Adams’ site is well known for promoting lurid nonsense about vaccines, water fluoridation and other useful medical interventions, while promoting bogus cancer cures and just about every other kind of quackery under the sun, including drinking your own urine. It’s rife with conspiracy theories, one of my favorites being the idea that the federal government knows that human papillomavirus doesn’t cause cervical cancer, but is nefariously promoting an HPV vaccine because…well, because it’s Evil.
Mike Adams’ latest thing is doing alarmist reports on heavy metal contamination of “superfoods” and supplements (probably to benefit sales of the supplements he sells on his own website), touting his new laboratory and its shiny machines to show he’s a Real Scientist and not a flaky huckster. Good luck with that.
Oz meantime has proven yet again that he’ll eagerly enable quackery if it means good ratings. About the only thing he could do that’s lower than promoting Mike Adams is to host John Scudamore of whale.to (the wackadoodle quackery/conspiracy/bigotry website) to feature him as a “whistleblower” and “health activist”.*
Time for Oz to hang it up. He’s truly jumped the shark (cartilage) this time.
*in fairness, another way Oz could sink lower is to launch his own line of ineffective supplements, instead of just endorsing other people’s useless remedies.
I work for a supplement company, so he’s good for business, but yeah so much of what he offers up is quackery.
Sadly, Adams isn’t so far off the mark regarding heavy metals. Botanicals have some pretty high amounts, especially lead, and their limits don’t take into account how many other botanicals people are taking. We had one lady complain that we were killing her with magnesium sterate (honestly, we are the worst killers ever, trying to kill so many and failing) but it’s probably the heavy metals from the ten different botanicals she’s taking that are causing her problems.
Dr. Oz is simply a shill with a medical license. It’s difficult to discern what he truly believes in as his show and the views he expresses changes almost daily. He’s yet another questionable medical professional (see Dr. Phil) who circles in the orbit around Planet Oprah.
If people choose to believe him and what he spews, then mores the pity for them.
He could interview that lunatic John Scudamore of Whale to or the good old quack emeritus Andy Wakefield himself. I wouldn’t put it past him at this point alas.
I watched the Dr. Oz show when it first started. After the first week or two, I caught on to his BS. Especially when he’d go into the audience, some woman would tell him her symptoms, and he’d give an instant diagnoses and cure. I wonder how many of his diagnoses made the problems worse.
Oprah should go down in history, not as a television talk show host, but as an enabler of the very worst kind of pandering to human weakness that skirts the law.
I hope that cunt dies alone and in misery. She deserves it.
The saddest part about this is that he really is a very good doctor. Like, one of the very best surgeons in the world. And then he goes on to pull stunts like this. Pathetic.
This doesn’t really surprise me. Specialty surgeons spend so much time focused in on the organ system they work with that they tend to be pretty out of touch when it comes to basic issues with the rest of the body.
And yet, the gargantuan ego necessary to become a hotshot surgeon on the level that Dr. Oz was (and is, I guess) often causes them to leave the reality-based community and really believe that their mind and words give weight to things. So they latch onto things that make a little bit of sense to them and they don’t question them any further, because making that little bit of sense to them is sufficient to make it true.
It doesn’t help when such behavior is reinforced by ego stroking and large checks.
There is a small list of people who I intend to kick hard in the taint should I ever encounter them on the street. Dr. Oz has a permanent place on it.
Way back I read a book by a sociologist from the thirties, he studied con men. Grifters and artists of the Big Store, guys like that.
He noticed that so many of the victims were professional men, who one might reasonably assume were pretty smart. He asked why, isn’t it harder to pull a con on a smart man?
No, they answered, its easier. In the first place, they have some money. But more to the point, a man who is very good at anything, any particular specialty, is likely to fall prey to the notion that he is generally smart, smart in a broad and inclusive way.
And if you set up your con is such a way as to let him think that he is cheating you!..that he is outsmarting you…the con gets easier and easier. You can cheat an honest man, but its too much work.
You also see that in criminals who think they won’t get caught because they believe they are smarter than the police. The MENSA member who thought he committed the perfect murder, for example.
Adams is hard to take seriously when his brand new lab hasn’t to my knowledge ever been credentialed or validated by any credible outside reviewer, and he has a conflict of interest problem a mile wide in that his website sells a variety of supplements which could benefit from Adams’ casting doubt on competing products.*
Oz could have interviewed a knowledgeable and responsible critic of dietary supplements and their potential contamination hazards. Instead, he chose to glorify Adams, whose scientific credentials are about as impressive as Michele Bachmann’s.
*one suspects a wee bit of conflict of interest when NaturalNews heavily touts products like raw/virgin/organic/non-GMO coconut oil, which it just happens to sell in its online store.
Once was in the room when someone was watching Dr. Oz and the guest was Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium. He asked her about cold reading, and she said she didn’t even know what that was. Apparently, the good doctor didn’t, either.
Then she stood in front of the audience, threw out some vaguaries, and someone stood up and said one of the guesses matched her dead loved one. A texpbook demonstration of cold reading. Theresa turned to Oz and said, “That wasn’t cold reading, was it?”
Dr. Oz said something like, “Amazing. I have no idea how you did that.” Disgusting.
Some people just get into the rut of “alternative” cures and nothing else is in their world.
I just ran into a friend of mine, who has absolutely no medical training whatsoever but a lot of empathy, and she told me she is starting a “medical” clinic with her sister (who has none, either).
When I asked her what kind of treatments she was going to offer, she said, “Reiki, power healing, reflexology, acupuncture and astrology.”
She has another sister who is a chiropractor (credentialed, I think :rolleyes: ) who runs a clinic that offers craniosacral therapy, detoxification, soul collage, energy work, yoga, and holistic chiropractic. Their dad is a chiropractor.