Dr. Oz is a Turkish-American cardiothoracic surgeon and television personality who is very known in the US and abroad for his daily medical television program, The Dr. Oz Show.While he is very respected by the mass for his advice on how to deal with common medical issues and personal health, he has been severely criticized for providing wrong information which has no scientific evidence.
“Misleading at best, total nonsense at worst” are some strong words some scientists, such as Julia Belluz, used to describe the Dr. Oz’s medical information. Julia Belluzis a National Magazine Award-winning journalist covering medicine and public health for Vox.com. She made the declaration on Vox.com about her finding after years of watching and searching the accuracy of the medical opinion of Dr. Oz.
She is not the only researcher to severely criticize Dr. Oz. Dr. Christina Korownyk, an associate professor at the University of Alberta’s medical school, stated “the research supporting any of these recommendations is frequently absent, contradictory or of poor quality”. Dr. Christina became curious and stated her research after numerous patients come in her clinic and say, ‘I heard on Dr. Oz yesterday that we should all be doing this.’ Those questions often left her scrambled to try to find appropriate answers.
A new study published in the British Medical Journal which analyzed the health advice recommended by Dr. Oz TV show and another popular television show, The Doctors, found that about half of suggestions offered by these shows contradicts what other scientific studies hadfound or had no verifiable evidence at all to stand behind them, and the potential conflicts of interest were rarely mentioned.
During the study, the researchers randomly consider 40 episodes of The Dr. Oz Show and TheDoctors. They isolated 80 pieces of medical advice from each show and dedicate one hour long to carefully examine each piece of advice, based on other well-founded scientific studies, to determine whether the hosts have evidence to support their claims. The result, “one out of three recommendations from The Dr. Oz Show has believable evidence, and about half of the recommendations on The Doctors has believable evidence,” said Mike Allan, another Alberta medical professor and co-author of the study.
“It is a good idea to seek health recommendations from health professionals, but false information is not what I want”, one fan of these shows said. Personal interest can be behind certain claims. At the end, the researchers advise consumers to be skeptical when it comes to medical TV shows.