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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: 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.