Still, people march into pharmacies or their physicians’ offices every day asking for Dr. Oz-endorsed treatments—even when these treatments are backed by the barest of evidence or none at all. Oz’s satellite patients spend tremendous amounts of money on products he recommends, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “Oz Effect.” After he promoted neti pots, for example, Forbes magazine reported sales and online searches for the nasal irrigation system rose by 12,000 percent and 42,000 percent, respectively.
[,,,] A legion of doctor-bloggers has dedicated thousands of hours to dissecting and debunking Oz’s claims. One of them is Steven Charlap, a preventive medicine physician in Delray Beach, Fla. “Patients were bringing in shopping carts full of different pills,” Charlap recalls. “When I would ask them, ‘Why do you take a certain pill?’ I found very often, the response was, ‘I heard about it on the Oz show.’ ”
[,,,] This doesn’t make for good TV, though, which gets at the tension between the worlds of science and entertainment. Science is a process, moving along in increments, with stops and starts, mostly very slowly. As a result, new treatments are usually only slightly better than older ones, actual breakthroughs are rare, and good medicine is often dull. Showmen like Oz, however, must be anything but humdrum—five times every week.
[,,,] So how are we supposed to tell medicine from miracles? As a general rule, said Victor Montori, an evidence-based medicine guru at the Mayo Clinic, “If studies are cited, then this cannot be, at the same time, a secret revealed just to you now,,,We can also arm ourselves with the knowledge that not all evidence is created equally, and celebrities—even famous doctors—are not credible sources of health information.
Can you trust Dr. Oz? His medical advice often conflicts with the best science. - Slate Magazine
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