A Guide To Employee Conduct And Progressive Discipline: Fill & Download for Free

How much this happens depends on the local organizational culture of law enforcement. There are places where a cop who gets caught driving drunk is going to get arrested and put in jail, no matter what. In those same jurisdictions, the cop is likely to lose his job. In other places, cops will go out of their way to avoid arresting another cop, even when it is more than clear the cop is too intoxicated to drive.There are many shades of gray to the latter practice. The drunk cop may get arrested, but the arresting officer may craft the report so that it is difficult or impossible to prosecute, or may intentionally omit some crucial step in the evidenciary process that makes the case non-viable. The cop who gets arrested might get someone inside the organization to "lose" the paperwork.I can't stress enough the influence that the organizational culture has on this. In some agencies, any social function means there will be substantial drinking involved, and there won't be any designated drivers at the end of the evening. In other outfits, this kind of behavior is viewed as deviant, and anyone who engages in it will be regarded as unreliable.Cops have no excuse for driving drunk. In the police academy, there is a class on investigation of drunk driving. Everyone gets a little chart with number of drinks down one edge and body weight on the other axis. At the intersection of any two data points there is an approximate blood alcohol measurement. This is only approximate, but it serves as a guide: this is how much you can drink before you're over the limit. The natural reaction is to find your own body weight and see where it intersects with the illegal per se limit, currently 0.08% in the United States.Further, every cop knows the consequences for driving under the influence, and how that will impact his job. The variable factor is whether he believes he can show his badge and get a pass from the officer who stops him.A cop who finds himself drunk with no way to get home except to drive always has an out. He can call the station and get a ride. I've asked this question of many cops in different places around the country: "If a cop you didn't know called you and said he was too drunk to drive home, and he was in your jurisdiction, would you get him home safely?" The answer has always been "yes," whether he worked for that outfit or not. There might be a come-to-Jesus meeting the next time he came to work, but he would get home safely that night. John Q. Public doesn't have this option in most places, but cops always do.The problem is that very few drunks--not just cops--will even consider calling for a ride. It becomes a matter of honor that they not surrender their keys and drive themselves. They can be defiant and confrontational about it. "I'm getting in my car! I'm wasted! You gonna stop me? You gonna bust me?" I have seen exactly this happen. Most of the people who did it eventually had their careers terminated by substance abuse or some problem related to it.Tolerance for this sort of thing is declining. The trend is to treat cops who drive drunk like anyone else. A critical factor in terms of how the issue is handled within the agency is consistency. Like many other workplaces, the critical factor on whether someone is disciplined for misconduct is not how bad the misconduct was, but rather who that person's friends are. In many departments, certain favored personnel can do almost anything and keep their jobs. The Chicago Police Department seems to have a particularly aggravated case of this: THE WATCHDOGS: Arrested again and again — but still a Chicago cop - Chicago Sun-TimesI don't know that there are any more problem drinkers among cops than in other professions. There are certainly alcoholics, recovering and otherwise, who are police officers, but these occur in other lines of work, too.The chief of police or sheriff who wants to reduce drunk driving and other misconduct issues among the rank and file has to come out with a policy that clearly sets out how each incident will be handled and what the consequences will be. He then has to stick by it. This can be tough, as the chief or sheriff may have to terminate the employment of someone he's worked closely with for many years. Not everyone is willing to do that.Some of the more progressive agencies offer substance abuse treatment to their employees, providing that the circumstances of their arrest don't require they be terminated as employees. Most drunk driving convictions carry a mandatory driver's license suspension or revocation, and cops generally have to have a driver's license as a condition of employment. One "out" is to offer the employee a leave of absence or the use of sick time to complete an alcohol rehab program, and then monitor his conduct thereafter with random and unannounced blood alcohol tests to ensure he has not been drinking. The driver's license suspension can run its course while the cop is in rehab.

Doing it right.There are a thousand or so ways to make a mistake and do it wrong, some of which can get you in a lot of legal trouble, others of which can buy you lots of nuisance-level consequences and repercussions for months or years afterward. (We won’t even go there about the possibility of provoking repercussions that constitute security threats to your company, property or staff — ever hear the term “Going postal”? . . .)And the one way to do it right seems to vary by individual.What I want above all else is a clean break. Have the employee move on, and have something to move on to, and have that departing employee quietly float away. It may be possible that time heals all wounds, and nothing would please me more than to have exactly that happen eventually, and we can meet again amicably and achieve some partial reconciliation, and no hard feelings in the interim; but on this day, until I’m sure there are no hard feelings, I never want to hear from that person in the foreseeable future.In a perfect world . . .Everyone all around — including the departing employee — would agree that the situation isn’t working, and that it's best for all that we have a parting of the ways.The departing employee would move on with his or her life, and have something to move on to that would have him or her content to move on with his or her life, and never look back. I don’t want any ‘disgruntled former employees’ running around loose in the world.The impact of the termination upon the departing employee would be limited to the discontinuation of his or her employment by our company. No wipeout of any savings he has from the sudden loss of his income, no eviction because she couldn’t pay the rent, her kids don’t suffer because there’s no longer enough income to keep food in the house, no cars repossessed because he gets behind on the payments, no difficulty finding future employment because of a bad or questionable reference.It all gets done without pushback, resistance or a bad fight on the part of the departing employee — and the departing employee doesn’t try to leverage our commitment to get it done clean, quietly and without any problems, against us.There would never be any hard feelings, or grounds for hard feelings. Everyone goes their way, complete.But in most cases, achieving all of this requires a world more perfect than the one you and I live in. Not even Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God and had all of the attributes of God while also being fully human, who literally needed no reference checks, who “did not need anyone to tell him what a person was like. He already knew” (John 2:25 - Easy-to-Read Version ); could select twelve guys to carry His message into the world and continue His work after He was gone without getting a Judas in the bunch. In a really perfect world, you’d never make a bad hire, an employee would never fail at his training or have performance problems or develop issues or fall into temptation and go bad on you, and no one would get fired at all.It takes some emotional intelligence. You need to be hard enough to get it done, but you don’t want to be so hard that you leave lingering hard feelings, have them feeling robbed of their livelihood, or provoke a pushback or thoughts of retaliation. Move along already, get out of here, go on with your life, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end; this could be the best thing that ever happened to you, a new opportunity opening up . . .On the part of the departing employee, there’s always an alternative view of his or her own performance, of the events that lead up to the termination, of the quality and quantity of work done by the employee and the usefulness of it to the organization, and/or of the employee’s behavior and the justifications for it. Indeed, that alternative view is so real to that employee, and the employee is generally so attached to that alternative view, that he or she stuck to it even when it was becoming more and more real (if not apparent to the employee) that his or her alternative view was not going to prevail and would cost him his or her job if he or she wasn’t willing to give it up. So, that’s how set in cement that alternate reality is, and how likely you are to win an argument against it.And there are always secondary consequences to the termination that cause inconvenience, hardship and even suffering for the employee. She can no longer pay her bills, the lights and phones get cut off. He can’t pay his child support and gets tossed into jail. She has difficulty finding another job because even if we don’t give her a bad reference, the termination itself is a sign of a problem to any future employer. The family ends up on food stamps.Put those two things together — the employee's alternative view of his or her performance, and the secondary consequences that will affect the employee as the result of the termination — and naturally, nobody who gets fired is going to feel that the decision to terminate them was right, just or reasonable. Even an employee who is aware and willing to admit that he made one or more mistakes is going to feel that his errors don’t justify what the company is doing to him in response. So, there’s always the potential for pushback by the now ‘disgruntled former employee’.And of course, since they make it to be ‘wrong’, and since the purpose of law is to define, uphold and enforce our notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, they’re going to look for something illegal about it; both because they feel wronged, and because the secondary consequences are expected to put them in dire need of whatever relief the law can provide.Imagine the fight you’d be inclined to put up if one day, you came in to work and discovered that they were letting you go, everything about the way you did your job was wrong (even though you had no idea other than what someone who you didn’t believe or know to take seriously maybe told you), everything about you and your personality and behavior was completely inappropriate to the workplace (you never got that); and that you were being fired and thrown out in the street that day, you were facing immediate loss of income for which you weren’t prepared, all of the conceivable consequences for that loss of income, difficulty finding another job, and denial of unemployment benefits. You’d want to confront the person responsible, you’d argue (and if your personality or maturity level was such that your notion of arguing involved making a scene, so be it), you’d look for ways to push back and try to keep it from happening, you’d feel you were wronged and entitled to retribution and compensation for it, you’d check with a lawyer; and you’d give serious thought to any other means of defense, retaliation and pursuit of remedy that those circumstances would justify in your occurring world. Whatever your reason or cause to fire someone, that reason or cause has to be big enough, and the legality of your decision to fire that person has to be watertight enough, to withstand that big and bad a fight. The only way you’re not going to have that big a fight on your hands is if the departing employee gets it that your grounds are big enough, and the legality of your decision is watertight enough, that it’s no use and she doesn't have a leg to stand on — and because of the secondary consequences she is facing, she may still be in a position where she has nothing to lose by trying.And so yes, I tell my managers, run it by me before you fire anyone. As a salaried manager, I don’t mind being accountable and behaving legally, but I never wanted my staffing authority restricted in any way, or my hiring or termination decisions questioned. But times are changing and while I try to support them and uphold their authority to the extent that I can, I can’t give managers working for me quite that much latitude. Nowadays, there’s too much trouble they can get me into.Indeed, ‘fire-crazy’ middle managers can cause you more problems than the people they fire, even when you include the grief and aggravation you get from the ones who could have maybe been salvaged and who didn’t really need to be fired. ‘Cat’s paw’ liability, established by some courts over the last ten years, can make your company liable for any wrongful discharge that one of your managers does, even if he or she clearly acted outside your established company policy in doing so, and even if it was done in a way that you didn’t know what he or she was doing, and that you would have never done or supported.Things to screen for when you advance people into management or supervisory accountabilities . . .People who rely too much on fear, negative personnel file entries, or threats of discipline or termination to motivate performance, or to deter substandard performance or bad acts. Captain Queeg was never the Navy’s best skipper, even when he wasn't suffering an acute psychotic episode in the middle of a typhoon.People who see their ability or 'authority' to impose discipline or termination as an expression of, or access to, their own personal power or status.Any wannabe 'authority pig', anyone who regards authority over others, or the ability to act out against others under color of company authority, as a workplace perk to which he or she is or should be entitled, or has 'earned'.People whose efforts to work with, give additional coaching or training to, straighten out, rehabilitate, salvage, or redeem errant employees are lacking — or completely non-existent.People who act rashly in making decisions around discipline or termination. As the book version of The Godfather noted (of a man who a few days later, in that memorable scene in the movie version, would awaken to find the severed head of a horse in his bed), the sort of “megalomaniac who loved to wield power wildly, without regard to the fact that by so doing, legions of enemies sprang up out of the ground”.Even worse, people who delight in firing people or — even worse than that — people who delight in some or all of the secondary consequences of a termination (e.g., “You’ll never work in this business again, not with the reference that you’ll leave here with!”, “You can forget about collecting unemployment!” . . .) Either they’re blind to those secondary consequences, which makes them too ignorant or lacking in empathy to have people working under them; or they’re actually present to those secondary consequences and delight in the prospect of inflicting them, which makes them probably psychopathic and more likely just plain evil in my book. They’d never even begin as managers in my company if I could spot them consistently, but the best I can do is screen them out as best as I can, and get rid of any I missed as expeditiously as possible once I spot one — I can’t get them all off the planet. There’s never a need, or a good reason, for that way of being. We remove people as necessary so that we don’t have to worry about what bad thing they’re going to do next, or so that we can have room (in both the organization and its budget) to hire someone that we can get a better performance out of; but firing people is not something we do to throw paybacks or inflict suffering as punishment for some wrong, whatever the wrong. What’s the old Nietzsche quote, “Mistrust any in whom the desire to punish is great”?We watch it with the ‘termination track’ for which any progressive discipline policy is infamous. (Some people say you should dispense with a progressive discipline policy altogether, but you need at least something to preserve the appearance of fairness; so instead we focus on ways to be responsible with it.) If three write-ups can result in a firing, guess what any employee is going to know he’s off on his way to when he gets the second one? We don’t want that. Really. If we did, we’d get rid of him now and have it over with. So we do a few things to take the edge off it, to work toward correction, redemption and reconciliation rather than eventual termination, and to make it clear to all involved that correction, redemption, and reconciliation is our preferred end state. We frequently go through employee files and remove previous write-ups, if enough time has passed that they’re starting to lack in relevance, and the employee has since stayed out of trouble and hasn’t done the bad thing again. On the second one, we open the conversation about “what is the ultimate role you see for yourself in this company, or this unit?” If it’s doable, we can offer to help him work toward it, and show him how his present performance or behavior is going to be in the way unless he turns it around. If it’s not a possibility, we can tell him so up front, and work with him on making future plans where perhaps he can achieve what he wants. We’re also looking to get a certified personal coach on staff, and plan to offer coaching referrals to people who find themselves on the ‘termination track’, get at whatever pain, fear or need is getting in the way of us getting an acceptable performance or behavior out of them, and work with them on dealing with it. (If resolving such a personal issue can also help you in other areas in your life, getting into trouble with us and getting a coaching referral might be the best thing that ever happened to you . . . )We keep confidential, internal records and hold our managers accountable for their performance in the areas of recruiting, hiring, supervision, employee performance, discipline and termination. If someone you hired for us works well and earns an advancement, a cookie award, or candidation as management, you get brownie points in your file for finding and hiring and training and coaching and bringing along this person, even if they’re no longer working under you at the time of the achievement. If they screw up and have to be written up, referred for individual coaching, or terminated, you likewise get black marks in your file for sticking us with these skids that you hired and trained — hey, where do you keep finding these people? We’re not necessarily out to pressure or penalize managers (unless one really sticks out as needing extra help or coaching in that area, or some restrictions on their authority in that area, or removal altogether). What we’re really out for is to see who scores the most brownie points and/or the fewest black marks, find out what they’re doing differently, and see if we can scale that up; if what they’re doing can work for the others, or can be written into our personnel policies or manager training.Things that apply in all firing situations.You need to be cool and dispassionate about it. It may be possible that the employee did something so bad that you want to strangle him to death on the spot. It may be true that whatever precipitated the firing proves for the umpteenth time that the employee is too stupid to have a job. But doing it in anger or disgust — or even making the decision to do it while you're in a state of anger or disgust — significantly increases the odds that you’re going to make one of those thousand bad mistakes as you’re doing it, probably more than one, perhaps even one of the more grievous ones. When you give him the bad news, you want to be there mentally prepared to stick to business — watch your way of being, don’t get emotional, don’t get personal (no matter how you might ‘enjoy’ it if the employee really was that bad or did something that bad), just stick to business. If the termination is in response to ongoing performance problems, then you’ve already had time to think it over and plan ahead for it, but one thing I picked up from one of Doubletree’s predecessor companies is, if a termination is being considered in response to a specific act, write up the employee and place him or her in a “suspension pending determination” status for several days. (Pickett Suites called it “suspension pending investigation”, but there’s usually not that much to investigate, and deliberation is a better use of the time.) Some of my more cynical, colorful people find “suspension pending termination” to be a natural play on words, but even if that’s all it is, even if the final outcome is obvious and it can’t be any other way, at least give yourself a few days to calm down and approach it rationally. In a few cases, you may even decide you don’t really need to go quite that far with it. And even where it’s obvious that you do, you can plan ahead and approach it tactfully.You need to make up your mind what you’re going to do, and stick to it. Given the disproportionate stakes involved for the employee as we’ve noted, even policies you have in place to give an employee some due process and protect them from arbitrary behavior by middle management is going to be something a departing employee will want to game against you if he can think of a way to do so. You know that at the very least, they’re going to try and argue their way out of it, and you know to consider in advance that there might be a scene. You need to go in committed that now that the decision is made, it’s not up for debate, and hold the line. Give in one time, and you can plan on the employee — and any other employees with whom she shares her experience with it — put up at least that much of a fight every time you have to remove someone.Regarding the foregoing . . . it’s good and kind of you that you’re mindful of the secondary consequences of a termination to an employee, and indeed we demand and expect no less from you, and would be very disappointed in you if you didn’t take that into account. But that can’t be the controlling factor. The needs of the company, and the hotel, must come first. My heart goes out to anyone who loses their job, loses their income, can’t pay their bills, and gets their car repossessed, too, even if they messed up, or kept messing up, and brought it down on their own head. But we use a progressive discipline policy, with enough restraints and brakes and fail-safes and modifications added to it to insure that we’re not stupid with it, and that we’re going the extra inch to work with these people, and giving them extra training and help and coaching in an effort to bring them around; so that we should be pretty confident that anyone who still manages to not be able to do the job, in spite of all that, did indeed bring it down on their own head, and that there’s nothing else we could have done that would have done any good. Anyone we do ultimately fire probably did deserve it.On the flipside of that . . . your awareness that there are a thousand ways to make a mistake in a termination and incur legal trouble, and your commitment to avoid that if at all possible, if it’s known to your people, is something else that a departing employee will probably (again, given the stakes for himself as he’s facing the secondary consequences) try and play against you. Don’t be intimidated by it. This is definitely something you don’t want to give in to. If you’re not sure of your cause, and you’re not sure you’re doing it legally, then you have no business having this conversation with him. If you are sure of your cause and your legal ground, get it done, do it powerfully. This is one threat you don’t want to back down to: if you do, once word gets around, it will be played against you every time, any time you need to terminate anyone, for whatever cause. One theatre chain for which I was a manager for the better part of twenty years was so well-known, even to its minimum-wage hourly employees, to be so paranoid about discrimination — and later, sexual harassment — suits that more than once, it was sued by a terminated manager claiming discrimination in that he was fired to appease or accommodate an aggrieved employee who was part of a protected class, and that the termination was merely an attempt to preempt possible litigation by that employee of a discrimination or harassment claim lacking in merit. They were very bad about overreaction to any allegation of discrimination or sexual harassment, and I myself saw them a few times flee a wolf only to run into a bear.Once you’ve reached the conclusion that with any particular employee — even one that you've never considered firing, who hasn't yet done that one thing — that you know how this one’s going to end, that sooner or later that employee is going to have to be removed no matter what happens in the meantime; then 'sooner or later' has arrived, and the time for trying to rehabilitate or salvage the employee or bring him or her around has passed. Do it already. Don’t let things accumulate, build up, or fester. Don’t allow new issues or occurrences to accumulate and further complicate things when the time does come. Some years back, a Landmark seminar leader who was an attorney specializing in employment law in his day to day working life shared with us that, in every single piece of employment-related litigation that crossed his desk, what turned out to be a part of it every single time, once all the costly discovery and depositions were done was, invariably, that employment situation had broken down irretrievably and stopped working for both the employee and employer long ago, usually months, sometimes years. Whatever in the end happened to bring about the ultimate firing, or the ultimate tantrum where the employee resigned and left the establishment feeling that he’d been run off by the employer, was always merely a precipitator, a catalyst, the proverbial final straw. And looking back in my own life, many times when I’ve had an employment situation go bad (both as an employee who’d eventually be fired or quit on not altogether the best of terms myself, or as a salaried manager dealing with such employees), it had worked precisely that way — I had known for some months, even a year or two, that it was going to end and that it was probably going to end badly. What I didn’t know or couldn't deal with at the time was, once you come to that realization, it’s time for someone to go. So once you know that’s how it’s going to end, and there’s little to no realistic chance to turn it all around, it’s time to end it. It’s only going to get worse. If the employee’s response is an unemployment hearing, a lawsuit, or an administrative hearing; the less the employee’s tenure and accumulated baggage, the less there is to litigate.Unless you live in a jurisdiction where high unemployment insurance premiums are a problem, if they can collect, let them collect, unless they did something so beyond the pale of acceptable conduct — dishonesty, workplace violence, sexual harassment or assault, drinking or using drugs on the job — that you’re rewarding very bad behavior in a way that’s going to have your own sense of morality called into question, if you let it slide. (In Pennsylvania, even the people at the job service office make no secret of it that you have to have done something pretty bad to be denied unemployment and even then, you’ve still got a shot. Connecticut is somewhere in the middle. We haven’t taken a hit in West Virginia yet. ‘Business-friendly’ North Carolina will put a hold on any unemployment claim if the employer sends back the form contesting it, then weeks later have a ‘fair hearing’ that doesn’t pretend to be fair, and in the unlikely event you win, your first unemployment check won’t arrive until a week and a half after that . . . The last time we opposed an unemployment claim was for a pair of housekeepers who, for some weeks prior to their departure, made no secret of it that they were hoping to deliberately provoke their own firing, in order to collect; something we couldn’t afford to let other employees who knew of their scheme see them pull off successfully and get away with.) Just letting them collect is in keeping with our desire that the employee move on, have something to move on to, quietly float away; and that we work toward a clean break and no hard feelings. So unless they did something so outrageously wrong, low-down and common that you're a chump to let them have it, don't fight them over the unemployment.Make sure it’s legal, from all possible angles. No one likes a rabble-rouser who’s always stirring up something among other employees in the workplace, looking for ways to challenge management, and keeping the employee rumor mill fueled and primed; but if you fire one and the NLRB decides that it could have been “protected concerted activity” under the National Labor Relations Act, you’ve just bought yourself a costly administrative proceeding that can in the end cost you a very disruptive reinstatement with back pay, or a pricy settlement for ‘front pay’ in lieu of reinstatement; is easier and faster for an aggrieved employee to win than (in North Carolina) a claim for unemployment insurance, and pays out nearly as much (of your) money to an employee as the average employment-related lawsuit. It’s a lot more difficult than is popularly known to win a discrimination claim — “termination for legitimate non-discriminatory reason, the presence of discrimination notwithstanding”, is one of several possible defenses — but discrimination claims are costly to defend if someone wants to play the race, national origin, or gender card. The inevitable inclusion of gay people (thanks to Obergefell v. Hodges), and transgenders (thanks to North Carolina’s one-time ‘bathroom bill’ — the litigation challenging it, which is on four corners with Romer v. Evans and now in the Federal appellate system on its way to the Supreme Court, didn’t go away once the bill was repealed), as protected minority groups under federal law, will add that much more diversity (bad pun, I know) to opportunities and options for aggrieved employees who can claim such status.What to do about future reference checks by other employers is a question with no easy answers. There is always the problem that the departing employee’s subsequent prospective employers, particularly the next one, is going to see any termination as a problem unless there’s an explanation that he’s comfortable with; and if you follow the common practice of only confirming dates and no more, they’re going to think that there’s something to know about the abrupt termination of employment that you’re not telling them. There are some possibilities where we can incur liability from a subsequent employer of that employee if we don’t tell him something, that he could conceivably make a case that we had some duty to disclose to him. While a standard or ideal might be difficult to settle upon, the principles and values by which we are generally guided are to act in alignment with our desire to make the break clean, have the employee move on, and have something to move on to, and quietly float away.This is one of those I’m going to have to keep coming back to.How do I play office politics in order to get promoted at my office?

America has had a long list of celebrity doctors that have made a great deal of money dispensing questionable advice while selling books, seminars, and supplements.Drs. Oz, Weil, Chopra and the like.These doctors typically present themselves as knowing far more than anyone else. In essence, they are proselytizing their own brand of religion, recommendations based on belief rather than science.From The Cut:In recent months, the media has become increasingly impatient with high-profile health advocates who dispense unsubstantiated medical advice. Among the highlights have been John Oliver’s continued humiliation of Dr. Oz, who repeatedly touted the power of energy healing and “miracle” weight-loss solutions, and a viral Gawker takedown of Vani Hari, aka “the Food Babe,” a blogger and food activist who once advised her followers that “there is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” Even the American Medical Association has had enough, and just announced that it would draft guidelines for disciplining physicians who dispense pseudo-scientific advice.Yet despite this heightened concern about the accuracy of health information, best-selling celebrity neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter seems to have escaped much scrutiny, even though he has a decades-long history of offering — and profiting from — suspect medical advice.In fact, he remains one of the most influential physicians in the U.S. His 2013 book Grain Brain reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, and after nearly two years, sales remain so strong that it has still not come out in paperback. This extraordinary success led to a long profile in The Atlantic and won him a 90-minute TV special: Perlmutter’s “BRAINCHANGE” aired on over 110 PBS affiliates, and has continued to air on a regular basis since it was first released in late 2013. In April, he released his newest book, Brain Maker, and within a month it, too, became a New York Times bestseller.Despite Perlmutter’s popularity, most mainstream medical authorities do not endorse the advice he dispenses. In Grain Brain, Perlmutter revealed “the surprising truth”: Gluten is a “silent germ,” and declining brain health can be blamed in large part on gluten-containing grains. Brain Maker, for its part, promises to help readers harness “the power of gut microbes to heal and protect your brain — for life” — it even purports to offer groundbreaking preventative measures and treatments for allergies, autism, Alzheimer’s, ALS, dementia, Parkinson’s, and cancer.Perlmutter has always been unorthodox in his approach to medicine. For well over a decade, and long before he was a household name, he has claimed to offer his readers “miraculous” — his word — treatments capable of preventing or reversing all sorts of devastating medical problems. He has also claimed that supplements and “detoxification” regimens — available for purchase on his various websites — are crucial to optimizing brain health. Earlier this year, he stated that the conversation about childhood vaccines and autism is “ill-defined,” and that parents should ask their pediatricians about spacing out their children’s vaccinations — an approach the CDCdisagrees with, and which 90 percent of doctors surveyed by the journal Pediatrics in 2013 said would put children and communities at greater risk of contracting preventable diseases.As Perlmutter’s megaphone has grown, so, too, has his brand empire — he has sold everything from “Empowering Coconut Oil” to supplement blends tailored for specific demographics, like the $90 “Scholar’s Advantage Pack” for “young adults seeking to optimize cognitive function,” and the $160 “Senior Empowerment Pack,” a “combination of formulas designed to help keep you cognitively sharp as you age.” One book pointed readers to an $8,500 brain detoxification retreat run by Perlmutter, which included shamanic healing ceremonies. (He even has his own organic foaming hand soap.)In light of all this, it’s worth asking: Should Dr. Perlmutter’s millions of fans really trust him?***Since Perlmutter presents himself as a distinguished medical expert, a natural place to start is with his credentials. “[Dr. Perlmutter] contributed extensively to the world medical literature,” reads his website, “with publications appearing in The Journal of Neurosurgery, The Southern Medical Journal, Journal of Applied Nutrition, and Archives of Neurology.” Earlier bios also list the Journal of the American Medical Association.Yet a closer look at his publications reveals that Perlmutter hasn’t actually conducted much research. In the scientific community, full-length peer-reviewed articles, especially widely cited ones, are the gold-standard of significant research. But his contribution to JAMA — an extremely prestigious medical journal — is actually just a letter to the editor. The Southern Medical Journal? A case report and a clinical brief, both co-authored with his father when the younger Perlmutter was still a medical student. Archives of Neurology? Another case report. (Case reports and clinical briefs are short discussions around 1-4 pages long.)As for the prestigious-sounding Journal of Applied Nutrition, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a legitimate nutrition scientist who’s even heard of it — and Quackwatch cites it as a “fundamentally flawed” publication that has carried ads for “questionable potions, services, books, and/or publications.” (As far as I can tell, Perlmutter’s article in it is unavailable on any reputable scholarly database.)Perlmutter does have two legitimate peer-reviewed articles in The Journal of Neurosurgery, co-authored nearly four decades ago with his mentor, the decorated neurosurgeon Dr. Albert Rhoton. Neither has anything to do withPerlmutter’s current theories about nutrition or the gut microbiome.I spoke with Dr. Rhoton at the University of Florida, who fondly recalled the young lab partner who wrote a total of four articles on microsurgical anatomy under his tutelage. “David did a nice job in our lab,” Rhoton told me. “He did good research and wrote up those studies. I wanted him to be a neurosurgeon, but he became a neurologist instead.”Rhoton was unfamiliar with Perlmutter’s recent work. “Something about grains?” he asked. “Grain … Brain? I’m so focused in on neurosurgery I don’t know anything about it.” (Perlmutter declined to comment for this article.)The basic premise of Grain Brain doesn’t fit with the current neurological literature: The latest reviews of evidence-based dietary approaches to preventing Alzheimer’s support a Mediterranean-style diet, complete with whole grains. Nevertheless, Perlmutter describes the science of Grain Brainas “undeniably conclusive.” He is similarly confident about the treatment regimens proposed in Brain Maker, telling his readers about astonishing transformations accomplished through simple dietary changes such as going gluten-free, eating fermented foods, and taking probiotics. “I can’t wait to share with you the countless stories of individuals with myriad, enfeebling health challenges … who experienced a complete vanishing of symptoms following treatment,” he writes. “These stories are not outlier cases for me, but by standard measure of what might typically be expected, they seem almost miraculous.”He’s right. The stories do seem miraculous: dramatic improvements in autistic symptoms after probiotics and DIY fecal transplants; Tourette’s symptoms gone after a regimen of probiotic enemas; multiple sclerosis successfully treated with nutritional supplements, probiotic enemas, and fecal transplants. (At this time, fecal transplants are only indicated for a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile.)But for medical researchers, claims of dramatic improvements as a result of unproven treatments generally raise red flags. A 2014 commentary on Grain Brain, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, puts it bluntly: “The declaration that a single, simple ‘cure’ can successfully treat numerous diverse diseases and symptoms is reminiscent of the oratory of the ‘snake oil’ merchants of generations ago.” Yale physician and nutrition researcher David Katz, no friend of the food industry, is equally dismissive, describing Grain Brain’s arguments as “the raw power of pop culture repetition, not the staying power of truth,” he said. “Whole wheat does not make us fat; whole grains do not make us stupid.”I asked Jonathan Eisen, a microbiome expert at the University of California, Davis, about Brain Maker. “To think we can magically heal diseases by changing to a gluten-free diet and taking some probiotics is idiotic, quite frankly,” he told me. After Eisen read the case study of an autistic boy that Perlmutter highlights in Brain Maker and on his website — “from a scientific perspective, [fecal transplantation for autism] makes absolute sense” — his words were even harsher. “It resembles more the presentation of a snake-oil salesman than that of a person interested in actually figuring out how to help people,” said Eisen.Perlmutter has a stock answer for skeptics like Katz and Eisen. “Each progressive spirit,” he tweeted in October of 2014, “is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.” The problem, in other words, isn’t with Perlmutter — it’s with all the so-called experts hamstrung by traditional thinking. In one book Perlmutter even parallels his situation to Galileo’s, a genius initially persecuted for his scientific theories only to be triumphantly vindicated by history.Setting aside the response to his two most recent books, does Perlmutter’s broader body of work lend credibility to his self-understanding as a path-breaking genius?To answer this question we’ll start with his second book, the self-published BrainRecovery.com is for sale (2000). Named after Perlmutter’s personal website at the time, it promises powerful techniques for preventing or reversing Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s, post-polio syndrome, ALS, and much more. (His first book, LifeGuide: Your Guide to a Longer and Healthier Life, was self-published in 1993.)Like Perlmutter’s latest best sellers, BrainRecovery.com is for sale includes dietary recommendations. But it is strikingly devoid of any discussion of gluten, grains, or probiotics. Gut bacteria are only mentioned once, in passing. Instead of emphasizing the importance of cholesterol and saturated fat for promoting brain health — as he does in Grain Brain, Brain Maker, and on his blog — Perlmutter cautions against them. “Meat and eggs are rich inflammation producing fatty acids [sic],” he declares. “It is this inflammation that leads to the enhanced production of brain damaging free radicals. The best diet is vegetarian with added fish.” There’s no doubt, Perlmutter writes, about “the direct relationship between multiple sclerosis mortality and dietary fat, especially saturated fats and animal fats.”Given Perlmutter’s current alarmism about grains, it’s hard to make sense of the numerous recovery stories in BrainRecovery.com is for sale. If one is to believe the “undeniably conclusive” science of Grain Brain, then the early Perlmutter was somehow healing his patient’s intractable neurological conditions despite putting them on a diet that was full of poisonous whole grains and dangerously low in saturated fat and cholesterol.It’s not just that Perlmutter is remarkably sure of himself, even when presenting an opinion that’s precisely the opposite of what he’s been advising for years. It’s that his confidence in unproven treatments often appears to profit him directly. During the BrainRecovery.com is for sale stage of Perlmutter’s career, for example, dietary changes were secondary. At that time, his main weapons in the battle for brain health were hyperbaric oxygen chambers, special nutritional supplements (BrainRecovery.com encouraged customers to purchase Perlmutter’s proprietary BrainSustainTM for $49.50 per 600 grams), and intravenous glutathione — an antioxidant naturally produced by the liver that is covered in a section of the book entitled “The Glutathione Miracle.” Glutathione’s effectiveness in Parkinson’s patients, writes Perlmutter, “is nothing short of miraculous.”What does science say about these cutting-edge treatments, which Perlmutter prescribed regularly through the end of 2014? Let’s start with hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment. Perlmutter sings its praises as “powerful therapy” for stroke, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Bell’s palsy, and Lyme disease, and until very recently he directed the Perlmutter Hyperbaric Center. (Though Perlmutter’s website doesn’t list prices, off-label HBOT therapy usually starts at around $200 per one-hour session, and it’s generally only covered by insurance in a very limited number of instances.) But a 2015 Cochrane review — the most comprehensive research review currently available — is skeptical of HBOT’s ability to improve stroke outcomes: “The evidence is insufficient to confirm that HBOT significantly affects outcomes after acute ischemic stroke. Use of HBOT as routine therapy for people with stroke cannot be justified by this review.”The science on HBOT for other neurological ailments is even worse. In fact, it’s so bad that in 2013 the FDA had to issue a consumer warning about unapproved HBOT therapy for precisely the conditions that Perlmutter claimed to treat.What about the “incredible effectiveness” of the “glutathione miracle”? Perlmutter has been an enthusiastic proponent of this substance for over a decade. In one 2010 online video posted by “Protandim Anti Aging” — more on that product soon — Perlmutter treats an elderly Parkinson’s sufferer with glutathione, effecting a remarkable recovery. BrainRecovery.com is for saledescribes similar successes, multiple patients reversing Parkinson’s and getting off of medication after following Perlmutter’s “Parkinson’s protocol,” a combination of intravenous glutathione and supplements (available for purchase on his website).These case studies raise an obvious question: If glutathione injection is such a miracle procedure, why hasn’t the protocol been more widely adopted? Perlmutter’s answer points to the profit-driven influence of Big Pharma: “Glutathione … cannot be owned exclusively by any particular pharmaceutical company and therefore won’t find its way to the highly influential advertising sections of the medical journals.”Sure, maybe. Or it could be that doctors don’t prescribe intravenous glutathione for Parkinson’s because it doesn’t work. And they know it doesn’t work thanks, in part, to work done by a man named … David Perlmutter. In 2009, he collaborated on a randomized, double-blind studyof intravenous glutathione for Parkinson’s. The results are clearly stated in the study’s conclusion: “We did not observe a significant improvement in parkinsonian signs and symptoms in the glutathione group when compared with the placebo group.” Based on these results, the National Parkinson Foundation put out a strongly worded statement about intravenous glutathione: “First, there is a lack of evidence it actually works; second, the therapy requires an intravenous line which has both short and long term risks; and finally, insurance does not cover the costs of this therapy. .. Patients should beware of any medical practices offering a fee for glutathione treatment of Parkinson’s disease.”Once the glutathione study was finished, Perlmutter had various opportunities to disclose its results. Yet in 2009, shortly before the study was published, he told fellow celebrity doctor Andrew Weil that the treatment was “quite effective.”It’s possible that Perlmutter just didn’t understand the results of the study, or perhaps he disagreed with the statistical analysis of his co-authors. The responsible thing to do, then, would be to acknowledge the study’s conclusion, state his dissent, and admit that it did not replicate the miraculous 80-90 percent effectiveness he claimed to have achieved in his clinic.But he does no such thing. Instead, in his 2011 book Power Up Your Brain, Perlmutter doubles down on glutathione — “we shout the praises of glutathione,” he writes — not just as a treatment for Parkinson’s, but also for fibromyalgia, cancer, and the common cold. As evidence, Perlmutter cites a series of outdated studies but never once mentions the double-blinded study in which he himself participated (and no, there’s no solid evidence of glutathione’s efficacy in treating those other conditions, either).Perlmutter co-wrote Power Up Your Brain with a “medical anthropologist and shaman” named Alberto Villoldo. The book opens with the tale of a woman suffering from chronic progressive multiple sclerosis, who, one afternoon, suddenly recovers and begins walking unassisted. “We are putting you on our miracle list,” Perlmutter tells her, a list that is apparently quite long:Over the coming months, I began to notice that we were putting more and more people on the miracle list. And it was becoming clear to me that, overwhelmingly, the patients who achieved the most profound recoveries were those engaged in some form of meditative or spiritual practice … Virtually all of these patients were somehow connecting with what the shaman had referred to as the Great Spirit.According to Perlmutter, open-minded healers like himself and the shaman are capable of achieving miraculous results that traditional doctors cannot. And the reason these miracles go unacknowledged is due, at least in part, to the effects of industry corruption (the Food Babe uses the same strategy to tarnish her critics.) Perlmutter regularly stresses how food and pharmaceutical companies cover up the effects of poisonous foods and deny the efficacy of life-changing “alternative” approaches to chronic illness. Companies profit, doctors and scientists line their pockets with kickbacks, and it’s all at the expense of public health.Perlmutter is right, in a broad sense, to bring up the pernicious influence of money on medicine. Indeed, “mainstream” doctors — like Marcia Angell, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, the author of Bad Pharma — have dedicated substantial parts of their careers to exposing corruption and financial conflict of interest in medical science. (Their efforts have met with near-universal acclaim from the scientific Establishment.)But Perlmutter might not be the ideal whistle-blower when it comes to the issue of profiting from questionable medical treatments. Starting with BrainRecovery.com is for sale through Brain Maker, his books have pointed readers to ever-slicker websites where he has sold his “scientifically proven” supplements, often developed by him and manufactured by companies in which he had a direct financial interest as an employee. There was brainrecovery.com for BrainRecovery.com is for sale; kidsbrainsustain.com for Raise a Smarter Child By Kindergarten; powerupyourbrain.com for Power Up Your Brain; and finally, slickest of all, drperlmutter.com for Grain Brain and Brain Maker. (The store section of his website came down in March of 2015.)Perlmutter has also had a long-standing involvement with shadysupplement companies. One of those companies, LifeVantage, fraudulently said one of its best-selling substances, Protandim, was developed by a biochemist, when it was really cooked up by a business executive. In various videos and interviews, Perlmutter has testified to the undeniable efficacy of Protandim for treating and preventing many brain disorders.It’s not just supplements. Up until late last year, Perlmutter offered a “6-day Power Up Your Brain Personal Intensive Program” on Powerupyourbrain.com. The most expensive package cost $8,500 (that is, a touch under $1,500 per day), and it was designed to “cleanse your body” and “detox your brain” using “neuro-nutrients, hyperbaric oxygen treatments under medical supervision, and ancient energy medicine practices.” In addition to being granted access to “shamanic sessions” — the administration of which was taken over from Albert Villoldo by Perlmutter’s wife, Leize — participants received the following:. 90-minute intake evaluation with Dr. David Perlmutter. One 30-minute follow-up 3 weeks after program completion with Dr. David Perlmutter. 90-minute evaluation with nutritionist. Five 60-minute Hyperbaric Chamber Oxygen TreatmentsAnd naturally, no course of treatment with Dr. Perlmutter would be complete without his go-to miracle substance: “Five intravenous Glutathione treatments.”***Taken as a whole, Perlmutter’s career — his support for unproven treatments, his profiting from those treatments, his endless “miracle”-talk — suggests he probably isn’t a misunderstood genius who will be vindicated by time. Rather, his work places him squarely in the medical arm of the self-help industry, which stars figures like Dr. Oz (who has hosted Perlmutter and blurbs his books) and the notorious anti-vaccine quack Dr. Joseph Mercola (Perlmutter wrote the foreward to Mercola’s latest best seller, Effortless Healing).The industry has clear rules: Endorse fellow gurus, even if they make extravagant, untested claims. Cherry-pick studies performed by Establishment scientists, but deflect Establishment criticism by accusing it of industry corruption. Take promising medical research that’s in its infancy, on subjects ranging from gluten sensitivity to the microbiome, and repackage it as settled science. If you do all this, then your unproven message will reach a giant audience of eager believers that’s far larger than the one reached by doctors like Marcia Angell and Ben Goldacre, whose criticisms of industry malfeasance do not serve as prelude to the promise of miracles.Perlmutter’s pitch is nothing new. Here’s food historian Harvey Levenstein comparing early-20th-century diet gurus to faith healers, in a passage that still rings true today: “[They] would tell of their own devastating health problems, miraculously cured by the proposed diet — mysterious or common physical or psychological ailments that had defied the greatest of modern medical minds had disappeared once certain foods were added or deleted from the diet.”There’s no problem with exploring the gut microbiome and the potential of dietary changes for treating neurological conditions. These are areas of ongoing study among genuine microbiome experts and nutrition scientists. After all, it’s their promising research that gets appropriated in Grain Brain and Brain Maker. But there’s a crucial difference between them and Perlmutter: legitimate researchers are humble about what they know and wait on proof before claiming to have discovered a cure, while Perlmutter forges ahead with marketing BrainSustainTM, intravenous glutathione, and other completely unproven products.Grain Brain ends with a warning that, in the context of Perlmutter’s full dossier, is a bit surreal. The epilogue tells the story of Dr. Mesmer, an 18th-century physician and charlatan who duped the public into believing he could “cure nervous system problems using magnetism,” which happens to be the origin of the word “mesmerized.”According to Perlmutter, “the medical and scientific community feared Mesmer,” and eventually they exposed him as a fraud. Perlmutter writes of this exposure approvingly, warning readers to stay alert for other like-minded crooks.It’s now generally accepted that Mesmer was actually treating psychosomatic illness, and he profited mightily from people’s gullibility. In retrospect, his theories and practices sound ridiculous, but in truth, the story of Mesmer parallels many stories of today. It’s not so ridiculous to imagine people falling prey to products, procedures, and health claims that are brilliantly marketed. Every day we hear of some news item related to health. We are bombarded by messages about our health — good, bad, and confusingly contradictory. And we are literally mesmerized by these messages. Even the smart, educated, cautious, and skeptical consumer is mesmerized. It’s hard to separate truth from fiction, and to know the difference between what’s healthful and harmful when the information and endorsements come from “experts.”It may be tempting to ignore all of Dr. Perlmutter’s advice, but this paragraph, at least, deserves everyone’s attention.Alan Levinovitz is an assistant professor of religion at James Madison University. He is the author of The Gluten Lie. Follow him on Twitter: @top_philosopher.The Problem With David Perlmutter, the Grain Brain Doctor