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from the let-me-sell-you-some-snake-oil dept.
AlterNet reports
[...]the prestigious British Medical Journal has joined [The New Yorker, the US Senate, and the Twittersphere in condemning Mehmet Oz, MD for the pseudoscience on his TV show].
In an article published this week, a group of health experts analyzed a random sampling of episodes of "The Dr. Oz Show" (along with another syndicated show, "The Doctors"). The upshot: the evidence supports less than half of what he says. Which, in practical terms, means you should have reasonable doubt about all of it.
The researchers sat through 40 episodes of the "The Dr. Oz Show"; from those, they identified 479 separate recommendations he or his guests made to his TV audience. After winnowing the selection down to more forceful recommendations, they randomly selected 80 and weighed them against the existing medical literature, evaluating each claim for "consistency and believability."
Only 46 percent of the advice, they found, had evidence supporting it, and just 33 percent of the time were those claims supported by "believable or somewhat believable evidence." For just more than 1 in 3 recommendations, they weren't able to find any supporting information at all (despite, they note, "being quite liberal in the type and amount of evidence we required").
The sad part is how many people get their "information" from television.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @12:13AM
Can somebody fill us non-Americans in on who exactly Dr Oz is, and why the fuck anyone would listen to him?
Are we talking about the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz? Wasn't a wizard, rather than a doctor?
I'm not going to google for this basic info. The summary should have included it.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday December 23 2014, @12:20AM
As the third link is Salon, I'm struggling to care.
I should care, and look into it myself to further my own understanding, but I'm going to be a lazy bastard and wait for someone to summarize it.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:03AM
Cool story bro!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 23 2014, @01:57PM
It's been all over Google News for the last week; there are few US newspapers that aren't covering it.
Dr. Oz is a physician who goes on TV hawking dietary supplements, and it's revealed that half of his advice has no scientific basis and much runs counter to what studies say.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Tuesday December 23 2014, @12:34AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Tuesday December 23 2014, @06:25AM
No, he's not "wrong". He's just whoring out his show to whomever pays the most.
(Score: 3) by khedoros on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:05AM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @09:53AM
No he can be wrong when he isn't a paid shill too. A while ago I was researching what was best to do with a blister (i.e. leave it or pop it), I came across a clip from his show and I watched it out of curiosity to see if he was as bad as I'd heard. From my research the most reasonable advice seemed to be to just leave it alone as the intact skin provides protection against infection and given time the body will reabsorb the fluid. What shocked me about what I watched though wasn't that he just gave bad advice, he actually got some poor woman to walk in ill-fitting shoes to develop a huge blister he could show off on camera, he didn't even treat her blister preferring to use a giant mock-up on stage. What was the point of that, everyone knows what a blister looks like, he didn't need a real-life example that he wasn't even going to demonstrate his "correct" method on. So his advice was wrong, his practise unethical, and he wasn't shilling anything.
That may be a trivial example, though with a bit of googling it should be easy to find more serious examples.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday December 23 2014, @11:11AM
Interesting. I was just looking at what to do about the blister on my foot yesterday, and I never get blisters, and here you are. That's what I found too. Don't pop it. Some coincidence.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @09:36PM
If there's the slightest chance I will rupture a blister, I will go ahead and deflate the thing purposely.
Sterilize a needle in a flame.
Insert it at the -edge- of the bubble to make a tiny hole then gently squeeze out any fluid.
Put a dab of antibiotic on the hole.
Cover the whole thing with a band-aid.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @01:29AM
No one here knows either. I think he's Australian.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @01:54AM
He's famous for making dubious health claims on his platform(s) [nbcnews.com] that cause his stupid fans to go out and buy supplements and other products [sciencebasedmedicine.org]. For example, "green coffee bean extract", "raspberry ketone" and other miracle food bullshit. He is a successful pseudoscientific alternative medicine touting snake oil peddler.
(Score: 4, Informative) by meisterister on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:03AM
To put him in a nutshell, I would say:
Random asshat with a TV show who likes to hawk vaguely medicine related bullshit and woo.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:25PM
Quick answer he, like Dr. Phil, is a creation of the almighty Oprah who got their own show. These people are religiously followed by the unemployable and stay at home parents who will blindly follow any crank advice they dole out.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone