Dr Bruce West

While researching cardiovascular health and wellness, I came across a newsletter that I liked, bought it, and it came with a cardiovascular supplement that made the claim that Congestive Heart Failure is actually beriberi of the heart. I consumed those pages quickly and then began going through studies after studies to confirm this guy’s assertion. And this was in the days when the internet was still young and I had to go to a medical library to look up the studies.

Sure enough, the guy was onto something.

So then I started researching him. Turns out he’s a chiropractor, born in ’47, had a clinic in Monterey county, California, and put out a newsletter. Somewhere online we learned West held a PhD, but we’ve since learned that that’s not true. He was, however, a Chiropractor between the years of 1973 and 1983 but did not, for some reason, renew his license. According to the laws of California, no one may refer to themselves and a doctor who is no longer a chiropractor. You much hold an MD, PhD, or a Chiropractic license.

Chiropractors, for the most part, study more nutrition than conventional physicians. And since I’m a student of nutrition, when someone tells me this is good for that, I actually do the legwork to find the studies behind those statements if the writer hasn’t supplied them, and if I cannot find any research to back up the claims, I quit reading these people.

Dr West was always right on, when I first discovered him. My only problem with him was that he sold Standard Process Labs supplements, which, at that time, could only be purchased from a health professional, though you can now find them on Amazon. They are expensive and they are made from organic foods, and a while back the FDA came down on them hard for printing something on the label that didn’t live up to their analysis of what was inside. Some of you might recall a while back when the FDA found that nothing Walmart sold in the way of supplements lived up to their labels.  It’s always good to check in on Consumer Labs once in a while to determine companies that deliver what they say they do.

Then one day I found junk mail from “Dr West” in my mail box describing the collapse of the dollar and the coming Armageddon and how gold or silver will save s all . . . and I started to pull away from this guy.

Someone once asked the question, “What is the foundation of all advertising?”

Ya know what they came up with?

“Fear.”

Fear that you’ll stink, fear that your teeth aren’t white enough, fear of being out of step with fashion, fear of not fitting in, and for us baby boomers, fear that you’re going to die without ever experiencing the bliss of the open road in that Cadillac, or Mercedes, or Lexis.

Over the next few months I started really checking out the things he reported in his newsletter and I started finding problems. Some of what he published was a “bit of a stretch.” I had already determined that Adam at Natural News was a conspiracy theorist, and in fact, I told online friends if you ever send me an article from his site, “I’ll block your ass in the blink of an eye.”

Because of the growth of conspiracy theories online over the past 6 years, I wrote this paper: Conspiracy Theories.

One thing I want you to know is, yes, there are actual conspiracies, but it’s best to wait until they get into court to learn about them rather than speculate. It’s a crime to be a part of a conspiracy to commit a crime. People go to jail all the time for this.

West’s original advice about cardiovascular nutrition and wellness was sound, but he started to leave the rails and I dropped his newsletter.

People have pointed out that he was a marketing genius. https://cdmginc.com/2014/12/17/launching-a-new-product-surprising-keys-to-a-super-multimillion-dollar-success-story-2/

He made millions, but another thing that bothered me was that he was treating nutrition as medicine and promising cures. Everyone knows the FDA is going to come down on you if you start promising cures. On anything we’ve ever said about a “product” that the FDA hasn’t published on that product, we have to put a disclaimer. The FDA has some very strict rules about how much you can say about something, and if you don’t follow their rules, and you start promoting cures and such, you’re going to get into trouble.

West got into trouble. Here’s the article that explains it all: Owner Of Supplements Company That Allegedly Preyed On Seniors To Pay $1.5 Million Penalty

Allow me to highlight parts in that article, like, “Defendant West regularly referred to himself as a “doctor” throughout his advertising campaigns, even though he was not and never has been a physician.”

A chiropractic doctor is a doctor. A naturopathic doctor is a doctor. He held a PhD and that makes him a doctor.

There is a medical doctor online I wouldn’t send my sick dog to: Dr Gundry, a cardiologist who aggressively markets a ton of supplements that he’s put his name on. I’m amazed the FDA hasn’t come down on him, except he is a conventional physician, and perhaps they give that kind of “doctor” a bit of leeway.

As you can see from the article, Dr West lost the lawsuit and a lot of money. But my favorite sentence is this one:

“The company is permanently closed and will no longer do business in California, according to the statement.”

The article was published July of 2022, and Dr West had been permanently dead since October of the year previous.

During the pandemic readers sent me articles by West and all I could do was shake my head. He was totally off the rails, repeating every antivaxx conspiracy theory available.

Some of you know our position on vaccines, which is very simple: vaccines are drugs. Drugs have side effects. No drug is 100% safe and no drug is 100% effective. And there have been problems with vaccines in the past such as thimerosal and we’ve only heard of those problems because of whistleblowers.

But when the pandemic began, I removed a lot of our research on vaccines because I did not want antivaxxers using our research to support their nonsense. All in all, vaccines work and they have worked for centuries, and the best statistics today show fewer deaths due to COVID among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated. I have kept a close eye on the CDC, WHO, and anywhere I could find statistics.

Dr Bruce West was a staunch antivaxxer. I’d heard rumors of his cause of death, but as a journalist, rumors are meaningless. I ordered a copy of his death certificate.

When it arrived, I found out his original name was Bruce Walter Weberbauer. I suppose, if you’re going to build up a marketing campaign, you might want to pick a new name that isn’t a tongue-twister.

And secondly I learned that he died from COVID-19: Acute respiratory failure, circulatory shock, and COVID-19 pneumonia.

Yes, there is a moral to this story. Get your facts from the people who have them, not from the people who make them up. If it sounds like it’s a conspiracy theory, it probably is. If it’s 100% contrary to what the CDC is putting out, ignore it. If your immune system is compromised, meet with your physician.

Just do not let the crazies of the world put you into an early grave.

Vaccines work. Masks work. Social distancing works.

And when you put them all together, we save lives.

Further Reading

“. . . the average COVID-19 mortality per million was 288.54 in countries without face mask policies and 48.40 in countries with face mask policies.”

To read the actual lawsuit, click here: 21CV001833-Complaint-6-7-2021.pdf.