Oprah’s Doctor Draws A Crowd

ABC News Medical Unit’s Roger Sergel reports: Heart surgeon Mehmet Oz, Oprah’s resident TV doctor, proved today that it isn’t just Oprah viewers who want to hear what he thinks. It is also his cardiology colleagues who packed a session at the American Heart Association meeting today. Oz drew the kind of doctor crowds that usually show up to hear a new study on drugs or devices. And this was not some obscure presentation at this meeting in New Orleans. There were signs up all over the convention center, and Oz was introduced by Tim Gardner, President of the American Heart Association. While the 8 million daily Oprah viewers hear Oz instruct them how to take charge of their health, Oz told the heart specialists how to reach their patients. And the heart specialists listened intently to his message. He told the doctors the Oprah "principles" that emotion drives 90 percent of getting people to change their behavior. He told them that you want to make health fun. "We need upbeat messages." And he told them they need engaging factoids and news you can use. And he cited the success of his attention getting appearance where he brought onto Oprah the diseased lung of a smoker. Rather than telling your patient, "you idiot, if you don’t quit smoking you will die," he encouraged the doctors to convince their patients that you care about them.  And how do you drive home the health messages. Oz went through his three best selling books: YOU: The Owner’s Manual. YOU: The Smart Patient, YOU: Staying Young, The owner’s Manual for Extending Your Warranty.  If you want to get your patients to lose weight, he said don’t give them a body mass index figure which indicates whether a patient is normal weight, overweight, obese, etc. Give them a tool, he said. Ideal waist size should not be one half your height. And he told the doctors and nurses to get patients to measure their waist. Oz said too many doctors were giving drugs for cholesterol lowering but not treating what Oz believes is the critical problem of belly fat. But there was much more than his  books. Oz kept coming back to how doctors need to change their approach to patients. "The materials we give to patients are remarkably poor." He told them to make videos their patients can watch at home. He also encouraged them to get involved with the press. The first step he said was answering the phone when the press calls. And he had some advice for those doctors who were concerned about health care issues. The words they are using won’t work. Let’s not talk about "tort reform" for the malpractice problem, he said. Call it instead "health justice." Want to push for universal health care? Call it "affordable care for all." He had career counseling — how to reinvent yourself at an earlier age. An opinion about online health. "The biggest abuse of the internet is not pornography, it is health information."  But he also showed the video of him that plays on the New York Presbyterian Hospital web site. He talked about the Hospital’s  agreement with Microsoft to get patients to put their records online as part of Microsoft’s Health Vault. Oh, and by the way, the key to getting people to your web site, is "search engine optimization." Years ago, before the "You" books, before Oprah, Mehmet Oz was just another heart surgeon. He had some interesting ideas about incorporating alternative medicine techniques with surgery care. He was involved with advances in left ventricular assist devices to help patients with weak hearts awaiting transplants. And he did work on robotic surgery. But today he is probably the most famous doctor in the country. Steve Nissen, may get more press than Oz on drug safety issues, and cholesterol drug studies. And he may be talked about for head of FDA. But the doctors who packed La Louisiana Room C today know where the real power is in medicine. It is Mehmet Oz. Not just because he has Oprah and "You"and his show on Discovery and appearances on "GMA." It is because he has figured out what doctors desperately want to know. How to get "you" to listen to them.