1. A psychic who helps people commune with dead family members.
2. Oz calls rasberry ketones, a supplement, “the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat.” The only research into their effectiveness is in rats and cell cultures, Specter writes. Such evidence rarely means a treatment works in people.
3. He hypes green coffee beans, another supposed weight loss aid, saying, “You may think that magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they have found a magic weight-loss cure for every body type!” Specter finds that claim is not accurate, and is based on a study of just 16 adults conducted by the company that makes the stuff, and which has used his comments as a marketing gimmick.
4. Red palm oil, Oz says, is a way to live years longer. Again, no evidence.
5. Oz does a show on therapy and counseling aimed at turning gay people straight. Robert L. Spitzer, who had been the most respectable proponent of the idea, had recanted and apologized to people who had tried the therapy, for which there was no evidence.
6. Joseph Mercola, who presides over an alternative medicine website that is very anti-vaccine (Specter accuses him of linking vaccines to AIDS, which is a new kind of crazy). Oz calls him “a pioneer in holistic treatments,” and as a man “your doctor doesn’t want you to listen to.”
7. The idea that genetically modified foods are unsafe. There are some respectable scientists who have concerns, but the expert and study Oz chose to use have been widely discredited.
And that’s not counting some other kooky but probably harmless stuff, from using Reiki, a Japanese mystic idea that you can move the body’s force fields with one’s hands, in the operating room to the notion that having 200 orgasms, give or take, will extend your life six years. (Reiki was discredited, Specter tells us, in a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association conducted by a nine-year old girl. Orgasms, on the other hand, actually are good for you, but the exact numbers? A stretch.)
To Specter, and to all of us who believe that medicine should be based on science and on data, Oz’s statement that medicine is “a very religious experience. I have my religion and you have yours” is, in a word, chilling. (That is Specter’s word.) But Specter also shows us Mehmet Oz, the gifted surgeon who is the most talented communicator of medical ideas of his generation:
Oz explains complex medical issues in ways that almost anyone can understand, and he knows how to work an audience. In an early appearance on “Oprah,” he showed up in scrubs, carrying a suitcase full of human organs. Wearing purple latex gloves, which became a trademark, he brought out a red, robust-looking heart. It was about the size of a softball, well-preserved and healthy, having come from a woman who had died recently in an accident. “The heart’s a very spiritual organ,” he told Winfrey. “It’s supple, and it’s firm, and it’s poetic. You want to feel the soul?” Winfrey said, “Sure,” and gave it a poke. Then Oz moved on to a badly damaged heart—bloated, white, and marbled with fat. The audience gasped as he cut into it with a scalpel; it looked like something that had been floating in water for weeks. He turned his attention to a pair of aortas. The first was pristine: smooth and clear, it had the texture of a clam. The other aorta was solid—it looked like gristle that had been discarded at a barbecue. “So that’s literally the hardening of the arteries?” Winfrey asked. She had summoned an overweight man to the stage. He asked Oz how he would know if plaque was building up in his heart and turning the aorta into an inflexible tube. Oz replied, “One of the ways that you’d know this is happening is from impotence. The fact that the blood vessels are not going correctly to the penis means they’re not going correctly to the heart, to the brain, to the kidneys. It’s a warning sign. It’s your dipstick.”
The big question, to me, is whether that man, the surgeon who, after years of cracking people’s chests, gives it to the audience straight and gross and gory and scares them with the reality of their biological selves, whether that guy could have succeeded on TV without all the appeals to energy fields and homeopathy and a new “miracle” supplement every week. Because that guy is still on Oz’s show, telling people that they need to lose weight and lower their blood pressure, and we need that guy in people’s living rooms. But I fear he wouldn’t be succeeding without his evil twin, in the same way that Specter, one of my favorite science writers, is not as famous as the far more flighty Malcolm Gladwell. It strikes me that Scripps’ Eric Topol, who Specter quotes calling Oz’s health advice “lunacy,” has some of the same dreams about changing medicine as Oz, dreams of escaping the constraints of medicine and the culture that walls off patients and doctors and bosses the patients around even when the doctor really has no idea what’s best. But Topol’s savior is digital, a blur of apps and mobile devices and genetic knowledge and Moore’s law. If we need a savior, Topol’s digital revolution is a far better bet than a bottle of red palm oil, but the desire comes from the same place. And it’s what’s making Topol very popular among the digital health crowd.
One of Specter’s last New Yorker stories was about Ted Kaptchuk, the Harvard professor who has studied the placebo effect using fake and real acupuncture. His research hints that there might be big benefits to bedside manner in relieving our pain. When Oz dreams of returning to the age of the village healer, this is what he’s missing, and it’s also what causes his audience members to respond to them as they don’t respond to their own physicians. There has got to be a way for medicine to appeal to people without detaching itself from reality. One gets the feeling that Oz is trying to find it. Right now, he is succeeding at being appealing, but not always at remaining connected to what is real and true.
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