Book review: “Natural Cures…” by Kevin Trudeau
The full title is Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, and that kind of sets the tone for the whole thing. Half the content is rants about the corrupt state of the FDA and Big Pharma in the United States – which while true and unsurprising, gets tiresome.
The remainder is mostly him telling us how great he is and how awesome the health secrets he’s going to reveal are. When he actually does get to the “secrets”, they boil down to:
- Don’t trust doctors who prescribe drugs or surgery.
- If it’s not recognized by the FDA, it must be good.
- There is no correlation between disease and cure; the correlation is between individual and cure (which is no correlation at all). You’ll just have to try every quack remedy until you find one that works.
I read this because it was a gift, but it still took me two years to finish it – a page here and there. It’s almost 600 pages long but would be about one third that if he didn’t incessantly repeat himself.
There was one positive message that I take to heart, at the very end of the book: Ultimately, you are responsible for your own health. You have to take charge and manage it because nobody else can do it for you.
That doesn’t excuse the preceding 565 pages of rubbish though. This book is a waste of time and money and constitutes bad advice no matter how right he is about the sorry state of the US health care system. Avoid this book, and given the way he presents himself in it, avoid all his other books too.
Update 2010/08: It turns out Kevin Trudeau is a member of a certain for-profit cult that shall not be named. That explains a lot, and puts the nails to any shreds of credibility he may have had.
