How Oprah’s Quacks Made Us All Sick

This week, the New York Times dropped an investigation into the memoir of venture capitalist Amy Griffin. The Tell, released in March 2025, was Griffin’s examination of her trauma and how she tapped into suppressed memories of a past sexual abuse via MDMA therapy. The book, which was ghostwritten, was an instant bestseller, in large part thanks to endorsements from Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, and Oprah Winfrey, the last of whom chose the title for her much-vaunted book club.

As noted by the New York Times report, the science surrounding the use of MDMA to retrieve supposedly repressed memories is extremely dubious. To further complicate Griffin’s story, the article alleges that Griffin may have, inadvertently or otherwise, used someone else’s memories of having been raped as a teen in her story of survival. The woman, a former classmate of Griffin’s, told the paper that she was ‘unnerved’ to read The Tell and note the eerie similarities between Griffin’s alleged experiences and her own. Griffin’s lawyer claimed that any investigation into the veracity of her book was retraumatizing to her client and that the classmate was a fabulist.

This is a tricky story to talk about for obvious reasons, but it’s also yet another sign of a decades-long pattern of errors at the hands of Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential women on the planet and a noted fan of what can most charitably be described as woo-woo wellness. Winfrey spent many years on her legendary talk show sharing unchallenged anecdotes and anti-science propaganda under the guise of helping her audience ‘live their best lives.’

In 2025, she remains a powerful figure with a lot of cultural pull, and she continues to celebrate, elevate, and evangelize for medically suspicious concepts. As the RFK Jr.-led anti-vaxx ‘Make America Healthy Again’ propaganda leads to potentially irrevocable changes in American healthcare, it’s no surprise to see so many figures across the political spectrum shilling for snake oil. Oprah may not be telling her fans to use ivermectin or freak out over seed oils, but her impact on how ‘alternative’ care has become legitimised in the mainstream shouldn’t be overlooked.

The Oprah Winfrey Show was driven by the ethos that we could all improve upon ourselves. That could mean a spiritual overhaul, a confrontation with our spouse, a creative breakthrough via an excellent book, or a shake-up of our medical outlooks. It was revolutionary to put women’s concerns at the forefront, particularly those who would be at home watching Oprah live, mainly mothers, older women, and at-risk communities. The show took seriously topics like menopause, addiction, and abuse. When Winfrey herself opened up about being sexually assaulted as a child, it put to the forefront an oft-ignored or covered-up issue. It was that personal quality that made the series so beloved. Here was a woman from a tough background who became a multi-millionaire icon and decided to bestow upon us all her sound advice and lived experiences.

Every one of Winfrey’s own advisors became her audience’s new leaders: Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Suze Orman, Iyanla Vanzat, even her BFF Gayle King. She loved a straight-talking, one-liner quip machine of guidance and improvement. These were figures who were primed for an audience with their charm and appeal. Dr. Mehmet Oz was a natural showman who wore scrubs on-air and walked the tightrope of conveying tough information without dumbing it down or being too academic. Phil McGraw was a Southern gentleman who took no BS. Suze Orman was like your cool aunt who knew how to balance a checkbook and had no patience for weak excuses.

Oprah often positioned herself as the patient in the woo-woo wellness battle, typically regarding her struggles with her weight. She let her audience in on every revelation and setback, forever underpinning how deeply relatable she was despite her wealth and status. It’s a remarkable sign of her charisma and charm that she retained this universal appeal even as she got richer and more elitist in her offerings. It’s a balance her spiritual successor, Gwyneth Paltrow, never pulled off, perhaps because she made the stakes seem so personal. We also saw her, in her own words, fail. We’ve all been there, but we haven’t all been shilling an endless assembly line of get-rich/thin/spiritual quick schemes to our fans, then moving on to the next one when it flops. We also haven’t all uncritically platformed genuinely dangerous weirdos.

Frankly, we could be here for thousands of words detailing the history of Oprah-endorsed quackery. She gave a lot of airtime to anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy to preach, unchallenged, about the endlessly debunked claim that vaccinations cause autism. Winfrey gave a huge boost to the junk science of former sitcom star Suzanne Somers’ menopause regimen, which included taking 60 pills a day and injecting hormones into her vagina (one of the doctors who Somers worked with and endorsed was disciplined by California’s medical board for gross negligence in 2018). She loved the spiritual babble of Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra.

In the ’90s, she platformed Christiane Northup, who claimed that thyroid problems in women develop ‘because of an energy blockage in the throat region, the result of a lifetime of ‘swallowing’ words one is aching to say.’ Winfrey said she turned to Northup after issues with her own thyroid, and that she was drawn to how the quack ‘always connects the mind, the body and the spirit.’ The treatment Northup recommended was eating fresh foods, drinking soy milk, and relaxing in Hawaii. To the surprise of nobody, Northup is also an anti-vaxxer and QAnon cultist who claimed that COVID-19 wasn’t real.

“Many people write Suzanne [Somers] off as a quackadoo,” she told her audience when she had the actress on her show. “But she just might be a pioneer.” She wasn’t, but it made for good copy to have the Thigh-Master lady be the scrappy underdog of women’s health rather than decades of medical advancements. On her show, Winfrey said that she decided to follow Somers’ menopause regimen, and that ‘After one day on bioidentical estrogen, I felt the veil lift.’ Hormone therapy is beneficial for many women experiencing difficult peri and menopause symptoms. At the same time, it doesn’t stave off or reverse menopause, and for some, it can increase a woman’s risk of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and cancer. The non-FDA-approved bioidenticals that Somers recommended, according to the Mayo Clinic, ‘aren’t safer than hormones used in traditional hormone therapy. And there’s no proof that they work any better at easing menopause symptoms.’

These people were positioned as free spirits, as ‘warriors’ and hard-working mothers who would be lionesses of ferocity in the face of the establishment to get what they wanted. The lionising of proud non-experts over qualified specialists is a common grift that helps to spread anti-intellectualism in the name of democratizing the conversation. Oprah let Jenny McCarthy champion ‘warrior moms’ who rejected crucial vaccines for their kids because they thought autism was a worse fate than death. Their faulty maternal instinct was not immune to propaganda, but it became powerful marketing all the same.

This spilled over into more spiritually driven self-improvement scams like The Secret. Rhonda Byrne’s book regurgitates myths on the so-called law of attraction and how you can essentially wish for your life to change. It was part Bible study, part airport book, and all nonsense, suggesting that all the bad things in your life, be it unemployment or illness, are your own fault because you attract negative energy with your bad attitude. It has sold over 30 million copies, in large part thanks to Oprah’s endorsement.

That shtick seemed to backfire somewhat when one Oprah fan was invited onto the show in March 2007 and said she’d decided to forego chemotherapy and treat her breast cancer with The Secret. “When my staff brought this letter to me, I wanted to talk to her,” Oprah told the audience. “I said, get her in here, OK?” On air, Oprah urged the woman to listen to her doctors. “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science and try to, through your own mind now, because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.” It’s all well and good saying that to save your arse legally, but you also helped to amplify a book that claims your negativity is what draws illness and failure into your life. A quick non-apology simply won’t do.

The Oprah method relies on putting a face to both the problem and the solution. We are more drawn to things when they have a first-person story attached. Typically, this was Winfrey herself, whether it was her raw confessions of trauma or yo-yo diets that veered between miracle cures and yet another failure left on the side of the road. Her list of quacks benefitted from this notion that they were the best advertisements for their products. Suzanne Somers looked great and survived cancer, so clearly her vaginal hormone injections work. Dr. Phil got results in court, so his increasing rightward swing and exploitation of vulnerable people on his own talk show is good somehow. Dr. Oz is good at surgery, so his supplements and politics work as well, surely? If the rich people Oprah endorses think you shouldn’t vaccinate your kid, those voices are sure to drown out the experts you’ve been told don’t care about your health.

People are drawn to pseudoscience and quack gurus because they are, not unfairly, distrustful of corporatized healthcare. Frankly, we should be sceptical of a for-profit system that has its roots in the exploitation of Black and brown bodies and long-ignored queer people’s suffering during the AIDS crisis. But con-artists prey upon historic fears to sell an enticing opportunity for us plebs to be the boot, and all it does is create more victims. It’s the promise behind every great con: you too could be the scammer but you probably won’t be. In the end, only Oprah and her friends got rich from this. The problem has continued in many ways, like Winfrey’s multi-million dollar Weight Watchers deal falling to pieces once she confessed to using weight loss drugs.

When I reviewed the newest work by Elizabeth Gilbert, the latest choice in Oprah’s book club (now sponsored by Starbucks, so make sure you get your special tie-in coffee to go with this book about drug addiction and trying to kill your partner), I wrote about the big problems with selling yourself as a perennial source of advice. When every part of your life is repackaged for the masses as inspiration porn, it quickly robs both you and your work of true power. You cannot condense the nuances and agonies of your own suffering into teachable lessons and not expect the world to grow numb to their realities. This is why the term ‘inspiration porn’ exists, and it’s how quackery is able to thrive. The high of this fake concern wears off very quickly and requires a regular replacement. Your thyroid is messed up? It must be an energy problem. Or your negative aura. Or vaccines. Maybe there’s a cream for it.

It’s undeniable that Oprah’s endorsements had an impact on the public’s choices. After Dr. Oz got his own Oprah-produced talk show, he upped the ante on pushing pseudoscience and miracle cures. For a study in the British medical journal BMJ, a team of experienced evidence reviewers analysed Dr. Oz’s on-air advice, and of the 80 randomly chosen recommendations he made in 2013, they found legitimate supporting evidence for fewer than half. He’s now part of the Trump Administration. Dr. Phil is similarly popular in the MAGA camp. Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vax crusade received further unchallenged media coverage from the likes of Larry King and helped to turn Andrew Wakefield, the discredited former doctor who pushed the entire falsehood about vaccines and autism, into a folk hero on the other side of the pond. All of the ‘just asking questions’ inspiring gurus of Oprah’s show are now helping to define policy against the advice of real scientists.

These days, I find myself frequently referencing Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger on matters of conspiracy and quackery. There’s a moment where she talks about how people are drawn to increasingly elaborate tinhat theories in lieu of confronting the darker and seedier truths of power. There’s something manageable, so to speak, about the outlandish theory that Bill Gates was sticking microchips in the COVID vaccine. The truth of corporations making billions of dollars from a vaccine in the midst of a pandemic that killed millions is less juicy and too hopeless to confront. We prefer the legend even if we know, deep in our hearts, that it’s fake. If it’s sold to us by a great salesperson, then all the better.

“We have the right to demand a better quality of life for ourselves,” Winfrey declared during the Somers episode. “And that’s what doctors have got to learn to start respecting.” It’s a truth that conceals an insidious practice of snake oil and sickness. Advocating for medical respect and autonomy matters now more than ever. Black women face high rates of death during childbirth due to medical negligence. Trans people are being stripped of gender affirming care and labelled as threats to society. Reproductive justice has been strip-mined for parts under the thinly veiled guise of religious freedom. Anti-vaxxers rule the Trump Administration, and the President just declared that Tylenol causes autism. Fighting for yourself against a broken system is crucial, but it doesn’t make crooks or quacks the solution to all our problems.

No, Winfrey is not single-handedly responsible for legitimizing dangerous junk science and peddlers of mistruths to the mainstream. Alas, we have a long and storied history of this very problem. But Winfrey is still a beloved national treasure, a woman who is consistently held up as a potential Presidential candidate (she herself has said no to these desires). Her word can still make a book into a bestseller, send a product flying up the Amazon charts. She is still on a quest to help people live their best lives, and she remains unconcerned with the collateral damage that this rose-tinted agenda has created. It’s turned us all into our worst, sicker selves.