I think people really need to understand that heart surgeons are not the people best qualified to talk about what causes heart disease. Doctors are not always scientists. Doctors are taught basic principles of human biology, but mainly they are taught the practice of medicine. They are unfortunately not often taught how to use or read research correctly (if they even have time to read it). I have a lot of acquaintances who are doctors or med students, for example, and I'd be happy to see them if I broke my foot or cut my hand open, but they would be totally useless for IBS or acne. Considering how many of us have suffered from the fact that the American medical system is built around selecting mostly-insane people, making them as arrogant as possible, and teaching them nothing about things like nutrition.

And the doctors that are thinking about nutrition who have become gurus? I would check their references. It's convenient that rather than footnoting his references like a researcher would, Dr. Kruse piles them on the bottom of his posts and when you try to find which of his "facts" correspond to his references, it's nearly impossible. And when you try to find them in the scientific literature...his facts just aren't there. Try to find any papers on cold decreased Neuropeptide Y or cold causing autophagy. Mat Lalonde, Paul Jaminet, and I have looked and found nothing. ANother example- Dr. Rosedale. He has a scientific paper, which might put him in the class of a researcher, until you carefully look at the numbers and find that the units of leptin and insulin are just wrong! Another clue- it's cited three times, twice by Rosedale and once in a random article by a low-carb doctor.

So hearing "a doctor says blah blah about health," well...it means nothing to me, I don't even bother linking to it no matter who the doctor is. In fact, it means less than nothing since doctors are often so arrogant that they have less useful information to share than a quantitatively oriented layman like Denise Minger. A medical research or professor on the subject, I would listen to.

It always surprises me that people do not dig deeper and question why a heart surgeon who retired from medicine in 2003 was suddenly brought before the board in 2008 after he published a book about how to cure heart disease by ignoring conventional medical wisdom.

You'll find they pulled patient cases from 8 years prior to retiring; that he had the highest patient success rate in Arizona; that he was voted Top 10 Doctors many times until he wrote a book about the greed and fallacy of statin medication for heart disease.

Look deeper. You'll find he was the only retired surgeon that lost his license to have the announcement broadcast by Press Release. The message was clear. Let any other surgeon speak out like this and you'll lose your license - even if you are retired.

Applaud this man for the courage he had to make a difference that has saved countless lives since.

I think a lot of the explicitly paleo doctors are pretty quacky. At the least, they are relatively unprofessional. Jack Kruse, for example, drops swear words regularly on facebook. How is that at all helpful to our movement? If he's supposed to be a leading intellectual, and his education/profession do put him higher on the totem pole than others like Sisson and Robb Wolf,then he needs to present an image that is as professional as possible.

And he doesn't. He's a joke.

I could not agree more about this. I think it is a good move to check out people using their Dr. credentials online and in articles etc. before taking their advice. Why should we be any less vigilant about selecting our diet and lifestyle doctor gurus than we are in who we select to provide direct care for ourselves and families? Maybe it would be different if these folks weren't using their doctor credentials publicly, but since many of them are we should at least see how they stack up on ratemds.com. Here's a nice article about how to go about selecting a doctor and I think it applies to this scenario.

This is exactly what happened when I sent the Lundell link to a non-paleo friend who is very scientific-rationalist-wants-peer-reviewed-studies: she immediately found him on Quackwatch. Though it appears that the guy who runs Quackwatch is himself a nut, so that isn't trustworthy either. Some comment I read indicated that Lundell lost his license for matters to do with record-keeping, not his views or his practice of medicine, but still.

Apparently, yes. Excellent find; I hadn't the initiative to google him myself - I think I had unquestioningly shared the article in question.

Like you, I think I can still give him the benefit of the doubt (possibly only because my own research supports his recommendations), but I certainly understand that not everyone would look at the results of a simple Google search with such an attitude.

There's plenty of potentially damaging folks practicing and prescribing paleo. Names don't need to be mentioned, but even the paleo movement has its black sheep. What to do about it? I don't know. Googling 'paleo diet' brings up an awful lot of negativity of itself. Search YouTube and the top results are Harley bashing it. It does seem like the negativity associated with an individual is any worse than the negativity out there with regard to paleo in general.

He's a lousy businessman. Check. He's a lousy record keeper. Check. He may even have killed a few patients. Check. (Of course look who he's operating on.) His words are beautiful. He has confessed that his entire professional life was a failure. How great is that, and how wonderfulis this man ....... Robert Mcnamara offered a half- assed apology for his Viet Nam "THING". And I was grateful for that little token of humanity and truth. This guy went way past what Mcnamara did. He did not waffle and did not try to pass the blame onto someone else. The man is a true mensch....... And wow, that Quackwatch guy is a piece of work. Any and all of the subjects I personally have tried that he mentions/rags have been very useful to my health. The guy is WRONG every time. How is that possilble? How can you be wrong on every subject? (Almost forgot "W")

What happened to this dr appears to be what happens in corporate America all of the time. Someone does or says something that pisses a higher-up off or embarrasses them, and they go back to something paperwork... Clocking in, emails, something minute, that was irrelevant when it happened, but technically was against the rules... And use it to fire them. It happens ALL of the time...

Excellent find GroveGal to counter the OP's find. Care to share a link with your info?

Otherwise, the removing of his license sounds like the response of a cult to members who say things the "leaders" deem heretical.

I want to believe Lundell. Being a women and having had a bypass at the age of 39. Why does nobody takes the concept he describes seriously and do more research on the topic? Do cardiologist's keep us in the dark... or are they also in the dark?

Hmmm...........You don't think that maybe "some" would try to dis-credit Dr Lundell because his points might hurt pharmaceutical sales of Statin drugs, now do you all? Naive idiots!!!!