“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 Then last month, a study he widely trumpeted lauding coffee bean weight-loss pills was retracted despite Oz’s assertions it could “burn fat fast for anyone who wants to lose weight.”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.”
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.”
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(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.
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