Why is Trump keen to hand power to TV quack Dr Oz?

Rhian Lubin on the president-elect’s pick to lead Medicare

A decade ago, Dr Mehmet Oz was hauled in front of a Senate subcommittee where he was grilled over false claims he had been peddling about diet and weight loss on TV.

“The scientific community is almost monolithic against you,” then-Senator Claire McCaskill said, referring to products he had been touting as “miracle” weight loss cures. Dr Oz trained as a surgeon before he was a regular guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s.

He went on to host his own programme, The Dr Oz Show, where he spouted other dangerously misleading claims ranging from “magic” coffee beans to spur weight loss and selenium supplements to prevent cancer. A 2017 paper published by the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics called him “a dangerous rogue unfit for the office of America’s doctor”.

Now, he is preparing to serve in Donald Trump’s second administration as lead of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), working alongside vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr. In a 2012 episode of The Dr Oz Show, Dr Oz claimed that selenium supplements – a mineral found in certain foods – was “the holy grail of cancer prevention”. But a 2014 National Library of Medicine study concluded there was “no convincing evidence” to date that “suggests that selenium supplements can prevent cancer in humans”.

Rather, it found that “extremely high intakes of selenium can cause severe problems, including difficulty breathing, tremors, kidney failure, heart attacks, and heart failure”.