April 16, 2010
Dr. Does-It-All
By FRANK BRUNI

As one of the most accomplished cardiothoracic surgeons of his generation, Mehmet Oz has transplanted lungs and repurposed hearts; implanted mechanical devices to provide the pump and pulse for patients that cannot manage that on their own; and otherwise pressed, pulled, cut and stitched inside bodies where a second’s lapse of attention or a millimeter of miscalculation could kill.

But on a morning not long ago, around a conference table high in the NBC building in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, the challenge before him and dozens of assistants was less obviously urgent. They talked of testicles. Specifically, they discussed what sorts of props might accurately (and tastefully) mimic said sexual organs in a television demonstration, on “The Dr. Oz Show,” of how men should examine theirs for tumors and cysts.

“What about Silly Putty?” someone asked, to smiles and contained laughter. “What about a pecan or walnut with some padding around it?” someone else asked.

Beanbags were mentioned; so was cotton. There wasn’t any quick resolution.

Diann Duthie, the show’s art director, shrugged her shoulders and assured Oz they were trying. Confronting aesthetic riddles like this one is the essence of Duthie’s job. So that Oz could talk television viewers through the correct manner of pimple popping, she once constructed a gargantuan zit. So that he could explain halitosis, she came up with a giant, germy tongue. But the surrogate testicles had to be life-size — and, she hoped, lifelike — and she needed not one pair but many, for all of the men in the studio audience who would be called on to participate. “It’s sort of labor-intensive,” she explained at the conference table. “We have to make 50 of them.”

Oz didn’t weigh in, but he leaned far forward in his chair, clearly engaged. True, this wasn’t a life-and-death operation. But heroic heart operations and lung transplants have become virtually routine for Oz, and they no longer stretch his abilities or satisfy his ambitions the way they once did. There are other frontiers to be conquered, television foremost among them. And if he wants to be “America’s doctor,” the tag bestowed on him by no less than Oprah Winfrey, he has to spice up his act for a daytime audience potentially distracted by the tantrums of a toddler or the yelping of a Labradoodle. Ultimately, Duthie rose to the challenge with wads of compressed plastic foam tucked into little panty-hose sacs.

“The Dr. Oz Show” made its debut last September to considerable curiosity, much excitement and impressive ratings, in large part because of his association with Winfrey, whose company, Harpo Productions, is a co-producer of the show with Sony Pictures Television. “Dr. Oz” is essentially a spinoff of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” on which he appeared more than 55 times over the last five years, invited back regularly for detailed and unblushing tutorials on even the most intimate bodily functions.

“When he made it O.K. to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything,” Winfrey says, referring to the time he told her audience that the bequest of a properly humming gastrointestinal system should be S-shaped and hit the water like an Olympic diver, without much splash. “He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating.”

His show tackles topics as diverse — and diversely weighty — as skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating and pubic-hair loss, returning constantly to the same television mother lode Winfrey profitably mined: weepy overweight guests who vow, and often fail, to get in shape. And it has taken its star far away from any sort of traditional medical practice.

He explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often, he told me, he would sit in his office and be “telling you stuff too little, too late — that if you’d been able to lose a little weight or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically changed your destiny, which is now to go downstairs and have open heart surgery.” With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to tend to all aspects of their health, head to toe, before they reach a point of no return.

But the show does something else for him that is perhaps equally important, and equally motivating. It indulges his own personal obsession with how best to treat the body and wring optimal performance from it. If he has credibility as an evangelist for wellness, that is in no small measure because he is a model of wellness, too, practicing what he preaches and demanding as much of himself as of others. The show holds him up as the sort of finely tuned machine that you, on the couch at home, yearn to be. And that underscores his determination to be an omniscient and omnipresent commentator on health-related affairs, one-stop shopping for all your somatic curiosities and some of your spiritual and intellectual ones to boot. While “Dr. Oz” is the flashiest part of that effort, it is by no means the only one.

Oz is also on the radio every day — Winfrey’s channel on Sirius XM satellite radio, to be exact — where his topics stray well beyond the purely anatomical to “How God Changes Your Brain” and “The Happiest People in the World.” When I eavesdropped on a session in early March, during which he was recording five shows to be presented weeks later, he debriefed a branding expert about his work with Southwest Airlines, then quizzed David Shenk, the author of a book titled “The Genius in All of Us,” about the malleability of I.Q. and the reliability of tests that measure it.

Oz is in bookstores, where you can find half a dozen titles in the ongoing “You” series — including “You: The Smart Patient,” “You: On a Diet” and “You: Having a Baby” — that he has written with Dr. Michael F. Roizen, the unofficial co-chairman of what might be called Oz Industries. There are about nine million of their books in print so far.

Oz is in magazines and newspapers. In February, he wrote what will be the first of six Prescription columns a year for Time magazine, which in 2008 included him in its annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In the fall he will start writing one column every other month for the AARP magazine. He reaches out to men with a monthly column for Esquire, to women with regular contributions to Winfrey’s magazine. All of this comes on top of the newspaper writing that he and Roizen, under the “You Docs” banner, produce for King Features Syndicate. This includes a 250-word “daily tips” column, a weekly 650-word question-and-answer column and a separate weekly 650-word feature on a given health topic.

Oz manages to churn out so much in part because he has assistants help with brainstorming, background material and more, and because he is often recycling and repackaging information from one format in another, a paragraph here reading like an anagram of the paragraph over there, the same set of skin-moisturizing and metabolism-boosting tips farmed out in myriad directions. But it is still remarkable, especially given how much time he devotes to “Dr. Oz,” which will ultimately record a total of 175 original hourlong shows, with about a half-dozen segments each, for the current September-to-September cycle.

For at least three days most weeks, the show requires him to arrive at Rockefeller Center by 7 a.m. and stay until 6 p.m.; he often has a shorter, fourth day as well. On the days, or portions of days, when the show isn’t taping, he occupies himself with not only the radio and the writing but also with other television appearances; with speeches; with his stewardship of HealthCorps, a not-for-profit organization, modeled on the Peace Corps, that he founded in 2003 to place recent college graduates in high schools as health educators; and with his sustained commitments at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, where he sees patients — and performs one or more operations — every Thursday.

Oz’s energy is astounding, intimidating, ludicrous. I spent much of my time with him over the last few months staring at his back as he darted — much faster than I could — through the halls at the NBC building or up as many as a half-dozen flights of stairs at Columbia Presbyterian, where he is too impatient to wait for elevators. He talks and thinks as fast as he moves, and he treats his body like an engine to be fueled in particular ways, at particular intervals.

I never saw him without a portable larder of baggies, plastic containers and Thermoses of food and drink, and all of it — every crumb, every drop — was healthful: low-fat Greek yogurt mixed with brightly colored berries; spinach; slaw; raw almonds; raw walnuts, soaked in water to amplify their nutritional benefit; a dark green concoction of juices from vegetables including cucumber and parsley. Roughly every 45 to 60 minutes, as if on cue, he would ingest something from his movable buffet, but only a bit, his portions assiduously regulated, like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.

His wife, Lisa, says, “He doesn’t have the relationship with food that a lot of people have.” While she has been a vegetarian since she was 15, and is credited by Oz’s friends for many of his healthful habits, he sometimes eats fish and, much less frequently, meat. But, she says, he is not as tempted by sweets or junk food as she or most anyone else is. “If you handed him a Cheeto,” she says, “he’d just throw it away.”

Oz confirms as much: “At an office birthday party, I’ll have a bite of something, and I won’t feel good.” Worse yet is the aftermath of a vacation during which he has not had as much control over his diet and exercise as usual. “I feel differently immediately when I start to put weight on,” he says. “I don’t like that sluggish, blunted disposition that I have when that happens.” He is six feet tall, and he usually weighs 178 pounds.

He says that a classic Mediterranean diet, light on animal protein and high in fiber, is best. He rarely drinks alcohol and never drinks coffee, which he learned to avoid because it is a diuretic and he has been involved in many long operations during which there was no possibility of a bathroom break. And he begins every day with a seven-minute mat workout that intersperses a succession of rapidly changing yoga poses with five sets of 10 push-ups, then tacks on 20 situps of a particularly grueling nature at the end. That is his base line, to which he adds more yoga, short runs and basketball games with friends near his home in Cliffside Park, N.J., when he can.

And every so often, when all four of his kids, who range in age from 10 to 24, are home, he rouses them from their television programs or iPods and summons them outside for the Oz Family Olympics, which can entail tennis, wind sprints, competitive stair climbing: anything to push back against the forces of, and tropism toward, sedentary living. “We all have fun with it,” says Daphne, the eldest Oz child, “but it is a little bit exhausting first thing Saturday morning.”

Oz, who is 49, notes that he was born in the Year of the Rat, referring to the Chinese zodiac, and says: “You run the maze. If you put cheese in that maze, I swear to God, I’ll get to it, and I’ll get to it really fast. But should I be running after that cheese? Am I in the right maze? All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I’m running after that cheese.”

Part of what propels him is the voice and example of his father, who grew up poor in Turkey during the Depression and, according to Oz, could not afford to slack off for even a second on his path to his own career as a cardiothoracic surgeon. “I’d say I got a 93 on a test; he’d say, ‘Did anyone get better?’ ” Oz recalled. “That was always the question he asked.” Oz told me that when, much later in life, he informed his father that he had made the Time 100 list, his father wrongly assumed it was a ranking and asked, “What number are you?”

“He wants to know what number,” Oz emphasized. “Are you kidding me? There are six billion people on the planet. It’s a rounding error!” And it’s also the kind of thing that goads a son to climb mountain after mountain, seldom pausing to enjoy the view.

Reared in Wilmington, Del., he decided to become a doctor at age 7, in line in an ice-cream parlor. “I remember it like yesterday,” he said. “There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad, just to pass the time, said, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ The kid said, ‘I don’t know, I’m 10.’ My father waited until he was out of earshot and said: ‘I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you tell me you don’t know. It’s O.K. if you change your mind. But I never want you not to have a vision of what you want to be.’

“I told him that day that I wanted to be a doctor,” Oz added. “And I never changed my mind.”

For college he went to Harvard, where he played football and water polo and studied hard, not content merely to get by. “He was very competitive,” Billy Campbell, one of his roommates, told me. “There was never any question that he wasn’t just going to be a doctor. He wanted to be a fantastic surgeon.”

And at the University of Pennsylvania, he did double duty, earning an M.B.A. along with his M.D. The business degree foreshadowed his eventual evolution into a brand as much as a doctor. In 1985 he married Lisa Lemole, the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon with whom his father was friendly, and their relationship opened him up to the worlds of alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism, which he integrated into his thinking and career early on. Her mother believed fervently in New Age approaches like homeopathic remedies and meditation.

Mehmet and Lisa Oz’s union is part business partnership — she has pitched in on his books and TV projects and usually sits in on his radio show to interview the guests with him — and all mutual-admiration society. He says that she is the most sensible, linear thinker he knows; she considers him a major hunk. In a book of hers that the Free Press published this month, “US: Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most,” she writes: “I have never been unfaithful to my husband. (I know, I know, he’s totally hot, but every other night on call gets old fast.)”

Daphne Oz is the author of her own book, “The Dorm Room Diet,” which was published in 2006 by Newmarket Press and followed by “The Dorm Room Diet Planner” and “The Dorm Room Diet Workout” DVD. Mehmet Oz wrote the foreword to “The Dorm Room Diet” and did the same for “US.” (Both books advertise that on their covers.) It is as if the Oz family is founding a wellness conglomerate — a wellness dynasty — that will point all of America toward a physical utopia, high in fiber and low in belly fat.

He first started drawing widespread attention in the news media around 1995, when he helped found the Complementary Care Center at Columbia Presbyterian. It recognized a potential value in alternative therapies and, for example, put a hands-on healer who believed in so-called energy medicine in the operating room, if a patient wanted her there. In 1996, his profile grew bigger still when he assisted Dr. Eric Rose in the heart-transplant operation performed on Frank Torre, the brother of Joe Torre, the Yankees’ manager at the time. Oz appeared over the next few years as a medical expert on ABC, CNN and, in 2001, “Oprah.”

It was about that time that Lisa Oz, who had worked some as a movie producer, suggested he do a television show of his own, as a way of practicing preventive medicine on a grand scale. The concept that she developed became “Second Opinion With Dr. Oz,” 13 episodes of which ran on the Discovery Health Channel in 2003, when Oz’s former roommate Campbell was its president. Each episode tackled a particular health issue. The first was obesity. Winfrey agreed to appear on it to discuss her struggles with her weight.

“Have you ever seen the soul?” Oz asked me as he leaned over a rectangular cavity that had been opened in the chest of a 74-year-old woman so that he and Dr. Michael Argenziano could get at her heart and replace a badly calcified valve with a new one fashioned from cow parts. He motioned me closer to the cavity as he used a metal instrument to poke at the organ — a floppy, vaguely orange-colored thing — and show me what he was talking about, a whitish area that he described as the heart’s electrical center, where everything comes together. “To me this is the most majestic part of the body,” he said.

It was a Thursday in January, we were in an operating room at Columbia Presbyterian and he was midway through a procedure that would wind up lasting an hour and a half, during which he and Argenziano made minuscule stitches to fasten the new valve in place without otherwise puncturing or tearing anything, the soul very much included. It struck me as demanding, thrilling work — more than enough stimulation for any ordinary mortal.

“This is sort of like putting a hubcap on,” Oz said, playing down the art and the stakes of it.

“In the center line of the highway,” Argenziano added.

For Oz, these procedures serve as a reminder — to the world, and maybe most of all to himself — of his concrete medical skills. But his hospital work fits somewhat oddly with his celebrity, which intrudes on it. Just before her operation, the 74-year-old surgical patient mentioned to Oz that she had seen him hanging upside down in a chair on “Dr. Oz.” “And I thought, He’s going to break his neck and not be able to operate on me.”

“The Dr. Oz Show” has been an enormous success, roaring out of the gate with ratings higher than those for any new syndicated daytime talk show since “Dr. Phil,” another “Oprah” spinoff, in 2002. And its number of viewers has grown steadily since. In the February sweeps period, “Oprah” and “Dr. Phil” were the only syndicated daytime talk shows that beat it. It tied “Live With Regis and Kelly,” came in slightly ahead of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and handily outpaced “The Doctors,” a medical show spun off from “Dr. Phil” that began in 2008.

An average of about 3.5 million viewers tune in daily to watch Oz, and his show — an elaborately staged, densely staffed production — works frenetically for them, alternating prop-driven demonstrations like the testicular self-exam with conventional journalism, animation, re-enactments, segments on laboratory equipment and a great many cadaver organs, about which the team of three full-time medical researchers — all graduate students taking a break from medical school at Columbia University — are extremely finicky. In the middle of one of several “Dr. Oz” rehearsals I watched, a researcher sped uptown to the Columbia Presbyterian hospital morgue to fetch a substitute large intestine for one whose appendix was not quite telegenic enough. When the right human body part cannot be found, pig or cow parts have to do. Researchers have come to know some of New York City’s most proficient butchers.

Critics of the show say that its need for so much fresh content — for new tips and revelations every day — leads to a chaotic bazaar of advice, not all of it equally reliable and important. To illustrate that exercise can be fun, Oz has roller-danced on camera; he has done flamenco dancing — in fitted dark blue scrubs — as well. He has demonstrated pet C.P.R. and, in full Maury Povich mode, done a segment — replete with horror-movie visuals and a soap-operatic score — on children who asphyxiate themselves in pursuit of a brief high. “It’s a game your child could be playing under your roof right now,” Oz said gravely into the camera. “It goes by many exotic names: rush, purple dragon, space monkey, funky chicken, cloud nine. But it’s best known as the choking game.”

In his urgency to get the attention of all the Americans whose blood pressure and cholesterol levels he would like to lower, does Oz, despite his preternatural talent for tackling a hundred things at once, sometimes show inadequate vigilance? He came under fire last year for the way a longevity-related Web site that he and Roizen maintain was working with drug makers. The site, RealAge.com, invites visitors to take a “biological age” test and become site members, which then leads to their biographical and behavior information being shared with pharmaceutical companies for marketing purposes. Oz concedes that the site wasn’t making that clear enough and says that the language on it has since been changed. But he defends the basic arrangement, saying it is a way to finance the site without having to use too much advertising.

Advertising, though, is used on “The Doctor Oz Show” Web site. In its question-and-answer section, information about irritated skin is often accompanied by a plug for Dove soaps.

Oz’s multifarious endeavors have certainly made him rich. Beyond whatever money he and Roizen earned for the first five “You” books, they received a $7 million advance from the Free Press for the subsequent three, according to Crain’s New York Business. A television-industry expert told me that the bare minimum he is making for the first year of “Dr. Oz” is $3 million, which would rise significantly within a few years. Oz doesn’t dispute those figures. But he was plenty affluent without all his current media activities. He purchased his home in Cliffside Park — a sprawling manse — about a decade ago, and well before “Dr. Oz,” he plunked down $2.5 million to annex the lot beside it.

He has met famous people and made famous friends, though he measures and experiences glamour differently than many people do. Mindy Borman, an executive producer of “Dr. Oz,” says that she has seldom seen him more excited than on the day Bill Nye, the bow-tied “science guy,” came on the show. They donned his-and-his hazmat suits for a demonstration in which they created a cloud out of water and liquid nitrogen.

In the end, Oz’s exertions seem tied less to avarice or the ability to name-drop than to a desire to keep testing, surprising, exceeding and enlarging himself, along with his presence and influence. And in his drive and discipline there are elements of compulsion. Michelle Bouchard, the president of HealthCorps, remembers that during their first meeting, when Oz was in college, he was sitting on a piano bench, and he told her he would like to learn to play the instrument someday. And she says that as a present for his 40th birthday, “as busy as he was,” he got and took those promised piano lessons, diligently checking off an item on his to-do list.

Moderately active in the Republican Party in New Jersey, he says he has at times contemplated elective office, but then he has also contemplated taking “Dr. Oz” in a more general direction, along the lines of “Oprah.” “If it’s just a show about medicine, then it won’t have the legs to keep you engaged,” he says, adding that in the Marcus Welby, M.D., past: “Your doctor wasn’t just someone who gave you your Lipitor dosage. He gave you some advice about life.”

He does not want to become bored and does not want to lose steam. In his Rockefeller Center office late one afternoon, he took out a piece of paper so he could draw for me a graph of a normal person’s productivity over the span of a life. It was a broad inverted U, and the slopes to and from its summit — which represented the moment of peak professional performance, perhaps in the late 30s or early 40s — were gradual ones. His intention, he said, was to delay that summit by taking on new challenges at determined intervals, thus creating vertical spikes in his own productivity graph, which he also drew. It was jagged, impressive and confusing, not least because Oz, despite his preoccupations with youthfulness, looks every one of his 49 years when he is out of makeup and the bags beneath his eyes are unconcealed. He has to be reminded to get enough sleep.

Matters of longevity, posterity and even immortality pop up time and again in conversations with him.

On the staircase at Columbia Presbyterian, apropos of nothing, he began talking about certain Japanese, Sardinian and Costa Rican populations that live unusually long — and said that their shared trait was activity, activity, activity. His first column for Time magazine, “Living Long and Living Well,” ran in a section called “How to Live 100 Years.” At another point, in his Rockefeller Center office, he said that so many people thrill to being on television because “there’s an element of eternity to it: you are storing you; you are taking your life force for that brief moment when you’re on camera, and you’re storing that for all eternity — which makes you someone who will never truly die.” And he described his own investment in television by saying: “I’ve always felt that, when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn’t say, ‘Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open-heart operations.’ I’ve probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000?”

He shook his head. “It’s just a different number on the tombstone,” he said.

Frank Bruni is a staff writer for the magazine.

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