FOOD IS NOT SOMETHING YOU PULL OFF THE SHELF—
IT HAS A LIFE FORCE TO IT.”
ment on a chat show? To hear Oz tell it, the two fields are
more alike than they appear. “I tend to be impatient,” he
confesses. “I want to know if what I did was right—now.
In heart surgery, when you make a mistake, the patient
tells you immediately, because their heart stops beating.”
Similarly, Oz says, an audience gives immediate feedback
about what’s working and what’s falling flat. And the swirl
of writers, producers, camera people, stagehands, and other
staff—a total of 149 people work on Dr. Oz—look to the host
to keep tapings on track.
ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer, a friend of Oz’s
since he began doing guest spots on Good Morning America
in the mid-2000s, sees no conflict between Oz the healer and
Oz the performer. “When he’s doing television, he’s teach-
ing; that’s what he also does in life,” she says. “It’s just an
expanded form of teaching.”
Despair over his patients’ poor health choices was the
catalyst for Oz’s eventual foray into broadcasting. “I grew up
thinking that medicine would offer everything I wanted it
to offer me,” remembers Oz, whose father and father-in-law
are surgeons as well. As a medical student at the University of
Pennsylvania (where he simultaneously earned an M.B.A.),
and then as an intern, resident, and professor at Columbia,
Oz reveled in the intellectual challenge of research, the phys-
ical challenge of surgery, and the human contact of patient
care. “But it became progressively more frustrating to take
people into the operating room when I knew they had cre-
ated their own problems,” Oz recalls. “If they’d known what
to do differently, even a year or two earlier, they wouldn’t
have needed the operation.”
Wife Lisa, then a TV producer, suggested a solution: in-
stead of advising patients one by one, Oz could reach millions
of people before they became heart patients by delivering
diet and exercise advice through the (CONTINUED ON PAGE 80)
