Columbia University Medical Center Cuts Ties With Dr Oz

Columbia University Medical Center has cut public ties with Mehmet Oz, MD, the celebrity doctor who goes by "Dr. Oz" and is now a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, according to The Daily Beast.

The teaching hospital has removed his personnel pages from its website. The move appears to have happened in January, the news outlet reported, after HuffPost reported that his title had been changed to "professor emeritus of surgery." Oz previously served in senior positions, such as vice chair of the surgery department and director of integrated medicine.

Columbia removed Oz's faculty profile and disconnected hyperlinks to the bio on several pages that mention his name from previous articles. His name also no longer appears in website searches for doctors with the school's Irving Medical Center.

In a listing for surgery faculty, Oz is listed as a "special lecturer" and still has office phone and fax numbers, but his listing is not linked to a faculty bio. Nearly every other faculty member without a link is no longer affiliated with the medical center or has died, The Daily Beast reported.

What's more, the outgoing message on the office voicemail for the phone number in the listing is old. It advertises audience tickets to his former daytime TV show and tells callers about medical services that he stopped providing 4 years ago, the news outlet reported.

Columbia has faced heat for its affiliation with Oz for years, extending beyond his decision to run for a Senate seat. In 2015, when he testified before the Senate about his endorsement of "miracle" cures, a group of medical professionals sent a letter to Columbia that demanded that Oz be fired, according to Vox.

"Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops," the doctors wrote. "Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain."

Oz previously served as a well-known surgeon. Then he became a public figure through guest appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which he used to create his own daytime program and build a multimillion-dollar brand.

Oz has drawn criticism from the medical community for years for supporting sham supplements and weight loss products, The Daily Beast reported. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, he appeared on Fox News nearly two dozen times to back hydroxychloroquine. 

In November 2021, when Oz decided to run for Senate, he wrote in an article for the Washington Examiner that the pandemic response provided motivation for his decision to become a political candidate.

"Dissenting opinions from leading scholars were ridiculed and canceled so their ideas could not be disseminated," he wrote. "Instead, the government mandated policies that caused unnecessary suffering."

SOURCES:

The Daily Beast: "'Chickenshit' Move: Columbia Quietly Cuts Ties With Dr. Oz."

HuffPost: "Columbia University Quietly Changes Mehmet Oz's Position Amid Senate Run."

Columbia University: "Columbia Surgery search," "Columbia Surgery faculty listing."

Vox: "A group of doctors just asked Columbia to reconsider Dr. Oz's faculty appointment."

Washington Examiner: "Why I'm running to be a senator from Pennsylvania."

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Cite this: Columbia University Medical Center Cuts Ties With Dr Oz - Medscape - May 06, 2022.