It’s not hard to understand what makes Dr. Oz so popular. Called “
America’s doctor,”
syndicated talk-show host Mehmet Oz speaks in a way anyone can
understand. Medicine may be complex. But with Dr. Oz, clad in scrubs and
crooning to millions of viewers about “miracles” and “revolutionary”
breakthroughs, it’s often not. He somehow makes it fun. And people can’t
get enough.
“I haven’t seen a doctor in eight years,” the New Yorker
quoted one viewer telling Oz. “I’m scared. You’re the only one I trust.”
But
is that trust misplaced? Or has Oz, who often peddles miracle cures for
weight loss and other maladies, mortgaged medical veracity for
entertainment value?
These questions have hammered Oz for months. In June, he was
hauled in front
of Congress, where Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told him he gave
people false hope and criticized his segments as a “recipe for
disaster.” Then last month, a study he widely trumpeted lauding coffee
bean weight-loss pills
was retracted despite Oz’s
assertions it could “burn fat fast for anyone who wants to lose weight.”
Sen.
Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) questioned TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz about his
claims that certain products are "miracle" workers during a Senate
Commerce subcommittee hearing on June 18, 2014 (Senator Claire McCaskill
via YouTube)
And now, his work has come under even greater scrutiny in the British Medical Journal, which on Wednesday
published a study analyzing
Oz’s claims along with those made on another medical talk show. What
they found wasn’t reassuring. The researchers, led by Christina Korownyk
of the University of Alberta, charged medical research either
didn’t substantiate — or flat out contradicted — more than half of Oz’s
recommendations. “Recommendations made on medical talk shows often lack
adequate information on specific benefits or the magnitude of the
effects of these benefits,” the article
said. “… The public should be skeptical about recommendations made on medical talk shows.”
The
study is part of an ongoing debate about medicine on television.
There’s clearly a market for doctor talk shows. “The Dr. Oz Show” ranks
in the top five talk shows in the United States, bringing in a haul of
roughly 2.9 million viewers per day. And the talk show “
The Doctors,”
also studied in the paper, nets around 2.3 million viewers per show.
These days, Oz considers disease in terms of marketability. Cancer, he
told the New Yorker, “is our Angelina Jolie. We could sell that show every day.”
But some doctors have
expressed alarm
at Oz’s willingness to sell it. “Although perhaps not as ‘sexy’ as Dr.
Oz would like, the public needs more information about the effects of
diet as a whole on cancer risk,”
commented
one paper titled “Reality Check: There is no such thing as a miracle
food” in the journal of Nutrition and Cancer. It lambasted Oz’s
assertion that endive, red onion and sea bass can decrease the
likelihood of ovarian cancer by 75 percent.
“Mehmet is now an entertainer,” New York doctor Eric Rose
told
the New Yorker. “And he’s great at it. People learn a lot, and it can
be meaningful in their lives. … [But] sometimes Mehmet will entertain
wacky ideas — particularly if they are wacky and have entertainment
value.”
Oz, for his part, said he’s only trying to give people
all the options out there. He said data shouldn’t stop patients from
testing out things like raspberry ketone — a “miracle in a bottle to
burn your fat” — even if it’s never been tested on people,
according to Slate. “I recognize that oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact,” Oz
said
at a U.S. Senate hearing, adding that he “personally believes in the
items I talk about in my show.” “But, nevertheless, I give my audience
the advice I give my family all the time. I give my family these
products, specifically the ones you mentioned. I’m comfortable with that
part.”
But researchers with the British Medical Journal weren’t
nearly so comfortable. They selected 40 episodes from last year,
identifying 479 separate medical recommendations. After paging through
the relevant medical research, they found evidence only supported 46
percent of his recommendations, contradicted 15 percent and
wasn’t available for 39 percent.
The study was not without its
limitations, however. The researchers conceded it was difficult to parse
“what was said and what was implied.” And some of the recommendations
were extremely general — “sneezing into your elbow prevents the spread
of germs” — and consequently difficult to find in medical research, let
alone substantiate.
Still, the article was a withering assessment
of Oz and the whole doctor talk show business. “Consumers should be
skeptical about any recommendations provided on television medical talk
shows, as details are limited and only a third to one half of
recommendations are based on believable or somewhat believable
evidence,” the paper
said.
“… Decisions around healthcare issues are often challenging and require
much more than non-specific recommendations based on little or no
evidence.”
But Oz considers himself an iconoclast trying to shake
up a stodgy medical community. “Much of medicine is just plain old
logic,” he told the New Yorker. “So I am out there trying to persuade
people to be patients. And that often means telling them what the
establishment doesn’t want to hear: that their answers are not only the
answers, and their medicine is not the only medicine.”
***
(NaturalNews) The
pro-pharma, anti-nutrition mainstream media is engaged
in an all-out panic over the success of Dr. Oz in teaching nutrition
and disease prevention to the American public. Not surprisingly, all the
usual suspects -- media outlets funded by Big Pharma advertising money
-- have unleashed a wave of hit pieces against Dr. Oz, claiming his
advice is "unproven."
This is rather hilarious from the outset,
considering the irrefutable fact that nearly all the most popular drugs
don't work on most people. The FDA will approve a drug for a disease
based on a mere 5% efficacy rate, meaning the drug doesn't work for 95%
of subjects. Flu shots, even when they do work
unlike the failed flu shots formulated this year, only prevent the flu in
about 1 out of 100 people who receive the shots.
So almost 99% of the people who take them receive no benefit (but they
do get the extra bonus of mercury, as flu shots administered in the USA
still contain this toxic heavy metal
which is intentionally added to the formulations). I verified this
myself via ICP-MS laboratory instrumentation that conducts mass
spectrometry elemental analysis using a quadrupole mass analyzer. (See
Labs.NaturalNews.com)
All
the media outlets attacking Dr. Oz also have extreme conflicts of
interest which they routinely fail to mention: they all take money from
drug companies in the form of drug-pushing ads. Nearly all the top drug
companies running those ads have criminal records and histories of
repeatedly committing felony crimes against the people of the world. For
example,
GlaxoSmithKline admitted guilt in a massive bribery scheme where they paid off 44,000 doctors in the USA to push their drugs. Most of that bribery went to doctors who
prescribed drugs OFF-LABEL, meaning the drugs were prescribed for disease symptoms and conditions for which they were never approved by the FDA.
Those
prescriptions, in other words, were backed by ZERO scientific evidence.
This is the dirty little secret of the drug industry, and the
mainstream media completely ignores this massive fraud taking place
across the western medical industrial complex: Most drugs prescribed
today have never been tested nor approved for the health conditions for
which they are prescribed. This little-recognized fact turns most of the
drug industry into nothing more than a
high-profit quack fest.
