DR OZ - PROFESSIONAL POS

Let me start by stating for the record I have thought Mehmet Oz was a fucking piece of shit since the first time I saw that smarmy smile of his on the TV - and immediately changed the channel. The man is a charlatan and a snake-oil salesman with his phoney-baloney “New Age” cures that were proven to be hooey back in the 19th Century, like most everything else associated with the “New Age.” Phrenology anyone? There’s a “holistic practictioner” out there who will be happy to examine the bumps on your noggin. Along with any number of other ancient items long ago filed under the subject heading Ignorant Bullshit.

So when, in recent days, rumors that Doc Oz (notice how close that is to “Doc Oc”?) abused puppies in the course of gruesome medical experiments during his time at Columbia University became rampant on social media, I was following it with interest, since I really love it when Republicans rip of their masks and expose the fact they really are the mole people.

The claim is so good if you’re an Oz-hater that you have to be careful, it almost sounds made up, discovering the least-defensible thing about this scumbag, too good to be true.

As with most of the stuff you find on the internet, there appears to be truth mixed with exaggeration in this.

As it turns out, the tweet saying:

“Among his violations, Oz pumped injections into puppies’ hearts without sedation. People noted the puppies’ screams could be heard through closed doors, then he left them dead in a plastic garbage bag.”

Is not accurate. At least not the part about Oz beingthe one with the syringe in his hand. The screaming puppies heard through closed doors and them ending up in a plastic garbage bag, though, is factual according to the Official Findings.

To me, the whole truth - as is almost always the case - is far worse.

Catherine Dell’Orto, then a postdoctoral veterinary fellow, who originally blew the whistle on studies that she says “were very badly done,” has come forward since all this surfaced and stated, “It wasn’t him that did the euthanasia of the puppies,”

However, Oz was in fact the director of a research program at Columbia involving experiments on puppies when the university agreed to settle animal abuse claims with the USDA stemming from research he was in charge of.

So what’s the full story? Here’s what we know.

In 2002, Oz was Director of the Cardiovascular Institute at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center of New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Dell’Orto, a graduate veterinary student who was in a position to know about the experiements, went public with allegations of animal mistreatment in medical research testing. Her claims were picked up by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which waged a public campaign.

The primary allegation was abuse towards primates. But it was the treatment of puppies that brought Oz into the controversy. I was surprised to realize he first gained renown as a cardiovascular research surgeon before becoming a Professional Putz (“Putz”: Yiddish for “a penis that thinks it’s a person”) on TV. He has contributed to multiple studies on cardiac function in dogs.

At Columbia, the experiments were supposed to “model human cardiac failure.” The dogs’ hearts were paced quickly for “six to eight weeks,” and then various treatments attempted to bring them back to proper heart function.

According to Dell’Orto, “There was no humane endpoint; there were major, multiple survival surgeries for these dogs. They suffered quite a bit prior to death, and a lot of them were just found dead in the cages.”

Oz was the principal investigator on these experiments. If one wants to apply the analogy of a ship’s captain, or anyone else in charge of pretty much everything else, it would mean he was responsible for the operation and administration of the experiments on all points.

Dell’Orto tried to bring attention to what was going on through internal channels at Columbia and then the USDA, and got no response (Surprise! Surprise! Not.) She then contacted PETA in 2002, first telling them about the treatment of macaques and baboons, following up with details about the puppies.

A letter written in 2003 by Mary Beth Sweetland, then director of PETA’s Research & Investigations Department, describes an incident involving a number of puppies:

“According to the complainant, a litter of fully conscious puppies was placed in a plastic bag and killed with an intracardiac (IC) injection of expired Beuthanasia-D. According to the complainant, the puppies cried out as they received the IC injection because it is, of course, very painful and should not be done without first anesthetizing the animals.”

Oz is not mentioned in a series of the letters until after the USDA and Columbia reached a settlement for whopping $2,000 fine in the spring of 2004. (Yeah, I’ll bet those Ivy Leaguers learned their lesson after suffering through the pain of making that payout. Not.)

The settlement was based on an internal investigation by Columbia’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, whose findings were accepted by USDA. Dell’Orto says “That internal review had investigators on the committee who were also complicit in this type of poorly designed, cruel animal experimentation.”

The committee’s findings pertaining to dogs are dated October 2003:

“Pups whelped from a dog being used in a research study were euthanized with outdated euthanasia solution; drug use logs indicate the pups were not properly sedated at the time as claimed by person administering euthanasia.”

“Dog exercise plan does not provide evidence that plan is approved by the attending veterinarian.”

Documented breaks from protocol found in a November 2003 review include “the improper administration of an injectable euthanasia agent.” This violation didn’t explicitly mention dogs, but the misuse of euthanasia wasn’t alleged in the case of the primates; their reported abuse came from the conditions of their containment and experimental practices, some of which they were not properly anesthetized for.

While administering euthanasia is rarely, if ever, a job assigned to department leaders or directors like Oz, Dell’Orto points out,“When your name is on the experiment, and the way the experiment is designed inflicts such cruelty to these animals, by design, there’s a problem.” The captain of the ship is generally considered responsible for everything that happens aboard..

Another letter from Sweetland that followed the USDA settlement in the fall of 2004 does call out Oz by name:

“Dr. Oz … is responsible for the extreme suffering endured by dogs used in his heart experiments. Columbia’s IACUC appears to have approved these highly invasive and stressful experiments without demanding a humane endpoint for the animals.”

In the letter, Sweetland recounts the last 29 days in the life of a dog used in one of Oz’s experiments, based on what she describes as 6,313 records from the dog’s file. After weeks of improper eating, urination, bowel movements, and wound care, the last day is described:

“Day 29: Does not want to come out of cage, right hind leg swollen; catheter out; chewed through [tube], not eating, breathing very labored, no stool, tried to feed - will not eat anything; p.m. Mehmet Oz took for last experiment.”

The USDA did not follow up on the later allegations from 2004, and neither did Columbia’s internal review. When Dell’Orto took her concerns to then-head veterinarian Popilskis, he told her “You still don’t understand do you? It’s all political.”

In other words, Oz could do whatever he wanted without being questioned because of his celebrity status.

The result of the fairly light USDA settlement fine may have had a more subtle impact. Following that, the National Institutes of Health stopped funding Dr. Oz’s work.

And now Dr. Mengele, er, I mean Oz, wants to be a Senator and write rules for the rest of us.

And as with the subject of the next post to come, the national Republican establishment has nothing to say about this.

Some events, many of them considered small at the time, turn out in retrospect to be “character tells.. This one “tells” us a lot about the Kindly Doc Oz.

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