I post some material from Dr. Joseph Mercola as I find it worthy and of interest, and it’s usually well cited for the conclusions and evidence. But I had noticed that some of his material I was starting to question, and this following post lays out what has been going on in his personal life and with his company. It would seem he’s been caught up with a spiritualist, and if not just a con artist, possibly possession. God warned everyone not to mess with the spiritual realm, as you’d don’t have defenses for much more intelligent and supernatural fallen angels. Also worth mentioning, due to the suicides and psychosis from AI use, these same demons can hijack your AI interactions with similar results.
https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/435-a-requiem-for-dr-joseph-mercola
A tribute, a warning, and a farewell
By Robert Yoho, MD
READER RESOURCES: THE APOCALYPSE ALMANAC: Hidden cures in our dystopian age. Check out the “Cure Cancer in Your Kitchen” chapter. FULLSCRIPT SUPPLEMENTS: top quality and economical. AFFILIATE STORE: I offer competitively priced products HERE that I have personally tested and used.
My brilliant editors were split on this post. Elizabeth Cronin felt it was meritorious and truthful, and that it should see the light of day. Jim Arnold of Liars World Substack thought the opposite. Let me know in the comments what your opinions are.
Summary
• Dr. Joseph Mercola, the osteopathic physician who built the largest alternative health platform on the internet, began consulting a self-described psychic channeler in late 2023 and fired his top three executives, including his own sister, in February 2024.
• The psychic, who goes by Kai Clay, claims to channel a spirit called “Bahlon.” Mercola pays him $1.2 million per year and has announced plans for a 12-book series based on these sessions.
• A mass exodus followed the firings: the CFO, CIO, HR director, marketing director, and other senior staff have departed. The new CEO, Laura Berry, had a suspended law license and a bankruptcy in her background.
• Mercola cut off funding to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) without warning, ending a decades-long partnership with Barbara Loe Fisher. His longtime partner, Erin Elizabeth, posted publicly that his family was praying for him.
• Two lawsuits allege religious discrimination and breach of contract. Former employees describe what they call a “corporate hijacking” driven by anti-Christian animus channeled through the psychic.
• Mercola’s earlier work educated millions about pharmaceutical corruption, nutrition, and the dangers of processed food. That body of work retains its value regardless of what has happened to the man who created it.
How I got here
My development into who I am today began nine years ago, when I became frustrated with my professional path and began preparing to exit practice and resign my medical license. I told this story in Butchered by Healthcare, which I excerpted below:
Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray, a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures. —Rene Leriche, Philosophy of Surgery, 1951
In the summer of 2013, when I was 61, I had two women in their 30s die in my surgical center. I sent them to the emergency room, but nothing worked. It was my place, so I was responsible. It was the worst period of my life. I felt guilty and was sleepless, and my wife thought we would have to give up our practice.
I did not learn why it happened until the autopsy reports came back six months later. One woman had an embolus of fat blocking her lungs. This occurs unpredictably, and there is no way to prevent it.
The second had a high blood level of local anesthetic. We inject this drug into fat to decrease pain, and after liposuction, we sometimes transplant the fat back into the breasts and buttocks. This raised her levels and caused her death, but there was no way to be sure.
To keep my mind occupied, I started reading medicine for 20 to 30 hours a week. My original training was as a generalist, but for decades, I had studied only cosmetic surgery.
I began with the Prozac-class antidepressants, which I had prescribed since their invention. It stunned me to learn that they hardly worked and were often damaging. I read further and found that other psychiatric medications produce irreversible brain and health problems. Doctors have been trained to pass them out like jelly beans.
I learned that many drugs are given for speculative benefits. Many are damaging. I consulted people for cosmetic surgery who were taking 10 of these at once. I began to see how medical corporations had done this to us.
I read about back pain. Most of it goes away on its own, but doctors have been thoughtlessly prescribing opioid painkillers and turning many patients into struggling addicts. Low back surgeries are the most expensive and some of the least effective procedures in all medical care, bar none. No one admits this, even to themselves.
I also realized that over the past three decades, younger and younger people had been getting heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. I wondered whether healthcare, particularly medication use, might be the cause. I thought about Peter Van Etten’s line, “In this insanity of healthcare, the patient always loses.” I saw that we were breaking them on a medical torture wheel.
It was during this period that I started reading Dr. Mercola’s work. Although I have never met him or communicated with him, he became my most important mentor. The breadth of his interests and his comprehensive knowledge base led me to follow him the way the Deadheads followed the Grateful Dead. Like many others, I respected him almost like a guru for years.
I listened to Mercola’s podcasts incessantly, aided by the fact that he had them all archived at mercola.libsyn.com. I republished some of his essays on my Substack after editing them for clarity. For some reason, his team’s writing quality was poor despite their many other talents.
The man who built the platform
Joseph Mercola was born on July 8, 1954, in Chicago. He studied biology and chemistry at the University of Illinois and graduated from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine (now Midwestern University) in 1982. He practiced family medicine in the Chicago suburbs, serving as chairman of family medicine at St. Alexius Medical Center, before launching mercola.com in the late 1990s.
The website became the most visited alternative health site on the internet. By 2017, Mercola stated under oath that his net worth exceeded $100 million, built on a supplement empire and a devoted readership. He claimed 2 million social media followers. His YouTube channel had over 300,000 subscribers and 50 million views before the platform deleted it in September 2021 for violating its medical misinformation policies.
Mercola wrote multiple New York Times bestsellers, including The No-Grain Diet (2003), Fat for Fuel (2017), and The Truth About COVID-19 (2021, co-authored with Ronnie Cummins). He funded the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) for years, providing roughly 40 percent of its annual budget. He and NVIC founder Barbara Loe Fisher dedicated a “Truth and Freedom Monument” together in Cape Coral, Florida, on March 25, 2023.
Whatever one thinks of Mercola’s positions on specific topics, the scale of his influence is not in dispute. He taught millions of people to question pharmaceutical narratives, to read labels, to consider nutrition before medication, and to understand that the FDA is a captured regulator serving corporate interests rather than patients. His archive of interviews and articles is one of the largest collections of alternative health content ever assembled.
Comment: I owe a debt to Mercola. He was the single most important influence on my transition from a conventional surgeon to a medical dissident. Many of the ideas I write about on this Substack, I first encountered on his site. That is what makes the rest of this story so painful to tell.
Something broke
About two years ago, something happened to Mercola. He had a mass layoff or firing of his top personnel, and he adopted a sort of spiritual figure on whom he based many of his subsequent actions. I watched his content deteriorate, and after a few months, I decided that it was so inconsistent that I could no longer follow him. Except for some forays into reviewing his older work, I have ignored him since.
The documented facts are worse than I suspected.
In late 2023, Mercola began consulting with a man who calls himself Kai Clay (also known as Christopher Johnson). Clay claims to channel an entity named “Bahlon,” which he describes as an “ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the causal plane.” In hundreds of hours of video recordings obtained by SupplySide Supplement Journal reporter Rick Polito, Clay sits with his eyes closed as if in a trance while advising Mercola on everything from spiritual matters to firing his executives and restructuring his company.
Mercola’s sister Janet Selvig, who served as chief editor and had been involved with the company since its founding in 1985, noticed odd language in her brother’s emails in late 2023. She confronted him on January 31, 2024, after seeing the channeling videos. According to Selvig, Mercola urged her to “join this noble crusade.” She declined.
One week later, on February 7, 2024, three top executives received termination letters signed by Laura Berry, a woman who had not worked at the company before but claimed in the letter that she was the new CEO. The fired executives were CEO Steve Rye (who had held the position since 2009), Chief Business Officer Ryan Boland (a 10-year employee), and Selvig herself. An email from Mercola’s address sent before the firings cited the executives’ Catholic beliefs as cause for termination.
The aftermath
Five days after the firings, Mercola sent a video to employees describing a 12-book series based on his conversations with Bahlon as “a new beginning for the company.” He announced his goal to reach “billions around the world with a new paradigm of how to increase joy in their life.” He promised to bring his new CEO and a surprise guest who would become the company’s chief operating officer.
The exodus continued. In the months following the firings, the CFO, CIO, HR director, director of marketing, product launch manager, product development manager for the Solspring supplement line, the inventory manager, and the contractor responsible for securing Mercola’s servers all departed. The CIO, CFO, and the IT contractor left in the same week in early July 2024.
Berry, the new CEO, turned out to have a suspended Maryland law license (following a 2013 complaint that cited failure to pay federal and D.C. income taxes for tax years 2000 through 2011 and the unauthorized withdrawal of $27,510 from an estate). She had also left a Virginia sheriff’s department without returning multiple firearms, a deputy uniform, and other equipment. The sheriff who hired her has since been indicted on charges of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud.
Court filings revealed that Clay’s consulting contract with Mercola’s company, NHP Innovations LLC, pays $100,000 per month, or $1.2 million per year. In the channeling sessions, Clay told Mercola that Rye’s Christian beliefs justified his removal, that Berry was “connected to an ancient entity,” and that the company would not have to honor Rye’s $5 million severance package.
Rye filed suit in Lee County, Florida, in October 2024, alleging wrongful termination and breach of contract. Selvig and Boland filed a separate lawsuit in January 2025, alleging religious discrimination and describing what they called a “corporate hijacking” and “Catholic purge.” The company has denied the claims and sought to move Rye’s case to mandatory arbitration.
Collateral damage
On March 25, 2024, one year to the day after Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher dedicated the NVIC Truth and Freedom Monument, Fisher received an email from Berry informing her that donations from Mercola’s Natural Health Products Research Foundation were discontinued. The funding represented about 40 percent of NVIC’s annual budget. Mercola did not contact Fisher by phone, email, or text to explain the decision. Fisher described herself as “stunned, hurt, and confused” in a public statement she released months later.
Erin Elizabeth, Mercola’s longtime girlfriend and the operator of Health Nut News, posted on social media on Valentine’s Day 2024: “This is the hardest post I’ve ever made in 16 years. Dr. Mercola’s family is praying for him. I am praying too. We are all praying for Joe, and I do not know what the future holds.” When a follower asked if she was still with Mercola, she replied, “I’ll update soon. Things are crazy.”
Rick Ross, founder of the Cult Education Institute, reviewed the situation for SupplySide Supplement Journal and said the pattern was familiar. The psychic’s claim to channel an entity that cannot be questioned, the isolation from family and longtime associates, the replacement of trusted advisors with unknown figures; these patterns appear in both cult dynamics and cases of psychic fraud. Steven Hassan, author of Combating Cult Mind Control, agreed that claiming special powers is a standard strategy for gaining control of a person.
The content problem
Mercola continues to publish daily on mercola.com and maintains a Substack (takecontrol.substack.com). He released a new book in late 2024, Your Guide to Cellular Health: Unlocking the Science of Longevity and Joy, published by Joy House (distributed through Simon & Schuster). The title received endorsements from several physicians in the alternative health community.
The content quality has deteriorated. Mercola has adopted positions that contradict the weight of clinical evidence in his own prior work. His stance on estrogen is the most striking example. He now promotes the idea that menopausal women are typically “estrogen dominant” rather than estrogen deficient, that standard hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is harmful, and that the solution is progesterone supplementation combined with seed oil avoidance. He cites prolactin levels as a proxy for estrogen activity and dismisses standard serum estrogen testing as useless.
Comment: I have followed and practiced. hormone medicine for fifteen years, have taken Neil Rouzier’s five courses twice each, and spent a year writing my book Hormone Secrets on this subject when I retired. The collective clinical experience with estrogen, particularly oral and vaginal estradiol, is massive and favorable. The Women’s Health Initiative’s negative findings applied to oral conjugated equine estrogens and synthetic progestins, not to bioidentical hormones. Mercola’s blanket anti-estrogen position contradicts the work of practitioners who have treated millions of women with bioidentical hormones. That he holds this position with such certainty while taking business advice from a channeled spirit tells you the quality of his current judgment.
The other irrational about-face in Mercola’s public stances is his abandonment of the ketogenic diet and fasting. My recent post about the woman who cured her near-fatal Lyme disease with prolonged fasting is an example of the profound benefits these modalities can have. And while, except for my daily 16-hour fast, I have not recently written about these modalities or used them personally, there is no doubt in my mind that they can be tremendously beneficial. The supporting literature cannot be dismissed.
The grandiosity in Mercola’s public statements has escalated. He described one of his books in a podcast as the greatest book ever written. He told employees his goal was to reach “billions” with his message. Multiple sources close to the situation reported that the psychic told Mercola he is “a god” and “the new Jesus.” No one with sound judgment makes claims like these, and the people closest to him, his sister, his girlfriend, and his CEO of 15 years, have all said so in public or in court filings.
Comment: I refuse to waste time on people who behave this way. It does not matter whether they have been threatened, bought off, or, in Mercola’s case, likely experienced some sort of breakdown. My ability to consume and evaluate information is limited, and I have to focus on people I can trust. If I listen to liars, commercially motivated operators, or, as Matthew Crawford calls them, “chaos agents,” I will get fooled as easily as anyone else. I have to make accuracy my first priority, and that requires high-quality input.
What happened to him?
Several patterns converged in 2021 through 2023, creating a vulnerable target. The New York Times labeled Mercola “the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online.” He was named to the “Disinformation Dozen” list. YouTube deleted his channel. The FDA warned his company to stop claiming its products could treat COVID-19. JP Morgan Chase closed its company’s bank accounts, citing a “pattern of deceptive business practices.” His longtime partner, Erin Elizabeth, had separately been labeled one of the most prolific spreaders of misinformation by the Times.
Cult experts who reviewed the case noted that people are most susceptible to manipulation during periods of stress, isolation, and perceived persecution. Mercola had been under sustained institutional attack for years. The combination of financial pressure, social deplatforming, and public vilification created conditions in which a person offering spiritual validation and promises of cosmic significance found a receptive audience.
I do not know whether Mercola has a diagnosable psychiatric condition. What I can observe is a pattern of behavior that his own family members, his girlfriend, his employees, and his longstanding allies all describe as a dramatic departure from the man they knew. The observable pattern includes: grandiose claims about his own significance; severing ties with everyone who challenges the new direction; replacing experienced professionals with untested figures recommended by a psychic; paying $1.2 million per year to a man who says he channels an ancient spirit; and announcing plans that bear no relationship to the health education mission that built his reputation.
Whatever the underlying cause, the practical result is the same. The information coming from Mercola’s platform is no longer reliable. The editorial infrastructure that once fact-checked and curated his content, his sister, his CEO, his CBO, his editorial staff, has been dismantled. What is left is the output of a man who takes daily counsel from a claimed spirit entity and a new management team with no history of competence in the field.
What he gave us
None of this erases what Mercola built. For 25 years, mercola.com was the single best aggregator of alternative health research, practitioner interviews, and nutritional science available to the general public. He introduced millions of people to concepts they would never have encountered through conventional channels: the dangers of seed oils, the failures of statin therapy, the corruption of the FDA’s approval process, the suppression of effective, inexpensive treatments, and the role of nutrition in preventing chronic disease.
He funded vaccine safety research through NVIC when no one else would. He platformed practitioners and researchers who had been shut out of mainstream media. He took enormous personal and financial risk to challenge the COVID narrative at a time when most physicians stayed silent. His early archives, the interviews, the deep dives into specific nutrients and protocols, remain valuable even now.
Comment: I separate the body of work from the current state of the man. Mercola’s archive of content from 2000 through roughly 2023 educated me and millions of others. I still reference his older material when it holds up under scrutiny. But I do not bother with his current output, and I urge my readers to apply the same standard. Trust is not a permanent gift. It has to be re-earned with every publication, and Mercola has stopped earning it.
The people who worked with him for decades, his sister Janet Selvig, CEO Steve Rye, and Barbara Loe Fisher, built much of what made the platform credible. They deserved better than termination letters from a stranger, the severing of 40-year relationships without a phone call, and lawsuits that should never have been necessary. The harm done to these people is documented and ongoing.
I hope Mercola finds his way back. The alternative health movement needs the man he was. It does not need the man he has become.
Synthesis
The Mercola case illustrates a vulnerability in the alternative health movement that we do not discuss enough. The same qualities that make someone a useful contrarian, the willingness to defy consensus, the confidence to stand alone against institutional pressure, the ability to attract and hold a loyal audience, also make that person susceptible to grandiose thinking when the pressure becomes extreme. The line between visionary and messiah complex is thin, and the people around the visionary are the guardrails. When those people are removed, nothing remains to prevent the slide.
Mercola’s $150 million supplement brand is now run by a woman with a suspended law license, answering to a man who takes direction from a claimed spirit entity. The editorial team that made the content credible is gone. The nonprofit he funded for decades was cut off without explanation. His sister, his girlfriend, and his former CEO are either suing him, praying for him, or both.
For those of us who build platforms that challenge institutional medicine, the lesson is simple: surround yourself with people who will tell you when you are wrong, and never fire them all at once. The moment you believe you have transcended the need for candid counsel is the moment you have lost your way.
The secondary lesson is for readers. No single source, no matter how brilliant or prolific, should be treated as infallible. I followed Mercola as closely as anyone for years, and even I did not see this coming. The information environment is too treacherous to rely on any one voice. Build a network of sources. Cross-reference. Stay skeptical of the people you agree with, not only of the people you oppose. If I had not applied this standard to Mercola, I might still be citing his current work, and some of it is wrong.
Elizabeth Cronin’s Epitaph
The psychics claim to channel an entity that cannot be questioned, the isolation from family and long-time associates, and the replacement of trusted advisors with unknown figures. These patterns appear in both cult dynamics and cases of psychic fraud.
That is what happened during the lockdowns: one big cult brainwashing that is still going on with young people wearing masks.
The Mercola case illustrates a vulnerability in the alternative health movement that we do not discuss enough. The same qualities that make someone a useful contrarian—the willingness to defy consensus, the confidence to stand alone against institutional pressure, the ability to attract and hold a loyal audience—also make that person susceptible to grandiose thinking when the pressure becomes extreme. The line between visionary and messiah complex is thin, and the people around the visionary are the guardrails. When those people are removed, nothing remains to prevent the slide.
Selected references
1. Polito R. “Dr. Mercola consulted with psychic before axing top executives,” SupplySide Supplement Journal, February 13, 2024.
2. Polito R. “Dr. Mercola allegedly plans to introduce psychic advisor to followers,” SupplySide Supplement Journal, March 1, 2024.
3. Polito R. “Cult or con? Experts say upheaval at Mercola brand resembles both,” SupplySide Supplement Journal, May 2, 2024.
4. Fisher BL. “Why NVIC is no longer associated with Dr. Joseph Mercola,” National Vaccine Information Center, May 2024.
5. Polito R. “Mercola CEO’s background as lawyer questioned amid exodus of top staff,” SupplySide Supplement Journal, August 2024.
6. Polito R. “Former CEO’s lawsuit against Dr. Mercola and his brand includes allegations of psychic takeover,” SupplySide Supplement Journal, October 2024.
7. Polito R. “Lawsuit by former Mercola brand employees alleges religious discrimination,” SupplySide Supplement Journal, March 2025.
8. “Joseph Mercola,” Wikipedia (biographical and business background).