The Unholy Alliance of Trump and Dr. Oz

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/opinion/coronavirus-trump-dr-oz.html

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Of course President Trump is getting advice about the pandemic from Mehmet Oz, and of course Dr. Oz is eager to provide it. They’re a match made in ratings-obsessed heaven.

Oz, mind you, is not a virologist. Not an epidemiologist. His actual specialty — cardiothoracic surgery — isn’t the most immediately relevant to the coronavirus. But his real specialty is using medicine as a means to maximum public exposure. He wasn’t about to let this dark chapter go to waste.

Over recent weeks he has made a blizzard of appearances on Fox News, giving interviews to hosts not exactly known for the dissemination of responsible information. I mean Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, the Trump-besotted pep squad on “Fox & Friends.”

And part of what the good doctor has done on these showcases is promote the anti-malarial treatment hydroxychloroquine as a potential wonder drug for Covid-19. An article by CNN Business’s Oliver Darcy and Kevin Liptak on Tuesday said that these plugs had piqued the president’s interest in the treatment, which he frequently mentions — rather, moons over — at his daily coronavirus news conferences. And The Times has reported that Oz also pitched hydroxychloroquine in conversations with members of the Trump administration.

I’ve neither the space here nor the science-reporting expertise to examine fully the arguments for and against hydroxychloroquine. But there remain more questions about it than answers, and its diverse boosters — including Rudy Giuliani, who has always been my go-to guru on all matters health-related — glide blithely over inconvenient facts about it.

Oz did precisely that on Hannity’s show, as The Atlantic’s James Hamblin pointedly explained in an excellent article about the treatment. Oz mischaracterized a French doctor’s study of it in order to gush over it and seemingly didn’t take into account that doctor’s reputation as “a pan-disciplinary provocateur” who has “questioned climate change and Darwinian evolution,” Hamblin wrote.

“Pan-disciplinary provocateur” — that’s not so far from how many scrupulous physicians have come to regard Oz, who switched his focus from surgery to television more than a decade ago, made a gigantic hit of “The Dr. Oz Show” and, as I’ve previously observed, “morphed not just willingly but exuberantly into a carnival barker.”

“He’s a one-man morality play about the temptations of mammon and the seduction of applause, a Faustian parable with a stethoscope,” I wrote.

I’ve written about him a few times and kept an eye on him over the years, because back in 2010, when I was a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, I was assigned an in-depth profile of Oz as a one-man wellness industry. He had just begun his TV show, and I spent hours hanging out with him on the set at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan and elsewhere. I even stood just a few feet from him in an operating room at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan as he performed open-heart surgery on a 74-year-old woman. I remember that the white pages of the notebook in which I was scribbling ended up splattered with little red dots.

I also remember thinking again and again that the values of serious science and the values of television were perhaps incompatible. As I watched Oz and his producers try to sex up medicine for what they hoped would be many millions of daytime viewers, I watched him travel toward silliness.

That journey accelerated over the ensuing years, as Oz became notorious for promoting unproven supplements and fad remedies and using words like “magic,” “miracle” and “revolutionary,” especially as they pertained to weight loss. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity expert at Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition, once told me that Oz’s approach in this regard was just plain nutty.

“It’d be like if we went to NASA and they were using astrological charts to try to figure out how to get a rocket to Europa,” Leibel said.

At one point, a group of 10 physicians wrote to Columbia University to urge it to sever its formal ties to Oz. At another, Oz was hauled before a Senate panel to defend some of his ludicrous weight-loss claims. At yet another, a study in The BMJ evaluated scores of his show’s medical recommendations and determined that more than half didn’t have sound scientific support.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Oz welcomed Trump to his television show and let him prattle on about what glorious physical shape he was supposedly in. The following year, the AMA Journal of Ethics published an article about Oz by three scientists at the Mayo Clinic who asked, “Should a physician be allowed to say anything — however inaccurate and potentially harmful — so long as that individual commands market share?”

Change “physician” to “politician” and the question pertains just as tidily — and just as sadly — to Trump.

There are problems with comparing Oz and Trump, chiefly that Oz has an extensive and distinguished background in medicine, while Trump had nothing of the kind in politics. I have qualms with Oz’s ethics, but I can’t say that he’s anywhere near as morally unmoored as the president.

Even so, Oz is to medicine what Trump is to politics: someone who has bent the discipline to the dictates of entertainment in pursuit of ever more celebrity, ever more power, and has warped and cheapened it in the process.

So when you hear him cheerleading for a supposed coronavirus cure, ask yourself what you do when Trump raises his own pom-poms: Is he engaged in meaningful public education, or does he just realize that magic and miracles draw more eyeballs than dutiful analyses of pros, cons and incomplete data?

If you listen skeptically, you’ll have your answer.

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