Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

No no no no no no no no.

I can tell you what I think I’d bring to this, which is, you know, I’m not a conventional choice, I haven’t followed the traditional path, but I do think I’d bring a kind of a lifetime of experience that is relevant to this job. I think that what we’ve seen over the last year, and particularly and even up to the last — is that there’s a lot of different ways that people are coming to public life now, and it’s not only the traditional path. Even in the New York delegation, you know, some of our great senators — Hillary Clinton, Pat Moynihan — came from, you know, other walks of life. We’ve got Carolyn McCarthy, John Hall, both of them have an unconventional background, so I don’t think that that is, uh — so I think in many ways, you know, we want to have all kinds of different voices, you know, representing us, and I think what I bring to it is, you know, my experience as a mother, as a woman, as a lawyer, you know…

That’s Caroline Kennedy explaining with a startling lack of articulacy why she should be appointed a US senator. I’m always on the lookout for code, and that’s a code I don’t think I’ve seen before. ‘Other walks of life’ and ‘all kinds of different voices, you know,’ is code for people with no relevant experience whatsoever going into politics, and it’s not in and of itself a thing to be cheered. Total lack of relevant experience is not absolutely always a disqualifier, but it does at the very least need to be offset by conspicuous talents and skills of the right kind – like, for instance, being able to talk in an adult way in public. Caroline Kennedy is 51 years old and a lawyer, and she talks like a teenager. So – she has no relevant experience, and she’s remarkably bad at talking in public, and the only reason to suggest her at all is because she is a Kennedy. Hmmm…that reminds me of something…what could it be…Oh yes, it’s the current president. And even he doesn’t say ‘you know’ every five words like a high school kid.

In my book, her being a Kennedy is a reason not to appoint her, and also a reason not to vote for her, just as in my book Hillary Clinton’s being a former president’s wife was a very strong reason not to vote for her. I detest this nepotism thing we’ve got going and I wish people would stop encouraging it. I don’t want a Kennedy dynasty or a Clinton dynasty any more than I want a Bush dynasty; I don’t want any damn dynasty. And I don’t want people from you know, other walks of life, either. This isn’t a game.

It’s all very well to diss the very idea of alternative medicine (alternative to what? the kind that works?) but what you don’t seem to understand is that people will spend money on it, and not in small quantities, either.

Feeling a tad listless? Perhaps your DNA is insufficiently activated. You may want to consult the healers at Oughten House Foundation, specializing in “tools and techniques for self-empowerment . . . through DNA Activations.” Oughten House recommends regular therapy as part of its DNA Activation Healing Project, at $125 per hour-long session.

$125 for…waving your hands around gently, or turning the dials on a convincing-looking Machine of some sort, or handing out a banana milkshake, and calling that ‘DNA Activation.’ Not a bad haul.

[W]hat was once a ragtag assortment of New Age nostrums has metastasized into a multibillion-dollar industry championed by dozens of lobbyists and their congressional sympathizers. Among the most popular therapies are acupuncture, at $50 to $100 per session; reflexology, which involves massaging various parts of the hands and feet, starting at $35 an hour; and aromatherapy, which relies on the supposed healing properties of about 40 “essential oils,” with treatments at $30 to $90 an hour.

Well – look, at least those people probably won’t be needing a bailout or an emergency loan or an adjusted mortgage. At least the practitioners are making a living. Maybe we should all do it, and then there’d be no more Economic Disaster.

Major hospital systems, notably Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins and New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, incorporate CAM-based programs like aromatherapy and therapeutic touch, often bracketed as “integrative medicine.”… “We’re all channeling East Indian healers along with doing gall-bladder removal,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Mr. Caplan harbors no illusions about what’s behind the trend: “It’s not as noble as, ‘I want to be respectful to Chinese healing arts.’ It’s more, ‘People are spending a fortune on this stuff! We could do this plus our regular stuff and bill ’em for all of it!’”

Well quite. I’m strongly tempted to hang out a shingle myself. I think I’d be really good at activating people’s DNA.

Another excellent piece about HIV/AIDS denial.

On Science-Based Medicine, we strive to apply the light of science and reason on all manner of unscientific belief systems about medicine. For the most part, but by no means exclusively, we have concentrated on so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) because there is an active movement to infiltrate faith-based, rather than science-based, modalities into “conventional” medicine. Indeed, such efforts are well-financed, both by public and private organizations, and are alarmingly successful at insinuating postmodernist and pseudoscientific beliefs into academia to form an unholy new monster that has been termed by some as “quackademic medicine.”

So science is under heavy suspicion while CAM is given the revolutionary salute. Yee-ha.

However, one pseudoscientific belief system about medicine that we at SBM have perhaps not dealt with as much as we should is the belief that, contrary to the overwhelming scientific consensus built up over 25 years, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) does not cause Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)…Before I go on to do a case study of the tragic price of HIV/AIDS denialism, perhaps it is worthwhile to take a moment to discuss just what HIV/AIDS denialism is. It is not “skepticism” or “rethinking” any more than creationism is a “rethinking” or “skepticism” of evolution, although denialists like to try to claim the mantle of those labels. Seth Kalichman, author of the book Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy has written a good primer of the phenomenon…

Yes and he’s going to write about it for B&W. Put that on your calendars.

Indeed, denialism, specifically the denial of scientific medicine, tends to be at the heart of the quackademic medicine movement, just as the denial of evolution is at the heart of the anti-evolution movement known as “intelligent design” creationism. It is a more general phenomenon that involves a dogged clinging to pseudoscientific or pseudohistorical beliefs (creationists and antivaccine advocates are a good example of the former; 9/11 Truthers and Holocaust deniers are a good example of the latter) and the use of logical fallacies and conspiracy theories to bolster their world view.

Read the whole piece; it’s long and thorough and full of horrors, and impressive.

It’s good to question conventional wisdom, except when it isn’t. Conventional wisdom holds that a bridge designed by engineers and built by reputable builders is safer to drive across than one designed by shamans and built by hairdressers. Questioning that conventional wisdom is not really all that productive, and if anyone listens to the questioning, it’s downright lethal.

So with Christine Maggiore.

Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.

That’s the risky kind of questioning conventional wisdom – and it risks other people as well as oneself. That’s why Prince Charles makes me angry when he indulges his passion for denouncing non-alternative medicine, and it’s why Juliet Stevenson made me angry when she used her celebrity to denounce the conventional wisdom about the MMR vaccine and autism, and it’s why Christine Maggiore makes me angry even though she’s now dead. It makes me angry that she breast-fed her children and it makes me angry that she went on television to denounce research showing that HIV causes AIDS. People shouldn’t do that. People shouldn’t take on life and death medical issues when they have no training or expertise in the subject. People shouldn’t trust their own judgment that completely.

For years, the South African government joined with Maggiore in denying that HIV is responsible for AIDS and resisting antiretroviral treatment. According to a new analysis by a group of Harvard public health researchers, 330,000 people died as a consequence of the government’s denial and 35,000 babies were born with the disease.

It’s not a subject for hobbyists or cranks or princes or actors. Children must never play with matches.