By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Dr. Oz
The son of Turkish immigrants, Mehmet Cengis oz (born June 11, 1960) was raised in Wilmington, Del., not far from where Joe Biden grew up 19 years earlier.
His parents — father Mustafa, who graduated at the top of his class at Cerrahpasa Medical School in 1950, then moved to the U.S. to join the general residency program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio; and mother Suna, who bore him (and up under) three children.
Oldest son Mehmet (Turkish derivation of the Arabic Muhammad, or the “praised one”) was an especially active, avid boy. After graduating from Wilmington’s Tower Hill School, ever hungry to learn, he headed straight to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1982 with a Biology B.A., magna cum laude, naturally.
Meanwhile he played safety for the Crimson football team and goalie on the men’s water polo team. Driven, Oz appeared unstoppable, bound now from Cleveland to Boston to Philadelphia’s Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania.
Twin Degrees
Four years later he won both Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) and Master of Business (M.B.A.) degrees from America’s oldest and still perhaps most prestigious medical School, founded in 1675 and now Penn’s Perelman School of Advanced Medicine, and the Wharton School, founded in 1881 as the world’s first collegiate business school and still a premier institution known for finance, management and entrepreneurship. Puerto Rico-born poet/physician William Carlos Williams (1883-1965) was another noteworthy Penn Med grad.
Oz was awarded UP’s Captain’s Athletic Award for leadership in college and was his class, then student body president. Of course.
A dual U.S. and Turkish citizen, the newly-minted Dr. Oz completed 60 days of mandatory military training in the Turkish Army during the 1980s.
On to the Big Apple’s Ivy Columbia University, where in ‘86 Oz launched his medical career with a general surgery residency and fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery — father Mustafa’s practice, too — at Presbyterian Hospital, then affiliated with CU. Eric Rose, who two years earlier had performed the first successful paediatric heart transplant ever in the building, hired him.
Dr. Oz, now great and powerful, put his business savvy to work as well, in April 1995, joining colleague Jerry Whitworth founding what they called the Cardiac Complementary Care Center to provide alternative medicines to heart disease patients. The 4C’s, as foreseen, created tension with the hospital higher-ups who’d first hired him, which he dropped due to their objections.
The next year Oz and Rose won praise and attention after their work on a successful heart transplant for Frank Torre, brother of New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, during the 1996 World Series, which the Yankees won.
Rose later remarked that while he did not enjoy the media attention, Oz “loved it.”
Oz and Whitworth’s professional relationship soured too due to hype Oz was getting. Whitworth later told the news site “Vox” he asked Oz to “stop the media circus.” Which of course he didn’t. In 2000 Whitworth quit the CCCC circus they had co-launched, whereupon Oz the same year reopened and directed the Cardiovascular Institute and Integrative Medicine Program at Presbyterian.
Oz became a professor at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2001, a post he held until 2018 when his next title changed to Professor Emeritus.
He was hungry to learn and earn, but his ambition curdled when Oz cuddled up to the real TV talk show wizard, Oprah Winfrey.
Seems the Discovery Channel launched a “Second Opinion with Dr. Oz” show that put him in touch with the diva. Sixty regular guest appearances on the diva’s top-rated daily gabfest in 2009 begat just “The Dr. Oz Show,” put out by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and Sony Pictures.
The daily show “about medical matters health” ran 13 seasons, won the Praised One 10 Daytime 10 Emmys more critics among former medical peers who saw him now as a mountebank peddling “alternative” medicine to dupes his veneer bedazzled. For the munchkins he was St. Mehmet at the Gate.
In September 2016, during his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump appeared on his show. CNN skeptics speculated Trump did so to appeal its large women’s viewership, but favors come back. In 2018 Trump appointed Oz to the President’s Council of Sports, Fitness and Nutrition.
In May 2022, Presbyterian Hospital cut ties with Oz and removed his presence from its website.
Facts or Fictions?
Old-school doctors dismissed his brand of alternative medicine as lacking biological plausibility, testability, repeatability or supportive evidence of effectiveness. Dr. Oz, in their minds, had abandoned the scientific method to become a Persian carpet or snake-oil salesman. Even Orthodox Turkish docs took leave of him, though for most he was still their genius genie who made magic.
He even turned on his own fellow Tower alum, now President Biden, calling him a Delaware Destroyer for his dependence on foreign oil fueling inflation here.
And the diva didn’t do it, he did.
In March 2020, Oz suggested that hydroxychloroquine, a drug typically used to treat rheumatological conditions and as an anti-malarial, could be used to treat Covid-19 as well. This glossed over that he owned at least $630,000 worth of stock in two companies that manufacture and/or distribute the pharmaceutical. Nevertheless, Trump took up the cry as well.
In April 2020, Oz called for reopening schools but continued promoting wearing masks and getting vaccinated against the virus. He at first praised the 38-year U.S. Infectious Diseases director, immunologist Anthony Fauci, as a “pro” and lauded his role fighting the pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
Overdrive
Ambition ever calling, Oz next ran in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania as a Republican, the first Muslim candidate for Senate to be nominated by either major party.
Though he perhaps for the first time failed, Oz was available when Trump in 2025 picked him to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He was a perfect pod mate for vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as new Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Critics say quacks and con men are the new “normal” under Trump, but I’m not one of them. Oz, RFK Jr. and Trump follow a long line of entertainers, both left and right, who have used their bully pulpits at first influence, then govern.
It works every way: Trump hangs a portrait of Ronald Reagan near his Oval Office desk, Oprah endorses Barack Obama, Austrian-born über bodybuilder/actor Arnold Schwarzenegger marries a Kennedy and follows Reagan as GOP New York Governor.
One odd case was pro wrestler/actor Jesse (the Body) Ventura, a rare Independent who in 1999 upset Democratic state attorney general Hubert Horatio “Skip” Humphrey (another dynasty kid) and Republican Norm Coleman, then St. Paul Mayor, to serve one 4-year but hardly gave up the limelight.
He in 2024 endorsed Democrats Kamala Harris and Minnesotan Tim Walz but remains, to Americans, a different breed of strongman.
Underdog?
Much as a twister blew Dorothy Gale into Oz, the son of Mustafa knows he’s not, thank Allah, in Congress or still rocking Cleveland when Trump’s Top Spot reopens.
Then only Persian lamb straitjackets ofruby slippers can hold him back.
