Dr. Oz’s health claims, TV shows, and scientific controversies

If you’ve wondered whatever happened to the snake oil–peddling celebrity physician Dr. Oz, and whether he’s still going strong, look no further than this news nugget today: President Donald Trump just announced he’ll appoint Oz to his Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.

Along with other sports and health celebrities — including the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick — Oz is expected to serve on the council, created in 1956 with the aim of promoting “regular physical activity and good nutrition.”

Last week, I got a surprising email from a science-minded colleague who had recently appeared on The Dr. Oz Show. “They are taking the ‘sticking by science’ thing fairly seriously,” he wrote.

This was intriguing. For years, Oz’s health show, watched by millions, has been sharply criticized for promoting bad science and bogus health advice. The Federal Trade Commission had found that Oz’s producers did the scantest research on the show’s guests, which allowed modern-day snake oil salesmen to appear on air hawking bogus products. In April, a group of professors, scientists and doctors argued the show was so misleading that Oz’s professor position was incompatible with his on-air work.

Dr. Oz is back on the air today after a tough few months.

Over the summer, “America’s doctor” embarked on a listening tour with health professionals across the country. His stated objective: to learn about how his brand of TV medicine, which has long been criticized as scientifically dubious, impacts doctors and patients. He also wanted to know how he might do better.

To hear Oliver Sacks tell it, writing books for a mass audience was once considered one of the worst things a doctor could do.

In his new memoir On the Move, Sacks recalls the day his first book was published in 1970. Born in 1933 to two prominent doctors, Sacks happened to be staying in his family’s London home at the time.

“My father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking,” Sacks writes, “holding the Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, ‘You’re in the papers.’” The article in question was actually a glowing review of Sacks’s book, Migraine. “But so far as my father was concerned, this made no difference; I had committed a grave impropriety, if not a criminal folly, by being in the papers.” At the time, popular writing by physicians was viewed as something vulgar, perhaps even a breach of medical ethics.

TV’s Dr. Mehmet Oz is one of 17 heart doctors who made more than a million dollars from a drug or medical device company between 2013 and 2014.

That’s according to MedPage Today, which parsed an open data set of payments to doctors from industry. According to the analysis, Oz earned $1.17 million from Covidien/Medtronic, which owns HET Systems, the maker of a hemorrhoid therapy he helped develop.

Medical students and residents frustrated with bogus advice from doctors on TV have, for more than a year, been asking the American Medical Association to clamp down and “defend the integrity of the profession.“

Now the AMA is finally taking a stand on quack MDs who spread pseudoscience in the media.

“This is a turning point where the AMA is willing to go out in public and actively defend the profession,” Benjamin Mazer, a medical student at the University of Rochester who was involved in crafting the resolution, said. “This is one of the most proactive steps that the AMA has taken [on mass media issues].”

The Dr. Oz media empire just took a blow from the woman who helped make him famous: Oprah Winfrey. According to New York Daily News, “‘The Daily Dose With Dr. Oz,’ a ‘radio minute’ produced by Oprah’s Harpo Productions, will end May 29.”

Even more interesting: Oz’s spot, which aired on 150 stations, may be replaced with “A Better Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta” — the CNN chief medical correspondent.

While there has been no explanation for the switch, the news comes just over a week after Oz faced heavy criticism for featuring questionable science on The Dr. Oz Show. The public scorn has caused some to question whether Oz — who was a medical expert on Oprah’s show starting in 2004 — is now tarnishing Oprah’s legacy.

In particular, a group of doctors and professors from across the country signed a letter addressed to Columbia’s dean of medicine — where Oz has a faculty position — calling the medical school’s affiliation with the TV star “unacceptable.”

Their letter arose out of a chorus of concerns about the increasingly questionable health advice featured on the show, and the public health impact “America’s Doctor” — arguably the most powerful health voice in this country — has.

Dr. Oz fired back with a counterattack — but many pointed out the ad hominem nature of his defense. He mostly tried to steer the conversation away from his misuse of science and toward the conflicts of interest some of the doctors who wrote the letter had.

Oz then also claimed that his show is not a medical one. “We very purposely, on the logo, have ‘Oz’ as the middle, and the ‘Doctor’ is actually up in the little bar for a reason,” he said in a TV interview. “I want folks to realize that I’m a doctor, and I’m coming into their lives to be supportive of them. But it’s not a medical show.”

This only prompted more criticism. HBO’s John Oliver pointed out some of the problems with Oz’s arguments:

The last two weeks have undoubtedly been tough on Dr. Oz. First, critics sent a letter to Columbia University questioning whether the surgeon should keep his faculty position in light of the dubious science he often promotes on his widely watched TV show. Then Oz fought back — on his show, in magazine articles, and in on-air interviews. But instead of addressing his misuses of science, Oz talked mostly about ... civil liberties.

“I know I have irritated some potential allies,” he wrote in Time magazine on Thursday. “No matter our disagreements, freedom of speech is the most fundamental right we have as Americans. We will not be silenced.”

Last night, HBO’s John Oliver eviscerated Oz for his ad hominem arguments.

Let’s be clear: The First Amendment protects Americans against government censorship, and that’s it. It does not guarantee you the right to simultaneously hold a faculty position at a prestigious private university and make misleading claims on a TV show.It absolutely protects you to say whatever you like on it, just as it protects my right to say what I think about you on mine, which is this: You are the worst person in scrubs who has ever been on television—and I’m including Katherine Heigl in that. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be worse than Katherine Heigl? You are also the admittedly handsome ringmaster of a middling mid-afternoon snake-oil dispensary and it says something that even when you do a show with seven fake models of human feces, the biggest piece of shit on the stage has his name in the title.

But newly leaked emails suggest that business considerations — not health or science — can be a driving factor in which products Oz decides to promote.

Last week, WikiLeaks released a series of emails sent between Dr. Oz, his staff, and executives at Sony (one of his show’s producers). They shed some light on how Dr. Oz’s daily talk show works behind the scenes.

In a phone interview with Vox on Sunday evening, Dr. Oz said his detractors had ulterior motives — such as financial ties to the food industry. “Did you know who those people were who were sending the petition?” Oz told me. “Did you know they work for companies and groups linked to the pro-GMO groups?”

Oz seemed to be previewing a defense he is expected to articulate this week on his show — attacking the integrity of his critics. “We plan to show America who these authors are, because discussion of health topics should be free of intimidation,” a spokesman for the show told CNN.

A group of doctors has had enough of Dr. Oz. On Wednesday, 10 physicians, surgeons, and professors from across the country signed a letter — addressed to Columbia’s dean of medicine — calling the medical school’s affiliation with its most famous employee “unacceptable”:

To learn more about why these doctors are angry, read our feature “The making of Dr. Oz: How an award-winning doctor turned away from science and embraced fame,” and watch the video below.

On Thursday, Columbia University replied to Dr. Miller:

When a new book by blogger Vani Hari, who calls herself the “Food Babe,“ arrived on my desk a few months ago, I looked at the cover, thumbed through a few pages, and tossed it away.

“Break free from the hidden toxins in your food,” The Food Babe Way boasted. “Lose weight, look years younger, and get healthy in just 21 days.”

A federal agency that protects consumers has gone after a guest on the Dr. Oz Show for false and misleading marketing practices, leading to a $9-million settlement yesterday.

Documents filed by Federal Trade Commission lawyers reveal an elaborate scam by Lindsey Duncan — a Dr. Oz guest and supposed nutrition expert — to hawk weight-loss aids, including green coffee bean supplements, in which he had a financial stake.

The FTC complaint offers a behind-the-scenes look at the anatomy of a Dr. Oz Show appearance. The details may seem stranger than fiction, but they’re all fact, and should make you think twice about the health advice featured on the program.

The story began when an Oz Show producer contacted Duncan’s PR people, asking whether he knew anything about green coffee bean supplements.

Duncan is an interesting character. A naturopathic doctor and “celebrity nutritionist,” he refers to himself as “one of the world’s leading experts on superfoods, herbal medicine, natural remedies and natural health.”

The government is forcing one of Dr. Oz’s favorite supplement peddlers to pay out $9 million to consumers after making deceptive and unsubstantiated claims about weight loss products.

Several years ago, you had probably never heard of the green coffee bean supplement for weight loss. But after Dr. Oz featured the supplement on his daily talk show, it became one of the hottest weight loss wonders around.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission just announced a giant settlement with one of the supplement marketers who appeared on the Dr. Oz Show, Lindsey Duncan, as well as the companies he had a stake in, Pure Health LLC and Genesis Today, Inc.

On the Oz show, Duncan made miraculous claims: that the pills could lead to nearly 20 pounds of weight loss — and a reduction of 16 percent body fat — in 12 weeks without exercise. He said this was all backed by science. But he never mentioned his financial conflict of interest in companies that made the pills. According to the FTC:

Of course, the science behind the green coffee bean supplements was dubious. There’s no good evidence that green coffee beans do anything Duncan claimed, and one of the related studies featured on the Oz show has even been retracted by the study authors.

For this peddling, the FTC went after Duncan and his companies — and they won.

Under settlement, the FTC says, “the defendants are barred from making deceptive claims about the health benefits or efficacy of any dietary supplement or drug product, and will pay $9 million for consumer redress.”

There is a very clear tension between the requirements of medicine and those of entertainment. Yet medicine and entertainment are often conflated: stale and inaccurate health advice is broadcast as if it were news, and patients’ hardship can be exploited on medical reality shows for entertainment value.

The investigative news website ProPublica documented a startling illustration of this problem: when a patient’s death was broadcast on television without permission from the family.

Health reporter Charles Ornstein tells the story of Anita Chanko, whose husband’s death was filmed and broadcast on the medical reality show “NY Med” — featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz — without the family’s consent.

The way Chanko found out about the alleged transgression is nightmarish. One early morning, more than a year after her husband died, she found herself unable to sleep, and turned on the TV to settle on the popular show:

For years, I’ve been looking at some of the dubious and harmful health claims TV doctors make on their talk shows. In carefully examining Dr. Oz, unpicking the evidence behind the products he peddles, I came to the conclusion that, on balance, the bulk of what he has to say is misleading at best, and total nonsense at worst.

He is, after all, in the business of entertainment. Real, evidence-based medicine isn’t often entertaining, especially on the subjects — weight loss, diets — he tends to cover.

It was supposed to be a forum where Twitter fans of the Dr. Oz Show could send in their most pressing questions for “America’s doctor.”

But since Oz made his offer yesterday, the #OzsInbox hashtag has turned into a channel for rage and shame, where skeptics and disappointed viewers have been venting about Dr. Oz’s psuedoscience and trickery.

(Read more: Why Dr. Oz can say anything and keep his medical license, Dr. Oz’s three biggest weight loss lies, debunked, and Meet the medical student who wants to bring down Dr. Oz. )

Mehmet Oz, America’s doctor, is known for many things, but being a proponent of good science isn’t one of them. Last summer, he was even dragged up to Capitol Hill and berated by senators for his bunk weight-loss prescriptions. “The scientific community is almost monolithic against you,” Sen. Claire McCaskill admonished him.

Now comes more evidence of Oz’s wizardry: according to the blog Retraction Watch, a key study that the TV doctor used to tout a green coffee bean extract for weight loss has been retracted. “The sponsors of the study cannot assure the validity of the data so we, Joe Vinson and Bryan Burnham, are retracting the paper,” the journal’s retraction notice reads.

Even before the retraction, the study had attracted a lot of scrutiny for being too weak and flawed to support any health claims, let alone weight loss wonders. The Federal Trade Commission had also settled a $3.5-million lawsuit with the supplement-makers for its false marketing and bad science. This from the FTC’s September press release about the settlement:

For more on how Dr. Oz can make these claims and still maintain his medical license, see here. To learn about the medical student who is trying to bring Dr. Oz down, see here.

“Dr. Oz has something like 4-million viewers a day,” Mazer told Vox. “The average physician doesn’t see a million patients in their lifetime. That’s why organized medicine should be taking action.”

Last year, Mazer brought a policy before the Medical Society of the State of New York — where Dr. Oz is licensed — requesting that they consider regulating the advice of famous physicians in the media. His idea: Treat health advice on TV in the same vein as expert testimony, which already has established guidelines for truthfulness. In 2014, Mazer also launched a website to gather first-hand accounts from health professionals about their run-ins with Dr. Oz-based medicine on the front line. It’s called “Doctors In Oz.”

I talked to Mazer about his crusade. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Julia Belluz: So you’re the medical student who wants to bring down Dr. Oz?

Benjamin Mazer: I’m definitely not the only one. This issue was brought up by a number of physicians I worked with during my family medicine clerkship. We had all of this first-hand experience with patients who really liked his show and trusted him quite a bit. [Dr. Oz] would give advice that was really not great or it had no medical basis. It might sound harmless when you talk about things like herbal pills or supplements. But when the physicians’ advice conflicted with Oz, the patients would believe Oz.

Dr. Mehmet Oz reaches more people in a day than most doctors reach in a lifetime. But his popular advice show is often based on bad science or no science at all. That’s why he was dragged to Capitol Hill this summer for a spanking by Sen. Claire McCaskill. Here are three of his biggest lies and how different he sounds when he’s forced to tell the truth.

Narrated by Julia Belluz

Produced by Joss Fong, Joe Posner, Alex Hawley

TV rigging by Marcos Bueno

It’s an adage that gets repeated again and again: you can speed up your metabolism and lose weight by eating certain foods or taking supplements.

There’s just one fairly large problem with that statement. Namely, that it’s not true at all.

This all raises the question: why does Dr. Oz still get to call himself a doctor? Oz has maintained his medical credentials, university faculty and hospital positions, all while giving potentially harmful and often ridiculous medical advice to his millions-strong audience. John Oliver argued this weekend that, at this point, a more appropriate title for Oz’s show would be one that dropped his medical credentials: “Check this shit out with a guy named Mehmet.”

The fact that Oz hasn’t lost any credentials speaks to a larger challenge in modern medicine: Once you get a medical license, its actually really difficult to lose it.