January 23rd, 2010 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Quackery Exposed
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The newest media Doc on the block is Dr. Mehmet Oz. When he was first seen on Oprah, he seemed engaging and answered some interesting questions in a real and professional way. The audience loved his blue scrubs and boyish clean cut open style.
That was then.
Let’s face it…the media spotlight seems to corrupt even the best physicians. Dr. Oz now has his own show and website and production company. That is a pretty big infrastructure to maintain and we know that the public is fickle. So what does he do?
His “Real-Age” website got 27 million people to sign up and take a health quiz. That information was sold to pharmaceutical companies who used the direct emails for marketing. Real-Age also sends the participants a series of emails about conditions they may (or may not) have and drugs they can use to treat it, based on their answers to the on-line health quiz, sponsored by drug companies of course. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
September 18th, 2009 by Gwenn Schurgin O'Keeffe, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy
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In a recent interview with Dr. Oz on Good Morning America, Dr. Oz told Diane Sawyer that he doesn’t think any of the proposed health care plans will work. Why? As Dr. Oz told Diane:
“What we haven’t done is get to the very root reality of the flaws we have in the health care system. True health care reform cannot happen in Washington. It has to happen in our kitchens, in our homes, in our communities. All health care is personal.”
Dr. Oz pointed out that the United States has twice the disease that is found in Europe. He believes that we have to find it impossible for Americans to not embrace good health. According to Dr. Oz:
“If I make your workplace conducive to walking at lunch, or working out at some time during the day, or I get people to use the stairs more by creating incentives to do such, then people will start doing it naturally.”
All you have to do is walk around any place USA compared to anywhere else around the globe to know this is true. Or, just note our friends from around the world who are visiting our country on vacation. Striking how much healthier our friends from other parts of the world appear – and act. They seem more vibrant, have more energy.
For these reasons, Dr. Oz isn’t hopeful any of the healthcare reform plans will work. He feels that until people start living more healthy, how the health care system is paid for is really moot. In his words: “The big debate right now in Washington is health care finance. It’s how are you going to pay for it. I don’t care which program we pick. I’ll tell you why. Because none of them are going to work.”
The sad truth is, he’s right. Americans have shown themselves to be very untrustworthy on the health care front with heeding doctors warnings about healthy living. Until that changes, until we find a way to make healthy living more appealing, how the system is paid for isn’t the path to reform.
After listening to President Obama last night, where does that leave us? No where useful. Sure…he talked a good talk about the insurance changes needed for the economics of the system to work but that has nothing at all to do with the true reforms needed in our system for not only personal health care but the actual ability to practice medicine, a topic the President barely covered last night.
I felt President Obama did an adequate job calming the waters of the misconceptions of the bill he is trying to put forward but let’s not mistaken that bill for the type of true health reform our country will need in the end. That type of reform, as Dr. Oz, pointed out, has to come from within each of us and the start of that may be as simple as looking in the mirror and accepting more individual responsibility for our own bodies and what happens to them.
What about savings, you ask? If we all care for our bodies better, we’ll all save by saving ourselves the time and expense of doctor’s visits, prescriptions, procedures, operations, and treatments of all kinds. Those savings will not only be in dollars to our bank account but years to our lives. Doesn’t sound too bad, huh?
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Gwenn Is In*
The newest media Doc on the block is Dr. Mehmet Oz. When he was first seen on Oprah, he seemed engaging and answered some interesting questions in a real and professional way. The audience loved his blue scrubs and boyish clean cut open style.
