Dr. Russell Blaylock's questionable resume

The Blaylock Wellness Report is a paid newsletter written and sold by Dr. Russell Blaylock. He claims that it has “over 100,000 subscribers,” at a price of $40 to $55 per year. It is a fountain of bad advice.

The August 2004, Vol. 1, No. 3 issue pooh-poohs the benefits of statins for treatment of hyperlipidemia. It contains many claims which are either questionable or clearly untrue, which you can read about here. But one of the most strikingly misleading parts of his newsletter is his own biographical information, at the end. The final sentence in the newsletter, in the “About Dr. Blaylock” section on page 10, is this:

“He [Blaylock] recently retired as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the Medical University of Mississippi and now serves as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Biology Belhaven College.”

That is extremely misleading. He did not “retire” from employment with the Medical University of Mississippi, nor any other Mississippi university.

In fact, there is no such institution as “the Medical University of Mississippi,” and there never has been. I searched the Web for references to an institution with that name, and all I found were references to Dr. Blaylock's own bio.

More recent versions of his bio have corrected the name of the institution to “University of Mississippi Medical Center.” The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) is a respected institution, but I wondered how Dr. Blaylock could have been confused about the name of his own employer?

So I tried to find him in UMMC's archived faculty directories. He wasn't listed in any of them.

So I emailed the department chairman at UMMC, and he informed me that Dr. Blaylock had never actually worked there! This is what the chairman wrote:

“He [Blaylock] was appointed clinical assistant professor of neurological surgery-non-salaried on July 1, 1996 and terminated on February 1, 2003. Clinical faculty are not necessarily listed in the medical center faculty directory. ...
Non-salaried means that the University of Mississippi gave him an honorific title in the hope that he would contribute to our teaching conferences for resident education. He never actually practiced neurosurgery at the university hospital nor did he see patients here. Unfortunately, he did not come to any teaching functions at the university, being quite busy in his business."

As you can see, the only thing Dr. Blaylock did at UMMC was misuse the honorific title (with “non-salaried” omitted) to misleadingly promote himself. It was obviously deceptive for him to claim that he “retired” from an institution where he never actually did any work, and was never paid anything.

What's more, it turns out that even the Belhaven College position is unpaid.

Of course, the fact that he lied in his bio doesn't prove that everything else he says is wrong. However, as Luke 16:10 cautions, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.”

Dave Burton

Original: June 8, 2007
Most recently revised: March 14, 2015
For pasting in email: blaylock_bio2.html