Dr. Oz Is Now the Grown-Up in the Room – The Atlantic

The first time that Mehmet Oz was questioned by the Senate, in June 2014, the atmosphere was not inviting. He’d been hauled in to defend his habit of promoting unconventional supplements for weight loss, including green coffee beans, raspberry ketones, and an Asian tropical fruit called garcinia cambogia, on his daytime-television talk show. “I don’t get why you need to say this stuff,” Claire McCaskill, the Missouri senator who chaired the hearing, told him. “Because you know it’s not true.”

Last Friday, Oz was back before the Senate, this time to be questioned as President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In the interim, despite a turn to politics that included an unsuccessful bid to join the Senate himself, Oz has stayed the course: selling stress-relieving shrubs on social media, for instance, and leveraging his mother’s Alzheimer’s to pitch herbal remedies. Now a physician who was once described by other doctors in an open letter as demonstrating “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain” may soon be tasked with regulating the health insurance of more than 150 million Americans. But the context of his return to Washington has cast the former TV star in a new, more flattering light: Next to some of the other appointees to the Department of Health and Human Services, even Dr. Oz seems safe and normal.

I’ve had a front-row seat for Oz’s unlikely transformation from maligned to mainstream. In 2013, when I was still in medical school, I launched a public effort to censure him. His exuberant pitches for unproven remedies were harming patients, I contended. I asked medical societies to do more to combat the spread of misinformation. My efforts were rebuffed at first; doctors were worried about infringing on free speech and criticizing professional colleagues. To buttress my campaign, I started collecting anecdotes from viewers of The Dr. Oz Show describing potential harm caused by his advice.

Oz did not respond to any of these efforts at the time. (He also did not respond to a request for comment on this story.) His initial dressing-down in Congress followed soon after, and then in 2015, I helped a group of medical students and residents cajole the American Medical Association into writing guidelines for ethical physician conduct in the media. Oz himself remained unchastened after this previous run of bad press, though. “We will not be silenced. We will not give in,” he told his TV viewers in 2015, while accusing one group of critics of having industry ties and denying that he ever promoted treatments for personal gain. In short, he embraced his reputation as a wellness guru and anti-establishment truth teller—the sort of person who would find a natural home in the “Make America healthy again” movement that has been popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Oz is likely to join Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services—and assume control of my parents’ health insurance, among so many others’—in the weeks ahead. That prospect would have terrified me in the 2010s, when I first watched him testify before the Senate. But when I saw him do so for a second time on Friday, he no longer struck me as a major threat. Rather, he looked like an anachronism: a charming celebrity physician with a penchant for theatrical claims. In the face of the Trump administration’s chaotic razing of the nation’s biomedical infrastructure, Oz’s brand of hucksterism seems relatively mild, even quaint.

Perhaps that’s why the Senate showed so little interest in his history of hawking suspect treatments. Even Democrats went pretty easy with their questions. Senator Ron Wyden accused Oz of having engaged in “wellness grifting,” and Senator Maggie Hassan said he’d backed “unproven snake oil remedies,” but this was not a central focus of the hearing. “There are many things I said on the show,” Oz said in response. “I take great pride in the research we did at the time to identify which of these worked and which ones didn’t.”

Instead of grilling Oz on his questionable supplement endorsements, the legislators mostly used their time to lobby for niche policy fixes, and Oz in turn displayed an expertise in health-care policy that seemed worthy of his Wharton MBA. He was fluent on the topics of pharmacy benefit managers, prior authorization, insurance payment models, and the Affordable Care Act. He came out in favor of work requirements for Medicaid—a conventionally conservative approach—while also making sure to show some sympathy for health-care consumers, calling the insurance companies that profit from excessive upcoding “scoundrels who are stealing from the vulnerable.”

This all came off as rather serious and boring, in the way that such a hearing really should come off. Compare that with the nomination hearings for Kennedy: When questioned by the Senate, he botched basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, refused to admit that vaccines don’t cause autism, and accused committee members of being shills for pharmaceutical companies. Dave Weldon, who was Trump’s pick to run the CDC, didn’t even make it to his hearing, which was also scheduled for last week. Why Weldon’s nomination was withdrawn is not exactly clear, but it’s possible he made the error of being slightly too transparent about his suspicions of standard childhood vaccines. When positioned next to Kennedy and Weldon, or to Trump’s picks to run the NIH and the FDA, Oz seems quite conventional. He clearly stated that the measles shot is both safe and effective, while doing little to attach himself to the angry COVID contrarianism expressed by Kennedy and other nominees for leadership at HHS. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

So now we seem to have arrived at the strange moment when a celebrity TV doctor with no significant experience in public administration, a physician who once suggested that pineapple chunks and chia seeds were reasonable treatments for sciatica, can present himself as an unusually rational and stable candidate for leadership in the nation’s public-health establishment. Oz may even become an advocate for a more conventional approach to health-care policy in a department that is now run by someone who touts the benefits of treating measles with cod liver oil. Improbably, the “green coffee beans” guy is poised to be the grown-up in the room.