Shame on Sen. Claire McCaskill for asking Dr. Oz to testify about health scams. He promotes them regularly, as Orac notes on his science blog:
With all due respect, Sen. McCaskill owes me a new irony meter. She fried that sucker flat, leaving nothing but a sputtering, sizzling, bubbling blob of qoo with a few copper wires sticking out of it. Dr. Oz testifying about weight loss scams? That’s like asking Al Capone to testify about U.S. tax policy or Stanislaw Burzynski about clinical trial design and ethics. Seriously. The only thing useful that having Dr. Oz testify in front of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection would be to use him as an example of weight loss scams being promoted to millions of people every day through irresponsible television shows.
I mean, seriously. Think about it. McCaskill is touting the FTC’s crackdown on companies selling green coffee bean extract and advertising it with bogus weight loss claims while at the same time respectfully listening to the one person most responsible for fanning the flames of the “green coffee bean craze” to reach new heights of burning stupid. She’s featuring Dr. Oz as though he were an expert at anything other than selling such scams to credulous viewers while disingenuously claiming to be the aggrieved party when companies understandably start using his breathless quotes about various weight loss supplements to hawk their products and even going so far as to brag about the team of enforcers he’s assembled to go after such companies.