Science-Based Medicine

Every so often, as the health care reform initiative spearheaded by the Obama Administration wends its way through Congress (or, more precisely, wend their ways through Congress, given that there are multiple bills coming from multiple committees in both Houses), I’ve warned about various chicanery from woo-friendly legislators trying to legitimize by legislation where they’ve failed by science various “alternative” medicine practices. This began much earlier this year, when I pointed out how Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) invited the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse to the Senate to testify. These included Dr. Andy Weil, Director, Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona, Vail, AZ; Dr. Dean Ornish, Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute, Sausalito, CA; Dr. Mark Hyman, Founder and Medical Director, The UltraWellness Center, Lenox, MA; Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, Director, Cardiovascular Institute and Complementary Medicine Program, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY. This occurred after Harkin had famously complained about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the Center in the NIH that he, more than anyone else, had created, because it had not validated enough quackery. (Yes, I know he didn’t use those words, but that was what he had done.) Most recently, Harkin tried to insert language that would mandate that the government and health insurers pay for quackery, as long as it was from licensed practitioners. Given that some states license naturopaths and even “homeopathic physicians,” such an amendment, if it stayed in place, would open the way for paying for all manner of nonscientific quackery.

However, there is another bit of chicanery that legislators are pulling, this time with the Senate version of the bill, that I have been made aware of by Rita Swan of CHILD and fellow SBM blogger Kimball Atwood. This time, the threat is religious, with Senators trying to insert measures into the health care reform initiatives that will pay for “religious” treatments, such as Christian Science prayer. Indeed, one of these, S.1679, entitled Affordable Health Choices Act requires the government or private party insurers to pay for faith-based therapies:
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It’s rather amazing how sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men (and bloggers) come to naught. I had planned on doing a followup post to my previous post about the cancer quackery known as the German New Medicine by discussing a particularly nasty French variant of it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon your point of view), events conspired to move my blogging ire towards another target, particularly since I had addressed this isse before. Specifically, I’m talking about 2009 Recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, comedian and HBO talk show host Bill Maher.

As you may recall, about a month ago, I wrote a rather long post (par for the course for me, I know) detailing ad nauseam how Bill Maher not only embraces germ theory denialism, anti-vaccine nonsense, and alternative medicine, in particular his apparent belief that “aggregate toxicity” or the typical unnamed “toxins” that alternative medicine mavens are so fond of blaming most disease on or, as Maher likes to call it, the “poisons” that we are eating and otherwise exposed to every day, but has been preaching this pseudoscience since at least 2005. Maher then followed this up a mere week before receiving his award named after a famous scientist with a hideously irrational promotion of cancer quackery. At that point, I thought I was done with the topic, at least as far as this particular blog goes (others know that elsewhere I’ve not been so quiet). At least, I had intended not to deal with this again on SBM.

Unfortunately, Bill Maher had other ideas. This is the perfect description for how I felt having to blog about this again:

Yes, it fits, particularly after Maher Tweeted to his fans:

If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.

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