I have written about Dr. Andrew Jones several times in the past (2010, 2011,2014), though as you can see, I moved on from this topic quite some time ago. The bottom line is that he built his veterinary career around denigrating other veterinarians and the profession as a whole and presenting himself as a champion for pet owners, while selling a mix of standard and alternative ideas and products. He chose to give up his license to practice in Canada rather than stop promoting himself by disparaging the rest of the profession, and he has continued to work as an online “influencer,” promoting a wide range of alternative medicine concepts and selling lots of personally branded supplements and other products, as well, of course, as his books, videos, diet recipes, and all his packaged opinions.
These opinions contain as much nonsense mixed in with standard advice as they ever did. He still claims homeopathy is useful and that homeopathic nosodes can provide meaningful immunity against diseases, which is not only mistaken but dangerous in light of his recommendations against many vaccines. He supports feeding raw diets (as long as you add his vitamin supplement), chiropractic, acupuncture, reiki, aromatherapy, and all sorts of outright pseudoscientific nonsense.
Dr. Jones falls into the classic error of presenting these as “options” and “choice” for pet owners while ignoring the lack of evidence that they actually benefit our pets, or simply accepting anecdotes only as god enough. Giving people a “choice” to do something they’ve been misled to believe will help when it actually doesn’t is no service to pet owners.
Since I haven’t written about Dr. Jones specifically in over ten years (though I do occasionally mention him in posts on other topics and refer back to my earlier articles), why has he recently written about this blog and sent his followers here to post hostile comments? The short answer is SEO (search engine optimization).
As Dr. Jones makes his living as an online influencer, he needs an active and positive online presence. Apparently, last year something happened to his Facebook page that cost him a large number of followers. He then discovered that, “when I type ‘Dr. Andrew Jones’ or ‘Andrew Jones veterinarian’ into Google, [SkeptVet’s] article is one of the first results that appears.” Obviously, this would not be helpful in rebuilding his online customer base or promoting his business, so he felt obligated to post about me even though, “normally, this isn’t something I want to spend time on.” In the last six months, he has posted three articles on his blog and some video content rebutting my long-ago characterizations of his work, and it seems pretty clear this was a marketing decision.
His rebuttals aren’t especially novel or convincing. They include language to the effect that-
- The stuff I promote and sell works
- I am on the side of pet owners against evil corporate veterinary medicine
- What has SkeptVet ever done to help pets and pet owners?
The issue of whether his specific recommendations are scientifically legitimate has to be taken on a case-by-case basis, but while plenty of what he recommends likely is (because it’s the same standard advice all the vets he attacks are giving), it is clear that he freely mixes pseudoscience and nonsense with this advice, and that only misleads pet owners and ultimately harms patients.
On the question of whether the influence of private equity and corporate consolidation has been a net negative for veterinary professionals and pet owners, I suspect Dr. Jones and I agree on that. Costs are too high, and plenty (though not all) of what is wrong with veterinary medicine can be linked in some way to changes in the business model. That said, this has nothing to do with the merits of Dr. Jones’ medical recommendations or my criticism of him.
He claims not to know who I am, though that seems unlikely given a five-second Google search would solve that, but what he really means is that he doesn’t care because he has no interest in considering the substance of my criticism or questioning his own beliefs and practices. He is immune to criticism personally, if not in terms of his SEO.
Similarly, what I do for a living and the contributions I make to the welfare of pets, pet owners, and veterinary professionals is both easily determined, if he cared to look, and also irrelevant. My criticism of him has nothing to do with who is a nicer person or who does more to help people and pets. They are about the pseudoscientific practices he promotes and the harm he does in spreading mistrust and misinformation about science-based veterinary medicine and the rest of the veterinary profession in the service of building his career as an iconoclastic outsider and champion of the people.
Dr. Jones appears to have been somewhat successful in his SEO optimization, in that his social media posts appear ahead of my blog posts in a Google search (though my 2014 article about him is still the third result). I don’t mind since my purpose here is to create a resource of science-based information and warn people about the misinformation folks like Dr. Jones promote, and that works regardless of exactly where my content shows up in a search. Nothing about this site is monetized, so unlike Dr. Jones I don’t have to work on optimizing my SEO. I tell people what I think is true and useful for them to know, and that’s all I need to do.
