The Land Of Oz Is A Funny, Funny Place
Keywords: Mehmet Oz, woo, alternative medicine, health
Probably the biggest illustration today of how health woo concepts have made it into the mainstream virtually unchallenged is personified by doctor Mehmet Oz, co-author of the YOU books and endorsed by the queen of television herself, Oprah Winfrey.
It's dismaying that he's become so popular and his health advice is often taken as gospel by so many, because a lot of what he has to say is pure nonsense.
The interesting dichotomy here is that Dr. Oz is a trained, and by all accounts competent, heart surgeon. He knows how to fix your ticker, and with the exception of possibly allowing a medically untrained woman into the room to align your body's healing energies while you're under, he adheres to the best medical practices for doing so.
But his knowledge of other areas of medicine is decidedly spotty. He's like a mechanic who can fix your engine with the best of them, but if you ask him to take a look at your brakes he's suddenly out of his depth. And it wouldn't be so bad if he'd admit his limitations, but instead he pretends that he actually knows what he's talking about, and has fooled a lot of people into believing it.
The biggest problem is that he has very little understanding for the standards of scientific evidence required in medicine. That's not necessarily an impediment for a doctor - after all, diagnosing and treating medical conditions doesn't absolutely require that kind of skill. But if you want to keep up with the latest medical research, you should have enough an understanding of science and statistics that you can read the research critically.
Otherwise your forced into choosing between credulous acceptance or cynical denial, neither of which is useful at all. Dr. Oz falls into this camp, credulously accepting many woo claims while cynically playing down the abilities of western "allopathic" medicine.
He explains his view in this quote from his book "Healing From The Heart", where he explains his feelings on the Grandmother Cell Theory, which suggests that everything we know and feel about a person (such as a grandmother) is contained in a single neuron in the brain:
Probably the biggest illustration today of how health woo concepts have made it into the mainstream virtually unchallenged is personified by doctor Mehmet Oz, co-author of the YOU books and endorsed by the queen of television herself, Oprah Winfrey.
It's dismaying that he's become so popular and his health advice is often taken as gospel by so many, because a lot of what he has to say is pure nonsense.
The interesting dichotomy here is that Dr. Oz is a trained, and by all accounts competent, heart surgeon. He knows how to fix your ticker, and with the exception of possibly allowing a medically untrained woman into the room to align your body's healing energies while you're under, he adheres to the best medical practices for doing so.
But his knowledge of other areas of medicine is decidedly spotty. He's like a mechanic who can fix your engine with the best of them, but if you ask him to take a look at your brakes he's suddenly out of his depth. And it wouldn't be so bad if he'd admit his limitations, but instead he pretends that he actually knows what he's talking about, and has fooled a lot of people into believing it.
The biggest problem is that he has very little understanding for the standards of scientific evidence required in medicine. That's not necessarily an impediment for a doctor - after all, diagnosing and treating medical conditions doesn't absolutely require that kind of skill. But if you want to keep up with the latest medical research, you should have enough an understanding of science and statistics that you can read the research critically.
Otherwise your forced into choosing between credulous acceptance or cynical denial, neither of which is useful at all. Dr. Oz falls into this camp, credulously accepting many woo claims while cynically playing down the abilities of western "allopathic" medicine.
He explains his view in this quote from his book "Healing From The Heart", where he explains his feelings on the Grandmother Cell Theory, which suggests that everything we know and feel about a person (such as a grandmother) is contained in a single neuron in the brain:
| For me the grandmother-cell theory undermined the entire Western-based allopathic system of medicine because it didn’t answer the main question: How do you truly recognize Grandma? If you push the understanding of the physiological basis of medicine far enough, you’ll usually come to a point that you can no longer defend it scientifically, that you must take it on faith. I couldn’t. |
This is a very strange statement to make. For one thing, nobody expects Dr. Oz or anybody else to accept the Grandmother Cell Theory on faith. Scientists will readily admit that we really don't know how the brain stores knowledge and information about a specific person. The Grandmother Cell Theory isn't the accepted medical answer to that question. It's a hypothesis, a suggestion thrown out there for discussion.
The fact that scientists don't know all the answers doesn't discredit what they do know. And that brings us to the second reason why Dr. Oz's statement is so strange. While modern medicine may not know everything, it still relies on solid evidence for the things that it does know. That's not the case with alternative medicine.
In essence, Dr. Oz wants to tell us that he refuses to accept medical science on faith.... therefore, he's decided to adopt a medical modality that requires you to accept it's premises completely on faith.
How's that for a non sequitur?
But the thing is, Dr. Oz actually thinks he's some sort of legitimate medical researcher, and performs his own studies in which he clearly shows his ignorance of the best scientific methods for generating and analyzing data.
For example, he performed a test to determine how sensitive the human body was to carbohydrates. So he got together three teams and had one drink some water, had another drink a tasteless carbohydrate drink, and a third swished the drink in their mouths and spit it out.
Well, at least in this test he shows some limited comprehension of the idea of control groups... but what followed this carbohydrate administration? He had the teams compete in a contest to cut sugar cane. The group who swished the drink won the race, and Dr. Oz concluded that carbohydrates give you an energy boost even if your body just senses them.
If this sounds like an exceptionally weak basis for an experiment to you, you're not alone. This data doesn't provide any kind of usable evidence. It's not so much a scientific experiment as it is an exercise in pattern finding - and I just recently talked about how tenuous that can be.
His standards of evidence are a joke, and yet this guy is a trusted source for medical information. I suppose one consolation is that in general his advice, while it's often complete nonsense, is still relatively benign nonsense.
He recommends that you monitor your poo to make sure that it comes out "S-shaped"... oooookayyy.... there's no evidence that most people can derive any useful medical information from the shape of their feces, but I suppose if you want to have a hobby....
He also recommends that you should monitor your urine to make sure that it's clear enough to read through, because if it's not you may be dehydrated. This plays into that old myth that you could be severely in need of water but not feel thirsty. It's completely untrue. The human thirst mechanism is designed to let you know when you need water, there's no reason to think that you'd need to monitor your urine for a second opinion.
The recommendation is unhelpful in any case, because it's too vague. Under what lighting conditions should you be able to read through your urine? And to what depth? At what font size? What should the concentration of water to urine be? And at what distance should you place your eyes from the water line?
It's an absolutely useless recommendation... but it's mostly benign. In any case, it's your own business if you want to carry around a card of laminated reading material on a stick for dipping into toilets after you're done.
But even if his advice is generally benign in terms of health effects, it's far from benign in terms of it's effect of the public's understanding of science. He's actively encouraging an alternative style view of how science and the human body works. So while he may not be promoting the really dangerous quack therapies, he's definitely helping along an understanding of science and medicine that leaves people vulnerable to them.
And it just seems to me like I see this kind of alternative style health thinking everywhere. It's something I've commented on several times in the past (see here, here, and here). Dr. Oz is just one particularly visible symptom of how undereducated we are about science and reason.
And he's a reminder that this lack of education can even affect the doctors who we trust to give us solid, science based medical advice.
