Tag: Oprah

The trouble with Dr. Oz

UPDATE 4/27/2011: Here’s the online video of Dr. Novella’s appearance on The Dr. Oz Show: Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 1 Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 2 Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 3 Welcome, Dr. Oz viewers! As managing editor of the Science-Based Medicine (SBM) blog, I am writing this post because our founder and exective editor Dr. Steven Novella was invited...

/ April 26, 2011
Thermography

Oprah’s buddy Dr. Christiane Northrup and breast thermography: The opportunistic promotion of quackery

Dr. Christiane Northrup came to fame as Oprah Winfrey's resident women's health expert. Unfortunately, she's using that fame to promote the unproven breast cancer screening modality thermography during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

/ October 11, 2010

Write for Oprah? Wrong for Me

From January through June of 2010 I wrote a column entitled “The Health Inspector” in O, The Oprah Magazine. Now, apparently, I have been fired; although they have not had the common courtesy to tell me so. The whole thing has been a bizarre, frustrating experience.  It started last fall, when I got an e-mail from Tyler Graham. He introduced himself as...

/ September 7, 2010

2009’s Top 5 Threats To Science In Medicine

As 2009 comes to an end, it seems that everyone is creating year-in-review lists. I thought I’d jump on the list band wagon and offer my purely subjective top 5 threats to rational thought in healthcare and medicine. Of course, it strikes me as rather ironic that we’re having this discussion – who knew that medicine could be divorced from science in...

/ December 24, 2009

David & Goliath: A Dramatic Role Reversal Spurred On By The Media

The Internet is teeming with false health claims and a long line of celebrities willing to throw their media weight behind every new flavor of snake oil. The irony is that alternative medicine proponents see themselves as a persecuted minority – the victims of some nebulous health industry conspiracy. But in reality, they have ingratiated themselves with the media to such an...

/ October 8, 2009

Will The Real, Silent Majority Please Stand Up – To Oprah and Jenny McCarthy?

Much to my surprise and delight, my recent blog post about Jenny McCarthy’s  “educational” video was picked up by several other blogs and websites, resulting in a small flood of emails applauding my efforts to expose dangerous pseudoscience. I had braced myself for what I assumed would be an onslaught of hate mail (what else would irrational folks do about a sensible...

/ June 4, 2009
Oprah Winfrey

The Oprah-fication of medicine

When it comes to quackery, Oprah really is the Queen of All Media. The Secret, Dr. Phil, "America's Quack" Dr. Oz, and Jenny McCarthy all got their start thanks to Oprah, plus a whole lot of New Age nonsense.

/ June 1, 2009

Hostility Towards Scientists And Jenny McCarthy’s Latest Video

I’ve been fairly quiet about Jenny McCarthy’s campaign against childhood vaccinations, partly because Dr. David Gorski has covered the issue so thoroughly already, and partly because of my “do not engage” policy relating to the deeply irrational (i.e. there’s no winning an argument with “crazy.”) But this week I was filled with a renewed sense of urgency regarding the anti-vaccinationist movement for...

/ May 21, 2009

Being Right Versus Being Influential

On May 9th I had the pleasure of lecturing to an audience of critical thinkers at the NYC Skeptics meeting. The topic of discussion was pseudoscience on the Internet – and I spent about 50 minutes talking about all the misleading health information and websites available to (and frequented by) patients. The common denominator for most of these well-intentioned but misguided efforts...

/ May 14, 2009