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In this world there is no reward for the commandments. Talmud |
Doctor Dean Edell (born 1942) is an American physician and broadcaster who hosted the Dr. Dean Edell radio program, a syndicated radio talk show which aired live from 1979 until December 10, 2010.
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Born in New York state 26 March 1941 to a Jewish family, Edell studied zoology at Cornell University and earned his M.D. from Cornell University Medical School in 1967. He later opened a private ophthalmology practice in San Diego, California and acted as an instructor of Anatomy and a clinical instructor at the University of California, San Diego. Edell soon left private practice. He later said that he "... didn't like medicine originally...I kind of found the thing I love the most, which is really the information and communicating the information".
He spent the next several years experimenting with lifestyles that included buying and selling antiques, acting as a silversmith and goldsmith, organic farming, painting, living in a 1950s-vintage bus and engaging in a self-described hand-to-mouth existence that included scavenging for food thrown out by grocery stores. During this period he describes himself as a hippie.
In the mid 1970s, Edell served as medical director of the County Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Center in Sacramento, California. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1980, and currently lives in rural Mendocino County.
Edell maintains collections of Chinese art, Chinese snuff bottles, and rare books on anatomy. On October 5 2007, Christie's held an auction of Edell's anatomy art collection.
Edell's sister is a Hollywood costume designer.
In 1979, Edell began broadcasting regularly on KGO-AM radio in San Francisco. The Dr. Dean Edell radio program was in continuous production since then, and was, by 2005, syndicated to over 200 markets by Premiere Radio Networks, and aired weekday afternoons on America's Talk on XM Radio. It was estimated to have 1.5 million unique listeners a week. The show's opening theme music (presently, in 2008) is "You Get What You Give" by New Radicals.
The program's format included commentary from Edell, and his conversations with callers on medical-related topics. He reported recent developments in medical science and exposed what he believed to be fraud, particularly in the areas of food supplements, holistic healing, and opposition to vaccinations. He frequently summarized complicated medical material in lay terms, and was fond of tackling controversial concepts from a viewpoint based on the scientific method.
On his program Edell was critical of drugs such as methylphenidate and the increasing number of diagnoses for attention deficit disorder (ADD) among children, based partially on Edell's own experience as someone who, if younger, might have been diagnosed with ADD. He also was outspoken in his criticism of routine circumcision. He was critical of complementary and alternative medicine and those who oppose childhood vaccines.
On December 1, 2010, Edell announced his retirement from radio after flagship station KGO dropped the show in favor of a local news hour. At first, Edell's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, said it planned to continue the show in 2011 with a new host.
Edell anchors Medical Minutes, a series of ten weekly radio medical reports. He also hosts a quarterly series of TV specials called "Medical Breakthroughs Presented by HealthCentral", which are syndicated to local stations via the HealthCentral Network. Up until March 2007, Edell did nightly health reports for KGO-TV (San Francisco Bay Area) newscasts. He has now retired from these regular television reports.
On February 4, 2011, Dr. Edell made a few post-retirement radio appearances on KSVY in Sonoma, California, broadcast on that station and on Internet radio network iRadioLA.
Edell was the author of the "Edell Health Letter", published from 1982 until 1994. The editorial staff of Healthcentral.com wrote articles based on his radio show topics on HealthCentral.com from 1999 until 2001 when the site went bankrupt and was sold to new owners.
In 1999, Edell launched the aforementioned HealthCentral, a website featuring both personally authored content and general health-related information with the mission of "becoming your favorite consumer health information service." Edell lost his ownership position in this company when it filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The site is now owned and operated by Washington, D.C.-based The HealthCentral Network. The site no longer publishes new content by Edell, though his advice column and articles which predate the bankruptcy are featured prominently.
Edell has endorsed and lent his name to a line of reading glasses sold in the United States since the mid-1980s.
Edell has won media awards for his work, including the C. Everett Koop Media Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, a national Emmy, the American Cancer Society Recognition Award, and the American Heart Association Award.
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