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Who is to say bio-identics and Somers Original Hormonal Happiness are not right up there with the discovery of insulin?

Medicine has always been an Oprah specialty — that and of course the new-age, inner-child, bespoke spiritualism of the West Coast Hollywood flapdoodles. (Gwyneth Paltrow’s fascination with her colon (and yours) and the Gospel of Goop are but second-hand Oprahisms.)

Her next real shaman — sorry shaperson — was none other than Baywatcher and erstwhile Jim Carrey mate Jenny McCarthy, who took full advantage of the Oprah TV town hall to warn America and the world of the dangers of vaccination and its infallible “connection” to autism. Medical advice on the calibre of Jenny McCarthy’s musings is normally (there is a God) very hard to come by. With Oprah’s help it was front of the bookstore. And what a boon. Jenny McCarthy or the Mayo Clinic? I know where my money is.

Were there world enough and time I would continue with her greatest medical discovery — Dr. Phil. How Western medicine has struggled along since the days of Hippocrates and Paracelsus without the attentions and manners of Dr. Phil, neither I nor you can know. But he is here now, sprung like Athena from Zeus’s head, out of dear Oprah’s equally pregnant cranium.

Photo by CBS/AP

I offer these meanderings just as reminders of Oprah’s thought and career, now that she is, as some say, a front-runner for the presidency in 2020. As for that speech, well like a lot of her medical advice, it was a sham.

The speech, for all the slobbering praise it received — as performance, and performance only, it had merit — was one giant “You’re all so wonderful and brave” aria to the very audience she should have been castigating.