The Man Who Loves To Bust Quacks - TIME - By Leon Jaroff - April 22, 2001

Barrett retired from his psychiatric practice in 1993 to devote himself full time to quackbusting. Along the way, he honed his communication skills and now considers himself an investigative journalist taking full advantage of the power of the Internet. “Twenty years ago, I had trouble getting my ideas through to the media,” he says. “Today I am the media.” ¹⁾

PEOPLE Magazine January 25, 1999 Vol. 51 No. 3

Doctor No By Thomas Fields-Meyer Considering Treatments That Sound Too Good to Be True? Quackbuster Stephen Barrett Has a Word for You: Don't Looking at the vitriol pouring into Dr. Stephen Barrett's World Wide Web site (Quack-watch.com), you might think he's been stealing candy from babies. “You are a disgrace to the world,” writes one inflamed correspondent. “You should be psychoanalyzed, or better yet, lobotomized,” writes another. Urges a third: “Rot in hell.” ²⁾

Stephen Barrett, M.D., a retired psychiatrist who resides near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has achieved national renown as an author, editor, and consumer advocate. In addition to heading Quackwatch, he is vice-president of the Institute for Science in Medicine and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 1984, he received an FDA Commissioner's Special Citation Award for Public Service in fighting nutrition quackery. In 1986, he was awarded honorary membership in the American Dietetic Association. From 1987 through 1989, he taught health education at The Pennsylvania State University. ³⁾

Curriculum Vitae ⁴⁾

Other Favorable Mentions

• NBNews Editor's Choice Award, May 1997
• Medical Web Site of the Month. Oncology Times, October 1997
• Superior Noncommercial Site. The Learning Fountain, November 1997
• Featured Site. CEO Express, November 1997
• One of four web sites selected by the Museum of Science and Industry in Paris to demonstrate the quality of health information on the internet at its “New Image, New Networks” exhibition from December 1997 through 1998.
• Site of the month. Protégez-vous, August 1998. Protégez-vous is a Canadian consumer-protection magazine whose name means “protect yourself” in English. Its review stated that Quackwatch is “one of the better sites to separate myths from reality as to health matters” and that Dr. Barrett “summarizes and criticizes tens of alternative methods, natural products, and fraudulant claims with an efficacy and precision difficult to equal.”
• Cool Site. Canadian Medical Association Journal, June 1998.
• Site du Jour of the Day. October 18, 1998.
• Listed as one of nine “select sites that provide reliable health information and resources.” Journal of the American Medical Association 280:1380, 1998.
• Site of the Week. Entertainment Weekly, March 15, 1999.
• Forbes “Best of the Web,” February 2000, June 2001.
• Best health care watchdog. Yahoo Internet Life, October 2000.
• U.S. News & World Reports, Best of the Web (alternative medicine), December 4, 2000.
• National Review: Top 100 Cool Sites.
• One of the 17 best general health sites on the Internet. ON Magazine, March 2001.
• “Kool Health Site of the Week.” Kim Komando Radio Show, March 16, 2001.
• One of 17 best general health sites. On Magazine, April 2001.

This page was revised on October 29 , 2001. ⁵⁾

“Organic” Foods: Will Certification Protect Consumers? Stephen Barrett, M.D. - December 2000

Organic foods are certainly not more nutritious [5]. The nutrient content of plants is determined primarily by heredity. Mineral content may be affected by the mineral content of the soil, but this has no significance in the overall diet. If essential nutrients are missing from the soil, the plant will not grow. If plants grow, that means the essential nutrients are present. Experiments conducted for many years have found no difference in the nutrient content of organically grown crops and those grown under standard agricultural conditions. Safer?

“Organic” proponents suggest that their foods are safer because they have lower levels of pesticide residues. However, the pesticide levels in our food supply are not high. In some situations, pesticides even reduce health risks by preventing the growth of harmful organisms, including molds that produce toxic substances [5].

To protect consumers, the FDA sets tolerance levels in foods and conducts frequent “market basket” studies wherein foods from regions throughout the United States are purchased and analyzed. Its 1997 tests found that about 60% of fruits and vegetables had no detectable pesticides and only about 1.2% of domestic and 1.6% of imported foods had violative levels [6]. Its annual Total Diet Study has always found that America's dietary intakes are well within international and Emvironmental Protection Agency standards.

Most studies conducted since the early 1970s have found that the pesticide levels in foods designated organic were similar to those that were not. In 1997, Consumer Reports purchased about a thousand pounds of tomatoes, peaches, green bell peppers, and apples in five cities and tested them for more than 300 synthetic pesticides. Traces were detected in 77% of conventional foods and 25% of organically labeled foods, but only one sample of each exceeded the federal limit.

Manfred Kroger, Ph.D., Quackwatch consultant and Professor of Food Science at The Pennsylvania State University, has put the matter more bluntly; “Scientific agriculture has provided Americans with the safest and most abundant food supply in the world. Agricultural chemicals are needed to maintain this supply. The risk from pesticide residue, if any, is minuscule, is not worth worrying about, and does not warrant paying higher prices.” ⁶⁾

December 1999 - Genetically Modified Organisms (false clams and wrong science do not age well.. this Monsanto talking points riff is a fun case study in shills )

Since life began, genes have crossed the boundaries of related and unrelated species in nature. Biotechnology applications by humans date back to 1800 B.C., when people began using yeast to leaven bread and ferment wine. By the 1860s, people started breeding plants through deliberate cross-pollination. They moved and selected genes to enhance the beneficial qualities of plants through cross-breeding without knowing the traits for which the genes coded. Most foods, including rice, oats, potatoes, corn, wheat and tomatoes, are the products of traditional cross-breeding. This time-tested practice continues to produce crops with desirable traits.

However, traditional cross-breeding has its limitations. It can only occur in the same or related plant species, so genetic resources available to any one plant are limited. Moreover, when plants are cross-bred, all 100,000 or so of each plant's genes are mixed, producing random combinations. Since traditional plant breeders ultimately want only a few genes or traits transferred, they typically spend 10 to 12 years backcrossing hybrids with the original plants to obtain the desired traits and to breed out the tens of thousands of unwanted genes. Clearly, this process is not speedy or precise.

Modern biotechnology or genetic modification adds tremendous timeliness and precision to this process. It is the result of scientists understanding and using what nature has been doing unaided since life began. What is genetic modification?

The term “genetically modified” is commonly used to describe the application of recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (rDNA) technology to the genetic alteration of microorganisms, plants and animals. This advanced molecular technology, developed in 1973, allows for effective and efficient transfer of genetic material from one organism to another. Instead of cross-breeding plants for several years to acquire a desired trait, scientists can identify and insert a single gene responsible for a particular trait into a plant with relative speed. Genes do not have to come from a related species in order to be functional; hence, genes can potentially be transferred among all living organisms.

What are the benefits of rDNA technology?

The World Health Organization estimates that the global population will double by 2050 to more than 9 billion people. Hence, food production must also increase, but little unused farmland remains. Simply put, rDNA technology is the most promising, precise and advanced strategy available today for increasing global food production by reducing crop losses and increasing yields while conserving farmland. Moreover, the use of rDNA technology has already shown that it can reduce the need for chemical pesticides and tillage, which can cause soil erosion, as well as enhance the nutritive value of crops. These benefits result from genetically engineering plants for ⁷⁾

“Research shows that during the first one hundred years of the American Medical Association existence it formed councils and committees which sat in judgement of its economic competitors. These committees would “investigate” the various alternative health-care systems and would then report on their findings and make determinations and recommendations that the public should stay away from such “quackery.”

Coordinating Conference on Health Information (CCHI) The CCHI and the AMA's Committee on Quackery continued to serve this function from 1963 to 1975. However, when the writing was on the wall, Doyl Taylor saw that his propaganda department was “going down for the count.” He apparently took steps to see that his work continued even if he weren't around to supervise the AMA's campaigns against the “quacks.”

For some years prior to the 1975 dissolution of his Department, Taylor worked to get groups outside the AMA to take an active role in their campaign against “quackery.” One of Taylor's tactics had been to get other groups to take a stand against quackery, to develop position papers on quackery, and to parallel what the AMA was doing in this area. Quite often these groups would simply duplicate the AMA's position on the issue.

The AMA would help that group develop their statements, and then the AMA would tout the group's position as being independent of the AMA's. In this fashion the AMA used the other group's statements to strengthen its own campaign. In the seedy world of intelligence this is known as “multiple reports.” One creates outlets from outside one's immediate area, and then points to these reports as evidence that there is a “national movement” or “public opinion” against one's target in a campaign.

As far as helping to set up front groups, this apparently came into play in the early 1970s. Doyl Taylor made it known that there was a psychiatrist in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a Dr. Stephen Barrett, who was a crusader against “quackery.” Taylor encouraged me in 1970 to make contact with Barrett, as he was very involved in the same issues as the AMA, especially in the area of chiropractic. Taylor said that he had given Barrett full access to the “quackery” files in the department of Investigation between 1969 and 1975. Barrett's group was known as the Lehigh Valley Committee Against Health Fraud. ([italics] Health Fraud [end italics] is a euphemism for [italics] quackery [end italics] which is still used interchangeably today.) The group was incorporated in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on April 19, 1970.

In reviewing published statements by the AMA and Dr. Barrett, I was able to find some of the pieces of the puzzle in the AMA News, as well as in the minutes of the CCHI. These pieces pointed to the distinct possibility that organized medicine may very well have been involved in setting up, or helping to set up, the first group outside the AMA to fight “quackery” or “health fraud.”

The following are Dr. Stephen Barrett's own words, published in the AMA News on August 25, 1975, describing the Lehigh Valley Committee Against Health Fraud. This was five years after it was incorporated.

• [quote follows]
• Several of the professional socieities endorsed our group and donated money to help the Lehigh Valley Committee Against Health Fraud, Inc. The medical society allowed us to use its office equipment until we obtained our own.
• ….By working “undercover” using assumed names and box numbers, we've gotten all sorts of information and publications other groups, like the medical societies, haven't been able to lay their hands on.
• ….Really, we're a bunch of guerrillas - we're not a large group, there are about 40 members, but we're the only such group in the country.
• [end quotes] ⁸⁾

The National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt group which describes itself as “focused upon health fraud, misinformation, and quackery as public health problems.” The NCAHF website is run by board member Stephen Barrett, M.D. The group also produces a weekly online newsletter in association with Quackwatch.org. [24] Although the group maintains a website, its 990 forms indicate no income or expenses for the fiscal year ending in 2006, the last year it's financial reports were available on Guidestar. ⁹⁾