Mehmet Oz

Sticking his neck out for woo. The sweet, sweet marketable woo.

Against allopathy Alternative medicine

Clinically unproven

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Woo-meisters

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“”Although the scientific community has turned against Oz, the unfortunate reality is that he is perceived as a scientific authority by millions of people who receive their relationship advice from Dr. Phil and, presumably, their time-traveling advice from Dr. Who.

—Steven J. Dell, eye surgeon

Mehmet Oz, born Mehmet Cengiz Öz, (1960–) is a Turkish-American TV doctor who first became known from his appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show between 2004 and 2009. He went on to host his own syndicated television talk show, The Dr. Oz Show which first aired on September 14, 2009.

Oz is a heavy promoter of so-called complementary alternative medicine, such as rolfing and acupuncture. He's hardly seen a piece of medical woo he didn't like. He has also featured anti-GMO activists on his program.

The general format of the Dr. Oz television show is to invite many people who work in healthcare for the audience, go through some very logical points with real medical background and consensus, having members of the audience participate, then ruin it by trying to peddle some alternative medicine garbage.

In May 2018, it was announced that then-President Donald Trump was appointing Oz to his council on sports, fitness, and nutrition. Because why stop at voodoo economics when you can throw in voodoo medicine?

In 2021, Oz announced that he was running for US Senator of Pennsylvania as a Republican with Trump's endorsement during the 2022 midterm elections, because apparently we need someone to replace Tom Harkin. Following a tight race with David McCormick, another Trump stooge but whom Trump did not endorse, Oz was declared the Republican nominee for PA Senate winning by less than 1,000 votes, but was ultimately defeated by Lt. Governor John Fetterman in November.

Background

As a doctor, Oz is actually one of the most accomplished cardiothoracic surgeons of his generation, making his woo-peddling all the more disconcerting. He has advocated doing whatever is necessary to keep a person's blood pressure no more than 115/75, five points below the normally accepted 120/80, which at least is something that's actually in his area of professional competence.

The Dr. Oz Show

Dr. Oz questioned by the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection about his touting of untested "miracle" diet products, 2014.

Like all commercial health TV programming, the purpose of The Dr. Oz Show is at least as much entertainment as medicine. Attempting to fill up nearly 5 hours of programming time each week with legitimate medicine while retaining a captive viewing audience is nearly impossible, particularly for a show that is constantly trumpeting new scientific "breakthroughs" and "miracles", which in real life are nearly non-existent. Hence, Oz fills his time with all sorts of material from the dubious to the downright fraudulent. In the past, he has given time to such dangerous quacks as Joseph Mercola. Oz generally stops short of endorsing these charlatans, but the fact that a legitimate doctor gives them a platform at all borders on malfeasance. It also gives these medical frauds the ability to promote themselves with "as seen on The Dr. Oz Show."

Ed Brayton comments that Oz will not lose his medical license due to promoting quackery, because "none of the groups that could do anything about it want to" in spite of possible evidence that Oz violates medical ethics codes.

Mike Adams, founder of Natural News, appeared as a guest on The Dr. Oz Show on May 13^th, 2014. In a clip from the show, Oz introduced Adams as "the renegade health ranger", whose website "gets more than 7 million hits per month".

Parasites and cleansing

While it is true that parasites are common in the United States, as Oz has claimed, the parasites that are most common are not the ones that Oz frequently talks about. The most common parasites in the US are:

• Trypanosoma cruzi — infects 300,000 in the US and causes Chagas disease, spread by an insect known as the "kissing bug"
• Toxoplasma gondii — infects more than 60 million people, spread to humans, cats, and perhaps other vectors
• Trichomoniasis — a sexually transmitted disease
• Cysticercosis — transmitted from undercooked pork, it has mostly been eliminated from the US food supply and mainly occurs in the US in people who have eaten pork in Latin America.

Rather than discussing how to prevent these diseases (there's not much money in that anyway), Oz instead concentrates on gastrointestinal parasites, which infect relatively few people in the US but can sound disgusting and scary. (Ewww, giant tapeworms! And they're blown up on a 4 meter square screen!)

Oz regularly proposes detoxification diets and colon cleanses, which do nothing for parasites or for one's health.

Delusional infestation (or delusional parasitosis) is a rare mental disorder, where a person has a "fixed, false belief (delusion) that they are infected by 'bugs': parasites, worms, mites, bacteria, fungus, living 'threads', or other living organisms." The disorder can be treated with antipsychotic medication, but don't count on Oz to tell his viewers this — it would spoil the giant videos of parasites that he shows while he scares people.

Magic beans

Oz has promoted a wide range of quack medical ideas on his show, managing to avoid the legal consequences of making false product claims because he himself does not make the claims. Oftentimes, he just JAQs up the claims, "Does it really work? Is it safe? Is it a miracle? Or is it hype?" without directly answering the questions himself but leaving it to his product-selling guests.

• Oz twice promoted human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) for weight loss, after there was conclusive evidence that it did not work, with the second time after the FDA warned HCG companies about making false claims.
• Oz promoted garcinia cambogia, for weight loss after the FDA warned that it could cause liver damage. Regardless, Oz said of it, "Well, thanks to brand new scientific research, I can tell you about a revolutionary fat buster. You heard it here first."
• Oz promoted selenium for cancer prevention, even though the National Institutes of Health said that there's no evidence that it can do so and that high doses can cause severe health problems.
• Oz hosted shows with psychics.
• Oz had a show with an iridology proponent.
• Oz made an unsupported claim that a diet of "endive, red onion, and sea bass" could decrease ovarian cancer.
• Oz was sued by the Federal Trade Commission, along with the manufacturers of green coffee bean extract and garcinia cambogia, for making false claims, but Oz managed to escape from being one of the defendants at the time of the final settlement. Regarding the magic beans, Oz said:

“”You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found that magic weight-loss cure for every body type: it’s green coffee beans and when turned into a supplement this miracle pill can burn fat fast for anyone who wants to lose weight.

At the time of Oz's 2022 Senate run, full episodes of The Dr. Oz Show are difficult to find, meaning Oz wants to run on his status as celebrity, not on his record of spouting bullshit.

Other stuff pushed on his show

In 2010, he said some things that implied that he — or at least his wife — is anti-vaccination.

A 2012 episode warned viewers of hidden food allergies, claiming they could take weeks to strike.

A 2014 episode decried the proliferation of genetically modified food, claiming that a lot of our crops have been modified to be pesticide resistant.

2022 U.S. Senate candidacy

The logo for Oz's 2022 Senate campaign, almost identical to the logo used for his quack TV show.

In November 2021, Oz announced he would run in the 2022 U.S. Senate race in the swing state of Pennsylvania as a Republican. This is despite his primary state of residence being in New Jersey (the address he has listed in his official paperwork is that of his in-laws). In his campaign announcement he blasted the U.S. government's COVID-19 response in a stereotypical conspiratorial Republican way:

Over 750,000 in the United States have died from the virus, a devastating toll for families and communities. Many of those deaths were preventable. COVID-19 became an excuse for the government and elite thinkers who controlled the means of communication to suspend debate. Dissenting opinions from leading scholars were ridiculed and canceled so their ideas could not be disseminated. Instead, the government mandated policies that caused unnecessary suffering. The public was patronized and misled instead of empowered."

This is in addition in an interview on Hannity where he supported generic Republican positions. Also worth noting that just after Oz started his campaign, he made a gaffe, as if his first impressions haven't been ruined enough: "Here's my pledge, my promise to everybody: I want to be your public servant, and every choice I make will be serving the citizens of Pennsylvania and the United States, and none of them will serve the special interests of Washington, many of whom I've been in be— into war with for most of my career." Has Oz been cheating on his wife?

The 2022 PA Senate Republican Primary

Of course, even with this shift to Republican ideals, Oz was still seen as a rather joke candidate, with Republicans calling him a Hollywood Liberal trying to pass as a Republican (ignoring the fact that their last President was a Hollywood guy). Until Donald Trump endorsed him that is.

Following Trump's endorsement, Oz skyrocketed in popularity among PA Republicans, making Oz one of the top three candidates, alongside hedge fund CEO and Trump administration figure David McCormick and right-wing commentator and hardcore Islamophobic woman who marched with the Proud Boys on January 6th Kathy Barnette. Even with Trump's endorsement though, many PA Republicans were skeptical about Oz given his past, and were not ready to accept him as a true Trump Republican, even going so bar as to boo him after Trump introduced him on stage at one of his rallies. This is also on top of his dual citizenship with Turkey, participation in their "election" in 2018, and refusal to give up said dual citizenship that has many PA residents worried whether for racist reasons or for concerns about Turkey using Oz to manipulate American politics to its advantage in the Senate. The resulting vote was close, with Oz leading the pack by less than a thousand votes ahead of McCormick (who demanded a recount), but he did have the backing of the PA GOP and Donald Trump, which hampered McCormick's recount demands. On June 3rd, McCormick conceded (before the recount ended by the way), making Oz the nominee.

The 2022 PA Senate Race

An Oz campaign billboard in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Vote for the hack celebrity doctor because he likes oil drilling or something!

Oz started off the campaign for Senate in a very advantageous position. Republicans were slated to win heavily in November 2022 due to the unpopularity of the Biden administration, and dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party's response to inflation. All Oz had to do was basically not screw up and he could glide into the Senate thanks to a loyal Republican voting base who would vote for a rock with an R next to its name over any potential Democrat candidate, and the tendency of Democrats to pick moderate candidates who killed voter enthusiasm.

However, he faced the enormously popular John Fetterman, the incumbent Lt. Governor of PA and someone who won the Democratic nomination in a blowout. Fetterman wasn't a normal Democratic politician; he had been mayor of Braddock, a rust-belt town near Pittsburgh, and was a major supporter of blue-collar workers that he felt the Democrats had abandoned, allowing them to crawl into the arms of the GOP. He also was one of the only major PA Democrats to back Bernie Sanders in 2016. In other words, Oz was facing off against one of the most progressive Senatorial candidates in the country. Fetterman also wasn't afraid to go hard on pointing out that Oz was not actually from Pennsylvania but was instead a New Jersey carpetbagger, and he did so by taking a page out of the Trump campaign by utilizing memes! One of the best examples of this is when Fetterman nominated Oz for the New Jersey Hall of Fame (cause he's from Jersey, not PA), and got numerous New Jersey celebrities to endorse this from Snooki to Steven Van Zandt. Oz attempted to counter with memes, but they seemed to backfire horribly. Case in point, when Oz made a post about Fetterman being "Lost" due to Fetterman taking it easy and not campaigning in person following his stroke in May, Fetterman took the image of himself in the meme and made it the banner of his Twitter profile. Oz also ran a lackluster summer campaign to the point of infuriating the GOP.

Fetterman continued to just control the online battle of the campaign. He managed to get a video of Oz in April at a Redner's Market (an Eastern Pennsylvania grocery chain) buying the ingredients for crudite, a vegetable platter, as a sort of jab at the Biden administration for not controlling inflation. Not only did Fetterman point out how out of touch it was for Oz to be complaining about a veggie tray for a party being expensive as someone who could easily afford the price increase (unlike many constituents that Oz wanted to represent in the Senate), but Oz called the place "Wegners", confusing it with Wegmans, another supermarket chain that also has locations in Pennsylvania, but is primarily based in New York. Oz's team scrambled to counter Fetterman by going after the fact that Fetterman had a stroke "because he didn't eat his veggies", which enraged many doctors who felt this was too low a blow and bad coming from Oz, whose medical advice were in some ways even more dangerous to the health of viewers of his show.

It also didn't help that while Oz ran for Senate, the person running for Governor of PA at the same time was Doug Mastriano, a far-right QAnon-following Christian nationalist who was the biggest supporter of Trump's election fraud claims and was there on January 6th busing people in. John Fetterman and the Democratic nominee for Governor, Josh Shapiro, had a "working relationship" with each other due to the fact that Shapiro was Attorney General while Fetterman was Lt. Governor. Oz did not have the same with Mastriano, who was a hardcore Islamaphobe. Hilariously, Pat Toomey, the guy whom Oz was trying to replace, who voted to impeach the guy who got Oz the nomination in the first place, endorsed Oz! Guess having a moral backbone against Trump doesn't extend to those Trump endorsees.

Oz also attacked the fact that Fetterman had financial support from his family (who were upper-middle class suburbanites) for his time as Mayor of Braddock. Sounds like a ding against Fetterman, until you learn that the position of Mayor only paid him $150 a month.

By October 2022, the tides had seemingly begun to turn in favor of Oz. Republicans began to fall into line, and even though most of them at the very least were not enthusiastic supporters of Oz, they hated Fetterman more, and thus voted for Oz solely to keep this "radical leftist" out of office. Oz's campaign and anti-Fetterman political groups also began to do major advertisement against the Lt. Governor, calling him soft on crime and citing that Fetterman's leniency towards nonviolent criminals as the guy dealing with pardon requests made him want to let murderers out onto the street (which Fetterman does not, his leniency is towards mainly nonviolent drug offenders who got insane time due to mandatory minimums or those who got super harsh sentences for crimes that didn't deserve such sentences). Yet, the average American's desire to see every criminal's teeth kicked in looked to be making up the gap between Oz and Fetterman. The GOP also poured tons money into anti-Fetterman ads (please note that these are not pro-Oz ads), with Fetterman becoming one of the most targeted candidates in the 2022 election cycle by conservative outlets, and to many it seemed to be working.

The 2022 PA Senate Debate

On October 25, 2022, Fetterman and Oz had their first and only debate. To many, this was more a test to see if John Fetterman was in a good spot following his stroke in May, with media outlets going so far as to question if Fetterman was physically able to take office should he win. Fetterman's stroke, while not physically or cognitively damaging, did leave him with auditory processing issues. Fetterman had some issues getting some ideas out and jumbled some words, even though those ideas and words resonated more with viewers according to analysis of the debate. The opposite was true for Oz, whose ideas, including the one where he stated that local elected officials should have as much of a say in abortion as doctors were seen as troublesome or just straight up hollow in authenticity, but he was an expert in handling the TV spotlight. Depending on who you asked, this was a major victory for Oz who showed that he was the healthier and more able person, or a major victory for Fetterman who still came out of this appearing authentic and brave for agreeing to this debate knowing his issues while his opponent came out a hollow snake-oil salesman.

Defeat

2022 Pennsylvania Senate results by county. Oz notably outperformed the whackjob GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.

On Election Day, 2022, many observers turned their eyes to Pennsylvania to see if Oz could win. For the week prior, all the stops were pulled. Oz campaigned with Donald Trump, who grappled with whether or not to steal Oz's spotlight and declare his intent for a 2024 run. John Fetterman meanwhile had Barack Obama and President Biden come and campaign with him, and even managed to secure the support of Oprah, the woman who gave Oz a platform in the first place. Polls were tight, and many were expecting Pennsylvania's results to take weeks to finalize.

Which is why it must have been a massive shock when that evening, John Fetterman was declared the winner, beating out Oz by over 4% of the vote. It turns out that the Republicans overestimated their performance in the midterm, and gravely overestimated themselves especially in Pennsylvania, where abortion reigned as a top issue of voters. Fetterman received more support in almost every county in Pennsylvania than Joe Biden did in 2020, especially in counties that were very red. Oz meanwhile struggled to match Trump's numbers in key areas. Unlike Trump though, Oz conceded the race and refused to contest it. The only person to perform worse in PA was Doug Mastriano, who was trounced even harder by Josh Shapiro .

It remains to be seen whether or not this defeat will send Oz out of politics. Dave McCormick, the hedge fund CEO who Oz beat in the primaries, became the GOP nominee in the race for the 2024 PA Senate election facing the other PA Democrat Senator Bob Casey Jr., and showed that Donald Trump bet on the completely wrong horse in 2022 (as well as having a much better campaign and having a much better electoral situation to deal with) by de-seating Bob Casey Jr. and becoming Senator . It is worth nothing that PA Republicans would have been okay with Oz coming back to run against Bob Casey Jr.

Oz is seemingly content to going back to being a TV person instead of a politician. His social media has been devoid of politics since his defeat, and instead his old campaign websites now re-direct to his YouTube channel where he posts clips of his show.

Criticism

“”Medicine is a very religious experience. I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.

—Oz, quoted in The New Yorker, 4-Feb-2013

Resveratrol

See the main article on this topic: Resveratrol

One of his biggest controversies involved the chemical resveratrol. While pharmaceutical research on laboratory mice showed it had some potential as an anti-aging agent, Oz went one step further by promoting it as some New Age miracle, and pushing his own supplemental version of the chemical, despite a current lack of proof of its benefits/risks for humans.

John Edward

See the main article on this topic: John Edward

John Edward once appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, where he did what he always does, and claimed to talk with the dead while really doing a cold reading with members of the studio audience. At no point in the episode did Oz question whether Edward could really talk to dead people.

Reparative therapy

See the main article on this topic: Reparative therapy

In November 2012, Oz provided a perfect example of false balance by giving a platform to "both sides" of the "debate" about reparative therapy. In reality, there is no debate: reparative therapy is utterly discredited and those who still promote it are a bunch of homophobic whacknuts. A very small bunch of homophobic whacknuts. As a result, gay rights groups ripped him a new one. Oz later apologized and said that "after reviewing the available medical data, I agree with the established medical consensus. I have not found enough published data supporting positive results with gay reparative therapy and I have concerns about the potentially dangerous effects when the therapy fails". It's slightly shocking to see Oz reason from medical data and scientific consensus, but there you have it.

Pigasus Award

Dr Oz won the James Randi Educational Foundation's Pigasus Award (Media section) in 2010 and 2011 for doing "such a disservice to his TV viewers by promoting quack medical practices that he is now the first person to win a Pigasus two years in a row." He also won in the Refusal to Face Reality section in 2013.

United States Senate inquiry

“”I don't get why you need to say this stuff when you know it's not true. When you have this amazing megaphone, why would you cheapen your show? … With power comes a great deal of responsibility.

—Senator Claire McCaskill, as quoted by CNN

In June, 2014, Oz faced a congressional inquiry by the Senate's Consumer Protection Subcommittee over his promotion of "miracle" diet pills. The concerns raised by that panel being, unironically, that he was promoting pills that he claimed would "magically" melt fat when he, himself, knew that such claims were unsubstantiated.

Sliced and diced

In 2014, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) published an analysis of medical recommendations made on 40 episodes each of The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors TV Show. Oz had an average of 12 recommendations per show. "For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%." The authors concluded regarding both shows, "Potential conflicts of interest are rarely addressed. The public should be skeptical about recommendations made on medical talk shows."

Trouble at his other job

As late as 2015, Oz was vice chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he has retained his position as a full professor throughout his entertainment career. All of the woo pushing finally engendered the attention of several colleagues (including former FDA official Henry I. Miller), and they mounted an earnest attempt to get rid of him. They wrote in an open letter to the dean of Columbia’s Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine:

Dr. Oz is guilty of either outrageous conflicts of interest or flawed judgements about what constitutes appropriate medical treatments, or both… Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine… Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.

Oz responded to the criticisms in the only way he knows how, by writing a letter to the editor of prestigious medical journal having a special segment on his TV show.

To add to this brouhaha, a court ruled in April 2016 that NY Med, a reality TV show hosted by Oz, had illegally filmed patients at New York-Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (affiliated with the Columbia University Medical Center). This resulted in a $2.2 million dollar HIPAA fine to the hospital. Why this man is still allowed anywhere near a patient is anyone's guess.

Although he quietly relinquished his administrative role following the controversies — and, save for a couple of stray publications, has not maintained an active research program since his television show began production in 2009 — Oz remains on the Columbia faculty as a professor and medical director of the university's Integrative Medicine Center. As Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger cooperated with a 2019 expose by the university's undergraduate student newspaper on its labyrinthine, dysfunctional judicial system for tenured faculty (in what amounted to a kind of hell-freezes-over moment) in the years following the HIPAA fine, it could be reasonably surmised that Oz's continued affiliation with Columbia is more indicative of the fact that he has not been accused of felonious conduct than an institutional endorsement of his quackery. Yet one of the cosigners of the aforementioned open letter, Gilbert Ross of the industry front group American Council on Science and Health, described Oz as “a true asset to Columbia -- as a surgeon” and encouraged him to “return to the operating theater, where he can do much real good.” Ultimately, Oz's later career is a case study in how tenure (designed in part to protect innovative work that upends disciplinary conventions from suppression) can potentially allow one to pursue quackery as a lucrative avocation.

Batshit coronavirus public statements

In April 2020, Oz took to Sean Hannity's program and proclaimed the importance of re-opening schools, saying "I just saw a nice piece in the Lancet arguing the opening of schools may only cost us two to three per cent in terms of total mortality". "Two to three percent in terms of total mortality"! For reference, a bit more than 3m Americans die each year, and apparently ~75,000 extra deaths is worth it.

External links

• The Dr. Oz Magic Wagon, from the musical parody The Diet Man
• Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which at 4:41 suggests that his show should be called "Check This Shit Out with some guy named Mehmet".