How Dr. Oz and Oprah Winfrey fueled the political rise of California-infused quackery
Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician who signed the Declaration of Independence, harbored an enthusiasm for bloodletting that alarmed even some of his colleagues in a profession still laboring under general ignorance. He believed as strongly in the power of purging, supplying Lewis and Clark with a powerful laxative containing heroic doses of mercury chloride and nicknamed Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts.
Mehmet Oz, in other words, is not the first politically prominent quack in America. But he might be the apotheosis of a sickening convergence of political and medical charlatanism.
It’s been pointedly noted that Oz, who recently announced a U.S. Senate run in Dr. Rush’s former colony, Pennsylvania, is a longtime resident of New Jersey. But Oz as we know him is a California creation.
Montecito’s own Oprah Winfrey put him on her show over 60 times before giving him his own — a few times. Beyond “The Dr. Oz Show” and “Surgeon Oz,” Winfrey’s West Hollywood production company and network featured the celebrity heart surgeon as one of “Oprah’s All-Stars” alongside another Winfrey-elevated doctor, Phil. Oz has said it was Oprah who taught him that Americans are motivated by “what they feel, not what they know.”
Another Oz who got the Hollywood treatment famously insisted that he was “really a very good man” while allowing that he was “a very bad wizard.” We can’t see into Mehmet Oz’s soul or know for certain what kind of man he is, but his televised practice of medicine provides more than enough evidence to conclude that he is a very bad doctor.
Oz has been grilled before the Senate he hopes to join and denounced by hundreds of fellow physicians. A 2014 study by Canadian researchers found no evidence for more than half the health advice offered on his show and no “believable” support for two-thirds of his prescriptions.
The doctor has probed the unfounded risks of apple juice and genetically modified crops while offering bogus tips to whiten teeth and cure insomnia. But the preponderance of his TV advice, the study found, deals with diet and weight loss. The doctor has used his formidable platform to persuade viewers to buy fake anti-fat elixirs such as green coffee bean extract, raspberry ketones and the tropical fruit garcinia cambogia — call them Dr. Oz’s Thunderbolts — even as he diagnosed then-candidate Donald Trump as only “slightly overweight.”
Oz’s symbiosis with Trump revealed the extent to which America’s quackery, demagoguery and mis-infotainment have merged into a single knowledge-destroying cancer. After Oz hosted Trump on his show to quell concerns about his medical condition and the opacity surrounding it during the 2016 campaign, Trump went on to appoint the doctor, alongside NFL villain Bill Belichick and TV monster Lou Ferrigno, to his presidential Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition.
Oz and Trump’s mutual penchant for medical and political disinformation found its most devastating expression during the pandemic, when both downplayed the danger of the virus and promoted unfounded treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug whose vigorously imagined efficacy against COVID has become one of the most thoroughly disproved hypotheses in medical science. Oz was forced to apologize after asserting in the early weeks of the pandemic that reopening schools represented an “appetizing opportunity” to restore the country’s “mojo” at the cost of an “only 2% to 3%” increase in deaths.
Oz could join an emerging Washington, D.C., quackery corps that includes Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor who also parlayed gauzy assessments of Trump’s medical fitness into a career in politics and pandemic denial; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist obsessed with undermining the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci; and, until last year, Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who excoriated Oz’s “quack treatments and cures” years before he became a top adviser on Trump’s disastrous COVID policy.
Oz and company have legitimized a form of fact-free medical freelancing that has trickled down to the local level, where Placer County school officials weigh in against pandemic precautions and Sacramento County’s Board of Supervisors chair, Sue Frost, has promoted conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines.
There is a certain inevitability about this miasma of bad politics and bad medicine, which after all have plenty in common. Good doctors and politicians have to tell us difficult truths about what we need to do for our health and society’s. It’s more pleasing to pretend that miracle cures will materialize like thunderbolts and let us go back to being guided by what we feel, not what we know.