The riddle of Dr. Oz

Dr. Oz is a controversial figure.

On the one hand, there is Dr. Mehmet Oz, an accomplished surgeon with impeccable medical credentials graduating from University of Pennsylvania Medical School and holding a Professorship in Surgery at Columbia University.

On the other hand, there is Dr. Oz the television personality of Dr. Oz Show fame who has promoted "alternative medicine" therapies from sleeping with heated rice-filled socks as a remedy for insomnia to speculative weight loss supplements such as green coffee beans.

The huckster side of Dr. Oz would be amusing except for the fact that people take his advice quite seriously (perhaps too seriously because of his professional credentials). Not surprisingly the borderline quackery of some of his shows has landed him in hot water, or to be more exact, before a Senate Subcommittee investigating false advertising practices (Salon):

"Sen. Claire McCaskill, chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance, led the panel that on Tuesday looked at false advertising for weight loss products. Subcommittee members took issue with assertions that Oz has made on his show about products that don't have a lot of scientific evidence to back them up, such as green coffee beans. "The scientific community is almost monolithic against you in terms of the efficacy of the three products you called 'miracles,' " said McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat. She said she was discouraged by the "false hope" his rhetoric gives viewers and questioned his role "intentional or not, in perpetuating these scams." "I don't get why you need to say this stuff when you know it's not true. When you have this amazing megaphone, why would you cheapen your show? ... With power comes a great deal of responsibility."

The Federal Trade Commission is in charge of protecting consumers from "unfair or deceptive advertising and marketing practices that raise health and safety concerns." In May, the FTC sued the sellers of Green Coffee Beans for deceiving consumers through fake news sites and invented health claims."

Not only the Senate, but also members of the medical and scientific community have been skeptical of the claims made on the Dr. Oz Show. Indeed, researchers decided to investigate more closely the validity of the statements made on a sample of the shows. What they found was quite alarming (Vox):

"Researchers writing in the British Medical Journal examined the health claims showcased on 40 randomly selected episodes of the two most popular internationally syndicated health talk shows, The Dr Oz Show and The Doctors. [...]

And what they found was disappointing but not exactly surprising: about half of the health recommendations had either no evidence behind them or they actually contradicted what the best-available science tells us. That means about half of what these TV doctors say to their millions of satellite patients is woo, and potentially harmful and wasteful woo at that."

More specifically as reported by Forbes,

"For The Dr. Oz Show, scientific evidence supported 46% of the recommendations.... Evidence contradicted 15% of the recommendations offered in The Dr. Oz Show."

In other words, an estimated 15% of the advice on the Dr. Oz Show is most likely wrong, and another 30% of the recommendations have no scientific or medical support (i.e. possibly wrong). This is shocking. A doctor dispensing 50% bad medical advice would be fired.

However, it is only fair to mention that Dr. Oz has great potential to do good. One example was his highly publicized colonoscopy. In a video series and essay in Time Magazine, he described how shortly after his 50th birthday he heeded conventional medical wisdom and underwent a colonoscopy. His doctors found a precancerous polyp and removed it. He claims that the colonoscopy saved his life which is a bit of an exaggeration because many precancerous polyps are not life-threatening (some are though).

More importantly, despite this overly-dramatized spectacle, Dr. Oz likely convinced many viewers to have a colonoscopy, and if so, he indeed could have saved lives.

Dr. Oz has a terrific platform to dispense sound medical advice, and he possesses the special charisma to sway people to follow his advice. Let's hope that future episodes of the Dr. Oz Show are lighter on the speculative grandiose hype, and focus more on publicizing medically supported and validated recommendations.

Figure 1. Dr. Mehmet Oz, surgeon, and Dr. Oz quackish television personality