Gabriel Arana, Senior Media Editor at The Huffington Post, writes:
"What I remember most about coming on the Dr. Oz show is speaking to one of his producers about what I was going to say, a sort of rehearsal. The producer kept interjecting: "We have a saying around here: Is this something Cathy in Iowa would care about? That's not something a housewife sitting on the couch at home cares about." The subtext was clear: we think our viewers are dumb. Another thing I recall: Being kicked out of the dressing room I had been plopped in because Clay Aiken, who knew nothing about ex-gay therapy but would resonate with all the frumpy Cathys in flyover states, needed his own.
The way Dr. Oz treated ex-gay therapy perfectly illustrates his penchant for promoting scientifically unsound therapies and products. It's the reason 10 prominent physicians, led by Stanford University's Henry Miller, have called on Columbia University, where Oz is vice chair of the surgery department, to fire him. "Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine," their letter reads. "[W]orst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain."
Dr. Oz didn't have anything to gain financially from lending his average daily audience of four million people to those peddling dangerous cures to homosexuality. But he presented ex-gay therapy as a scientific debate, featuring the stories of people like me who tried to change their sexual orientation and nearly killed themselves in the process, and those who claimed to have successfully prayed away the gay."
