His Helpful Healer

Art-imitating-life douche Jeremy Piven recently announced his abrupt departure from David Mamet’s play Speed the Plow after missing two shows, citing an illness brought on by “high mercury count.” Is that a symptom of an over-inflated ego?

The show’s producers weren’t returning calls, but Variety reached out to David Mamet, who wrote the showbiz satire and seemed skeptical of the reasons for Piven’s departure. “I talked to Jeremy on the phone, and he told me that he discovered that he had a very high level of mercury,” Mamet said. “So my understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.”

So who's treating him for this terribly serious illness? A celebrity doctor with a shady past named Carlon Colker.

Colker is a former body builder turned celebrity physician and motivational speaker in his early 40's. He's been on weight loss TV shows, promoted wellness with the likes of Christie Brinkley, and coached Shaq. His area of interest has mostly been dietary stuff—he wrote a book called The Greenwich Diet and has shilled for muscle-building health supplements. Colker mentioned Piven got all that extra mercury in his system because he was "eating sushi twice a day."

Back in 2004, Colker's expertise was called into question when a class action lawsuit against a company called Cytodyne, that claimed that Colker's trial results concerning a weight-loss aid called Xenadrine RFA-1 were suspect. The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded them $12.5 million, saying that Colker lacked credibility. Forbes ran a story about the whole ephedra mess that year, and mentioned Colker's involvement specifically. The year prior, Colker was also named, in 2003, in three other lawsuits in West Virginia, Illinois, and Missouri for pushing a weight-loss supplement called Hydroxycut.

All of this is to say that he may be a little lacking in the professional integrity department, so if he were lying when he told press that it might have been Piven's two-meals-a-day sushi habit that raised his mercury levels, it wouldn't be that big of a surprise.