Are Oprah’s recommendations for health care really good for your health? It’s been a while since I thought so and now it seems that Newsweek may just share my disbelief at some of what the most powerful woman in journalism is telling her ever growing army of devoted followers.
The article titled “Why Health Advice on ‘Oprah’ Could Make You Sick“, authors Weston Kosnova and Pat Wingert, which was published in the June 8th 2009 edition of Newsweek implies what I’ve been thinking for a long time. That Oprah is treading on dangerous ground when it comes to health care advice.
Not only is has she featured Suzanne Somers as something to be admired for her willingness to inject herself with horemones and to use an inordinate amount of supplements in her quest to live well into her hundreds, but she’s been very carefully cultivating relationships with supporters of the more (for the sake of a better word) extreme and sometimes even borderline insane medical treatments available today.
This ever growing group of medical outsiders includes jenny McCarthy, whom even in the face of clinical studies believes that the preferred treatment for autism is to allow our children to be made susceptible to Measles, Mumps or Rubella and perhaps even to cease vaccines at all. I mean really, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we allowed smallpox to come back into the mainstream?
Not only does Oprah seem to feel that little Jenny the Mother Warrior, who feels that “mommy instincts” are far more valuable than the volumes of research garnered by the medical community, is good enough to be featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, she also feels that her message is valuable enough to have her own talk show on the newly created Oprah Winfrey Network. While I doubt that a single medical issue will be covered well on this show, I can assure you that it will be good for a hell of a laugh, at least until you get the overwhelming urge to throw your new flat screen out the window. (Or better yet, just stop watching. Ratings will always win over idiocy).
The Newsweek article covers all of these topics much more eloquently than I can here. Unfortunately, I am no journalist and tend to become emotional over some of the topics covered. I simply cannot find the strength of will to be objective.
I hope that I am not the only person that feels this way.
As Stan Lee so eloquently puts it in Spider Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Oprah most definitely has the power, but it appears that the only responsibility she is showing on these topics is to her ratings and her bottom line. This is not just sad, but dangerous. Too many people hang on Oprah’s every word as though it were some strange new gospel. The cost in the end could be lives.
Enough said.
Peace, I’m out.
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Oprah is a very strong base of followers who will stick to her every word even topics such as health care advice. She needs to back away for issues such as this and leave it up to the professionals.
Jenny McCarthy has never said the world would be a better place if smallpox came back. She is not anti-vaccine, as she will say for the 3,457th time, she is anti-toxin and anti-schedule. This is a common scare-mongering tactic used by people who simply don’t understand diseases and vaccines.
I had the measles, mumps and rubella growing up. Guess what. I’m fine. I got to spend a grand total of 6 days in my room watching TV and eating ice cream. Then I got better and life goes on.
The “volumes of research” you refer to have never, ever once studied the cumulative effects that so many vaccines have on infant children. Not one study. Ever. If that’s the safety record you are referring to, no wonder so many parents don’t trust their doctors and listen to parents of *recovered* children as to how to help their children.
Have you ever actually read the studies yourself? Or do you just repeat Newsweek and CNN? I suggest you go to http://www.14studies.org and actually read for yourself what the “volumes of research” have to say, WHO paid for them, and what TIES to Big Pharma all of them have. Every single one has enormous conflicts of interest. The fact so many people gloss over this is very irritating.
My son never spoke a word, until we chelated, and began speaking in 2-3 words sentances 6 weeks after we began. And this is happening with thousands of children all over the country. Jenny McCarthy is not on her own, so go ahead and make fun of her being blond, being a Playboy model, or dating a A-list celebrity. SHE is backed up by “volumes of research” and big time doctors with lots of fancy diplomas hanging on their walls, just like your guys in white coats. Difference is, Big Pharma’s not paying her to be their whore.
Jessica,
I’m glad that your son is doing better, but I doubt highly the chellation has anything at all to do with that.
Yes, I’ve read the studies you mention. They are at best, pseudo-science and more accurately, science fiction.
What I think you should research is the history of the people and companies you are backing. they switch from condition to condition touting chellation as the answer until they are proven to be quacks, then wait a few years and announce they have found a breakthrough cure for the next hot-topic disease or condition. It’s crap, it’s been crap and it will remain crap; Nothing more than expensive promises to parents, loved ones and the afflicted.
You can promote these people all you want. I will stand on my side of the fence and oppose their methods. I do not agree with them. My son is improving using standard methods and has been immunized against everything he should have been. He was BORN autistic.
Best wishes for your child. I hope the improvements continue.
Jessica,
It is completely irresponsible to be so flippant about having the measles, mumps and rubella. You are lucky that you are fine, but so many are not. Things don’t always get better and life doesn’t always go on. My cousin died from the measles. It caused him to go into a vegetative state at the age of 6 and he remained that way for the next 12 years until he finally died. It destroyed my aunt and uncle to have to watch their child grow into a man while lying motionless in a hospital bed.
I understand why you are angry and why you are looking for the cause of and a cure for the condition that ails your child. My son doesn’t have autism, but has other challenges and I am equally as passionate in my quest to help him get better. But emotion sometimes makes us lose sight of the facts. We see what we want to see and ignore facts that don’t fit into what we so desperately want to believe.
And in your quest to demonize vaccines and doctors for being “whores” to “Big Pharma” you are overlooking the fact that companies are also getting rich off of chelation therapies while countless families of autistic children are going broke from this snake oil.
Godspeed.
What a wonderful read this post was. Do you mind if I bookmark your site?
there is still no permament solution for autism. we just have to take good care of the kids who are suffering autism.*~.