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.