NEWS AND COMMENT: Dr. Mehmet Oz is a celebrity doctor. He is known in America as Dr. Oz. He wants to be a senator representing Pennsylvania sitting in the U.S. Senate making the law. The U.S. Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress. The lower chamber is the House of Representatives.
Dr. Oz has a very long Wikipedia page including the fact that he is worth between $76 million and $500 million. He is a Turkish-American television presenter, author and professor and a retired cardiothoracic surgeon.
He’s won several Daytime Emmy awards for Outstanding Informative Talk Show Host. He was awarded Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum. He even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Okay, he is an esteemed, celebrity American citizen with dual American, Turkish citizenship and is the first Muslim candidate to be nominated by either major party for the U.S. Senate. A major success story.
At one time in his career, he was the principal investigator at a Columbia University research laboratory. He was given full scientific administrative and fiscal responsibility for the conduct of his studies. A review of 75 of his studies when he was apparently the lead scientist, revealed that his research killed over 300 dogs and inflicted significant suffering on other animals used in his experiments. This occurred between 1989 and 2010. This report of alleged animal cruelty was published on the Jezebel website.
On that website they report that Dr. Oz’s team experimented on at least 1027 live animals including dogs, small rodents, rabbits, calves and pigs. At least 329 dogs allegedly died in 34 of the experiments. 31 pigs died in two experiments and 38 experiments killed 661 rabbits and rodents according to the Jezebel report.
It appears that the information come from a whistle-blower and veterinarian, Catherine Dell’Orto. She has provided testimony about his research, and it contains allegations of “detailed extensive suffering inflicted on his team’s canine test subjects”. The allegations include multiple violations of the Animal Welfare Act which provides minimum standards of animal welfare when animals are in the possession of laboratories and animal dealers.
For example, Dell’Orto, testified that Dr Oz’s team was cruel to a dog which experienced kidney failure, paralysis, vomiting and lethargy due to their experiments but which wasn’t euthanised for a full two days.
Allegedly there were other “horrifying examples of gratuitously cruel treatment of dogs”. For example, one dog was kept alive for a month for experimentation notwithstanding she was in pain and unstable and that the experimentation was “deemed unusable”.
A litter of puppies was killed by intracardiac injection with syringes using expired drugs inserted directly into the heart without sedation. As I understand it, this is known to be painful and the whole process terrifying for the animal. The killed puppies were put into a garbage bag with living puppies who were the littermates according to the report.
Dell’Orto told PEOPLE that “The puppies killed in the bag were killed by a vet tech”.
It needs to be noted that it wasn’t Dr. Oz himself who was allegedly being cruel to these laboratory animals but his staff. However, he was, I believe, the lead scientist or one of the lead scientists and his “name is on the experiment”.
There are other alleged examples of animal cruelty. Comment: it has to be said, from my perspective, that all of animal testing is inherently cruel but the examples reported here are overlaid on top of that default situation.
Below are some more articles on animal testing.