Eat your greens
Deepak Chopra uses a lot of code too. His is quite familiar.
[T]he writer opened his piece by pledging allegiance to “scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine.” He next declared opposition to integrative medicine…
Scare-quotes on evidence-based, no scare-quotes on ‘integrative medicine’…Code in the form of misallocation of bullshit-indicator.
We believe that Salerno’s piece is the opening salvo from the right aiming to influence the incoming administration as it strategically allocates resources for improving the U.S. health and wellness system.
Classic – the pretense that criticism of woo-medicine comes from the right, along with the pretense (more fully expressed later) that critics are as opposed to good preventive practices as they are to manipulation of chakras.
A new integrative medicine system would marry the superb options of high tech emergency care…by empowering and educating its citizens to maintain wellness and prevent disease, through improved nutrition, exercise, stress-management, and a wide range of other proven integrative approaches.
Orac comments on this tactic:
CAM/IM apologists like Chopra try very hard to appropriate science- and evidence-based modalities like good nutrition and exercise, along with health maintenance measures, as being somehow “alternative” or “integrative” (the bait) when they are in the purview of “conventional medicine.”…Today, nutrition and excercise, tomorrow homeopathy. To CAM/IM advocates, it would seem, it’s all the same. Far be it from them to worry themselves about doing the actual hard work to do the science that determines what treatments do and don’t work.
Naturally not, when they can get so rich and famous by not doing the actual hard work.
Thanks, Ophelia, your wise words have well and truly re-activated my DNA, on the quantum level of course, allowing me to truly love and approve of myself. Damn I’m enlightened. Now, where shall I send the cheque?
Gosh. I would have thought that the only way to activate one’s DNA at $125 per hour would be in a brothel. Shows how ignorant I am.
The whole thing about EBM being right-wing is a pretty odd slur. Granted, lefty hippies types are often into CAM, but right wing libertarian types are no less prone to woo. There was the libertarian guy who turned himself blue (permanantly) because he took a lot of colloidal silver:
Stan Jones
Somehow Mags,I think the workers in your average brothel are smart enough to ignore the dictates of Der Pappenfuhrer and take steps to prevent your DNA from activating.
Jokes aside, I long ago came to the conclusion that much of alternative medicine is little more than a prostitution equivalent for well off middle aged women – A bit of physical contact, a bit of pretense that someone cares and a significantly reduced bank balance.
Francis, I beg to inform you that middle aged women are only a part of the clientele – they will take anyone’s money. Chiropractic, for instance, feeds off the sore backs of physical workers and farmers.
Well, ChrisPer, I did say ‘much’. But you’re right about the money. It’s just that middle aged women tend to have a fair bit of it to throw around.
I actually tend to view that part of the alternative medicine industry as relatively benign. Relative, at least, to people like the anti-vaccination crowd.
It’s a private vice – keep it in private and I’ll have more important things to worry about.
Years ago doctors in the UK would routinely give out sugar pills and pink medicine which kept a certain part of their practice happy. More stringent ethical rules have more or less taken the placebo from the physician’s armoury – despite its efficacy. Undoubtedly a good thing as it reminds physicians that patients are fellow humans with a right to be treated as serious people.
However, the placebo effect is now the sole domain of charlatans and mountebanks and they cannot be trusted with so potent a tool. It is but a small step from trusting a chiropractor with your bad back (and many can give a competent back-rub which will alleviate symptoms)to trusting some unqualified dip-stick with your cancer treatment.
Really, a very small step.
So, Francis, I don’t see it as relatively benign. It’s an open door to the sort of very bad stuff we saw about HIV/AIDS denialism in SA.
I am reminded of a close friend who died of cancer a few years ago. His ex-wife (but still very amicable and supportive) urged him to let her crystal waving friends have a go. When he declined she asked ‘What have you got to lose?’ to which he replied, ‘My last shred of fucking dignity.’