July 11, 2017- by Steven E. Greer, MD
How does one become a successful TV medical doctor pundit? First, you have to leave your medical ethics at the door when you enter the studio. TV doctors like Dr. Oz have to be willing to promote junk science and hype fads.
The doctors hired by CBS news are especially egregious at hyping junk science and promoting dangerous drugs and ideas. Dr. David Agus has been championing daily aspirin as a panacea despite the fact that the data shows it greatly increases the risk of death from bleeding while not being proven to lower cancer, etc.
Dr. LaPook has seemingly been on the payroll of the coffee industry lobbyists for years. Every time a small or poorly designed trial claims to show that coffee consumption is beneficial, he reports on it. Of course, his producers are the ones who are authorizing and encouraging this.
Well, The TV Coffee Docs are at it again, and more egregious than ever. Over two-days on CBS, Dr. LaPook, and the newest one, Dr. Tara Narula, have promoted two junk science publications claiming to show that coffee consumption reduces death rates and increases a slew of healthy biomarkers, such as HDL.
Wow. If that were true, then coffee would be the most powerful drug ever discovered. After all, even statins have not been shown to lower death rates.
In the video above, we debunk the telecasts. As any doctor could guess, the flaws of these latest studies are the usual factors. They were not randomized or controlled. They relied on self-reporting, which is infamously unreliable, and the confounding factors were so numerous that they cannot even be estimated, much less corrected for by statistical methods. (Click here for the editorial).
The only conclusion to be drawn from these studies is that coffee is expensive and consumed by wealthy healthy people. You don’t see many people living in poverty buying daily $5 Starbucks drinks, or even having a home to brew their own.
Meanwhile, the extremely harmful effects of caffeine were totally ignored by the CBS agenda-driven doctors. Caffeine at moderate doses causes psychosis, tremors, excessive urination, and heart palpitations (e.g. PVC’s). It makes the work environment hostile for people sitting close to the caffeine addicts. Caffeine is also associated with increased use of deadly cigarettes. At high doses, caffeine frequently kills.
Coffee also stains the teeth and gives one bad breath, as Gayle King properly pointed out in the video.
Congress needs to subpoena Dr. Narula and LaPook, as it did with Dr. Oz, and get to the bottom of this pro-coffee propaganda campaign. If the money trail is followed, it will lead to Big Coffee.