It has always been known that we are not fans of Dr. Mehmet Oz. It's hard to not know him, given his fame and his full embrace of President Trump for his campaign to become the Republican nominee for the Senate from Pennsylvania. I have to admit that his achievements back then were impressive, as he was a young rising star in academic cardiothoracic surgery. Something happened. After meeting Oprah Winfrey and being featured on her show, I started referring to Dr. Oz as "America's Doctor." It didn't bother Dr. Oz that he was a grifter, he had worked in Manhattan for decades, and he voted in 2020 using his wife. Dr. Oz was pulling a common trick when he challenged Dr. Anthony Fauci to a debate.
Despite promoting misinformation about health for over a decade, Dr. Oz maintained his positions at Columbia University as professor and vice-chair of surgery. It's a sad reflection that we tended to repeat almost any time Dr. Oz hit a low in promoting quackery. We wondered why Columbia would continue to employ him in such high level leadership positions despite his bad reputation in medicine for promoting quacks like Joe Mercola and Mike Adams. There were a lot of stories that appeared over the last couple of days.
Given Dr. Oz's history, I thought it would be interesting to discuss what happened in relation to his longstanding leadership positions at Columbia University, and his history of promoting cell phone and diet supplement scam.
The Huffington Post reported on this in January.
TV doctor-turned-politician Mehmet Oz has apparently retired from clinical practice and his faculty role at Columbia University since announcing his Senate run in Pennsylvania.
Oz, who once served as vice chair of the surgery department, now holds the title of “professor emeritus of surgery” at the Ivy League school.
The title reflects the fact that Oz, 61, no longer sees patients, according to a Columbia spokesperson, but it’s unclear how long he’s been retired from his clinical practice. Oz didn’t have the emeritus title as recently as last month, just after he launched his campaign.
An emeritus status is conferred to retired professors and faculty members “in recognition of distinguished service to the university and eminence in their discipline,” according to the university.
The university didn’t respond to questions about when the change took place or how involved Oz still is with its medical faculty. Oz is also now a special lecturer in the surgery department.
More:
Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center maintains a page for Oz, listing an office for him at its Washington Heights campus and noting that he specializes as a board-certified cardiac and thoracic surgeon.
But as of early December, Oz was still listed as a professor of surgery and as director of the Integrative Medicine Center — a department that, according to its description, would combine traditional medicine with alternative practices such as acupuncture, meditation and yoga. It’s unclear what happened with that role.
I was surprised that this news article was published a long time ago, as I thought I had become a bit of an expert on Dr. Oz. I had never heard about the change in his status at Columbia University or that he had stopped seeing patients a few years ago. It made me wonder if the Huffington Post story the weekend before the Pennsylvania primary election was the work of one of Oz's Senate rivals. I'll mention again how I've wondered how Dr. Oz could hold those leadership positions at Columbia and host a daily hourlong syndicated TV show with an insatiable maw for new material. It requires regular practice to be able to sew those little blood vessels together so that the anastomosis doesn't clot.
The Columbia website for Dr. Oz was mentioned in a HuffPo report, but it is no longer there. If you click on the original link, you will find that the page is no longer there, and the Wayback Machine at Archive.org gave me an error message searching for it. His former page at the Department of Surgery at Columbia returned an access denied message, but the Wayback Machine returned a version of it as late as December.
It would make sense for Dr. Oz to be kicked up to emeritus status when long time faculty members retire. It allows them to keep a title, continue to have access to university email and library services, while maintaining some connection to the university for teaching or part-time research. One of my partners did that a couple of years ago and I hope I can do the same when I retire. The HuffPo article got that wrong. The story in The Daily Beast states that Dr. Oz became a professor and special lecturer.
His name no longer appears in website searches for doctors with the school’s Irving Medical Center. A Columbia faculty listing still says Oz has an office, along with the role of special lecturer—though not “professor emeritus.” But as with a handful of other names on the list, Oz’s listing no longer links to his faculty page, as it did one week before he launched his campaign. (Nearly every other faculty member without a link is no longer affiliated with the medical center; one of them died last year.)
The outgoing message on Oz’s voicemail for the listed number is quite dated, directing callers to medical services when Oz stopped taking patients four years ago. The message also advertises audience tickets to his now-extinct daytime TV show.
Four years ago Dr. Oz changed his position at Columbia. Whether he stepped down or was pushed out, he no longer had a leadership position at the medical school, nor did he have a position as a full professor in the department of surgery. Columbia University administration and Dr. Oz are the only people who know what happened in the year. The Daily Beast headline on Saturday was Move: Columbia Quietly Cuts Ties With, and it was because of the reports that revealed that the university and Dr. Oz kept it on the down-low.
Dr. Daniel Summers, a Boston-area pediatrician and writer, called Columbia’s stealth purge a “chickenshit” move.
“Their handling of his status there is a massive blot on their reputation. What a chickenshit thing to do,” Summers told The Daily Beast.
Dr. Summers is correct. It was rather cowardice to cut ties with Dr. Oz after he had been there for so long. Even after that, Dr. Oz remained on the Columbia website. I think that the process of updating Columbia's website to reflect Dr. Oz's true status is a slow one. It's unlikely that the most recent scrubbing was anything sinister, but Dr. Summers does have a point about how Columbia and Dr. Oz severed ties four years ago. It is assumed that this happened a few months ago.
Art Caplan is a bioethicist.
The prominent medical ethicist Dr Arthur Caplan, who in 2014 accused Oz of “promoting fairy dust”, told the Guardian he was not surprised Columbia had “quietly eliminated” Oz.
“They won’t have a press conference in the middle of this guy running for the Senate saying they were throwing him out … it could be seen as trying to influence an election, it could be risking bad blood should he become a senator,” said Caplan, professor and founding head of the Grossman School of Medicine Division of Medical Ethics at New York University.
“My question becomes, ‘What took so long?’ He’s been a huge danger to public health in the US and around the world for a long time with respect to quack cures for Covid and touting quackery to treat diseases.
“I was among the voices saying he had to be removed years ago. And I still think it’s the right thing to do because he really has forfeited credibility as a doctor. Whether that will matter in terms of the election, we shall see.
“I think it should, I doubt it will.”
It's true but it's assumed that this happened a few months ago, when Dr. Oz decided to run for the Senate. The reasons mentioned by Dr. Caplan don't apply if it happened in the year 2018? I think it's useful to understand Dr. Oz's history at Columbia and wonder why the medical school kept him in multiple leadership positions for so long. A group of doctors tried to shame Columbia into doing something about Dr. Oz, an effort that backfired spectacularly.
I have been extremely critical of Dr. Oz, even having dubbed him "America's Quack", an obvious rip off of Oprah. Dr. Oz made a name for himself by embracing pseudoscience and mysticism, and Oprah never noticed him. His embrace of pseudoscience goes back to his childhood, when he was a promising young man, as noted by Julia Belluz at Vox in 2015, in which she noted the difference between his promising start and what he had become.
Oz has achieved some of the greatest scientific accomplishments of his career at Columbia. While a resident there, he was the four-time winner of the prestigious Blakemore research prize, which goes to the most outstanding surgery resident. He now holds 11 patents for inventing methods and devices involved in heart surgeries and transplants. This includes helping to research and develop the left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which helps keep people alive while they’re awaiting a heart transplant. Oz had a hand in turning the hospital’s LVAD program into one of the biggest and most active in the world.
Dr. Oz is a rare beast. It is uncommon for an academic physician or surgeon to spend their entire career after medical school at one institution. I always think about what could have been if Dr. Oz hadn't taken the bait. Imagine if he had stuck to science-based medicine and research instead of embracing other forms of nonsense, like reiki and other forms of nonsense. Belluz notes that the roots of Oz's experimentation with alternative techniques go back to his childhood, and that his departures from evidence-based medicine have gotten more extreme as he has become more.
There was another influence, too. While he was studying for his medical degree and MBA at the University of Pennsylvania, Oz met his wife, the actress Lisa (then Lemole). Lisa’s dad was also a cardiothoracic surgeon who embraced alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism, and, according to a profile in the New York Times, her mother “believed fervently” in homeopathy.
In 1994, Oz launched the Cardiac Complementary Care Center at Columbia-Presbyterian with a certified perfusionist and registered nurse, Jery Whitworth. The center, one of the first of its kind in the nation, was “created, in part, as a response to consumer demand for comprehensive care,” Oz and Whitworth wrote in a 1998 scholarly article.
In the 1990s, Lisa Oz became a reiki master.
They also used audiotapes to try to subconsciously relax patients before surgery and brought reiki — or “energy medicine” — into the operating room. Reiki, an ancient Japanese healing art, has never been shown in scientific studies to alter the outcomes of patients. One high-quality study on the effect of reiki on pain in women after C-sections showed that it had no effect. Science-based thinkers have wondered whether it’s ethical to continue studying reiki, given that we know it works no better than a placebo and we may be diverting funds from treatments that could actually help people.
Oz’s work with the center drew critics. One Mount Sinai physician told the New York Times in 1995: “I call practitioners of fraud practitioners of fraud. It’s my feeling that the [center] has been promoting fraudulent alternatives as genuine.”
Belluz cited an article by Steve Novella and me that questioned whether clinical trials of magic could ever be ethical. We concluded that the answer was no. The problem of academic medical centers legitimizing quackery under the guise ofcomplementary and alternative medicine is something I can help with. If you don't believe me, look at the examples of the Cleveland Clinic, UC-Irvine, and many others. Dr. Oz is the most famous example ofintegrating mysticism, pseudoscience, quackery, and just plain grift into medicine among the general public.
Instead of Dr. Oz continuing his research, we got the huckster Oz, America. But why? Michael Specter was quoted by Dr. Oz.
“I would take us all back a thousand years, when our ancestors lived in small villages and there was always a healer in that village—and his job wasn’t to give you heart surgery or medication but to help find a safe place for conversation.”
Oz went on, “Western medicine has a firm belief that studying human beings is like studying bacteria in petri dishes. Doctors do not want questions from their patients; it’s easier to tell them what to do than to listen to what they say. But people are on a serpentine path through life, and that is the way it is supposed to be. All I am trying to do is put a couple of road signs out there. I sit on that set every day, and that is what I am focussing on. The road signs.”
When our ancestors lived in small villages, medicine consisted of shamans, priests, and magicians who couldn't actually do much for anything other than minor physical injuries, for which they could bind up. They could not do much to treat serious infections. If people got better, it was usually because of the disease. Oz seems to think that in order to be a good doctor, you have to embrace the quackery that is much of what is now referred to as CAM.
If you want to know why Dr. Oz promotes so much quackery, I'll refer you to Specter, who explained it by letting Dr. Oz speak for himself and asking Oz how he can feature people like Joe Mercola, who are not good for science. The central exchange in Specter's entire article is what I believe to be the reason why Dr. Oz promotes the quackery he does.
“I’m usually earnestly honest and modest about what I think we’ve accomplished,” Oz told me when we discussed his choice of guests. “If I don’t have Mercola on my show, I have thrown away the biggest opportunity that I have been given.”
I had no idea what he meant. How was it Oz’s “biggest opportunity” to introduce a guest who explicitly rejects the tenets of science? “The fact that I am a professor—one of the youngest professors ever—at Columbia, and that I earned my stripes writing hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals,” Oz began. “I know the system. I’ve been on those panels. I’m one of those guys who could talk about Mercola and not lose everybody. And so if I don’t talk to him I have abdicated my responsibility, because the currency that I deal in is trust, and it is trust that has been given to me by Oprah and by Columbia University, and by an audience that has watched over six hundred shows.”
I was still puzzled. “Either data works or it doesn’t,” I said. “Science is supposed to answer, or at least address, those questions. Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?”
Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “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.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it—that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true—was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”
Mercola was overjoyed to be on The Dr. Oz show, which was a great opportunity to promote his brand. Did Dr. Oz point out all the bad things that Mercola does? You know the answer to that one. It is clear that Dr. Oz bought into the narrative that science is just another way of knowing. Oz's other stated desires in the article were to have healers the way we used to hundreds or thousands of years ago. Most of the healers were priests or shamans, and they did little more than placebo medicine and faith healing. It made perfect sense for Dr. Oz to return to that time in his life. I'm sure that Dr. Oz has always imagined that he willintegrate ancient healing practices with modern medicine. integrative medicine is what it is.
It has been clear for a long time that Dr. Oz is a huckster, dedicated to being a showman more than he was ever dedicated to science. Julia Belluz mentioned that in her article.
Monique Class, a family nurse practitioner and another former employee of the center, said the media attention negatively affected their work. “It became about Oz. Not about the project. Not about the patients. Not about the work. That all became secondary to his rise to the top.”
It wasn’t uncommon, Class said, for Oz to say some version of the following to her or to the other employees: “Give me a patient because the cameras are coming in, and tell me what I need to know.”
Class said, “He was always acting. He didn’t know this patient. He was not connected to this patient. We’d give him a two- or three-minute sound bite and he’d sit there in front of the cameras like he’d done this work and had this deep connection.”
Which is exactly the opposite of what shaman-healers did and also an indication that it's not about the patients but about Dr. Oz and his brand. Patients and shamans were both part of the same villages and communities, so shamans tried to form an attachment to them based on their long history of living there. Dr. Oz has used his patients as stepping stones to become famous, which he justified to Michael Specter.
One day, I asked Oz whether he minded that many of his medical peers criticized him for following the dictates of daytime television more than the demands of scientific truth. “I have always played offense,” he responded. “So I don’t care what people call me. I used to. I felt that to say I was an entertainer was dismissive. But it is part of what I have to do. I want to get my message across to people who are not going to get it in other ways. And I can’t do that if I am not palatable to the people who watch the show.”
I'm pretty sure he told himself the same thing when he invited Donald Trump to appear on his show, just as he did when he decided to run for Senate in Pennsylvania. I'm pretty sure that he told himself the same thing when he started promoting hydroxychloroquine and other treatments for COVID-19 two years ago.
In 2015, a group of doctors led by Dr. Henry Miller wrote a letter to the Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia University arguing that Dr. Oz's brand was in danger.
Two of the ten signers were from the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank that is known for being climate change denialists. It's an institution that has a questionable commitment to science in one area, and it's attacking Oz for pseudoscience. The American Council on Science and Health is pro-science when it is aligned with industry interests. The late president of the American Cancer Society was known for dismissing concerns about various chemicals as a potential health hazard. I turned down an offer to be on the board of advisors for ACSH because I thought it was going too far in the other direction. I note that the article is no longer there, and that it is temporarily unavailable. Thankfully the Wayback Machine at Archive.org has preserved it, so please check back in a few days.
You can see where this went. Dr. Oz is a master at propaganda. He struck back on his show, sighing heavily about the doctors who tried to shut him up because he criticized genetically modified organisms.
With a few clicks and some simple searches, a remarkable web of intrigue emerged—one that the mainstream media has completely missed. The lead author, Henry I. Miller, appears to have a history as a pro-biotech scientist, and was mentioned in early tobacco-industry litigation as a potential ally to industry. He also furthered the battle in California to block GMO labeling—a cause that I have been vocal about supporting. Another of the letter signees, Gilbert Ross, was found guilty after trial of 13 counts of fraud related to Medicaid. He is now executive director of American Council on Science and Health, a group that has reportedly received donations from big tobacco and food and agribusiness companies, among others. Another four of the 10 authors are also linked to this organization.
The attacks were devastating because they were mostly true, like the ones 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 The food and pesticide industries are represented by the organization. Its stances on vaccines, alternative medicine, and GMOs do align with those of SBM, but also for the wrong reasons. The stunt resulted in a lot of attention from the press and even Ross regretted signing the document, saying in an interview:
“Given the mistake I made more than 20 years ago, I now recognize that I should not have added my name to (the) letter,” Dr Ross is quoted as saying. “Even though I believed in the letter’s content — to focus attention on the often-questionable medical advice Dr Oz dispenses on TV — I see that by doing so it only opened me up to personal criticism. It also diverted necessary attention away from challenging many of Dr Oz’s unscientific claims. My involvement was solely based on trying to protect America’s public health.”
Do you think?
One of the people who signed the article is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no expertise in infectious disease, epidemiology, or public health. He advocated for fewer interventions to slow the spread of the virus, which was consistent with his admiration for the Great Barrington Declaration.
The polls I have seen show the contest for the GOP nomination for Pennsylvania Senate to be close, with Oz leading and others showing him behind, but none by that much. It's possible that Oz could win the primary, but he probably won.
If politics is the reason that Columbia severed ties with Dr. Oz, I can only say that it's sad. If Dr. Oz succeeds in becoming the next Senator from Pennsylvania, he will be able to influence health care policy in a major way. Even if he loses, I'd be willing to bet it won't be long before he reappears.
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