Once a well respected and brilliant cardiac surgeon with a worldwide reputation, Dr. Mehmet Oz has taken quite a fall since a study in British Medical Journal that less than 50% of his television advice could be backed by actual science and his appearance before a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection where he caught a harsh scolding about his diet product ads.
Last June, John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” took on Dr. Oz in an epic segment that outlined what was problematic with him and the nutrition supplement industry. Then this month a group of ten prominent physicians sent a letter to Dr. Lee Goldman, Columbia’s Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine calling for Dr. Oz’s ouster from the hospital’s faculty, citing, among other reasons, his “egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”
The good doctor has been doing damage control with interviews in TIME magazine, televised news media and on his show.
Once again, at the beginning of his show, John Oliver blasted him, calling him “the worst person in scrubs who has ever been on television” and included an amusing reference to actress Katherine Heigl who played a doctor on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“No. You are scientifically wrong about that as you are about so many things. Let’s be clear: The First Amendment protects Americans against government censorship, and that’s it. It does not guarantee you to simultaneously hold a faculty position at a prestigious private university and make misleading claims on a TV show. It absolutely protects you to say whatever you like on it, just as it protects my right to say what I think about you on mine, which is this: You are the worst person in scrubs who has ever been on television-and I’m including Katherine Heigl in that. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be worse than Katherine Heigl? You are also the admittedly handsome ringmaster of a middling mid-afternoon snake-oil dispensary and it says something that even when you do a show with seven fake models of human feces, the biggest piece of shit on the stage has his name in the title.”
(h/t The Daily Beast)
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