Oz is hardly an impartial figure to evaluate the health and fitness of the next potential resident of the White House. | Getty Dr. Oz invites Trump to his scientifically dubious TV show

In lieu of releasing his medical records, Donald Trump is turning to a familiar space — a TV doctor show — to allay voters’ concerns about his health.

That’s the game plan next week when the 70-year-old reality TV star-turned-politician plans to appear on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s highly rated — and highly criticized — daytime talk show to discuss his “personal health regimen,” as the show promoted it, amid demands that he and Hillary Clinton both disclose their medical records.


Oz is hardly an impartial figure to evaluate the health and fitness of the next potential resident of the White House. Oz himself has been pilloried for years for making dubious medical claims on-air and for placing greater importance on the financial or business opportunities of his TV show than on solid, scientific medical research.

He’s been called out by fellow doctors as a quack and dragged before a Senate subcommittee to defend his support of weight-loss supplements like green coffee extract. His Harvard degree, his M.B.A. and his affiliation with Columbia University as a practicing cardiothoracic surgeon and director of the Integrative Medicine Center can’t insulate him from the charge of being, as The New Yorker put it in a lengthy expose, “an operator.”

Below, POLITICO rounded up the various ways that Oz has been discredited by the medical, health care and political establishment.

QUESTIONABLE MEDICAL CLAIMS — For years, Oz has been dogged by charges that he has perpetuated dubious medical advice on his show. He has promoted a raft of scientifically unproven therapies and downplayed the risk of concussions for kids. He’s given airtime to prominent anti-vaccine advocates and their widely repudiated theories, and was hauled before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection to talk about the deceptive marketing practices of some supplements he’s promoted.

A 2014 study that appeared in the British Medical Journal found that medical research either didn’t support or flatly contradicted half of Oz’s TV recommendations.

FELLOW DOCTORS DON’T WANT TO ASSOCIATE WITH HIM — Oz may hit TV ratings gold week after week, but that doesn’t mean his fellow physicians respect him. A group of doctors in 2015 sent a letter to the vice chairman of the Columbia University department of surgery (where Oz practices medicine), calling for his dismissal. One of the docs who sent the letter called Oz a quack, fake and charlatan.

In The New Yorker’s long profile of Oz, fellow doctors seemed eager to dish about him. "Oz has a huge bully pulpit, with the entire Oprah empire behind him,” said David Gorski, an associate professor of surgery at the Wayne State University School of Medicine and the editor of a prominent science and medical blog. “He can’t simply dispense with facts he doesn’t find convenient.”

CONGRESS HAS INVESTIGATED HIM — Oz’s dubious medical advice earned him the attention of Congress, where he appeared at a 2014 Senate hearing for his role in promoting weight-loss aids on his show and for saying that green coffee extract was a “magic weight loss cure for every body type.”

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) scolded him: “The scientific community is almost monolithic against you in terms of the efficacy of the three products you called ‘miracles,’” she said. “When you call a product a miracle, and it’s something you can buy, and it’s something that gives people false hope, I don’t understand why you need to go there.”

EVEN OZ’S BOSS THINKS HE’S FULL OF YOU-KNOW-WHAT — The head of Sony Pictures Television and Oz’s big, big boss indicated as much in an email, released as part of the WikiLeaks Sony dump. Oz is “smart as hell,” Steve Mosko wrote in an email to the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen, and “full of s---.” Not that anyone on the business side of TV is arguing, since other WikiLeaks emails combed through by Vox suggest that Oz firmly places business concerns above his scientific training.