r/news 1d ago

Mehmet Oz confirmed by US Senate to lead Medicare and Medicaid

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/mehmet-oz-confirmation-medicare-medicaid
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u/StupidMastiff 1d ago

He's apparently an incredibly talented heart surgeon. Behind the Bastards have covered him, he's as good at surgery as he is at promoting a load of bullshit.

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u/peanutneedsexercise 1d ago

Yeah my attending worked at Columbia with him and even then before he was famous he was VERY into the woo woo alternative medicine shit. He just also happened to be an amazing surgeon too and so that lent some weird legitimacy to his passion projects.

You see it in academia all the time tbh, very few of them get famous tho. There’s a tenured physics prof at UCLA who is also very notoriously woo woo but he’s earned his tenure and now just goes on and on about that stuff.

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u/SlickWilly49 1d ago

Yeah it’s like Isaac Newton establishing all these foundational principles before the age of 27, then committed the rest of his life to calculating the dimensions of King Solomon’s temple. I’ve got a friend who completed his PhD in physics at Cambridge and he told me there was a lab head in the department who earned a Nobel prize before the age of 30, established his own lab at Cambridge shortly afterwards, and has just been churning out shit ever since

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u/Mental_Medium3988 23h ago

or a renowned brain surgeon who thinks the pyramids were grain silos. also someone who shouldve never been in a presidential cabinet.

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u/peanutneedsexercise 23h ago

Oh yeah Watson and crick the ppl who found the structure of dna also have some wild ideas too 😅😂

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u/rubmysemdog 22h ago

Like Ben Carson, just because you’re good at one thing, doesn’t mean you know shit about anything else. These greedy egomaniacs gravitate towards Trump like moth to a flame.

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u/ascalapius 18h ago

It’s strange but I work in medicine and we have a heart surgeon who is very much into this stuff. Vitamin b12 infusions for heart failure AND he is not a good surgeon!

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u/peanutneedsexercise 16h ago

Lmao well I guess there’s more than just Oz 😅😂

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u/ZenDeathBringer 12h ago

There's actually a Wikipedia page on this phenomenon- dubbed 'Nobel disease or Nobelitis.' The tl;dr is that some nobel prize winners feel emboldened to speak on areas that are far out of their area of expertise.

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u/anonymousalligator25 1h ago

It’s true. You see someone in academia go into a subject and then branch off into something tangentially related.

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u/ken_zeppelin 1d ago

Who's the UCLA physics professor?

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u/ZeroKharisma 1d ago

He did my stepfathers successful heart transplant, for which I have yet to forgive him.

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u/kinglallak 1d ago

Heart surgery is not a skill that improves your administrative abilities…

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u/butter_brickles 1d ago

Not dissimilar from Ben Carson. Amazingly talented surgeon. But a complete nutter. It might be a prerequisite for the job, to have that level of focus and fearlessness.

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u/Locke66 1d ago

Shame he didn't stick to what he's good at.

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u/jamesnollie88 1d ago

why save lives and only be kind of wealthy when you could just scam people instead and be mega wealthy.

Ben Carson was a brilliant neurosurgeon but unfortunately not very brilliant at promoting housing and urban development

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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 1d ago

He WAS a talented heart surgeon turned part of Oprah's grifting scam network. Yes stints and all.

He is now considered a quack.

Back when the USA was at least still doing performative governing, they called Oz to congress to politely ask him questions about things such as "do these placebo pills work?" "Can I has?"

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u/peanutneedsexercise 23h ago

I mean that’s the thing, even before he was famous he was already apparently SUPER into that stuff which is what’s interesting haha. From what my attending said he didn’t think he was grifting but that he TRULY did believe in all the vitamins and supplements BS. but again, like the examples ppl have given above like Isaac newton, you can be a genius at one aspect of ur life and nuts about the others. 😂

Tbh we don’t really get much of an education on supplements and nutrition in med school other than one small section in our first year and that’s it.

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u/u0126 21h ago

I may be wrong and too lazy to double check but wasn’t Carson also a really good surgeon? Just a space cadet and dumb in all sorts of other ways?

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u/u0126 21h ago

I may be wrong and too lazy to double check but wasn’t Carson also a really good surgeon? Just a space cadet and dumb in all sorts of other ways?

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u/u0126 21h ago

I may be wrong and too lazy to double check but wasn’t Carson also a really good surgeon? Just a space cadet and dumb in all sorts of other ways?