I’ve always had my opinion of Oprah and for all of her faults (and who doesn’t have them) she does do an awful lot of good. I could go into the charitable work that she does or her social activism but my point isn’t to defend or demolish. My real questions is, “What leads someone like Oprah down some of these wacky alt-med and spiritual paths?”

In our lunch room at work many people bring old magazines for their co-workers to peruse while nuking their lunch. These magazines are mostly local magazines, like Fort Wayne, Whatz Up or Business People or what could loosely be termed women’s magazines*, like Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook or Lucky**.

Recently someone brought in a dozen of Oprah’s magazine, O. I avoided reading the magazines for the longest time for fear that I might learn The Secret and start injecting hormones into my man parts. Eventually The Oprah won and I began leafing through the magazine and eventually reading the articles. After a few magazines I was surprised that a) it wasn’t filled with buckets of crap and b) I did not feel like injecting anything into my man parts.

Seriously though after reading these magazines, I think I have a better understanding of where Oprah may be coming from. This may not be The Way to understand her because humans are complex and trying to boil someone’s motivations into a single thing would be a bit of an insult. Having said that, this may be A Way to understand her.

A theme throughout her magazine was this sense of Empowerment. This empowerment was evident through

• her beauty tips, which focused less on changing yourself and more on accentuating who you are,
• Suze Orman’s financial advice,
• her choice of interviewee’s like Sally Fields, and
• her focus on healthy lifestyles, active living, eating right, etc.

Before I continue, let me define empowerment in its popular form (straight from Wikipedia, The Source of all Truth)

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social or economic strength of individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in their own capacities.

I’m focusing less on communities here and more on the individual aspects embodied in the second, bolded, sentence. Without understanding where she’s coming from, it will be very difficult to counter her arguments. Let me illustrate my point.

If the basis of her advice and beliefs comes from the question, “What will contribute to the greatest empowerment for the individual?” , and the basis of your, the skeptic’s, advice and beliefs comes from, “What is a set of knowledge that has the weight of evidence and can be independently verified?” , there’s a potential for a disconnect. Can you see where, from the start, you’ll be talking across each other and not to each other? You are not starting at the same level or even the same zip code.

Now I could stop there and leave you with my opinion and again more questions than answers but that seems to irritate people***. So I’ll tell you why I think that Oprah is, in fact, disempowering her audience.

Let me setup a little straw man argument for rhetorical purposes. A straw man argument is a logical fallacy and means “arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.” Since I don’t know Oprah’s motivations and are not likely to be boiled down easily (see above) this is my take on the situation.

From Oprah’s empowerment perspective (my straw man argument)

Turning over the responsibility for your health to doctors and medical professionals who only diagnose and proscribe is cold and clinical. She brings on guests that provide a more self-directed and personal approach. Watch a Dr. Oz segment and you’ll see more often than not him giving you advice on how to check yourself and not simply submit to a lab test. This is taking your health into your hands.

Oprah will bring on Jenny McCarthy, who tells the story of being dismissed by her medical professional and simply forced to vaccinate her son by society and the school systems. Jenny McCarthy’s repeated and tearful assertions that vaccines gave her kid autism are rebuffed by cold, hard science.

The entire basis of The Secret is that you can directly impact your future by thinking positive thoughts and directing your desires to the Universe to bring about good fortune. Everything good that happens to you is completely within your control.

Drawing on the pop-psychology advice of Dr. Phil McGraw who’s catchphrase seems to come down to, “So how’s that working out fer ya?” puts the ownership of the solution to your problems within yourself.

From my empowerment perspective

Actually I don’t have a problem with the basis of StrawOprah’s thinking, only its application. And in its application the actual removal of empowerment.

In the case of Oprah’s contribution to health education her approach is mostly sound. The only part that goes off-base is the dismissal of the medical profession, or if not the dismissal, the elevation of personal testimony to be of equal weight. While she may give the obligatory disclaimer about “consulting a physician prior to starting a health program”, it lacks sincerity and her audience can see through it as just that, obligatory. Working with a medical professional that you trust is key to quality health care. If you don’t trust your doctor, Dump Her! and get a new one.

I actually agree that in many instance “science-based medicine” can be cold and clinical but much of this sound advice if not properly delivered can come through as cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all advice. If the patient doesn’t understand Why a particular course of action applies to her; their likelihood of acceptance is going to be lower than someone who understands how a particular solution fits their situation.

In the case of Jenny McCarthy, I think this is a very personalized story that demonstrates my above point. The cold, clinical approach that left Ms. McCarthy holding the bag so to speak and that’s unfortunate. However, what started with Oprah’s support of a mother’s story in searching for answers and help for her child, strayed too far into the perceived empowering aspects of Jenny McCarthy’s story and in the process removed empowerment from her audience.

She has setup this story of a mother over and above the truth about how vaccines actually work. She has elevated the personal testimony (or Jenny McCarthy’s Authority) over the well-demonstrated usages of vaccines. Think about it this way, the repeated demonstration of the efficacy of vaccines is a democratic process. Anybody can demonstrate their effectiveness. Is it easy and suitable for everyone, of course not, but it is open to everyone. Oprah has said, “This mother’s story is more authoritative or of equal weight to the decades of evidence and hard work that has gone into protecting humanity from death and disease.” This isn’t empowering to anyone, this is like Divine Revelation, “Believe this because I said believe this” and not opening any path for the individual to verify or even understand something on his or her terms.

The only problem with the advice from pop-psychologists is that psychology is an extraordinarily complicated science and trying to give advice in 44 minutes is going to be fraught with gross over-simplifications. In a personal aside, I was watching a bit of Dr. Phil’s show and he had on a girl who looked like a walking skeleton because of an eating disorder. He was trying to get across that this is a self-image problem (a gross oversimplification) and during the commercial break were advertisements for Neutrogena with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Victoria’s Secret. Oh! The Irony it burns!!!

The Secret suffers from the same fundamental problem that pop-psychology does. It’s a gross oversimplification of life itself. If you have full control over the good things then you have full control over the bad. While in one instance Oprah will do a series of shows helping women who have been molested come to terms with and ultimately overcome the psychological damage of that abuse and then she embraces a spirituality that puts the ultimate responsibility back onto the victim.

Bad things happen sometimes because bad things happen. This is a position that The Secret fundamentally rejects. Oprah has demonstrated a lack of belief in “received” religions and has clearly turned to more of the personal spirituality movements. I think this one aspect of the things she promotes demonstrates that the personal empowerment straw man that I’ve come up with, IMNSHO, isn’t probably too far off the mark.

I haven’t obviously delved too deeply on the individual topics but that wasn’t my intended purpose. A lot of what many skeptical websites, authors and podcasts focus on is the Bad Science behind what Oprah promotes and those serve a valuable purpose in understanding why what she promotes might be harmful. But what seems to be fundamentally lacking is a basis of understanding of where these beliefs come from and ultimately a different way of combating them. Arguing on the basis of Science is going to go nowhere If Science were all that awesome we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

Arguing from the basis of empowerment, while being informed by science and reason, is going to go a long way in conveying why you believe some of these claims may not be based on reality.

* I’ll get in trouble for being so sexist but if you’ve ever sat there for 5 minutes while nuking your lunch IMO these magazines are NOT targeted to men as a group.

** If you think Oprah is destroying America, read that crap. It’s literally a magazine about shopping.

*** That was a little passive-aggressive but at least I didn’t link to any comments, because that would be very passive-aggressive.

The recent October 28th podcast covered his list of the 10 most wanted celebrities who endorse harmful pseudoscience. Now I must specify that he does not want these people to be hurt or harmed, he simply wants people to be aware of how dangerous following these people can be.

There are figures on both the right and the left politically, but all are taken to task for the harmful ideas they promote. Guess who is number 1: Oprah Winfrey. A magazine I read about a year ago called Oprah the closest thing America has to a living Deity. All the more reason to take whatever she says with a truckload of salt.

The rest of the list:

1. Oprah Winfrey – Jumping on every Alternative Bandwagon that comes along
2. Jenny McCarthy – Anti-Vaccination
3. Prince Charles – Alternative Medicine
4. Bill Maher – Alternative Medicine
5. Larry King – Bad Journalism
6. Pamela Anderson – PETA
7. Ben Stein – Comparing Science to Nazism, Creationism
8. Joe Rogan – 9/11 Truther, et al.
9. Chuck Norris – Christianity
10. Montel Williams – psychics

I urge you to check this podcast out. It’s only about 10 minutes long to listen to and even faster to read.