TJ Walker discusses calls to remove Dr. Mehmet Oz from Columbia University over promoting unproven health products like green coffee beans on TV. Walker notes Oz has strong credentials but questions why he risks his scientific reputation for mass-market popularity.
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Doctor Oz fights back. In the last week, a number of prominent physicians have written to the deans of the Columbia School of Medicine asking, requesting that Dr. Oz be removed from faculty status. They gave a long laundry list of charges, allegations all backed up by fact, that Dr. Oz is essentially prostituting himself on the airways, promoting all sorts of hoaxes and out and out frauds, weight loss gimmicks, gadgets, magic beans. Well, Dr. Oz is fighting back. He's now attacking his attackers, saying they are just tools of the giant food industry and they're angry about him being upset by talking about organics and being against hormones. Is this really going to work? Well, yes and no. No, it's not going to work in the sense of people who care about science, who care about medicine, who care about testing the whole concept of empiricism. They're pretty upset with Dr. Oz. I include myself as one of those. But for the people who just are a part of a Dr. Oz cult. By the way, that's a video clip behind me. It just ran a snag. And that's why, you see, this is a tv. But in the interest of full disclosure, I'll just continue and let you make your own judgments. But this kind of takes you beyond the curtain behind the curtain to see how we do things here. So Dr. Oz is a very odd case because he's someone who really, by all accounts, is brilliant, is a gifted surgeon, is someone who has 11 patents, multi, multi talented person and a great communicator. The Ivy League resume, football star, goodlook. He's got the whole thing. And yet he seems to be throwing it all away because he is someone who has all the mainstream credentials, did have tremendous mainstream respect and already had high ratings. He seems to be tossing away all the mainstream respect and I don't know why, because he can have the best of both worlds. There are some people in the world of journalism, Hollywood, who say, you know what? I've got a choice between respectability, being intelligent and pandering to the masses to get rich. I think I'll choose this. But with Dr. Oz, he doesn't have to make that choice. And yet he persists in promoting that. Literally, if you haven't seen the show, he persists in this Jack and the Beanstalk type of thing where he has these magic green coffee beans that are supposed to help you lose weight, when in fact there's no empirical evidence that it does. And there are numerous cases like this. So I don't think Dr. Ross is ever going to be held as respectable in the eyes of the mainstream health establishment, medical establishment, nutrition establishment. Can he continue to host this show for another 10 years? He has almost 2 million viewers. He's very popular. Can he continue to make tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars? Yeah, I guess so. But it remains a mystery to me as to why he wants to do it this way when he could have it both ways.
