“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.Īt one point, a group of 10 physicians wrote to Columbia University to urge it to sever its formal ties to Oz. 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. 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.

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. I also remember thinking again and again that the values of serious science and the values of television were perhaps incompatible. I remember that the white pages of the notebook in which I was scribbling ended up splattered with little red dots. 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. 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’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’s a one-man morality play about the temptations of mammon and the seduction of applause, a Faustian parable with a stethoscope,” I wrote. Oz Show” and, as I’ve previously observed, “morphed not just willingly but exuberantly into a carnival barker.” “Pan-disciplinary provocateur” - that’s not so far from how many scrupulous physicians have come to regard Oz, who switched his focus from surgery to television more than a decade ago, made a gigantic hit of “The Dr. Oz mischaracterized a French doctor’s study of it in order to gush over it and seemingly didn’t take into account that doctor’s reputation as “a pan-disciplinary provocateur” who has “questioned climate change and Darwinian evolution,” Hamblin wrote.

Oz did precisely that on Hannity’s show, as The Atlantic’s James Hamblin pointedly explained in an excellent article about the treatment. But there remain more questions about it than answers, and its diverse boosters - including Rudy Giuliani, who has always been my go-to guru on all matters health-related - glide blithely over inconvenient facts about it. I’ve neither the space here nor the science-reporting expertise to examine fully the arguments for and against hydroxychloroquine.

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