• Psythik@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    3 months ago

    Full article because paywall:

    The first time that Mehmet Oz was questioned by the Senate, in June 2014, the atmosphere was not inviting. He’d been hauled in to defend his habit of promoting unconventional supplements for weight loss, including green coffee beans, raspberry ketones, and an Asian tropical fruit called garcinia cambogia, on his daytime-television talk show. “I don’t get why you need to say this stuff,” Claire McCaskill, the Missouri senator who chaired the hearing, told him. “Because you know it’s not true.”

    Last Friday, Oz was back before the Senate, this time to be questioned as President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In the interim, despite a turn to politics that included an unsuccessful bid to join the Senate himself, Oz has stayed the course: selling stress-relieving shrubs on social media, for instance, and leveraging his mother’s Alzheimer’s to pitch herbal remedies. Now a physician who was once described by other doctors in an open letter as demonstrating “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain” may soon be tasked with regulating the health insurance of more than 150 million Americans. But the context of his return to Washington has cast the former TV star in a new, more flattering light: Next to some of the other appointees to the Department of Health and Human Services, even Dr. Oz seems safe and normal.