SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3) by RamiK on Tuesday December 23 2014, @06:58AM
MDs recommend un-evidenced-based*practices all the time. Most of the time it's the little things like people asking them what they should eat or how they should work out or what this nagging pain in their backs...
Sometimes it's even in their general field but not in their expertise - i.e. family physicians are pretty notorious for not having a clue - which is of course completely reasonable for them not to know everything, until they start recommending treatments without referring to an expert...
So, you're saying 46% is supported by research? I say sounds like a decent number until you can prove other (real?) doctors score better.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:18PM
The other 46% is shilling for his fake medicine that he makes a huge profit on.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh