What has happened to you, Dr. Oz?

The show biz career of Dr. Mehmet Oz has enjoyed a meteoric rise ever since he started in television back in 2003 on the Discovery Channel.  The first guest on that show was one Oprah Winfrey, who dubbed the charmer, “America’s Doctor”. Dr. Oz now spends his time writing best-selling books on diet and beauty, and hosts a hit TV show. One wonders when he has time to practice cardiology anymore.

Less cardiology would seem to be a tragedy.  His useful book Healing From The Heart made a profound impact on me when I read it after my own heart attack in 2008. But in an unprecedented frenzy to win TV viewers and boost ratings, the skilled cardiologist-turned-entertainer is now in danger of becoming a pathetic caricature of his former well-respected self.

You may have witnessed the latest embarrassing low point in which he trotted out a trio of his smarmy cosmetic surgery pals to demonstrate their expensive and oddly disturbing anti-aging procedures on live audience volunteers, all women, of course. The rest of the star-struck crowd cheered as if this were an old time religious revival, and as if it were perfectly normal to eavesdrop on syringes filled with who-knows what injected beneath a patient’s eyes in public by a doctor who kept asking her camera guy: “Can they see this?”

If you did catch this show, you might agree that some of the medical advice Dr. Oz is now peddling is what the watchdog site Respectful Insolence has aptly described as “ranging from fairly pedestrian to pure quackery”.   Continue reading

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News flash: food is better than supplements for staying healthy

You may wonder why anything this obvious even needs to be reported as news in the first place. Yet that’s what’s happened this week over the issue of whether taking vitamin supplements can ward off cancer and other serious diseases better than eating healthy food does. Pitching this supplement claim is like a dream fantasy for legitimate supplement manufacturers and snake oil salesmen alike, so both groups will be disappointed by the “news” out of the University of Texas.

Sally Scroggs, health education manager at the university’s M.D. Anderson Medical Center’s Cancer Prevention Center, has announced in a news release:

“Researchers are still unsure about whether or not minerals, herbs and other plants taken in pill, capsule, tablet or liquid form actually prevent cancer.”

Researchers may be unsure, but luckily for the supplement industry, a gullible public remains profitably convinced that not only should we all take expensive vitamins and supplements, but that it simply is not humanly possible to consume the nutrients that we need with mere food alone.   Continue reading

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Why the poor pay virtually no attention to ‘quit smoking’ campaigns

Years ago, while working on a street outreach program feeding the homeless, I observed that virtually every one of our clients was a smoker. (In fact, researchers now estimate that about 94% of the North American homeless population smoke). These are men and women whose health is already severely compromised because of their living conditions, mental health issues, addictions or disease – not to mention lack of money for smokes.

Why are they adding a known health threat like tobacco to the mix as well?

A fascinating study in the UK sheds some light on that question by observing that the poorer you are, the more likely you’ll be to take up smoking, and the less likely you’ll also be to quit smoking. It helps to explain the spectacular lack of success that otherwise effective anti-smoking campaigns have among lower socioeconomic populations.   Continue reading

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Stealth marketing: how Big Pharma tries to shape medical news

Although Jeanne Lenzer’s article about “stealth marketing” in Reporting On Health is actually meant for other journalists, it reminds me that we consumers should all be more savvy when it comes to evaluating medical news. Before my own heart attack, for example, I pretty well swallowed any medical miracle breakthrough news without question.

But because I now take a fistful of powerful cardiac medications everyday, I have become gradually both aware of and alarmed by Big Pharma marketing, and especially about what Dr. Marcia Angell herself (for over 20 years the Editor-in-Chief at the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine) calls “… its pervasive conflicts of interest that corrupt the medical profession.”

In fact, I have absolutely no way of knowing which of my cardiac meds were prescribed for me based on flawed research or tainted medical journal articles that were funded and ghostwritten by the very drug companies who stand to gain by paying for positive outcomes.  And, worse, neither does my doctor. This is allowed to happen in part because of what we now know as “stealth marketing“.

Continue reading

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