Dr oz is no wizard but no quack either

[beam me up scottie]

72. What about his dog and pony show before the Senate?

Dr. Oz and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Dr. Mehmet Oz is one of the most well-known, and possibly the most influential medical doctor in America. The Dr. Oz Show is broadcast in 118 countries and reaches over 3 million viewers in the USA alone. When Oz profiles a product or supplement on his show, sales explode – it’s called “The Dr. Oz Effect”. Regrettably, Oz routinely and consistently gives questionable health advice, particularly when it comes to weight loss products, where Oz regularly uses hyperbolic terms like “miracle” for the products he profiles:

. (On green coffee extract) — “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found the magic weight-loss for every body type.”

. (On raspberry ketone) — “I’ve got the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat”

. (On Garcinia cambogia) — “It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

...

When it was announced that Dr. Oz had been invited to speak by Senate Commerce subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) about weight loss scams, at least one irony meter exploded. A protégé of Oprah, his spin-off television show started in 2007 quickly became a platform for hosting other dubious “experts”, offering questionable health advice, and repeatedly profiling today’s versions of snake oil. So asking Oz to speak about weight-loss scams seemed absurd, given he’s possibly the most influential promoter of weight loss scams in America. A friend of the blog suggested that a better use of Dr. Oz would have been to hold him up as an example of the very problem he’d been asked to speak about.

...

Senator McCaskill repeatedly grilled Dr. Oz on green coffee beans, one of his most absurd “miracle” supplements that he’s endorsed. Here’s the key excerpt, and I thank friend of the blog, Dr. Peter Lipson, for taking the time to transcribe it:

Dr. Oz: Well, if I could disagree about whether they work or not, and I’ll move on to the issue of the words that I used. And just with regards to whether they work or not, take green coffee bean extract as an example. Uh, I’m not gonna argue that it would pass FDA muster if it was a pharmaceutical drug seeking approval, but among the natural products that are out there, this is a product that has several clinical trials. There was one large one, a very good quality one, that was done the year that we talked about this, in 2012. Listen, I’ve…

Sen. McCaskill: wh..wha..I wanna know about that clinical trial. Because the only one I know was sixteen people in India that was paid for by the company that, that was in fact, at the point in time when you initially talked about this being a miracle, the only study that was out there was the one with sixteen people in India that was written up by somebody that was being paid by the company that was producing it.

Dr. Oz: Well, this paper argue that there was no one paying for it, but I have the, four papers, five papers actually plus a series of basic science papers on it as well. But, but Senator McCaskill, what, if I, we can spend a lot of time arguing the merits of whether green coffee bean extract is worth trying or not worth trying. Maybe the things that we argue you do with regard to your diet are likewise criticizable, I mean should you be on a low fat diet, a low carb diet, we b…I spent a good part of my career recommending that folks have a low fat diet, but we’ve come full circle in that argument now and no longer recommend that now, many of us who practice medicine because it no longer worked for our patients. Now it is remarkably complex, as you know, to figure out what works for most people even, in a dietary program.

In the practice of medicine we evolve by looking at new ideas and challenging orthodoxy and evolving them. So…so when I hold…these are the five papers, these are clinical papers, uh, and we can argue about the quality of them, very justifiably, uh, I could pick apart papers that showed no benefit as well, but, at, at the end of the day, I have clinical subjects, real people, having undergone trials, and in this case I actually gave it to member of my audience it wasn’t a formal trial, it was just an exch…

Senator McCaskill: Which wouldn’t pass…the trial you did with your audience, you would not say that it would ever pass scientific muster.

Dr. Oz: No, I would never publish the paper. It wasn’t done under the appropriate IRB guidance, that wasn’t the purpose of it. The purpose was for me to get a thumbnail sketch, was this worth talking to people about or not. But again I don’t think this should be a referendum on the use of alternative medical therapies ’cause if that’s the case then I’ve been criticized for having folks come on my show and talk about the power of prayer. Now again as a practitioner I can’t prove that prayer helps people survive an illness, I…

Senator McCaskill: Sure, but it’s hard to buy prayer.

Dr. Oz: Hard to buy prayer. That’s the difference.

Sen. McCaskill: Prayer is free.

Dr. Oz: Yes, prayer is free, that’s a very good point.

More: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dr-oz-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day/

You ask:

Where do all these attacks come from, so suddenly, and why? And why does a "distinguished doctor" who served time in jail for Medicaid fraud have it in for Oz?

Why are you lending credence to his conspiracy theory that some shadowy faction is "suddenly" out to get him when it's obvious that Dr. Oz has had a quacking problem for a very long time?