Columbia University removes mentions of Mehmet Oz from website

The website of Columbia University Medical Centre stopped hosting personal pages for Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz in January after a news report erroneously stated that the hospital had distanced itself from him by chancing his title to “professor emeritus”.

According to The Daily Beast, an incorrect 12 January report in HuffPost which alleged the change in title to have happened in January (his title had actually changed in 2018) prompted Columbia to remove Mr Oz’s biography from the site and modify pages which mentioned him so they no longer linked to the defunct profile page.

Mr Oz, who was once a professor at Columbia’s medical school and served as vice-chair of the school’s surgery department, stopped seeing patients in 2018, but still has an office at Columbia and is listed in the school’s directory as a “special lecturer”.

Once a renowned cardiothoratic surgeon and heart transplant specialist, Mr Oz has long been the subject of controversy. In 2015, a group of the country’s top medical professionals asked Columbia to cut ties with him, citing his “disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops”.

The group also accused him of having “manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain”.