Oprah Winfrey has been taken to task, rightly, by both bloggers and mainstream media on her advice on health issues.
Most prominently is a recent front page story on Newsweek, titled, Live your best life ever!
Pediatrician Rahul Parikh was ahead of the curve on this topic, blogging a similar stance a few weeks before the Newsweek piece was published. But how should Oprah, who, as Dr. Parikh writes, is an “economy of scale onto herself,” treat health issues?
Given her influence, very carefully.
But given her terse response to the issue, it doesn’t appear she’s going to change her ways, and her stance is to shift the burden responsibility to her audience.
Dr. Parikh offers some advice, saying, “She just needs to get a good set of health advisers who can brief her on the latest medical evidence and provide true balance to her show. She could also ask some tougher questions of her medical ‘experts’ and invite a real discussion by putting credible doctors onstage next to her ‘quackadoos’ instead of sticking them in the audience, displaying statements by them or leaving their insights on the cutting-room floor.”
Will that ever happen? It’s unlikely, as it’s hard to see “the entertainer in Oprah . . . capable of doing this.”
Related posts:
- Should Oprah be giving medical advice?
- Ten top medical blog posts, May 2009
- Rahul Parikh on the KevinMD Live Q&A: Tuesday, July 21st at 10:30pm Eastern
- Can patients and doctors handle the truth?
- 5 top medical comments, July 5th, 2009
- Southwest Airlines and medical emergencies
- How should doctors handle the difficult patient?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 7 comments }
I would suggest that Oprah handle her health care credibility problem by sticking to shows about hair loss options and how to handle your divorce and Tom Cruise jumping off couches and having the entire cast of Spamalot gab about how much they love each other off the set and hawking overrated novels about late thirties female ad execs who have one last chance at love and find themselves falling for the sweet, goodnatured and incredibly hot barista at their favorite coffee shoppe around the corner who secretly writes long epic poems a la the Song of Roland. She’s an entertainer, for god’s sake. You don’t get to be the richest female entertainer in the world by having PBS-esque panels of experts from opposing viewpoints with regards to the relative merits of vaccines. Ignore her. That’s what I tell my mom, anyway.
If she is going to give medical advice, and she is giving medical advice, and she is going to focus on giving advice contrary to the guidelines of reputable medical organizations, maybe some of her viewers need to start suing her for the bad medical advice.
I am guessing that she would seek the services of a real lawyer to deal with problems that come from promoting Dr. Jenny McCarthy, Dr. Jim Carrey, and the rest of the medical fringe. While there is much to be improved in medicine, the answer is not to come to the conclusion that the crazies in tinfoil hats have any kind of a clue.
Poeple are dying because of this bad medical advice. Oprah should be ashamed.
She has to much authority to speak about medicine. She needs a medical license to be able to do that. Could even be some legal ramifications to influencing someone’s medical decisions. On the other hand, I am sure someone like Oprah has a top notch legal team observing every word/episode.
Oprah has to be the poster-woman for paternalism with her “do as we do” attitude and now, when she comes under fire she wants to put the burden on the part-time, minimum wage, retired and soccer mom crowd that make up most of her audience? Sorry if that’s a bit harsh, but for her to blame “the masses” that made her who she is, will, I can only hope, backfire as badly as any serious look at Suzanne Sommers’ longevity regimen…
She ceased to be a newswoman almost as long ago as most news shows ceased to carry actual news… and people wonder why talk radio and blogging are the fastest growing “media outlets” in the world.
Dr. Oz is as big a part of the problem.
I’m sure he is a fine surgeon, so he should be quiet and just be a surgeon.
Instead, he is a self-appointed expert on everything and Oprah behaves like a groupie with him.
Meanwhile, he makes life more difficult for us pcps in the trenches.
She shouldn’t. She should only provide qualified resources.
Whatever. I come from a large family. Each one of them has
a different ailment, and they have told me each one, the last one being a relative who is having a hysterectomy any day now. The family thinks I understand, but not until one yelled in my ear and said on Sunday…..blah, blah, blah, ……for the first time did I even believe the family’s secret or secret black sheep.
I am doing well to understand any of this in doublespeak.
Don’t make fun of me. I want to know the truth. Just like after one of them had eye surgery, he couldn’t find out without much work what the followup instructions were.
The family thinks everyone understands. One doesn’t.
Why does the One not get any say in anything?????
Comments on this entry are closed.