While he’s mostly known for giving out health tips on his TV show, Dr. Mehmet Oz found himself in the middle of a medical emergency during a flight on Wednesday.
While flying from to Las Vegas to attend the Consumer Electronics Show, a passenger on Oz’s flight collapsed. A stewardess immediately sought out Oz for help.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“I was grabbed by a stewardess on the plane after a 30-year-old guy collapsed,” Oz said in an interview with Page Six. “I got him to lie on his back and [put] his feet up on the emergency doors, and with that I began to get a reasonable pulse and blood pressure.”
Oz then grabbed the electrode pads from the plane’s Automated External Defibrillator to make a homemade EKG test to measure the passenger’s heart rate.
“I couldn’t tell if he was having a heart attack or not,” Oz said. “His blood pressure was really low but his heart rate was really high.”
Oz was unable to treat the passenger, but he did keep him sustained long enough for the plane to land and emergency responders to get him to an emergency room.
“I was worried about a clot going to his lungs which is common in airplanes,” Oz said. “While he was laying on the ground he started to shake and he went from being clammy to he had a temperature of 103 by the time he got to the ER.”
Oz said he’s been keeping up with how the passenger has been doing since the incident. He’s since learned that the symptoms were caused by the flu.
“The evaluation so far is leaning towards a bad flu and a high fever caused his collapse,” Oz said.
As a cardiothoracic surgeon, Oz first started his television career as a health expert on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He started his own show, The Dr. Oz Show in 2009.
