, whose conspiracy-laden screeds and paeans to raw foods and unproven alternative medicine treatments appear on a website of his called Natural News. (I have briefly discussed Adams on one previous occasion.) Here's an apt description from David Gorski:
His website is a one-stop shop, a repository if you will, of virtually every quackery known to humankind, all slathered with a heaping, helping of unrelenting hostility to science-based medicine and science in general. True, Mike Adams is not as big as, say, Joe Mercola, whose website, as far as I can tell, appears to draw more traffic than NaturalNews.com, but what Adams lacks in fame he makes up for in sheer crazy.
That is no exaggeration. Mark Hoofnagle calls him
a deranged individual who denies HIV causes AIDS, promotes some of the most absurd quackery in the world, and also is such an all around crank you can rely on him to wax conspiratorial about almost any dramatic news story.
For example, here he is on Alex Jones's uber-conspiracy show, talking about the "zombiefication of America."
Jon Entine at the Genetic Literacy Project writes that Natural News "is the cyberspace version of the water cooler gathering spot for crackpot conspiracy theorists of the far left and right." Entine ticked off some choice samples of the crazy:
In recent months, Adams has claimed that high-dose Vitamin C injections, which he conveniently sells, have been shown to “annihilate cancer” (doctors warn high doses of vitamin C can be dangerous); that measles and mumps are making a comeback because vaccines are “designed to fail” (he’s an anti-vaccine campaigner); and that fluoridated water causes mental disorders. He is also an AIDS denialist, a 9/11 truther, a Barack Obama citizenship ‘birther’ and a believer in ‘dangerous’ chemtrails.
But hey, apparently nobody is too crazy to appear on the Dr. Oz show. Last year, a New Yorker profile of Oz by Michael Specter asked:
Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good?
I think the answer to that is now self evident. UPDATE: It turns out that Mike Adams is threatening to sue Jon Entine and Forbes, where that article had appeared.
