Joel D. Wallach



It is not clear where Wallach gets his data, but it is a lie.

Joel D. Wallach, also known as the mineral doctor, is an American veterinarian, naturopath quack, colloidal mineral woo promoter, cholesterol denialist, vaccine denialist and best known for promoting the false claim that all diseases are caused by mineral deficiencies.

Wallach believes that people can live more than one hundred years if they take colloidal mineral supplements, including colloidal silver. His ideas have been described by medical experts as false, misleading and dangerous to the public.

He operates the alternative medicine website Critical Health News.

Qualifications and naturopathic career
Wallach refers to himself as a physician. However, he is not qualified in this field. He is a qualified veterinarian, but when it comes to human medicine he is totally unreliable; he obtained his ND from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine.

In the early 1980s, Wallach was associated with cancer woo. He described himself as a "Manner Metabolic Physician" and practiced metabolic therapy, a form of cancer quackery pioneered by Harold W. Manner. This type of discredited treatment involved the use of laetrile which is clinically ineffective for cancer and potentially toxic.

He also worked for the "Hospital Santa Monica", an alternative medicine clinic operated by convicted fraud Kurt Donsbach.

In 1995, it was reported that Wallach was practicing chelation therapy for coronary artery disease at a clinic in San Francisco, California, and that one of his patients had died following his advice to avoid help from a regular physician. Chelation therapy has been utilized by alternative medicine proponents but is a serious misuse of the treatment.

Nobel Prize nominee
Alternative medicine websites like to claim that Wallach was a Nobel Prize nominee. What do they not mention is that he was nominated by "Association of Eclectic Physicians", a non-scientific naturopathic group founded in 1982. Quackwatch have noted that:

Dead Doctors Don't Lie
Wallach is known for his controversial audiotape Dead Doctors Don't Lie, 1994. In the tape, he made a number of distortions, lies and pseudoscientific claims.

Wallach claimed that he has authored over 70 peer-reviewed papers. Upon investigation, the real figure was only a handful. Wallach said that cystic fibrosis is preventable and totally curable. Scientific evidence says otherwise. He proclaimed that physicians have a life expectancy of only 58 years, which is entirely false and has been described by medical experts as an outright lie.

Wallach claimed that five cultures in the world had average lifespans of 120-140 years when, in reality, no such cultures have existed. He also made many false medical claims unsupported by clinical evidence such as all aneurysms being caused by copper deficiency, male-pattern baldness caused by tin deficiency, and Bell's palsy caused by calcium deficiency.

Cholesterol denialism
Wallach is a cholesterol denialist. He believes that people should not worry about high blood cholesterol levels as they have no negative health effects. He has ignored the majority of scientific studies that have found that saturated fat intake and high LDL cholesterol levels increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Colloidal Minerals
Wallach's statements about colloidal minerals are entirely erroneous. According to the The Skeptic's Dictionary: