Is there a difference between objective reporting and "balanced" reporting?
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Recently, Xiaorui Zhang, World Health Organization (WHO) coordinator on traditional medicine policy, noted the difficulty in conducting clinical trials of herbal remedies because of two factors: first, participants can detect a difference in taste between the placebo and the herbal therapy; second, quality control is difficult since many of the herbal products contain multiple ingredients, making it tough to determine which chemicals are responsible for any health outcomes. She added: "Western medicine came to China about a hundred years ago.
What in the world are the folks at the World Health Organization thinking these days? They're supposed to be devoting their energies, expertise, and considerable budget to...world health, I believe. You remember: poverty, famine, disease? Yet only a week ago their director general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, announced that the world's most important health challenges now include "junk food," cholesterol, and alcohol. What happened to malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS? (On the bright side, she also mentioned a previously under-appreciated but looming global threat, tobacco.)
Interested in losing weight? Want to do it without: (1) moving, (2) counting calories, (3) restricting food intake, or (4) any change in lifestyle whatsoever, and do it without any detrimental health effects? Well, step right up there are many products designed just to help you accomplish that goal. Then I have some Enron stock to sell you.
Why do news reports sometimes suggest that men can lower their risk of prostate cancer with changes in behavior, such as diet modification or changing the frequency of sexual activity?
Caveat Emptor. Consumers and journalists beware Anti-biotechnology activists engaged in a week of "direct action" at Starbucks Coffee shops this week aim to target you over the next few days with false and misleading information about food safety, nutrition and the environment. The same people who brought you a long list of other false health and environmental scares including the infamous Alar in apples scare, the Dow-Corning breast implant campaign and dozens of other debunked fears are at it again.
"It's a prescription for panic."
Dr. William Casarella, chairman of the department of radiology at Emory University, on the idea of frequent total-body CAT scans for the general population. Casarella is one of many people who have undergone intrusive surgery to examine ambiguous but benign nodes in his body. (New York Times, May 27, 2002)
For decades, Americans have relied on the American Lung Association (ALA) for reliable information on respiratory health. But in its recent "State of the Air 2002" report, ALA vastly exaggerates air pollution levels and misleads people into believing air pollution is getting worse, when in fact it has been improving for at least twenty years.
The National Council Against Health Fraud, Inc. (NCAHF) has concluded that policies prescribed in the report issued March 25th by the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) would lead to widespread adoption of unproven, disproven, and irrational methods and would cost the American public billions of dollars and thousands of human lives.
The 1910 Flexner Report set the standards for medical education. The WHCCAMP report does the exact opposite by outlining the agenda for establishing quackery.
The arrival of Earth Day brought a discussion of how to feed the poor. Feeding the hungry has been added to the Earth Day agenda, but the anti-technology rhetoric of past Earth Days, when the poor were forgotten, cannot easily be reconciled with this newly discovered concern.
A March 15th article in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "In Europe, Prescription-Drug Ads Are Banned and Health Costs Lower" suggests that prescription drug advertising is the reason for high health care costs. With talk of the European Union easing its ban on direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies, many consumer groups and European officials fear that increased spending on advertising will result in higher prices on prescription drugs, squeezing already tight healthcare budgets. However, a basic economics lesson would teach them that such worries are unfounded.
You've heard that quote, "The trouble is not what we know, it's what we know that isn't so?"
Well, one of the things I do at the Reason Public Policy Institute is argue for safety, health, and environmental policy that is rooted in the sound use of science, and more often than not "what we don't know" is glossed over in favor of unsupportable statements of certainty. Time after time, we hear that this policy or that policy is based on "sound science," and that the "debate over the science is done, now it's time to implement!" But it's virtually never that simple.
Compelling scientific evidence shows that cholesterol-lowering drug therapy can reduce the risk of heart attacks by about 30 percent, according to a new report released by scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
A recent Associated Press story by David Ho reported that BioPulse, Inc. and BioPulse International, Inc. have settled federal charges with the Federal Trade Commission regarding how they marketed alternative therapies such as insulin-induced hypoglycemic treatment (IHT), which has been used to "treat" cancer.
Editor's note: Tiki the Eco-Penguin's website has been updated since Andrew Apel wrote this article criticizing him for ACSH two years ago, but Tiki, alas, is still online and Apel's criticisms are still insightful.
Just as the Stonewall riots of 1969 are remembered as the start of the gay rights movement, so too will July 27, 2002 be remembered as the start of New York City's smokers' rights movement.
At least, that was the plan of the group NYC C.L.A.S.H. (NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment) as they organized a petition drive against proposed New York City laws that would banish smokers from restaurants and even bars a petition drive launched on the site of the pro-gay rights Stonewall riots.
Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal strongly condemned the Brooklyn Museum of Art recently when that august institution decided to devote a large exhibition space to the art of the Star Wars films. The Journal saw the exhibit as evidence of the decline of civilization while the Times was aghast at the crass commercialization of art. I loved it, and I'd argue that Star Wars movies are more relevant to the real world than they might at first appear.
As I learned one day at an alternative medicine expo, pseudo-scientific health remedies come in all forms: animal, vegetable, and mineral literally. Let's take them in reverse order.
Mineral: Healing with Crystals
Flawed government regulation discourages innovation and delays lifesaving products. Yet as the nation's population ages, Americans are becoming more dependent on medical progress to provide innovative treatments for diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and stroke to cancer.
A chilling example of this tension is the delay of an injectable antibiotic called Tigecycline for infections caused by "resistant pathogens" bacteria that are immune to standard antibiotics.
Every year over 1.5 million adults choose to have some type of vision correction surgery to rid themselves of glasses and/or contact lens dependence. The most popular of these surgeries is LASIK. While glasses and contacts correct a person's eyes with a prescription, LASIK uses a laser to put the prescription directly on a person's cornea the front, clear portion of the eye. The LASIK procedure can correct relatively high degrees of nearsightedness and astigmatism as well as farsightedness.
"[CSPI] has just declared that all that cheese and meaty topping should have only a cameo appearance in a meal, not a starring role. The 'good news' is that they strongly endorse pizza with little or no cheese and lots of vegetables instead of sausage or pepperoni. Isn't that called 'salad'?"
Holly Love, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (brought to our attention by http://www.ConsumerFreedom.com ). Also see ACSH's press release on CSPI's pizza report.
A low-fact diet can be dangerous. Have you heard that chips, fries, and even bread can give you cancer? This "fact" has been widely reported, even though it's essentially untrue.
If anyone doubts the power of letter writing: Wal-Mart cancelled its contract with a cake manufacturer because of my letter (below).
If you would like to take ten minutes and send an "ez-letter" on a smoking issue, go to www.smokefree.org and choose your letter.
Joe
Joe Cherner 375 South End Avenue New York, NY 10280
Yesterday's news that an American citizen had been charged with plotting with al Qaeda to obtain a "dirty nuke" is understandably causing increased anxiety in our already skittish nation. Before we start handing out radiation pills to everyone, however, we need to take a careful look at the real risks we face, and how to counter them.
Pagination
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