What lighten my dumpster? First, I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. That little introduction was in honor of my hometown, Portland, which just had a police officer murder a man who is having a mental health crisis. And we'll probably be lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight, although you won't hear it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all beside the point right now, because the point right now is that I'm introducing our guest today, the inimitable.
Matt leeb Baybe. What's going on, Matt? How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. A big fan of the pod. Love me some bastards? And you are?
You do a Sopranos podcast and the name is it really pod yourself a gun?
That's right podcast? All right? Gun? Yeah, that's my world's only Sopranos podcast. Don't go looking for any other ones, because they do not exist.
Little known TV show, the Sopranos. You might have heard of it, very obscure.
A niche, a niche TV show that only people who really like art understand. And that's that's why we talk about it. We talk about the art.
It's fun thinking about that because I believe the song that introduced that show was something about waking up in the morning and getting yourself a gun, which is what I did this morning.
You bought a gun.
I did, I did. I did buy a gun this morning. Not for sopranos like uses, although I am Italian, so you can't really know for sure. You can't really know for sure.
Yeah, you woke up with a blue moon in your eye and you decided, I'm gonna go get.
Myself a gun and then I'm gonna commit crimes. And the Pine Barons of New Jersey. Yeah, they do that a lot in the show, right, a lot of Pine Barren crimes.
They do it at least once.
And it's great, yeah that they're chasing that guy through the yeah, yeah, the Russian Yeah.
And they leave their DNA everywhere, well they.
Pee everywhere, and you know they look.
We Italians are not a subtle people.
No.
They spend that whole episode literally like dying of like cold and they're lost in the woods, but they spend all the time talking about how they're starving because they haven't eaten in twelve hours. It's the most Italian in the world.
But I want to hear about this gun. Oh, it's just a gun. But today we have something much more exciting than a gun. We have a bastard and our bastard. Are you ready for this?
Oh? I'm so excited.
Are you settling in? Yes, doctor z I never introduced them like that. We're talking about doctor fucking Oz today. Yes, that's right.
Who the thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor?
Who the fuck a TV doctor could be a bad man?
No, they take an oath TV doctors, they say, do no harm and get good ratings. That's the hippocratic oath they do.
They also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy because he sucked and I didn't enjoy it.
Honestly, if you are going up against LeVar Burton for any job, your first action should be like, you know what, I'm bowing out ye immediately, I'm not going to compete with LeVar Burton off fighting Jeordi fighting, Kunta Kinte, fighting whatever. The reading Rainbow guy's name was. No, I think LeVar.
Yeah, yeah, No. I did not watch him on Jeopardy, but I have seen the show and had no idea he was a bastard.
Yes, he's a piece of shit. He's he's a different piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in the very near future about doctor Phil, who's a much worse person. Doctor Oz is bad for some reasons that you'll suspect, you know, the pseudo science stuff, but also for some I think more complicated reasons, which will we'll have us a nice talk about at the end of
this episode. So I've always said that one of the great tragedies of American public life is that our very best doctors are usually like kind of schlubby dudes and ladies who maybe aren't the best at at social graces and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked to do TV appearances.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. They're not hot. I've always said is the bottom of they're not hot. I look at them and I'm like, ill, Like.
We need to put a couple of billion dollars into a national program for more fuckable doctors.
Come on, yes, yes, doctors who fuck that's the next level of healthcare in America. It won't be universal healthcare, but at least doctors will look fuckable.
Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckibility, because it's inherently hot to be a doctor. It's more the fact that they're not necessarily if. Even the ones who are have a good bedside manner are good at explaining things, just don't have the time to spend a lot of it on television because they're busy saving lives. This has led to a thriving industry, well documented in this show of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling
people poison with honeyed words and practice smiles. Today, though, we're talking about a different kind of medical grifter, kind of a grifter who helps to launder those more shady grifters, the guy people who aren't doctors, people who have no medical training, who are just trying to sell you nonsense cures. The guy we're talking about today exists to give them credibility and launder them into the public consciousness. And his name is Mehmet Oz. Mehmet Oz is maybe the most
influential public physician in the country, possibly the world. He is, in every professional sense of the word, an excellent doctor, exceptional even within the bounds of what it is he is trained to do. He may be one of the best in the world at what he does, and he uses his you know, the thing that makes him a bastard is that he uses these exceptional qualifications along with his charisma his handsome face, to sell millions of people on nonsense cures every single year. And that's that's a
bad thing to do. He's kind of made worse. We'll talk about this a lot by the fact that he is he's a he's a heart surgeon, and he's an exceptional heart surgeon.
That's so sad. It's always sad when like an amazing doctor is a piece of shit. This is like how I felt when Ben Carson turned out to be a Trump guy. He was like, but you're so good.
The surgeons which you talk to doctors, they'll be like, yeah, of course, it's always surgeons, yeah, yeah.
And they're the ones who think they're gods, right, yes, they essentially have a god complex, and they'll be really good at one thing, and then they'll also think that they're good at like yes, politics and shit like that.
I think good surgeons are so prone to being also like nonsense, like so many of our nonsense public doctors or surgeons, for the same reason that so many of our terrorists are engineers. There are people who get really good at a specific thing, and it lets them convince themselves that they know what they're talking about in a wider variety of things than they really do.
That's great. It just makes me glad that I never, you know, got really proficient in anyone's skill.
Never gain skills. I never ever learn how to do things.
You'll become too smart for yourself and think that you are God. If no one.
Learned to do anything, we would still be living in the mud and eating grubs. And you know what, we wouldn't have salesman, or that we would have very little at all. Mimet Senga's Oz was born on June eleventh, nineteen sixty to parents Sunna and Mustafa Oz, who must have fucked at some point in October of nineteen fifty nine. In order to conceive him. We have to assume his parents fucked in in October.
I don't know that.
Yeah, he could be immaculate conception.
Wow, yeah, you know possible, I would say right now. The most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October.
Ah, all right.
His father, Mustafa had been born in Boskir, a village in southern Turkey. He had grown up poor in the countryside during the Great Depression, and obviously, you know, Great Depression, bad time everywhere, real bad time. If you're like in rural Turkey, you know, you're dealing with a different kind of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here.
So he had to work himself to the bone in order to make something of himself, in order to get into medical school and distinguish himself enough that he was able to earn scholarships which allowed him to immigrate to the United States as a medical resident in nineteen fifty five. So this is a This is a hard working man and a man who has to struggle, I'm going to guess in ways that are kind of difficult to imagine for most of it's even as difficult as our present times are.
He is like a true lift yourself up by your bootstrap, yes kind of guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Came from the middle of nowhere, rural Turkey and worked himself into becoming a good enough doctor that he got you know, he was able to get over the racism of the fucking nineteen fifties immigration system. That's that's an achievement.
Good for him started from the bottom and now he's on TV selling cures.
That's his dad, that's that's not men. Yeah, yeah, that's Mustafa. So we're talking about his dad and his mom right now. His mom, Suna, came from a much wealthier background. I don't know if this is what helped his dad get into the country or not. It may have been. Her father was a successful pharmacist and both sides of her family came from Istanbul. She grew up with a lot of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustapha was
an observant traditional Muslim. Soon his family was more moderate and secular. Mehmet and his two sisters grew up split between both approaches to religion. The Oz kids spent their childhood speaking Turkish and English fluently at home, so they grew up in a bilingual house. Mehmet was from a young from a young age, ambitious, starving for success and his father's approval. He was wont to note that he was born in the year of the Rat according to
the Chinese zodiac. In one interview, he noted of this quote, you run the maze if you put cheese in that maze. I swear to God, I'll get to it, and I'll get to it really fast. But should I be running after that cheese? Am I in the right maze? All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I'm running after that cheese.
What the fuck? So that's way too much stock into the year of what animal?
The rat?
At least he wasn't born into the Year of the Pig. And he's like, well, what you gotta do is you gotta take your snout and put it into the trough of life.
And just you shut your face into food as hard as you can.
You roll around in the shit, and then you hope that someday you find another piggy to fuck, and then you have little piglets. It's like, look, I was.
Born in the Year of the Pig, and that's why it disposed of bodies for the mob.
It's just what you do. Well, that's it's a nice take on Year of the Rat.
For him, it is it is telling because what he's saying there is like, I don't think about why I'm doing what I'm doing. I just I just strive to achieve things, and I don't think about whether or not they're good or bad. I just I have to achieve.
Yeah, he just wants that cheese.
Yeah, he wants that cheese. It's ambition without an analysis, I think, is what you'd call it. And he's he's pretty open about that.
Now.
Mustapha his dad, repeatedly told the growing doctor Oz who's not yet a doctor obviously, that when he grown up, when Mustapa had grown up, he hadn't been able to relax for even a second on his road to escaping poverty and establishing himself as a cardiothoracic surgeon. So he's like telling his kid as he grows up, like, you know, like if you want to succeed, you can't relax for even a second. You can't can't take a moment off. You always got to be hustling. And that's how Memet
grows up. He's an excellent student, but no amount of success is ever enough for his dad. He later recalled, I'd say I got a ninety three on a test, He'd say, did anyone get better? That was always the question, he asked, cool death, It sounds like.
A fun guy would hang, Yeah, I mean this the school I grew up in because of just where we were in North Texas, Like about half of the kids in my school were either from India or from China or Japan, And so you had a lot of kids who would talk that way about their parents, right, and some of them had, especially around our senior year, there were a couple of kids who had to get like taken in by an ambulance because they would just like one in one case easing as a result of stress.
Like Jesus good to put this kind of pressure on a kid.
Yeah, like straight having like nervous breakdowns just from like trying to get good grades. Right, once again, don't get good at anything, it's not worth it.
Develop skills.
Don't develop skills, You'll get seizures. You're at risk of seizures. You're at risk of your of your dad not loving you. You know, you just gotta love.
You no matter what.
Yeah, exactly, Stop caring about your dad, you know, just coast coast.
Some dirt, eat some grubs. You'll be fine.
Yeah, start a Sopranos podcast. That's all you got to.
Do, dude, really bringing it back there.
So Memet decided to become a doctor when he was just seven years old. He recalls standing in line at an ice cream parlor. Quote, I remember it like yesterday. There was a kid in front of me who was ten. My dad, just to pass the time, said what do you want to be when you grow up? The kid said, I don't know, I'm ten. My father waited until he was out of earshot and said, I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question, I never want you to tell me you don't know.
It's okay if you change your mind, but I never want you to not have a vision of what you want to be.
Momet go kill that kid.
Kill that kid, fucking cut it.
Murder that loser kid, and tell me what you want to do with your life. God damn, that is way too much pressure. Way waits so.
Much pressure to put on a kid.
And it seems like the kids like that always end up becoming the like going into the career that their father wanted them to do, and then eventually their dad dies and then they're like, oh fuck, I didn't get to do what I wanted to do with my life and now I'm miserable.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a real bummer. Yeah, it's not just don't put pressure on people. There's plenty of grubs.
Yeah.
By the time Memmett was ready to start school, his father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son to Tower Hill School, a K through twelfth grade private college preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware.
Jesus, that sounds horrible.
I know, it sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Fancy boy, yeah, sounds uniforms ties.
Yeah, probably like your choice during the summer.
Yeah.
The fancy boy prep school worked well enough that Mehmet was accepted to Harvard, where he played football and water polo. His grades were, as always exceptional. One of his roommates later recalled he was very competitive. There was never any question that he wasn't going to be a doctor. He wanted to be a fantastic surgeon. So people around him, like, everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes he's got the drive he's going to achieve, you know, so good for him.
I mean, it's just like, I just look back now at my own childhood and I'm like, God, damn it. If I can think of one friend where I knew what they wanted to do for a career, I don't think we ever talked about like, what's your career gonna be. No one was like I'm a doctor, you know. It was it was mostly just like, you know, how's your hip hop album working out? And they're like good and they're like cool, and that was the whole thing.
That's interesting. I think it was different for me because there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something.
You know.
I went to a public school. Yeah, I didn't go to a private school, but I went to a public school in my early schooling years. Was in a dirt, poor farming town called Isabella, Oklahoma. And the school was as good as it could be in a place like that. Like they paddled us and stuff like. It was not damn not a high end educational.
But once I'll do in a public school. Yeah yeah, oh damn.
They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah, you got to sign the paddle afterwards too.
It's nice.
But when I was in i don't know, third grade or so, I moved to Plano, which is a fairly wealthy suburb of Dallas, and the schools, the public schools are very good and there is a lot of drive to achieve, like I said, a lot of like kids who were really motivated by their parents achieve And so you either were kind of planning to be a doctor or you know, something on that level, or you were
planning to join the military. Because it was Texas and I was in ROTC, so me and all my friends, I think we all kind of assumed we're all going to join the army, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I went to yeah, public school, you know, in my entire life, and I think most of my friends either wanted to they were either going to go into the army or they were or they wanted to be famous musicians and or athletes.
So see, my brother is a doctor and knew he was going to be a doctor from that. He's my older brother too, from the time that he was like seven, so like, and I'm like, la la la, no idea that I'm.
Just saying, Like a level of ambition at a very very young age has always been a turn off for me when it comes to like friends, because it's just they always have that like sense where they're trying to get there. You're you're some sort of stepping stone into there what ever their career path is. And I don't like it.
So Oz took only one break during his relentless progress through medical school, and that break was to do a compulsory I think it was a one year term of service in the Turkish Army in order to maintain his dual citizenship. Other than that straight onto like becoming a doctor, that's the only kind of break. So I guess that's his gap year is being in the Turkish arty.
I'm just gonna take a break, have a gap year and join the military of a foreign country.
Yeah, helps suppress you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff. Whatever.
Yeah, they got to stop trying to have their own thing. Yeah.
He got a four year degree in biology and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he doubled up working on both an MD and an MBA. He succeeded in earning both, So that's interesting to me. He gets both. He gets at the same time as he's getting his MD, he also gets a business degree.
Yeah, this is very there's a lot of foreshadowing going on a shadow.
He earned both obviously with flying colors. He's an incredibly intelligent man, right, This isn't just a guy like We'll talk about doctor Phil later. Doctor Phil I don't think is very smart. He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people, He's not particularly a genius. Meme At Oz is a genius like I think almost certainly is an actual genius. In nineteen eighty five, at age twenty five, he married Lisa Lemole, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon
who worked with his father. They met it like a party or something. This relationship gradually opened him up to alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism because Lisa's mom was hardcore into homeopathy, meditation, and other New Age stuff. We'll talk about that more in a little bit. For the next decade, in change, doctor Oz's career zoomed forward. He became triple board certified, which I don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive. It's at least three boards. It's at
least three boards. That's three more than I've been certain.
Yeah, I got zero boards under my not a one fun not.
A single board between the three of us.
So we really should find a board just to get us some certifications, guys.
Just to get certified. If you're a board, if you're a medical board is a board out there. Well, actually, you know what, the State of New Jersey has certified me as a reverend doctor, so I'm one board certificate.
I assume that we're out there. Is there a board in the Universal Life Church? Because I am a minister slash Jedi night, I'm gonna say that counts all right, I'm board certified. Can you get me painkillers? You know? I know a guy.
Sounds legal enough. So he starts working as a heart surgeon. And he's very good at being a heart surgeon. And he's not just good at the heart surgery apart, he's good at the science part. Over time, he authors hundreds of peer reviewed articles and he's awarded eleven patents. One of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs. Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted without open heart surgery. Like, he's not just really good
at the mechanics of surgery, he's an ex scientist. Yeah, eleven patents is pretty good.
Seriously, one might say he's the Wizard of Oz there.
I think I read like six articles with variations of that title on the.
Guard right, Well, I gotta go.
Then it's just a thing. Journalists can't fucking help themselves.
Anybody you see Oz and you're like, I got a calm a wizard.
Got a columb A wizard. Doctor Oz was hired by Columbia Medical School as a teacher, and as you know, he's also working. They've been a hospital. He's working there, but he's also teaching, and he very quickly rises to the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair of the cardio of the heart surgery department. Basically at this point he's in his thirties.
Oh man.
Yeah, Like everything I've read right now on its own would be a career trajectory. Any doctor in medicine would envy. Like you could die happy with that being your fucking resume. Like that's a hell of an achievement.
Yeah. Yeah.
In nineteen ninety five, a New York Times profile referred to doctor Oz as quote, probably the most accomplished thirty five year old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country. He might be the best at what he does in the entire United States at this point. I mean, I don't know how to measure that, but he's very good.
I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name, so fuck yeah, I mean he's the guy.
Yeah. Now, the article that I found that quote in, however, gives some hints about what was to come, because that article was about doctor Oz's increasing experimentation with alternative medicine. It opens with the story of one of his patients, a forty nine year old diabetic smoker who suffered a critical heart attack. She went under Memet's knife for a dangerous surgery quote at the invitation of Oz and his patient.
There were two other people on hand in surgical gowns and masks, a second year medical student named Sally Smith stationed at the patient's feet, and a fifty two year old healer named Julie Mox who was standing at the patient's head. As volunteers in Oz's cardiac Complimentary Care Center, they worked for free through the operation, seldom moving except to reposition their hands as Oz requested sutures and clamps
and units of lydacane. Motts called softly to Smith to move her hands from the small toe of the patient's right foot to a point on the soul known as the bubbling spring. What they were doing, no one else in the operating room knew how to do, or had ever seen done during a coronary bypass, or had ever thought worth doing, even as an experiment in this ultimate
theater of scientific medicine. The women were using their hands, as kings once did to treat subjects with scropula, and as Jesus is said to have done, and as shamans and mothers and Chinese quigong practitioners still do. They were using their hands to run a kind of energy which science cannot prove exists into the patient's kidney meridian, which also may or may not exist. Of the kidney meridian, Yeah, you gotta get that meridian. That's the best part of the Kidney's the meridian.
That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the maridian.
Man with fucking on a ritz cracker slice, then I love me a little little bit. They just want to get You want to get like some duck fat or some butter, and you want to get it sizzling in the pan, and you just slap that meridian on for like a half a second and it's good to go. That's all you fucking which is a little bit of a little bit of char you know.
I mean, this all feels like he's going to start turning his patients into fois gras, and I'm very excited for what's to come, this heel turn that he's gonna take.
So, yeah, that's that's that's silly. I think that's silly. But at the other hand, like it's in a hospital. These people are clearly following sanitation guidelines. They're not getting paid, the patient's not getting charged extra, So I don't have a problem with that.
And now's the smartest doctor in the world. It's like one of those things where you're like, I feel like this is wrong, but I don't know enough to dispute it. So with my kidney meridian.
I'm not willing to morally condemn him for that, even though I think it's silly, just because like, yeah, yeah, what's the fucking harmon seeing you know, And in that case, if you're actually doing it in the medical context, you're guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures. Fucking whatever.
Yeah, it seems like from what I can tell, that sounded non invasive. It's not only yeah, they were just doing energy work or whenever they were throwing you know, crystals and doing fucking pendulums over him.
It falls through the category of it couldn't possibly hurt, so why not give it a shot, right, which is we'll talk about this more later, but that's kind of what they were going for. You know what else can't hurt? I don't The products and services that support this podcast guaranteed to not harm you. In fact, every one of the products of ours that you buy extends your life by exactly forty five minutes, so you know, spend all
your money and gain immortality. We're back. Uh, we're talking about doctor Oz, who in the mid nineties has started some weird alternative medicine stuff. Now he's not the person who starts the alternative medicine program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which is also like a teaching hospital whatever. It's one of those hospitals that they have a medical school with. You know how. You know the thing if television has taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly m hm.
Doctors fucking teach, that's what they doctors, fucking they teach, that's all they do. You know, when you're not teaching, you're fucking. And Columbia Presbyterian was among the most reputable medical establishments on Planetar It still is as far as I'm aware. So this alternate medicine program there is kind of an odd thing. It was not started at the
behest of anyone at the top of the school. The whole thing came about because in nineteen ninety three, a retired utility executive named Richard Rosenthal gave them three quarters of a million dollars as a private grant in order to establish a center to study alternative medicine. Just gifted money and just said, do this start a magic doctoring school. Yeah, okay.
Now, Richard had been motivated by having several close friends of his get terribly sick in such a way that doctors told them there was nothing that could be.
Done to help them.
And his response was to basically throw a bunch of money into a hole to see if alternative medicine could come up with solutions. And it's one of those things I could make fun of, Like this is almost exactly a week after my mom just died of a type of cancer that when you get diagnosed with it, pancreatic, there's basically nothing they can do, you know. It's even like like she went through chemo and it did nothing. You know, I get it. You go through something like that. Okay,
well let's try other shit, you know. Yeah, So I can't I can't even blame Richard for like it seems like he was motivated out of grief to do this.
You know, you can't blame people for trying to try any other alternative to I mean, you know, something in which there is no cure in modern medicine.
I might blame the snake oil salesman. I'm never going to blame someone who's like, well, doctors said they can't cure me, So I'm going to eat this root. You know, fuck it, why not go for it? Who gives a
shit like it can't hurt if you're definitely gonna die? Yeah, And it is, to be honest, like it is kind of within even you could argue within kind of medical best practices because one of the things, if like I took EMT training years ago, one of the things they tell you is that you're not supposed to use an aed you know, like paddles to restart a heart. You're supposed to use them on an infant. But if an infant is in you know, the state where like you use them on them because.
They're dead them. Yeah, they're dead.
You can't make dead worse, So like, why not? So I guess like, yeah, you can't. I don't know, can't make it worse? Why not see if if something happens. I'm not against the basic idea of testing some of this shit is what.
The worst thing you're going to get out of that is a really cool TikTok video of electrocuting a dead body.
Absolutely, and then you get a fuckload of followers, and then you start selling brain pills.
It's a perfect plan.
Uh So. Yeah, So I can't blame the college for this. I can't blame the guy for funding it. It's a reasonable thing. Why not?
You know what?
That's kind of my attitude is why the fuck not? And that's more or less what the dean of Faculty of Medicine at the college said, like, all right, well, we're not paying for it, why not give it a shot? That said a lot of medical professionals were really angry
about the idea. Doctor Victor Herbert, a Columbia Medical School graduate and a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai and a board member of the National Council Against Health Fraud publicly lambasted the lecturers brought in by the program as con artists and sociopathic liars and knowing the kind of people who get into the selling this shit business, I don't know if he's wrong about that. A lot of these people are fucking sociopaths, you know, he says, quote,
I am nasty. I call practitioners of fraud, practitioners of fraud. It's my feeling that the Rosenthal has been promoting fraudulent alternatives is genuine, and I get his critiques, you know, that is one of the like I can say, on one hand, what's the harm, but also maybe the harm is that people hear this stuff is being done in a hospital, so it must help when it doesn't, And maybe some of those people do that not the way doctor Oz is doing it, where we're going to do
the normal medical procedure, we'll have this done. Maybe some people decide I just want to have the energy work done, and then they dropped out of a heart attack because it doesn't replace a valve.
You know. I'd like to think that even at a hospital or research facility with Western medicine, that they still peer review and try out different you know, like alternative medicines, right, you know, like.
Some of them, some of them work, some of them work.
Like there was a time when you know, acupuncture was seen as kind of like a croc and now it's like kind of just a standard part of Western medicine. It's just you know, so.
Yeah, and there's a lot to be said about even acupuncture. You know, I went through a lot of it as a kid and it did nothing for me. But my grandpa swore by it for his Parkinson's and even if it was I don't know, you could say it's like fucking whatever placebo, but he experienced relief. So I don't care, like, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I'm not going to get into like it because I don't know. I don't know all of that.
I know.
It's one of those things where there's a number of divergent opinions on actuature. But a number of things that were initially considered alternative medicines have been found to have medical benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has happened in a history you know, different kind of traditional or whatever treatments. So this is very controversial, though, is the point I'm making, and a number of people even picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened. None of
this dissuaded doctor Oz from participating in it. His explanation as to why he embraced alternative medicine was to be quite honest, kind of brilliant. He said that his by this point vast experience as a real doctor had really
informed him of the limits of medical science. Specifically, he said that while he could sew bypass grafts and even implant a new heart into someone's chest, he couldn't change the habits that had made them sick in the first place, nor could he cure the emotional issues that they were dealing with. Depression, he pointed out, was a major risk factor in heart patient recovery post surgery, and things like meditation. Right, that's kind of considered wu new age that can help
with depression and that can help with healing. And he's right about that. That's bad point to make, So he seemed to insinuate when he was talking to The New York Times, why wouldn't a caring physician want to try everything possible to improve his patient's odds. He could point out that meditation had shown some benefit for heart disease patients. Who was to say that other stuff wouldn't work. Doctor Oz told The New York Times that he felt ethically
obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine. The article makes it clear that doctor Oz had not let up one bit in the workaholic tendencies that he inherited from his father as well. And I'm going to quote from the Times again here, Memet Oz is one of those rare beings who seem incapable of sloth. He's doing a heart transplant right now, his secretary says on the phone. And he's got a double lung transplant waiting, and those are in addition to his two regularly scheduled open hearts.
And then at three he's supposed to fly to Boston to deliver a lecture. So exceptional is Oz's energy that some of his colleagues use him as a benchmark correlating their own vitality is a fraction of a full memic unit. He runs down lobs, sizes, tennis partner, mentor and department chairman doctor Eric A. Rose, who at forty four, is one of the top transplant surgeons in the world.
So I can't tell you how nervous I would be going into a lung transplant procedure and then hearing like this doctor's got to do a heart after you and then got to fly to Boston. I'd be like, do you think you could maybe take your time with this bro? Like, could I get that? I do?
It is a matter we'll talk about the ZN two. We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a major health problem. How few people there are that can do this. Yeah, but it is exhausting everything you read about this guy's daily Like, you're just one of those people who I think, I kind of get the feeling. I don't want to psychoanalyze someone, but you get the feeling. He can't be alone, and we still like he has to always be moving towards something.
Yeah, he's got his dad in the back of his head exactly telling him to murder that kid in the ice Cream show.
Yeah, to kill that fucker kill.
He doesn't know what he wants to be, just like, Yeah, I mean I imagine that would create a bit of a problem later in life with stillness.
Yeah, I feel for him a little bit of that.
Sure. Now.
The article also goes into more detail about how doctor Oz's wives fam. Doctor Oz's wife's family piqued his interest in alternative medicine. His father in law was one of the surgeons on the first heart transplant team in Texas. He'd also been nicknamed the rock Doc by Rolling Stone for playing music in the oar to relax patients. His mother in law had developed a special low fat diet for her husband's cardiac patients, and this was really before it was accepted that low fat diets would be good
for heart patients. She once refused surgery for her own inflamed gallbladder and handled it instead by altering her diet. She taught her son in law, doctor Oz, about using arnika for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches. So he gets brought in in part to alternative medicine by these people who have a real medical background and are doing things that aren't widely accepted but also may help.
You know, music, I think there's there's some data now and how music can help with the curtain aspicts of the healing process. Right fat fat mother in law seem to be on the cutting edge of that.
When you send the rock Doc, I got concerned. I thought he was going to like replace people's hearts with crystals and shit.
Yeah, oh no, oh no, they all die, but my god, their hearts are pretty So this is how memeic gets introduced to the wide world of quack cures, and it makes sense he enters it through largely reasonable ways, alternative treatments that have some positive impact on people. That's in it.
There's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general, Like doctor Oz points out that in nineteen ninety five, American hospitals had only recently allowed family to stay in the hospital with a patient, while in Turkey it was common for families to do this, and of course having loved ones nearby can help a patient's morale, which can influence how well they heal. No one I think today would even think to disagree with that. It didn't used to
be common. It changed. So he's in medicine during a time when a lot of stuff that like just wasn't that is kind of now common sense medicine wasn't, And I think that kind of opens his eye to like, well, maybe all this other shit works.
Yeah, maybe everything in my head is correct. Yeah, only getting to him turning into a complete narcissist.
Yeah, and the article kind of veers right from yeah. Having loved ones in the room can influence how well you heal to doctor Oz's love of energy work, particularly his work with a lady named Mottz who believed she could sense the energy of heart transplant patients. The Times article certainly does not portray this woman in a particularly positive light. She now has her surgical sea legs under her, but the first time Motts observed open heart surgery she
had a shaky debut. She had been standing at the patient's head outside the sterile field, periodically telling Oz what changes she was able to sense ind the patient's energy. The patient was obviously not awake, but probably had some awareness, most likely smell and perhaps hearing. Open heart patients are often fitted with headphones and provided with tapes to listen to, including if they want, Oz's own specially recorded soupie trance
music for the bypass team. It was quite a novelty to hear Mott's report that she was registering the patient's moods in her body, various states of fear, anger, or satisfaction perceived as roughness in her chest or turbulence in her stomach. At one point, seeing that Motts was not looking so good herself, Oz asked a burly assistant to take her outside for some air. When he returned, he said, I'd sense a change in my stomach. It's a tenseness. No,
it's a growling. No, wait a minute, I'm just hungry.
Oh my god. I swear she's like she seemed like she is just describe having her own feelings and then just ascribing them to an open heart.
Yeah, I think, But yeah, it's it's one of those things. I'm not sure exactly what type of energy work this person is doing, because there's a few different kind of categories of it.
Checking the vibes, dude, she's checking the vibes, just making sure, you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil.
I should not, if I'm going to be totally fair, that riki, which has its origins in Japan, has been shown in some early scientific studies to help diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and to significantly alter people's experience of physical and emotional pain. And I have some friends who swear by it for kind of physical and emotional pain in particular.
I don't know what riki is I've heard of it? Is it like when mister Miagi rubs his hands together and then he.
Kind it's like energy work. I guess, I don't know. It's not a kind of thing that I particularly believe in, and I kind of think in a lot of cases it's that you have a good relationship with the practitioner and you trust them, and it can be, you know, an emotionally soothing thing, which I don't know. There were early studies, scientific studies that showed that it could diminish
the symptoms of chemotherapy and reduce people's experience of pain. Now, further studies were commissioned after these early studies, which starting in the early two thousands, were more negative. A number of hospitals did, however, add wreki practitioners to their stable of available providers, in part as a result of the work that doctor Oz in the Center at Columbia was doing.
You can find these people in hospitals now. And it's worth noting that a number of the positive studies about riki and other similar things were conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Their work is problematic, to say the least, and I'm going to quote now from an analysis of several studies conducted by this organization by professor doctor edzard Ernst.
Quote.
Three studies suggested that energy medicine had an effect, but their authors either applied statistics inappropriately, confounded the effects of energy healing by adding unrelated interventions to the experimental condition, or failed to design or blind equivalent placebo controls. Their results are therefore untrustworthy. The two studies that were well designed failed to demonstrate effects from energy and healing. The odds of generating a useful result of a clinical trial
of energy medicine are small. Moreover, what impact would negative studies have? Scientists will simply say we could have told you so, and proponents are unlikely to change their mind. Proponents may then claim that the negative study must have been flawed, or that energy medicine cannot be investigated by the tools of science, or they might rely on the NCCAM. That organization I talked about funded studies that generated biased
but apparently positive results. The NCCAM's approach encourages a self perpetuating cycle of misinterpreting research and conducting flawed research, which inevitably generates some studies that erroneously claim positive effects and give the false impression that the efficacy of energy medicine is still scientifically un resolved.
Man, we are just veering into anti vaxx territory and like anti mass territory. People who just they google stuff and then they go this article right here says that mass actually can.
They can't, they can't analyze. And it's from a government science organization. You know, these guys like and here's a study that's and it's like, well, okay, but you actually look at scientists, you don't have a vested and often financial interest in this, and they point out all these very obvious flaws in the study. It's worth noting that the NCCAM was founded in nineteen ninety eight, three years after the New York Times article about doctor Oz and
the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia was published. Now, doctor Oss at this point was not yet on Oprah's show, but he had been featured on TV several times for his pioneering work with mechanical hearts, as well as his embrace of alternative medicine. You can draw a direct line. I don't know if we would have an NCCAM without
doctor Oz. I don't know, you can't say that for certain, but he is someone who, before his embrace of alternative medicine, starts to be well known as an exceptional doctor and scientists. He embraces this stuff. Colombia starts studying this stuff, and even though everything they find is pretty inconclusive, the fact that it's in an actual hospital lends it legitimacy. This
organization is started in order to test this stuff. The organization is filled with people who already believe in it, carrying out tests that are flawed, and it helps prepare this culture believing too much in this stuff.
Oh my god, it's just like it's a real life Facebook group, you know. It's just like everyone already believes in all the stuff and they just keept like just co signing each other's bullshit.
And it's one of those things like I again, I know people who swear by Riki, who gain you know, emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with you know, a number of things, including like physical including emotional pain, and like if you find something that helps you alleviate your emotional pain in power to you know, never gonna hear me say damn against it.
You know, go with God. That's that. That's all great, But uh, I mean you want to relieve pain, Yeah, try some morphine though, dog, because that ship oh mark morphine.
There's no downsides to morphine.
No, I can't think of one downside to morphine.
It's a single one.
Yeah. It just feels good the whole time, and you just need to take more.
My issue is not so much with any particular treatment, not that not even an issue that people would like. It's number one. A lot of people will issue actual medical treatment in favor of some of this stuff, and it's not going to I'm trying to be as fair as I can. Really is not going to solve your blocked cardiac pathways. You know, it's not going to fix it.
Yeah, I mean, energy is great, but plavix works wonders.
You know, this is a lot better. And it's it's it's more to the point, even more than that, is it. It gets us on this this road of increasingly accepting and legitimizing things that there's no, there's not a scientific basis for, and that leads us to shit like let's drink bleach to cure the coronavirus. Like, you know, it's where the roads I have more of a problem with than doctor Oz experimenting with an energy worker during a surgery, Like, it's where that leads to. And he plays a major
role in legitimizing that. He's he helps put it, he helps put our national foot on the gas pedal into the post science age.
So yeah, it's a slippery slope to that, you know, downing that brain octane oil.
In exactly exactly. So yeah, at this point, though we're talking still in the mid nineties, everything doctor Oz is saying is reasonable from a certain point of view. He's not claiming that Ricky's going to cure cancer. He's not even claiming it's going to cure your heart disease. He's saying it could help with recovery, and a lot of recovery is mental, and he's not you know, it's possible, He's right.
Yeah, he is not yet a bastard.
It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to have a mental impact which can positively affect recovery. Okay, Yeah, so yeah, he's not a bastard. At this point, Nearly all of his alternative medical claims were things that you could argue were at least to some extent reasonable based
on the way he framed them. And he was, most importantly, regardless of whatever kind of woo woo stuff, he got into an exceptionally gifted medical Prefecture professional who was performing something like two hundred and fifty heart surgeries a year. You know, that's two hundred and fifty lives a year extended. That's great. He's not a bastard yet.
Yeah, he's doing great work so far. Yes, despite the weird heart stuff. Fine, a little bit of energy, a little bit of heart surgery. It works out.
And the thing though, that is I think is happening during this period, And I don't know how conscious a choice this is by doctor Oz. I think it is because of the fact that he gets an MBA as well, and the fact that he's very good at getting pressed, very good at getting on TV, at getting in the news. I think he he is at this point crafting his career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous TV doctor. I think he is building a background that
will allow him to establish his celebrity career later. It is not hard to see how a handsome doctor with TV experience a new York Times profile talking about alternative medicine and a seriously impressive resume was going to wind up eventually on Oprah Winfrey's radar. He almost built himself perfectly for that to happen, and he tried in the early two thousands, he tried with his wife to start a TV show. They like, filmed a pilot episode. It
didn't really take off, but he succeeds. And I think he's pushing and his wife is pushing him to get in. She's very much his business partner to develop himself into a media personality, and he eventually succeeds in two thousand and four in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show, Now Memmet immediately endeared himself to Winfrey's audience with his willingness to discuss frank health details in a way that was
demystifying and humorous. He most famously explained that healthy poops tended to be shaped like an S and should hit the water like an Olympic diver with very little splash. Oprah herself later recalled when he made it okay to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything. He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating.
Man. That is uh. I mean, I'm I'm low key impressed that he impressed Oprah with the doodoo shapes.
It's mom's stuff.
You know.
Moms love poop.
They love talking about doo's.
And that's what like Oz does exactly the right things to endear himself to like millions of middle class moms, which is the best market in the It's.
An incredible market.
You can make all of the money if you can get a few million middle class moms to love you.
Yeah. I worked at this digital uh what do you call it, like a digital production company, and the most famous person that we dealt with was a famous Facebook mom who had millions of followers. And I would watch her stuff and I was like, this is you know, maybe the most awful shit I've ever seen is just a you know, lady in a car yelling at people about kids and uh. But the she was a famous mom. I mean, if you can become a famous mom, you will be one of the most famous people in the country.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's the power of particularly middle class moms can't be exaggerated. Like the cops in the Feds were able to fuck over as many people as they wanted until they started gaessing moms. The whole country's pissed.
Yeah, they're like like, hey, listen, you can do that to people of color, but those are moms.
Those are white moms.
Those are white moms. That could be my mother.
Yeah, you know what else?
You know, what else did your mom? That's where I thought you were going with you?
Now what else is your mother? The products and services that support this podcast. We're back.
So we've all disagreed that Matt is very fine. That was the discussion over the break.
You made this one into a two parter, Matt, So you audience can thank you for two episodes about doctor Oz this week.
All right, or they can blame you.
And if they blame or blame him, Matt's home address is we love to dox our guests.
Baby.
So Oprah had Doctor Oz on her show fifty five times over the course of five years. She gave him the nickname America's Doctor, which stuck, and although I'm not saying this in a positive sense, is unfortunately accurate. He's definitely America's Doctor.
Just appealing to the lowest commons denominator the stupidest human being.
Marry doctor and if you look at the health of the average American, you can tell the quality.
Of job he's done.
More breadboat bread. Well, actually that's the one thing he is. He's actually pretty good about like weight low. Well, I don't know, that's still debatable.
Stop defend. I'm not going to defend.
I just love to be fair.
You know, I know you too, You're very fair.
Look say what you will about Hitler, you will.
He was a vegetarian, and that's good for the environment.
The man cared about animal rights. By two thousand and nine, it was clear that doctor Oz had more than enough star power to justify a shot at his own show. Oprah's production company had little trouble finding a buyer for what was sure to be a blockbuster news series. Her show celebrated the launch of Doctor Oz's show with an entire episode dedicated to Doctor Oz, which acted as something of a coming out party for his brand. From a press release on oprah dot com, this is talking about
the special Doctor Oz episode. Moving personal stories and extraordinary surprises are featured throughout the hour as Doctor Oz meets viewers who share how his advice saved their lives, from those who noticed life threatening diseases their doctors missed to those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from doctor Oz. Real people step forward to offer their thanks
to America's doctor. Plus, it's the reunion that Doctor Oz never imagined would happen, as Oprah Show producers tracked down a young boy he cared for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the two reunite for the first time. He's like the fucking perfect, perfect guy for this.
I mean, I love that. It's literally sounds like an hour long special of people just thanking him, which might be the most narcissistic thing I think I've ever heard. Yeah, I mean, like it's one thing for Oprah to do that, because I think America does legitimately owe her thanks for just years of content, you know.
But years of mostly dangerous health based content.
Oh yeah, no, I mean it's awful content. But the fact is it's it's quantity over quality in America. And you know, but an hour of just thanking doctor Oz and having people come up to him like you save me, fucking.
What it's worth noting in terms of his bastardrey that and kind of the acceleration from hey, maybe energy healing works to becoming a monster. The early two thousands of the period in which Oprah becomes aware of a Brazilian healer named John of God who believes he can do psychic surgery and like God, yeah.
Yeah, oh of the of the Brazilian of God's yohl.
And on the episode in which she introduces John of God to America, doctor Oz comes on and gives his professional opinion that, like, he seems like he's really having an effect on people, and I can't explain it. I don't think medical ex science can explain what this man is doing, basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this guy's gotta be legit. John of God later turned out to be a mass rapist on these on a scale, hundreds of victims, on a scale almost incomprehensible. We did
a two parter on John of God. You can listen to it. It's a fucking nightmare. This guy never gets half the following that he has if it's not for Oprah and doctor Oz.
So wow, holy shit.
Uh it's good shit, good shit. I found a fascinating New York Times article written a few months into doctor Oz's new show. It notes that in transitioning to his own series, Doctor Oz had to spice up his act for a daily for a daily daytime audience quote potentially distracted by the tantrums of a toddler or the yelping of a labradoodle. They go on to summarize his early episodes.
His show tackles topics is diverse and diversely weighting a skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating, and pubic hair loss. Returning constantly to the same television mother load, Winfrey profitably mined weepy, overweight guests who vow and often fail to get in shape, and it is taken in it star far away from any sort of traditional medical practice. He explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often.
He told me he would sit in an office and be telling you stuff too little, too late, that if you'd been able to lose a little weight, or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically altered your destiny, which is now to go
downstairs and have open heart surgery. With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to end all aspects, to tend to all aspects of their health head to toe before they reach a point of no return, lose weight, go to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man.
Oh god, oh wow. You know there's always that point, you know, I've listened to your show, and there's always that point in the episode where the comedian or the guest has no other option but to just say fuck, that sucks, dude, there's no other comment, but what Oh that's crazy. But you know, hey, John of God, your os they also sound like great people.
Yeah, yeah, and it's it's going to get worse, you know, this is kind of the period. One of the things he's just to do in this period is he starts cutting back on his surgical practice and performing fewer surgeries.
Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates.
Yeah, in order to tell people about John of God, the mass rapist, and in order to tell people about I don't know, some stuff that's good, right. Telling people to eat healthier is a good. America's diet sucks. His diet advice, I think is well, we'll talk about that later. It's also problematic anyway, he's trading objectively useful medical work for being a nonsense doctor. But he's making millions of dollars.
Yeah, and in America, that is the ultimate marker of doing the right thing.
Yeah. That's the only thing that tells you whether or not you're doing the right thing.
Is you're making a lot of money, then whatever you're doing is the right thing to do. Yeah, it's morally correct to make a lot of money.
Yeah, morally righteous, righteous wealth.
Yes.
You know what else is righteous, Matt?
Is it the products and services?
No, my man, it's you. Because the episode's over. Part one is over, and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna sail out. But first you've got to plug your pluggables. And I just decided to compliment you before were.
Yeah, that's very nice here here, I thought you were just trying to get me to talk about products and services. Well, I thank you for having me on. I have a product end or service called pod Yourself a Gun. It's a Sopranos podcast and uh uh yeah, if you like the Sopranos, or even if you don't, check it out on the you know wherever the podcasts store is.
Podcast All right, Well, this is the show that it is, and we're done doing the things that we do so go out into the world and I don't know, find doctor Oz and scream at him. Give'm a good screaming
M