Today I finished, or ‘graduated,’ my cardiac therapy program. It went for 36 sessions (the most that insurance covers, apparently), and began the Wednesday after Labor Day, but what with the facility’s shutdown for a month due to plumbing issues, and the holidays, and one unsettled week when I skipped, my 36 weeks didn’t end until today. More in the endpiece below.
Today’s links, with quotes and comments, are about Dr. Oz and the deliberate noise-making of conspiracy theorists.
NYT, Annaliese Griffin, 9 Jan 2022: Take a Good Look at What Dr. Oz Is Selling Us Now
(This was online several days ago and just appeared in the print paper yesterday.)
Dr. (Mehmat) Oz is the surgeon and TV doctor who’s been criticized for years for touting bogus medical advice on his TV show. He’s come to wider attention with his announced candidacy for senator from Pennsylvania.
As Dr. Oz pursues this pivotal position, he should be seen as more than a celebrity turned politician. He’s rightly understood as a kind of quasi-religious leader, one who has set up his revival tent between a yoga studio and an urgent-care clinic, with the television cameras rolling. And many Americans are primed and ready to commit to his doctrine, which promises boundless possibility so long as we invest in individual responsibility — for our health and for everything else.
Why is he so popular? First guess: he’s charismatic and offers lots of simple solutions to complex problems, especially that of being overweight. And there are always people out there who will believe anything you tell them.
In the article Oz explains how his so many surgeries on obese people gave him to the drive to help them improve their lives.
And his announcement that he is now making the leap from daytime television to national politics took on a downright rapturous tone: “I’m running for the Senate to empower you to control your destiny,” he wrote in an essay in The Washington Examiner, “to reinvigorate our great nation, and to reignite the divine spark that we should always be seeing in each other.”
The thousands of on-air hours Dr. Oz has spent ministering to Americans’ health concerns have made him a multimillionaire, and also a controversial figure. He has praised unproven supplements such as sage leaf tea, green coffee bean extract and raspberry ketones as “miracles” for weight loss and was chastised by senators for doing so. He was part of a team at Columbia University that patented a device to strengthen damaged heart valves, and also was the target of a letter of protest by physicians who asked why the university kept him on the faculty since he had shown “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”
His advice on Covid-19 has been contradictory. But here’s the key to his success:
The thousands of on-air hours Dr. Oz has spent ministering to Americans’ health concerns have made him a multimillionaire, and also a controversial figure. He has praised unproven supplements such as sage leaf tea, green coffee bean extract and raspberry ketones as “miracles” for weight loss and was chastised by senators for doing so. He was part of a team at Columbia University that patented a device to strengthen damaged heart valves, and also was the target of a letter of protest by physicians who asked why the university kept him on the faculty since he had shown “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”
The article asks,
The bigger question is why so many are ready to believe that organic, cold-pressed snake oil could stop us from aging, cure cancer, make us lose weight and end a pandemic?
There’s something deeply American in Dr. Oz’s quest to reach a higher state via the improvement of the body. Its roots can be found, arguably, in the spiritual strivings of the Transcendentalists, the group of 19th-century nature-obsessed New England philosophers.
(Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
The same ideas, filtered through the 21st-century preoccupation with wellness, quickly arrives at the idea that we shortchange ourselves by accepting what we are told by society — by doctors, scientists or government health officials — if it contradicts our individual instincts or opinions.
This is, of course, dangerous, and the fodder for conspiracy theories and the peculiarly American mistrust of the government. And it undermines coordinated efforts to defeat worldwide problems, like Covid-19 and climate change. In a world increasingly assaulted by world-wide catastrophes, this attitude is the route to doom.
The same ideas, filtered through the 21st-century preoccupation with wellness, quickly arrives at the idea that we shortchange ourselves by accepting what we are told by society — by doctors, scientists or government health officials — if it contradicts our individual instincts or opinions.
Dr. Oz is running a business.
And by recommending products and services, Dr. Oz offers us opportunities to buy things — a very American way to feel empowered. He helps us find the perfect alchemy of diet, exercise and açaí berries to keep us spry, thin, and disease-free forever, as long as we can pay for it all out of pocket. In our individualist, consumerist society, wealth is health.
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 12 Jan 2022: Republicans have hijacked the process: Congressional hearings are now rife with conspiracy theories, subtitled, “Taxpayers are funding a right wing derangement loop, allowing GOP leaders to detach their base further from reality”
The repost at Alternet is called The real insidious reason the GOP spread conspiracy theories that don’t even make sense.
She begins with the item about Ted Cruz using the words “terrorist attack” the other day (concerning Jan. 6, 2021). Cruz has been backpedaling and changing the subject ever since, focusing on the conspiracy theory that it was the FBI who caused the Capitol riot.
Here’s the gist of Marcotte’s argument:
Like most right-wing conspiracy theories, this one is both incoherent and easily debunked. But, crucially, this narrative isn’t supposed to make sense. On the contrary, the nonsensical nature of it is very much by design. The whole point of these incoherent conspiracy theories is to create a cloud of bewildering disinformation so thick that the actual truth gets lost in a maze of lies, hand-waving and fart noises.
Even more crucially, Cruz’s performance yesterday worked exactly as intended, providing ample video footage that could be cut up and re-edited into clips to be disseminated across right-wing land as “proof” that the FBI is hiding something. Misleading clips spread rapidly on social media with breathless text like “the FBI stonewalled and refused to answer” and “The American people deserve answers.”
No one sharing these videos wants “answers,” however. They just want to make a bunch of noise to distract from the fact that there’s no mystery regarding what happened on January 6. It was an insurrection, instigated by Trump, for the purpose of overthrowing an election so he could be installed as an illegitimate president.
Unfortunately, Cruz’s sleazy behavior Tuesday is not an anomaly, but part of a larger right-wing derangement feedback loop.
The article goes on with more, e.g. about Fauci, the coronavirus, and a socialist hoax. “Yes, these ideas contradict each other. No, the people who claim to believe these theories don’t care about that contradiction. As usual, the point is not to make sense, but to grind rational discourse into dust.”
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I’ve said this before — for any half-witted person, it’s hard to let go of the idea that the people propounding these conspiracy theories aren’t speaking in good faith. Surely the conspiracy theorists have reasons for what they believe?
Well, no, these days, most of them don’t. They’re just making noise, seeing how many people they can fool, muddying the waters. Key evidence: Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year: Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” approach is destroying American democracy. They’re open about it.
Moreover, I’m gathering there is something even more insidious going on. Some people truly don’t understand that claims and evidence need to be connected. There are people who think making a claim and getting people to believe you — these include charlatans of all stripes, not just politicians — is all you need. And because there are always people out there ready to believe… it is for some.
(These people include, for example, all the people who claim themselves to be “prophets,” invariably prophesizing the return of D.T., the imminent end of the world, and so on. Are these folks the equivalent of the prophets of the OT, or did the latter just get better press and ghostwriters? I’ll explore this idea in a future post.)
Endpiece
The cardiac therapy was worthwhile, if only by forcing me to do cardiac exercise, on treadmills or exercycles, for 30 minutes three times a week. (Plus 15 minutes at beginning and end for stretching and warm-up/warm-down.)
Several weeks before the end, they gave me an “exit survey” set of forms that mirrored the entry forms: to assess my general health and eating habits. I returned it to them on Monday. Today, one of the nurses talked with me, while I was still riding the exercycle (this is a stationary bike with handles that move back and forth in synch with the pedals), about my plans for future exercising, and so on.
We do in fact have an exercycle — or perhaps properly called a “stationary bicycle,” with no moving handles — in our garage. I used it back in Woodland Hills, but since we moved to Oakland, it’s sat in the garage gathering dust, partly because to bring it up to the main floor would require carrying up a staircase, and when the movers moved us in, there was no obvious place to put it. (And it’s heavy.) But Y and his son J assure me they can bring it into the house, and put it into the library room where I used to have the desk that is now on the main floor in the living room… And then I can use that three or four times a week, to keep up my cardiac health.
But as one chapter closes, another may be opening…
