Dr. Oz Scrubs his Website as he Aims to Bring His Quest to End Belly Bloat to Congress

Guess he doesn't stand by any of his previous claims?

Doctors everywhere sobbed at the news that Dr. Oz, the original TV Snake Oil Huckster, has announced his run for the Senate. His dedication to spreading health disinformation is deeply embarrassing to those of us in the profession who don’t want to scam people out of money and who want to keep people alive.

I was thinking of writing a piece on his greatest scams and casual maleficence, so I held my breath and headed over to droz.com for some research…where I was greeted with this abomination.

Okay, no big deal. This is his new barf-worthy landing page where he tells us how he is going to heal America. He is an everyman he tells us, not an elite. Here is his elevator pitch, which frankly reads like a very poorly written voice-over for a soap opera.

Today, America’s heartbeat is in a code red in need of a defibrillator to shock it back to life.

Many of us feel like we’re in the adjacent operating room, armed with insights and already scrubbed up but reluctant to leave our quiet, serene setting for the chaos next door. But for me, stepping into the political arena is the right thing to do.

In our time of need, we want to be surrounded by people of action more than armchair intellectuals, because a great surgeon never censors ideas and never shuts off the light that shines on our wounds, which is what happened while our nation battled the pandemic.

But among the treacly seventh grade prose, which I totally believe Oz wrote, there didn’t seem to be links to any of his past shows. What was up with that?

So I Googled one of his greatest hits that I know by heart, “The Bloat Cure” (in my head it is sung to the theme of The Love Boat. Try it!). Dr. Oz is very obsessed with bloat. He totally missed the opportunity to say he was going to take the bloat out of Congress.

I clicked the link. Nope. No bloat, just the campaign. So I found another link. Surely Dr. Oz hasn’t really abandoned his medically incorrect, yet persistent campaign against gas?

Another bust.

Next I tried his weight loss tips.

Back to his landing page. Argh.

He even abandoned Dr. Mercola and his cancer-causing tanning beds!

Yet another Senate run link.

So I headed to my old Wordpress blog as I knew it contained Oz links. For example, I wrote about Dr. Oz’s tips on how to tell a real psychic from a fake one. No really. I am not shitting you, he thinks there are real psychics. That will be oh so helpful in Congress.

The “fake psychics” link used to take you to an article that tells you how people from “places like Romania” are likely to be fake psychics, but after I pointed out the xenophobia, coincidentally the next day the reference to Romania was removed. Now, you just get the Senate run. But screenshots are forever.

Finally, I checked Facebook. Look at this yummy recipe with a totally not creepy picture of Oz. Surely his recipes are still on his website? How can you be ashamed of cranberries and polenta?

I wearily clicked the link. Nope. Gone. No creamy cranberry polenta for me. So sad.

So that begs the question, if Dr. Oz is using his career as a doctor as his credentials for Congress, then that also includes that den of disinformation he calls a TV show where he has given “reparative therapy” (a type of conversion therapy) a platform, foisted decades of belly blasting scams on the public, presented vaccine hesitancy, amplified Dr. Mercola (a super spreader of disinformation himself), and his many, many shows with psychics as well as the myriad of medically bereft articles and blog posts that used to fester on droz.com.

His shows are still available on YouTube, for now anyway, but the articles and blog posts seem to be gone. It’s also definitely harder to find his old content on YouTube versus his previously uncensored wound of a website.

“A great surgeon never censors ideas and never shuts off the light that shines on our wound.”

Hmmm.

It’s possible Oz is just trying to capitalize on his web traffic, and so the bait and switch of belly bloat for Senate run is temporary. Maybe the Complete Oz Quackatorium will resurface under another url. But it’s also possible he is trying to distance himself from his epic quackery.

Fortunately, we still have his appearances on Fox News, like the time he said that it was “appetizing…that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” He claims he misspoke, but clearly not as on his new Congressified website he tells us, “the arrogant, closed-minded people in charge closed our schools, shut down our businesses and took away our freedom.” And who can forget his promotion of the scam COVID-19 therapy, hydroxychloroquine?

Oz has plans to heal America, just not all Americans as apparently losing a few million people as a sacrifice to capitalism is good medicine.

Based on his body of work, it seems Dr. Oz’s plan to help America get its “mojo back” will likely involve hydroxycholoroquine and psychic mediums. After all, according to him they may be the new therapists.