Dr. Oz. Credit and link: Reuters
A television teleprompter reader who exaggerates his personal risk while covering military combat is suspended, demoted and vilified, so why does a television doctor who exaggerates the power of "Miracle Foods" get a free pass?
That is the question asked by a team of physicians at Reuters, including a large chunk of faculty at Columbia University Medical Center, where the person who calls himself "America's Doctor", Dr. Mehmet Oz, retains a faculty position.
Obviously the American Council on Science and Health has been asking that since 2009 and though Dr. Oz has spent a great deal of his corporate funding attempting to discredit his detractors, so far it has been to no avail. After the Council's last round of criticism, the American Medical Association (AMA) began to be concerned and even discussed guidelines based on input from the serious medical community. They want to be able to penalize doctors who skip between scary stories about chemicals and miracle foods in order to generate media hype. And they want programs to disclose if content is based on "published peer reviewed evidence, standard of care, or personal opinion, (for that last part, they may be referring to Dr. Oz embracing homeopathy and claims of superior nutritional quality in organic food), which means that more than half of the segments on "The Dr. Oz Show" would disappear.
So he could still recommend meditation, herbs and Yogic flying, or whatever may make it onto his show next, but he couldn't don scrubs and pretend any of his beliefs had been subjected to scientific review
Dr. Oz won't have a good way to deal with those challenges, so he will resort to name-calling and a nonsensical defense that the world of science is in a conspiracy against him, all while avoiding phone calls from Sony executives who will want to know why their corporate funding is not being better spent.
