Dr. Mehmet Oz was nominated to the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz would serve under the secretary for Health and Human Services.
President-elect Donald Trump has proposed unsuccessful Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- that's the same Dr. Oz of television fame. Though he was trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon, his reliability regarding medical advice went off the rails years ago.
A profile of Oz in The New Yorker reviewed his televised claims and stated that "Oz has been criticized by scientists for relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches the show." Putting Oz in charge of Medicare and Medicaid? What's next? Perhaps Trump wants to appoint Mike Lindell, who sells "MyPillow" on late-night cable television, as surgeon general?
The voters of Pennsylvania wisely kept Oz out of the U.S. Senate. Of course, it didn't help his campaign that he was a resident of New Jersey and quickly obtained a Pennsylvania address to run for Senate. Regarding giving Oz the consolation prize of a federal job, let's consider some objective data.
Scientists at Canada's University of Alberta medical school studied medical recommendations made on Oz's television show. Most recommendations concerned general medical and dietary advice and how to lose weight. They studied whether there was any scientific evidence to support his recommendations and published their findings in 2014 in the British Medical Journal. There was "believable or somewhat believable" scientific evidence supporting the medical advice dispensed on "The Dr. Oz Show" only 33% of the time. I take care of children with cancer, and I never met a patient or their parents who wants a doctor whose advice is believable or somewhat believable one time out of every three.
The researchers also reported that Oz recommended that his viewers consult a health care professional only 9% of the time -- in contrast to another television advice-dispensing show called "The Doctors," where the show recommended consulting a health care professional 33% of the time. Where I went to medical school, we were taught that standard practice involved obtaining expert advice from a doctor who had personally taken a patient's medical history, performed a physical examination and reviewed the relevant X-rays and laboratory results. Maybe television's Oz missed that lesson?
Oz and his television show guests failed to disclose financial conflicts, said an article in the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics. The article concluded, "Oz is a dangerous rogue ... He has told mothers that there were dangerous levels of arsenic in their child's apple juice (there weren't) and suggested that green coffee is a 'miracle' cure for obesity. Federal regulators discovered altered data in hyped coffee bean evidence ... Dr. Oz also featured two guests on his show who claimed that genetically modified foods were cancer-causing (despite repeated safety reports that found no adverse effects)."
On the show about genetically modified foods, Oz identified his guest as "a scientist" when, in fact, he had no scientific degrees or experience in genetics or agriculture.
In the operating room, Oz was known for encouraging and practicing Reiki, a Japanese art of laying on the hands based on the groundless assertion that a nonexistent source of energy flows through our bodies.
In a 2014 congressional hearing, then-U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill told Oz, "I don't get why you have to say this stuff, because you know it's not true ... So why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, why would you cheapen your show by saying things like that?"
Oz held a faculty appointment at Columbia University's medical school. Several years ago, 10 prominent physicians wrote to Columbia's dean. They said Oz was endangering public health and had demonstrated contempt for medical and scientific evidence. They recommended that his faculty appointment be revoked. In 2022, Columbia quietly changed Oz's faculty appointment to emeritus status.
A respected New York surgeon told The New Yorker that he stopped referring patients to Oz years ago. "Mehmet is an entertainer ... Mehmet will entertain wacky ideas -- particularly if they are wacky and have entertainment value."
An editorial in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association described Oz's promotion of useless homeopathic remedies, how he frequently had guests on his show who claimed they were psychics able to communicate with the dead and spirits, and that he hosted guests espousing the unscientific claim that sections of the eye's iris correspond to parts of the body and that a person's health can be diagnosed by examining regions of the iris. The editorial writer pointed out that the risks created by Oz were of "great harm by preventing or delaying proper diagnosis, providing false hope, and encouraging people to waste money on useless treatments." "Dr. Oz's Five Wackiest Medical Beliefs" appeared in Forbes magazine. A professor of genetics at the Scripps Research Institute, Eric Topol, described many of Oz's claims as "simple lunacy." This is not medicine, Topol said, "it's more like medutainment."
Those Americans dependent on Medicare and Medicaid deserve a reliable manager at the helm of the system, not medutainment. Oz publicly forfeited a claim to reliability long ago on television for all to see.