I’ve written about him a few times and kept an eye on him over the years, because back in 2010, when I was a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, I was assigned an in-depth profile of Oz as a one-man wellness industry. He had just begun his TV show, and I spent hours hanging out with him on the set at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan and elsewhere. I even stood just a few feet from him in an operating room at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan as he performed open-heart surgery on a 74-year-old woman. I remember that the white pages of the notebook in which I was scribbling ended up splattered with little red dots.

I also remember thinking again and again that the values of serious science and the values of television were perhaps incompatible. As I watched Oz and his producers try to sex up medicine for what they hoped would be many millions of daytime viewers, I watched him travel toward silliness.

That journey accelerated over the ensuing years, as Oz became notorious for promoting unproven supplements and fad remedies and using words like “magic,” “miracle” and “revolutionary,” especially as they pertained to weight loss. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity expert at Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition, once told me that Oz’s approach in this regard was just plain nutty.

“It’d be like if we went to NASA and they were using astrological charts to try to figure out how to get a rocket to Europa,” Leibel said.

At one point, a group of 10 physicians wrote to Columbia University to urge it to sever its formal ties to Oz. At another, Oz was hauled before a Senate panel to defend some of his ludicrous weight-loss claims. At yet another, a study in The BMJ evaluated scores of his show’s medical recommendations and determined that more than half didn’t have sound scientific support.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Oz welcomed Trump to his television show and let him prattle on about what glorious physical shape he was supposedly in. The following year, the AMA Journal of Ethics published an article about Oz by three scientists at the Mayo Clinic who asked, “Should a physician be allowed to say anything — however inaccurate and potentially harmful — so long as that individual commands market share?”

Change “physician” to “politician” and the question pertains just as tidily — and just as sadly — to Trump.