Discuss Latest WCI Blog Post: The Rise of Dr. Oz and How He Made So Much Stinkin’ Money

[The White Coat Investor]

My civic is a year older with 153k miles. KBB gives me a valuation of ~$3400 or so. The only way I think you'll get $7000 for yours is if you put a $2500 mountain bike on the back.

Glad to hear it actually. The dealership I ordered my truck from is hoping I don't actually want it when it comes so they can slap a $10-15K premium on it and sell it in 2 days.

[MPMD]

There are many eastern medicines that were / are considered a quack because they did not go through the FDA process. Some may indeed be inactive but there are many that now the western medicine grudgingly accept as beneficial. Things like turmeric as anti inflammatory substance. Acupuncture for pain relief. Even Yoga was dismissed as numbo jumbo and before that meditation was East Asian quackery. Now all are mainstream. So hold your judgements on alternative medicine. When an Aussie doc blamed bacteria for causing gastric ulcers and even going on to stomach cancers and lymphoma, physicians laughed at him. He was proved right and won the Nobel prize.

yeah so this is the mantra of the quack.

Oz isn't doing an RCT of whether or not raspberry extract helps you lose weight, he is selling extract pills.

[fatlittlepig]

yeah so this is the mantra of the quack.

Oz isn't doing an RCT of whether or not raspberry extract helps you lose weight, he is selling extract pills.

so you're stipulating that he was directly selling supplements, care to back that up?

[Kamban]

yeah so this is the mantra of the quack.

Oz isn't doing an RCT of whether or not raspberry extract helps you lose weight, he is selling extract pills.

If I had told you ten years ago to take a teaspoon of ground turmeric with warm milk at night to get relief from arthritic pain, would you have called me a quack. Maybe if I were an entrepreneur I could have made it in a capsule and sold it. But now it is well established that it works.

Tip: If you have a cut on your body that you want to heal and have no Neosporin nearby, just sprinkle some turmeric powder on the wound, after initially applying pressure to stop bleeding. You will notice that the healing is rapid. It has been used for ages in India to help heal wounds, but unfortunately has not passed any RCT in USA.

[MPMD]

If I had told you ten years ago to take a teaspoon of ground turmeric with warm milk at night to get relief from arthritic pain, would you have called me a quack. Maybe if I were an entrepreneur I could have made it in a capsule and sold it. But now it is well established that it works.

Tip: If you have a cut on your body that you want to heal and have no Neosporin nearby, just sprinkle some turmeric powder on the wound, after initially applying pressure to stop bleeding. You will notice that the healing is rapid. It has been used for ages in India to help heal wounds, but unfortunately has not passed any RCT in USA.

i don't think i would have called you a quack.

i have always told pts that i don't argue with what works for them.

i think then and now i would have asked for evidence. something having been used for ages is not evidence, it's actually kind of the exact opposite of evidence. but look if turmeric works for arthritis i'll start recommending it tomorrow. Oz has very clearly made many recommendations that don't have any evidence.

to me this kind of thing is a bit like how every big band has a story about how John Smith the agent in 1982 told them they'd never amount to anything and what a dope he turned out to be. what we never hear about is how John Smith was right about 99.9% of the bands that he didn't sign. yeah sure there are folk remedies that have turned out to be grounded in science, but there are many more that were just bunk and in some cases actual torture.

[xraygoggles]

It has been used for ages in India to help heal wounds, but unfortunately has not passed any RCT in USA.

???

Ur confusing anecdotal/historical usage (& likely placebo effect) for scientific truth - they are not remotely the same.

AFAIK, there have been a few scattered RCTs done on various homeopathic/naturopathic tx, but the results, as a whole, have not shown to be efficacious for patient care. It may be the case that at some point in the future, there will be statistically significant evidence for the benefits of some of these tx, but until then, they are more on the quackery side of the spectrum.

[The White Coat Investor]

there have been a few scattered RCTs done on various homeopathic/naturopathic .

These are not the same thing and IMHO, you have a whole lot higher likelihood of a naturopathic treatment eventually panning out than a homeopathic one.

[Fugue]

If I had told you ten years ago to take a teaspoon of ground turmeric with warm milk at night to get relief from arthritic pain, would you have called me a quack. Maybe if I were an entrepreneur I could have made it in a capsule and sold it. But now it is well established that it works.

Tip: If you have a cut on your body that you want to heal and have no Neosporin nearby, just sprinkle some turmeric powder on the wound, after initially applying pressure to stop bleeding. You will notice that the healing is rapid. It has been used for ages in India to help heal wounds, but unfortunately has not passed any RCT in USA.

This is a terrible take. By this logic, anything "could" be proven in the future.

Our jobs as physicians is to practice based on the current evidence. When the studies pan out, we adopt these changes accordingly.

And yes, Dr Oz directly endorses these products. Unlike many of the people in this thread, I've seen his show. I've seen him directly endorse Garcinia, coffee bean extract, the latter of which I believe landed him in front of a congressional panel.

[fatlittlepig]

Yes he’s endorsed those supplements but he didn’t sell or profit from them, which is an important distinction and something that would have been much more inappropriate.

[fatlittlepig]

I’ll make a strained analogy, Dr Oz is like the white coat investor. He spends most of the show talking about benign and banal general health topics and he sprinkles his show with talk and endorsements of supplements which the general public has great interest in. The white coat investor spends most of his website talking about benign topics like low cost index funds, and sprinkles his site with talk of crypto and questionable real estate courses which the general public is interested in.

[Tim]

I’ll make a strained analogy, Dr Oz is like the white coat investor. He spends most of the show talking about benign and banal general health topics and he sprinkles his show with talk and endorsements of supplements which the general public has great interest in. The white coat investor spends most of his website talking about benign topics like low cost index funds, and sprinkles his site with talk of crypto and questionable real estate courses which the general public is interested in.

Strained yes, but. Add to it words like “recommended”, “advertising”, “disclosure”, “conflict of interest” and “suitable” .

Rules of entertainment (web and TV) are different from physician/patient duty.
Just gotta go get some red and green powder for my fruits and veggies. The consumer has responsibility, an enormous amount.

[Fugue]

I’ll make a strained analogy, Dr Oz is like the white coat investor. He spends most of the show talking about benign and banal general health topics and he sprinkles his show with talk and endorsements of supplements which the general public has great interest in. The white coat investor spends most of his website talking about benign topics like low cost index funds, and sprinkles his site with talk of crypto and questionable real estate courses which the general public is interested in.

How many episodes of his show have you watched?

[xraygoggles]

Yes he’s endorsed those supplements but he didn’t sell or profit from them, which is an important distinction and something that would have been much more inappropriate.

That sounds very pedantic.

Also - you already admitted to never having watched the show, or read the original blog post - so not sure how you can even make that claim to begin with.

& even if it was true, even tacit endorsements of products go a long way to getting the word out - particularly when ur already on TV.

[The White Coat Investor]

I’ll make a strained analogy, Dr Oz is like the white coat investor. He spends most of the show talking about benign and banal general health topics and he sprinkles his show with talk and endorsements of supplements which the general public has great interest in. The white coat investor spends most of his website talking about benign topics like low cost index funds, and sprinkles his site with talk of crypto and questionable real estate courses which the general public is interested in.

Yea, it's weird. I've never gotten a single piece of email feedback asking me to talk more about index funds but every day someone is asking me to talk more about real estate and crypto. Always a challenge to blend the content side of a media company with the monetizing side of it too, but no margin, no mission.

[East coast]

Yes he’s endorsed those supplements but he didn’t sell or profit from them, which is an important distinction and something that would have been much more inappropriate.

Your statement that "he didn't sell or profit from them" isn't quite a settled fact. I seem recall there was a lawsuit that he paid a few million (small sum) that set out to prove that though of course never got that far due to the settlement.

Also, to your comparison with WCI - would you state that WCI's statements were analyzed to be 78% of the time not evidence based (or whatever the financial equivalent to that would be).
https://www.healthnewsreview.org/201...lysis-reveals/

or little/no evidence 55% of the time https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/349/bmj.g7346.full.pdf

We're not talking about someone who made comment here or there....