Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

It’s funny you should blame the government for this. In the 90s people actually died from shady supplements. In response the FDA tried to expand its authority to regulating these supplements. The industry started a scaremongering ad campaign telling people that they wouldn’t be able to get Vitamin C supplements unless they wrote their congressman. Many did. Reps received more letters from their constituents on this one Bill than the entire Vietnam War [1]. In response to pressure from constituents, government reversed course. The unelected experts in Government tried to do the right thing. It’s the people who were so easily misled that forced the end of regulation for dietary supplements. Paraphrasing what Terry Pratchett said, the problem here isn’t that we have the wrong sort of government, it’s that we have the wrong sort of people. [1] - ▶ this video

There's no such thing as an "immune booster". The immune system is incredibly complex and nuanced, and there isn't a knob (or 10) that you can tweak to turn it up or down. It exists in a continuum of largely understood configurations, and it can learn and adapt (not always with good results). If anything, "boosting" it as in turning up immune activity is usually terrible (think auto-immune disorders, inflammation, cancer). The "misinformation" people are battling is about a) unsubstantiated health claims and b) the fact that supplement manufacturers don't need to provide any evidence or follow any regulations regarding what's actually in the supplements. That means they can say they're selling e.g. Vitamin C but it's just sugar. John Oliver has a good video on it: ▶ this video

Haha. This is an incredibly polite reply, sharpened to a very fine point. I'm grateful I have something to contribute to a site that I've gotten an incredible amount out of. And it's a powerful reminder that very very smart people can have a hard time critically appraising medical claims. As powerful as the internet is, medicine is really complicated, and it's easy for doctors to forget that. I'll let the surgeon speak for him/herself, but for my part: I am raising the issue of industry size and quackery to give other readers context. It doesn't make the article wrong necessarily, but I would want to have that context as a non-expert reader trying to understand how it fits into the larger body of scientific understanding. And I would say yes, that does happen (and is appropriate to have happen) in scientific discourse. On a related note: one amazing site that isn't well known is the OpenPayments[1], maintained by the US government. If you live in the US and have doctor, you can see how much compensation they received from industrial sources. Some of the numbers are shocking. Put your own doctor in, and see where they are. There is no need to resort to conspiracy claims when you can audit them, to some degree, yourself. The physician mentioned in the article, Dr. Paul Harch, has received $74.48. So way to go Dr. Harch! we can worry much less about getting a skewed opinion based on a industry payments. But weighing against that is his CV, which lists publications with "D Amen",

Next I'll be hearing I should chew willow bark instead of paying for Aspirin :) Even if this worked, the amount of misinformation about this has inoculated me against taking medical decisions myself (other than avoiding the free Twix littered in the office kitchen). John Oliver covered this style of journalism, rather sarcastically a while back. ▶ this video