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Born in Cleveland to Turkish parents, Mehmet Oz came to our attention as a frequent guest on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Before that the 49-year-old cardiac surgeon appeared on the Discovery Channel's "Second Opinion With Dr. Oz." He now has his own show "The Dr. Oz Show," which airs every day on WPXI. For more information, go to www.doctoroz.com. He is a professor of cardiac surgery at Columbia University and is in the operating room at least once a week. He also founded the Complementary Medicine Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He's the author and co-author of several books and lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children.
You spent a lot of time in Turkey growing up. How did that shape you.
Being raised in Turkey for a good part of my childhood was hugely influential to me. It taught me to see the world from two different perspectives. It was a very different vantage point on almost everything you can imagine including health. In America we had a huge amount of trust in doctors and hospitals and science to find solutions, but in Turkey there was still a lot of reliance on your own intuition.
See the Did you learn Turkish growing up?
I learned Turkish because it was my parents' first language. They still live in Turkey by the way; they moved back after I went off to college. At around age 5, I started going to Turkey for the summer.
Do you go back to Turkey often?
Every year. I want my kids to at least remember their heritage. My wife is American, and for that reason they don't spend the summer as I used to. I think it will offer them a little bit of a hybrid approach to handling different problems as they grow up.
What chain of events led to you meeting Oprah?
Meeting Oprah was a wonderful blessing that occurred primarily because of my wife. I had spent a good part of my life telling my wife what I did at work and then lamenting some aspects of my job. I was talking to folks on the way to the operating room telling them things if they had only known a year earlier it could have dramatically changed their future. So Lisa said, "That's enough. Instead of complaining to me about how dark the room is, let's light a big candle here." She said, "Lets do a television show together." She's a producer. She produced a show called "Second Opinion [with Dr. Oz]" on the Discovery Channel. The show needed a big guest to launch it. Gayle King, who is a wonderful person, said she believed in what I was doing and thought that Oprah might be interested. So we got her to come on the show as my first guest. We had a great time.
So the media life was not in your game plan?
There was zero belief in my heart that I'd ever make any kind of a living in media. It was a surprise from day one.
Is complementary medicine finding more acceptance in hospitals?
I think it's finding more acceptance in hospitals across the country because patients are demanding it. They are clamoring for it. You don't appreciate this when you are outside of medicine, but the role of patients in driving change is critical. A a new generation of doctors and nurses are turned out with bias toward alternative medicine. Complementary medicine is a word that's often used because it's not instead of medicine. It's in addition to medicine. There's still a lot of resistance to meaningful change among what I would call basic scientists. These are the folks who spend their time looking at the fundamentals of how chemistry and physics and biology work in the human body. In alternative/complementary medicine you can't study it that way. I can't put prayer in a test tube.
In your experience, does religion or a spiritual belief system make a difference?
I have found in my practice when folks have a strong spiritual guide, either internally or with family or other folks that support them, it helps them. I did a big study on this with some very insightful colleagues at Duke Medical Center. These studies have opened my eyes to the powers that could be offered by some of these spiritual paths, but they're not convincing yet. I'm convinced that having a game plan of what you want to do when you are done with the illness is a huge asset to anybody. When you don't have a reason for your heart to keep beating, it often won't.
So people can die of a broken heart?
People can definitely die of a broken heart. A study most recently by a group of folks at Johns Hopkins actually demonstrated that when you've lost a loved one, the chance of sudden arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) dramatically increased. You can also get heart failure, where the heart begins to fade away because it loses the hormonal mix that allows it to function at the normal rate.
What about recreational marijuana use? Is it valuable medically?
Marijuana is a hotly debated topic now, in part because there are some medicinal values for it. My biggest concern with medicinal marijuana is people abuse the privilege. There are some illnesses like metastatic cancer where the pain and nausea that goes along with the therapy is well treated with medical marijuana. I understand why many members of society are very reluctant to grant broader use. I have told this to many of my adult friends -- We should be very honest with our kids about the risks of marijuana but not overstate it either. It is at least as addictive as cigarettes. I feel very strongly about being out front about how powerful a toxin it could be for that reason.
What topic do you find people are most interested in talking about?
I get asked two general classes of topics. There's the weight loss, energy topic. People are very public about and open in saying they want to lose weight. You can usually see that they should be losing weight. They've got a complete loss of energy in their life. They feel washed out and fatigued, often driven by stress. Then there are the private questions people ask. They revolve around issues of sex and lack of intimacy in their lives. We often don't appreciate how important sex is to our health. It's how we build connection in life. We described on the show how we have a sexual famine in America. I use that word very purposefully. In middle-aged Americans the amount of sex we're seeing is dramatically decreasing.
What is going on if someone like Oprah, who could have a chef and a trainer, still struggles with weight.
A lot of Americans suffer from habits that aren't in our best interest. In the case of obesity there is the biology of blubber. If you don't understand how the basic pieces of the puzzle fit together, you are going to continue to undermine your natural ability to resist temptation. A lot of Americans fall prey to that. They tend to eat fast food or what's available in the vending machine. They don't plan to fail. They fail to plan. An equally important area is not about knowledge but about emotions. I firmly believe this is true, and I learned it on "The Oprah Show." People do not change what they do based on what they know. They change what they do based on what they feel. If you don't have the right emotional connections to your decisions, then your ability to resist those temptations diminishes.
Mackenzie Carpenter's video program, "Omnivore," is available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
