The Truth About Dr. Robert Atkins

From: MU (munospam_at_fastmail.fm)
Date: 01/11/05 

Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:18:31 -0500

"After reading most of that new book (the uncorrected proof), it seems that
many women came to Atkin's practice simply to get in bed with him. And
when he approached his patients (the one who came as honestly patients for
help), he helped them. If he asked one out, they certainly had the
opportunity to say no."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, I wondered when someone was going to play the "whore" card. I don't
care if they paid him to have sex, Atkins took them in as patients and as
workers. He was screwing them in hospital beds, in his office. He sexually
harassed women and one account, given to me personally, a women was fired
when she refused sex with him. As in, "Let's do it, Baby. No. Then get out
of here."

That was my first encounter with this horrid truth.

Atkins claimed ketosis was as delightful as sunshine and sex. Liar. He
didn't stay in ketosis as often as he slunk around.

This "news" of Atkins sexual zeal is part and parcel of a man whose life
has been built around dissatisfaction. He never got enough of anything. He
came from a family that sold sugar items and quickly figured out if he
could keep ppl eating treats and sweets and lose weight, he had a winner.
Note I am saying he came at this from an entirely business/famous POV. He
wasn't particularly interested in anyone's health, he was interested in the
bucks and the spotlight.

Quoting:

There had been an incident at a hospital in upstate New York where Atkins
had been training. He never really confided the full details but hinted he
had had a major fight with the head of the hospital. Arky believes that
this experience triggered a lifelong bitterness toward the medical
establishment and hospitals in particular. Atkins decided he would never
associate himself with the extremely political world of hospitals again. He
could not relate easily even to junior hospital staff said Ronald Arky,
today a professor of medicine at Harvard, enrolled in the same class as
Atkins at Cornell medical school in New York. They were two of only three
Jewish students in a class of 90. “He started to regard himself as being
more important than everybody else, and since he obviously had more
potential, he could even think about becoming famous.”

He had been a successful ladies’ man at college, but when he made a play
for the nurses after work he became a nuisance.
“He flirted with all of us, waiting to see if he could talk one of us into
going home with him for the night,” said Stinson. “It would start out
harmless enough, but he was too much of a pest.”

He also made another breakthrough. On emergency calls at night he often
found himself dashing to New York’s theatre district, where the wealthy
would head out for dinner and a show — and sometimes suffer a heart attack.
As he frantically tried to revive the prone victims, Atkins noticed the
preponderance of beautiful showgirls among the watching crowds.
He decided the theatre world was a good place to trawl not only for people
with money but also for girls.
A former university classmate who visited his consulting room soon
afterwards told Arky it was like “an audition for a Broadway musical . . .
all the patients were beautiful showgirls”.

Any slackers received tough treatment. Atkins sat behind a massive mahogany
desk set high on a platform so that patients had to look up at him as he
bullied them.

Fran Gare, a former patient, tells of her first visit: “Through the door I
heard Dr Atkins berating a patient for having gone off the diet. I heard
sobbing then a promise that she would never cheat again. When the door
opened I was amazed to see a well dressed extremely thin woman walk out.
Her eyes were red and puffy and when she saw me she nodded, as if to say,
‘He’s all yours’.”

Arky recalls that Atkins would keep friends updated on the way he mixed his
social life with his medical practice. “He would often tell me he had
patients who wanted to sleep with him and so they stuck to the diet just so
they could get into bed with him,” said Arky.

Challenged that this was unethical, Atkins argued: “They came to me first.”
This is the Roger Zoul School Of Denial at work here.

“Bob’s the kind of guy that likes to check out different women,” she said.
“I got tired of him dating around so much, and finally I told him I wanted
to be number one. He thought about it for a couple of days and finally said
okay.”
She lasted only a week or two until the next woman came along.

Atkins knew his market for his book too. And it wasn't the braniacs of the
world.

Atkins claimed later that he wanted to target the book at the medical
community. But “the publisher told me, ‘This isn’t a medical book, it’s a
popular book that will be bought by people who don’t normally read books’”.

Nice guy, right?

Atkins seemed to welcome all comers........as long as they were young and
pretty. Nurses also wanted to come to work for the famous diet doctor. His
lifelong feeling that no matter how much he had it would never be enough
clearly applied when it came to women.

“At that time women for him were just the chase, and he didn’t talk much
about the individual women themselves except in terms of jumping their
bones,” said Raxlen. “They were the prey and afterward he would discard
them, which is awfully hard if you are hiring that person to integrate them
into your staff.

There are stories about wild cocaine parties in his penthouse during the
1970s but back at the office, things were abnormal as usual.

Beyond touting for patients at gallery openings, he started to learn about
modern art. He even bought a few pieces, and would often send one of his
nurses to bid at auction.
“More times than I’d care to remember I’d spend my lunch hour at an auction
at Christie’s wearing my nurse uniform surrounded by rich New Yorkers
dressed in mink,” said Judy Klopp, head nurse at the Atkins Center for 15
years.

“In later years he could have taken all the money he was spending on the
art and used it instead to sustain a good clinical trial where he could
have doubled the life expectancy of people from the beginning. He was
certainly wealthy enough, but he wasn’t the least bit interested in
substantiating his intuitive clinical practice with the science of good
research."

But all in all, Atkins Diet was followed by Atkins. Right? Healthy man?
Right?

Wrong.

Another friend, Betty Kamen, remembered that sometimes Atkins’s appearance
would signal he was not following his diet.
“We were concerned because he was overweight and he really did not take
care of himself,” she said. “If you are on a really good diet, you are not
overweight and you don’t look the way he looked. He never looked healthy.
We always had the feeling, unfortunately, that he didn’t walk his talk.”

As early as 1974 he took a risk in revealing to Roger Rapoport, a reporter
writing a book about celebrity doctors, that he broke the rules. Over a
weekend at the Hamptons, Atkins let it slip that he had orange juice with
his bacon and eggs for breakfast every day.

His female companion for the weekend seemed shocked. She told him, “No you
can’t, it’s not on your diet”, to which he replied, “I have almost no
willpower,” Atkins admitted. “In fact, I’m the kind of guy who will ask the
waiter for something to eat while we’re being served.”

To his credit Rapoport did not sell this to the tabloids, which would have
made it the lead story: “Diet Doctor Cheats on Own Diet.” At least there
are a few inners in this expose of a shalow man possessed.

“It wasn’t enough for him just to be a doctor; he needed to be looked at as
unusual, and he needed constant praise, so he would hire people who he knew
would only praise him and tell him things he wanted to hear. And despite
all the money he made, he never felt rich.”

© Lisa Rogak 2005

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