Mehmet Oz | |
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Oz at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2012
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Born |
Mehmet Cengiz Öz June 11, 1960 Cleveland, Ohio, United States |
Residence | Cliffside Park, New Jersey, U.S. |
Education |
Harvard University (A.B.) University of Pennsylvania (M.D., M.B.A.) |
Occupation | Surgeon, talk show host, author |
Years active | 1982–present |
Spouse(s) | Lisa Lemole (m. 1985) |
Website | www |
Mehmet Cengiz Oz (Turkish: [mehˈmet dʒenˈɟiz øz]; born June 11, 1960), better known as Dr. Oz, is a Turkish-Americancardiothoracic surgeon and professor at Columbia University, pseudoscience promoter, author and television personality.
Oz came to general prominence with appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show beginning in 2004, and later on Larry King Live and other TV programs. In 2009, The Dr. Oz Show, a daily television program focusing on medical issues and personal health, was launched by Winfrey's Harpo Productions and Sony Pictures.
He is a proponent of alternative medicine and has been criticized by physicians, government officials and publications, including Popular Science and The New Yorker, for giving non-scientific advice. In a Senate hearing on weight loss scams, Senator Claire McCaskill chided Oz, saying: "The scientific community is almost monolithic against you in terms of the efficacy of the three products you call miracles". An investigation by the British Medical Journal found that 46% of his claims were misleading or incorrect.
Oz was born in 1960 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Suna and Mustafa Öz, who had emigrated from Konya Province, Turkey. Mustafa, born in Bozkır, a small town in central Turkey, earned scholarships that allowed him to emigrate to the United States as a medical resident in 1955. Suna (née Atabay), who comes from a wealthy İstanbul family, is the daughter of a pharmacist with Circassian (Shapsug) descent on her mother's side. Mehmet Cengiz Oz has two sisters, Seval Öz and Nazlim Öz.