From Dr. Drew to Dr. Oz to Dr. Phil: Can we get rid of TV doctors who are wrong about the coronavirus pandemic?

Mel Magazine

Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Phil McGraw have followed in the footsteps of Dr. Drew Pinsky in taking advantage of the "Dr." before their names to spread coronavirus disinformation. "The problem," says Miles Klee, "is that a TV doctor isn’t seen as a pundit with an agenda — instead, he’s an infallible expert with an objective point-of-view. That’s why scammers have successfully used Dr. Oz’s brand to market their bogus diet products, it’s how 'Dr.' Phil (who isn’t a doctor) became a well-paid spokesman for a diabetes drug and it’s the reason anyone trusted Dr. Drew when he spent weeks downplaying the threat of COVID-19 as it began to sweep the country. If you stop to question these wack-a** dudes for half a minute, you can’t escape an obvious conclusion: Their priority is viewership, not the health of that audience. How can you keep folks watching if you just agree with the other boring experts? How can you fill an hour every single weekday without new, exciting trends and advances? Neither is possible, so you become a contrarian voice (Dr. Oz loves alternative medicine, for example) and open the door to hucksters of pseudoscience. The incentive is to entertain while appearing to inform, to promote utter bullshit while noting a perfunctory skepticism in fine print — just to cover your a**. A talking head like CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta is less susceptible to pure hoaxes than some of these other clowns, yet his job calls for oversimplification and broad generalization; he’s also relied on dubious sources and hyped drugs and tech for Big Pharma while minimizing risky side effects. His true alliance is with the medical industry, just as Drs. Drew and Oz have cozied up to the right-wing disinformation machine and Dr. Phil enmeshed himself in the pop-celebrity complex by recklessly exploiting Britney Spears’ 2008 mental health crisis. These men treat their fame as an escape from the actual duties of ministering to patients, and they quickly shed any of the associated ethics."