The Checkup: Dr. Oz Faces Lawsuit After a Viewer Burns His Feet

• Oh, my. The New York Daily News reports on a new lawsuit against Dr. Mehmet Oz, brought by a viewer who claims he was badly burned after employing the T.V. doctor’s advice for a new insomnia cure. Last April, Oz apparently touted a “knapsack-heated rice footsie”—basically, socks filled with rice that are heated in the microwave—as a technique to help people doze off. He advised on the show that you should lie in bed with the socks on for 20 minutes to get blood flowing toward your feet. The socks help speed up your body’s cool-down process, which is apparently something that needs to happen before you can doze off. But when 76-year-old New Jersey man Frank Dietl (brother of the guy from those Arby’s commercials) did it, he didn’t realize how hot the socks were because he has diabetes-related numbness in his feet; Dietl ended up burning them badly, according to the lawsuit. “He didn’t realize how hot the socks were until he got up in the middle of the night and tried to walk,” reports NYDN. Yikes. Read more here.

• If you’ve torn your meniscus, don’t rush into surgery just yet: A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that in a lot of cases, physical therapy works just as well as surgery—and at a fraction of the cost. Read more here.

• Whoa, this is super cool. ABC News has a video of a Washington man who invented a finger prosthetic out of bike parts. Watch it here.

Photo: lev radin / Shutterstock.com