Dr. Joseph Mercola is an osteopathic physician (DO) based in Chicago, Illinois. Like MDs, he completed four years of training and study in the basic and clinical sciences, and also passed licensing examinations successfully. He completed his family practice residency in 1985.
Dr. Mercola’s primary passion is transforming the conventional medical paradigm in the United States. He believes that the American health care system is flawed and has been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, which is why people are now receiving poor quality healthcare and are still quite far from real solutions to their health woes. He became exposed to this reality during his first few years of private practice, where he followed the conventional medical model and recommended prescription drugs to his patients.
But upon realizing that the treatments he was prescribing were not curing his patients and are actually worsening their state of health, he decided to switch to holistic remedies. He became well-known for these time-tested approaches, which are still being used in his Natural Health Center (formerly The Optimal Wellness Center) in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.
Dr. Mercola has also been greatly fascinated with the Internet since the 1990s. As a student in the University of Illinois, he helped to develop a nationwide online system for finding kidney transplant recipients. This experience showed him how powerful the Internet could be for medicine.
In 1997, he established his own natural health website, Mercola.com, which is dedicated to providing free health and wellness articles, natural products, as well as other resources to people worldwide, inspiring them to take control of their health. Mercola.com is now known as one of the top natural health websites in the world, with over one million subscribers.
Dr. Mercola authored three New York Times bestsellers, The No-Grain Diet, The Great Bird Flu Hoax, and Effortless Healing. He has been invited as a keynote speaker at many health-related conferences and assemblies, and has also been featured in various media resources, such as TIME magazine, LA Times, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, Today Show, Dr. Oz, and CBS’s Washington Unplugged with Sharyl Attkisson.
In 2009, Dr. Mercola was named the “Ultimate Wellness Game Changer” by the Huffington Post, an honor bestowed upon “100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders in 10 categories who are harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world.”
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