New Wikileaks release peeks behind the scenes of America’s quack

[SidDithers]

It would appear that some people got the impression that, just because I questioned whether a recent publicity stunt in which ten doctors and researchers, led by a well-known pro-GMO activist working for the Hoover Institution, Dr. Henry Miller, sent a letter to the dean at Columbia University in essence asking him to fire Oz for his promotion of quackery and, pointedly, anti-GMO fear mongering on his show was a good idea, somehow I’m going easy on Dr. Oz. Not at all. Miller and his compatriots at the Hoover Institution and the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) made what I see as a spectacular blunder, and it’s because I detest Oz and want to see effective methods brought to bear to counter his quackery that Hoover’s antics—and, yes, that is the perfect word to describe what he did—irritate me so much.

That’s why another story yesterday caught my eye. At first, I was wondering whether I should address it because it seems so much like a “dog bites man” story, telling us nothing that we don’t already know about our old friend Mehmet Oz. On the other hand, it’s the way that it tells us about how The Dr. Oz Show operates that makes it worth a notice. The information comes to us, initially, in the form of a story by Julia Belluz again, New WikiLeaks documents reveal the inner workings of the Dr. Oz Show:

Dr. Mehmet Oz often appears on his popular show to promote new health products and devices. Most viewers are likely under the impression that he’s doing this because he’s closely considered their merits and decided the products are widely beneficial.

But newly leaked emails suggest that business considerations — not health or science — can be a driving factor in which products Oz decides to promote.

Last week, WikiLeaks released a series of emails sent between Dr. Oz, his staff, and executives at Sony (one of his show’s producers)Show. They shed some light on how Dr. Oz’s daily talk show works behind the scenes.

See what I mean about this being a “dog bites man” story? Of course Oz is driven by business considerations. It’s syndicated, commercialized TV; by definition commercial considerations are, if not paramount, very, very important. The question is whether commercial considerations overruled science. Of course, The Dr. Oz Show being The Dr. Oz Show, I suspect we already know what the answer to that question is. The only real question is how much did commercial considerations rule? Of course, what hadn’t occurred to me is that there might be damning e-mails in the big Wikileaks release of Sony e-mails relevant to Dr. Oz, mainly because, although I knew Sony was one of the producers of Oz’s show, I just didn’t connect the dots.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/04/21/new-wikileaks-release-peeks-behind-the-scenes-of-americas-quack/

Dr. Oz.
What a fucking joke.

Sid