We have all heard of Dr.Oz and many of us have mixed feelings about what he is up to.
I am aware that he promotes Reiki which is a good thing.
The following is a piece that I took from a recent article published in the New Yorker. If you have time I suggest that you read the whole article, it is very interesting.
The Operator
Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good?
It
didn’t take long for Oz to become convinced that a patient’s state of
mind could be important to a successful surgical outcome. With his
father-in-law’s encouragement, he began to explore music therapy, energy
fields, and therapeutic touch, and he began to offer them to his
surgical patients. Here, too, Lisa played a major role; she is a Reiki
master, and Oz soon became famous at New York-Presbyterian, not to
mention within the broader surgical community, for encouraging the
practice of Reiki in the operating room. Reiki, the Japanese art of
laying on hands, is based on the notion that an unseen, life-giving
source of energy flows through our bodies. Oz hired a Reiki master named
Julie Motz to stand in the operating room, where, she has said, she
would attempt to harness “the body’s own energy to help patients survive
risky operations, such as heart transplants.” Many of Oz’s colleagues,
including some who worked directly with him, thought that permitting a
Reiki master to enter the surgical suite at New York-Presbyterian was
ludicrous. “She would come in and daven over the heart-and-lung machine
for a while,” Eric Rose told me recently. In 1984, Rose made history
when he performed the first successful pediatric heart transplant. He
hired Oz in 1986 and then, several years later, when he served as
chairman of the surgical department at New York-Presbyterian, assigned
him to his transplant team. Studies of energy forces in our bodies have
routinely shown that Reiki adheres to no known principles of science. In
perhaps the most famous such review, a nine-year-old girl conceived and
executed a test in which she demonstrated that twenty-one people who
claimed to be skilled in the techniques of Reiki were nevertheless
unable to detect her “energy field” more often than they would have by
guessing. The study was eventually published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In 2009, even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged Catholic
health-care facilities and clergy not to promote or support Reiki.
I
told Oz that I was aware of no evidence showing that Reiki works. He
cut in: “Neither am I, if you are talking purely about data. But this is
one of the fundamental disconnects between Western medicine and what
people often refer to as complementary medicine. Not everything adds up.
It’s about making people more comfortable. I offer things like massage
therapy, and offered Reiki if people wanted it. I did not recommend it,
but I let people know it was their choice.”
Oz
often says that he is just trying to present people with all their
options, because they are sophisticated enough to make decisions for
themselves. But some options are more beneficial than others, and
medical experts are morally bound to explain the difference, as David
Gorski told me recently. Gorski, an associate professor of surgery at
the Wayne State University School of Medicine, is the managing editor of
the influential blog Science-Based Medicine. “Oz has a huge bully
pulpit, with the entire Oprah empire behind him,” he said. “He can’t
simply dispense with facts he doesn’t find convenient.” Scientists often
argue that, if alternative medicine proves effective through
experimental research, it should no longer be considered alternative; at
that point, it becomes medicine. By freely mixing alternatives with
proven therapies, Oz makes it nearly impossible for the viewer of his
show to assess the impact of either; the process just diminishes the
value of science.
“I
am guided by evidence above all,” Eric Rose told me recently, when I
visited him in his office, at Siga Technologies, a biotechnology firm
that develops treatments for highly lethal diseases like smallpox and
Ebola fever. He is also a professor of surgery at the Mount Sinai
medical school. Rose, who is sixty-two, is slim and thoughtful, with a
casual elegance that suggests the head of an auction house more than the
chief executive of a biotech firm. His office is framed from floor to
ceiling in glass, with modern art on nearly every wall. I noticed a
picture of Rose, posing with Oz, displayed on a shelf, above several
Prouvé Standard Chairs. “I always liked to encourage surgeons to do what
made them comfortable, and Mehmet is a particularly fine surgeon,” he
told me when I asked why he permitted a Reiki master in his surgical
program. “So when he told me he wanted to try Reiki I didn’t see why I
should prevent him. Eventually, though, without any fanfare or
difficulty, I suggested that it might be better if he knocked it off.”
By
that time, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, anti-rejection drugs like
cyclosporine had helped make heart transplants common. They were no
longer front-page news, unless they involved notable people. When that
happened, Rose was often asked to perform the operation. On October 25,
1996, Frank Torre, the brother of the New York Yankees manager Joe
Torre, received a new heart at New York-Presbyterian. Rose led the team
and Oz was his deputy. The transplant, which was a success, took place
during that year’s World Series. The next night, the patient, who
himself had been a successful baseball player and manager, watched from
his bed as his brother’s team beat the Atlanta Braves to win the sixth
game, and the Series. The publicity surrounding the operation was
intense; a collage of articles about the event—“HEART OF THE YANKS,” the Daily News
offered, in supersize type—still hangs in the cardiac-department
offices at New York-Presbyterian. “I had my fifteen minutes of fame,”
Rose said. “It was great for my career and for the hospital, but frankly
I learned that it wasn’t something I enjoyed.” Oz had an entirely
different reaction to the attention. The Torre transplant, Rose said,
“was his first big splash of publicity, and he loved it.” Rose laughed
and suggested that the experience helped propel Oz toward his current
career. I asked Rose what he thought of his disciple’s work as a
television host.
“I
want to stress that Mehmet is a fine surgeon,” Rose said, as he did
more than once during our conversation. “He is intellectually
unbelievably gifted. But I think if there is any criticism you can apply
to some of the stuff he talks about it is that there is no hierarchy of
evidence. There rarely is with the alternatives. They have acquired a
market, and that drives so much. At times, I think Mehmet does feed into
that.”
I
asked if he would place his confidence in a heart surgeon, no matter
how gifted, who operated just once a week, as Oz does. “Well,” he
replied, “in general you want a surgeon who lives and breathes his job,
somebody who is above all devoted to that.” Again he mentioned Oz’s
experience, but when I asked if he would send a patient to Oz for an
operation, he looked uncomfortable. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. In many
respects, Mehmet is now an entertainer. And he’s great at it. People
learn a lot, and it can be meaningful in their lives. But that is a
different job. In medicine, your baseline need has to be for a level of
evidence that can lead to your conclusions. I don’t know how else you do
it. Sometimes Mehmet will entertain wacky ideas—particularly if they
are wacky and have entertainment value.”
The
era of paternalistic medicine, where the doctor knew best and the
patient felt lucky to have him, has ended. We don’t worship authority
figures anymore. Our health-care system has become impersonal,
mechanized, and hollow, and it has failed millions of people, many of
whom want to find a way to regain control of their own medical
decisions. As Oz likes to say, Marcus Welby—the kindly, accessible, but
straight-talking television doctor—is dead.
