For the first time in its mildly illustrious history, The Sherman Oaks Review of Books presents an actual excerpt from an actual, not-made-up book. It is Monsters of the Ivy League, by Steve Radlauer and Ellis Weiner, published today by Little, Brown. In its amusing, devastating pages you will find numerous profiles of men and women with two things in common: All have been associated (as graduates, administrators, founders, or faculty) of Ivy League universities and colleges. And all have done terrible things and/or are terrible people.
Below, a typical example. With brilliant art by Randy Jones!
Dr. Mehmet Cengiz Öz
Harvard BA ★ Penn MD ★ Penn (Wharton) MBA
Columbia Faculty
[Dangerous Narcissist, Disgrace to Profession, Scammer, Greedy Bastard]
He’s a distinguished cardiothoracic surgeon—a heart-transplant specialist at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center! He’s also a popular TV personality! Who touts dubious remedies! Dispenses New Age-y pseudoscientific advice! Spouts uninformed anti-GMO propaganda! Promotes paranormal beliefs! And hosts crackpots who say things like: Cancer is a fungus that can be cured with baking soda!
He’s Mehmet Cengiz Öz—TV’s handsome Doctor Oz!
You’d think it would be enough for anyone to be a professor, vice-chairman of surgery, and working surgeon at a major hospital, not to mention an inventor and holder of lifesaving medical patents. But that wasn’t enough for Dr. Oz. He wanted more. He wanted fame—big-time, TV-level fame. And he understood that you don’t get that kind of big, fat fame by being a do-your-job academic and a just-the-biomedical-facts-ma’am kind of doctor.
Nope, mass quantities of fame requires being known and loved by mass quantities of the masses. And to attain that, you’ve got to promote crazy shit. Not just a little bit, either. Lots and lots of crazy shit. And so it came to pass that Dr. Oz, with a big assist from Oprah Winfrey, got himself a TV show, or maybe several TV shows, some radio shows, and a bunch of book deals—who can keep track?—and, voila, big-time fame!
What he seems not to have realized, despite his obvious smarts, is that publicly promoting tons of crazy shit doesn’t go over so well with other members of the medical profession—or anyone else who is enthusiastic about healthcare, the scientific method, or objective reality. The British Medical Journal analyzed Oz’s recommendations and found that over half of them had no scientific basis. “Oz,” said the New Yorker, “has been criticized by scientists for relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches the show.”
Ponder that for a second: A TV doctor, over half of whose recommendations are iffy at best and downright dangerous at worst. With medical advice like that, who needs disease to feel sick? And that was mild compared to the denunciation leveled by a group of prominent American physicians in a letter to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons (yet another Ivy institution, incidentally). It included lines like “Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine” and “he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.” (The manufacturers of certain “miracle” products touted on his shows have also sponsored those shows. You expect this sort of thing in infomercials about self-washing fry pans or vegetable juicers that pick you up at the airport. Not on shows about health, hosted by actual doctors.)
For his support of faith healing and communication with the dead, among other procedures not taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the James Randi Educational Foundation—whose agenda is to expose parapsychological, paranormal or psychic fraud—has awarded him its Pigasus Award an unprecedented three times.
Mehmet Oz was a highly respected doctor who, with admirable focus and superhuman determination, transformed himself into a media superstar. But he’s become so much more than that. Indeed, his achievement has exceeded the fantasies of even the most driven double- or triple-Ivy-degree holder. He is a self-invented institution.
He is America’s Quack.
