Longtime readers from years, even decades, past will remember that Oprah Winfrey used to be a not-so-uncommon topic of this blog. The reason, of course, was that she had built an empire out of her long-running syndicated daytime television talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ran from 1986 until she ended the show in 2011, during which time she not-infrequently used her platform to promote dubious health topics, in addition to other harmful ideas (e.g., The Secret) and conspiracy theories like the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the first time I noticed her promotion of quackery was in 2007, when she had actress Jenny McCarthy as a guest on her show, allowing McCarthy to promote her antivax claims that vaccines had made her child Evan autistic and portraying herself as a “warrior mom” fighting to “cure” Evan.
From there, as they say, the rest is history in that for a time, Jenny McCarthy became the celebrity face of the antivax movement, even leading an antivax “march on Washington” in 2008 with her then-paramore, comedian Jim Carrey. Its slogan? “Green Our Vaccines.” The through-line to the “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement is hard to deny, particularly the false claim that there are so many “toxins” in vaccines.
What brought Oprah to mind again were articles published late last week with titles like Oprah Finally Addresses the Trumpy Doctors She Made Into Stars; Oprah washes her hands of Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz over their pro-Trump politics: ‘Not one thing to do with me’; and How Oprah Built an Empire. Now here’s the funny thing. Oprah is distancing herself from just the politics, because she doesn’t like Donald Trump. In contrast, however, she seems perfectly fine with all the quackery, conspiracy theories, and New Age nonsense that she promoted. Before I get to her recent interview, here’s a bit of background.
I’ve been pointing out how bad Oprah is for literally decades now, and, to be fair, nowhere near all of the horror with respect to science, medicine, and New Age woo that Oprah inflicted upon the masses, becoming a billionaire and incredibly influential in the process. Relevant to the current “make American great again” (MAGA) and MAHA hellscape, more than anyone else Oprah was responsible for making an alternative medicine-friendly cardiothoracic surgeon named Dr. Mehmet Oz and a clinical psychologist named Dr. Phil McGraw (better known as just “Dr. Phil”) into a household names. Thanks to Oprah, both had popular long-running daytime TV shows that valued spectacle over sound information and often promoted dubious (at best) health takes. Unsurprisingly, later both contributed to COVID-19 disinformation and minimization early in the pandemic, but that’s just part of their misdeeds. Also, to be fair, I feel obligated here to point out that Oprah is guilty of so much more than just Dr. Oz (who currently has a powerful position within the Trump administration) and Dr. Phil (who does not, although he likes to do ride-alongs with ICE and was appointed by President Trump to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission in May last year). Dr. Phil, like Dr. Oz, also used his show to promote a lot of pseudoscience and misinformation about health, generating scandal as he did so.
I’ve long referred to Dr. Oz as America’s quack who owes his media career to Oprah. Here’s why. After five years appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show as a recurring guest dubbed “America’s doctor,” Dr. Oz parlayed that gig (with Oprah’s heavy support) into his long-running daytime medical talk show, The Dr. Oz Show, where, along with relatively benign segments on various health issues, he also promoted psychic mediums (such as John Edward and “Long Island Medium” Theresa Caputo) as healers, as well as real faith healers, homeopathy, reiki, and fear mongering about GMOs, cell phones and breast cancer. By 2014, Dr. Oz’s reputation for quackery had gotten so bad that he was increasingly facing less than adoring press and was hauled before Senator Claire McCaskill’s (D-MO) committee for his unscrupulous boosterism for unproven weight loss supplements, where he was soundly humbled. All of this happened long before the pandemic hit. Indeed, Dr. Oz even once had Mike Adams—yes, that Mike Adams, founder of Natural News!—as a guest on his show. Consistent with that, long before MAHA, Dr. Oz himself supported antivaccine hucksters, featuring, for example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on his show in 2014 to hawk his antivaccine book with “functional medicine” quack Dr. Mark Hyman. (Now RFK Jr. is his boss, and Dr. Oz eagerly does his boss’s bidding.)
Dr. Oz eventually gave up his daytime show to run for the Senate in 2022 as a carpetbagger in Pennsylvania, where he lost to John Fetterman. Unfortunately, Dr. Oz’s political career did not end then, because in 2024, after winning the Presidency for a second time, Donald Trump appointed him as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), putting him in charge, in addition to Medicare and Medicaid, of administering the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There, predictably Dr. Oz went all-in with MAHA, including embracing its soft eugenics that emphasized health as a consequence of virtue, and its authoritarian tendencies.
Overall, from my perspective (and that of supporters of science-based medicine) Oprah had a malign influence on the science of medicine, driven by the “Oprah effect,” an observation that anything featured on Oprah’s show would suddenly sell quite a lot of product. Meanwhile, her show went out of its way to minimize skepticism and, whenever a skeptic was on her show, to make it difficult for him to be taken seriously. An excellent example was recounted by James Randi himself. It was the story of Oprah basically using selective editing, timing, selection, and staging of a “debate” over psychic abilities to make the psychics seem more credible and the skeptics look stupid. Indeed, so pervasive was the Oprah effect that I once referred to it as the “Oprah-fication” of medicine and even got an op-ed published in The Toronto Star making that same point. In retrospect, I can’t help but conclude that Oprah was very much an early trailblazer for the movement that later became MAHA.
Let’s take a look at what Oprah said in an interview with Emmy Magazine about making Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil into stars:
People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views. Dr. Phil, he was so practical, so down to earth, so real. And he would ride in the car with me every morning on the way to trial, where I’m literally sitting on trial for six weeks. [In 1998, Winfrey was sued by Texas cattlemen who accused her of defaming the beef industry.] I felt that he was so instrumental in helping me. I thought, “Oh, you could help a lot of people. You should come on my show.”
Gayle introduced me to Dr. Oz. He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements. I thought he had the language for explaining medical things in a way that was helpful to me. I thought it would be helpful to many other people. And that is how they ended up on the show.
Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them. At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.
It’s nice that Dr. Phil supported Oprah during the civil suit brought against her, and, yes, one can sort of see how she might try to distance herself from Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil because of their toxic politics. However, notice one thing. She basically only mentions their “politics or their views.” She doesn’t mention the health misinformation that they promoted. Why? Because the reason she recruited them to be on her show and then later mentored them as media figures and provided the cash for them to get their own shows up and running was because she was totally down with their views on health.
The rest of the interview was, predictably, pretty fluffy. Indeed, given the fluff-driven nature of a celebrity interview like this, I was actually kind of surprised that the interviewer brought up Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. I would have very much liked to have see questions about, for example, Winfrey’s promotion of the faith healer known as John of God. This particular faith healer was a rather obvious fraud who used rather obvious carny tricks, like the “forceps up the nose” and the “cornea scraping” tricks. Then, again, there was her promotion of Jenny McCarthy, whose appearance with Oprah catapulted her to be the celebrity face of the antivax movement for several years, before she started soft-pedaling her antivax views in order to have a career again. Let’s also not forget Oprah’s friend and frequent guest Christiane Northrup, who promotes breast cancer quackery and, these days, so much worse. Oprah also featured Suzanne Somers and her various forms of quackery on her show.
Oprah spent 25 years promoting all manner of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and quackery on her show, becoming incredibly wealthy, famous, and influential in the process. Whether it was Satanic panic, New Age mysticism like The Secret (even when it led to a breast cancer patient foregoing effective treatment), antivax propaganda from Jenny McCarthy, or the various quackery featured on her show, she promoted it all cheerfully and shamelessly. She can hide behind distancing herself from the political views of her two most famous protégés, but she can’t distance herself from the quackery and health misinformation they all promoted. There is a reason why I call her a trailblazer for MAHA. No doubt she would object to being referred to that way because she considers the politics associated with MAHA to be odious. However, she promoted the very same sorts of ideas, the same ideas that health is a matter of personal will and virtue, and the same sorts of quackery that are now MAHA.
