What draws some physicians to the celebrity spotlight? And why is the American public so attracted to them? What gives them their star power?

By Katrina Woznicki

Surf through any TV channels or walk into any bookstore and you’ll come across them. Even folks who don’t regard themselves as health nuts know their names: Atkins, Chopra, Love, Northrup, Ornish, Weil.

To make a name in medicine is one thing, but to become a household buzzword as these physicians have is another thing altogether. Few medical professionals break beyond the recognition that comes with having one’s work published in prestigious medical journals. Almost none move into a realm where everyone from suburban soccer moms to middle-aged politicians to esteemed scientists queue up for a book signing or to attend a lecture. Most physicians don’t have fans and those who do gain membership to the celebrity guru club.

“There are people, like Jennifer Lopez or Ricky Martin, who have charisma,” says Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya, a physician who practices holistic medicine in New York City and a trustee of the American Holistic Medical Association. These medical gurus, she says, have that kind of charisma. “These celebrities, they care for people…they reachinto our souls in a way medicine is not allowed to do, and they reach into our minds and reach into the cohesion that’s mind, body, spirit.”

Today’s celebrity healers share an emphasis on the mind-body-spirit trinity, a concept increasingly popular in mainstream America and one that parallels the public’s rising dissatisfaction with a conventional health-care system many find to be disconnected from what makes humans human. Despite their controversial and sometimes unproven medical advice, these physicians have achieved cult status by appointing themselves interpreters of a scientific jargon many view as complicated and cold, and by spinning their advice with the warm fuzziness of grass-roots healing. They recognize the American public doesn’t have the patience for scientific mumbo-jumbo, so they provide the public with the CliffsNotes to health and well-being.

Reflection of the times

Famous healers have always had a place in history, but the mass-media reach of the modern medical celebrity seems to have taken hold in the 1980s with former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who fit the physical image of a no-nonsense physician and who harped on Americans to put out their cigarettes. And let’s not forget “Dr. Ruth”—Ruth Westheimer, Ph.D., a tiny, always-smiling Jewish lady who, with her grandmotherly physical appearance, got a nation to more publicly discuss sex. But in the first year of the 21st century, it’s difficult to picture sober-looking physicians like Koop having the kind of platform enjoyed by today’s new celebrity healers, who often forgo white lab coats for a more casual look. This casual style resonates with a public thirsty for holistic knowledge.

And thanks to modern technology, these medical celebrities now have an international soapbox instantly bring-ing their messages of holistic healing to populations plugged in around-the-clock. Each physician has something different to say. Andrew Weil preaches herbs. Deepak Chopra pushes spirituality. Dean Ornish promises to reverse heart disease. Robert Atkins pitches his diet and specialty food products. Christiane Northrup spreads the word about wholeness in women’s health. And Susan Love has become the unofficial spokeswoman on breast health and breast cancer. Whether it’s through cable TV, newspapers, Web chats or a guest appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (which often has the effect of fairy dust on many people’s careers), these physicians are able to spread their word, so to speak, in a way few physicians can.

“The kind of recognition I have has been enough to get a significant number of people listening to me,” says Robert Atkins, founder and executive director of the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine in New York City, author of seven best-selling books and the creator of the famous Atkins diet. “But my job isn’t just to have a significant number of people listening to me, but to get honestly back into medical teaching. I need to be much better known than what I am, and this is what I’m going to fight to accomplish because this isn’t about me, but it’s about people going through illnesses needlessly.”

Though not every medical celebrity sees his career as a crusade, many think conventional Western medicine lacks a bedside manner that resonates with the general public. Deepak Chopra, founder and chief executive officer, and director of educational programs at the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California, finds this to be true. “I’m very aware of the fact that one of the big problems in medicine is that patients feel their physicians don’t understand them because they don’t understand the physician’s lingo. It’s a very privileged lingo,” says Chopra, who has claimed in the past that he levitates during meditation and who Time magazine has called “Emperor of the Soul” and “the poet prophet of alternative medicine.”

“I think what I’ve been able to do successfully is take esoteric, philosophical speculations and put them in the language of science” that makes sense to people, Chopra says. He is a best-selling author and is co-author of the new book Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging, in which he describes ways to reverse biological aging by up to 15 years. The book includes such age-reversing recipes as banana-coconut stew, and cranberry and sweet potato chutney.

Physicians charming

The messages that these physicians disseminate must resonate with the public. But would these messages be as widely received if someone else delivered them?

“I hope it’s more than personality, I hope it’s content,” Chopra says. But even he acknowledges the obsession Americans have with celebrities can open doors to a physician eager to spread a message. And in his case, Chopra says Americans may be more receptive to his suggestions because of his Indian heritage. He says it gives him an exotic quality, and it brings an air of credibility, particularly to his messages about maintaining a healthy spirit and mind. “I think people like my Indian accent,” he says jokingly. When people see him, they know he “has a background, he has a tradition, he has a culture,” he says.

If Chopra can be considered the Indian sage, then Andrew Weil is the Earth Father. A Harvard-trained physician, Weil leads the integrative medicine movement seeking to merge two often-polarized worlds of medicine—conventional and alternative. He is frequently photographed wearing sandals, relaxing in the gardens of his Arizona ranch and smiling through his long salt-and-pepper beard. The man The New York Times has called “Andrew Weil, Shaman, M.D.” is “the antithesis of the cold clinical physician with a tie and a stethoscope,” says Dr. Ronald Hoffman, president of the American College of Advancement in Medicine (ACAM) and director of the Hoffman Center, a complementary med-icine facility in New York City. “The gifted herbalist is still a popular image in this country,” he says.

Weil’s gifts are repeatedly disputed, and he is one of the most controversial medical gurus to have a place in the national spotlight. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) But the trained botanist’s reach is vast: He is the founder of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the first of its kind; he has authored more than a dozen books, many of which are blockbuster sellers and have been translated into other languages; he has his own Web site; he has appeared on television shows ranging from “Oprah” to “Larry King Live”; and he frequently appears as a guest speaker at medical conferences, where professionals line up for a chance to speak to him or get his autograph.

His discourses on the benefits of herbs rile many physicians—including Weil’s former teacher—who argue Weil is preaching loose and untested advice to millions of people. “Weil has no special medical message at all of no value,” says Dr. Arnold Relman, a professor emeritus of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School who had Weil as a student in the 1960s. “Medical salesmen have been around for centuries,” says Relman, who also served as editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). “The snake oil salesmen and the physicians who claim they have special remedies or certain treatments—if they’re persuasive enough, most of the public will go along with it.” The kind of alternative medicine touted by these medical gurus has “commercial value,” not scientific value, he says.

The value of science

Considered to be one of the most commercial physicians around, Atkins has repeatedly been accused of not supporting his claims with sound science. “It’s almost as if his attitude is ‘I don’t care if it works, I’m going to do it anyway,’” says Dr. Stephen Barrett, creator of www. quackwatch.com and a retired psychiatrist. “He’s the one responsible for the fact that there’s not enough study.”

There is particularly little documented research on what Atkins may be best known for today, his widely used Atkins diet. This regimen claims people can melt pounds by eating high proportions of meat and dairy—foods that are typically the first ones trimmed in a weight-loss plan—and by avoiding carbohydrates, including fruits and vegetables, which have long been considered the foundation for good nutrition and good health. The problem with producing research, Atkins says, is that research costs a lot of money and funding usually only comes if there’s a chance of making a profit.

“I never was a billionaire,” he says. “I was just a practicing physician with just enough money to live on. I couldn’t fund a study.”

However, money has been funneled into alternative medicine research, which appears to have both commercial and, more recently, scientific value. “The critics of alternative medicine say there’s nothing in the literature about it, but there’s a fairly significant amount of studies,” ACAM’s Hoffman points out.

Several studies examining the therapeutic benefits of the more common alternative practices, such as acupuncture, massage and herbs, have been published in the most reputable journals, including NEJM and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which have devoted entire issues to alternative medicine research. While some studies have found these therapies offer no benefit—for example, several reports indicate St. John’s Wort does little or nothing to alleviate depression symptoms—other studies have found some alternative treatments to have great potential, including research suggesting the usefulness of St. John’s Wort. And still other studies have determined that massage can lessen pain, biofeedback can help irritable bowel syndrome, and the herb chaste berry may ease premenstrual symptoms.

A physician who’s rarely accused of not backing his claims with science is Dean Ornish. Ornish contends that not only can heart disease be prevented, but it can also be reversed without drugs by means of sticking to a strict low-fat, high-vegetarian diet, exercising regularly and practicing such stress-reduction techniques as meditation or yoga. Unlike most of these gurus, Ornish is praised by both conventional and alternative practitioners; alternative practitioners like his emphasis on strengthening the mind–body connection and eating a plant-based diet, and conventional physicians like that Ornish is a conventionally trained cardiologist who uses hard, scientific data to support his claims. “He can be chameleon-like in his behavior because he’s not threatening to mainstream physicians,” Hof-f-man says, “but he lives the alternative medicine lifestyle. He’s a closet hippie.”

“As far as I’m concerned, he’s not in the same league as the others,” says Quackwatch’s Barrett. “Ornish is doing extremely important work. He’s done some well-designed studies to test his ideas.” Indeed, Ornish’s research and reports have been published in every estimable medical publication, including Circulation, JAMA, NEJM, The Lancet and the American Journal of Cardiology. Even the U.S. Department of Agri-culture has declared Ornish’s diet effective, and Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), a self-proclaimed fan, has teamed up with Reps. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.) to sponsor Medicare use of the Ornish program.

“As a scientist, I’m trying to do the best research I can,” explains Ornish, whose credentials could be a book of their own. Most notably, he is president and director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Cali-fornia, has served as a physician consultant to former President Bill Clinton and to the White House chefs, and has also served on the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Despite his commission seat, this cardiologist considers himself first to be a scientist—not an alternative medicine practitioner—then an educator, and if celebrity helps him dispense what he has learned, so be it. “I don’t seek after it, and I try not to avoid it,” says the man Life magazine named one of the 50 most outstanding members of his generation. His job, he says, is about “disseminating information that could really help people. I mean, that’s why we’re here.” Ornish has disseminated information on just about every major network morning talk-show—including “The Phil Donahue Show,” “Today,” “CBS This Morning” and “Good Morning America”—and he’s appeared on CNN and “Oprah.” In print, his reach has stretched from the popular men’s magazine Esquire to The Washington Post.

Green with envy

So if science does support the benefits of some alternative practices advocated by these gurus, why hasn’t the harsh criticism quieted?

“A lot of people who attack these celebrities are just jealous,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. He says it’s true that many physicians who speak out against these cult healers have their patients’ best interests in mind—“Celebrity can so easily lead to demagoguery and quackery and sleaziness and all the rest,” he says—but a handful of medical professionals also resent the fact that these physicians have captured the nation’s attention. “A lot of this stuff is turf protection,” he says.

Few physicians and scientists would dispute that the medical field involves grueling, difficult and often unrewarding work—the “drudge and sludge of medicine,” as Bhattacharya calls it. And Hoffman says some physicians may resent that these celebrity healers “seem to glide effortlessly over the real difficulties inherent in medicine. Medicine is tough, slogging, miserable work.” People die, medicine can’t cure everything, and unfulfilled expectations can give many physicians a sense that they have failed, he says.

While Relman, Weil’s former teacher, agrees that scientists like to be recognized for their hard work, he denies any jealousy of medical celebrities. “The notoriety that Chopra and Weil have is not something that most physicians envy,” he says. “Most good scientists I know just want to get the answers to good questions. If you’re a real good scientist, your primary major purpose in life is not to get famous.”

Something these gurus’ critics all agree on is that these physicians certainly know how to package and sell themselves. Coming across as confident and caring counts in a big way. “Medical celebrities tend to share parts of themselves,” Bhattacharya says. “They’re secure in themselves and their character. Each of these people who is a celebrity has a sense of healthiness. They’re a role model.”

Barrett strongly disagrees that these physicians serve as role models, and he even accuses some of them of blatantly delivering false information. The problem with Weil, Barrett argues, is that he presents his views on integrative medicine as a moderate viewpoint, and it’s far from being moderate. “He’s simply not a trustworthy source of advice because too much of his advice is wrong,” Barrett says. According to him, physicians like Weil, Chopra or Atkins are just capitalizing on Ameri-cans’ impulse to buy such alternative medicine products as dietary supplements and herbs—an impulse that’s fed by aggressive, mainstream media marketing. “The message is, ‘Everybody jump on the bandwagon,’” he says, adding that it’s very difficult to get what he calls the “anti-quack” perspective on mainstream media outlets to counter claims made by these gurus. “You try to get an anti-quack message on a talk show—it’s almost impossible,” he says.

As seen on TV

Mass media, especially television, plays a huge role in nurturing the careers of these medical celebrities.

“[It’s] the very fact they’re being bounced off satellites into the living rooms of millions and millions of Americans, which gives them degrees of legitimacy that many physicians don’t have,” Thompson says.

Whether these gurus were created by pop culture or whether they created their own culture is a chicken-or-the-egg kind of question. The fact remains that these physicians are gaining not just from mainstream America’s interest in holistic medicine but also from the mere fact that for many Americans, television lends credibility to just about anything, even medical information. “If the camera is not recording it,” Thompson says, “it must not be very important.”

Barrett concurs. “You want to get popular? You go on ‘Oprah.’”

Chopra offers a different view of why Americans cling so obsessively to what they see on television. America, he says, is a new culture lacking “authentic mythology,” which serves as a source for heroes and role models in many older cultures, including his native India. “Generally what has happened is that the media has perpetuated people as heroes…. It’s totally out of proportion to the reality,” he says.

Although these gurus describe their celebrity status as an honor and recognize that their fans have helped make them what they are today, they also acknowledge drawbacks to millions of strangers knowing their faces.

“There is a dark side or a down side,” Ornish admits. It can be difficult when one just wants to go out for a quiet dinner at a restaurant, he says.

Chopra echoes these sentiments. “I can’t go to the airport or a restaurant without being treated as a celebrity. In the beginning, I felt an-noyed, but then I realized it was a privilege. I depend on these people for a living.”

Where are the women?

Whether these physicians have hit the apex of their careers or their stars will keep rising remains to be seen. But one thing for sure is that the competition for the spotlight is about to get tougher.

“So far, the authorities in American culture,” Bhatta-charya says, “whether it’s politics, whether it’s news, whether it’s sports, whether it’s medicine, are men.” She predicts that within a decade, the public will see more women physicians in the national spotlight.

Sex guru “Dr. Ruth” may have helped pave the wayfor women physicians like Christiane Northrup and Susan Love to reach even greater stardom. Northrup, who has ap-peared on “Oprah,” preaches a philosophy blending conventional medicine, alternative medicine, spirituality and feminism to get women to think differently about their bodies—a feat unto itself given this country’s level of body image obsession. She shares the podium with Love, who, like many of these celebrity gurus, has her own Web site—and even has her own breast cancer foundation. Unlike North-rup, though, Love’s focus is more specific: helping women prevent, treat and cope with breast cancer. Con-sidering the political power breast cancer groups have in the United States, it is likely that Love’s profile will also contin-ue to grow.

But despite these strides, the women’s accomplishments are often overshadowed by the clout of their male counterparts who are almost universally known. But women now represent more than half of the medical student population. Women gradually pushed their way into medical school, Bhatta-charya says, so they’re going to push their way onto the medical celebrity stage as well. Talk show hosts are going to have to bring out extra chairs for the women who will develop followings of their own and reshape this predominantly male guru club.

© Copyright 2001 The New Physician.