Why ZDoggMD and His Toilet Humor Are Best Flushed and Forgotten
After caring for patients for over 3 decades, loving it more now than ever, I can’t imagine leaving the calling early in my career. Apparently not all doctors feel the same way. I guess if you can’t make it as a doctor you change careers to mock other doctors who haven’t bailed on providing compassionate care. Is humiliating other doctors a protective mechanism to accommodate for leaving a short medical career and seeing a health clinic project close this year? It seems so for Zuben Damania, known as ZdoggMD on social media. He has a large following for his zany songs and antics that began while he became “burned out and depressed” during his medical career. His main activity now seems to be doing anything for a laugh, particularly since Turntable Health closed January 31, 2017.
What’s my beef with the Dogg? For reasons he does not reveal, ZDogg posted a You Tube review of the health documentary What The Health with the subtitle “we wasted an hour and a half so you don’t have to”. I urge you to watch the film and decide on your own if you find it informative. You will notice I have a few short cameos in it but somehow escape the Wrath of the Dogg. Too bad as I like a fight with someone who has done no research. I did not get paid for my appearance and have no equity in the film so I have no financial bias as to whether it succeeds or not. I imagine the other doctors interviewed also were not paid. I dislike my colleagues, known for their high integrity and passionate patient care, being trampled on for cheap laughs. They are indeed the doctors you would want your family to see. Fortunately, they actually see patients while Zdogg tells jokes for a living. He was in the arena, he opted to bail out, end of story. Or almost end of story as he has used social media to get attention at any cost. I took a few notes while watching the You Turd he made and share a few comments with you.
1) In a discussion early in his video about the announcement in October, 2015 by the World Health Organization that processed red meats cause cancer and qualify as class 1 carcinogens, the Dogg advises viewers that Kip is “just realizing life causes cancer”. Damania seems completely unaware of the science indicating that the vast majority of cases of cancer are related to lifestyle and may be modifiable to avoid the disease. He would rather just laugh at attempts to apply medical science to individual lifestyle decisions such as forgoing processed red meats. Why can’t you just take your chemo and prostatectomy like a man while guzzling bacon and cheese hot dogs? You will always have ZDOGG there to humor you from your death bed.
2) Damania rants and raves about the futility of advising people about healthier lifestyles because people continue to smoke despite warning messages about the health risks. The Dogg apparently is not aware that there are fewer smokers in the US than ever and that health messages are impactful when not mocked by physicians that should know better.
3) Damania mocks film director Kip Anderson’s pants as “carcinogens”. I hope everyone that has ever had cancer or has a loved one that suffered from it recoils from this stupidity and potty humor. Just turn him off for good.
4) Damania goes off on Neal Barnard, MD questioning why he is a “premier researcher and diabetes expert”. That is easy, it is because Dr. Barnard is a premier researcher and diabetes expert. His prospective randomized trials in diabetes and its complications are respected and widely quoted. He leads an international conference on nutrition every July in Washington, D.C. gathering world expert’s sharing the latest research on disease prevention. Unlike Damania, Dr. Barnard has published dozens and dozens of research papers in quality peer reviewed journals and has authored over a dozen medical books on nutrition. To what purpose does Damania mock Barnard when he has no academic research credentials of his own? He clearly has never read the research on diabetes and lipotoxicty by Dr. Gerald Shulman of Yale who spoke at the last international conference headed by Dr. Barnard.
5) He tries to steamroll over Garth Davis, MD, a bariatric surgeon in Houston, Texas, as a guy that runs a “weight loss center”. Indeed, Dr. Davis is a celebrated board certified surgeon and author of a widely acclaimed textbook on nutrition with hundreds and hundreds of medical references cited. It was a rather poor choice by Damania to pick on Dr. Davis when the Dogg has no experience leading an advanced weight management center himself. The only bright side of this of this rude pile of Dogg-poop has been an ongoing You Tube exchange between the “comic” and the practicing surgeon to discuss nutrition further on his channel.
6) Damania mocks a statistic quoted in the film that eating an egg may be as risky as smoking 5 cigarettes. If he had taken a moment to research the topic instead of laughing like a hyena he would have learned that the data originated from a peer-reviewed scientific study published by eminent researchers. One of those authors was David Jenkins, MD of Toronto, a world renown nutrition expert. Only one doctor has yolk on his Doggy face for mocking the scientific process and that doctor is not David Jenkins.
7) I am quite sure Damania has never met Michael Klaper, MD because Dr. Klaper is one of the sincerest and caring of practicing doctors you can ever meet. After decades of practice, he still loves seeing patients in his clinic, quite the contrast to Damania. Damania rudely comments on Dr. Klaper’s shirt, perhaps wet from washing his hands after seeing real patients. Damania proves that the Dogg is a Low Dogg best muzzled.
8) Damania goes for any laugh he can get including stuffing his face with jerky during his video. Keep it up doc, you may not be around long but you could start your own brand called Jerk Jerky.
9) He mocks two females interviewed in the film, one MD and one nutritionist, for bringing up the “T” word, toxin. It seems Damania is spending time somewhere other than the medical literature and missed the fact that many stuffy medical societies like the Endocrine Society now recognize environmental toxins as serious causes of suffering and disease.
10) Clearly unable to do a Google search, Damania mocks super athlete Rich Roll, asking if he was “high as f-ck” when interviewed on how good he feels on a plant based diet. Damania has no idea that Roll speaks to medical groups about his recovery process from drug and alcohol addictions and was high on life, not the stupidity that Dogg is selling. Damania’s insensitive comments are inexcusable.
So how do I really feel about ZDoggMD? Are his antics worth even a minute of your life to watch? Sadly, he has devolved from an apparently well trained physician to a muck raking low life who will offend anyone for a laugh. His cruel attack on caring physicians and wellness leaders is to be denounced and flushed down the toilet. If you want to watch something uplifting in the medical genre, I suggest you tune into The Big Fat Truth and see real people struggle to better their health and lives without ugly mockery.
