When I went home for winter break, I knew the media would be abuzz with gossip about President Barack Obama’s appointees. But I didn’t expect to see the same thing played out at temple, at Christmas parties, at Patel Brothers. Anywhere that a group of South Asian immigrants and their children gathered, we were told about the amazing exploits of Obama’s pick for Surgeon General, the esteemed neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta.

At the tender age of 39, the telegenic Gupta has achieved what every immigrant dreams their kids will one day be – an unmitigated success. For starters, he’s a doctor – and a neurosurgeon, at that. And he writes a column for Time magazine. And he has his own show on CNN. and he’s the author of a New York Times national bestseller. And (according to People magazine in 2003), he’s one of the sexiest men alive. And (according to his mother) he spent two hours with Obama. And he’s building a house for his wife and two kids in Atlanta.

Gupta is the quintessential role model of young urban professional success, the consummate yuppie role model. My dad would certainly be thrilled if I ended up having half of Gupta’s credentials. But there’s a dark side to Gupta’s rise.

As surgeon general, Gupta will be in charge of the United States Public Health Services, including the 6,000 physicians who work with it to respond to public health crises. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has questioned whether Gupta has the necessary experience for this post, particularly because Gupta has no significant record of involvement in public health and has never worked with the USPHS before.

In all fairness, Gupta does have some government experience, as a White House Fellow during the Clinton administration and as an adviser on health care to Hillary Clinton. But that doesn’t mean he’s an advocate for universal health care. In fact, he strongly advocates preventative screening for patients, even when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t. The expensive EKGs and prostate cancer screenings that Gupta promotes (without evidence-based medicine backing him up) are the reason for unaffordable health care costs.

Physicians for a National Health Care Plan has called Gupta out not only on his rejection of a single-payer plan and on his refusal to apologize for calling Michael Moore a liar based on mistakes made by CNN aides (“faulty intelligence,” if you will), but also for his ties to pharmaceutical companies.

Gupta has not disclosed any financial ties to pharmaceutical companies to date, but he has strongly advocated Gardasil, the HPV vaccine sponsored (and vigorously advertised) by Merck, who sponsors his show on CNN. Gupta also co-hosts AccentHealth, three TV channels that are broadcast directly into doctors’ waiting rooms, where “with implied endorsement from the physician and a relevant, captive environment offering ad recall scores twice as high as network and cable.” That’s a quote from AccentHealth aimed at drug companies.

In 2003, when the rest of the medical community was freaking out about the 39 percent increase in heart attacks among patients taking Vioxx, Gupta was on TV supporting the continued use of the Merck product. The pill was taken off the market a year later, after an estimated 60,000 related American deaths.

I’m not delving into these ethical gray areas because I don’t want Gupta to be surgeon general. The point is, Gupta hasn’t succeeded despite his questionable connections, but because of them. Some of his credibility comes from his M.D. Some from his natural good looks. But really, his money and power come from his ties to big money in big business, specifically Big Pharma.

He’s probably not a bad guy. He went to Iraq and operated on American soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike. I’m sure he has saved many lives. But he’s sold more than his name and image to Big Pharma, and if that’s the price of success, count me out. Sorry, Daddy.

Vineeta Singh is a junior neurobiology and physiology and Spanish major. She can be reached at singhdbk@gmail.com.