Dr Oz is the real deal
You knew this, of course. But the details are still startling.How anyone like this can be a contender for the US Senate is just shocking:
Mehmet Oz looked directly into the camera and introduced his daytime television viewers to a “controversial” weight loss approach: taking a hormone that women produce during pregnancy combined with a diet of 500 calories a day.
“Does it really work? Is it safe? Is it a miracle? Or is it hype?” he asked in a 2011 episode of “The Dr. Oz Show” before introducing his audience to “human chorionic gonadotropin,” or HCG, and to a weight loss doctor who promoted it.
In fact, there was little uncertain about the HCG Diet. Numerous studies conducted years before Oz’s show had shown that the fertility drug does not cause weight loss, redistribute fat or suppress hunger. Ten months later, the Food and Drug Administration warned seven companies marketing HCG products they were violating the law by making such claims, and the agency issued additional warnings to consumers in subsequent years. Nevertheless, Oz revisited the topic in 2012, providing a platform for the same weight loss doctor, who claimed that HCG worked.
Now as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, a key battleground in the fight for control of the upper chamber of Congress, Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, is putting his medical background and his popular TV show at the center of his campaign pitch. At a recent town hall in a Philadelphia suburb, he said his approach to medicine and politics is similar: “If you teach people on television or whatever forum you use, they actually begin to use the information and they begin to change what they do in their lives. I want to do the same thing as your senator. Empower you.”
Yeah. Empower you to throw your money away on bullshit. He knows his GOP audience.
But during the show’s run from 2009 to 2021, Oz provided a platform for potentially dangerous products and fringe viewpoints, aimed at millions of viewers, according to medical experts, public health organizations and federal health guidance. The treatments that Oz promoted included HCG, garcinia cambogia — an herbal weight-loss product the FDA has said can cause liver damage — and selenium — a trace mineral needed for normal body functioning — for cancer prevention, among others.
“He spouts unproven treatments for things and supposed ways to maintain and regain health,” said Henry I. Miller, one of 10 physicians who in 2015 tried to have Oz removed from the faculty at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Miller described Oz, in his view, as someone who has been an advocate of “quack cures.”
Did you say quack? He pushed Hydroxychloraquine hard. Very hard. He got into the White House with that clap trap. Of course they believed him. They love quacks.
Apparently, he’s been gaining in the polls. There really is a sucker born every minute.