Why I won’t watch the Oprah show…
This article is just one reason or example as to why I won’t watch the Oprah show anymore. Anyone who is as biased as she has shown herself to be (remember during the campaign having Obama on her show but not McCain or Palin?) is not someone I would want to support with my TV rating.
When Dr. Lauren Streicher, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago, got a call from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” inviting her to discuss menopausal hormones with actress Suzanne Somers, she figured she’d better read Somers’s best-selling books on the subject. As Streicher worked her way through the first chapter, she started underlining every sentence she felt was inaccurate. “But pretty soon, I had to stop,” Streicher says, “because I was underlining almost everything.”The taping of the show, which aired Jan. 29, proved equally disconcerting. Somers, a self-styled hormone and anti-aging expert whose controversial books promise midlife women that they will feel young and sexy if they take unregulated hormone therapy (HT) in much higher doses and for much longer time periods than most experts recommend, was literally given center stage.
Let’s all get our medical advice from an actress for goodness sakes. I should hope that people have more sense than that. But in this celebrity-worship-crazed society we live in today, one never knows. I’m all for alternative ideas on medicine and the human body and I’m the first to agree that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are probably in cahoots. But to go as far as Oprah has in giving Sommers a center stage presence on her show is a real head scratcher since Sommers is by far not a hormone expert. Well, like the saying goes, you get what you “pay” for (goes for money spent and watching whose advice you take).
Good article – it discusses a particular example of what puzzles me about the popularity of Oprah. I have tried to watch the show about 3 times, but get through about 10 minutes of it and have to switch after boredom sets in. Its usually about dieting or the sex life of some minor celebrity.