Surprising Facts You Didn’t Know About Dr. Oz

Dr. Mehmet Oz, best known simply as Dr. Oz, has made recent headlines for his political aspirations — first for running in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania, and then when President-elect Donald Trump nominated him as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

But long before Oz was tasked with heading up Medicare, he was a well-known figure to TV audiences around the world. The long road from growing up as the son of Turkish immigrants to a White House appointment is a fascinating one.

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio.

Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

Oz was born in 1960 to Turkish immigrants Suna and Mustafa Öz, who named their baby after Mehmed the Conquerer. His father Mustafa first moved to the United States in 1950 to join the general residency program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Oz's mother Suna came from a wealthy family. Oz said, "[My mother's] great grandmother was brought from the Caucasus to Istanbul as a concubine in Sultan Mahmud II's harem."

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He grew up in a mixed Muslim family.

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Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Lexus
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While Oz's upbringing was undeniably Muslim, there was some nuance to it. Because his father came from a family that was more rigid in their beliefs while his mother came from a more secular environment, Oz's upbringing blended the two interpretations of Islam.

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The Öz family includes two other children as well, Dr. Oz's sisters Seval and Nazlim. The three siblings split their childhood between the United States and Turkey, where they typically spent their summers.

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His family moved around growing up.

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While Oz was born in Cleveland, his father's ambitious medical career ensured that the family was never in the same place for very long. After Mustafa moved on to Emory University in Atlanta, the family followed.

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After Atlanta, the family moved to Wilmington, Delaware — the city where Oz spent the bulk of his childhood. He attended Tower Hill School in Wilmington and went on to Harvard for his undergrad.

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He was a college football player.

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@DrOz/X
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Harvard has a strong football team considering its Ivy League pedigree, and Oz went to Harvard for more than just an education. He played safety for the Harvard Crimson football team.

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More than just a football defender, Oz also took part in water polo. He served as a goalkeeper on Harvard's men's varsity water polo team. On the education front, he received an undergraduate degree in biology cum laude in 1982.

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After Harvard, he went to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

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After graduating from Harvard in 1982, the 22-year-old Mehmet Oz went on to receive his MD and MBA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton School, also at Penn.

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It was during his time at Penn that Oz continued his active extracurricular life, serving as class president and student body president. He also received the Captain's Athletic Award for leadership.

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His medical career began in the 1980s.

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Jemal Countess/WireImage via Getty Images
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After getting his MD from Penn, Oz was officially an accredited doctor. But while his academic career was impressive and his burgeoning medical career looked promising, he was far from the celebrity he would later become.

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Oz earned a residency at New York's Presbyterian Hospital in 1986, which was affiliated with Columbia University at the time. For the remainder of the decade and into the '90s, Oz served ably as a doctor at the hospital.

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In 1995, he made a big splash in the medical world.

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It was in 1995 that Oz and Dr. Jerry Whitworth founded the Cardiac Complementary Care Center, with the stated purpose of providing alternative medicine to heart disease patients.

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The move caused a significant ripple, with hospital administrators expressing concern about their alternative forms of treatment. Chief among these concerns was Oz's use of therapeutic touch on patients — a practice that he quickly discontinued after his bosses raised objections.

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The following year marked his first brush with mainstream fame.

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In 1996, baseball's New York Yankees were playing for the championship for the first time in a decade, when Frank Torre — the brother of Yankees manager Joe Torre — needed a heart transplant.

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Needless to say, it was big news — and Oz, along with his colleague Dr. Eric Rose, successfully performed the transplant. While Rose said that he didn't enjoy the media attention, he added that Oz seemed to love it.

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After this, his colleagues soured on him.

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David Maxwell/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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It was this brush with fame that changed Oz, at least if you ask his colleague Dr. Jerry Whitworth — the doctor with whom he co-founded the alternative treatment center.

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Whitworth said that the fame got to Oz's head, putting strain on their professional relationship. He said that at a certain point, he asked Oz to "stop the media circus." In 2000, their professional relationship came to an end.

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His medical career continued into the 2000s.

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Peter Kramer/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
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Although his status as a burgeoning celebrity meant that his medical career eventually took a backseat, Oz's medical accolades continued to accumulate. He became a professor at Columbia in 2001 and was elevated to professor emeritus in 2018.

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He worked on research related to heart surgery, but was banned for two years by the American Association for Thoracic Surgery in 2003 owing to the fact that he changed his methodology rather than academic dishonesty.

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He first became known to TV audiences in 2003.

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PAUL BRUINOOGE/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
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Second Opinion with Dr. Oz aired on the Discovery Channel starting in 2003 and was produced by Oz's wife, Lisa. It was through this show that Oz first met Oprah Winfrey, the TV legend with whom he'd later collaborate with.

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While Oz's Discovery Channel show was a flop, running for only five episodes, he was able to pivot to The Oprah Winfrey Show. It was with Oprah that Oz's status as a TV celebrity was established.

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He appeared on Oprah's show for five seasons.

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Starting in 2004 and running through 2009, Oz was a featured health expert on The Oprah Winfrey Show. After these five seasons, Winfrey offered Oz his own syndicated series that she'd produce through her company.

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Oz readily accepted the offer, and The Dr. Oz Show made its TV debut in September 2009. While his medical opinions were generally well-received during his time on Oprah's show, they went in some new directions after he got his own show.

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The Dr. Oz Show ran from 2009 to 2022.

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Official White House Photo by Sonya N. Hebert
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Formatted as a daytime talk show, Oz served as host of the program. Segments were divided between discussions on health, wellness, and medical information, and sometimes included celebrity guests and even true crime stories.

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During its 13 seasons on the air, it received nine Daytime Emmy Awards. It was never cancelled, but rather ceased production after Oz announced in 2022 that he'd run for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

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He appeared on more than just his own show.

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As a bona fide daytime TV celebrity, Dr. Oz quickly found himself in demand. Along with Suze Orman and Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil), Oz was part of a weekly advice show, Ask Oprah's All-Stars.

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Oz also had a regular health segment on the 1010 WINS radio station in New York and had an additional spin-off show, Surgeon Oz. He also appears in the credits of the 2002 drama film John Q., where he was credited as a consultant on heart transplantation.

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He discussed various health issues on his show.

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Randy Holmes/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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Oz frequently toed the line between conventional medical advice and more controversial medical topics. Of note, he was a major proponent of resveratrol, a compound that he claimed had anti-aging properties.

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During the show's run, Oz gradually became a bigger proponent of alternative medicine, a trend that began during his years at New York's Presbyterian Hospital. These opinions made Oz the target of some criticism for a perceived lack of scientific credibility.

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Many of his claims don't stand up to scrutiny.

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Lorenzo Bevilaqua/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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While daytime TV must be taken with a grain of salt, Dr. Oz is a licensed cardiothoracic surgeon, so his opinions carry some weight. A 2014 study by the British Medical Journal stated that less than half of the claims made on his show were backed with "some" evidence.

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As for claims with "believable" evidence, the journal concluded that less than a third of Oz's claims met this threshold.

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Medical journals have routinely criticized Oz.

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Karen Neal/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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In addition to the damning report by the British Medical Journal, Oz also encountered sharp criticism from the website Science-Based Medicine, which stated, "No other show on television can top The Dr. Oz Show for the sheer magnitude of bad health advice it consistently offers, all while giving everything a veneer of credibility."

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Of course, the claims that fell under the most scrutiny extended far beyond Oz's usual advocacy for alternative medicine.

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Oz has a spotty track record on vaccines.

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Randy Holmes / Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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A 2010 recommendation on Oz's show to space out childhood vaccines was roundly criticized, as this is based on the false premise that children's immune systems can only respond to one vaccine at a time.

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It's a premise that's often featured in anti-vaccine literature, and Oz later doubled down on this by saying that his children were not vaccinated against H1N1, a subtype of the flu virus.

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He endorsed a discredited claim.

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Henry S. Dziekan III/Getty Images
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Later on, Oz suggested that the MMR (mumps, measles, and rubella) vaccine may be linked to autism. This was an inflammatory claim, as it isn't backed by medical evidence.

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In fact, the notion that MMR vaccines are linked to autism came from a fraudulent paper written by Andrew Wakefield in the 1990s. The paper was so erroneous that Wakefield was stripped of his medical license as a result.

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Oz seemed to come around to vaccination eventually.

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While many in the credible scientific and medical communities criticized Oz for his statements and implications about vaccines, he did soften his position somewhat in the years to follow.

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In 2019, Oz endorsed the MMR vaccine on his show, encouraging viewers to vaccinate themselves and their children against mumps, measles, and rubella.

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The strange claims didn't end there.

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Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
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A September 2011 episode of The Dr. Oz Show became a hot topic after Oz hired a toxicology lab to test apple juice, erroneously concluding that apple juice contains dangerously high levels of arsenic.

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The claim was rebuffed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which noted that Oz didn't distinguish between harmless organic arsenic and toxic inorganic arsenic. A statement from the FDA read, "There is currently no evidence to suggest a public health risk."

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He's also featured conversion therapy on his show.

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Oz called it "reparative therapy," but it functioned identically to the controversial practice of conversion therapy: Providing therapy to a gay person with the goal of turning them straight.

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The episode featured a guest from a pro-conversion therapy organization along with guests who are against the process. Oz was roundly criticized for platforming a controversial group, as well as offering no challenge to some of their most controversial claims.

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Oz defended his position.

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In a blog post, he said, "If we want to reach everyone who might benefit from understanding the risks of this therapy, you have to present multiple perspectives."

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He concluded by stating that he agrees with the medical consensus on conversion therapy, which says that there's no evidence to suggest that it's an effective or positive form of therapy. He added that he made some errors in hosting the segment in the first place.

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In 2014, he was criticized by the U.S. Senate.

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Senator Claire McCaskill challenged Oz during a hearing on consumer protection, saying that Oz plays a role in promoting questionable weight loss products by airing segments about them on his show.

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McCaskill said she's "concerned that [Oz is] melding medical advice, news, and entertainment in a way that harms consumers." Oz's claims about green coffee extract — which he called "magic" and "a miracle" were also criticized by the Senate.

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He was sued by olive oil manufacturers.

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Clara Margais/picture alliance via Getty Images
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Oz has appeared in many crosshairs over the years, but one of the most unusual was when the North American Olive Oil Association sued him in 2016. The suit was related to a claim Oz made in which he said that 80 percent of extra virgin olive oil may be "fake."

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Oz was sued for promoting misinformation in Georgia, a state that has a food libel law on the books. He refuted the allegations, and the suit was dismissed in 2017.

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He's a proponent of medical marijuana.

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In a 2017 appearance on Fox & Friends, Oz weighed in on the issue of cannabis, which is still a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law. He called the classification "hypocrisy."

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Furthermore, Oz has promoted the idea of medical marijuana as an alternative to harder substances such as opioids during an episode that featured Montel Williams.

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He's promoted colloidal silver.

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Colloidal silver — silver particles suspended in a liquid compound — was used as a treatment prior to the development of modern antibiotics, and its efficacy has largely been discredited.

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On multiple episodes of his show, Oz said that colloidal silver could be an effective treatment for cold symptoms, wounds, viruses, and bacteria. There is no medical evidence to support any of this, and the consumption of colloidal silver may be unsafe to begin with.

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In 2016, Donald Trump appeared on his show.

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Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
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During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump appeared on The Dr. Oz Show. It was noteworthy because the appearance came just days after Trump refused to shared the results of a physical health examination. Before his appearance on the show, Oz implied that he'd broadcast the test results.

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Oz obtained a brief, one-page summary from Trump's physician Harold Bornstein, and the appearance was criticized for not being thorough. It was also pointed out that Oz is not Trump's personal physician.

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He served as an informal health advisor to Trump.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, Oz hypothesized that hydroxychloroquine could be an effective treatment against the virus, though he noted that it would need to be backed by case studies.

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It was around this time that Oz started serving as an informal health advisor to President Trump, which perhaps helps explain Trump's enthusiastic advocacy of hydroxychloroquine during the early months of the pandemic.

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He wanted schools to reopen at the height of the pandemic.

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In April 2020, a month after the pandemic exploded in the U.S., Oz mused that reopening schools might be worth it — despite the deaths that would inevitably result.

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"I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us two to three percent in terms of total mortality," he said during an appearance on Fox News. Later, he apologized and said that he misspoke.

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His political aspirations go back years.

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Elyse Horvath/Wikimedia Commons
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It was reported in 2007 that Oz was a donor to the Republican Party, and he supported various GOP politicians, including George W. Bush, over the years.

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In 2018, Donald Trump appointed him to the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. He was later forced to resign from this position because his Senate candidacy made him ineligible.

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In 2021, he officially announced his candidacy.

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Oz announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022. The announcement sent ripple effects through the TV world, as numerous stations pulled his show over concerns that airing it would force them to give equal time to opposing candidates.

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Oz came in hot during the early days of his campaign, calling for the firing of Dr. Anthony Fauci and announcing his opposition to mandatory vaccines.

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His campaign was endorsed by Trump.

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Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images
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While Oz ran as a Republican, there were concerns among the GOP that he wasn't a true conservative, while his status as a dual citizen of both the United States and Turkey was also criticized.

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Regardless, former president Trump endorsed Oz in April of 2022. For his part, Oz said that the criticisms were a "distraction," adding that he'd renounce his Turkish citizenship if he won the election.

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Oz became the Republican nominee.

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The nomination was not without a few hiccups — Oz prematurely declared victory, causing significant controversy, and his opponents accused him of being opportunistic for running in a state where he'd only lived since 2020.

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Despite this, Oz eventually was named the Republican nominee after his main opponent, David McCormick, dropped out of the race. This cleared the way for Oz to run against Democrat John Fetterman for the Senate seat.

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His campaign was high-profile.

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He posted a video in August in which he blamed high grocery store prices on President Joe Biden, a move that was roundly mocked for its perceived out-of-touch tone. Oz acknowledged that the video wasn't a great idea.

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Later, Oz mocked Fetterman with a joking list of concessions he'd be willing to make, including "not intentionally hurt[ing] John's feelings" and granting Fetterman unlimited bathroom breaks. He also mocked Fetterman's diet, suggesting it was the reason for a recent stroke.

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Oz lost to Fetterman.

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The two held a single debate on October 25th. A couple of weeks later, in November, Oz conceded defeat to Fetterman after losing by a margin of 4.9 percent.

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He was gracious in defeat, calling for voters to, "Put down their partisan swords and focus on getting the job done." If he'd been elected, he would have been the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate.

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He quickly moved to his next gig.

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LATROBE, PENNSYLVANIA - NOVEMBER 05: Pennsylvania Win McNamee/Getty Images
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Just ten days after conceding the Senate race, President-elect Trump named Oz as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In this role, according to Trump, Oz will work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services.

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While Kennedy's nomination encountered sharp criticism, the Oz nomination was better received. His former opponent, John Fetterman, said, "Dr. Oz is about protecting and preserving Medicare and Medicaid, I'm voting for the dude."

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Some of his political positions are known.

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Prior to 2019, Oz supported a woman's right to seek the termination of her pregnancy, though he acknowledged that he disliked the practice on "a personal level."

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But in 2022, following the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Oz stated that he was "relieved" by the decision, adding, "If life starts at conception, why do you care what stage our hearts start beating at? It's still murder."

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He has opinions on foreign policy as well.

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Republican Senate Candidate Mehmet Oz Holds Campaign Event
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Oz holds a "tough on China" position in line with other Trump Republicans, although he partnered with a Chinese tech company and served as their chief health officer in 2013.

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Oz has also stated that Israel is "an ally and a vibrant democracy in the world's most troubled region," a position in line with his long-held support for Israel.

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If his nomination is confirmed, he'll be part of the Trump administration in January.

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Trump's first presidency showed that his inner circle and appointees can shift unpredictably, sometimes changing day by day, so it's impossible to predict how the coming months will play out.

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While Oz has been a controversial figure throughout his career, he's generally regarded as less controversial than some of Trump's other allies, which suggests that he will be sworn in to head the CMS in the Trump administration.