Dr. Oz,Quackademia and Academic Freedom

Once he was a real doctor

It had to happen, eventually: The faculty of Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons (the medical school with the world's best name) finally got embarrassed enough by the vice chairman of the department of surgery, Mehmet Oz, to gather together and write a letter to the deans of the school asking Dr. Oz be removed from the faculty because he is, well, a quack.

This of course, was greeted by the powers that be with a statement about academic freedom, the right to free speech, the importance of open inquiry, in other words, we, as deans of the medical school cannot admit we've tolerated this quack for so long and if we pretend he's respectable, we're off the hook.

Of course, quite the opposite.

Dr. Oz has, among many other transgressions, suggested that green coffee bean extract is a good weight loss medication.  When called to testify before a Congressional committee, he waved a few bogus publications in what were not peer reviewed journals to support his claim, as if any publication is the same as any other in supporting a claim to scientific respectability.

 There is always the problem of whether or not a quack knows he's a quack or is simply promulgating what is profitable for himself because he's made himself believe the garbage he espouses or whether he knows it's bogus, but pushes the remedy anyway, in which case he's guilty of willful fraud.

The point is, when you are using the good name and reputation of Columbia College of Physician and Surgeons to profit, to make believable your claims, the university has the responsibility to be sure it's name is not being misused and sullied. 

Not wishing to appear narrow minded, the university may lose all perspective and claim it's a free country and in the name of "free inquiry" all viewpoints must be tolerated. Quackacedmia.

There is a danger of being too hide bound and orthodox: Boston University's department of Dermatology expelled Michael Hollick, the man who developed the assay for vitamin D for the heresy of saying people ought to expose their arms and face for to sun 15 mintues a day to prevent hypovitaminosis D.  Sun is bad, as far as dermatology dogma goes, and for the most part, this is likely true, when you are faced with the prospect of melanoma.  But you have to listen to the other side and realize that low vitamin D levels may be no blessing.

And of course, there was Galileo and Semmelweiss. Galileo, of course suggested the heresy that the Earth revolved around the sun, and nobody in the religious or academic hierarchy wanted to believe that. Semmelweiss,  the Hungarian physician who suggested doctors ought to wash their hands between examining patients to prevent spreading disease from one patient to the next and he was hounded out of the profession, the country and just about out of his mind for having the temerity to suggest his colleagues and fellow physicians might be the source of uterine infections in women who they examined with their bare hands after they had examined corpses in the morgue without washing.  Doctors did not understand about sterility and hygiene and microbiology in those days, but they did understand about blame. Both offended entrenched authority.

The difference between their offense against established authority and Oz's offense is Galileo and Semmelweiss had made observations on which their heresy was based and they followed those observations back to the lab. In Dr. Oz's case, he is not seeing what any undergraduate ought to see claims are being made which are unsubstantiated.

On NPR this morning, they interviewed a patient and her holistic doctor in Bethesda, Maryland, in the very shadow of the National Institutes of Health, that bastion of scientific rigor,  because the FDA is opening hearings about whether or not holistic medicine is quackery. The doctor sounded sincere when he says, "We believe that there is a memory left in the solution. You might call it a memory. You might call it energy... There's no question that it helps patients. I have too many files on too many patients that have shown improvements."  Of course, nobody has critically evaluated these files; they are like the "studies" Dr. Oz waved at the Congressmen. Hold something in your hand and you've got "proof."
As Shakespeare said, "In speech, there is logic." Just say it, especially if you sound sincere, and there is the "ring of truth."
None of this would be a problem if we had an educated populace, capable of critical thinking, armed with skills to dismember these frauds, contemptuous of those who lack intellectual rigor.
But for the most part, most people do not have the time or the resources to be able to critically evaluate medical claims. They place their faith in institutions and names, or,nowadays, in the TV or the youtube, where if you are on the screen, you are ipso facto believable. 
In Huckleberry Finn two hucksters, the King and the Duke, sold a noxious mixture of snake oil which poisoned local townspeope and they were tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.
Oh, for some of that ante bellum justice for Dr. Oz and the homeopathic physician from Bethesda.
Certainly no such justice will emanate from the deans at Columbia P&S, who have tacitly endorsed quackacademia in the cynical belief claiming academic freedom can shield them from the truth. 

P.S.: I am told by my reliable sources at Columbia, Oz really was a highly proficient surgeon once, and his research was quite well done, but now he has gone Hollywood and the question is why.  I would guess the same qualities which drove him toward excellence in his youth are now driving him toward another form of reward. He is, like Kurt Schork, the Reuters war journalist, an adrenalin junkie. Schork, of course, never allowed his compulsions to taint the high quality of his work; in fact they drove it.