Columbia University Medical Center has quietly cut its public ties to Mehmet Oz, MD, the TV celebrity physician who is now a Republican candidate for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, WebMD reports.
Dr. Oz held senior positions with the academic medical center, such as vice chair of the surgery department and director of integrated medicine.
Now, Dr. Oz's faculty profile has been removed from the hospital's website and hyperlinks to his bio are disconnected on several pages that mention his name. His name no longer appears in website searches for physicians with the school's Irving Medical Center. In a listing for surgery faculty, Dr. Oz is listed as a "special lecturer" and still has office phone and fax numbers, but his listing is not linked to a faculty bio.
Tension between the celebrity physician and the medical center goes back years. In 2015, after Dr. Oz testified before the Senate about his endorsement of "miracle" cures for weight loss, a group of 10 prominent physicians wrote to the school's dean of medicine to express dismay over his academic appointments and to note he "has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine." A spokesperson for the medical center responded at the time to say Columbia is committed to the principle of academic freedom and to upholding faculty members' freedom of expression.
Dr. Oz's website for his political run describes him as "the host of the Emmy award-winning 'The Dr. Oz Show' and an Attending Physician at NY Presbyterian-Columbia Medical Center."