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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, @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_