I’d just like to take a moment to engage in a little bit of shameless self-promotion and point out that an SBM post has actually seen print. Specifically, my post about the malign influence Oprah Winfrey’s promotion of dubious medical practices on her show (The Oprah-fication of Medicine) has been adapted (with heavy cutting and editing) into an op-ed piece in The Toronto Star, entitled Is Oprah Winfrey Giving Us Bad Medicine?
No one was more shocked than I was when the editor of Sunday Insight section of The Toronto Star contacted me earlier this week to ask if he could adapt my post to a newspaper editorial. Actually, he and his editors did the vast majority of the work in whittling my usual logorrheic prose down to a manageable size and paraphrasing the sections of the NEWSWEEK article on Oprah that I had quoted liberally from. (After all, I didn’t want to be accused of plagiarism.) It was a rather educational experience, actually. Unfortunately, reading the finished version again, I don’t think it quite makes the link between Oprah and the infiltration of pseudoscientific CAM practices into modern medicine as clear as the original post, perhaps because the context of all the other blog posts on the topic by SBM bloggers is missing, which is why I hope that some Star readers will find their way here and be able to read the full length version.
In any case, compare:
The Oprah-fication of medicine (the original, full-length blog post)
Versus:
Is Oprah Winfrey Giving Us Bad Medicine? (the heavily edited op-ed piece)
And see what you think.