On my Monday radio show, I praised Oprah Winfrey for her #MeToo speech at the Golden Globes, but tried to scuttle any thoughts of her running for president. My major objection to her has always been her embrace of nonsense and her enabling of people who advocate alternative medicine and flat-out scams, like Mehmet Oz, […]
This is Part 1 of a speech I gave to the Ethical Society of St. Louis on Sunday, July 16, 2017 (You can listen to the audio here)… Photo courtesy of Lance FinneyFifteen to twenty years ago, my inbox was regularly filled with emails that people had forwarded to everyone on their contact list. […]
This is Part 1 of a speech I gave to the Ethical Society of St. Louis on Sunday, July 16, 2017 (you can listen to the audio here)… Photo courtesy of Lance Finney Fifteen to twenty years ago, my inbox was regularly filled with emails that people had forwarded to everyone on their contact list. […]
“60 Minutes” has hired Oprah Winfrey as a special contributor. This is not good. This is the woman who made Dr. Oz famous, allowing him to spread pseudo-science to millions of viewers over and over again. This is the woman who gave Jenny McCarthy a national television platform to spread anti-vaxxer lies and fear-mongering. Oprah […]
Julia Belluz on the FDA cracking down on companies that sell bogus dietary supplements. These pills have not been scientifically proven to work — in fact, they cause harm, because they’re not tested as rigorously as they should be. Before USPLabs agreed to pull OxyElite Pro from store shelves, the product sickened dozens of people, […]
John Oliver has taken on some serious subjects on his HBO “Last Week Tonight” show, from net neutrality to payday loans to gay rights in Uganda to Dr. Oz’s ridiculous science-free endorsements of nutritional supplements. Oliver infuses them with just enough comedy to make them interesting to a mainstream audience. The big segment on his […]
After Dr. Oz’s thrashing by Sen. Claire McCaskill on Capitol Hill last week, I asked Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman — who wrote an investigative piece for Slate last year exposing the bogus diet scams Oz promotes on his TV show — for their reaction to the Senate hearing and to explain why Oz’s promotion […]
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 […]
Two months ago, I spent a segment of my KTRS show discussing why you shouldn’t believe Dr. Oz, the cardiac-surgeon-turned-TV-star who uses his media platform to advocate unscientific nonsense. Here’s what James Randi thinks of Dr. Oz…
Yesterday, in introducing Julia Belluz for her expose on Dr. Oz, I mentioned an ABC News show about “John Of God,” which I said aired ten or fifteen years ago. Checking my archives, I discovered it actually aired just under eight years ago, on February 10, 2005. That show’s lack of skepticism about this faith […]