The true sign of an addict is the relapse: After copious public promises to stop with the appalling and self-destructive behavior, they backslide right into the old habit. It’s a frustrating cycle, even as the addict deserves our understanding and sympathy. So it is for Dr. Drew Pinsky, health counselor to celebrities—especially those he has no real insight on or connection to—so long as there’s a microphone in the vicinity. Vulture reports HLN has canceled his show, Dr. Drew On Call, presumably in a final, intervention-like effort to get him to stop saying dumb shit.
The impetus seems to be the latest fall off the wagon into speculating about things he doesn’t have any real information about—namely, that Hillary Clinton has serious health issues. On the radio show KABC In The Morning, Pinsky said he was “gravely concerned not just about [Clinton’s] health, but her health care,” and accused her doctors of providing her with “a 1950s level of care.” It’s possible he simply got the facts reversed in his mind, given that Pinsky has roughly the same amount of insider knowledge about Clinton’s current health care as someone living in the ’50s. Still, it’s an unfortunate return to talking out his ass from someone who swore it off back in 2013, when multiple deaths of his famous clients—which reached a staggering 13 percent mortality rate—pushed him to get help for his habit of sticking his nose near anyone with a Q rating above zero.
His sources seem to be the same baseless speculation every other right-wing talking head has employed, involving everything from seizing upon the slightest cough as proof of debilitating disease to the glasses Clinton donned post-concussion in 2012 being proof of brain damage. (Pinsky also reiterated that outdated claim, incidentally.) Making this story even sadder is the knowledge that Pinsky has tried to shake this particular monkey off his back once before: He publicly apologized earlier this year for repeating the conservative talking point that Clinton made a late debate entrance due to brain injury, rather than having to use the bathroom.
It’s hoped, as always, that this will be the incident that forces Pinsky to seek private help of the kind he denied his patients by forcing them to confront their demons in the most public manner possible on one of his many TV or radio shows. Between this and another HLN regular who was let go this year, Nancy Grace, it seems making wildly unsubstantiated accusations about things you know nothing about will now be restricted to presidential candidates and Jenny McCarthy.