Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

good article on the quackery promoted by Winfrey:

One frequent guest who offers good advice on how to lose weight and stay healthy is Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Turkish-Amer ican surgeon at Columbia Uni versity. However, Oz, who now has his own spin-off show, promotes a variety of high-priced food supplements, such as acai berry, MonaVie, and Roserv atol, which have no more benefit than a well-balanced diet. He also promotes alternative medicines, notably acu punc ture, which he has praised on Win­frey’s show, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of doctors consider it worthless beyond its placebo effect. He can be faulted further for sitting silently while Winfrey spouts what he must know is balderdash.

Oz is said to be a disciple of the Swed ish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Swe d en borg wrote at length about his out-of-body visits to other planets whose inhabitants and cultures he describes in his writing.

Oz’s best-known book is Healing From the Heart. He is the coauthor of YOU: Being Beautiful, which is the last of five YOU volumes.

Winfrey’s enthusiasm for New Age books reached its apex when she promoted the monumental idiocy of The Secret. It can be described as a hilarious parody of books by Norman Vincent Peale. Instead of God working miracles, the universe itself does it. The Secret teaches that the universe consists of a vibrating energy that can be tapped into with positive thoughts, allowing you to obtain anything you desire—happiness, love, and of course fabulous wealth. Want to lose weight? Then stop having fat thoughts and think thin! Want to become wealthy? Stop thinking poor thoughts. Think rich!

“I’ve been talking about this for years,” Winfrey said. “I just never called it the secret.”

The Secret was first a film produced in Australia in 2006 by New Age author Rhonda Byrne. Two years later, the book version was issued in the U.S. by Astria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. The editors at Simon and Schuster can smell a best seller as soon as they read a manuscript’s first page. Move over Mary Baker Eddy! Thanks to Winfrey, The Secret has sold over seven million copies in the U.S. alone. Time published a recent issue featuring one hundred of the world’s most influential people. In a fit of poor judgment, they included Byrne on the list. She now lives in California not far from Winfrey’s estate. Her newfound wealth, of course, is proof the secret works (for more, see “Secrets and Lies,” SI, May/June 2007).

Let Dr. David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University School of Medicine, have the last word: “The bottom line is that, when it comes to medicine and science, [Winfrey] is a force for ill.”

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/oprah_winfrey_bright_but_gullible_billionaire/