Dr OZ

Ugh, I can't stand the health sensationalism present on Dr. Oz. That show preys on the elderly and the uneducated. I can't tell you how many times my husband's grandmother has said, "I saw on Dr. Oz..." and then spouted off some very poorly generalized bit of health news. By generalization, I mean the concept wherein a conclusion about a particular characteristic is reached based on a sample from a group (Boss, 2010). See also: Generalization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Essentially, what happens is that journalists see studies, jump on them, and try to draw a wider conclusion from the limited sample covered in the study. But the sample size can be too small for the results to be good ones (see 'Chinese Restaurant Syndrome' http://hss.sas.upenn.edu/system/files/ChineseSyndrome%2520schom.pdf), or it could be based on a study in animals (see Saccharin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) that is not easily generalized to a human population.

It's also rampant with an appeal to authority aspect; Dr. Oz is presented to the audience as a health expert, and due to the title of the show, people assume he is knowledgeable about what he purports to be knowledgeable about; however, he is actually a surgeon. I'm not saying he knows nothing about health, but I doubt his credentials give him the expertise necessary to make judgments the way he does.

There are some other logical fallacies that show is guilty of, which is one of the reasons I dislike it so strongly.

 

That's an awful lot of words to say Dr. Oz is full of shit.

 

Yeah, basically Dr. Oz is the Dr. Phil of physical health, whereas Dr. Phil is the Deepak Chopra of psychological health.

As for Deepak Chopra, he's basically the Oprah of spirituality.

As for Oprah, well, she's not exactly a person so much as a brand.

But whatevs.