Half of Dr. Oz’s advice is baseless or wrong, Canadian researchers find
Link to the BMJ Study:
http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7346
Medical research doesn't back up — or flat-out contradicts — what the TV doctor says, study published in BMJ reports
Lauren Victoria Burke
/ AP
Dr. Mehmet Oz, chairman and Professor of Surgery, Columbia
University College of Physicians and Surgeons, testifies on Capitol Hill
in Washington in June about deceptive weight-loss products.
It’s not hard to
understand what makes Dr. Oz so popular. Called “America’s doctor,”
syndicated talk-show host Mehmet Oz speaks in a way anyone can
understand. Medicine may be complex. But with Dr. Oz, clad in scrubs and
crooning to millions of viewers about “miracles” and “revolutionary”
breakthroughs, it’s often not.
He somehow makes it fun. And people can’t get enough.
“I haven’t seen a doctor in eight years,” The New Yorker quoted one viewer telling Oz. “I’m scared. You’re the only one I trust.”
But is that trust
misplaced? Or has Oz, who often peddles miracle cures for weight loss
and other maladies, mortgaged medical veracity for entertainment value?
These questions have
hammered Oz for months. In June, he was hauled in front of the U.S.
Congress, where Sen. Claire McCaskill told him he gave people false hope
and criticized his segments as a “recipe for disaster.” Then last
month, a study he widely trumpeted lauding coffee bean weight-loss pills
was retracted despite Oz’s assertions it could “burn fat fast for
anyone who wants to lose weight.”
And now, his work has come under even greater scrutiny in the British Medical Journal, which on Wednesday published a study analyzing Oz’s claims along with those made on another medical talk show.
What they found wasn’t reassuring.
The Canadian
researchers, led by Christina Korownyk of the University of Alberta,
charged medical research either didn’t substantiate — or flat out
contradicted — more than half of Oz’s recommendations.
“Recommendations made
on medical talk shows often lack adequate information on specific
benefits or the magnitude of the effects of these benefits,” the article
said. “The public should be skeptical about recommendations made on
medical talk shows.”
Oz, for his part, said
he’s only trying to give people all the options out there. He said data
shouldn’t stop patients from testing out things like raspberry ketone —
a “miracle in a bottle to burn your fat” — even if it’s never been
tested on people, according to Slate.
“I recognize that
oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact,” Oz
said at a U.S. Senate hearing, adding that he “personally believes in
the items I talk about in my show.
“But, nevertheless, I
give my audience the advice I give my family all the time. I give my
family these products, specifically the ones you mentioned. I’m
comfortable with that part.”
But the Canadian
researchers weren’t nearly so comfortable. They selected 40 episodes
from last year, identifying 479 separate medical recommendations. After
paging through the relevant medical research, they found evidence only
supported 46 per cent of his recommendations, contradicted 15 per cent
and wasn’t available for 39 per cent.
The study was not
without its limitations, however. The researchers conceded it was
difficult to parse “what was said and what was implied.” And some of the
recommendations were extremely general — “sneezing into your elbow
prevents the spread of germs” — and consequently difficult to find in
medical research, let alone substantiate.
Still, the article was a withering assessment of Oz and the whole doctor talk show business.
“Consumers should be
skeptical about any recommendations provided on television medical talk
shows, as details are limited and only a third to one half of
recommendations are based on believable or somewhat believable
evidence,” the paper said.
“Decisions around
health care issues are often challenging and require much more than
non-specific recommendations based on little or no evidence.”
But Oz considers himself an iconoclast trying to shake up a stodgy medical community.
“Much of medicine is
just plain old logic,” he told The New Yorker. “So I am out there trying
to persuade people to be patients. And that often means telling them
what the establishment doesn’t want to hear: that their answers are not
only the answers, and their medicine is not the only medicine.”
The study is part of an ongoing debate about medicine on television.
There’s clearly a market for doctor talk shows. The Dr. Oz Show
ranks in the top five talk shows in the United States, bringing in a
haul of roughly 2.9 million viewers per day. And the talk show The Doctors, also studied in the paper, nets around 2.3 million viewers per show.
These days, Oz considers disease in terms of marketability. Cancer, he told The New Yorker, “is our Angelina Jolie. We could sell that show every day.”
But some doctors have
expressed alarm at Oz’s willingness to sell it. “Although perhaps not as
‘sexy’ as Dr. Oz would like, the public needs more information about
the effects of diet as a whole on cancer risk,” commented one paper
titled “Reality Check: There is no such thing as a miracle food” in the
journal Nutrition and Cancer. It lambasted Oz’s assertion that endive, red onion and sea bass can decrease the likelihood of ovarian cancer by 75 per cent.
“Mehmet is now an entertainer,” New York doctor Eric Rose told The New Yorker. “And he’s great at it. People learn a lot, and it can be meaningful in their lives.
But “sometimes Mehmet will entertain wacky ideas — particularly if they are wacky and have entertainment value.”
http://www.thestar.com/life/2014/12/19/half_of_dr_ozs_advice_is_baseless_or_wrong_canadian_researchers_find.html?app=noRedirect
No comments:
Post a Comment